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Internet Marketing Big Picture For Small Business

Internet marketing is the buzz word today. All businesses, be they big or small, can grow if the internet is used effectively. It is true that the influx of information regarding internet marketing makes it confusing, overpowering and scary to those who own small businesses. However, once all the hoopla surrounding it is brushed away, it is as easy as making apple pie. It is necessary for all to look at the big picture and understand it, regardless of whether one is looking at internet marketing to do business online or whether one is looking at it, in order to outsource the internet marketing for the business.

It is easy to see that the world has changed and so has the world of business. Today the market place for business is no longer in the streets but online. The market place is in the memory of computers reaching out to many more individuals than you could have ever dreamed of. Hence it is crucial that every business man, no matter how small his business, knows how to get his business and products marketed online.

One of the big business plus points of Internet Marketing is that you are not strait jacketed into the 9- 5 work hours. On the Internet it’s a 24 hour day and you can only gain from this.

Success of a business lies in how well you promote yourself, the reasons you give people to be loyal to your business and the claims your clients make about you. This holds true not just on the streets but also when one is marketing on the internet. The only difference is that different methods are required to make these strategies work online. To grab attention and focus it on your business and/or products there are two options available. One option is to purchase advertising and the other is to use different strategies to build “name recognition”, such that the name of your company is associated with the service provided by you. The main thing to remember is to target your potential buyers effectively. One of the advantages the internet offers its advertisers is the ability to figure out the effectiveness of the advertisement in a relatively short period and low cost.

Google Adwords and similar advertising services from Yahoo and MSN is a good way to advertise your business or product. These advertisements appear as text ads along the side of the searched results and these are simultaneously sent across the internet to a whole host of other websites.

Another more favoured method is to not buy advertising, but to get your company listed as high as possible in search results of your interest. Thus the traffic is directed to your business from all the sites which mention the services you provide. This method however, requires a lot in terms of money and effort for the strategy to work. This method probably gives more lasting results than the one where you buy advertising.

However, no matter which method you use, it is extremely important that you understand the strategy you are using, else your efforts will be in vain.
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CategoryPosted in: Online Marketing, Small Business commentsComments Off
AuthorBy admin Dated October 7th, 2007

Alexa Ranking – Facts

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and it has been popular because of the website ranking service offered for the websites. Alexa evaluates a website on the basis of its popularity among the Alexa Toolbar users and assigns a rank to it. The lower the rank value, the higher is the popularity. Through the ‘Alexa Toolbar’, Alexa also provides a lot of information about the website traffic and the user behavior for a particular website. With the help of this toolbar, the visitor to a website is appropriately guided in his search for a specific content in a website. It gives the detailed information about a website; for example, it shares information such as whom the website is registered with, how many pages it had, and how often it was updated, etc.

However, there is a serious flaw in the calculation of the website ranking by Alexa. Alexa rank is assigned to a website on the basis of the number of hits produced in it by the users who have installed the Alexa toolbar in their web browser. The Alexa toolbar is provided with a number of SEO tools, and therefore, it has been a popular tool bar among website owners. Thus, a common user may not find any specific use of this tool, and so he may not have installed it on his browser. Thus Alexa ranking is based on the number of the hits produced in a website by a selected group of users, not by a universal group of visitors.

The fact that Alexa ranking depends entirely on the users of the Alexa toolbar indicates that the Alexa ranking cannot be trusted, especially for the ranking of the not-so-popular websites. Those with the high ranking, for example, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc., are always ranked the highest by any ranking method; and Alexa also does not show much difference. However, the case with low-ranked websites is different. There are many websites, including many websites that are popular in one region or a country, that are given the least ranking by Alexa. This contradiction is a clear indication that the visitors of such websites do not possess the Alexa toolbar on their web browser.

There are other allegations over Alexa ranking that its ranking can be easily manipulated. There is one such claim that if a website that is ranked low by Alexa can be pushed to the top of its ranking list if a number of users use the particular website as their default home page. Also, the popularity of the website in Alexa can be increased by increasing the traffic to one’s website by different methods. If the website owner of a particular website decides to increase the Alexa ranking of his site, he can achieve it easily by requesting the known visitors of his website to install the Alexa toolbar. Thus Alexa ranking lacks authenticity.

Had Alexa used the software that is able to count every single hit produced in a website on a daily basis and assess its popularity, it would have been widely accepted as one of the best website ranking service.

CategoryPosted in: Webmasters comments3 Comments »
AuthorBy admin Dated October 3rd, 2007

Why Directory Submissions and how it helps in SERPs

If you are done with your website designing, the next thing that immediately jumps to your mind is its marketing. There are a number of website optimization methods available through online and offline; however, most of them cost you a significant share of your budget. Article submission is one of the best SEO methods that allow you to submit the articles free of cost and earn external link to your website.

