Many marketers have been shifting their marketing budgets to the web over the past few years. Marketing online allows you to target specific audiences and easily track return on investment, commonly referred to as ROI. Unlike traditional marketing methods, results of Internet marketing campaigns are almost immediate. This allows you to better evaluate what elements of your campaign are producing results and which are not. When buying online media, you must be willing to shift your marketing dollars to the online methods that produce a positive return.

To be successful at Internet marketing, you must understand the essential secrets of Internet marketing. These secrets can allow you to achieve success by finding the right audience, communicating your message properly, and leading consumers down the path to purchase. These secrets include:

1. Website Directory Listings. Before you begin any marketing campaign, make sure that the website you’re promoting has been listed in the common directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, and Google. Even if you’re using a marketing page off of the root directory of your website, be sure that the primary site is listed. This ensures that prospects can continue to find your marketing pages long after you’ve launched your campaign.

2. Generating Traffic. In order to realize a return on your investment, you need to generate traffic to your marketing pages. There are a number of ways to do so online. Some of the most popular include Google AdSense, Overture, and Looksmart. Other methods include affiliate programs and targeted website advertising. Research other websites that have the audience you’re looking for and negotiate favorable ad rates for your online marketing campaign.

3. Marketing Pages. Don’t lead prospective purchasers to a generic website. If you do, potential buyers won’t know what to do next. The easier you make if for prospects to take advantage of your offer, the better. Whenever creating a marketing campaign online, provide a specific page for leading purchasers to your product or service or a billboard that showcases the offer. Take the guess work out of making a purchase and more consumers will buy.

4. Testimonials. Customer testimonials are the most powerful way to sell your product or service. When consumers hear from those who have purchased and used your product or service, they gain a certain level of trust and comfort in what you have to offer. Solicit testimonials after each purchase and use those that are the most convincing to prospective purchasers.

5. Create a Compelling Offer. Be sure to offer something that no one else is currently offering. If your offer is similar to your competitors or is not very interesting, consumers have no reason to learn more. Of course providing something for FREE is often a great way to entice potential customers. Maybe it’s a 3-day free trial or a free evaluation of some kind. Be creative, try something new, and measure the response.

6. Developing Trust. Before anyone will buy from you, your website or company needs to be seen as reputable. This means that consumers can purchase from you and not worry about the safety of their credit card information, personal information, or anything else being exchanged. A good method for developing trust is to purchase and display safety and reliability icons such as BBB Online, Trust-e, and VeriSign.

7. Provide a Guarantee. Nothing makes a consumer more comfortable with a purchase than offering a guarantee. Perhaps you can offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee or a money back guarantee. A guarantee is a great way ease the risk of making a purchase. If your competitors are offering a guarantee, you want yours to be equal or better.

Internet marketing is an incredibly powerful medium for segmenting your prospects and delivering targeted advertising. Online, you can easily measure you return on investment and refine your marketing campaign over time to improve results.

If you are a local business you can benefit from Internet marketing as well. Look for local directories to list your business or service. Or, you can supplement your local advertising with product marketing pages on your website. Internet marketing is more than just placing ads online, it’s using the web to communicate the value of your products and services.

b>Now more then ever profitable opportunities exist to promote your local business on the Internet. Through search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, email marketing and local listings, you can connect with a willing audience. Your customers are turning to the Internet to find local products and services. If your competitors have an online presence and you don’t, guess who gets to take home the prize

Below are several crucial techniques for promoting your business regionally:

Local Listings

Even if you do not have a web site you can still promote your local business online. For example, you can list you business and contact information with the local search engines of Yahoo and Google. It takes an hour at the most to get a free listing on the two most popular search engines. Your listing will include an interactive map that can direct customers right to your front door.

Another important resource that accepts free listings is Verizon’s Superpages.com, as does the local version of AOL.

And don’t overlook regional and industry specific directories. Many accept free listings, or charge a nominal fee. Once again, for most a web site is not a prerequisite.

Pay Per Click Advertising

If you do have a web site, than you need to promote your local business through Pay Per Click on both Google and Yahoo. With Pay Per Advertising you bid on keyword terms that your potential customers would use in a search. An example is “Tacoma Wedding Photographer.” The cost per click depends on how competitive the term is. You only pay if a prospect clicks on your text ad and goes to your site. This is referred to as performance advertising, where you only pay if the ad performs.

