Friday, 28 December 2012

Tips for a Better Online Marketing Campaign


The Internet user base is huge and it has become an effective medium of communication. Just like conventional platforms (TV and newspaper), the Internet has been used for advertising. Online marketing is relatively new and there are no rule books. A lot of businesses have resorted to online marketing, not because it is economical, but it has proved successful.

You will need to make a plan if you want to have a successful online marketing campaign. Here are some tips that will help you.

Figuring out the long term goals

Like any marketing campaign, online marketing requires you to plan well in advance and have your expectations sorted out. Although online marketing is a lot more economical than other marketing methods, there are a lot of aspects that can go wrong. So, before you start out, schedule a plan and stick to it.

Analyze past data

If you’ve had a similar campaign in the past, it is a wise idea to analyze the data and pull out as much information as possible. If something had worked in the past, make a note of it and try using it in your marketing campaign. Similarly, if you’d gone wrong somewhere, don’t use the same strategy again. After all, you can’t expect different results if you are repeating the mistakes.

Fix a budget

Although online marketing is relatively economical, it is wise to fix a budget and stick to it. There are a lot of companies that offer marketing services and don’t be tempted to subscribe before you figure out if you can afford it. Having a budget also helps you plan better and succeed.

Use all the platforms available

Email marketing and ad banners on websites aren’t the only form of online marketing. With the popularity of social media platforms, a lot of businesses have chosen it as an advertising medium. Before you promote your product or service, you need to establish a credible presence. So, exploring the possibilities of using different platforms is an essential part of online marketing.

Put social media tools to best use

Social media is here to stay and there are a lot of ways to use them. Each platform is designed for a different purpose and demographics of the user base will vary. There are loads of analysis tools that help you get statistical data and to have a successful internet marketing campaign, you need to build strategies based on this. For example, to reach out to the maximum number of audiences, you need to post when the traffic peaks and the only way to figure it out is by using analysis tools.

Get to know your customers

This is a very important aspect of internet marketing. By knowing what your customers like, you’d be able to reach out on a personal level and connect with them. Similarly, if you are using a particular platform, be a part of it and blend in. By being a part of the crowd, you can avoid the chances of being perceived as a newbie.

Create original content

When you are sending out emails or promotional stuff, don’t plagiarize. If the person who is reading figures out that you are sending content that is not yours, there are chances of scarring your reputation. Similarly, avoid spamming. Everyone hates spam and there are chances that people might just turn a blind eye or even worse, report you for spamming.

These are some tips that will help you succeed in an online marketing campaign. Then again, you need to realize that there are no hard and fast rules. A strategy that might work for you might not work for another business and it is up to you to figure it out.

George Webber is a freelance writer who writes about the latest in Social Media, Internet Marketing, Technology, Etc. Currently writing for www.1800cabletv.com - your gateway to the best cable companies across the nation. click here

Social media optimization tips to make your website seen in the search engine results


Lately, as an increasingly large number of consumers are logging onto the websites like Facebook or Twitter, it has become too vital to embrace the social media by a business firm in order to be seen online. Although there are too many companies that are aware of the importance of the social media, very few are actually aware of the ways in which they can use the social media tools in the proper way. The tips that are mentioned below will not only make you aware of how to use the social mediaeffectively, but will also provide you with new ideas of social media marketing. This will also optimize the effectiveness of the social features of the website. By bringing social media to your website, you can also offer your visitors with more ways to share your content. Here are some tips that you should follow in order to socialize your website and make it seen in the web.

Twitterize your business website: Twitter is one of the most common and popular social networking website and if you can add a Twitter stream to your website as this will be a great way of showing your visitors that your website is public. Even if you didn’t add any new content to your website, a Twitter feed can keep your webpage afresh. You should incorporate the actual Twitter stream by putting a Twitter button on which the visitors can click for the major reason apart from the fact that it brings new content to your website.

Let the visitors connect you through Facebook: You can also set up your website with Facebook Connect as this is another way of increasing the engagement of the visitors. When the visitors connect through Facebook, they can effortlessly share content, see which friends have visited your home page and also get notifications when your friends leave comments. You can thus remain connected with your visitors through Facebook and know what they like and dislike about your website.

Promote shareable content to boost sharing options: One of the best ways to promote your website to encourage your website to promote the sharing options so that your content can be shared through Twitter, Digg and Facebook. You should update your website regularly so that the visitors always get something new to check out in your website. Simply give them the ‘share’ option so that they might be able to share what they like and support. Post content that is certainly share-worthy so that you may get more and more visitors to share the content that you post.

Therefore, when you’re wondering about the ways in which you can make your website social media optimized, take into account the above mentioned points. If you still haven’t embraced the social media, it’s high time you do so and set profits rolling for your online business website. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg are some of the most popular websites that you might use.