Directory submission simply refers to the idea of submitting articles to a directory where thousands of articles are published daily, under different categories. Almost all the websites in western countries today are involved in this practice of article submission as they have found them the best way to increase their page ranking in the Search Engine Page Result (SERP). Thus article directories today consist of almost all the topics under the sun.

What happens to your articles after they reach the directory site? This question is important because the articles that are created by you or through outsourcing will bear fruits only if they are used effectively. In fact, your articles will be picked up by the websites that do not have sufficient text contents in them or the websites that find the relevant contents in your articles and publish them in their webpage. While publishing the articles, most directories offer the facility to add a certain number of hyperlinks within the content or at the bottom of the text. Thus the articles that find its way to a website display your link in that website. In this manner, many websites (you may not know who they are) publish your articles, and in return, you gain many external links to your website.

External links gained by article submission improve the page rank in different ways. As most of us know, relevant links are one of the major contributing factors of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Article submission is the best way to achieve external links. The advantage of these links is that they are unidirectional, i.e., they are not reciprocal links. Many of the websites that use reciprocal links are found to be facing the threat from the search engines because of their ‘link farm’ nature. Thus articles directory is of great help to the websites to improve the page rank in an ethical manner.

Secondly, article submission helps the websites mutually. They share the contents and thus increase the richness of the contents. Search engines trap the websites with the help of the keywords present in the textual contents of the website. Thus websites that have got the rich contents will gain more popularity among the search engine spiders. Article submission service, therefore, is a boon to the websites that do not have enough contents in them. For example, a banking firm may not find much textual matter to be published in its website. However, if it uses the article directory for publishing a number of articles that describe the various features of the service offered by the bank, they will improve the contents and thus gain popularity.

In short, article submission is an effective way of improving the page rank for both the author website and the recipient website.

CategoryPosted in: General Directories, Search Engines commentsNo Comments »
AuthorBy admin Dated October 3rd, 2007

Web Directory Submission-Powerful Yet Under Utilized

Web directory submission is one of the latest SEO trends that are gaining popularity in the western countries. However, it has not been fully utilized yet. Only a fraction of the websites that are offering their service through internet are aware of the benefits of the article submission service. Therefore, analysts predict a dramatic growth in the web directory service all over the world within a few years.

The article submission service is one of the most powerful tools of search engine optimization. It is a more practical method of getting a good page rank in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The conventional methods of SEO such as keywords and reciprocal links, etc., demand a great deal of accuracy and patience. The result generated by such methods, however, is unpredictable. Compared to these forms of search engine optimization, the directory submission offers a lot of benefits. It not only generates active one-way links to a website, but also helps to improve the quality of the contents of both the donor and the recipient website.

Article submission complies with the fundamental rule of search engines, i.e., to generate search-engine friendly articles. The articles submitted through the website directories are relevant to the topic of the websites, and they meet the keyword criteria specified by each search engines. An article directory supplies hundreds of articles under one category, and this enables the webmasters to pick up the most relevant article for his website and thus make it content rich. On the other hand, the author website produces hundreds of articles under different topics covered in the website using the appropriate keywords in each of them. When this is distributed through the directories and picked up by different websites, the author website becomes optimized. Thus article submission benefits a large number of websites at one-go.

By using article directory service effectively, a website can ensure a smooth traffic and also a decent page rank throughout. However, there are chances that the website, especially that is new to the search engine, may be pushed to the Google sandbox because of duplicate contents. This happens when a large number of websites pick the same article from the directory. Thus the original article presented in your website shows similarity with many other websites, and therefore, the website will be penalized being duplicate. To avoid this, articles should be prepared altering their contents slightly and submitted to different directories.

Article submission is an effective and organic means of search engine optimization. They not only provide content rich websites but also help to gain one-way links. Moreover, the articles share a lot of information about all topics of relevance for the users. Thus it is one of the best and the most effective way of marketing the websites. Those who have identified this truth have been reaping the benefits of it. There are many article submission directories that publish the articles in their directories free of cost. Make use of these facilities and get a good page ranking for your website.

CategoryPosted in: General Directories commentsNo Comments »
AuthorBy admin Dated October 3rd, 2007

Google Sandbox Explained and Solutions

The ’sandbox’ phenomenon is a mirage to a large number of web users. Does it really exist or not? Some webmasters are of the opinion that the page ranking of a website is decided by a set of mathematical algorithm and that it cannot be altered by an individual policy such as sandbox.

