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5 Quick Tips To Get Website Traffic Fast!

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Online, one of the most significant keys to success is getting website traffic.  The more visitors you have, the better your sales and profits.  Presumably you have a niche and you know your keywords, and regularly conduct keyword research to stay on top of what’s popular.  Based on those assumptions here are five quick and easy tips to get website traffic fast!

Tip #1  Make sure you’re actually tagging your keywords.  

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag them on your webpage?  Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your web pages.  Here’s a quick brief on tags.

There are a number of tag types including,

* Title tags.  Title tags are quite possibly the most important place to situate your keywords.  Here’s what they look like – <title>Primary keyword phrase here. </title>

Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase.  The sentence will describe your business in less than 90 characters.  

* Header Tags.  Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines.  They’re ranked in order of importance and look like this – <h1>Primary and/or Secondary keywords here</h1>

      The “1” designates this header as the most important header on the page.

* Meta Tags. Meta tags provide the small descriptive text found underneath the title tag on the search engine results page.  Like title tags these should be kept brief, informative and up to date.

* Alt Tags.  Alt tags are used to provide a text description of a graphic.  Each graphic on your site should have a description and an alt tag.  

Tip #2 Add content to your site daily

Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking.  Content is what search engine spiders look for and index – without it there’s nothing to index or rank.  Give visitors and search engines a reason to visit and index your site. Make a commitment to provide daily, optimized content and your traffic will soar.

Tip #3 Procure valuable and relevant incoming links

The more websites which link to your webpages the more valuable search engines perceive you to be, though not all links are created equal.  Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website topic.  

There are different types of links.

- A direct link looks like a basic website address, for example, www.yourwebsite.com

- A text link occurs when the webpage address is embedded in the text.  Readers simply click on the link and are redirected to a new website page.  

- If the link is to an internal web page, for example an article published on a website, rather than the home page, it is called a “deep link.”

You can encourage linking to your website by:

* Adding content to your site.  
* Submitting to article directories.  
* Publishing press releases.  
* Blogging and participating in social networking forums, chat rooms and social networking sites.  

Tip #4 Be Social!

Now more than ever before, internet marketing is about building a community.  Whether you offer a forum on your website or you participate in social networking sites, social networking is a valuable traffic generating tactic.  Sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site – create a profile and then post comments, links to your site and ideas which generate conversation.  

Get involved – many chat rooms and forums are industry specific, find those which cater to your industry, and begin participating.  Speak to and connect with a highly targeted audience.  

Tip #5 Advertise for more exposure and traffic

Advertising, when handled strategically, can be used to promote your content and products or services.  PPC advertising is often the tool of choice because you control the advertising budget on a daily basis and have the tools to test and track your advertising efforts.  Once you’ve honed your PPC ads the return on investment can be phenomenal in terms of traffic and purchases.    

For maximum results, create a traffic and SEO strategy.  Outline your plan and your goals and then take the necessary action.  Take advantage of these five traffic and search engine tips to boost your business.

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Learn SEO for Drive Traffic on a Budget

March 2, 2011 By

If you have an online business then you know how important traffic is to you. Without people viewing your site, how can you hope to find buyers for your products? One way to get them to come running is through search engine optimization.

 

What is SEO?

This is the abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of using keywords to bring targeted traffic to you. Ideally, when people enter their search keywords into any of the most popular search engines, your website content, videos and audio media should pop up in the first page of search results. That is what everyone wants to achieve. The better the search engine rankings the more likely you are to get buyers who are ready to spend their money on what you have to offer.

How to Use It

Now, there are courses that teach search engine optimization. There are also SEO firms that will gladly take your money in exchange for their help in outfitting your website for the traffic that you want. They can promise front page Google and Yahoo rankings within web searches. But, all of this costs money and it’s not pennies we’re talking about here.

It may take you longer, but you can learn how to use SEO yourself. As a student of Internet marketing, you have to be willing to do the legwork required to gain the knowledge you seek. It sounds a little Zen but it works.

1. Know how to use the resources available to you. If you don’t have any keywords in mind, you can use free online keyword tools to help you discover the viability of keywords in your niche. They will also rank them for you. Keep a spreadsheet of all the words you use so you can track how they work at increasing your visitors, sales and search engine rankings. Here are two free keyword tools you can start with:

  • http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
  • https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  • http://www.marketsamurai.com/lvsolutions
  • http://www.domainsamurai.com/c/lvsolutions

2. Pick a keyword or two and use it on your website. Website optimization is a bit trickier than optimizing content (we’ll get to that later). For your website, these keywords can appear in web page headlines, picture tags, taglines, anchor text (the words that hide a hyperlink within the text of an article) and other places. When your website is registered with search engines, the bots and spiders crawl each page. You want them to find your keywords and rank accordingly.

