Five reasons to invert in article marketing for your web site. Article marketing incorporates content material which is key-word rich, popular and simple to locate to pull traffic and visitors into the internet page. There are quite a few benefits associated with using online marketing from the use of article marketing, 5 of which are summarized in more detail in this article.

1. By using article marketing you are providing several other methods for prospective customers as well as other visitors to get a hold of your blog because you are establishing supplementary links to your blog found on highly trafficked internet websites. The more options you can find for impending website visitors to choose you, the more likely you are to be located.
2. By means of article marketing, you will be creating inbound links to your blog. This type of back links will be oneway links, which makes them some of the best kind of linking for search engines like google and yahoo to follow. When your search engine rank matters to you, then generating each of these inbound links is the central portion of marketing your website, and article marketing can allow your business to achieve this in no time.
3. Article marketing permits you to build an identity for yourself. A lot of article submission websites feature biography segments where you can impart information regarding your company as well as your exact topic. By composing helpful articles that people actually want to read, you will be formulating a reputation for yourself as an authority across whatever subject matter you may be authoring.
4. Article marketing is free, that is definitely one of the better added advantages. You are getting your content on the market, spreading your message concerning your website to the entire world, and yes it does not cost you any money. As a result of putting your content on the web, you are building effectively pertaining to visitor potential, and publishing blog posts to article directory sites should not cost you anything at all but some of your energy when putting your articles together to submit.
5. Article marketing permits you to make excellent use of key words, since you are talking about an issue which applies to your website. After you generate backlinks and see your name out there in blog posts that are abundant with appropriate key words, it will boost the Website positioning features of your website, and allow you to build a robust connection among the information that you are providing inside the article, along with the attributes of your online site. Buyers usually have one of these eureka instances when they will understand they could visit your web site for much more of the exact same excellent information, and this is an exceptional way for you to draw in absolutely new visitors coming from a highly revered supplier for information.

There are so many other benefits of website marketing through article marketing, however these seriously should jump start your thought processes when it comes to crafting posts to redirect new website visitors to your website. For anyone who is focused on internet marketing, penning articles for syndication on the subject of article marketing is actually an exciting technique for you to go.

If you are not using your Google Analytics data regularly to review how well your website is performing then you are not making use of some of the most powerful information available to you. Information that could help you improve your website and learn more about your visitors. There may still be some small businesses that are not using their Google Analytics data, but if you exist out there then the best advice you can take is to start using them right away. If you want to be able to optimise your website better, understand your visitors better and convert more visitors into paying customers then Analytics data are one of your most effective weapons. One of the key data elements you should be reviewing is the Bounce Rate. There has been much discussion since the Google Panda update about whether or not Bounce Rate is a ranking signal and, if not, whether it should be. But regardless of how Google perceives Bounce Rate in terms of search engine optimisation, as a small business owner you need to take it seriously. Bounce Rate together with the Time Spent on Page, is the indicator that shows you whether visitors find what they are looking for on your website. It is shown as a percentage of visitors who looked no further through your website than the landing page on which they arrived. So if you get 500 visitors a day and your bounce rate is 60% then you are only capturing the attention of 200 of those visitors. Many small businesses like to know what a realistic bounce rate is, but it varies hugely both by market sector and by the keywords used to drive traffic to a site. General keywords will always result in a higher bounce rate than highly targeted 3-4 word keywords so it is very difficult to generalise but as a very rough guide you should aim for no more than 50% – 60%. Google’s own definition of Bounce Rate is: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.” It’s fairly obvious that if visitors are not staying long on your site or only visiting one page then you either aren’t offering them what they want or they can’t find it easily. Either way there is room for improvement. This is where a small business search engine optimisation campaign starts to get entwined with the marketing and it can be hard to see where SEO ends and marketing begins. (This, of course, is why we see the term Search Engine Marketing more and more). The focus should be on creating a site where a visitor will want to stay for a while and browse and then search further within the site. This comes back to the value of good content and Google’s focus on a good user-experience; this is the best way to keep people on your site, which will keep Google happy but also be good for your business. What this means in practise is that every page on a site should ideally be a high-quality page with good content. This has the added benefit of ensuring that all of your internal links point to high-quality pages which prevents good-quality pages with internal links to low-quality pages from losing some of their value as a result. But back to that valuable Analytics data – Bounce Rate is shown as an average for the whole site but also as a percentage by keyword for each web page. By reviewing all of these data you can pinpoint very high bounce rates that are dragging down the site average and also very low rates, which indicate a high level of customer satisfaction. But there is more in Google Analytics than just Bounce Rate, Time Spent on Site and the Number of Pages Visited. It can also be used to spot long-tail keywords that are targeting visitors you didn’t know you had. Keywords can be viewed by individual pages in order of popularity. If visitors are arriving at a low-quality page via a particular keyword then there is the opportunity to change that page to be more appealing to that visitor. For example, if a high percentage of visitors are landing on general information pages through long-tail keywords but you want them to buy a product, or at the very least register so you have their contact details, then add links to the information pages that will take the visitor to the registration page or product pages. Show them your site has more than just information. You can also view the on-page click patterns of your visitors. This is a great way to visually show what links are most popular and can help in redesigning the layout of a page for better effect in terms of internal link building. So if you are involved in a small business SEO campaign take a good look at your Google Analytics on a regular basis and use these data to improve your search engine optimisation efforts. If you don’t, you are wasting a great opportunity.