The appeal of PPC is you can get it going within an hour. You set the budget, you determine what keywords are relevant, and you determine your price per click. You can also turn it on or off in an instance. The general consensus is that PPC generates a higher return on your investment over traditional offline advertising.

Search Engine Optimization – Free Traffic

For those that like a challenge there is search engine optimization. SEO is the ability to optimize your web site for high search ranking. If you can optimize your site properly, you can benefit from an endless stream of free, targeted search engine traffic. It takes time and effort, but the results can take your business to a whole new level.

If you are selling nationally SEO can be cutthroat. For a local business it can be relatively easy to rank for terms that relate to your business and location. (ex. Richmond Wedding Photographer)

Local Email Marketing

Another tremendous marketing tool is email. For virtually nothing you can communicate with both prospects and your existing customers. Email is an excellent method to convert prospects to customers. It can also significantly increase the lifetime value of your existing customers by simply alerting them to upcoming sales and promotions.

Knowing the power of email communication, I find it hard to believe how few use it to promote their local business. Now listen up, start collecting your customer’s email addresses today. I can guarantee they will respond favorably to joining your list. We all like to be informed on bargains and special offers.

The future of your local business will depend on the Internet. It is estimated 25% of searches online are local in nature. The Internet is the perfect resource for finding local products and services, which is why your customers are searching online. Now is the time to get your business positioned to reap the rewards.

If you are new to search engine optimization and want to boost traffic to your web site, writing good Title Tags is a great place to start.

Many coaching web sites lack good page titles. They are often completely ignored during the design process or just poorly written.
This causes two main problems:

Firstly, a poorly written title won’t get many clicks.
Here’s what happens …

When someone performs a search, they are provided with a list of results to choose from. This list uses your page titles to display to the person doing the search. If your page title doesn’t grab attention, it won’t be clicked on.

It’s like writing a great book on how to catch fish, but giving it a crumby title of “A Fishing Book.” It will easily get passed up in favor of the book next to it titled, “How to Catching A Lot of Fish – Easily”

The second problem is lower search engine rankings.

Generally speaking, if your page titles don’t contain keywords that people are searching for, then your pages will have a lower ranking than if your title did have those keywords.

So you will want to make sure you write good titles for your web site page to both increase your rankings and to attract people to click to your web site.

So, where do I find the page title?

It can be found in the html source code, towards the top of the page, (with the word title before and after the title text).

So, how do you write good title tags?

The two biggest things to keep in mind when writing your titles are:

1. Include your keywords in your title. Search engines use the words in the title tag to identify what your web page is about. Including your keywords in the title tag will improve its ranking in search engines.

2. Make your title attention-grabbing. As mentioned before, search engines use page titles when displaying results. If you make it attention-grabbing, it can win more clicks and bring more traffic to your web site.

Here’s more advice on writing attractive, keyword rich title tags:
Include your keywords towards the beginning of the title. This gives those keywords more prominence.

* Avoid filler-words. Words like “the,” “a,” and “and” just take up space and don’t help your ranking.

* Use your name, your patented coaching process, book title or other well-known trademark in the title tags of the pages in which they are mentioned.

* Don’t put “John Smith – Business Coach.” This won’t grab attention as much as something like “Business Coach – Grow your business 200%.”
Use about eight words. This is the amount that is visible in search engine result pages.

* Write titles that draw attention. Some techniques include: using keywords that people are searching on, using problem statements, benefit statements.

* Be sure your titles accurately reflect what is on the page. Misleading titles disappoint users and search engines may penalize your site.

* Don’t overstuff your page title with keywords. It makes for a bad looking title in search listings and puts your page at risk for search engine penalties.

* Don’t keep the same title tag across multiple pages. This implies the pages are of the same content and they really aren’t – a minus in the eyes of search engines.

Here’s an example of a title tag for the home page of a career coach web site:

“Career Coach for Accountants and Lawyers – Increase Your Earnings”

You can see that this title includes a benefit statement, relevant keywords, and the target audience’s name – good for rankings and good for getting attention.

In conclusion, make your title keyword-rich for search engines and attention-grabbing for searchers. It’s an easy way to boost your search engine visibility and bring more visitors to your web site – more possible clients!

How do you get the most out of your web site? Setting up and maintaining your web site isn’t at all difficult, and if there is anything you need to learn you can find out everything you need to know on the Internet. Without too much effort and a lot of time, you can create a beautiful web site, filled with images and great content.

