Keyword Research

If you are involved in marketing online, then you are already aware that keyword research is a major component of your campaign. I’ll show you some of the best keyword research method going. I’ll point out what 90% of people are doing wrong, and how to do it right. It’s true, most people are going about it all wrong, maybe even you yourself.

Whenever people go to do their keyword research, they just find themselves some words that fall within certain guidelines. These guidelines might be having 1,000 searches every month with under 5,000 quoted results. When they find their keywords this way, here’s what they’re actually doing:

They’re totally stopping their thinking! That’s true. They think if they have some keywords that are within those guidelines, then the sales are going to start flying in. But in fact, they totally miss their target audience.

For each keyword you can find, I’d like for you to consider what type of person is going to search for that specific keyword phrase. Think about just what they’ll be looking for. Don’t try selling ‘cheap designer handbags’, to someone looking for ‘cheap handbags’.

Ok, lets move on. Your best approach to keyword research has two parts. The research, and the analysis. The first thing is to research and find keywords fitting within the guidelines. You next move is to analyze them.

Go to the Google Keyword tool. Do a search for a really broad term. For this example, let’s use ’smartphone’. The point here is to go from here to a deeper and more detailed keyword. You might try something now like ‘android smartphone’.

Now you want to research the ‘android smartphone’. You repeat this process until you’ve got a keyword phrase that’s very detailed, and gets more than 1,000 searches every month. You might find something like ‘best android smartphones’.

Now you take that long phrase and put it between “quotes”. Then put into Google’s search engine. Now look at the last page of the search results. Look at how many results you have. Anything under 5,000 results means it’s a good keyword phrase for you to use.

Now it’s time for analysis. Download and then install a software called ‘Traffic Travis’. Now open the program. Go to the ‘SEO analysis’ part. Type that keyword phrase there (without quotes), and then analyze it. If you get a result of ‘easy’ or of ‘relatively easy’, then you’re in good shape.

Now again think of what type of person is going to search for that particular phrase. For this example, it’s probably someone who is new to smartphones and is a little uncertain about whether or not it’s for him/her.

Target your page at that specific type of person. Write like you’re actually talking with them personally, and not to a crowd.

There you go. Now you know the best way to do keyword research. It’s simple, it’s easy. But it’s amazing how many people do this wrong. Stick with this method and you can end up miles ahead of all your competition.

Online businesses have no better ways of promoting their sites than by employing SEO strategies. It’s the best way or increasing traffic to their websites. If you can optimize your site using SEO strategies, you can stay competitive and increase your profits. If you happen to be new to this process, you could end up spending lots of money on marketing strategies. But I want to tell you how easy it is to make use of cheap SEO strategies, and ones that are effective.

You heard me, cheap! You can find cheap SEO strategies for giving you good results with generating more traffic to your site. These strategies may need some getting used to, but it pays you to learn them and to get started. Here are some of them:

The first thing you want to do is create a domain name. It needs to be one that’s easy for people to remember. Whenever you get your web hosting, you’ll be asked make up a domain name to go with your site. This will be your web address in your new online world, so it’s best that your create a name that visitors can remember easily.

Now you’re ready for the next SEO strategy. This one is cheap too – create or purchase content. That means you have to write your own, or have someone write, good quality content for your site. When you post articles on different article directories and other blogs, you can reach a much broader audience. Your keyword usage is a major aspect of article writing, because those words are what the search engines will be looking for to send traffic to. It’s vitally important that your articles are relevant to your theme, and can grab your readers’ interest. This is what will get them there, keep them there, and bring them back.

You can’t just bombard an article with keywords. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’. It’s heavily frowned upon with search engines and can do more harm than good, resulting in even getting banned. What you want from your articles is good original quality content. Uniqueness is what people want, something that stands out from the rest. There are some guidelines you can follow for making sure that your content is searchable. Then you can create backlinks by submitting those articles to several of the top directories. You can find article spinning software to use that helps create volumes of your re-written articles.

Your next SEO move is to get involved in link exchanges. The name is self-explanatory, you exchange links with others. It’s cheap and many times it’s free. You just need to make contact with website owners asking if they’ll exchange links with you. If they approve, you can post your link on their website, and place their link on yours. It’s a very effective way of getting traffic to your site, especially if the site you link to gets plenty of daily traffic.

So you can see, there are lots of cheap and easy SEO strategies you can use. Just make sure what you do is effective, and you’ll be on your way to success.

If you want to attract traffic to your website, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the right approach. Just imagine traffic getting pulled to your site with people using credit cards to shop for items. SEO is the right internet marketing strategy which helps in drawing more visitors to your site. Pay per click agencies depend upon these strategies to make money on their revenue models.

It helps in improving the class and superiority of the traffic to your site.  SEO is not similar to SEM (Search Engine marketing).  In this form of marketing, you pay for pulling traffic to your website.  On site search engine optimisation takes assistance of organic or natural ways to draw visitors to their website.

