Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

One popular reasons given for using partial feeds as opposed to full feeds is that it increases the amount of visitors to your actual site. If you let people have your full feed they will just consume your content through a feed reader and never visit your site, so you have to offer just a partial feed so they will have to click through to your website and read your full post, right? … Wrong! Several recent posts say otherwise, and so do I. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and find out it only offers a partial feed I unsubscribe immediately in almost all cases. On the rare occasion that I do stay subscribed I end up reading less of the content than I would have had they offered a full feed, simply because clicking through to a website is just an extra step that I am reluctant to take, because it takes me away from all the other good content in my feed reader provided by all the other blogs who let me subscribe to a full feed. There is a lot of good content out there and I am always looking for ways to sift through it all. By offering only a partial feed you are pretty much guaranteeing that I will place your content in the never return category. One exception to this is Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. He offers great content that I wouldn’t want to miss it, but his blog is the only exception.

If bloggers want readers to click through to their website I recommend that they entice them rather that force them. Offer great content that encourages discussion and people will want to click through after they have read your full post in their feed reader simply to see the comments and post one of their own. I do this very often myself. As I read posts in my feed reader I open the ones I would like to comment on in a new tab and go back to them after I have gone through all the content in my feed reader. So for everyone out there who offers only partial feeds, if you want this reader please switch to full feeds.

I have recently decided to take an opportunity to go to the Philippines for several months to recruit and train internet marketers to work for clients in the US. I will be leaving at the end of this month and will stay in Makati (in Metro Manila) for probably about 4 months.

If you are interested in hiring a worker from the Philippines to do internet marketing for you, or if you live in the Philippines and would like to work as an internet marketer please contact me. No previous internet marketing experience will be required from our workers as we will be training workers from the very basics on to more advanced internet marketing tactics. For now we plan to focus just on SEO, but that could expand to more in the future. Since this will be my primary focus for the next several months you will be hearing about it a lot on this blog. We have just barely begun this program, but as things progress I will keep you updated and share what I am learning. I will also be asking for feedback from my readers so I look forward to hearing your advice and opinions in the future.

It is generally a good idea to keep a close eye on your website analytics in order to know what search engine keywords are bringing visitors to your site. If you are already ranking for a particular keyword in many cases it only takes a few new links having the anchor text of that keyword pointing to your ranking page to boost your ranking a few spots. Considering the fact that click through rate increases pretty significantly the higher up you are in the SERPs, your time and money is often times better spent focusing on boosting rankings for keywords which you are already listed for rather than keywords which you hope to rank for but have not yet obtained a listing. You may end up spending a lot of time and money trying to rank for keywords which are ultimately out of your reach when you could have spent that same effort boosting rankings for keywords for which you already have a listing. You could reasonably expect to increase traffic from a given keyword ten fold by increasing your position from a 9 or 10 to number one , and at least double traffic from a keyword by moving from a 2 or 3 position to number one.

A few weeks ago I noticed I was getting a visitor from a fairly competitive keyword about every other day. When I checked to see where I was ranking for that keyword I found out I was at position 39 at the time. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to boost my ranking to hopefully the top ten where I knew I would get considerably more traffic from that keyword, so over the next few weeks I kept that in my mind. Within a few days I was able to increase my position to the mid twenty range and was starting to get traffic for that keyword every day. My position fluctuated in the 15-30 range for about two weeks, but yesterday I discovered that I am now ranked #10 for that keyword, and I getting quite a bit of traffic for that keyword. This keyword seems pretty competitive so I think my time would be better spent going after some less competitive keywords going forward, but this experience solidified in my mind the value of keeping an eye on your analytics and spending the effort it takes trying to boost rankings for keywords for which you are already listed.

There are hundreds of ways to promote a business online. I come across new ways to advertise and promote a business online almost every week. However, to simplify things I recommend you first consider doing the following things to get the most bang for your buck.

1. Do some basic Search Engine Optimization
Search engines can bring in a huge amount of highly targeted “free” traffic to your website. You can just launch your website and hope you get listed in Google, but with some SEO knowledge and some effort you can almost guarantee that you will get traffic from search engines. My article Three Steps to Search Engine Traffic outlines a pretty straightforward SEO strategy to follow. While it isn’t really too hard to learn the basics of SEO, it is important to remember that the most important factor in SEO is backlinks, which could take a bit more knowledge and some creativity to obtain in a cost effective manner. Knowing how to do SEO and having the creativity and resources to carry out a plan are two separate things. If you have the budget, hiring an outside SEO firm or an SEO expert in house would be a good investment.

Many of the promotion methods listed below will help you obtain backlinks which will complement your SEO efforts, so it is important to consider SEO first so that you can best leverage the impact of other promotion methods.

2. Run PPC Campaigns
Running a Pay Per Click Campaign is probably the quickest way a business can start profiting from their online presence. One great thing about PPC campaigns is that you can know exactly how much profit you are making on each keyword and you can test different ad copy and get quick results. For a good introduction to Adwords, Google PPC network, check out Perry Marshall’s free course 5 Days to Success with Google AdWords.

PPC click campaigns can also complement your SEO efforts. As you find out what keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are converting the best you can adjust your SEO efforts to put a greater priority on the things that are converting the best in your PPC campaigns.

3. Start a blog
There are many benefits to blogging. It helps build a community around your business, helps with your SEO efforts (it creates more content and attracts backlinks), it can act as a “maven trap” (discussed in The Tipping Point), it empowers customers to easily spread the word about your products and business, and it can help you network with others in your industry.

4. Pay Bloggers to Review your website and/or products
Within the past six months or so many websites have launched which will help you find bloggers to write reviews. The four that I am aware of are ReviewMe, PayPerPost, Blogitive, and LoudLaunch. ReviewMe seems to be the best if you want to reach a large audience because the bloggers there tend to have a larger readership, but you will also pay a lot more per review than the other blogger review sites. PayPerPost could be a good option to increase your backlinks, but don’t expect as much traffic initially as you would from a ReviewMe Review. I have no experience with Blogitive and LoudLauch but I will be writing about them when I do.

I hope these tips help you get the most from your presence online. Feel free to contact me if you have specific questions, and check back often for more advice and tips in the future.

Gareth Davies at GSINC Ltd has put together a good series of SEO Basics videos.

They are very well done and I would recommend them to anyone starting out in SEO. It’s nice to just sit back and watch a video sometimes that you can really get some useful knowledge from. The six videos are free to view and are created in short 60 second - 5 minute tutorials. Well done GSINC.