IdeaPro.com

1. You could decrease or increase the length of your ad copy. There is no rule on how long your ad copy should be unless space is a consideration. The ad should be long enough to sell your product.
2. You could add some sub headlines on your ad copy. Sub headlines act just like headlines; they grab the readers attention. They'll keep the readers interested as they continue to read your ad.
3. You could ask your reader questions through out the ad copy. They will answer the questions in their own head as they read your ad copy. The questions you ask should persuade the reader into buying.
4. You could highlight keywords through out your ad copy. The keywords should be attractive to your target audience. You could highlight them with color, underlines, italics, etc.
5. You could bullet or indent your benefits on your ad copy. Must people won't read a whole ad copy, so make your products benefits standout and you won't lose the sales from all the skimmers.
6. You could change the size of your text on your ad copy. You want to make your text large enough so it's not hard to read. You also want your headline and major points to be larger so they will standout.
7. You could raise or lower the price on your ad copy. A higher price could increase the perceived value of your product and a lower price could lesson your product's value.
8. You could add proof of results on your ad copy. You should include testimonials, endorsements, and factual statistics to prove your product's claims.
9. You could add special offers on your ad copy. It's usually easier to sell the offer than the product. You could use discounts, free bonuses, volume sales, etc.
10. You could eliminate the hard-to-understand jargon on your ad copy. Unless your product calls for technical words, you want your ad to be read without people pulling out a dictionary.

About the Author: Scott F. Geld is the Director of Marketing at Marketing Blaster, Inc., a firm dedicated to low-cost, super targeted traffic for small businesses operating on the Internet. For more information: http://www.MarketingBlaster.com

1. Design your web site to be a targeted resource center. Choose one subject and build on it. You'll gain repeat visitors that are interested in that topic.
2. Offer something that is really free. If people go to your site and what you said was free really isn't, you'll lose their trust and they won't buy anything.
3. Add a chat room or message board to your web site. People want to interact with other people that have they same interests as them.
4. Entice people to link to your web site by giving them something free in return. This'll increase your ranking in some search engines.
5. Trigger your reader's emotions in your ad copy. Example, if you sell a book on gambling tips, tell them the feelings they'll get when they win money.
6. Make sure your site looks good in all browsers. You could be losing sales because it looks distorted in some web browsers.
7. Increase your sales by e-mailing full page ads to your e-zine subscribers. Remember to tell people before they subscribe or they may consider it spam.
8. Make inquiries in your ad copy that make people consider their personal issues. An example: Do you want to be debt free?
9. Magnify the size of your prospects problem in your ad; show how your product can solve it. The bigger the problem, the more sales you'll have.
10. Invest a percentage of your profits right back into your business. Spend it on marketing, product improvement, customer service, advertising, etc.

About The Author: Scott F. Geld is the Marketing V.P. for Marketing Blaster. Feel free to email him with any questions or comments about this article at: http://www.MarketingBlaster.com

So you want to make money with Google Adsense? I don't blame you, who doesn't want residual income! This article will show you how to better optimize Google Adsense to make more money from your web site(s).

Before we get into it, learn more about Google Adsense here: http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/

First and foremost is: Positioning

Where you position your Adsense link boxes and banner ads is extremely important. Trying to make money from the bottom of your pages within your website just won't cut it.

You need to add your Adsense links right in the heart of your template or right in the heart of your content. I would personally suggest both actually.

Adding Adsense in the heart of your template:

Link Units:

Since the introduction of Google Adsense "link units", we can now add what looks like a "menu system" to compliment our menu system within our website. This is HUGE. Have you ever just clicked on a website and kept clicking on the menu links?

I know we all have. By adding a "Google link units" to your menu, you will get more clicks than you thought possible. Try adding the link units near the top for better performance and try creating your link units to match the color of your menu system in place. Once in a while I find myself clicking on a menu link unit without even realizing it which in turn gives more money to the website owner.

Leaderboards and Skyscrapers:

These may very well be your "bread & butter". I only say this because of the sheer size of these ads units. The best place to add these ad units is obvious; Straight across the very top of your website (leaderboards), and straight down the side of your template (skyscrapers). Anywhere else may not look proper within your template and may look unprofessional.

Square and Rectangle Ad Units:

These are great to compliment the mass amount of content within your website and also within your recommended resources. You want to compliment your content, you don't want Adsense to BE your content because this will look poor on your part. Adsense is very popular with webmasters; who doesn't want to make some extra money. However, don't forget that many of your visitors are also used to seeing Adsense within a website, and need a good reason to click on them.

Square and rectangular units are great to use within articles posted on your website or within your link resources. Try adding your Adsense boxes above your resource links within a page to give your Adsense account that added extra exposure. Just remember that Google allows up to 3 ad units per page. Using these 3 strategies will help to better optimize Adsense for positioning! Let's now go onto targeting…

Optimizing Adsense: Taking out non-related ads!

Do you ever wonder how ads like "business card specials" ever get displayed on to your website when your company content is all about baby clothing? Since the introduction of "Adwords Site Targeting", we now have to keep an eye on the ads being displayed on our website(s).

Companies may now specifically target your website for more exposure. There is no restriction whether the website is content related or not, just more marketing exposure for the advertiser.

