JNB Web Promotion Newsletter February 28
Good tips to increase traffic to your web site
Choosing the proper keywords! (Tip)
For your website is one of the most important steps that you can undertake to properly marketing your website. Here, I’ll point out some common mistakes I see with people and their websites.
For those aware of the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, one thing you have to keep in mind is that, Overture tends to clump singular, plural and misspellings together with the count. For example if you search for website marketing, or web site marketing, you'll come back with 19267 searches with the phrase web site marketing showing for each version searched for. The reason for this is that an advertiser bidding on web site marketing, will show up for both spellings of this phrase on Overture and its partners. While this is great for PPC marketing on Overture, basing all your SEO Marketing on the exact overture phrasing could leave you in the wrong direction for the best keywords to target. This is where you need to use the Metacrawler info to differentiate the phrases and find out whether the singular, plural or a misspelling is getting the most searches.
Topics:
1 - What Is Link Popularity?
2 - How To Increase The Link Popularity Of Your Site
3 - Targeting Keyword Phrases
4 - Don’t Spam Search Engines!
5 - Use Your URL To Improve Your Rank
1 - What Is Link Popularity?
Link popularity is simply the number of websites that have a link on one of their pages to your site. Most major search engines use link popularity to judge how "important" each site is relative to other sites. Search engines assume that sites with more links to them must be established, quality sites and therefore deserve a higher rank on their results lists. Therefore if your site has 200 other sites linked to it it will rank better, all things being equal, than sites with fewer links pointing to them. Your link popularity will vary on each engine because each engine have a different number of sites indexed and slightly different rules on what defines a link.
For Example, Google has very strict rules regarding what is a link. They stipulate that for a link to count as a "good link" (a link google counts in your sites link popularity score) there must be less than 30 other links to other sites on the page. They believe that link lists containing more than 30 links on one page are of lower quality than lists of less than 30 links. According to Google, long links lists are probably the result of webmasters linking to each others sites just to improve each others ranking, this process is called link farming. Alta Vista, on the other hand, accepts links on longer pages much more often. Fast search (All the Web) accepts any link back to your site.
Benefits of Developing Link Popularity
Permanent Flow of Free Traffic - Well placed links to your site on other websites can be excellent traffic generators, they can provide long term, steady targeted traffic. A well-placed link can provide you with 50 or more new visitors per day! Lets take a very conservative example to show the value of reciprocal links. Lets say you have links on 50 other sites back to yours. You only receive an average of one visitor per day from each link
- Links On External websites 50
- Daily Traffic From Each Link 1
- Additional Visits Per Day 50
- Additional Visits Per Month 1500
- Additional Visits Per Year 18,000
Even with these very conservative estimates it is easy to see the value on reciprocal links . Who wouldn't want 18,000 targeted visitors per year, especially in an environment where pay-per -click search engines are charging 5 cents or more per visitor! At 5 cents per visitor these 18,000 visitors represent 900 dollars in traffic!
Better Search Engine Rank - As mentioned earlier, link popularity is one of the most important factors in establishing website ranking. Despite the obvious value of link popularity relatively few websites have developed a significant number of links back to their site. Developing a minimum of 50-150 links back to your site will give you a significant advantage over your competition and will propel your search engine ranking into the top 30 of even the most competitive keyword phrases.
Frequent website Reindexing By Search Engines - One of the ways that search engine spiders find new sites is through links from other sites. The greater number of links pointed back to your site allows search engines to reindex your site more frequently, which means that you will see the benefits of any changes you make in your website much sooner than if you had not links pointing back to your site.
2 - How To Increase The Link Popularity Of Your Site
There are several methods that you can use to increase the number of links to your site. Here are several ideas.
Step 2 : Cost Benefit Analysis
Every day for the past seven days I have fielded phone calls from concerned clients. This week they are thinking about the new fee structure introduced by Yahoo and the impending costs associated with these new fees. With Yahoo stating they will charge $0.15 to $0.30 per click for sites participating in the Site Match program, and costs between $0.15 to $1.00 per click for much larger sites feeding data to Yahoo through the Site XChange program, businesses need to know the least expensive methods of getting prominent placements. In order to provide the best possible advise, JNB Web Promotion is now conducting a cost-benefit analysis for all new campaigns and will be applying this analysis to currently existing ones.