So…how do you get people to visit your site?

Just because you know that your web site is great, it doesn’t mean that everyone else does. There are thousands upon thousands of web sites floating around out there in cyberspace, and everyone has a piece of the pie. For everything there is, there exists a web site. Every single type of business that you could name has its own web site on the Internet. How are you supposed to get yours to stand out above so many others that are out there?

How do you get traffic?

Internet users know that search engines are your key to finding what you want. Search engines are a friendly little Internet tool that does the work for us. All we have to do is think about what we’re looking for in the vaguest of terms. For instance, you’re doing a research paper on the wives and daughters of King Henry the eighth of England. So, you go to a search engine and type in the keywords, “Henry VIII and wives.” Just like magic, the search engine instantly presents you with a list of web sites filled with information about King Henry and his many wives.

As most everyone knows, those sites that appear at the top of the list get visited most often. The top of the list is definitely where you want to be, so that potential visitors will see your web site proudly displayed among the best. But, in order to appear at the top of list, you need to know something about search engine optimization.

Which leads to the burning questions: what is search engine optimization? It sounds sinister, but really search engine optimization is simple and easy. The following is a list of tips that will help you with search engine optimization. Using these tips, your web site will appear closer to the top of that list, and you’ll get more traffic on your site:

- Simple, easy to spell keywords
Internet users don’t want to take a lot of time – with anything. They aren’t going to spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of a search engine list, and they aren’t going to be that specific or exacting (at least not in the first search) with the keywords that they use. Keep your keywords as simple as possible. Commonly misspelled keywords should be featured on your site under all possible spellings, to maximize the possibilities of getting hits to your site. Long, complex, and hard to spell words don’t get searched out very often, so be sure to use as many short, simple keywords as possible.

- Lots of links
Search engines love links, so include as many as possible on your site. Both internal links, links that link to pages within your own site, and external links are good. The more links you have, the better your chances with the search engines.

- Lots of content
The more content you have means the more possible keywords you’ll have on your site. Search engines look at sites for content and their rankings are based upon that content, so you’ll want to have plenty of it. Keywords without content is nothing, and search engines don’t give good rankings to sites that have lots of keywords but very little content. Even if you content isn’t the greatest, it won’t hurt your chances with the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization. Big words. Sounds Important. What is it? If you do a search in google for the web definition of search engine optimization, you get a lot of different results.

Some simply say that search engine optimization is the generic term for making sure your site is optimized to appear as one of the top ranking web sites on a search.

Others get more detailed with their definition and say search engine optimization is the term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a web site to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.

A number of factors are important when optimizing a web site, including the content and structure of the web site’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.

Is it important? That also depends on which definition you believe and who you ask that question to. If you ask someone who runs a business and charges for search engine optimization, they will tell you it is the most important thing you will ever do for your website.

At each SEO website, they will tell you they are the number 1 SEO company on the web, even though each of them has a completely different method of optimizing your website.

If you ask many self-appointed webmaster gurus in some of the webmaster forums, they will tell you the same thing, then each one will tell you a different way to do it and they will all disagree on the most important aspects of search engine optimization.

So the confusion continues for the average user and the SEO companies love it that way. If the consumer doesn’t understand what you are doing, you don’t really have to do very much and just say you are doing a lot. Most of them would never work on your website on a contingency payment plan, one based on actual results and performance. Some say money back guaranteed, but read the fine print.

A lot of these businesses are based on the fact that people who are new to the web and even some of those who have been online for awhile do not know what search engine optimization is. They know that with more and more people coming onto the web for the first time, their business is secure. They can continue to tell people that without their service the website will fail.

I’m not saying all search engine optimization companies are rip-offs. Some of them really do their best to get good rankings for their clients and know what they are doing. A lot of them still really believe that search engine optimization is the key to success on the web.

It isn’t. How’s that for a statement? I know a lot of web designers will disagree. I know a lot of SEO companies will disagree. But simply put, search engine optimization of your WebPages is not the most important thing you need to do to succeed on the web.

Let’s break down some of the things that are included in the phrase search engine optimization.

Metatags are one of the things these gurus tell you is important. Metatags are all but dead. Search engines, especially google, ignore metatags for the most part.

Having them in does not hurt you, but go do a search on any topic besides web design or search engine optimization, etc. and you’ll find that IF the websites at the top of the search results have metatags at all, they usually only have the description and keywords metatags.

