L.A. Management Company

Everyone wants “organic” or “free” traffic, but it’s a full time job to try to keep on top of the search engines changing rules. Instead, if you build a good content-rich site and do the things on this list, you’ll get traffic and help your ranking at the same time.

1. Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Get traffic in an hour with PPC. Google and Overture (now Yahoo). Don’t bother with others until you make these two work. The key to this is to know your visitor value, bid on hundreds of key words and phrases and split test your ads and track each key word, phrase or ad separately.

2. Distribute Your Content – write articles of value to your target market. Distribute that content for other webmasters to use on their sites as long as they keep the link back to you in a “resource box” at the end of each article. Distribute your articles through article directories, ezines, and distribution services. The key to make this work is valuable content.

3. Submit Press Releases – submit electronic press releases frequently with news of interest to the media and your target market. Since press releases are news, if they get picked up, it will be quickly and you may get hundreds of links back to your site this way. Key to make this work: write 300 – 500 word releases, include a link back to you, and have them written and distributed by experts who know how to optimize each release for key words (not typical PR firms).

4. Set Up a Blog with RSS – to be effective, blogs must have frequently updated content. Base yours on information helpful to your customers, not sales pitches. Don’t do it unless you can commit some ongoing time to it. Seth Godin says the keys to a successful blog are: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness (short & to the point), and Controversy. The key to making this work is to make it interesting to your visitors, submit to blog directories, ping the search engines when you post and distribute your content with RSS.

5. Get One-Way Incoming Links – All the previous tips will create incoming, one-way links but you can also buy links from other sites from text link brokers. Don’t do reciprocal linking, it’s dead. Make sure you get links from pages with a Google Page Rank higher than “0″. A site Google rates as “0″ may be because they are penalizing it for some reason. If you link to it, you’ll get penalized too.

The key to making this work: Make sure links have your key words in the anchor text and make sure they are text, not graphical links. Make sure they are from other relevant sites, not link farms or FFA (Free for All) sites. The ideal is links from relevant pages without many other links.

6. Give Other Sites Your Testimonial – let them publish it on their web site as long as they link back to you. This can get you a one-way link from a site that would otherwise not give it to you. The key to make this work: keep it short and to the point.

7. Email Promotions – Advertise in Ezines, place ads in someone else’s email newsletters that reach your target market. The key to make this work: track everything carefully

8. Joint Ventures – Get promoted to your JV partner’s customer database by your JV partner. John Reese sold over $1 Million of his information product in 24 hours exclusively by using joint venture promotions from his partners sending his offer to their customer lists. He paid his partners commissions on sales. The key to make this work: know your visitor value and have a tested and proven sales page that converts well BEFORE you contact JV prospects.

9. Get Affiliates – If selling a product, offer a commission to affiliates to sell for you. Each affiliate’s link to your sales letter conversion page will bring you traffic and a better search engine rank too. The key to making this work is to make it financially attractive to your affiliates and give them everything they need to promote your product or service.  Make it brain dead easy for them to do.

10. Buy Other Web Sites – Find web sites that already rank high on your keywords and verify their traffic with the site owner and independent tools. Make sure you get ownership of the domain – you can let them still use their content elsewhere. Check deleteddomains.com to see what domains you can register for a few dollars that their owners have let expire. The key to making this work: Check Google page rank, Alexa rank and the number of back links for any site  before you buy a web site.

One marketer I know challenged some SEO experts to see who could get ranked highest on a given term in 24 hours. He won, the techies did a lot of slick things, but the marketer just bought the site that was already # 1.

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Joe McVoy is a marketing consultant who has had experience starting up & growing businesses. He founded 2  companies selling to Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers, a mail order company and an Internet marketing business.  He helps clients with traditional marketing, direct marketing, on-line marketing and has a free newsletter & resources at:  http://www.profitablemarketingsystems.com

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Four Vital Steps for Optimizing Your Website

Search engine optimization is best defined as the art and science of building web pages that are both search engine friendly and user friendly. Below are four basic steps that you should take when optimizing your web pages.

1. Emphasize Text and Not Graphics.

While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a search engine is trying to classify pages by text and not by images. If you have an opening page with a beautiful picture of a flower arragement in a wicker basket and only two words of text saying “enter here” then this page will not rank high in searches for Wicker Baskets. Similarly, if you have a headline with important text containing your site’s keywords, it should not be displayed as a gif or jpeg image. Pages that are all flash or all images are not search engine friendly, and often are not user friendly as well.

2. Links to Your Interior Pages Should Be Easily Found by Search Engines

While most people will probably enter your site through the main page, many will enter after doing searches which lead them to your inner pages. The best way to make sure that search engines will find and index your inner pages is to include text links to these pages.

3. Build Your Pages Around Specific Keywords or Phrases

Robotic search engines and human users have one thing in common: they are trying to figure out what your site is all about. It is possible to build separate web pages which explain and give importance to various aspects of your organization’s activity. These sub pages can be optimized so that they perform well in searches for your various keywords.

4. Your Keywords Should Appear in Strategic Portions of Your Web Pages

If your site is about wicker baskets, then these words should appear in the following places of your html pages:

a. In the File Name or the URL.

If your site is called www.wickerbaskets.com then this will give you a head start in any searches for this term. Similarly, if your company is called Acme Crafts, you may have a web page with this url:  www.acmecrafts.com/wickerbaskets.html

The URL or file name is an important indicator to a search engine, so don’t miss the opportunity to put your important term either in your main domain name or in your file names.

b. In the Title Tag

The text that is displayed in the blue line at the top of your browser is your title tag. The title tag is located in the <head> section of the document. If your main phrase is “Wicker Baskets” then the title tag in your html document should look something like this: <title>Wicker Baskets: Wicker Basket Information by Acme Crafts</title>

c. In the Description Tag

The description tag is not seen on the web page but search engines often display it as the text which gives the searcher an idea of what your page is about. The description tag should be compelling, and make someone want to click and see your page, while also containing the keywords that are in your url and your title tag. A description tag for this site might look as follows: <meta name=”description” content=”Wicker Baskets: Design your Wicker Basket with the help of Acme Crafts. You will find up-to-date information on designing your own wicker baskets on our website.”>

d. In the Headlines

Just as someone reading a newspaper looks at headlines to find out what is important, a search engine robot looks at the headlines of a web page in order to pick up the essential feature of that page. Put your main phrase in a headline and place it near the top of the page. Your headline text should be enclosed with special header tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3>. A headline tag for our hypothetical page could be written as follows: <h1>Design your own Wicker Baskets with our online basket builder .</h1>

If you don’t like the look of the h1 tag, then use a smaller tag, h2 or h3, or adjust your site’s style sheet so that the h1 tag is displayed in a small font which better matches your body text.

e. In the Body Text of Your Page

Your main keywords or key phrase should appear in the first paragraph of text and in a natural way throughout the text and also at the end of the page. In normal writing you would first introduce your subject, then explain what it is about and then summarize at the end. Follow this same procedure when you start writing your web page. Pages written in this style will automatically have correct keyword density and distribution.

f. In Anchor Text on Your Page

Anchor text is the clickable portion of links on your web page. Suppose you are describing your Wicker Baskets and you want to direct your web visitors to an inside page with more information about this subject. Instead of making a link that says “click here,” it would be better to have a link that says “Click here for more information about Wicker Baskets” or even better, the link text will only be “Wicker Baskets” and the “click here” will be rendered as normal text.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization steps when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily understood by your visitors, and easily classified and
indexed by search engines.