Given below are some ways to boost your search engine rankings.

a) Keywords
The right use of keywords needs to be targeted. Keywords are basically the words people type when they are looking out for some information.  These words are typed in the query box of the search engine when they want to get data on a particular product or service.  If you are able to focus on the right keywords which someone is looking out for to buy a product or service, then your sales is surely going to increase.  You could either use paid tools or free tools to locate these keywords.

Once you have identified and located these keywords, there are basically four basic factors which would help you go into the on site SEO which are keyword optimized copy, meta tag optimization, title tag optimization and the last one is image tag optimization.

b) Keyword optimized copy
The article which you write for your website should be worth reading and enjoying. Viewers reading your article should feel that they are spending their time reading something of quality.  Once you are through with them, make sure to optimize the article with the keywords which you would be targeting. The keyword has to appear at least once in every hundred words.  Make use of LSI (latent semantic indexing) which is phrases which are linked to your keyword.  The right location of the keywords should be chosen in the article.  It should not look out of place and thus the placement of the keywords in the right manner would encourage the reader to go further to the next step and place the order for the product or service.

c) Title Tag Optimization
The title is the first thing which catches the viewer’s attention when they people view in the browser.  The main keyword has to appear in the title tag and for first time optimizers; it should have an introductory line like ‘Welcome to our Website”.  The title which you choose should be catchy and attractive.  An exclusive title would distinguish your website from thousands of other sites.

d) Meta Tag Optimization
The next step is to insert Meta tags which are referred to as keywords Meta tag and description Meta tag.

The main aim of site search engine optimisation is to adopt the right SEO techniques which help in providing high page ranks in the search engines.  The higher the page ranking, the greater would be the number of visitors to that site. If you want to make the pages search engine friendly, then you would have to revise or amend the content and then accordingly code the HTML.

If you are having an online website or store for very long time but not many people are visiting your website, you want to analyze the situation.  There may be some clues which can be further investigated with some efforts. Largely many sites do not have good volume of traffic because content may not be suitable for search engines.   This is when a professional SEO company can help you optimizing the written material on your website for search engines. An efficient Toronto SEO company took a look at my keywords carefully and helped to re-write some of the material again to have the right density of keywords without making my content sound unprofessional. The ranking within the search engines is very crucial.

There is not one solution for all the search engines. SEO Companies understands the operations of many leading search engines.  Professional SEO help is important because your site would be re-worked to work well with most of the search engines.  But if too much is done, there are chances that search engine will overlook your site as over-optimized. There is a good balance and SEO companies know what is best for your online site.

SEO companies can also help you to get the appropriate program for pay per click advertising. There are two ways to go about it. One, you can display these ads on your site and second, you can display your ads on many other site. In both the case, it is important that you choose the most popular programs which match the category of business with yours. Many such programs spread the word in a network of sites, and many visitors, clients and customers are acquired that way. If you want to display these ads on your site, it is good idea to earn good money. I chose to offer your own logos and banners to the sites which have good traffic and help you to have good volume of sales which can be translated with the number of visitors and items sold online.

Your business presence must be visible and evident in the market with your best adopted brand. Your brand identity is very important as it is the sign which identifies you with your customers and clients. In the past, paper based advertisements were good mediums to reach your customers. But advent of internet has changed everything in the media industry. Now there is no business which does not have a website. Your web site makes it possible for many customers to find your services and products and they come to know about your offerings. It is a really nice idea to have a website. The careful planning of your website is very important, in order to make it very effective, it must stand out from the crowd among other similar websites and your competitors. The blue-print can be created by you and it must include all the information you want to present to your customers online. Once you have written information or articles and details. The next search is to find an agency or web designer which can turn your thoughts into reality with a professional website. I know of a Toronto Web Design company as it was referred to me and it is good company to begin with. An effective web design company would be able to give you designs which would be suitable to your business.

A website is a medium to show to the world your business and vision. There are many business companies which are very much successful and are purely online in the presence methods. Once your website becomes ready and it is hosted at the web server. The users and visitors start coming to you through your website and web address. Initially the traffic to your site may be low. But website can not be very much successful without submitting the site to search engines. Optimizing the website for the search engine provide substantial traffic to the site for maximum return. I like the services from a professional Toronto SEO company because of the detailed job they do.  It is to your advantage and you get more sale and business.  Just having a website online among millions of others won’t do you any good unless you are promoting it.  An effective website with a strong SEO plan goes a long way and gets optimum results.

Temi blog is a webmaster, search engine optimisation, affiliate marketing and website development discussion blog, you can also share information on motivational techniques, community networking and relevant applications. Internet entrepreneur blog was setup primary to blog, discussing and sharing information, opinions and experiences related to the internet from an entrepreneurial point of view. Guest bloggers are welcome to submit a blog post about issues that will fit into any of the categories found on the website and share your views in ongoing discussion in the blog. Please note that Temi blog sets strict guidelines for articles published on this site, if you follow the guidelines you have a better chance of getting your article published.

Boss cart looked promising as it first appeared online and many developers thought of having some good implementations over other eCommerce deployment options. Many companies re-oriented their development strategies around new ways with boss cart. However developers dont found it difficult to work with the boss cart framework. Many ecommerce gurus wrote the many articles supporting it but developer oriented forums and boards were filled with Shopping Cart Software.