Well they also have the title tag, which is sometimes referred to as a metatag, but it is actually the only metatag you need to have.

Keyword Optimization is something the gurus will tell you is very important. Some will tell you they know the exact percentage of text that should be your keywords. Yes, keywords are very important. Do they know what percentage the search engines will want to read for the best results? No.

When writing copy for your website, you must be conscious of the keywords you wish to promote. Don’t pick too many keywords and try to optimize each page of your website for twenty different things. If you do, it will not be relevant for any of them. That isn’t guru talk, that’s just plain old fashioned common sense.

Remember that search engines crawl web pages, not web sites. If you choose just one or two keywords per webpage that you wish that page to be optimized for, then you can optimize the page easily and write text the user will want to actually read.

Write your sales text the way you would with only the user in mind and with making sales in mind. Then go back and reread the page.

Find places where you can add in your keyword without destroying the flow you created when you wrote the text in the first place.

Now, do you need to hire an SEO company to do that? Do you know your product? Do you know how to sell your product? Then you need to write the text. If you do not wish to write the text, then hire a writer. You still don’t need a search engine optimization guru.

Some search engine optimization experts will tell you they can increase your link popularity. They use a variety of methods. They create websites where they put all of their clients website links so you will have links to your website. The search engines call these link farms and discount any value they may have had in the past.

Those methods, along with many others, are simply tricks that temporarily work. Alot of search engine optimization companies all keep up with the latest tricks and shortcuts. They may even get you some good results in the short-term. But what happens when the search engines catch onto the trick?

I’m glad you asked. They stop letting that trick or shortcut work. They may even penalize the websites that used it. They penalize you, the customer, not the search engine optimization guru who used the trick and charged you for it.

Whenever one of these companies tells you it has “inside information”, “ex-search engine company employees”, “guaranteed search engine placement”, guaranteed top 10 placement”, or “secret methods”, a red flag should go up in your mind right away.

If you start a business offline, like a restaurant or a store, you know that besides the money you will have to put up, you will also have to work to make it a success. It is no different when you start a business online. You have to work at it, if you want to be successful.

If search engine optimization is not the most important thing you can do to become successful, what is? Again, I’m glad you asked.

Promotion. Do not depend solely on being found by the search engines. Search engines are fickle creatures and what is today’s #1 can be tomorrow’s #100 just because they decided to change the way they give relevance to websites. Continually chasing this dream is a total waste of time.

There are other sources of traffic out there. Would you rather have 1000 hits from a search engine for one of your minor keywords or have 100 hits from someone who read an article you wrote and came to your website because they liked what you had
to say?

If you chose the thousand hits, you don’t get it yet. Out of that 1000 hits you might convert 2 of them into sales. Out of the 100, you may get as many as 20-25 people who want to buy from you. Conversion rate is more important than how many hits you get to your website.

Write articles about your website, about your products, about relevant topics to your products or services you wish to sell. Distribute or submit those articles to article submission websites that provide free content to webmasters.

You may write one article like the one I am writing now and have 100 webmasters want to use it as content for their website. That would mean there is suddenly 100 other websites on topics related to your product that now contain a link to your website. (see the footer below contains links to my website and is to be included when this article is reprinted.)

That increases your link popularity without the need for a company to optimize you. Just by submitting your article to several article submission websites, you increase your link popularity, but when those webmasters start to republish your articles, you will see a huge increase in your page rank and the quality of your traffic.

Some people write one article per month and others write one or more per day. It depends on you. How fast do you want your website to grow?

How much time do you have to invest? If you are not good at writing articles or do not have the time, hire a writer to ghost-write them for you with your byline and your links in
the footer.

So that we are clear. Search engine optimization is necessary, but by no means the most important thing you can do for your website to make it successful. I would not pay a lot of money for this service. Promoting your website IS the most important thing you can do. Articles are just one of the methods you can use to promote your website.

Advertising, buying links on relevant websites, posting in forums and blogs with related topics, putting your link in your signature line, are some of the other ways you can promote your website.

My Checklist:

1. Be conscious of the keywords you wish to target with each webpage you build. Write your text for the reader, then go back and add your keywords without destroying the flow of your text.

2. Make sure the website is easy to navigate and user-friendly. Don’t assume the customer knows the web site as well as you do. Make it simple. Make it easy to find the buy button!

3. Once the website is built, quit worrying about the newest search engine trick or optimization technique as some like to call it.

