Internet Marketing Techniques to Help Increase Your Sales
The Internet offers many means of affordable marketing, often with full-color imagery to go along with text. And multimedia components add some spice to the mix and increase online visitors and purchase. Here are some top Internet marketing techniques to help increase your sales and income.
Create your own directory on a specific industry topic, placing your own ad or banner along the top. Then invite others to add their website links via a link exchange program, listing them in your directory. This will result in lots of free advertising for you as your directory expands with links across the World Wide Web. Enter “link exchange software” into your favorite search engine for help with setup.
Write out a simple step-by-step instructional class in your area of expertise. Then break it up into smaller segments and set them up in an auto responder as email messages with your ads included at the top and / or bottom of each message. Invite website visitors to sign up through on online form or email subscription address offered through the auto responder service. Then as people sign up, they will learn more about you and your products and services. For more detail go to www.spam-learners-pro.com. Forget about small daily or weekly eZine. Try publishing one large monthly e-zone as an e-book format, preferably an Adobe .PDF file. Include a large number of articles with each issue and regularly featured areas like inspirational quotes, industry tips, favorite sites and advice from the pros. Also insert full-color graphics, multimedia components like audio file links, if you like, and ads. Then you can charge a monthly rate, with an annual discounted package purchase, and sell advertising spots.
Set up your own Tip of the Day targeting your own area of expertise, relating to your own products and services. You can set it up on your website in a targeted box, via auto responder, a blog, an RSS feed, an audio file or others means of communication. For more detail go to: www.podcastings-telepromoter.com. Add your own ad along with your tip for whichever product or service you want to target or maybe even your own online store for all. This will gently remind your target audience where to go to learn more.
In summary, by using Internet Marketing techniques customized to fit your own products and services, you can reach out and increase your website traffic and purchase opportunities. Internet marketing can mean a more affordable way to grow your business.
Create your own directory on a specific industry topic, placing your own ad or banner along the top. Then invite others to add their website links via a link exchange program, listing them in your directory. This will result in lots of free advertising for you as your directory expands with links across the World Wide Web. Enter “link exchange software” into your favorite search engine for help with setup.
Manish
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/internet-marketing-techniques-to-help-increase-your-sales-698372.html
10 Viral Marketing Strategies To Try
Viral advertising and viral marketing are popular means of allowing people to freely pass along or distribute your free product, service and / or information to others. The main viral concept is that you include your targeted ad with the freebie so that hopefully a percentage of the recipients will read your ad and order paid products and services from you at some point in the future.
To help you kick start some viral campaigns, here are 10 viral marketing strategies:
1. Give other people the right to reprint your articles. They can use them on websites, in ecourses, guides, ezines, print newsletters, magazines, reports, ebooks and more, so in your resource box or byline at the end of the article, include permission for others to reprint the piece, keeping the resource box intact.
2. Set up an online forum or discussion board with your banner ad at the top and share it with others who do not have anything similar for their sites. Invite forum subscribers to link up in a similar manner.
3. Create and package a special report, an ebook, learning series or other item from time to time, and insert your ads in all of them. Invite your clients, prospects and others to include these specials as freebies or free bonuses for their own clients, prospects, members and others.
4. Set up free web sites on your server and include your company banner with link somewhere on the page for promotions. Then give away the free space, requiring people to keep your banner ad in place in exchange for the hosting service at no charge.
5. Set up a free link directory. Then invite others to add their links to your directory in exchange for a return a link back to your directory site.
6. Offer some type of free online service like free 5-minute consulting sessions or e-mails, search engine, domain or RSS submissions, etc. Then invite others to share these services with their subscribers, website visitors and others.
7. Create or outsource the creation of new software. Brand it. Then invite people to give it away free to others.
8. Create or outsource the creation of some awesome web site templates and / or graphics. Brand them. Then invite people to use them and give them away free to others.
9. Create or outsource the creation of an ebook, report or other info product. Brand the content with your ads. Then invite others to insert their own free ads in exchange for promoting the item(s) to their lists, in their ezines, on their websites, etc.
10. Once again, create or outsource the creation of an ebook, report or other info product. And brand the content with your ads. This time simply give the item(s) away, and invite recipients to also give the item(s) away.
So kick start your own viral campaigns. See what works best for your products and services, and then repeat accordingly with new campaigns all year long to keep a healthy flow of leads coming your way.
