Search engine optimization services go well beyond the one dimensional yellow page listing. The two are tantamount to having a brochure versus the printed business card to market one’s business. While the yellow page ad or business card features basic company information, search engine optimization services and brochures share a common denominator about your business: They highlight your company’s offerings in a directive marketing format. So if you are still thinking, I suggest that you give it a try and see the difference for yourself.

When market researchers compare the efficacy of the online directory to that of an Internet marketing company the latter achieves leads in a twelfth of the time (a year), it takes the a Yellow Page ad to produce results. Once upon a time, consumers referred to an oversized-bulky directory to search for businesses specific to their needs. Shopping decisions were made in a matter of moments based on listings provided in the Yellow Pages. Customer acquisitions were high.

Small Business Marketing Research Findings:

Today, our choices have quadrupled. Armed with a plethora of information and options, consumers spend between three and eight hours gathering information, comparing prices and evaluating merchant related shopping terms. A market study published by Nielsen Media showed that 88 percent of small business proprietors start their shopping using major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

On the contrary, the findings of these same business owners’ marketing habits were disquieting. Less than 50-percent were using search engine optimization services to promote their own company. Only 44-percent of the small businesses that were polled had a website.

Other market research studies indicate that the vast majority of consumers start their research online and complete most transactions by phone or in-person. Given these trends in consumer behavior, it is paramount for the small business to market their services on the Internet.

Among small business owners, there are innumerous misconceptions about the capabilities of search engine optimization companies. From the cost-effectiveness, to the measurable results, and the power to generate new leads and customers, Internet marketing clearly has its lists of advantages. Not to mention, for the business, advertising with the online Yellow pages, the business with a website outshines the one without.

When visitors arrive at the destination site, their actions are the most critical aspect of the small business search engine marketing strategy-transaction. Search engine marketing services are not only based on driving targeted traffic the distance. It takes eight seconds to make a favorable or unflattering online impression. The time span is the difference between motivating a visitor to learn more, attaining a new prospect, and turning away new business. To learn more about how internet marketing services can improve your business, visit our site at The Click Depot.

Integrating search engine optimization services with the small business marketing strategy affords multiple financial rewards. Primarily, most Google certified, SEM Companies warrant a return on investment (ROI). In other words, search engine optimization services done right deliver reliable and measurable returns- guaranteed.

To learn more about how Search Engine Optimization Services can improve your business or for a complimentary consultation, contact The Click Depot at support@theclickdepot.com

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In the decade or so since the search engine was first invented, the field of Search Engine Optimization has evolved. Some obsolete information and old wives’ tales still persist, and these can damage your standings.

The myths and obsolete techniques fall into a few broad categories:

- Keyword density: There are many number of magic formulas touted on the internet, claiming that if you reach the perfect number of keyword instances per page, your rankings will go up. While you do need to have the keyword somewhere in your text in order to have your stated keywords considered relevant, artificially inflating the number of instances is a bad plan. First, it simply decreases the quality of your content. Second, the search engines may begin classifying your site as too spammy, and actually downgrade your rating.

- Tags and META: Loading keywords into your page headers and the meta data of your site is also an old trick that’s now likely to get you classified as spammy. Only keywords that are relevant to your content and specific to what your users are searching for should be included.

- Links: Some fraudulent SEO services, and some outdated pieces of advice, will associate your website with link exchange systems and link farms. Since the search engines keep track of these farms and exchanges, and using them is considered trickery, being part of them can actually significantly downgrade your rating.

- Submission to search engines: Once upon a time, submitting your site to search engines was a long and arduous process, which was nonetheless necessary to get a good place in the rankings. These days, search engine submission is generally not needed at all, since the engines automatically search for new sites. If they don’t find yours quickly, manual submission is quite easy and there are a few top search engines that have most of the market share.

Conversely, there are a few relevant and current strategies for climbing the ranks of search results. (It should come as no surprise that these are broader and more difficult or time-consuming to implement than the myths would suggest.)

- Unique content: Consistently offering high quality content that is valuable to your users, unique on the web, and from original sources is by far the best way to attract users and search engines to your site. If your site consists of copy, providing a unique value in information filtering, commentary and analysis, or other user-friendly services.

- Voice of authority: Along with unique content, offering an authoritative voice is a good way to increase your links and therefore your page ranking. Either become an authority yourself or offer interviews, quotes, or guest content by noted authorities in your field. If well-respected people and organizations recommend or reference your site, your popularity will rise.

- Professional networking for link sharing: As a web master, blogger, marketer, or business owner, professional contacts matter for a wide range of activities. Additionally, you may ask these people to link their sites with yours, or to provide expert and authoritative content for your site.