Businesses are always interested in what their competition is up to, usually out of professional curiosity. But how can competitor research and analysis help your SEO efforts and is it necessary for a successful SEO campaign?   Researching your competition, whether online or not, is a vital part of any growing business. It will help a business to grow by providing better products or services than other companies. It will reveal gaps in the competitors’ offerings that you can take advantage of and, hopefully, encourage you to come up with original ideas of your own.   But when it comes to the online marketplace the main focus of many small businesses is how to get high up in the search engine rankings. It is often only when they are high in the rankings and their sales are not as high as expected that they start to think in more traditional ways about improving their products and services and their marketing strategy. Initially a high ranking is the Holy Grail, which many small businesses believe will be the answer to their prayers.   But try not to become so focussed on SEO that you lose sight of the marketing basics. Competitor analysis is the ideal opportunity to focus on both SEO and Marketing strategies at the same time, which can lead you to high search engine rankings and high volumes of sales. That really is the Holy Grail. You should already have completed a thorough keyword research and analysis process and have a list of defined keywords to target. Some businesses use competitor analysis as part of their keyword research but this can often limit free-thinking and the development of new ideas so try and do independent keyword research first.   The first step in competitor analysis is to look at where your competitors use their keywords in their web page titles. Simply perform a search on each of your keywords in the most popular search engines. Which search engines you use is very much dependent on which country you are based in and which country/countries your target audience resides in. Take a look at the titles that appear in the search results on the first 2 pages. Your aim may be to achieve page 1 but that is almost certainly the aim of those businesses on page 2, so don’t overlook what they are doing – they have probably been doing it for longer and may already have found a chink in the armour of the Top Ten so you may learn something from them.   Now put yourself in the shoes of a buyer and write down which titles really grab your attention and which page titles seem to offer a benefit to the potential customer. A classic marketing technique is to promote the benefit of buying your product and this is just as important online as in the bricks-and-mortar retail world. For example, would you be more tempted by “Book a Cheap Exotic Holiday” or “Luxury Tailor-Made Holidays to Exotic Destinations”? Of course, the decision would almost certainly depend on your budget so ensure you know your customer.   Now look at whether the page titles are relevant to the search phrase. Sophisticated online browsers are already aware of ploys by certain companies that throw up pages with automatically filled titles that take you to irrelevant pages. For example, if you search for “Car Hire in Madrid” you may get results showing titles like “Best Car Hire in Spain – Cheapest Rates” but the website to which you are directed does not actually have a car hire office in Madrid. Never assume your potential customers will be foolish enough to fall for these ploys – they are more likely to get annoyed.   Think about good, alternative and eye-catching titles that actually promote what you have to offer. Don’t forget to log all your title ideas in a spreadsheet along with the good page titles and good websites you come across from your competitors. These are the businesses you wish to emulate.   If you offer a number of different products or services, competitor analysis can become very confusing. So take one webpage, with maybe 3 keywords (1 main and 2 secondary) and follow the analysis process through just for that manageable amount of information first. This way you can become more familiar with the process and once you are confident of the best way to research and analyse the competition, it will be much quicker and easier to complete the process for your other pages and keywords.   Now look at all the good competition – those genuinely offering what the customer is searching for – and study their home or landing pages – the visual aspect and the underlying source code. This should give you enough information to get started on improving your webpage for higher search engine rankings.   First concentrate on creating a great Page Title (less than 70 chars long) that includes your main keyword and 1 or 2 secondary keywords, where possible, using the competitions’ page titles as a guide. But remember, don’t blindly copy your competitors – they do not have exclusive access to good ideas. Limit your keywords to 3 per page to keep SEO simple and manageable. This title is an extremely important factor in the success of your SEO strategy.   Now use the same keywords and competitor research to create a great Description (for the META DESC tag), which is usually used by search engines to display underneath the Title. The META DESC tag does not contribute much, if anything, to your search engine ranking position but it is a key factor in whether a visitor will click on your website. Use it to add detail that cannot be shown in the title but don’t repeat the title words in the first part of the description unless as a deliberate aim to reinforce your message. Limit your descriptions to 150-160 chars long otherwise it will be truncated by the search engines. And when you extend your competitor analysis to other products and services, with other keywords, on other pages an important SEO factor is that each Description is unique.   Always ensure that all of the information gleaned from your competitor analysis is documented in a spreadsheet. It is impossible to effectively store all that information in your head or on scraps of paper. And when your business and product offerings grow it will be a useful document to refer back to.    

