SEO: Simulating Organic Growth On A Busy Schedule

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it's real traffic you're looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.

Anyone involved in SEO can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don't understand or want to deal with: “organic.” What they see is “successful long term strategy” and “search engine placement.” And that's where the trouble starts, because it's the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth - the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is “for real.” Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won't see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

Search Engine Ranking

Everyone knows that top ranked sites get a lot of traffic, BUT is that because they are “top ranked” or is it because they get a lot of traffic that makes them top ranked?

Which comes first the Chicken or the Egg?

The eternal question, here’s a way to answer it, in relation to Search Engines anyway

First, the major Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, all have different formulas for calculating how they rank a site and these formulas are always changing so it’s impossible to know exactly how to optimize a site for top ranking all the time.

One thing is fairly certain though and it doesn’t matter if this changes or not because the means of achieving a top rank will on its own, provide more traffic than we would get from a top ranking position anyway! I’m talking about INCOMING LINKS.

I’ve seen Log reports from a site ranked consistently in the top 5 positions on all major search engines, which show that less then 20% of all traffic is coming from the search engines, and the rest is coming from incoming and reciprocal links.

To learn more about incoming and reciprocal links go here

Incoming links are links from other sites and pages that send people to our site.
Reciprocal links; are links from our site to someone else’s and a link from them back to our site.

Having a large numbers of reciprocal and incoming links is good because while giving us more traffic it also makes us rank highly in search engines. As explained above it doesn’t matter if we don’t rank so well in the search engines, because we have more traffic from the incoming and reciprocal links anyway. So more traffic better rank, better rank more traffic, it’s perpetual motion!
If you would like to see how Alexa determines ranking here’s a quote from their site.

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).”

(Taken from: http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html )

Marketing Your Web Site

For most good online marketers it took at least a year to get up and running to get successful. They had to budget their time and money well. Don’t assume that putting a huge sum of cash into your business will bring you instant rewards. It is important to spend your time and money on several different approaches to see which ones generate the best hits. You need to remember to be persistent and spend your time and money wisely. When you fail to plan you plan to fail at your business. You want to find targeted visitors that are interested in what you have if you want to make sales.

1. Build Your List

Most online marketers send their offers to many targeted sources and prospects that they have generated. They do this regularly and have great success. It will allow you to build a lasting and trustful relationship with the list members. As the trust grows so will your money. There have been plenty of marketers who have made thousands just from sending an e-mail to their lists.

2. Pay Per Click search engines.

This type of search engine is the way to build high volume traffic immediately. Many hosts will be more than happy to set you up with this and you will be able to see how many people have been to your site. You will also end up paying less per month. You will also want to get Wordtracker to get as many targeted keywords as possible. The more targeted keywords you get the more traffic to your sites.

3. Article Submissions

You want to provide free and interesting articles related to what you are trying to sell to your audience. This will inform them on the benefits of what you are promoting and give it worth. Make sure your articles are truthful and not plagiarized.

4. Regular Search Engines

You will want to get started immediately to be able to build an online web presence. This will help to promote your site and gain you ranking which will move you to the top of the list. The higher on the list of ranking you are the more hits you will generate. You can link your self to a reciprocal linking campaign. This will give you the highest success in search engine rankings than anything else.

5. Forum Posting

A great way to target your market is to join a forum that is geared towards your audience. You can become friends and be helpful with all the people. This will let you gain trust. You want to be friends with your customers when marketing on the net. Visit and join high traffic forums daily and share your experiences with them and offer any advice as much as you can.
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Three Simple Things To Do To Get Traffic

When I first set out to quit my job and make money online it seemed like a very big task. Everything out there tells you how easy it is. They tell you how much money you can make in a month, or a week, or even a day depending on what you're looking at.

The money won't just fall into your lap, but I can tell you what you can do to make the steps to getting there much, much easier. I'll skip the part of long hours, time put in, how you seem to think about it even when you'd think yourself "off work" and the like, as you probably are already familiar with that stuff before you even thought of trying an online business.

First, KNOW exactly what you want to sell and/or what service you want to do. This will save you lots of time just in trying to make your website or sales page correct. The rest of your website will make sense around it as well and your web page will look and feel complete. You need to know as specifically as possible what goods or services you're offering. A subject that is too broad will not only make your site hard to find, but hard to update and keep track of as well.

Second, is get familiar with Search Engine Optimization(SEO), even with a finished site and a product ready to go, if noone can find your site you won't sell anything or get no visitors. You don't need to know it in the expert sense, but you should know what aspects search engines look for and adjust your website accordingly. Research the keywords and phrases common to your website's topic to find what people are searching for to properly optimize your page for the right traffic you want to go to your website.

Third, promote your site in as many different ways that you can think of. While it's not normally recommended to directly submit your website to the biggest search engines, taking out a few seconds to do it can't hurt. You can do so many things to promote a webiste, and as you work with one way, you'll often discover another way to get the word of your site around. From posting on forums to email advertising to Google Adwords, try and do as much as you can. Not every person surfing online will use the one or two ways you started promoting your site and may not see it. Get your hands dirty and experiment with as many as you can to give your site it's best chance of being seen.

This will hopefully help tweak and refine your site so when you follow the steps after it visitors will see what they were looking for and keep coming back or buy from you.

You've Got A Site -- Now What?

So you've got a website ready to go and you want to get the word out to either make money on it or promote it so it's the most popular page of it's kind. Now what?

Well, the first thing you should do is double check to make sure the site is as search engine friendly as possible. Go ahead. I'll wait. Done? Perfect. So, now it's easy for the search engines to find and categorize it once they do find it. Time to get that website where it can be seen.