Filtering Adsense Advertisers:

Within your Adsense manager, you have the option of using the "Competition Filter" which allows us to remove certain websites from the ads being displayed regularly. This is going to be an on-going optimization task in the future. Without filtering the ads being displayed within your website, you might find yourself with ads unrelated to your industry and possibly some ads that have a negative effect within your site. If you don't remove all the unwanted ads being displayed on your website, you might end up hurting your Adsense performance online. The more targeted you can get your Google Adsense ads to display on each page, the better your chances at being able to make more money. Try to take a moment every week to study the ads being displayed on your website. Open up a note pad, or word document and record all the websites you don't want to be displayed anymore.

Add these sites to your "filter list" within your Adsense account. Remember to add the website (within your filter list) like so: smartads.info - without the www. Adding anything after or before the url will only prevent the company from displaying one of their many ads like so (www.site.com/ads/1.html). This way you stop anything from the entire website from showing up within your Adsense campaign online. The more you optimize your Adsense filter, the better your performance will pick up and the less non-related ads will be displayed on your website.

One constant that holds true with Adsense:

The more pages you have with your Adsense campaign being displayed, the more you WILL make. People who have online networks immediately can profit from Google Adwords because they have the power to add their Adsense boxes & banners onto multiple websites, possibly 1000's of pages.

Should you add Adsense to your website?

If you own a small company that has a brochure type website that gets maybe 50-100 visitors a day, I recommend NOT adding Adsense to your site. It will never make enough money with that kind of traffic.

Remember: Your Adsense campaign needs to make over $100 to get paid out. If your company receives around 500-1000+ visitors a day, you can now start considering to make money through Google. Adsense is all about numbers. Play the numbers to make more money. In fact, try making goals for yourself to make X amount of dollars through your Adsense account by a certain time.

Doing this will only increase your business and make your company more powerful online by increasing the amount of traffic it receives. For multiple websites, channels are important: Google allows you to track the performance of multiple websites all in one account which ultimately gives you the ability to track how many visitors you're getting for each website. It also allows you to work harder on those sites that aren't up to par. I consistently look at each individual website channel to work harder at promoting the ones that aren't performing well.

By doing this, we increase the amount of promotion going into the websites that under perform, and in turn eventually increase the business for those websites as well. The more you promote your website, the more the exposure you will ultimately deliver for your Adsense campaign and your company.

Google Search with Adsense:

To top all that off, you can add Google search within your site to give visitors a search function for your content and to allow people to also click on your Adsense program. Please note that for Google search to work, your website and all of its content pages must already be indexed by Google.

Adding the Google search bar to your site right away won't help your visitors at all. For more Google Adsense optimization tips, go here: https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

Don't forget to read the Google Adsense Policies & Procedures: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies I hope this article helps you to make more money!

About the Author: Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads helps their clients to maintain a strong presence online through up-to-date marketing tactics. Sign up for Martin's weekly newsletter here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter For a free SEO evaluation, go here: http://www.smartads.info/website-evaluation.html Copyright © 2005 Smartads Advertising Network - Reprints Accepted

Do you have a business web-site with some detailed product and service pages, but you are not converting many visitors into paying customers? The key is to develop an effective sales page that wins them over. Once you have created an internet sales page that works, then you have a template you can use again and again, customizing the basic formula to any product in your line. The key is to be sure to include all the elements of an effective sales page, and use a ‘formula’ that has been tested and is known to work.

If you are hiring a copy writer or writing the copy yourself, here is a checklist of the essential elements to help you organize and plan your next internet sales page.

Headlines: There can be up to three parts to the headline. First, there is the pre-headline, which is a note to attract your target market, letting them know you have something for them in particular. Second, is the main headline, which describes the big benefit of whatever you’re offering. The main headline should be in large font, and nothing elsewhere on the page should be larger or distract from it. Third, is a post-headline, which is only necessary if you need to clarify or elaborate upon the main
headline.

Introduction: The first few sentences of the letter should grab the visitor’s interest at an emotional level. The introduction draws the visitor further into the copy, allowing you to make a presentation of your product and offer. To appeal to the emotions, show the reader the benefits of your product or service by describing how they will feel or how their life will improve once they own and use the product.

Your Credibility: This is especially important on-line, and needs to come early in the letter. Some of the ways you can build credibility include testimonials about real results, that include the full name of the person giving the testimonial. Also, use specific numbers rather than approximations in your copy overall. If you have expertise and credentials related to the product, say so. When applicable, explain product test results. Quote favorable reviews from newspapers or magazines. And give your contact information with an address. This proves you are real. Don’t worry that someone will show up on your doorstep, and if someone calls you, that’s good. You learn from contact with clients.

Benefits of the product or service: Using bullet format, because bullets are easy to scan, itemize all the benefits (not the features). Put them in order of priority. It is better to have too many than too few because it often takes just a single benefit to inspire a prospect to purchase, but every prospect has their unique hot button.

Specifications and features: Tell exactly what the product is. Give details about what the buyer is getting.

Bonuses. Always include something extra, and make sure it has value - that it could be something people would order the product just to get the bonus. Tell the specific dollar value so you can use that information in the value build-up, or close.