Monday, 24 December 2012

SEO Mobile optimization techniques for better search result


mobile seo techniques

Step #1: Understand Google’s mobile optimization preferences

As a website owner, you have several choices when launching a mobile version of your site. You can use a responsive site design that automatically detects when users are accessing your pages using mobile devices, you can control your site’s display using separate HTML and CSS files or you can create an entirely separate mobile website on an “m.yourwebsite.com” domain.
Here’s how Google feels about each of these options:
“Google supports smartphone-optimized sites in three configurations:
  1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.
  2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
  3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.”
As a rule, the search engine supports all of these different options, though given how competitive the mobile world is becoming, most companies will benefit from working with Google’s recommended configuration.

Step #2: Create a responsive design

Given Google’s recommendations, it’s clear that the best path for webmasters who are interested in pursuing mobile optimization is to create a responsive website design that serves up the same information using separate CSS files that are triggered by mobile browsers.
In nearly all circumstances, there are two primary ways to do this:
  • Purchase a website design theme with responsive options built in, or
  • Coordinate with a web developer to have a custom responsive version of your existing website built.
The approach that’s right for you will depend on the size and complexity of your existing website, as well as your mobile marketing budget. Working with web developers or design agencies to have your current design coded into a responsive format will obviously be much more expensive to complete than purchasing a standard template, though this expense may be worthwhile if you’ve invested heavily in your corporate branding.

Step #3: Understand mobile design limitations

Whichever route you take, there are a few specific mobile design cautions that you’ll want to keep in mind throughout the design process:

Mobile users hate scrolling. 

Scrolling can be challenging on mobile devices, which is why most users want to be able to log on and find the information they need without having to adjust their screens. If the content of your pages is too long to display correctly, consider breaking up chunks of text onto separate pages.

Feature timely information prominently. 

If you’re a pizza parlor, it’s much more likely that mobile users are searching for your hours and address, not your company’s history. Carefully consider which pieces of information should be featured on your mobile homepage to avoid forcing your users to go hunting for the details they need.

Render images on a percentage basis, not an absolute pixel basis. 

Rendering images according to a fixed number of pixels can disrupt mobile displays. To prevent images from breaking your responsive website design or otherwise mucking up your display, size them using percentages instead.

Allow mobile users to access your desktop site. 

Although most mobile users are looking for quick pieces of information about your company, other readers may be looking to kill a significant amount of time on your site. To give these viewers access to your full site’s content, give them the option of switching from your mobile display to your desktop website.

Place mobile calls-to-action carefully. 

Finally, if you’re going to include calls-to-action on any part of your mobile website, be sure that they’re obvious to device-based viewers. Instead of the standard bottom-right placement, consider putting these buttons and statements in the upper left-hand corner of your mobile website version.

Step #4: Cater to mobile SEO needs

For the most part, mobile SEO doesn’t differ significantly from standard desktop SEO. You’ll still want to ensure that all of the pages on your website have the proper title, meta description, and headline tags in order to rank well in the mobile search results, and you’ll still want to court backlinks to your site’s pages, as the URLs of your mobile site will be the same as those on your desktop website (just rendered differently according to responsive design principles).
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Sunday, 23 December 2012

Five Tips on How to Improve Internal Linking to Boost SEO


When thinking about improving a website’s search engine optimization, people so often think about linking out, so that they can build their website’s reputation. However, internal linking is extremely important and is a great way to improve your search engine optimization as well.

Whenever you add new content to your website, whether it’s in the form of a blog post or a new page, it’s important to promote that content within your website, so that people know additions have been made.

Here are five tips, so that you can better your website’s internal linking, and improve your search engine optimization as a result.

Think About Your Keywords

When you start thinking about your keywords, it’s important to use alternate keywords for the anchor text. If you use internal links from webpages that have a higher linking capability, then you can improve the ratings of the new pages, since your webpages are helping each other out. Keep in mind though, the more competitive the keyword, the harder this will be. It’s not impossible though, you just need to spend some more time thinking about your keywords.

Use Your Blog Wisely

If you don’t blog – you should. It can do wonders for your search engine optimization and it is the perfect place to take advantage of internal linking. Since you can really blog about anything you like, it’s the ideal section of your website to include links to your other pages, where appropriate of course. Make sure you use relevant keywords though.

Use a Footer

Do not waste the valuable section at the bottom of your website. Add a footer. Using the footer, you can draw people’s attention to individual pages of your choosing and create links to all of them. The footer is stable along every single page, so if a visitor doesn’t click on it from the homepage, they may click on one of the pages in the footer when they’re finished reading the content on your “About Us” page.

Don’t Let Visitors Get Lost

Navigation is very important for good internal linking. Link your pages so that people can navigate between pages easily. If you write a blog post about one of your products, make sure that you link to that specific product page within your website, so that people can easily find what they’re looking for. If they have a pleasurable experience with your website, you may be able to turn them into a long-term customer.