Boss cart promised to provide the hacker proof code base with good proper implementation of object oriented technologies. Developers felt that it requires longer learning to write and implement code on this new platform. Many companies still go on looking for ways to automate online stores and enhance the existing capabilities of ecommerce sites with boss cart. Business decisions and requirements are good catalysts for pushing any new technology forward. Boss cart will take more time to be a mainstream paradigm and developers can adopt it if their projects demand enhanced functionality.

Most of the time, you can easily see the school of though a web designer leans towards in their web design. Web designer from a graphic design background tends to be high in visual element of the website, design eye catching websites with very little use of text, there are some website that are actually completely made from graphic without a single text a spider can read.
There other design who go in the opposite direction, loads of text with very little graphics. From search engine optimisation view point, this is actually great but from usability point of view, its almost as bad as the site design entirely with graphics.  The best sites are somewhere in between the two methods.

One mistake some designer make is that the lose focus of the purpose or a website, a website that is not and information site basically want to sell something to you, a designer should get to the point without too much irrelevant information.  One case in point is a website recently reviewed by Temi.ro , the site is and adult dating site, the previous version of the site (see image 1)

Very Naughty old version

was quite heavy on text, does not place information about the services and call to action link that will help visitors make up their mind quickly in a prominent place. The result was that the site gets a lot of visitors but also loses most of the.

The site was recently redesigned with help from Temi.ro. (see image 2). It was emphasised to the designer that importance of presenting information and arranging functions and call to action links or button in a way that makes the maximum use of the screen space without the need for users to scroll before accessing required information.
The new design was also requested to keep all the text from the old site and use H tags instead of bold tag for paragraph headlines. The final result of the new design was and eye catching website with straight forward link functions and call to action links. As at the time of writing this post, the site owner has recorded 10% drop in bounce rate.

Basic Implementation of Usability Testing

You have done all the hard parts, planning, analyzing, and designing. Now comes the implementation of usability testing. Throughout the previous analyses, there were most likely several negative findings. So many that it may be difficult to implement the changes to fix them all. In fact, you may not want to regardless of budget or time issues.

Develop Priorities

The next step is to create a list of priorities on what needs fixing first. Look for simple easy fixes, or try finding the ones that can affect most of your users. Fixing a poor Terms of Agreement page hardly compares to poorly done new user form or confusing navigation bar. A common side effect of fixing the larger issues first is that lesser issues become resolved on there own.

Another reason you might want to hold off on making all the fixes at once is that it may be difficult to determine what new changes made, make the greater impact. It’s easy to see improvements if all you did was move a menu to the left instead of the right versus moving the menu, redoing the menu’s organization, and changing the header all at the same time. Take little bites. It could be that moving to the left did work better for your users, but now using another feature has become more complex. Maybe the fix needed to be not moving the menu, but reorganizing it.

Test Again

Now comes the fun and ongoing part. Test and test again. A site is never really ever done. Even the big guns like eBay, Microsoft, or Google are constantly testing. I have been lucky enough to participate as a test subject for Google’s Adwords and AdSense. It’s the advantages to living nearby that I got to participate at Google I guess. Don’t forget, testing is one of the most important steps to building a website, and if you don’t do it don’t expect much. I’m guessing not everyone will like it.

Yahoo web stats

Yahoo announce it web analytics last week, excerpts from the blog that announces the arrival of Yahoo web analytics follows:

Have you ever bailed on an online checkout because something in the user experience bugged you? Or were pleasantly surprised that the sponsored listings were more relevant than the regular results of your web search? This week, we are rolling out a new service that creates a helpful feedback loop for e-merchants, website owners, advertisers, and developers based on how well they did with you in critical moments like these.

Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

full story

Webmaster forum

Forums were once called the original Web 2.0 sites by a commentator. He argued that way before the word Web 2.0 and its accompanying phrase ‘user generated contents’ forums existing and forums fit perfectly into the definition of Web 2.0. All contents of forums are user generated and its is interactive. Forums on the Internet are modeled after forums in real live, people with interest in a particular topic gather round to discuss issues around that topic.

One of the most popular kind of forums on the Internet are Webmaster Forums, they are very popular, they provide a platform for webmasters not only to discuss web related issues but to share knowledge, information and resources.

One such webmaster forum is a forum called webmaster serve. Its not quite new but it has recently undergone a revival. It has a new skin and various categories of webmaster related discussions including web hosting, domain name registration, web development, search engine optimisation, general business discussion and a thriving Webmaster Marketplace.

The Webmaster Marketplace category is one of the most interesting part of the forums. Threads contained in this forum showcase services webmasters from allover the word have available to sell, exchange or are looking for. You can find services from basic HTML coding to buying a complete website. To post good or services you have for sale at the webmaster marketplace is completely free.

You can browse webmaster service without the need to register however if you want to actively participate in webmaster discussion you need to register. Registration is completely free. You can register from this page.