Value build-up: Be explicit about the reasons the price of the product is a good value. Make comparisons to other similar products that are more expensive with less gained. Offer a guarantee if at all possible. Anticipate and counter objections. Create a sense of scarcity. That is to say, give a deadline, explain why they need to act now, and keep your deadline real. Help the visitor feel the pain of not ordering~ exactly what won’t change or get better unless they have your product.

Ordering: Make this absurdly easy. Assume the visitor has never ordered on-line, and give clear step-by step instructions and several options of how to purchase. Offer a secure on-line credit card page, Pay Pal, call to order, or how to send a check, (it is rare that anyone ever actually does this). And remember, ask for the order! Write, “Order Now.”

Post Script: This is a summary of your sales page, a one- paragraph sales page in effect. Include a reiteration of the highlights, and ask one last time for the order.

After reviewing this list, find good examples by doing a little online research. You wouldn’t ever copy another sales page, of course. Simply look for inspiring examples, and then say it in your own way.

About the Author: Loren Beckert is Marketing Director at ClickTracs Advertising Service a company that specializes in delivering highly targeted traffic to internet businesses. For additional articles and resources to promote your online business, visit www.ClickTracs.com

Think you know how to write a business website homepage? Read this article to make sure. You probably think you already know what a homepage is. But if you’re like many business website owners, you really don’t. The homepages of many business websites are suffering an identity crisis. They’re trying to do the job of several web pages, and doing none of those jobs well.
What a Business Website Homepage is Not:

• A homepage is not the place to dump a long description of your business. That’s for the “about us” or “company information” page. On the homepage, this information will just bore most people.
• A homepage is not the place where you list and sell all your products (unless you only have one or two). You should have a special products and services page for that, and preferably a shopping cart or catalog. Trying to make people buy right on your homepage is a little pushy. The homepage will also get over-crowded as your offerings expand. Instead, just include a list of product categories with links to inside pages, along with direct links to your biggest sellers.
• A homepage is not the place to include the full text of your announcements and press releases. Just include a teaser paragraph of each article on the homepage, with a link to the web page with the full text. If people want to read the full text, they can. If they don’t, you haven’t bored them to tears.
• A homepage is not your company president’s or owner’s personal blog. It’s OK to rant, rave, or preach the need for world peace. Just don’t do it on wesellwidgets.com

As you’ve probably noticed, a good website has multiple pages. You should have special web pages for special topics: an “about us” page for company information, a products and services catalog, the president’s blog, etc. When you advertise or send out links to your site, you should link directly to the most appropriate page, rather than just the homepage. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t need a homepage, just that you don’t need it to do every single thing you want your website to accomplish.

Quick Guide to Writing a Business Website Homepage

Important Points to Consider

Target Audience

Your business website’s homepage must be all things to all the people who type your URL in their navigation bar, whether it’s their six-hundredth visit or whether they just happened to catch your web address painted on the back of your car.
Content

For the benefit of new visitors, a homepage must provide a snapshot of who you are and what visitors can do on your website. Your first one to three paragraphs should give a quick overview of what visitors can do on your site. For example, you could include a short paragraph each on “buy widgets,” “learn more about widgets,” and “meet other widget enthusiasts,” with links to your shopping cart, informational articles, and message board, respectively.

For returning visitors, the homepage must serve as a touchstone for navigating the site, announcing new developments and pointing out especially popular or useful pages. For these visitors you don’t have to write anything new especially for your homepage. Anyone who’s coming back to your site is already interested and is going to want to jump right into the deeper pages of your site, rather than linger on the homepage wondering whether it’s worth their time.

That’s why your homepage should include teasers for the inside pages of your site. For instance, you could have a tip of the week, linked to a web page on your site with an article explaining it. Good navigation (list of links to the four to eight most essential web pages on your site) is also a must.

For both new and returning visitors, always give a prominent place to a featured product or service (or two or three) with a picture, one or two-sentence description, and a link to its own web page or its place in your "products and services page," catalog or shopping cart.

You should also always feature a satisfied customer. It’s great if the satisfied customer can send you a picture of himself or herself. But no matter what, always include a testimonial quotation, and a link to a case study or customer story on its own web page, which you should definitely find time to write or have written for you by a website content provider.

Title

Don’t title your homepage “Welcome to [name of your site].” Don’t include that message anywhere on your homepage, in fact. It’s a waste of space. This was normal in 1996 but it’s pretty passé now. Everyone already knows they’re on your site. What you need to tell them is what they can do there. Try something like “Buy, Study, and Discuss Widgets.”

Also make sure your title incorporates any keywords you think people might use to search for your product or service on the internet. Search engines decide how to categorize pages largely based on the homepage title and first heading text.

Length

Ideally, the first few paragraphs of the homepage (the ones aimed at new visitors) should not be more than 100-350 words total. The teasers for inside pages targeted to returning visitors should not be more than about 100 words each.
Making Sure Your Website Has the Best Homepage Possible

Before your homepage goes live, test it out on a few people. Don’t just ask your volunteers how they like your homepage. Courtesy may prevent you from getting an honest response. Instead, ask them to find how to buy your latest product or if they understand what’s the most important development in your company recently. If they can navigate to the correct page within about eight seconds (the average human attention span on the web), you’ve done well.