The load speed of a website is now one of the many factors that influence how the search engines view the quality of the website and consequently how well the site ranks.  That means that fast loading websites have an advantage in the search engine positions over similar websites that are slower.   Websites with large images, lots of smaller images or flash graphics could be losing out to similar sites with smaller or fewer images in the search engine rankings now that the load speed of a website is a factor used to determine at which position a website appears. But it is not only images that slow down a website – there are also many scripts that also affect site speed, paradoxically, Google’s own Analytics script, which has become a vital tool for most website owners and also Google’s Adsense code. Although site speed is one of 200 factors affecting the perceived quality of a website, and is currently not a major factor, every known factor should still be optimised for where possible. This obviously doesn’t mean that you can’t use images but it does mean that every image should be reviewed to ensure it is the lowest resolution possible and that the size of the image file is the size of the image being displayed to the user. There are many sites out there that resize images as they are displayed on the site using the HTML “width” and “height” attributes. Eliminating this practise alone could have a considerable effect for sites with a substantial number of images per page. It is important to recognise that each new factor introduced by the major search engines is designed to promote high-quality sites in preference to low-quality sites. Provided you concentrate on a high-quality site with great, new content that is well-optimised a website should not be adversely affected by any current or new factors used to determine site quality. Typically it is spam websites, that come and go very quickly, that will not be optimised well and will tend to load more slowly and if these are badly affected by SEO factors then that can only help the cause of the high-quality sites. For genuine websites, Google is, in fact, doing you a favour by forcing you to optimise for site speed because a faster loading website could potentially have a lower bounce rate and an increased conversion rate as fewer visitors lose patience and look elsewhere. Website visitors are notoriously impatient and said to lose interest if they have to wait more than 5 seconds for a page to load. So, irrespective of what the search engines are encouraging us to do to our websites, the page speed factor should be one foremost in our minds if we want to capture and keep the attention of our visitors. There are, of course, other factors that can contribute to slowing down your website such as too many CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and JS (JavaScript) files. Keep the number of these files to a minimum for a website – many websites can manage perfectly well with a single CSS and JS file. The reason they slow down a website is because each time one of these external files is required by the source code, it has to be retrieved from the server, which adds to the time taken to display the page to the visitor. The size of the file also affects page loading time so ensure there is no excessive blank space or comments in the files themselves. Blank lines and space, and excessive comments will unnecessarily increase the file size and hence the load speed. It is possible to test the page load time of all of your website’s pages, as well as those of your competitors for comparison, using one of the free tools available online. Just remember that free tools are not always entirely accurate so use them only as a guide and for comparing your performance with your competitors. Probably the best tool to use is the web-based Page Speed Online (part of an open-source project started at Google) which enables page analysis in any browser without the need to download a browser extension. It highlights potential speed-related problems and makes suggestions on how to improve load time. Page Speed is also used in tools such as Webpagetest.org and Show Slow. So don’t lose out to your competition by having a slow loading website – it is both simple and free to improve your Site Speed and keep visitors engaged with your website. Site Speed is only one aspect of search engine optimisation but it focuses purely on the user-experience so that has to be a good thing.    

It’s incredible how technology has grown. Fifty or sixty years ago, the thought of all – or at least a real good chunk – of the people on the planet connected to each other via an invisible web of information would have sounded like something straight out of a pulp-fiction novel, or a bad comic book. The thought that we would walk around with portable telephones that feed us data was an idea reserved for television serials like Star Trek. Nowadays, however, we wouldn’t blink an eye at the concept of such an invisible web – we call it the internet. And that data device that keeps us in constant contact? We call them cell phones, and they’re no longer reserved for Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock; many, many people own one. If this goes to show anything, it’s that it’s really qute hard to imagine what the future will bring, especially in any field related to technology or science. However, while it is next to impossible to make long term future predictions, it is sometimes possible to make short-term predictions based on current knowledge.