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox refers to a temporary cache in the search engine where the domains of the recently registered websites are saved. These domains do not show up in the search engine page result until a time is deemed when the search engines think that they can commence the ranking. It is the time when the websites picks up their ranking by using other methods such as external linking or any advertisement methods. This process of restricting the new websites from search engine pages is accepted in order to avoid the sudden ‘jump’ of the newer websites in the SERP. Usually the websites are kept within the sandbox for two to three months. However there are instances of not showing the websites for more than eight months.

The sandbox feature now explains the reason for your 0 page rank in the initial days of your website irrespective of its procurement of many reciprocal links. It is commonly noticed by the website owners that the page ranking starts from the lowest, almost nil, to a sudden 7 or 8 within a period of three months.

The ’sandbox’ concept has been the most debated by the search engine experts. Some of them accepts the existence of sandbox in search engine and attribute it as the reason for the low page ranking of the newer websites whereas the others are of the opinion that the low page rank is caused because of the natural delay caused by the Google search engines to interpret the credibility of the website before assigning it a page rank.

Another shocking information is that a well-established link may also be put in the custody of sand box if it is identified as a link farm. Many websites that have collected hundreds of links in a brief period of time have realized that their page rank dropped to the lowest all of a sudden and remained there for almost a year or so.

Now comes the most important question. Is there any solution to come out of this choking sand box? In reality, nothing. The only thing you can do is to wait. The hope that your website will show up in one fine morning with flying colors makes your waiting more meaningful. Meanwhile you can concentrate on other popular strategies such as Adwords for popularizing your website. Adwords help your website procure quality links from other sites. It will also find a proper place in the search engine pages of AOL, AskJeeves, Netscape, etc. As it earns more visibility, Google will release the website from the sandbox.

Do not get discouraged by the ’sandbox effect’. Apart from Google, there are Yahoo! and MSN as popular search engines where you can get a decent page ranking from the beginning itself. Keep working on your website. Improve its quality and update the contents focusing on the user side. Do not waste your time worrying about the ‘non-existing’ (?) sandbox.

CategoryPosted in: Web Design comments1 Comment »
AuthorBy admin Dated September 23rd, 2007

Article Marketing to Search Engine Marketing

Article marketing is a relatively new means of achieving smooth traffic to a website in an indirect way. On the other hand, search engine marketing follows the straightforward approach of allowing the search engines to trap the websites based on certain criteria. Both search engine marketing and article marketing are found to be good practices for creating effective website traffic. However, there are a few shortcomings in each one.


Article Marketing - Pros

· You can build prospective one-way links to your website. Articles serve as a cause to direct potential visitors to a website. Anyone who is interested to read an article about a particular topic will find the links mentioned in it the most useful. Thus the articles help the website to invite more traffic towards it.

· The quality links contained in an article are search-engine friendly. They attract the search engine spiders mainly because of their attachment to the relevant content. Thus the page rank of your website increases with the help of these articles. There are article directories which host a collection of articles. Search engines easily catch the articles from these directories. It is, therefore, better to supply your articles to many article directories.

· Keyword-rich articles invite search engines towards them. However, the articles that contain excess keywords will be assumed as spam and will be ignored by them.

· Finally, articles help you to improve the reputation of your brand. Most of the users will find the articles useful to them before selecting a product. Therefore, by giving the relevant information to the customers through your articles, you gain more credibility from the customers.

Article submission has been found very effective because of their cost-effective nature. If you are able to identify the right content that describes your product or service and prepare the contents with the correct use of keywords, half of the job is done. As a next step, you will approach the article directories where you can post your articles free of cost, and they can be circulated to hundreds of other article directories after making necessary changes in the content in order to avoid duplication. In this way, articles help you to make your website content-rich in an indirect manner. Thus article marketing is cheaper than search engine marketing.

In order to achieve a proper SEO from the popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for your website, you have to invest a large amount of money for making your website SEO-friendly. If you wish to get better results from Search engine marketing, you have to accept many paid services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

There are no many shortcomings for using article submission strategies for effective web marketing. However, we can say that article submission process is quite slow. It consumes a considerable amount of the author’s time. If they outsource the work, it would become quite expensive.

To conclude, we can say that article marketing is cheaper and effective if used wisely, but it gives slow results. Same is the case with organic search engine marketing. However, if you want immediate results, go for the paid search engine marketing services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

CategoryPosted in: Web Design comments1 Comment »
AuthorBy admin Dated September 23rd, 2007

Article Marketing to Search Engine Marketing

Article marketing is a relatively new means of achieving smooth traffic to a website in an indirect way. On the other hand, search engine marketing follows the straightforward approach of allowing the search engines to trap the websites based on certain criteria. Both search engine marketing and article marketing are found to be good practices for creating effective website traffic. However, there are a few shortcomings in each one.