You may just want to hire a website copywriter, online copywriting firm, or website content provider to create your homepage for you. After all, you wouldn’t build your own office building, would you? Of course, that’s not an entirely fair comparison—more people will see your business website homepage than will ever see your office building.

About the author: Joel Walsh is the head writer for UpMarket Content, a website content firm serving business sites. You can find more information on writing a homepage, including a template, along with the rest of the seven essential web pages for business websites, such as the “about us” and “product and services” pages, at Upmarket Contents Templates.

Copywriting is a technique that is used to communicate a clear message to readers through newspapers and websites. Super copywriting is designed to both capture and then retain the readers attention, and in some cases even grab the readers attention away from a competitors offerings. Readers are always looking for different information that adds value to them so you need to determine what information you can offer that will have this effect.You can also use copywriting with computers and the Internet. This is known as search engine copywriting. Search engine copywriting is very popular now because many people yearn for sites that generate plenty of traffic. Why? Because this will in turn generate sales. Let’s explore this in more detail below.

Search engine copywriting is all about re-jigging the content on your website so it becomes more appealing to the reader/customer but also is able to be searched and retrieved by the search engines. Writing for search engines takes skill and when it is done correctly you should receive higher search engine ranking and hence higher sales.

Many sites depend highly on certain search engines such as Google in order to accumulate traffic. Search Engines gather the different information from your site and bring up the keywords looked for by the user. The search engine in turn brings up anything close to what the user keyed into their search. Depending on how your copywriting is laid out will depend on whether your site is even accessed at during a search. Good copywriting will in turn bring traffic to you thus creating better potential buyers.

There are companies and professionals that specialize in search engine copywriting. Because it is so technical it is usually better to leave it to the professionals. While this can be a bit on the high side in terms of cost the results will reap rewards. If you have a website that could do with more hits then consider search engine copywriting.

About the Author: Tina Valiedi is the webmaster of MPStrategies Firm, an internet company specializing in super targeted pre-qualified web traffic that results in higher conversion rates and ROI.Visit http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com today

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don’t let the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, distract you from the importance of good content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world’s wealthiest media company, really only display web pages that meet arcane technical criteria? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not. Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Factors

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google’s top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

• Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.
• Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word’s check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google’s algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.
• Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
• Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.
• Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.
• Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword. The page may contain the keyword itself few times or not at all.

SEO “Do’s” and “Don’ts”

A hard look at the results slaughters a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows.

• PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google’s algo is using. But if you’re one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.
• Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site’s linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.
• JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that’s not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.
• Keyword optimization. Except for two pages, keyword optimization was conspicuous by its absence. In more than half the web pages, the keyword did not appear more than three times, meaning a very low density. Many of the pages did not contain the keyword at all. That may just demonstrate the power of anchor text in inbound links. It also may demonstrate that Google takes a site’s entire content into account when categorizing it and deciding what page to display.
• Sub-headings. On most pages, sub-headings were either absent or in the form of images rather than text. That’s a very bad design practice, and particularly cruel to blind users. But again, Google is more forgiving.
• Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about “link popularity bleeding.” Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it’s not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn’t seem to care if your website makes money.
• Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.

Recommendations

1. Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site’s content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I’ve even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the “back” button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.
2. If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.
3. Update your content often. It’s important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can’t afford original content, use free-reprint content.
4. Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a “duplicate content penalty” for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.
5. In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.

About the Author: Joel Walsh is the owner, founder and head-writer of UpMarket Content. To read more about website content best practices, get a consultation with Mr. Walsh, or get a sample page for your site at no charge, go to his SEO website content page.

It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on a continuous battle to win our hearts and get everyone to convert, but is converting someone really a matter of the quantity or the quality? Let’s take a look at some top key searches and compare them with some search engines online. I will outline a few things for each search result:

1) Search Engine
2) Number of results found
3) Quality & content of the top 10 sites
4) What you find going beyond the first 10 pages

Each section will get ranked out of 10 points for quality (information taken on August 26,2005).

Starting with my all-time favorite search term: "INTERNET MARKETING"

Google.com
- 99,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers top quality results

Yahoo.com
- 281,000,000 results
- 7/10 on quality. There’s no reason to list a "Hotel Marketing Firm" & "Building websites". The #1 spot was reserved for Yahoo marketing.
- 9/10 Past 10 pages, it is very generic for business, not specific.

MSN.com
- 93,661,176 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Past 10 pages still delivers high quality results. I am surprised and give MSN two thumbs up for their attention to detail.

Moving onto the search term for "BUSINESS NEWS"

Google.com
- 627,000,000 results
- 10/10 on quality
- 10/10 Beyond 10 pages delivers high quality & local news centers.

Yahoo.com
- 1,260,000,000 results (wow)
- 10/10 on quality
- 9/10 Beyond 10 pages. There are still some sites that should never be there.

MSN.com
- 381,631,054 results
- 8/10 on quality - Some aren’t related at all and brand new sites as well.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. Their results seem to tighten up and get better.

Let’s now take some more "local" search results to see deeper and more targeted results…

Moving on to the search term for "WASHINGTON UNIVERSITIES".
I hope to find the "University of Washington" come up #1 or thereabouts.

Google.com
- 22,700,000
- 10/10 on quality (www.washington.edu is #1)
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. The results still deliver "university" topics.