The major factors in relation to Yahoo/Overture placements involve the actual costs associated with the new fee structure. Even after signing up for Site Match, paying the review fee and agreeing to the cost-per-click fees that will be charged against the listing, Top20 placements will still depend on good site optimization. As any honest SEO will tell you, search engine optimization is a kin to loading dice. Getting the placement is still a roll of the dice but at least we can help weigh those dice on your behalf. So, SEO is a good bet for front page placement at Yahoo but we know of a 100% sure bet, Overture. There are several examples where the cost-per-click charges that will be imposed by Yahoo will be higher than the third place bid-per-click at Overture. With the top3 bidded listings at Overture displayed on the front page of Yahoo and other Yahoo owned search engines, the best option for our client (in this scenario) would obviously be to pursue Overture advertising and avoid rolling the dice on SEO/Yahoo cost-per-click. Not only will the costs be lower, front page placement is guaranteed as long as Overture and Yahoo retain the distribution agreement that displays Overture ads at Yahoo. We have a general idea of costs existing clients will face by taking their average number of visits per day, dividing it against the approximate 41% market share Yahoo currently enjoys, and multiplying the dividend by $0.15 or $0.30, depending on the client's business sector. Please note, we realize how unscientific this method may be but it does offer our clients at least some approximation of the long-term costs of their campaigns. This is an oversimplified view of our analysis but it does express our basic premise, there is almost always a less expensive option to find for the clients.
Step 3 : Optimize for Inktomi/Yahoo and Link Build for Google
Our current SEO methods have us optimizing for Inktomi / Yahoo and link-building for Google. The thinking behind this method is based on the behaviours of Yahoo, MSN and Google. Both Yahoo and MSN are currently drawing from the Inktomi database though we know this will change in April as Yahoo will be drawing from its own database, (which will likely be
drawn from sites already included at Inktomi). According to Yahoo spokesperson Jennifer Stephenson, Yahoo-Slurp (Yahoo's spider) will act much like its famous cousin Google-bot by crawling sites, following every link found, and incorporating the information found on these pages into its database of spidered sites. Google-bot continues to work the way it always has but the information it gathers is being measured in different ways than it was before. Links are the most important factor (of nearly 100 unique factors) to Google rankings. Assuming the site is well optimized for Yahoo and Inktomi, good, strong links will produce good, strong placements at Google. It is therefore summarized simplest in the phrase "optimize for Yahoo, link-build for Google"
Step 4 : Submit and Monitor
After all is said and done, the site needs to be submitted to the search engines and monitored for several months to see what happens. During the second phase we conducted a cost-benefit analysis so we have a plan for how we want to submit the site and can offer reasonable expectations to our clients for the amount of time it will take to be spidered and hopefully appear in the Top20 or Top10. At this point, we begin monitoring the site on a daily basis starting 72-hours after first submission. By that time, we expect to see evidence of search-engine spiders appearing in server logs and may even see a debut placement for the site. One of the greatest benefits of a paid-inclusion program is the increased frequency of spider-visits to a website. Most paid-inclusion programs promise repeat spider visits every 48 - 72 hours, making the SEO job a bit easier as we can see the effects of tweaks in fairly short order.
An important submission note: Most search engines continue to support free-submissions however preference is shown to sites which have paid their inclusion fees with a far greater frequency of visitors. Jennifer Stephenson from Overture said that sites participating in Site Match will be revisited every 48 hours while sites that are found by the Yahoo-Slurp spider and are added to the database will be revisited approximately once each month.
Step 5 : Client/Sector Communication
In times of great change, the one constant will be people wanting to know what the heck is going on. Businesses of every size need to know how their money is being spent and what factors might effect how that money is spent. All humans react better to known quantities than they do to unknown quantities. Clients who feel broad-sided by changes are generally less than happy clients as many of us in the SEO sector found in November. Even though we were broad-sided by Google's Florida Update many clients expected us to KNOW what was going on. One of our saving-graces at JNB Web Promotion was our level of communication with clients and the fact that we honestly stated that we did now know but would work to find out. Always tell the truth to your clients. They will never accept it if you try to bluff your way through but will almost always accept honest answers, even if they don't particularly like the facts (or lack thereof) presented to them. When major change happens, we write about it here and issue a client-wide bulletin.
Change Happens
The information age has brought about the greatest changes to human interaction since the end of the Dark Ages. The information age, as an era is less than fifty years old. Change happens very quickly these days and that pace of change is quadrupled on the Internet. Even in the midst of rapid change, planning is the best part of execution. Aside from providing a loose road-map, the very act of planning helps perfect your
plans.
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless,
but planning is indispensable."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)
By: J.W. Bertrand
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