4. Search for blogs and forums with related topics and sign up for them and participate in discussions with your link in your signature line.

5. Write articles about related topics and submit them everywhere or buy a service like isnare.com that will do the submissions for you. If you cannot write the articles, hire someone to do it for you.

6. Don’t do link trades with websites that have less traffic than you do. Buy links on websites that have more traffic than you and are on a topic related to your products or services.

This article in no way claims to have listed all the ways you can use to promote your website. What I have done here is tried to explain to you what is or is not important to creating and maintaining a successful website. I hope this helps you.

One of the most crucial mistakes I made when I first started Internet Marketing was not completely understand the importance of proper back linking, anchor tags, keywords and the title tag. The most important things to search engines is providing relevancy to search results using keywords in the anchor tags and back links. Back links to your website has become one of the most or if not important aspects to better Search Engine Result Positioning (SERP) using your keywords in your anchor tags.

One of the most common mistakes that I personally made with my website was in the title was:

Title: Succeed Online with ES-Solution

The problem with that title was; What does that have to do with my website and keywords? Search Engines base a lot of importance on the keywords and the anchor tag contained in the back link. Additionally, I submitted my website to many directories and search engines using that title. What I am telling the search engines? That my most important keyword or keyword phrase is “Succeed Online with ES-Solution.” How many possible searchs do you believe would have that exact phrase or keywords? Zero.

My rankings for my keyword phrase “Internet Marketing eBooks” were even more horrible!

Steps to avoiding this same mistake:

Step 1: Never using a descriptive title

Step 2: Choose the most relevant Keywords for your Title

Step 3: Create back links using the appropriate anchor tag.

My actions:

1. I changed my title to “Internet Marketing eBooks”. Another important idea behind your title and keywords is that the search engines will shift around your keywords to make more phrases. I only have 3 Keywords but using different combination, I have 3 good keyword pharses:

(1) Internet Marketing eBooks
(2) Marketing eBooks
(3) Internet Marketing

2. And I began re-submiting my website to directories and search engines with the proper title (anchor tag): “Internet Marketing eBooks”

My results:

(1) I have several back links with the anchor text “Internet Marketing eBooks”, but unfortunately I still have some of the old back links with the anchor text “Succeed on with ES-Solution” dropping my overall relevancy to 54% when it should be 100%.

(2) I have managed to achieve the number one ranking as of 6 December 2005 for the keyword phrase “Internet Marketing eBooks” in MSN and the number two ranking in Yahoo.

After preparing your list about keywords well, you should begin placing those keywords on your website. But, which part on the website should it be placed?

1. Title Tags
As you open a front page via the web browser, the Title tag would appear on the top of the front page as usual. As for the search engine, the Title tag is vitally crucial. Comparing with other parts on the website, the part of search engine stands high proportion for the Title tag. So, to put keywords into this tag is the turning point of heightening the vision scale of search engine. Besides, the Tile tag would also appear on the searching result of search engine and then be hyper-linked to your website. Therefore, that the Title tag is described well or not relates to if browsers can be drawn attraction to click your website as choosing from numerous searching results. And Title tag is the first description that people can read as searching results are shown via search engine; thus, make the Title tag easier as possible as you can so that people can realize what your website is about.

2.Meta Description
Meta Description is kind of HTML tag and mainly used to describe the content of the front page. But these years the Meta tag isn’t arranged into the running rule of operation analyses because that isn’t as important as the Title tag. But we still suggest readers to compose the Meta tag because certain search engines would manifest the content of Meta tag in the searching results. That is to say, it can be the attraction for web browsers to click and read materials inside. Remember the description cannot be exaggerated; otherwise, as web visitors browse your website but find out the content isn’t like what you describe, he may recede soon.

3.Meta Keyword
The keyword tag isn’t that crucial as the Title tag and Meta description. But if correct keyword tags can be noted down, it may do good. As one types keyword tags, he should choose the keywords which relate to content of that front page to avoid surplus, irrelative or duplicate keywords. This tag won’t be read by people in common condition except for the search engine.

4.Headings
Headings are words placed between (h1)(h1) in HTML tag and mainly prompt browsers what the main content is and for the search engine, it stands in the pivotal place for the search engine.

5.Context
The ratio of numbers of keywords to words on that front page is called keyword density. Your keywords should appear in the appropriate website content. When it comes to numbers of times and frequency, you can search for the keywords you want to optimize in the search engine and compile statistics about the density of top keywords on the website.