Diana Barnum
http://www.articlesbase.com/viral-marketing-articles/10-viral-marketing-strategies-to-try-135606.html
Things that Do Not Work on Internet
Internet is an ever evolving medium. What worked yesterday necessarily does not work today. There are many advertising methods that are a total waste of time and money. If you do not know what some of these things are, do not worry about them. But some of the items on the list below will probably surprise you. I have tried all these and have spoken to various internet marketers for their experience. The list below gives in a nutshell the advertising that no longer works on the net so please do not waste your time effort and money in chasing a ghost that no longer exisits.
free classifieds
free for all link sites (FFAs)
viral generators
banner exchanges
link exchanges
search engine posting
multiple search engine posting
multiple search engine and FFA posting
safelist contact name blasters
literally anything with the word ‘blaster’ in it
guaranteed sign ups
paid guaranteed click thrus
practically anything you have to pay for
just about anything with the word ‘viral’ in it
purchased leads or free leads, it does not matter if they are ‘double opt-in’
auto-surf exchanges
paid surf exchanges
This is a simple word of advise from someone who has wasted a lot of time, effort and money on the net. Please do not re-invent the wheel of folly.
THINGS THAT WORK A LITTLE BIT
In the world of free advertising there are things that work a little bit. I would not say that really anything works well. The truth is that if you want to pick up about one new recruit every one to three days, that you can do it if you use the techniques I am about to show you. But it will require about two hours or more of your time on a daily basis. And you will have to be consistent to profit from it.
There are really only two methods of free online advertising that work at all – safelists and click exchanges. But having said this, you must realize that 99% of both are no good. You have to choose the right ones. Further, you have to use them the way I tell you. By themselves they will not work.
SAFELISTS
You can spend about ten minutes daily posting to safelists. You should pick up one recruit every other day if you use the top twenty list at Traffic Hoopla. And you may pick up as many as one recruit per day if you use all of the lists given at SafeList Boyz combined, although this is a nightmare to set up. I do not want to sell these to you by offering you my affiliate number for these programs. Look them up on Google. Traffic Hoopla will lead you to the most effective lists. SafeList Boyz will lead you to the most popular ones and give you an automated method for posting to about a thousand different lists every day. The response rate is much lower than with the lists on Traffic Hoopla. But you post much more quickly using the SafeList Boyz manager, which is sold through PayPal for about $5/month. Do NOT use the SafeLists listed on SafeList Boyz by themselves. Allow two to three weeks for set up.
Now all of these lists are free but offer upgrade options. If you get results will it be worth it to upgrade? That depends on how much you value recruits. In every case you are targeting recruits. You use them to find opportunity seekers. That is because opportunity seekers are the people who use these lists. Or more accurately, people with opportunities and an appreciation for MLM. Between the SafeList Boyz subscription and upgrading your membership on ten safelists or more you can easily spend $100/month. The figures I gave you in the paragraph above assume you are remaining as a free member. Suffice it to say you could multiply your results if you upgrade. To me, time is money. So if you see you are getting results, you should consider upgrades.
CLICK EXCHANGES
Traffic Hoopla rates both safelists and click exchanges. A click exchange is a network of people who agree to view each others web sites. This is arranged through a program. The program is a server you log into. To move from one members web site to another you click – hence the name click exchange. Many exchanges will cheat you so that you do a lot of clicking but you do not have other people looking at your site. Traffic Hoopla serves as a watch dog group among click exchange users by rating the reliability of the exchanges, as well as response rates.
SIMULTANEOUS USAGE
The problem with click exchanges and safelists is that everybody is interested in having their own advertisements seen. Nobody is really interested in seeing anybody elses advertisements. For one thing, there would n0t be time to do so if they tried. As a result, response rates tend to be very low. On the other hand, a good safelist or exchange will offer safeguards, to be sure people really do look. Hence the ratings. But good is still really not very good.
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS A CLICK EXCHANGE?
A click exchange, hit exchange, surf4hits program or whatever you want to name it usually has an offer that looks like this:
A) You agree to visit web sites of other members who have joined the exchange
B) You agree to look at their web sites for a specific period of time before moving on to the next member’s web site in the exchange, usually 10-30 seconds.
C) Other members of the exchange make the same agreement and agree to visit your web site in exchange for you visiting their web site.
D) Most exchanges give you a two to one offer. In other words you will get one visit to your web site for every two visits you make to web sites of other members in the exchange.
E) If you do the math you will see that this leaves them with a lot of spare visits. The administrators of the exchanges usually sell these extra visits to you and the other members. That is how they make their money.