A successful SEO campaign is vital to the success of every small online business. Without it your website will not receive many visitors and if people aren’t visiting your website then they are not buying your product or service. But is there more to online success than just SEO? It is unlikely that there is a single small business out there striving for online success which is not taking SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) seriously; and with very good reason. It is a business’s SEO strategy that will determine how quickly their website achieves a high ranking in the search engines, how well it maintains it’s ranking and ultimately how many visitors they will get to their website. Search Engine Optimisation, in it’s simplest sense, is the process whereby a website has its pages fine-tuned to appeal to the search engines for a certain set of keywords or search terms, and builds up a good online reputation by gaining links to the site from other reputable and related websites. Optimising the pages of the website is often referred to as on-site SEO and involves creating Titles, Descriptions, Headings, Bold Text, Alternative Text for Images and, of course, the main textual content to include primary and secondary keywords. The keywords must constitute a proportion (or density) that the search engines consider appropriate but not so much that the site will be penalised for over-use of the keywords (sometimes referred to as keyword-stuffing). The keyword density in the various elements of a webpage is not a pre-defined percentage because rankings are always determined in relation to the competition. But a good SEO consultant will be able to advise on the appropriate keyword density for a particular set of targeted keywords. The ultimate goal of off-site SEO is to build a good online reputation by creating links to the website. Many people still believe this is just about creating as many links as possible. But the search engines have become more sophisticated and SEO has followed suit. Link building is now focussed on relevance, the page rank of the site from which the link has come, the type of link and the text associated with the link (anchor text).  So, yes, you need a substantial number of links but the quality of each link is more important than overall quantity. But if your SEO campaign is a success and your small business achieves a page 1 ranking, does that guarantee the success of your company? Unfortunately there is much more to online business success that just SEO. To achieve online success, there are a number of other factors that have to be treated just as seriously as SEO. Social Media Create a business Facebook page, get active in Twitter, create a blog (and actually post to it regularly), invite people to bookmark you site from social bookmarking sites like Delicious. Ask people to bookmark your blog from Reddit and StumbleUpon. If you can’t manage your online social life and also the business then employ a ghost-blogger or social media marketer. Website Design Ask someone independent of the business to review your website for it’s look-and-feel, usability and functionality. Does the home page and the other main landing pages have a “call-to-action” above the fold (i.e the user doesn’t have to scroll down to see it). A call-to-action can be something as simple as a button inviting the user to “View Special Offers Here”. Traffic Analysis Traffic Analysis is vital for all websites but particularly so if a site is getting plenty of visitors but has a low conversion rate. Conversion rates can vary quite dramatically by market sector but you should have an idea of a typical percentage for your type of business. Analyse your traffic data to see which keywords are bringing visitors to your site. There may be a high percentage from long-tail keywords you were unaware of that indicate a visitor who may only, for example, be looking for information or advice. These visitors may push up the visitor numbers but they are not the right type of visitors for converting into paying customers and can suggest misleading figures for both vistor numbers and conversion rate. Email Marketing Don’t neglect this highly effective method of reaching potential new customers and retaining existing customers. Produce a regular newsletter or mailshot every week or every month, with useful information, special offers, news etc. But don’t make the mistake of trying to sell something to the customer with each email – their purpose is to ensure that when the customer is ready to buy they will visit your website. Quality Data Capture Of course an email marketing campaign is only as good as the list of potential or existing customers to which it is sent. Capturing the details of existing customers is easy as they are usually required to provide their details to make a purchase. But the best way to obtain visitor details from people who are not yet ready to become customers is to offer something of value for free. Typically this would be something that could be downloaded in the form of an e-guide or e-book. For example, a holiday company might offer free tourist guides. Remember to make it clear that by signing up for the free item they will be added to your email list and ensure that every mailing gives them the opportunity to unsubscribe from your list. So search engine optimisation is vital for all small businesses but it is also important to see SEO in the context of a wider marketing approach. There are many other techniques that will complement and enhance your link building and other SEO efforts.