One of the most common ways to get a site's pressence known in through Pay-Per-Click campaigns. They will assure you that the most qualified and targetted visitors come to your website. Keep your keyword and phrases as relevant as possible. If you keep your bids low it can be a profitable campaign when it targets the right audience. Keep track of the keywords people are clicking on to go to your site as well. This can tell you if you're targeting the right people or if you need to change your ad approach. Yahoo and Google are two very popular websites to do PPC campaigns on. There's numerous articles on the benefits and banes of PPC, and though it's not the focus on this one, it's usefulness to site promotion can't be simply disregarded.

Posting on forums is another way to promote your site. Do it specifically on forums with a topic relevant to your website. Check the TOS and make sure you can do it there first though. Simply placing our web address in your signature can create clicks through the forum, as well as create backlinks for your site. If the forum has a high Page Rank in Google it will work out even better for you. The main benefit of this is the backlinks your posts create which some search engine "spiders" deem gradually more important as they find your site linked more and more in different places on the internet.

On the idea of linking, reciprocal linking is another way to promote your website. This just means trading links with someone by putting a link on your website to them and they put a link on their website to you. Websites like Link Market and SEO Link Exchange are designed for just this purpose. As long as you keep the sites linking to you and from you relevant to your own site it should be just a matter of time before the search engine spiders find your site. The old fashioned way of emailing the webmaster of the site's can do it for you as well, but web services like the aformentioned ones, get rid of smaller steps that might make it harder to get linked using simple "Accept"/"Reject" buttons.

I hope this helps get your site to the top of the search engines.

Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Help Promote Your Web Site

Every successful business campaign begins with a strong, viable marketing plan. To rise above in the internet marketing world, you must be prepared to pull out all the stops in the areas of promotion and advertising. Sound difficult? Think again. The expansion of the World Wide Web has made the complications of internet marketing promotion a thing of the past. With a wide array of promotional avenues to wander, almost anyone can be victorious in the internet marketing game.

Search engines have always been, and still are, the most effective way to generate traffic to your web site. The largest search engines have their own huge databases that contain tons of information that can be discovered through keyword searches. Keywords are an essential factor when dealing with internet marketing. Search engines account for over 80 percent of traffic generated to web sites. In internet marketing, every visitor is a potential customer. The more customers you have, the more money for you.

The mailing list is an excellent internet marketing technique that can be of great help when trying to accomplish your goals. The unique aspect of a mailing list is, while it not only brings recent visitors back to your web site, these visitors will most likely send your newsletter to their acquaintances. To utilize this internet marketing method to the fullest, develop an expansive customer list, and use this list frequently.

Blogs are a new and increasingly popular internet marketing technique designed to educate readers about your product or service. This marketeting method is favored because of the ability to create and publish information instantaneously on the web, and receive feedback from its readers. Blogs and blogging have become an excellent source for internet marketing promotion because of the constant content development, as well as, overall popularity. In the internet marketing realm, it's the web site visitors that make the world go round.

Using A Free Blogging Web Site

When you’re new to blogging, a free blogging web site is a good way to get started. Popular blogging web sites like Blogger and Eponym allow users to set up and host a blog for no cost at all. The fact that one of these sites can provide you with all of the tools that you need to get your blog up and running for free, encourages people to start a blog. As it’s free, you don’t have anything to lose. Many people that have never had any other kind of web presence before find themselves drawn to blogging, partly because it is so easy to find a way to blog for free.

Compared to starting your own blog from scratch, signing up with a free blogging web site will get you listed in search engines much easier. For example, Google, that runs the free blog hosting site Blogspot, crawls its pages very often to look for updates. As a result, if you have a Blogspot blog, you are almost guaranteed to be listed on Google's blog search engine. This way you can spend less time on promoting your blog, and you can gain a following with a minimum of marketing effort.

If your blog attracts many readers, you may want to think about moving your site. Many people think that a blog that is hosted by a free blogging web site has a kind of amateur flavor, not appropriate for a high-profile blog. Your own domain name can help you make your blog feel professional, and finding a webhost is not difficult or expensive. Once your blog starts to attract a large readership, you will probably be able to sell enough advertising space to be able to afford to buy your own domain and pay for a hosting package, and still have money left over. However, until you have a sizeable readership, there’s really no need to invest in these luxuries.

When you want to build a following before you spend any money on your blog, using a free blogging website is a good idea. Later, when you feel ready to take the next step and pay for your own domain, your readers will follow you to your new home.

Web Site Strategies that Work!!

1. Review your goals and markets for your site:

a) Are there clear business goals and desired outcomes behind your Web site, and for each major page or section? How will you evaluate your success?

b) Have you defined all the target audiences for the site, and the "languages" they speak? Do you have compelling benefit statements, testimonials, case studies?

c) Does your home page appeal to each of your target markets and audiences? Does it effectively direct them to appropriate areas of your site?

d) How compelling are the "calls to action" on each page?

2. How can you take your online business to the next level?

a) Is your site making the best use of available technologies? How will you stay on top of online developments in your field? Are all appropriate staff involved?

b) Does your content effectively position the expertise of your business? Are there media or public relations outlets that you could tap for wider promotion?

c) Are you taking full advantage of "real-world" opportunities to promote your site?

d) Does your business offer other services or customer support functions that you could provide online? Are there further efficiencies that you could achieve?

e) Review your contact databases and your use of e-mail to support your marketing. Do you have clear opt-in and privacy policies?

3. Review your Web traffic reports:

a) Are there any obvious patterns in your traffic, or the paths your visitors follow that you could capitalize on, or need to change?

b) What are the top exit points from your site? Where are you losing conversions?

c) Which external sites link to you? Are these appropriate? Are you generating sufficient return on investment for paid online advertising?

d) Do the search phrases for your site suggest ideas for new areas of business development?

(c) 2005. Philippa Gamse.