Yahoo.com
- 143,000,000 results
- 9/10 on quality - The top spot is reserved for Yahoo on Washington University in St. Louis. There seems to be a strong battle going on here on which university to list.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. Content is specific and relevant.

MSN.com
- 34,442,536 results
- 9/10 on quality - Again another battle going on and washington.edu is #10 tilting on the verge of page 2.
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages. All related to Washington & University living

Let’s now get even more specific than that… For this search term I will be using something very local that I can relate to and give a better analysis.

Moving on to the search term for "HAMILTON ONTARIO CANADA".

Google.com
- 3,700,000 results
- 10/10 on quality - Great job
- 10/10 beyond 10 pages - Anything goes but is directly related to Hamilton.

Yahoo.com
- 14,900,000 results
- 10/10 on quality - Almost the same as Google but a couple of different choices.
- 9/10 on quality - Some results are found by keyword stuffing their pages.

MSN Local *New (http://search.msn.com/local/)
- 1,280,405 results
- 9/10 on quality - Getting some random placements & keyword stuffing
- 10/10+ beyond 10 pages - Many local companies well listed in the results.

Let’s now take a look at these results as a total. Out of a possible score of 80 points, here are the total scores for each:

Google - 80 points
MSN - 76 points
Yahoo - 73 points

Total search results delivered:

Google - 752,400,000
Yahoo - 1,698,900,000
MSN - 511,015,171

And people wonder why Google is the king of searching?! But wait, without even noticing the results, as I totaled the final point standings, MSN came up in second place! In my study, I tried to be as neutral as possible.

How is it that Msn & Google have 50% the amount of results shown in Yahoo, but outrank Yahoo in quality?

In conclusion:

Even though Yahoo delivered a report stating that it has over 19 billion search items, what does it matter when you’re still trying to figure out how to deliver all that content? MSN & Google seem to know exactly what to do with their results. They don’t seem "off the wall" at all. If Yahoo is to step up and be crowned the search king, I really think that they need to refine the amount of search terms they have, to match the quality of search results as well.

Yahoo has major potential to outreach Google but they still have a lot of work ahead of them and by the time they figure things out, Google may even step up their game even further and wow us all on some other search plateau.

About the Author: Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads is dedicated to helping you expose your business online and offline. International: http://www.smartads.info Article Submission Website (Beta): http://www.article99.com Post Comments Here: http://forum.article99.com/viewtopic.php?t=24

Link popularity can make or break your website. Search engines have their own ranking systems and they use links to do it. Search engines count for so much in the online world. They are invaluable in the constant search for information. This is where links come in.

Google laid the groundwork for other search engines to follow. This is primarily ranking to sites that have links to related information from other worthwhile websites.

Keywords matter in regards to link popularity. The more often a keyword is used the more difficult it makes it to obtain the end result of link popularity.

It’s not as simple as managing to link up with plenty of other websites. Quality is your aim, not quantity. Link farms are everywhere on the Internet but they only make your search for link popularity a nightmare. Look past these awful “endless lines of link pages” and continue your quest for exceptional quality.

It cannot be stressed enough- quality of a site must always be put before quantity. Cast aside junk sites masquerading as sites of worth and soldier on to higher peaks!

Now it is time to get down to business and look at what you need to do to improve your website rankings.

Yahoo and Open Directory Project have directories worth looking into. Search around on the Internet and you will find a host of others. Some require a monthly or yearly fee while other are completely free.

Shoot for the stars as far as categorizing your site. Some sites are less known or sought after than others. Think big dreams and go after the successful “big cheese” kind of sites.

Once you have directory listings you now need to find other sites on the Internet that provide some of the same products and services that you yourself provide to customers. Related sites help ensure a higher degree of link popularity so bear that in mind as you do your homework. The time and effort you put into your site will benefit if it is linked up with others who feel the same way. And they will in turn benefit as well.

Do your research first as not all sites have an interest in linking up with others. Search out sites and see what they have to offer and see whom they are linked to.

Once you have found a site that suits your needs, congratulations! Now it’s time to get to work. Right off the bat make their link a part of your site. Drive the traffic to both of your sites. Now via e-mail inform the owner of the other site that you proudly have linked their site to yours. You’ve joined forces in a sense. Everyone needs allies in the online world after all.

Show your appreciation of their website and let them know that you handpicked their site especially because you enjoyed what you found when you visited it. Do be honest and do not shower false flattery on them. It’s deceitful.

Repeat the same process with as many sites as you wish to link up with. You can never have too many link partners in the Internet. Just remember that you stand for quality and you won’t accept anything less.

Be consistent and disciplined not just in finding other sites to link to but also in checking the search engines to see how much advancement of your site is taking place. Remember that it will take a considerable amount of time but rest assured that success is near!

Is your site pleasing to the eye or an eye sore? Put a lot of effort into making your site one others would be honored to link to!

About the Author: Tom Bishop Runs Double Qualified PPC Traffic Which Offers Ultra targeted, High Converting Traffic For Just 20 Cents a Click. For Full Information visit his company, Double Qualified PPC Traffic.