F) Some exchanges offer credits to you if you refer other members to the exchange. Most of these will give you one visit to your web site for every ten web sites your referrals visit
G) Some exchanges offer indirect referral credits too, in a multi-level marketing fashion, except they’re not splitting up commissions among several marketers, they are splitting up visit credits among several marketers.
H) Often this is referred to as ‘viral’ marketing. But don’t let this word scare you. You will not get a disease. You are not spreading a virus. The word ‘viral’ is a description of the way your free advertising can multiply. It multiplies as fast as a virus does, from person to person.
Or, at least, that is what the administrators of these exchanges would like you to think. The reality is a little bit different. The truth is that very few people continue to use click exchanges for very long because they soon encounter some harsh realities.
1. Nobody is using just one exchange at a time staring at any screen for 10-30 seconds except for the most naive kind of person
2. Everybody is deliberately clicking past every site they see on the exchange.
3. Nobody has any money to spend. They are out there trying to earn money.
4. They have fierce competition. Their own products or services are rarely unique and compelling to this ad-weary group of non-buyers.
5. The ‘I-give-up’ factor kicks in for their downline and for them. They conclude that click exchanges don’t work.
But they are wrong. Click exchanges work quite well. The percentages may be very low but the people who are using the exchanges are the people who are actively involved in internet business. They are the right target audience. Even if you get one serious click out of 600 the effort is worth it. By multi tasking and surfing several sites simultaneously you can reduce your effort substantially.
Praveen Kumar
http://www.articlesbase.com/advertising-articles/things-that-do-not-work-on-internet-70468.html
10 Effective Ways to Increase Web Traffic
Today, there are many ways to increase web traffic to your website. Some of them bring more traffic to your site, but some don’t. Here are 10 of effective ways that can make your pages experience a traffic explosion.
1. Trading links with other web sites that related to the subject of your web site can bring you more web site traffic. Instead of trading links, you could also trade banner ads, half page ads, classified ads, etc. Moreover, a lot of banner exchanges offer free banner impressions just for signing up. Here are just a few banner exchanges website that offer free banner impressions:
http://www.purelybannerz.co.uk
http://www.linkswap.co.uk/
http://www.click4click.com/
You will find banner exchanges that offer free banner impressions more if you do a search for “banner exchange” on any search engine.
If you don’t have a banner for your web site you can create one for free at:
http://www.addesigner.com/
2. Start an e-zine for your web site. When people read each issue they’ll be reminded to revisit your web site. They’ll see your product ad more than just once which will increase your orders.
P.S If you want to start building a list but have no auto responder for capturing leads, you can get a very cheap auto responder here:
http://www.aweber.com
3. Form an online community. It could be an online message board, e-mail discussion list or chat room. When people get involved in your community they will regularly return to communicate with others.
4. Write articles and submit them to e-zines, web sites and magazines that accept article submissions. Include your business information and web address at the end of the article. Here are the best places to submit your articles:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.contentdesk.com
You can also use Article Marketer which is a paid service and I recommend using it to save you time. Just click below for more information.
http://www.articlemarketer.com
If you don’t want to write article by yourself, you could outsource article writing for around $5 per article at these sites:
http://www.rentacoder.com
http://www.elance.com
5. Give away an electronic freebie with your ad on it. Allow your visitors to also give the freebie away. This’ll increase your ad exposure and increase web traffic to your web site at the same time.
6. Combine your products or services into one big package deal with other businesses offerings. You could share a web site and advertise the package deal; which means double more web site traffic.
7. Submit your freebie to the online directories that list your particular item or service for free. If you’re offering a free e-zine, submit it to all the free e-zine directories on the internet.
8. Participate on message boards. Post answers to other people’s questions, ask questions and post appropriate information. Include your signature file at the end of all your postings.
9. Exchange classified or sponsor ads with other free e-zine publishers. If there is a huge subscriber difference between e-zines, one can run more ads to make up for it.
10. Post your ad on free advertising areas on the internet. You can post it on free classified ad sites, free for all links sites, newsgroups that allow ads, free yellow page directories, etc.
Nattawuth Tuntiwiwattanapun
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/10-effective-ways-to-increase-web-traffic-59830.html
Significance of Internet Marketing for Dummies!
There are many people every day jumping into the online world. With more and more people using the internet the floodgates of internet users are opening wider everyday. But how, as a home business owner, can you expect to compete with the “big dogs” of the internet and dip your cup into the profits as well?
There are a ton of tips and tricks that people will tell you are the “best” way to advertise your home business??. For more info login to:www.freeearningtips.comBut do them incorrectly or choose the wrong methods and all you’ll really end up doing is increasing your frustration, not your traffic or your sales.