- Crawler files: Having a robots.txt file that is updated, accurate, and properly configured can make your site easier to catalogue correctly. Building the site’s architecture in a crawler-friendly manner can give your site a slight edge that may be worth pursuing. Do remember that search engine developers are concerned with their users and serving them appropriate content. They’re smart enough to outwit most technical tricks.

Author Bio: SEOSapien is a SEO Company. We offer affordable and guaranteed SEO services

Article marketing is touted as the most effective link building strategy and traffic building tactic in existence. It is and it isn’t depending on how you employ it. There are many different points of view but there are mainly 5 strategies that most experts agree upon and use.

Article directories allow you to include a resource box for every article you submit. Inside this resource box, you include a link to your website. If you submit just one article to 100 article directories and it is approved for publication, you will immediately receive 100 back links to your website. There are thousands of article directories in the World Wide Web which can mean thousands of back links and huge traffic!

Now, if you submit, say, 5 articles to a hundred directories, you may get 500 back links easily! How? Again, by including the link to your website or blog in the Author Box at the end of your articles like I have done below. The best part about this strategy is that quite a number of article directories have high page ranks (PR). We’re talking about PR4, PR5, and on occasion, PR7 websites! Having a link to your own website in a website which has a high page rank would give a significant boost to your search engine standing! This means your site will be noticed by more people.

Here are the top 5 questions that experts get about Article Marketing and the answers to those questions.

1. If I submit the same article to many article directories, will it violate a search engine’s policy against duplicate content?

The simple answer is – No – but see #2 (below) for a loophole. Since we’re dealing with high ranking websites, the search engines will assume that the submitted content is your original work. This is the reason why most article directory editors are pretty confident about the articles they display. The problem that they try to avoid, really, is with regards to the credibility of their services. They don’t want to be known as a repository of junk content, that’s why they have outlawed the posting of PLR (private label rights) articles as well as articles loaded with Affiliate links.

PLR articles are those you buy that were written by someone other than you. These are not a good way to go because the authors are selling the same articles to hundreds of other people. Using PLR articles will create a “duplicate content” problem for you with both the search engines and with the Directory editors.

2. Should I submit articles which I have already posted in my own web pages?

If the article was posted on your website or blog first, the answer is “Yes, absolutely!”. If you submit your articles to directories first, the search engines may assume that where the articles first appeared, in the Article Directory, is the originator of the content. In that case, your articles could be distinguished as “duplicate content”. This could lead to the de-indexing of your articles. It will not, however, get your website de-indexed. The key is, you want your articles to appear on your website or blog first and be indexed first as originating with you. Wait a few days and then submit them to directories.

3. Can I submit as many articles as I want to as many article directories as possible?

Absolutely, that’s what I do and I do it often! This is very much advised as a fast way to build up your link popularity and secure a great page rank for your website or blog. I have only found one directory so far that only allows one submission per day. I have not found any others that have any limits whatsoever.

Bear in mind that search engines are quite wary of any website that suddenly experiences a great increase in the number of its back links. It is advised that when you submit articles to the article directories, wait a few days between each submission. There is one exception to this. When I began submitting articles I had 10 that I submitted on the same day to get established, so to speak. After that I limited my submissions to one a day to each directory.

4. Why are my page views still quite low even after submitting my articles?

If your page views remain at low levels after submitting many articles, ask yourself, or someone you trust, the following:

a) Is the subject of your article interesting enough? Does it cater to a wide audience?

b) Is your title enticing enough to merit a reading of your entire work?

c) Is your article informative enough to merit recommendation to others?

d) Is your article readable enough to give your audience an easy time in digesting the information you are sharing?

I almost always ask my wife or my best friend for their advice on my writing. I have no ego to bruise. I want my articles to be readable and helpful. So ASK! If you get – “No” – to any of these, you have found the factors that contribute to your low page views. Doing some editing to correct the problems you have identified can dramatically increase the number of times your article is viewed and your Author Box link to your site clicked.

I have some articles that were viewed more than 130 times in just a few days through just one Article Directory! Multiply that by about 300 and you can see the impact. Many of the readers clicked my Author Box link and visited my blogs for more Free Resources on a particular topic. I pride myself on providing lots of Free stuff on my blogs and you should too.

Remember, some article directories attract only a few visitors so viewing will also be low. If you are writing on a highly specialized topic, low page views would not be unusual.

The key is, your articles are published and your back link in your Author Box is pointing to your website or blog and that helps your page rank even on a low viewed directory.

5. Can I be sure that my articles will be kept intact by people who would use them in their own websites or eZines?

You can never be sure. This is why you have to run your own check from time to time. Search for unique phrases in your article and click on the results. Determine if the webmaster published your Author Box links. If he did not, you could ask him to include them. If you get no response, contact the article directory editors so that they themselves can act on the matter. Vigilance is the key. It is rare but it does happen.