Information that is posted on the internet in the form of web pages includes business information, family photo albums, book contents, school courses, even stores where you can place orders with your credit card and have your products shipped to your home without ever speaking to a human.Of course, the value of having business information posted on the internet is its ability to be displayed to potential customers 24 hours a day. The internet is a very economical way for businesses to advertise. For a nominal monthly fee they can post a great deal of information on a web site that could potentially be viewed by millions of potential customers each month.

With all of the information on the internet, it can be hard for any one web site to stand out or even be found by an internet user. This is where search engines and websites that are search engine friendly come in.

NOTE: The estimated number of web pages on the internet is currently in the billions.

Search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo continually “crawl” (search) the internet through programs called “spiders” or “bots”. These programs look at all websites they come across, read the information in them, determine their category, and index them in a giant catalog. When a person uses a search engine to find web sites in a certain category, they type in “key words” or “key phrases” describing the subject they are searching for. The search engine then looks at its index to find the best matches for that key phrase and displays its results for the user to select from. Exactly how each search engine ranks web sites is something that web designers are continually trying to figure out, but there are some things that ARE known about them.

Utilizing these known factors when creating a website is important in ensuring that the website will appear high in the rankings when a user looks for a category that the website fulfills. The higher the website is listed in search engine results, the more likely it is that the website will get people visiting it. Higher rankings in search engines may also lead to increased credibility in the eyes of potential customers, and could lead to a higher number of visitors who will also become customers.

NOTE: The percentage of people visiting a website who become customers is called the website’s “conversion rate”.

Although there are hundreds of search engines on the internet, most people only use an important handful. Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and the Open Directory Project constantly search the internet for new websites, so even without paying a service to submit your website to them a website should be crawled within 2-4 months. Once a website is listed with these major search engines, the smaller engines should pick up the website automatically.

NOTE: You should only pay to submit a website to a search engine if you need it to be listed right away.

Businesses today have a great need for web designers who can create a search engine friendly website for their company, and often pay thousands of dollars to have their website “analyzed” and reworked for search engine optimization. Successful optimization can actually be accomplished in a series of simple steps.

About the Author: Visit Alexandra DeBoer at http://www.chadandrewsgraphics.com.

Are you interested in tapping into the vast internet market, but you are not sure the best way to go about it? Do you have an amazing product or service and a fantastic website, but you are not getting traffic and buyers to support it?

If you could find a way to get a 700% return on your advertising investment would you be interested?

If you have been disappointed by pay-per-click services and the small amount of traffic they bring in, you need to check out the newest trend in the pay-per-click business-double targeting. Double-targeting brings individuals to your website after screening them for their level of interest. In other words, you only get visitors who are serious buyers, instead of those who are just clicking around for the fun of it. This kind of targeting is more productive, it is simple to set up, and it will pay off with big dividends in the end.

How exactly does double-targeting work? When someone types a keyword they are sent to a content site. Your ad is featured on the site. Once the customer clicks on your ad, they have now expressed not only initial interest in your type of product, but also in your specific business and product. This eliminates false clicks from those who are not really interested in buying and also those who are looking for a different product or service altogether. You will only be paying for clicks of people who really are interested in what you have to offer.

However, there is a new kind of advertising available that is easier to use, more cost-effective, and more productive. Double-targeting is a new kind of pay-per-click advertising that is emerging as a leader in the new online advertising arena. With double-targeting potential customers type in a keyword or phrase and are sent to a content site. Your ad is on the site. When the customer clicks again on your site they have demonstrated a specific interest in your product or service. This narrows down the people who visit your site to those who are most likely to buy. You will not get a bunch of false clicks to pay for that will be of no value to your business.

You will not find a more effective way of bringing customers to your site. Customers that really want to buy your service or product. You will be able to concentrate on the other aspects of your business as customers come pouring in.

With Fix My Traffic bring you this type of traffic. You will be able to focus on your key elements of your business. Don’t ever let another client slip through the cracks.

About the Author, Jessica Vandervilts: Jessica is contributor and visitor of Fix My Traffic, where you can find more of her articles. Or visit: http://www.fixmytraffic.com

Is your web-site customer friendly? Customer service is increasingly seen as one of the most valuable uses for a commercial World Wide Web site. Your Web site is available on a 24 hour, seven days a week basis. So it is well worth exploring ways in which your customers can virtually “serve themselves,” without the need for overtime staff, or lengthy voice mail procedures.

James Feldman is President of JFA, Inc., an online business offering high quality and unique gift items including automatic watch winders, Grundig shortwave pocket radios, and nitroglycerine pill fobs. The JFA Web site has been online since 1997, and has doubled its income every year - it’s now a multi-million dollar e-commerce enterprise.

Jim, who’s also a professional speaker and expert on customer service, highlighted for me how the online buying experience differs from the bricks-and-mortar model.

Buying online eliminates the physical presence and personality of the salesperson from the process. This makes the Web site copy critical in creating a one-to-one relationship with the customer or prospect.

Which echoes one of my favorite mantras:

Every page of your site should be written from the visitor’s point of view, not yours.

A visitor should be able to look at your offerings, and immediately answer the questions:

“Why me?” – that is, is your Web site the right place for me?
“Why should I care?” – does this copy convince me that you can meet my needs?
It’s much easier and immediate to jump from Web site to Web site than to move between real-world stores. So the visitor has far more freedom of choice online. Jim says that the challenge for customer service is therefore very clearly to focus on one customer, one purchase at a time. E-customers expect great service, with little or no direct interaction. They will tolerate some mistakes, but not many.