He remembers back when he started my first business (not online) it seemed like almost everyday someone was willing to offer me a great deal to advertise my business. Of course with all these different resources out there some of them had to be more effective than others. The only problem was ???. HOW Do he Tell Which Ones? He had limited resources and certainly couldn’t afford to give them all a try, unless I just wanted to cross my fingers and hope they worked so He wouldn’t go out of business!
Thankfully, today’s online world provides home business owners with a variety of different marketing techniques, and each can be as profitable as the next. As a business owner you simply have to decide what you are willing to invest in your business, and which will have the best return on your investment
Let’s run through a few of the most popular types.
Paid Banner (CPM + CPC) and Paid Text-
Banner ads you can pay for as CPC(cost per click) or CPM(cost per every thousand times banner is displayed) usually placed in a high traffic area on a site that causes visitors of that site to see it and visit your site.
Paid Text advertising is similar only the ad is in the form of a text link usually off to the sides (or at the top in search engines like Yahoo! And Google) For more info login to :www.tube-traffic.comIf you are going to use this kind of advertising make sure you pick the sites you place your ads on carefully (popular sites will be expensive but you should get more clicks and smaller sites will be cheaper, but often with little or no results)
E-mail lists -
Programs or services that will get your link out to many different internet users. These can be good if you have a very widely used type of product. The negative to these lists is that with new e-mail features often these types of messages get marked as spam and are disregarded by the intended recipient.
free traffic Generators -
Traffic generators like Traffic Swarm can be a great way of just getting people to go to your site. There are some that you can pay for that will guarantee you a certain number of visitors for a set price. Problem is that most of the people that are now visiting your site aren’t really interested in your product or service. You might get one or two sales from extremely impulsive buyers but the rest only visit to earn credits or something of the sort from the home site. If you’re going to rely on this type of advertising make sure your visitor/buyer ratio is already high for your site.
Link Exchange -
This is by far the best way of driving quality traffic to your site?? if you do it right! Before you even THINK about trying to exchange links with other sites there’s a few things you should know?..
1. Download the Google toolbar – This way you will be able to tell the page rank of any pages you want to exchange links with (higher the PR the higher in the search ranking which means more traffic)
2. Exchange links with only pages of PR 4 or higher. It will help your page more by having a few PR4+ pages linking to you than 10000 pages with no page rank.
3. Build your content FIRST! Don’t expect E-Bay to display your link just because you asked them nicely! Webmasters want to know they are linking to a quality site with a good amount of substance. Focus on building your site before you ask people to link to it.
4. Try to exchange links with other sites that have the same key words as yours. Ie: There’s no reason to exchange links with a flower web site if you sell telephone service
The only thing this type of advertising will cost you is a little effort. The greatest part of it is that the people that visit your site are people that are actually interested in your product or service, not just people stopping by to earn credits?? and you don’t pay a cent. There are many books and sites on the web that can give you more details on how to effectively exchange links to your benefit.
Hopefully these tips have helped you narrow down the best type of advertising for your site. The one thing that hasn’t changed in the transition from regular to internet marketing is that you never really know what will work best for you until you try. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet and see what you like!
Amandeep Singh
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/significance-of-internet-marketing-for-dummies-681119.html
How To Increase Your Websites Links
You might consider hiring a link builder to increase traffic to your website. In this case, you can have lots of links to other sites related what you are promoting. Link building is one of the fastest ways as a traffic generating strategy.
You could also make a link page to your site. Why should you put link page if you can hire a link builder?
Creating a link page on your Web site can give other Web sites permission to link to yours. It should be very easy for them to include you by providing cut and paste HTML code. Incorporate your key phrases into the linking code. Create small banners or buttons for this purpose as well.
Leave your Links Everywhere – in chat rooms, guest books, etc. You would be surprised at where your link turns up on search engines when you start doing this. And if the SE has found it, then it adds to your link popularity.
Be Creative and Visible. One of our most successful methods for increasing link popularity is to offer “awards” (a gif that links back to our site). We create a strong incentive for the awardees to place the award on their site because the awardees perceive a benefit he gets to tell the world that another site recognized his site as a quality site.
Accordingly, there are times when one has a difficulty in link building.
So, when in doubt, it pays to follow the golden rules of link building by Danny Sullivan:
Get links from pages that are read by the audience you want
Buy links if visitors that come solely from the link will justify the cost
Link to sites because you want your visitors to know about them
Link Building can definitely be an extremely difficult task if you want to take it on based on purely human labor to go out and request for links, whether they are one way or reciprocal.