If you know anything about search engine optimisation you will know that the critical first step to a successful SEO campaign is getting your keywords right. And there is plenty of advice available about tools that can help you to do this, but keyword research and analysis cannot just be performed by a software tool. The results of any keyword suggestion tool are only as good as the data input into them. If you input flawed or incomplete data then the results will not be accurate or complete. To then base a whole SEO campaign on these keywords could, at best, mean missing out on opportunities, or, at worst, lead to the SEO campaign failing and the business failing. So it is imperative to incorporate a human element into the research and analysis. In fact, go back to pre-internet days and think about what you would need to know to get your advertising right. And that is simply to know your target market; to know your customer. Keyword research for internet based businesses is not only about what people have already searched for but understanding your customers’ perspective and anticipating their needs. True business success can come from predicting what customers will enter as a search term before they do so. But you can only do this if you know your customer well. This may be an easy matter for an existing bricks-and-mortar business now reaching out to grow their internet-based business, but many small businesses starting up on the internet are completely new businesses with no history of previous customer traits to call on for guidance. So how do you get to know a customer that you don’t yet have? Well, spend some time, which might be hours, days or even weeks, discovering all you can about them. The internet is the ideal place for gleaning this information:

• Social networks – get active on the social networks and find out what the current trends are related to your product or service. What are peoples likes, dislikes, interests and hobbies

• Forums – get active on forums related to your business and find out what problems potential customers have; offer advice and useful information to elicit more feedback and opinions on current, relevant issues. Take note of the words people are using, particularly new buzz words or technical jargon.

• Blogs – look at the blogs of experts in related fields and at the blogs of your competition. If any of the competitors do not have a blog then you have already found the chink in their armour.

Create a spreadsheet and start listing all the words and terms that you come across on the social networks, forums and blogs, including buzz words, abbreviations and technical jargon. And don’t forget alternative spellings of words or common mis-spellings. Now you have a broad list of potential keywords that can be used to elicit further suggestions and opinions in a brainstorming session. Remember that you are trying to put yourself in the mindset of a customer and you yourself might be too involved in your products or services to see them from a customer perspective. So make sure the brainstorming session involves a range of people from inside and outside the business. Persuade people to be involved by offering a free lunch or some other appropriate sweetener. Limit the session to two hours maximum to prevent boredom and a loss of focus creeping in. If you have a wide range of products and hence potential keywords that cannot be dealt with in that time, then have separate sessions on different days. No-one can cope with a whole day of brainstorming. Don’t be tempted to rush the internet research on social networks, blogs and forums or the brainstorming. These are the critical elements to your keyword research that will provide you with the right input to the keyword suggestion tools that you will be using. Without the right input, you will not obtain an effective list of keywords to target. And since all of your SEO efforts (time and money) will be based on these keywords, they are the foundation of your SEO campaign. When you are ready to move on to using keyword tools, don’t simply use the ones provided by the search engines. These tools are useful but only in a wider context where they are used in conjunction with other tools that collate information independent of the search engines. Take the advice of an SEO expert you trust and make sure you are not using tools that simply use Google’s data presented in a different format. One of the limitations of search engine data is that it is averaged over a 12 month period. If your business has a seasonal product, this sort of average data may not provide the information you need. Neither does it take account of trends going in and out of fashion. There are 3 key factors to remember when analysing Keyword Tool data that can have a huge impact on the success of your small business SEO campaign: Negative Keywords Negative keywords are individual words that are often combined with other words or phrases but which alter the person’s searching objective. If these keywords are not eliminated from your target list then you may find you have plenty of visitors but a low conversion rate. The classic example of this is shown in the difference between the search terms “sell used BMW” and “buy used BMW”. Slightly more subtly is the difference between “contemporary bedroom furniture” and “classic bedroom furniture”.  If you can do so, eliminate all keywords suggested by the tools that have a negative connotation for your business. Search Volumes All keyword tools will indicate a figure for the number of people who enter certain search phrases (often as a 12 month average) but this is not the same number of visitors you could expect even if your website was number 1 on Page 1 of a major search engine. These numbers should always be treated with caution and used more as a relative guide for comparing different keywords than for estimating actual numbers of visitors. Search Objective Never forget that around half of all people searching on the internet are looking for information. Many small business SEO campaigns are run on the assumption that every searcher is looking to buy something. So watch out for those keywords/phrases that indicate the objective is to find information. Label these types of search terms as “non-buyers” and eliminate them from your list. A simple example of the difference is between the search terms “Android Phone Facts” and “Android Phone Deals” – the second phrase suggests the searcher is in a buying frame of mind and comparing prices, whilst the first suggests they are simply researching the product. Of course, you can (and should) provide information about your products on your website but these visitors are not those you should be actively targeting in your SEO strategy. So Keyword Tools provide extremely useful and valuable information but they are only the final part of a wider view of keyword research and analysis as part of a search engine optimisation campaign, which includes a substantial human element.