3. Use the keywords in your content displayed on your website. Keyword density is the number of times that a certain keyword appears in a piece of content of a certain size. Optimal keyword usage is between 1% and 3%. Going over that could be considered “stuffing” and get you reprimanded.

Search engine optimization is trial and error. Others can do it for you for a price. But, if you are dedicated and want to increase your skillset, you can learn to use it for yourself and drive traffic to your website and increase sales.

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2010 – Don’t Think Social Media, Think Relationships

January 25, 2010 By

2010 is not going to be the year of social media. 2010 is going to be the year of relationships. Yes, it will be the social media toolset that invigorates relationships. There is a subtle mindset that will separate winners and losers.

At the end of last year I had a conversation with a senior executive about bringing a social media strategy to his global company. Referring to his colleagues, he said, “We have to make them understand that social media is more than just Twitter and Facebook.” Social media is not about catching the hype of Twitter and Facebook, but connecting with your customers and building relationships. There should be a social media strategy and plan before jumping on the bandwagon!

The strategy must be about building relationships with potential customers, and strengthening relationships with existing customers. Do not think of social media as an advertising and promotion vehicle, but rather a relationship builder. How do you build relationships in your personal life? Transfer this “skill set” to your professional social media activity.

Social media is often viewed as a marketing endeavor. For the most part this makes sense, but I would not limit social media to being in the hands of the marketing group. When I think of social media, I am reminded of a quote many years back from David Packard (cofounder of HP) – “Marketing is far too iSocial media = customer relationships. Thus, social media is not just a “marketing thing.” In a company, who is concerned with Building beyond social mediacustomer relationships? Hopefully you answered everyone. This means that every department should have visibility to the social media program and provide information or monitor activities related to their domain expertise with a focus on how their functional area affects relationships with customers.

If you want a winning social media program – the owner of the social media program in your company must design a program that is customer-centric. They should not focus on advertising, promotion, and certainly not selling. Relationship building in a social media context is about traversing your customer along the “A-Path” – Attention > Attraction > Affinity > Audience > Advocate, as I have previous written about important to leave to the marketing department.”

Bottom line – use social media to build strong relationships. People usually buy things from people they feel comfortable with. Reinforce your customers’ buying decisions by continuously delivering valuable information through social media outlets in your brand domain expertise. This will build loyal relationships and ultimately turn your customers into advocates – the strongest marketing engine possible.

Article written by SocialSteve’s Blog http://bit.ly/7SeAOP

I wanted to post this on my blog due my agreeing with Steve and feel that he made some very good points about building relationships with social media and that it would help you to feel more comfortable with your clients and building your loyalty with them!

Hopefully you will think about how a Virtual Assistant can help  your company in assisting your social media marketing and let me know if I can be of any service to you!  Hope you have a wonderful day!  Happy reading..

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Using Social Media Requires Strategy

September 17, 2009 By

After plenty of time spent exploring the vast array of Social Media offerings online the temptation is great to be everywhere at once.  Usually the outcome, especially when you’re trying to do this yourself, is abandonment since it quickly becomes overwhelming.  The old paradox of choice rules the day. The more choices offered the lower the number of decisions.  This is especially true in business since the fear attached to losing money, time and resources adds to the anxiety and amplifies all the psychology already attached to this phenomenon.

As with any type of advertising or marketing, a strategy and clear plan for implementation is required to enjoy the greatest return on investment.  Finding a clear set of steps to execute in employing Social Media on your own can be a very daunting task since there aren’t nearly so many resources available on this topic as there are showcasing all of the available tools and suggested tactics.   You have so many choices.

Social Media is simply a new way to perform an old task, getting the word out to a particular group of people about a product, service, event, etc.  Just as with all forms of traditional advertising, employing Social Media requires a clearly defined set of steps that will be followed, methods for measuring effectiveness and predefined steps that will be taken based on the results of these measurements.

How much one is able to measure effectiveness will  depend on resources of time, skill level and money. Before measurements can be meaningful, setting goals for each step, establishing timelines, and a daily map of tactics should be in place.  How can you know if your being effective if you don’t know specifically what you are trying to do and if it is realistic?