To protrude keywords on the website appropriately will be helpful for the ranking of website in search engine. But, excessively modifiers may be considered as Spam by the search engine.

If you target the wrong key phrases you might as well give up and go home now……

Keywords are the first thing you need to consider when approaching the subject of internet marketing and search engine optimisation and if not properly selected will loose you copious amounts of targeted traffic.

I would hazard a guess that probably 99% of websites are not targeting the keywords that would be most profitable for them and so are losing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pounds by ignoring this important part of Search Engine Optimisation.

Most businesses when asked “So how did you decide on the keywords you wanted to target” will say one of the following two:

1.”They are the keywords my competitors use so I used them”.
2.”Well it obvious they are the keywords I should use isn’t it”.

Do these comments sound familiar to you? To 99% of you they will and if that’s the case then you need to read on.

Keyword selection is an easy process but many people overlook it and target keywords that they would expect to be profitable and find out to their peril that they were not.

First of let me clear one thing up that not a lot of people seem to realise and that is that a keyword is individual, So for arguments sake the key phrase “great keyword” is different to the key phrase “keywords that are great”. This sounds strange I know but if you are optimising for a specific key phrase you need to keep your eye on that key phrase (this is important to remember).

There are now many tools that make the process of keyword selection very easy. One example of this is Yahoo marketing’s (formally known as overture) keyword tool that’s free to use and will quickly tell you all the different variations of the keywords you are targeting and exactly how popular they are.

I always recommend the following when deciding the best keywords for a campaign:

1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes (what would you search for if you were looking for your product or service?).
2. Research your competition and see what they are doing but don’t just do what they are doing because they are.
3. Write down all of your suggestions and ideas for keywords (you will need them next)
4. Go to the Yahoo marketing web page and use their free keyword checking tool and in turn type in your key phrase suggestions.
5. Take note of all of the different combinations that are suggested to you and the amount of searches done on them this is where you normally find out that the key phrase you thought was profitable are not the most profitable on the list.
6. This is where you now decide to reselect your keywords unless you are in the 1%.

Only once you know what specific key phrases you are targeting can you start the job of search engine optimisation safe in the knowledge that you are not chasing a white elephant.

Keyword optimization is a tool that anyone starting a website (or trying to maintain one) should take advantage of. This tool can do wonders for a web-based business, and has proven to keep web visitors coming back to certain sites time and time again-if it’s done correctly. Here are some suggestions for making keyword optimization work for your website that could improve the state of your Internet business or informational website.

Test the keywords out yourself. When you’re thinking of keywords that will make your site more searchable, test a few out on popular search engines to see that kind of results a person looking for your site or a site similar to yours will find. You’ll be surprised sometimes to find that keywords you think are ‘common’ or ‘regular’ may not yield the results you expected. Try to think both as practical and as abstract as possible when it comes to keywords, and select keywords that you think are somewhere in the middle. For instance, if you’re opening an online boutique, you’ll want to input keywords like ’boutique’, ‘accessories’, or ‘handbags’, because it is safe to assume that the people searching for your boutique will be looking for accessories or handbags. However, you may also want to use words or phrases like ‘online boutique’, ‘original designs’, and ’boutique clothing’ for secondary keywords, so that if people are looking for something a little more specific, they can still be led almost directly to your site.

Find out how different search engines work. Another great way to make sure that keyword optimization is working for your website it to test out different search engines, and learn the ‘rules’ behind each of them. Use the keywords you have chosen several times with different search engines, so you can see just how effective they are. Some search engines yield better results when the person searching enters a short phrase (i.e. Yahoo), because more words offer more details, and the search engine can give more specific details in terms of findings. And, some search engines work well when using only one or two words (i.e. Google, Microsoft). Making sure that potential customers can find you no matter what search engine they’re using will definitely help to increase business and traffic for your site.

Change your keywords if necessary. Every now and then, you may want to change your keywords or phrases in order to make your site more searchable. This depends largely on the type of content that you’re putting on your site, so you may need to add a few keywords to your list to make sure that customers can find you easily. The more updated your site is, the more attractive it will be for new and existing customers, the more traffic your site will be able to take on.

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It’s the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.
Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it’s going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site…after all, isn’t that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.

How many times have you heard or read that “this is the Internet and it’s ok” to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don’t do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as “sex”, the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the “alt=” HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn’t hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.