Article Marketing - Pros

· You can build prospective one-way links to your website. Articles serve as a cause to direct potential visitors to a website. Anyone who is interested to read an article about a particular topic will find the links mentioned in it the most useful. Thus the articles help the website to invite more traffic towards it.

· The quality links contained in an article are search-engine friendly. They attract the search engine spiders mainly because of their attachment to the relevant content. Thus the page rank of your website increases with the help of these articles. There are article directories which host a collection of articles. Search engines easily catch the articles from these directories. It is, therefore, better to supply your articles to many article directories.

· Keyword-rich articles invite search engines towards them. However, the articles that contain excess keywords will be assumed as spam and will be ignored by them.

· Finally, articles help you to improve the reputation of your brand. Most of the users will find the articles useful to them before selecting a product. Therefore, by giving the relevant information to the customers through your articles, you gain more credibility from the customers.

Article submission has been found very effective because of their cost-effective nature. If you are able to identify the right content that describes your product or service and prepare the contents with the correct use of keywords, half of the job is done. As a next step, you will approach the article directories where you can post your articles free of cost, and they can be circulated to hundreds of other article directories after making necessary changes in the content in order to avoid duplication. In this way, articles help you to make your website content-rich in an indirect manner. Thus article marketing is cheaper than search engine marketing.

In order to achieve a proper SEO from the popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for your website, you have to invest a large amount of money for making your website SEO-friendly. If you wish to get better results from Search engine marketing, you have to accept many paid services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

There are no many shortcomings for using article submission strategies for effective web marketing. However, we can say that article submission process is quite slow. It consumes a considerable amount of the author’s time. If they outsource the work, it would become quite expensive.

To conclude, we can say that article marketing is cheaper and effective if used wisely, but it gives slow results. Same is the case with organic search engine marketing. However, if you want immediate results, go for the paid search engine marketing services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

CategoryPosted in: SEO comments1 Comment »
AuthorBy admin Dated September 23rd, 2007

Google Sandbox Explained and Solutions

The ’sandbox’ phenomenon is a mirage to a large number of web users. Does it really exist or not? Some webmasters are of the opinion that the page ranking of a website is decided by a set of mathematical algorithm and that it cannot be altered by an individual policy such as sandbox.

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox refers to a temporary cache in the search engine where the domains of the recently registered websites are saved. These domains do not show up in the search engine page result until a time is deemed when the search engines think that they can commence the ranking. It is the time when the websites picks up their ranking by using other methods such as external linking or any advertisement methods. This process of restricting the new websites from search engine pages is accepted in order to avoid the sudden ‘jump’ of the newer websites in the SERP. Usually the websites are kept within the sandbox for two to three months. However there are instances of not showing the websites for more than eight months.

The sandbox feature now explains the reason for your 0 page rank in the initial days of your website irrespective of its procurement of many reciprocal links. It is commonly noticed by the website owners that the page ranking starts from the lowest, almost nil, to a sudden 7 or 8 within a period of three months.

The ’sandbox’ concept has been the most debated by the search engine experts. Some of them accepts the existence of sandbox in search engine and attribute it as the reason for the low page ranking of the newer websites whereas the others are of the opinion that the low page rank is caused because of the natural delay caused by the Google search engines to interpret the credibility of the website before assigning it a page rank.

Another shocking information is that a well-established link may also be put in the custody of sand box if it is identified as a link farm. Many websites that have collected hundreds of links in a brief period of time have realized that their page rank dropped to the lowest all of a sudden and remained there for almost a year or so.

Now comes the most important question. Is there any solution to come out of this choking sand box? In reality, nothing. The only thing you can do is to wait. The hope that your website will show up in one fine morning with flying colors makes your waiting more meaningful. Meanwhile you can concentrate on other popular strategies such as Adwords for popularizing your website. Adwords help your website procure quality links from other sites. It will also find a proper place in the search engine pages of AOL, AskJeeves, Netscape, etc. As it earns more visibility, Google will release the website from the sandbox.

Do not get discouraged by the ’sandbox effect’. Apart from Google, there are Yahoo! and MSN as popular search engines where you can get a decent page ranking from the beginning itself. Keep working on your website. Improve its quality and update the contents focusing on the user side. Do not waste your time worrying about the ‘non-existing’ (?) sandbox.