If link building is a difficult task for you, you can have banner advertising. Banners have become the most popular means of advertising on the Internet. You can organize your banner advertising for free through banner exchange programs. If you decided to pay for your advertising it is better to do some research on where your advertising dollars would have the best return. The basic concept of banner exchange is that if you show another site’s banner ad (linked to that site) on your site then they will show yours (linked to your site) on theirs, hence giving your site exposure and the chance of a hit. As this stands it would simply be a reciprocal link agreement between two sites.
What you need to consider, if you decide to buy banner advertising? Where are you going to advertise your banners? Banners on General Rotation are displayed at random across any part of a web site to any site visitor. Also know as “Run of site” these campaigns tend to be the least expensive because they are the least targeted.
These are the different site advertising strategies for banner ads:
Single site advertising
Network-wide advertising
The prices for banner advertising may vary depending on place & type and other special conditions of advertising. The type of banner you choose to expose will depend on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re trying to attract visitors to your site and image is important, then a graphic banner may be most suitable.
If these stuffs won’t work for your site, Promote on your own site. One often overlooked place to promote your Web site is the site itself. It’s one thing to get the word out about your Web site and attract first-time visitors. It’s another thing to convince those visitors to come back again and again. Fortunately, there are a number of techniques you can use to entice visitors to return.
Here are a few things that you can do:
Feedback and FAQs
Make them members
Spread the news
Start a conversation
There is no better satisfaction than knowing that you have promoted your site and drove lots of traffic without the aid of other sources. Though, it doesn’t guarantee speedy success to reach the target market or niche that would be interested to your product, service or business in general.
Nevertheless, it is all worth trying. One failure in one strategy may lead to a better way discovering another strategy that could best drive traffic to your website. Experimental techniques may be advisable but at your own risk.
Costa Dedes
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/how-to-increase-your-websites-links-81016.html
Organizing a Cost Effective Small Business Website Promotion and How to Promote your Website Without Costing you a Nickel
Organizing a Cost Effective Small Business WebSite Promotion And how to promote your website without costing you a nickel.!
Small Business Web Site Promotion
The most important thing to remember when you want to encourage visitors to visit your web site is to make sure they will want to return again. ‘Visitors’ means not just human web surfers, but also the search engines and directories. Small business website promotion, no matter how much you promote your site, will be the look of the site that will keep visitors there and hopefully buy your products or services.
Optimize your Site for Search Engines; Check your links
Small business website promotion starts with a search engine spider indexing or cataloging your site by following the links from one page to another. Just as human visitors dislike a broken link, so do the spiders. If a link doesn’t
work they’ll simply move onto the next page. No matter how sophisticated the search engine software is, it can’t index what it can’t find. Also remember that a spider will not be able to follow a link that requires a form submission or Java Script so small business website promotion is very important.
While considering the subject of links, if you are using HTML and CSS on your site, make sure that both work properly. A certain minimum level of requirements must be met so that your pages will display correctly. It is only if these are met that a spider can do its work. There are free facilities online that can check both of these for you.
* Make sure your links work.
* Do not use forms or Javascript if you want a search engine spider to find your pages
* Check that HTML and CSS work properly.
Do not make your Pages too big!
Most of us have heard the expression ‘size isn’t everything’. While this may not be true of many things, it does matter when it comes to web pages. People do not like having to wait an eternity for a web page to load. Search engine spiders may not fully index a page bigger than 150k in size. Remember that the size of a page does not simply depend on the actual HTML file itself, but includes everything on the page such as images, banners etc.
If you have a lot of images on your pages, then either reduce the number of them, or use a program such as Macromedia Fireworks to optimize them for the web. If the page has a big file size because there is a massive amount of text in it, then you should consider splitting the text into smaller, more manageable pieces and putting them on several pages and linking one to another. SEO Chat has a tool called "Page Size Lookup" which can tell you the size of your web page; you can check it out at:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/
* Keep the file size to below 150k
* Optimize images for the web
* Use a free page size checker to find out the actual size of the page.
Search Engines and Directories; What is the difference between a search engine and a directory?People frequently use the term ‘search engine’ as a catch-all expression for anything they use to search the Web. They are different things though, and an understanding of the differences will enable you get use both effectively to promote your site more successfully.
How does a search engine work?
Search engines use highly sophisticated software to search the web for new pages. It then automatically creates and updates their indexes. Whenever they find an active hyperlink, they will follow it and add that to the index and so on. These ‘crawling’ programs are generally referred to as ‘spiders’.