All of this sounds very complex when you take into account how many tools are available and that the list of goals, steps, and strategies can be dissected in so many ways.  Enter the choices paradox sited earlier, you  become paralyzed with the overwhelming amount of choices, lack of clear direction and decide this isn’t looking so appealing now.  How can anybody make any money this way?

What is needed is a shift in thinking.  Approaching this is no different than any other project, it must be pared down to a manageable level.  Eat the elephant one tiny bite at a time by defining what is realistic for you in strategyterms of time, money and expectations, establish a clear plan to implement, monitor, adjust as needed and make additional investments over an extended period.  There are many reports of overnight successes using Social Media but a lot of variables are in play that mean one size will not fit all and we should expect a lot of differences from one project to the next in terms of results and how they are achieved.

Think back, does this sound familiar?  This is exactly the same information you receive from counsel in using other forms of marketing isn’t it?  The only real difference here is you have an opportunity to apply sweat equity, your own time and determination, and reach a tremendous amount of people directly.

What is the catch?  We all know there is no such thing as a free lunch.  You must learn how the tools work, have a clear plan for using them and have the time to invest.  Otherwise you’re left with hiring someone else to do it and it is now essentially the same as any other marketing vehicle.   You now have an additional effective means of reaching people on the Internet, along with print, television, radio, email, PPC (Internet advertising), banner ads on the Internet, your website, and direct mail.  Social Media is not free – it requires either your time and skill investment or hired time and skill from an employee or vendor.

Developing a plan first, then inserting the steps you will take to test, adjust, cultivate and maintain it are absolute requirements.  If you have the basics of a working knowledge of a few of the major Social Media platforms down pat, the next step is setting up the plan to use them separately and in a synchronized medley for a streamlined, efficient marketing effort.

The good news is this can be done on a very small scale to start, growing over time with your skills and available resources.

Date : September 4th, 2009Category : Social MediaAuthor : Lisa Isbell

Tags: Social Media, Internet Marketing, Internet advertising, Social Marketing

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Filed Under: Social Networking

Three Ways to Use Tweetdeck to Improve Your Twitter Experience

August 19, 2009 By

Recently, Tweetdeck announced an upgrade and this made a lot of people very, very happy.  The reason?  Tweetdeck used to experience some bugs and Adobe Air did not make that any easier.  Now, Tweetdeck is back with an improved interface and a fabulous new iPhone app.

However, some people are still perplexed at why one should use Tweetdeck over just going straight to a browser, accessing it via a mobile device or using something over Tweetdeck.

Here are three ways to use Tweetdeck to improve your Twitter experience:tweetdeck

1. Categorize Your Twitter Followers

Tweetdeck has these things called “groups” and you can setup as many of them as you want.  Once setup, you have the ability to then list them in columns for easy access and so you can see them at all times.  Some of the columns I recommend include: clients, team, favorites, tech tips, etc.  Categorize the things that are most important so you can converse with your rock stars in a much easier way.

2. Use Tweetdeck to Clear Replies You’ve Seen

Do you ever find your @ replies just get to be overwhelming?  If so, use Tweetdeck to “mark them as read” so that you know you’ve either seen it or actioned it and you can now move on.  The worst thing about the browser interface is that you can often forget if you’ve replied or not and then spend a lot of time going back into your history. Tweetdeck eliminates that.

3. Setup Notifications to Play When Tweets Come In Directed at You

Now, some people may find this distracting but as more and more people use Twitter as their primary means of communication, you can use Tweetdeck to be notified immediately as to when someone mentions your name or messages you directly. This will help you stay on the top of your game without being too distracted by e-mail and telephone.

These are just three ways that you can use Tweetdeck to improve your Twitter experience.  It helps with automation, ease of use and helps to keep that conversation going.

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Erin Blaskie is the owner of Business Services, ETC – A Global Internet Marketing & Implementation Firm. Her company helps businesses from around the world take their practice online and create huge success using various internet marketing tactics. Erin herself has been featured in three print books (”Becoming an Online Business Manager” by Tina Forsyth, “My So-Called Freelance Life” by Michelle Goodman, and “The Official AWE Emerging Trends Guide 2009” compiled by the Association of Web Entrepreneurs), honored as Office Arrow’s 2008 Runner-Up Business Woman of the Year, interviewed by countless gurus and media personalities (John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, Sheri McConnell, Stacy Karacostas, Gina McNew) and featured in major news publications (ABCNews.com, Ottawa Citizen and Employment Journal).

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