Jim offers five rules for effective online customer service:

1. Be accessible. Show very clearly on your site all the ways that your customer can contact you – including e-mail, phone and fax numbers, and your office hours.

And, if it’s practical for your business, be personal – give your visitors a real person to call who has a name, as opposed to sales@mycompany.com

Of course, if you’re really upscale, you can include a “Call-me” button on your site.

2. Return every e-mail or phone call in the same day, as far as reasonably possible. This may sound simplistic, but a recent experiment with the top Fortune 100 companies showed that nearly a third failed to respond to e-mail sent through their Web site within one month! Some of these companies still don’t provide a usable e-mail address on their sites at all.

3. Acknowledge all orders. Send e-mail confirmations (this can be done very effectively with autoresponders), and if you’re shipping actual products, give tracking numbers and expected delivery dates.

4. Provide a clear return policy, honor it and learn from it. This may give you more information about what’s working and what’s not. Jim’s products are sometimes returned with no explanation, so his staff always call the customer to establish and resolve the problem.

5. Expect more phone calls. Jim says: “Customers can’t read or write!” If your Web site traffic and response rates grow (which is, of course, what we want), so will the volume of phone calls, whatever your business or industry.

Regardless of the site quality, clear returns and privacy policies, secure servers, etc., people still require human interaction. All of my clients report talking to customers on the phone, and walking them through the Web site, where their questions are clearly answered. Maybe these psychological barriers will lessen over the next few years, but right now, they are very much there.

If you can get the customer service aspects of your business working well, there’ll be a definite bottom line impact. Jim is quite clear that his business has grown substantially through repeat business and referrals from satisfied customers.

And in contrast, we can see the impact of poor customer service and fulfillment procedures in many of the dot.coms that are currently failing. Jim says that people buy things online in the expectation of getting something more valuable than the actual money they spend.

Does your Web site do this? JFA Inc. can be found at http://www.jfainc.com/

About The Author: Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is an internationally recognized e-business strategist. Check out her free tipsheet “Beyond the Search Engines” for 17 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317 or mailto:pgamse@CyberSpeaker.com.

If you want to establish your company’s position in the market place, then the company branding is one of the most important components of your marketing plan. A well branded company projects an image of professionalism and competence. A company’s branding package consists of identity, differentiation and reputation.

The way people look up to your brand largely depends upon your brand efficiency, the way it is portrayed, recognized, respected and remembered in the community.

A brand is essentially a way of communicating a promise or an exchange between you and your
customers. It is a way of you communicating to you customer who are you are what you promise to deliver to them.

These independent marketing consultants will help you decide on the right branding message that you should communicate to the community and the customer. They will also guide you in choosing the correct medium to get your message across to the customers. The marketing or branding message should communicate to the customers that your company/product is the most able and preferred resource available in the market.

Company branding makes it easy to build momentum in your advertising. When people know your company name, your logo, your products and your brand, it tends to stick in their minds. So when you run a commercial or a print ad, you don’t have to work as hard at gaining visibility. You can just work on selling your products. Once people know what your company stands for, when they recognize your logo, they will immediately tie it to your products and services.

When the people know your company, its name, its logo and what it stands for, they will relate the logo to your products and services. To position your self in the market is a tedious and time consuming process. And once a definite market position has been attained, then to
maintain it is not so difficult but effort and energy will have to be put for maintenance of positioning. The marketing consultant will be able to assist your company in building and maintaining a brand image and winning customers. Your brand should be communicated to the customers in a way that whenever they need the product or service that you provide, they should automatically think
of your company/products. This should be the ultimate goal for every business.

About the Author: Scott Geld serves as the V.P of Marketing for Marketing Blaster. Feel free to contact him with any feedback or questions about this article or any marketing topic.

Your web content makes or breaks the profitability of your site. Here’s how you can develop a strategy to make the most of your site’s content.Your content is what gets you in search engines, speaks to visitors, and ultimately decides the success or failure of your site. Meanwhile, your content has to be updated at least once a month if you want to get return visitors and search engine traffic. You need to have a web content strategy for your site to succeed.
Web Content Strategy Components

There are four basic ways you can get content for your site.

1. Free-reprint content that you can publish on your site in exchange for putting a link to the authors’ site under the article. The main benefit of this kind of content is that you can build up your site quickly.

2. Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook-style comments. The main advantage of this content is that it costs nothing and gives you insight into your visitors. The disadvantages are low quality and the constant vigilance needed to police it for misbehavior.

3. Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site. This content is usually informational articles, whitepapers, and sometimes, press releases. Exchanging content is an essential component of getting links to your site.

4. Original written content that’s exclusive to your site. You should have some content that you hold back from republication, to avoid giving visitors or search engines the idea all your content can be had somewhere else. This can include FAQs, “about us” pages, case studies, testimonials, and other content that other sites would not want to reprint anyway.

What Kind of Content to Use

So, which of the four kinds of content should you use on your site? Ideally, all four. That way you’ll maximize the amount of quality content your site can have.