Normally, all this is totally automatic, but sometimes human intervention is involved. The spider will return periodically to the pages and check for updated content. Often there will be a delay between you uploading your page, and the spider finding it, unless you submit your URL directly to the search engine itself. You can submit a
web URL to Google ™ free of charge.
* Search engines are usually automatic
* They will revisit your pages.
* Spiders will find all the pages on your site as long as there are active hyperlinks for them to follow.
* You can submit a site to most search engines free of charge.
How Directories Work.
The primary difference between a search engine and a search directory is that a directory is compiled by a real person. Frequently the site owner will submit a short description of the site together with its URL to the directory compiler to be considered for inclusion. Directories are arranged into categories to make it easier to find what you are looking for.
When you submit your site to a directory, you choose the category you want your site to be featured in. A reviewer then checks to ensure that your site is in the most suitable category.Another difference between a search engine and a directory is that whereas a search engine could list every individual page in your web site, a directory will generally only contain a single entry covering your entire site.
* Directories are compiled by real people.
* They are categorized.
* A reviewer checks to ensure your site is in the best category.
* A directory will usually only contain one entry for your entire site.
Shared Indexes and Hybrids
Things are never so straightforward though. Some search portals are a hybrid, combing a search engine and a directory. The search engine part returns automated results, while the directory gives human found results.Normally, a hybrid will supply hits from the directory as the primary source, with the search engine results of
individual pages as the secondary source.
Getting your Site Ready
It cannot be stressed too strongly that search engines and/or directories are by far the most important way of getting your site noticed. To do this, you have to properly prepare the site and submit your URL to them. Keywords are important: Choose the right keywords
Think what your web site is all about. If you had to describe your site in one word, then that word is your first keyword. Then think about other words to describe your site. Make a list of them, with the most important at the top of the list and so on. You want a list of between ten and fifteen words. Since these keywords will be used in a variety of ways, it is important that you take some time selecting them.
Keywords are important because they are possibly the most important thing that a search engine uses to determine whether a page is included in the search results. Even although different search engines use keywords in different ways, most experts agree that the frequency and position of your keywords is an important factor.
* Select keywords to describe your site.
* Choose 10 – 15 keywords.
* Take your time picking keywords – they are extremely important.
Pick a Good Title for your Web Page
When you write a web page, there is always a tag. This goes into the section of your web page.
The tag is what is shown at the top of your web page when it is displayed in a web browser. Search
engines, however, often use the tag as the title of the listing in the results.
The tag looks like this
The name of my Web Page
Not only is it good practice to make your tag have a good description of the content of the page, but if you can manage to work into it some of your keywords, so much the better.
Why you should use Meta Tags? What are meta tags?
Meta tags are a special type of HTML code that goes into the section of a web page. Site visitors do not normally see them, but search engine spiders do. Just as some HTML tags have an attribute with a value, so too do meta tags.
As far as optimizing your web page for search engines is concerned, the most important meta tags are keywords and description. The syntax for the keyword tag is as follows:
<meta name="keywords" content="">
The description tag is as follows:
<meta name="description" content="">
Unlike some HTML tags, it is not strictly necessary to have the meta tag closed, but if you want to have valid
XHTML, then you do need to close all your tags.
Consider your URL
Since we are discussing matters that will influence how a page appears, it is worth considering the actual URL of the page itself. Since the URL that appears in your browser reflects the file path for the page, it makes good sense to have the file name reflect the navigation of the site.
You can see at a glance that this page refers to the Lower Square, which is part of the Castle, which in turn is part of Stirling. Not only does this meaningful URL impart information to the visitor, but for the web designer it makes sense to have the separate files arranged in a logical manner. This will only apply to pages that have not been dynamically created by a database program, of course.
* Choose a meaningful title for your page.
* Put your keywords into the /www.dmoz.org/). This is the largest human-maintained directory of the Web. Because it allows virtually anyone to access its resources, many search portals such as AOL, Netscape and HotBot take advantage of this and include their data into their own systems. This means that once you are included on the ODP database, you are also included in many others.
* There are places you can submit your site free of charge
* Google is probably the most important place to submit to.
* Yahoo is a good second choice if you don’t mind registering with them.
* Do not forget the Open Directory Project.
Paid Listings
Although Google and Yahoo do not charge you anything for submitting your site to them, they do not guarantee where or when your site will appear in their listings. However, they do have sponsored links that appear either above or beside the listing of search engine hits. These are useful for promoting your small business web site since they are targeted links. If, for instance, someone searches for “bagpipes”, then not only will they get a list of bagpipe related sites returned, but they will also see the ‘sponsored links”.