A positive side of directories is the editors will recognize “duplicate content” when the thief tries to submit your article under their name. The article will be rejected. This leaves them with placing it on their own blog or wesbite and you can find that out by doing the search as described.

Do these 5 things and watch your traffic increase.

Lastly, finding Article Directories to submit to is simple – Google “Article Directories” and you will get a huge list. Or, do what I do. I use software that submits the articles with a few button clicks. This has saved me hours upon hours of tedious hand-submission because the software has over 350 of the best directories built in so you do not have to search for them.

Keep in mind, submitting articles takes work, tons of work when submitting to one directory at a time. Check out various software like I did. The best software does cost a few bucks so do not expect to get off cheap. There is free or low cost software but “you get what you pay for”.

Bottom line is: Articles, written by you, are still the fastest and cheapest (Free!) way to get more traffic and higher search engine rankings.

Become a better writer, today! Jim DeSantis is an Internet Publisher and former TV News Editor. Jim provides more information about writing on his blog, AnswersPlus.info, where you’ll find – “The Writer’s Guide to Internet Marketing” and “Instant Essay” software. Click “Writers’ Guide” and “Essay Creator” in the sidebar. Also available here – http://www.answersplus.info

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I had to cut things short yesterday because I was traveling to Pontefract to stay with my daughter. I’m feeling great today because I don’t see Fran and my grandchildren often enough and when I do I always feel refreshed.

It was a special occasion yesterday, my 3 year old granddaughter Isabella was dancing on the stage at a concert organised by her dance school. My what a lot of cute there was and I especially enjoyed watching Izzy dance. She did really well remembering the 3 dances that she performed with a group of other children around her age. Talk about proud gran!

Anyway now that I’ve returned relaxed and happy I feel raring to go and can spend more time on this blog. I’m mentioning this because I feel that it’s important to take quality time away from a business internet or otherwise else it can take over your life.

As today is Sunday it was easy enough to check the articles submitted to my directories. There are never as many submitted at the weekends which gives me more quality time with my websites and blogs, but I don’t have as much free time during the week so it’s best to make the most of it.

I’ve mentioned article directories before and they are actually an excellent free way to get traffic called Article Marketing. There will be more about Article Marketing on another day, when I start to go through that process.

Traffic

I said yesterday that I would give you a quick peak at statistics for visitors, it’s very early days so I wouldn’t set too much store in the results but traffic has already increased. This domain had been averaging 17 unique visitors a month and my first target was to double that within the first week and get 17 unique visitors a day by the end of the first month. During the last 3 days of January there were 47 unique visitors so I have already beaten my first target with the steps that I have taken. Those are results from my site cpanel stats.

When I set this blog up I also set up an account for it with Google Analytics. You can get very detailed statistics there, but I’m going to wait until my first month is up before I check them properly.

Where Did The Traffic Come From?

5 Visitors came in through an advert that I posted to a free advertising blog. 2 from keyphrase searches that found articles,  1 a keyword search for a product sales page that was the main page of the site previously – still there but not the home page, 8 click throughs from some of my other websites and the rest came via Twitter and the Tweet Me plug in that I added.

What On Earth Is Twitter?

My thought when I first encountered Twitter last year. Twitter is a social bookmarking site where you can pick up followers who are interested in what you are doing. According to Tweeters who rave about it on forums Twitter is currently one of the best ways to get traffic to your sites and blogs. Although I joined Twitter over a year ago I haven’t really used it until I started this blog. So I am also learning as I progress.

When I added the Tweet Me plug in it automatically posted excerpts of the new blog posts to my profile on Twitter. Obviously several people were interested enough to come and take a look and one of them was interested enough to become a follower yesterday.

Apparently how Twitter works for Internet marketers is that you build up a following and then every now and then post details of something that you are trying to sell, a special offer or something new to your followers, but it works better if you have at least 10 fresh blog posts in between ads.

Obviously you would have to build up quite a following to make sales, but you can do that by searching for members in your niche and following them. They are notified and some reciprocate. I haven’t got time for that so for now I’ll settle for new content attracting followers, or indeed those who are adding me because they want to sell me something. It will be interesting to see how many followers I can attract this way.

Opzioni Sociable

No I don’t speak Italian, well not words that you’d want to know! Optzioni Sociable is a new plug in which I added today. If you look at the bottom of the posts you will see a bunch of pretty icons underneath the heading Share and Enjoy. These are links to social bookmarking sites.

This is a powerful tool that can help to get traffic to your sites and blogs, help your posts along in Google rankings and provide quality backlinks. Optzioni Sociable gives you a choice of over 100 social bookmarking sites to link to, but I chose the 30 I believe to be the most popular and effective. I could be wrong and I may add more or remove some later, but at least I have some control over them.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Basically when you socially bookmark a site or article you are creating linkbacks on websites that are popular and can help your sites and blogs gain popularity. You can socially bookmark your own sites, blogs and articles and you can use the bookmarking icons when you see something that you like on other websites and blogs.