Just be careful not to rely too heavily on free-reprint content. If most of what’s on your site isn’t original to you, you’ll suffer in credibility, both with your visitors and the search engines.
Here’s a good starter content strategy:

1. One-quarter free-reprint content.
2. One-quarter content contributed by visitors.
3. One-quarter originally written content you let other sites reprint in exchange for a link to your site.
4. One-quarter originally written content you do not redistribute.

Scheduling Content Updates

Search engines, especially Google, seem to give pride of place to sites that regularly update their content. Regular content updates also give visitors a reason to return.

In short, if you have thirty web pages worth of content this month, it’s better to post one page each day rather than put them up all at once. To make sure you do this, schedule an hour each day for updating your site’s content.

One way to get regular content updates for your site is to start a blog, a “web log” in which you write your thoughts and post news. The one disadvantage is that many web users are getting tired of blogs, which are often not well written and contain more opinion than information. Search engines, too, seem to be featuring blogs in their results less often.
Identifying a Content Provider

Ever wonder how Bill Gates keeps the MSN and Microsoft sites so content-rich? Doesn’t he get RSI from writing a thousand or more pages a day?

You guessed it: Bill Gates does not write the content for any of the Microsoft websites. Nor should you write all your own content. All successful website owners have someone else write a large part of their content. This person or company is called a “web content provider.”

Your web content provider has to be a person or company with proven experience writing content for the web, rather than just print content. Ask to see writing samples. You might even ask if you can commission just a single page to start with, for evaluation purposes.

In short, your web content is too important to leave to chance. Make sure you have a strategy for getting the best content. Contact a content provider to develop a web content strategy today.

About the Author: Joel Walsh, a professional content writer and founder of UpMarket Content, recommends you check out their site to learn more about what you can get from a web site content provider: http://upmarketcontent.com/website-content

Level1Diet.com

In February of 2006, we created Level1Diet.com. The Level1Diet.com website is a support web site for people who are trying to lose weight and reduce problems with low-level chronic inflammation and insulin resistance. Those health problems are known to be associated with heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and many other major diseases.Despite the heavy competition in the diet and weight loss field, Level1diet.com is consistently ranked highly by leading search engines. On many keyword searches, Level1diet.com beats hundreds of thousands, even millions of web site competitors, including famous brand names and well established international corporations and even government health sites. See the “Keyword Successes” below.

The Level1Diet.com web pages were launched in February, 2006. Within 6 weeks of the finalization of the pages, the site had been rated as a Pagerank or PR of 5/10 by Google. As of June, 2006, it still has that high page ranking of 5.

As of July 2nd, 2006, here are some of the successful page listings for Level1diet.com:

• Google shows a 5/10 Pagerank for “Level1diet.com”
• Google lists 614 sites that contain the term “Level1diet.com”
• Google lists 346 pages inside the site “Level1diet.com”
• Google lists 8 pages that link to the site “Level1diet.com”
• Google lists 30 pages that are similar to “Level1diet.com”
• Yahoo lists 700 pages that contain the term “Level1diet.com”
• Yahoo lists 1310 sites that link to the site “Level1diet.com”
• Yahoo lists 683 pages inside the site “Level1diet.com”
• MSN lists 770 sites that link to the site “Level1diet.com”
• MSN lists 131 pages that contain the term “Level1diet.com”
• AOL lists 19 pages that contain the term “Level1diet.com”

Keyword Successes

Here are some of the rankings and particular details about popular keywords targeted for the weight loss and diet health support web site:

• “anti-inflammation supplements” - #1 of 1,350,000 sites in Yahoo
• “anti-inflammation food list” - #1 of 24,300 sites in Google
• “anti-inflammation food list” - #1 of 3,381 sites in MSN
• “anti-inflammation food list” - #2 of 676,000 sites in Yahoo
• “supplements for anti-inflammation” - #4 of 1,310,000 sites in Yahoo
• “weight loss foods to eat” - #51 of 6,120,000 sites in Yahoo
• “weight loss foods to avoid” - #9 of 3,100,000 sites in Yahoo
• “anti-inflammatory food list” - #5 of 1,320,000 sites in Google
• “anti-inflammatory food list” - #81 of 1,220,000 sites in Yahoo
• “anti-inflammation foods to avoid” - #1 of 833 sites in Google
• “anti-inflammation foods to avoid” - #3 of 415,000 sites in Yahoo
• “anti-inflammation foods to avoid” - #2 of 1,441 sites in MSN
• “anti-inflammation diet” - #7 of 9,190 sites at MSN
• “anti-inflammation diet” - #23 of 1,640,000 at Yahoo
• “anti-inflammation diet” - #260 of 60,300 at Google

Other search successes include:

• miracle drink + cancer treatment - #2 at google
• which natural food supplement should be kept refrigerated but should not be frozen - #2 at google
• acai fruit berry benefits - #6 at google
• overcoming inflammation - #7 at google
• obesity inflammation epa - #2 at google
• what kinds of food are good for stomach disorders - #2 at google
• foods to avoid for diabetes - 17 at google

So far, Level1diet.com has never spent a single penny on “pay per click” web promotion. Every visitor has discovered the site from free online promotional efforts. We have used free press releases, linking from friends’ sites, and SEO optimized web pages. The search engines have done the rest for us.