Free Promotional Techniques: Ad Swapping
This is one of the easier ways of getting your web site promoted. What it involves basically is that you display an advertising banner, button or text link on your web site, and other sites do the same for your ads.The simplest way of swapping banner ads is to join an existing banner swapping network Banner Advertising
Banner networks work because you are provided with a few lines of HTML code to include on your web pages, usually near the top. The HTML creates banners from other sites on your pages. When a visitor clicks on them, they are re-directed to their web site. At the same time, you provide the network organizer with your own banner to display elsewhere.
There are many banner ad networks available, so choose with caution. Try to find one that will direct traffic to your site, by displaying your ad on related sites. In order for the network to make money, they will perhaps ask you to display 2 banners in return for displaying yours once.
No network will promise a 1:1 ratio, so avoid those that do. Do not consider paying for extra banners until you have proved to yourself that the free ad is generating enough visitors to your site. Although most networks will promise not to display ads for pornographic or other unsuitable sites, in reality you have no control over them.
* Banner ads are free
* Try to choose a network that is related in some way to your business.
* Avoid those that make extravagant claims about the ratio of ads.
* Be aware that you have virtually no control over what ads appear on your site.
* You might get buttons or text links instead of banners.
Peer to Peer Swaps
Although banner swapping can yield increased exposure of your site, sometimes a more targeted approach is required. The object of the exercise is to get your ad seen by as many possible visitors as possible, therefore if you can arrange a deal with the webmaster of a busier site than yours it could be advantageous.
You may have to compromise. In return for prominently displaying an advertisement for a busier or better known web site than yours, you might have to agree to less prominence on the other site.Web RingsThese are networks of similarly themed sites which creates links from one to another to form a chain. You will display a web link icon and a list of at least some of the other sites in the ring. If you are just launching your web site it is probably best to try to join an established ring.
There are possible flaws in joining a web ring. You will need to allow space on your pages to display the ring logo. Visitors might think that you are part of an organization, and if some of the sites are badly built, you might be associated with the rest of them. You will have no control over which sites join the ring, and link to you and vice
versa.
* Web rings are free.
* They are normally similar web sites to your own.
* You have no control over the quality of the other sites in the ring.
Article Submission Sites : What is an Article Submission site?
An article submission site, and there are roughly 250 of them, are an effective way of promoting your own goods and services as well as generating traffic to your web site. Their purpose is to provide webmasters, e-book editors and e-zine publishers with free content for their own publications. The articles are usually arranged into different categories, and the site is normally searchable.
How they workYou write an article or series of articles about what you have to offer on your web site. The purpose of the article is not to directly sell your goods. Let us suppose that your web site sells a wide range of possible gifts for all members of the family. Your article might be about, for example, birthday gift ideas for teenage boys.
The purpose is to make your article interesting enough and informative enough for it to be used somewhere else. Since you have included some biographical details about yourself, including your own URL, and your article is published exactly as it appears on the article site, your URL appears in the end-user’s web site. Thus you are getting free publicity, and the publisher is getting free content.
* Article submission sites get you free publicity.
* Publishers get free page content.
* Your URL appears wherever your article is used, and so generates traffic to your site.
Paid or free submissions
All article submission sites will allow you to submit your article for nothing. You register with the site, and you can select what category you want your article to appear in. When you write your article you will include the same keywords as you did when you wrote the HTML for your web site. Thus a search engine will find your site, as well as the article you wrote about it.
Some article sites will allow you to bid for better placement within their pages. Basically, the more you bid, the higher prominence you will get on the article site’s home page. Thus you are the first thing a publisher notices. Even if you are outbid for top spot, chances are you will still be on the home page. Since a lot of the sites also have separate front pages for each of the categories, even if you don’t achieve prime position on the site’s home page, you likely will in the category pages.
* Use the same keywords you used on your web pages.
* You can bid for increased placement on the article site’s pages.
Summary
As you can see, there are many ways that you can promote your small business web site. By far the simplest way is to ensure that your web site has carefully chosen key words for search engines to find. You can also submit your web site to search engines, ad exchange networks, web rings and article submission sites free.
Rajesh
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/organizing-a-cost-effective-small-business-website-promotion-and-how-to-promote-your-website-without-costing-you-a-nickel-101704.html
Making Money With Articles – Banner Advertisements
When you are trying to make money off of the articles on your website, it is important to effectively promote your site so that you will attract customers and they can see just what a good, quality site you have. There are several ways to market and promote your website, one of them being though banner advertisements.