Stay On Top of Internal Linking

Whatever internal linking methods you employ to improve your website’s search engine optimization, make sure you stay on top of it. Test your website, research your competitors and determine what is and is not working. If something isn’t working, change it… there’s no time to waste when trying to improve your website’s search engine optimization. 

Author Bio:


BelugaLabs is a New York City web design company. We are a group of experienced designers, programmers and marketing professionals, with a proven track record and a diverse portfolio.

Friday, 21 December 2012

SEO and Web Hosting: How Are They Related


If your web host is a poor one then it is possible that it will affect the SEO value of your website. If your website is due to draw a lot of traffic then a poor host may also limit the SEO potential of your website. Mostly all SEO matters revolving around hosting are negative, since there are no real web hosting qualities that will help you to raise your websites SEO. But, first things first, what is web hosting and SEO?

SEO
This stands for Search Engines Optimization. It revolves around how your website is read and subsequently indexed by the search engines. This notion is often described as a value, where a website that is likely to be ranked higher in a search engines results pages is described as having a higher SEO value. A website may also be called SEO friendly, which means it is correctly set up so that it ranks higher in the search engines results pages.

Web hosting
This is where you purchase some server space from another company. The server is always online and available for anyone on the Internet to see. This means that you can put information into the space on the server (such as an HTML page) and other people using the Internet will be able to see it.

Restricted bandwidth
Your host may only offer you a certain amount of bandwidth. This is okay if you have small numbers of traffic, but if your website becomes heavily attended it is going to mean your viewers are going to be staring at a blank screen. If this happens too often, the search engines will lower your websites ranking and push you further down their search engine results pages.

Security
If your host does not run a secure server then it may come under attack from hackers, which is going to mean multiple system crashes, and you may even lose the information on your website. This means that your website is going to be offline for long periods of time, which is going to negatively affect your websites SEO value.

Viruses
It is up to your host to make sure that the server you are using is not infected with viruses (unless you are responsible for maintaining the server). If they do not do a good job of this then you will again be at the mercy of system crashes, which will lower your websites ranking on the search engine results.

Updates
Again, unless it is up to you to update the server, the host is supposed to do it regularly. If your host does not update on a regular basis then the server will be vulnerable to hackers and will have compatibility issues with current software. Both of these situations are going to negatively affect your websites SEO value.

Page completion time
Google judges some of your SEO value on how long it takes your website to finish loading. A lot of this responsibility falls on you and how you design your website, but your host may also add a drag factor, which will slow your progress onto the first page of the Google search results. If the host only provides a slow bandwidth then your page completion time is going to be slow. If the server is rarely defragmented and poorly updated then it will run slowly and cause problems. If the server is poorly maintained and poorly optimized it will slow down your page complete times.

The Up-Time
This should not be a problem unless your host is a really bad one. Your website is supposed to be online at least 98% of the time. If your host is not running your website for at least 98% of the time then you are going to suffer the consequences when the search engines notice. As you can imagine the longer and more often you are offline, the harsher the SEO punishment. Sadly, there is little you can do about this besides changing hosts (which many would recommend that you do).

The reaction of others
Do not forget that if you experience any of these problems it may seem temporary, but the people who link to you may notice your problems and break their links to you, which is going to negatively affect your websites SEO value.

Author bio: Korah Morrison, writer on essay writing servicesthat helps students to write essays of any complexity. She writes about SEO blogging, social media and internet marketing and other tips.

Website’s Structure which can Affects its SEO


How Your Website’s Structure Affects its SEO
When it comes to SEO training, most of the resources out there are quick to extol the benefits of both on-site optimization (typically, including your target keywords in key areas across your website) and off-site SEO (as in the case of external link building activities).
However, many of these introductory guides gloss over a subject that’s just as important to your website’s natural search success—its underlying structure. In fact, there are a number of different ways your website’s structure can influence its overall SEO authority, so be sure to brush up on the following site structure elements to make your website is as search-friendly as possible.

Element #1: Site Navigation

At first glance, website navigation might seem like one of those things that happens organically. That is, you don’t plan out where you’ll place every page on your website; categories and hierarchies simply start to form on their own as the size and breadth of your website grows.
When it comes to SEO, though, this is a huge mistake! The structure of your website plays a tremendous role in its overall SEO authority, and the specific navigation elements you put into place deserve plenty of attention in this process.
Your first site navigation consideration should be to avoid using navigation types that make it difficult for the search engines to crawl through your pages. Particularly, steer clear of navigation structures that are built entirely in Flash or JavaScript. While these formats might look flashy to your visitors, they’re nearly impossible for the search engine spiders to parse and crawl.
Instead, stick with navigation schemes based in XHTML and CSS (or, if you must, images that use appropriate keywords in their ALT tags). These navigation structures are more easily read by the search engine spiders, making it more likely that your pages will be crawled, indexed, and displayed in the SERPs, where appropriate.
But beyond the initial setup of your website’s navigation structure, you’ll also want to pay attention to your website’s depth.
When it comes to websites, “depth” refers to the number of clicks needed to reach any page on your site from your home page. From an SEO perspective, a shallow website (that is, one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach every page) is far more preferable than a deep website (which requires lengthy strings of clicks to see every page on your site).
As an added bonus, don’t forget that shallow navigation structures improve your website’s usability, making it far less likely that visitors will give up trying to find the content they were looking for in your buried pages. This decreases your website’s bounce rate and may improve your overall average time on site, both of which are factors that are suspected to play a further role in SEO rankings.