It all works in a similar way to Twitter and the more times your content is socially bookmarked the better it is for you. I have icons to some of my favourite social bookmarking sites set up in my browser, so I generally use those whenever I want to give my content a boost for traffic, or indeed see something that I like on somebody elses website or blog.

My favourites are Dig, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Myspace, but with Facebook I’m not always comfortable with submitting Internet Marketing material to my profile apart from when I launch a new website. That is because half of my friends on Facebook are personal friends and relatives who are not interested in Internet marketing and I don’t want to annoy them by having my updates automatically posted to their profiles. I guess the best way around that is to start a group of those interested in Internet marketing and submit to that.

And The Rest

I added some more content and will continue to do so daily. The articles are all being selected to especially fit in with the theme of this blog. In time I should be able to build up a lot of information about free tools and resources for Internet Marketers and where to find them. Hopefully you will help me in this quest by recommending good ones in comments.

I also set up pinging to ping-o-matic which is  is a service to update different search engines and let them know that your blog has updated. I probably should have done that on day 1 but better late than never.

Ask any business person who’s website is at the top of the search engines if his/her site is making money, and the answer is almost always “yes”.

An example is Glenn Canady, the author of “Gorilla Marketing” who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars.

The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it’s traffic to your sites that’s free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work.

Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I’ve included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately.

1. Optimize your site.
To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for.

There are two tools that you can use to help you with search engine optimization:

a. Search Engine Optimization Fast Start Ebook – http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-book.php – will teach you simple and effective techniques for optimmizing your site. This ebook is now in its 4th edition, is completely up to date, and is one of the best ebooks I’ve seen on search engine optimization.

b. Web CEO – http://www.webceo.com – This is a complete search engine optimization suite that offers 10 different tools to help you optimize your site for the search engines. It offers the most comprehensive, and step by step, set of instructions I’ve ever seen with any software package. According to the instructions, you can get started in one hour. The free version of this software will work for most, and it also includes a $97 search engine optimization course as part of the package.

2. Develop a linking strategy.
One factor that influences how well you are ranked in the search engines is linking. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.

For each link that you have pointing back to you, that’s another opportunity for your potential customer to find you. With credibility being such a big problem on the internet, to have someone recommend you increases your chance of making the sale.

To help you develop an effective strategy, I recommend that you read “Linking Matters” – http://www.linkingmatters.com/. This ebook shows you how to develop an effective linking strategy for your site, and do it very quickly.

3. Develop a content strategy.
The truth is, “Content is King”. Most people online are looking for information. The more information that you provide for your customers, and the more valuable it is, the more likely you will make the sale.

Below are three different ways to develop content for your site.

The first and most effective strategy are articles.

Articles actually work for you in several ways.

a. Brands you as an expert so that customers come to you.
b. Provides valuable content to your potential customers.
c. Builds a relationship between you and your potential customers.
d. Creates a viral marketing strategy for your site.
e. Builds a linking strategy for you every time a webmaster publishes one of your articles.

No other strategy that I have employed has brought me more business than this one.

To find sites that accept articles, go here: http://www.jogena.com. This is one of the sites that I use because it’s one of the oldest, and most reputable sites online for finding information on ezines. Unfortunately, there’s no search, but everything is done by category, and the information is comprehensive, so you will locate rather quickly what you are looking for.

However, if the thought of writing your own content gives you nightmares, there’s a way around this.

You can use public domain information. Public domain information is information that is free to use because it’s in the public arena, or the copyright has expired.

To help you easily locate this information, I recommend that you download the public domain toolbar. You can get it at the Public Domain Forum – http://www.publicdomainforum.com/forum. You have to register for an account to get the toolbar, but both the forum account and the toolbar are free. The toolbar is a very comprehensive resource of public domain sources.

The third content strategy you need to consider is blogging.

What a blog does is allows you to create search engine friendly content on your topic of interest. Combine this with an RSS feed, which the search engines love, and you have a winning strategy.

Not only will it help you build content for the search engines, but it can also help you raise your traffic and sales.

Here is a comprehensive ecourse that you can take that will drastically reduce your learning curve, as well as provide you with the resources you need to implement this strategy.

http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/blogging-course.htm

Finally, to keep abreast of what’s happening with search engines, you need to subscribe to Search Engine Watch – http://www.searchenginewatch.com. This site offers tons of resources, news, and a newsletter on search engine optimization.

Apply one, or all, of these search engine resources to your search engine strategy, and you can expect a major increase in your traffic and sales to your site.

The author Jinger Jarrett is a writer and internet marketer living in Alpharetta, GA. You can get all of her best free internet marketing resources, including freeware to help you market on the forums when you visit her site at http://www.askjinger.com

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