Banner ads can help bring visitors from other sites to your own. Although monthly fees can be expensive to advertise on high traffic sites, in the end it may be cheaper and/or a faster way to start seeing significant revenue from your website efforts, rather than waiting for SEO techniques to bring your own site to the top of search engine results. Aside from paying to advertise on someone else’s site, there are also free banner exchanges to choose from. We will look at the pros and cons of each banner advertising method below.
Free banner exchanges are when you and other sites exchange each others banners. Their banner will go on your site and your banner will go one their site. Although this option is free, there are two main problems with it. First, if you want your banner on a significant number of sites, it will mean cluttering your own site up with these banners. This could even shoot you in the foot if you run an affiliate website because, instead of clicking on your affiliate links, your visitors may be clicking on your banner exchange links. Secondly, you have to be really careful about the types of sites that you exchange banners with. Some sites like to gather a lot of banners so that they can be a directory or portal site and not have to have any real content. These “banner farms” or “link farms” will do nothing positive for your site and, in the meantime, you will be bringing them potential traffic.
As we saw above, paid banner ads cost money, but they will eventually pay off if you choose the right ones. You need to ensure that the site produces the amount of traffic that they say and that they have your ad placed in a way that invites visitors to click without being too pushy. You also want to choose a site that does not house too many other banners on the same page as yours or that there are no competitor links on the same page. Just a few simple strategies will go a long way in marketing your web stie.
All in all, banner ads can end up being profitable for you site if you go about it the right way. If you do decide to check out banner advertisement as a marketing avenue, be sure to keep the above tips in mind.
Keith Londrie
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/making-money-with-articles-banner-advertisements-68379.html
SEO – Banner Ads Must Be Visually Irresistible
Nobody clicks on a banner that is not visually appealing. Nobody clicks on a banner that is on a page that it does not seem to relate to either. For instance a banner selling dog food might look kind of weird on a page that sells fake diamonds. The intelligent and humanly intuitive placement of a banner on a web page is what is needed to give it the best chance of receiving some clicks.
The most stunning banner ads are usually the hand made ones. Anyone with computer knowledge can learn how to make a very basic banner ad. To code the banner, simply combine the HTML tag for a link with the HTML tag for an image. You can create the necessary graphics using a simple computer art program, like Paint Shop Pro. Keep in mind that you don’t need to animate this banner. In fact the less animation the better or the search engine spider may read the banner as a frame containing blank space which is poor SEO.
Basis banner ads are so easy to make you can make sores of them for your site in less than an hour. Do-it-yourself banner ad sites work really well for most people, but if you like you can also hire a professional ad designer. You can get a professional banner ad for $50 on a place like http://guru.com or http://elance.com or you can spend upwards of $1,000 depending on what kind of designer you hire to work with.
Still it seems silly to hire someone when it is possible to get good results for free. There are hundreds of Web sites that offer tools for free banner ad creation. These automated sites provide you with all the mechanisms that you need to make your own banner ad, such as backgrounds and fonts. Some of these sites will simply generate a banner for you. Some require that you do a banner exchange with them in return for using their services.
Chris Angus
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/seo-banner-ads-must-be-visually-irresistible-101775.html
Seo – Are Your Banner Ads Working For You?
Banner ads are going out of style as a pay-per-click way of garnering income. However does this mean that you should discard your banner ads and trade them in for another type of SEO.
There are several ways that tell whether or not your banner ad is worth keeping.
You need to somehow keep track of your page Impressions. This term is the number of times a particular web page has been requested from the server. Advertisers are interested in knowing how many page views they are being offered before they do a banner exchange with you. If you don’t have a high rate of page impressions then the banner ad is not doing much for you.
Another thing to do is examine your Click-through rate (CTR). This describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It tells you in the form of a percentage the total number of web visitors who actually clicked on the banner ad. The typical click-through-rate of payment is a measly 1 percent and if you are not even making that then the program is not working for you.
If you are thinking of starting a banner ad click through or pay per click type ad campaign you should make sure that the banner relates to your web content. Otherwise you could confuse both search engine spiders and people looking for you.
It is also a good idea to put banner ads at the top of the page rather than further down. Yet another tip is to link the banner ad to the page on your web page that features the same as it helps raise your rankings in the search engine. The hitch with this and also the reason why trading banners may not be worth your time is that many banner exchanges won’t do the trade with you unless you can guarantee that you will place the banner on your home page!
Chris Angus
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/seo-are-your-banner-ads-working-for-you-101350.html