CategoryPosted in: Search Engines, SEO commentsNo Comments »
AuthorBy admin Dated September 23rd, 2007

Track Online Phone Sales to your PPC Keyword Bid

E-commerce sites now can use an efficient way to track their online phone orders right back to the original keyword query posted by the visitor into a search engine. It proves to be highly supportive in their PPC management.

A good example is KeywordRadar.com whose exclusive domain is to help small business owners ascertain from where their most profitable traffic comes from on the Internet - is it from a keyword or from a banner ad? So when website visitors purchase products via any website’s displayed toll free number or local number an exclusive tracking code is attached to the buy order. It is mechanized by Keyword Radar’s unique code that is placed at the bottom of tracked order page.

This is an innovation unavailable till now. Online marketers, till now, relied on their call center executives to interview customers on how did they locate the company. It will also prove beneficial to website owners who also run associate programs to push sales of their products. Tracking technology will make the associate program more conducive to associate promoters who now need not be apprehensive on losing commission for a visitor referred by them.

The tracking technology can ensure associate codes to confirm that traffic and sales begot by associates is comprehensively credited back to the associate. Thereby, E-commerce site owners now have a competent way to track how their most profitable phone order customers logged at their website.

Such data can be highly beneficial in their pay per click management as in one flash of a tracking summary sales report, one can decipher which keyword or traffic source resulted in most sales.

Prudent site owners can use the data to generate more traffic from profitable sources and relegate to corner those campaigns, which resulted in losses from non-profitable traffic sources.

CategoryPosted in: Shopping, Online Marketing commentsNo Comments »
AuthorBy admin Dated September 4th, 2007

Online videos – a new tool to raise online shoppers satisfaction

Customer satisfaction levels for Internet sites have stayed at lower levels despite colossal amounts invested in devising customer friendly technologies. ForeSee Results, a consulting and research firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich, surveyed 20,000 online shoppers to come up with the conclusion that customers expectations are higher and keep on increasing than the promises made and delivered by Internet shopping.

According to the ForeSee survey only five sites received scores higher than 80 out of 100, with no site scoring more than 85. In descending order they were Netflix, QVC .com, Amazon, Barnes &Noble and Drs. Foster & Smith. Similar scores were scored last year when only five sites exceeded 80 and no site scored higher than 85. According to Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee, though individual sites have improved on their scores but the overall numbers have remained stagnant. He further added that the E-commerce companies, which did not made continuous efforts to shore up things saw gradual drop in their scores.

A decade ago online merchants and investors anticipated Internet stores to be inexpensive and hence far more profitable than offline stores and this new dimension has given a new life to them.

Future belongs to companies that can innovate like QVC whose sales staff thrusts the site’s merchandise with hi-tech and smart video presentations. QVC.com, with merchandise sales of over $1 billion in 2006, has from last five years has let visitors watch live feed of its network’s broadcast. As a new innovation QVC.com has made archives of all shows available online and soon it will make online videos from recent shows constituting individual products from its stock. In opinion of Bob Myers, senior vice president of QVC.com websites, video salesmanship is highly persuasive to the customer when integrated with detailed product information, customer review and multiple photographs. He cites an example where a customer had problems determining the size of the handbag from the height of model holding it. To make amends, with in two weeks, QVC introduced a new system that showed the bags with women of there different heights resulting in 10% increase in response from women who saw the photographs as against women who did not see them. Yet Myers consider video a particularly decisive element to garnering sales as e-commerce began with television commerce. Therefore, the site that can hold and entertain customer will lead in future. Similarly Drs. Foster and Smith, anticipating videos as a big move, in commerce, has also considered putting some of its product on video to offer 360 degree and hassle free view to its customers. Mr. Gordon Magee, head of Internet marketing at Drs. Foster and Smith says that company will rely on its vendors to make the video who will then send it as a code to put it on the site. According to Mr. Magee, company should maintain its customers satisfaction levels till it fulfills basic needs like pricing on website to be reflective of catalogue prices.

Despite passive customer satisfaction levels, customer service spending among websites has increased many folds. The survey by Forrester Research reflects that online retailers will spend 32% more on customer service than last year, which is double the expected increase.

Some like Lala.com, the online barter service for CDs and DVDs, have designed comprehensive customer service system on low budgets improving their overall customer satisfaction levels. Mired with shortage of service staff Lala.com started online discussion boards to garner sense of community among its customers. Soon customers were helping each other with problems and a veritable customer service team took shape. In view of Mr. Anselm Baird-Smith, cofounder Lala.com, the company has designated some volunteers as guides who help customers with their problems and feel loyalty to the community. Lala.com experiment has been a huge success.

CategoryPosted in: Shopping comments1 Comment »
AuthorBy admin Dated September 4th, 2007