Element #2: Internal Linking

Of course, if your website is large, controlling the depth of your website through your site’s navigation structure alone isn’t entirely feasible. If you have 100 total pages, for example, you’d need more than 30 separate categories to make all of your pages accessible within three clicks using navigation structures alone, which would almost certainly bog down your site’s appearance and functionality.
So, while structuring your navigation paths correctly from the start can help to improve your website’s SEO performance, you can also decrease your site’s depth through the use of internal linking.
In the world of SEO, there are two types of backlinks:
  • External backlinks, which are links that point to your website from an entirely separate site, and
  • Internal backlinks, which consist of connections between individual pages within your website.
Creating internal links between the pages on your website offers a number of different SEO advantages:
  • As mentioned above, internal links decrease the number of clicks required to access each page on your website, allowing the search engines to use their crawl budgets more effectively.
  • Internal links offer opportunities to use keyword-rich anchor texts throughout your pages (though you should be careful to only create internal links to relevant, useful pages, instead of using this as an opportunity to create keyword-stuffed links).
  • Internal links improve the user experience on your website by providing readers with additional materials that may pique their interests. As a result, both average time on site and average pages per visit go up, leading to potential SEO and conversion rate benefits.
Fortunately, unlike plotting out your website’s entire navigation structure, getting started with an internal linking plan is easy. Whenever you add a new page, article, or blog post to your website, take a second to see if the readers who are accessing this new content might be interested in other topics you’ve covered elsewhere on your site.
If you do find opportunities to recommend related pieces, create internal links within your new content that point to these other website pages.
Again, keep in mind that, though there is some benefit to creating internal links that utilize keyword-optimized anchor text, this shouldn’t be your primary pursuit. Keep the focus on serving up interesting content to your readers, and don’t be afraid to skip internal linking on new content pieces altogether if you’d have to stretch to make other articles seem relevant.

Element #3: URL Structure

One final website structure element to consider is how your individual page URLs are built. As you might expect, there’s a potential SEO benefit to be had from integrating your company’s target keywords into this vital navigation area.
The specific steps you’ll need to take to set up an SEO-friendly URL structure depend on whether your site runs on HTML or a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Magento.

HTML websites

If you run an HTML-oriented website, your page URLs will be built according to the file names of every new HTML file you create and upload to your site.
For example, if you use a desktop website editing program like Dreamweaver to create a new article and save your file as “my-new-article.html,” the full URL of your article once uploaded to the root domain of your website will be “http://www.mydomain.com/my-new-article.html.”
Now, in this example, odds are you aren’t trying to get your website ranked for the keyword phrase “my new article.” So, instead of using generic file names, take the time to label each file with a descriptive name that includes your target keyword.
Be sure to separate multiple words with dashes, rather than underscores, as the search engine spiders may interpret words separated by underscores as a single word (as in, the file name “apple_pie” might be read as “applepie” to the search engines in some cases).

CMS websites

Typically, most CMS websites make it easy to create search-optimized page URLs, though you may need to tweak a few settings to get the greatest SEO benefit possible.
For example, in the case of WordPress, you’ll need to first navigate to the “Permalinks” section of the “Settings” area within your dashboard and select a link structure option that includes your post title within the full URL assigned to each post. If you don’t take this action, your URLs will—by default—include the numbers and codes created for each new post by WordPress’s standard settings.
According to the default WordPress settings, a new post URL structure could look like this:
By selecting the “Post name” option within the “Permalinks” panel, this URL would be transformed to:
This second variation is both more appealing to readers (leading to higher rates of engagement on your website) and confers the SEO advantage of being able to include your target keywords in your URLs.
If you’re using a CMS other than WordPress, consult the Help section of your chosen platform for complete instructions on how to set up SEO-friendly URLs on your website.
Even if you’ve already built your website without these elements in mind, it’s still very possible to go back and make the changes needed to ensure that your website qualifies for full consideration by the search engines and their automated spider programs.
Try correcting one element, or even one element on one single page, at a time. With consistent effort, you’ll see substantial SEO benefits as the result of your site structure changes.
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