Friday, 14. May 2010
Internet Marketing can “ad” a boost of traffic to your site
In today’s internet culture, getting the message out about what your site is offering can be a difficult challenge. Sure, what you have to offer could really help people, or save them money, or revolutionize politics. But if people aren’t finding your site, then what good is your message, product, or service? Isn’t search engine optimization ( SEO ) supposed to bring throngs of traffic to your site? I say not necessarily.
SEO is meant to accomplish a few different things. First and foremost, SEO optimizes your website for search engines to find, follow the links on your site, read and interpret what your site is about, index your site, and then show your site within a search engine results page. Ok, so let’s assume that you rank number one on Google for neoprene accessories. That in itself won’t bring you a great deal of traffic. So how do you bring in more traffic?
Internet marketing to boost relevant traffic
One of the easiest ways to boost traffic with internet marketing is to tap into pop culture. The company that sells neoprene accessories could tap into connecting their product to iPods and urban culture. And this can be as simple as featuring their product in a 30 second video on the website, blog posts featuring their product in different urban settings, and pictures of their product being used by young trend setting college students. After those are in place a simple short ran advertising spots on Facebook, Myspace, other popular high traffic sites will get the traffic jump started.
After traffic starts coming in, analyze your traffic sources to determine which internet marketing efforts are performing and which ones aren’t. Trim out the sites that aren’t performing. What you’re left with is your core advertising demographic. At this point your have to decide if your advertising budget can afford to bring in another site that has the same demographic as your core site(s). If not, you may want to consider cutting your core site(s) click-thru’s in half and spread the advertising money across the other sites in your demographics.
Once you get the core advertising site(s) down to a science, do you know when to get out? Some people say stick with an ad as long as it is working. Others say drop the ad after a certain point, and there is also a school of thought of rotating in new ads to keep the ad spot looking fresh. Certainly, if you are a non-profit entity your getting out position is fairly easy, when your funding stream dries up. As an internet marketer, this is my position, it is time to look at getting out of an advertisement spot when your organic traffic has increased %30 -%60 of the original amount. Now this percentage can be what ever amount you want, or you can have a conversion amount also.
Internet Marketing Goes Viral
The end goal is your site, message, video,e-book, etc to go viral. By this I mean it gets forwarded by people automatically without prompting or incentives. It’s at this point you know your site has made it to the big leagues. You’ll have more traffic than you’ll know what do do with, and chances are you’ll need your own dedicated server. Even if you don’t run paid ads, you can use link building to help bring in traffic and increase the popularity of your site. Whether you do it yourself, pay for someone else to do it, or prefer to run paid ads for you, internet marketing picks up the slack until your organic traffic gets to the level you want.
Posted in Promotion by -
Wednesday, 12. May 2010
ALT tags bring visitors to your site from image searches
Search engine optimization is all about getting ranked high in the search engine results page for a specific search query. And ALT attributes for your your images and other other media do indeed help your web page rank higher if the ALT tags are indeed keywords your are trying to rank for. But does it matter to you if your visitors land on your page because they are looking for information on Kim Kardashian or looking for pictures of Kim Kardashian?
This is the main difference between using image ALT tags for SEO and image ALT attributes for internet promotion. If you care about organic search engine results, then use the ALT tags to gain that last bit of SEO juice to give you that edge. If you care more about traffic, then ALT attributes could bring you more traffic naturally than the normal search engine results page does, either way you won’t lose by using image ALT tags.
Kim Kardashian is tagged on my webpage
If you are ready for better placement in the search engine results page and more traffic from image searches, then it is time to supercharge your images. If you examine the Kim Kardashian bikini tag below…
- Kim Kardashian Bikini
… you’ll find the following information:
- Image Title: Kim Kardashian Bikini
- Image Location: kim_bikini.jpg
- Alt Text: Kim Kardashian Bikini
- WP Caption Text: Kim Kardashian Bikini
As you can see, there are four opportunities to get you keyword text onto the web page. The best part is all of these fields are able to be spidered and indexed by search engine spiders. All of this is fairly easy to do, and most web authoring software has the ALT text data field available for your information. If you are using WordPress, then these functions are available by default.
If you need help getting your site optimized and ready for search engine spiders to crawl and index, please use my contact form and let me know what services you might need. I can perform a SEO survey of your site and recommend which changes to make and why. And for you Kim Kardashian fans, here is one fore reason to use ALT tags, each one of these pictures will bring about 500 unique visitors to this page each month.
Kim Kardashian Bikini
Posted in Promotion, Search Engine Optimization by -
Saturday, 8. May 2010
Why Not To Buy Recycled Adsense Ready Sites
I recently read the article, “Purchasing new Adsense ready site” and felt compelled to blog about this. A recycled adsense site is a website that has content written to perform well with Google adsense. Then the site is sold wholesale to unscrupulous webmasters for the sole purpose of making money with adsense. While I am all for making adsense sites and content writing sites to sell for profit, it is my professional ethical belief that flooding the internet with duplicate content is wrong.
These sites add nothing of real value for the internet community. Sure, the basic content may be useful to the visitor, or the adsense ads that are generated by the content may be of use, but over all it they are a nuisance to people. Finding the same content on four different sites while performing a longtail keyword search is very annoying.
Google’s Content Guidelines
Google wants fresh and relevant sites to crawl and index. Additionally, Google specifically warns against using duplicate content [1] . While some content management systems automatically use excerpts, use blocks of text in other places, or use sequential pages of blog posts and canonical articles, sites that are bought and sold in bulk may be reported as spam and be penalized by lowering the rank or removal from the index all together.
Spamsense Sites Still Make Money
One might wonder, “If Google penalizes or removes a site for spam, how does it make money?” This is actually really easy to answer. First these site use a different advertising system that doesn’t penalize for duplicate content. Second, the webmaster uses an aggressive internet marketing strategy that includes link building, sponsored links, paid traffic generators, paid to read emails (PTR), and paid to surf programs (PTP).
These spam sites do require money to make money. But if the keywords are chosen carefully and the internet marketing is done on the cheap, then they can be moderately successful. And thus the reason these sites are sold wholesale.
Ultimately it is up to the webmaster to decide on the business ethics and how they pertain to internet websites. I highly encourage more research into this subject before proceeding. Not only can one site be banned, but if you have many of these different sites residing on a dedicated server, that server’s IP address could be banned. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave a comment or use the contact page to get in touch with me.
[1] Duplicate Content – Webmaster Tools Help. Google. Web. 8 May 2010. <http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359>
Posted in Adsense by -
