Archive for March, 2009
Researching Some Site Topics
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about niche research. One of the biggest lies, that even many experienced marketers buy into, is that competition is determined by the amount of pages that are optimized for the term you are thinking about attempting to rank for. If you search internet marketing forums, you will find endless back and forth debates about the relative validity of determining the number of competing pages using the phrase in quotes versus searching the phrase preceded by the allinititle modifier. What rarely seems to get brought up in these heated debates between these two different methods is the following - neither of those really matter, in the final estimation. Everyone agrees that ranking is important. For instance, if you want a career in personal training, you need to rank in order to gain clients.
You heard me right. Neither of them should be your final determiner. This is not to say you can’t get some useful information from them. Obviously, a site with one million competing pages (whichever way you judge the competition) is going to be more difficult to rank for than a site with one hundred competing optimized pages. When you look at it in those broad strokes, it seems obvious. However, success in niche marketing rarely comes from the broad strokes, but rather the small details.
However, where the grey area starts to appear is when you consider that a term with five thousand competing sites where the top ten are very well optimized can be much more difficult to rank for than a term with fifty thousand competing sites where the top ten are pretty poorly optimized. There are a couple of things you can look at to determine how well optimized the top ten sites are. Of course, none of them alone is going to give you the total picture, but taken together, they can provide a decent guide.
The first thing to do is scan through for bold in the content that’s showing on the page. Remember, Google highlights the keywords in that were searched for in bold. If there is bold in the title, in the content snippet, and in the URL - that is very good optimization for that keyword. This could be a difficult competitor, taken on that aspect. Next, take a glance at the Google Page Rank of each listing. If you are really serious, you can even look at the Page Rank of the individual page that appears in the rankings, as well as the Page Rank of the home page for the site it appears on. The higher each of these are, the more solid that makes their position in the rankings. There are plugins for Mozilla Firefox which are freely available which help you quickly and easily determine Page Rank. Two of these are SEO for Firefox and SEOQuake. My personal preference is SEO for Firefox, but SEOQuake is also quite useful. Lastly, look at the backlinks each page has pointing to it - both to the individual page as well as to the home page of the main site. There are Mozilla Firefox plugins to help you determine this as well, but it is equally easily determined by conducting a simple custom search in Yahoo. You will want to put “link:” into the search box and then the domain name.
This extra effort in niche market research will pay off huge dividends. Taking the extra bit of time to vet the pages in the top ten search results before beginning to chase a keyword will give you a much more realistic picture in your niche research than simply knowing the number of competing sites!
Get More Traffic to Your Site with Internet Marketing
Anyone who has a website will want other people to look at it, otherwise why set a website in the first place? This is even more important if you have a website that you can make money from, either by selling goods or offering a service or services to others as without visitors to the site no purchases will be made and it will not be profitable. Using internet marketing is the best way in which to drive the much needed traffic towards your website. Refer to internet marketing for more information.
Internet marketing is not just one or two methods used on a website in order for it to (hopefully) achieve high rankings on search engines but it is a comprehensive strategy that will market a website effectively. Before you can employ any kind of internet marketing tactics you firstly need to decide what the aim of your website is. For instance, if you have goods or services to sell the aim of the website is to generate interested visitors that will make purchases and return to do this time and time again.
If you are selling a certain type of service or product you will have an idea of the kind of person that would buy what you have to offer. So if you were selling rock music DVDs you would have an idea of the type of person that you would be selling to and tailor your internet marketing accordingly to reach the maximum number of rock music fans it could. One way of doing this is to bid on keywords relating to that topic and using pay per click ads for this keyword. Go to online marketing for more information.
This is one form of internet marketing that can be highly profitable, but it does cost money each time a visitor clicks through your advert.
If you don’t have the funds to use pay per click internet marketing you could use links in order to market your website. Links can be placed on other websites that will direct visitors to your website with the aim of the visitor making a purchase. In order for links to be profitable for you they must be of a good quality and be relevant, you must also include links to other sites (reciprocal links) as this will get both sites traffic and keep the links open.
Maybe you would prefer to use keywords in the content of your website as this is an excellent method of internet marketing. Keywords are the words that are most used in searches for certain topics and you can find out what these are by using different tools that are online. Once you have found out these keywords they can then be incorporated into your website’s content. However there is a drawback to using keywords and that is if you use keywords too many times in the content. It is thought that the best density for keywords on a website is between 2-5%, so for a density of 3% a keyword should be used 3 times in every 100 words. If you use keywords more than this your website will be seen as being guilty of keyword stuffing and this could result in your website being removed from search engines. If you cannot write content to a certain density you could always employ someone to specifically do this for you.
As shown there are different ways of using internet marketing, and there are many more that can be used to improve your websites ranking. However as with any method of marketing it is always best for your internet marketing to be ethical or it can have the opposite effect for your website. Visit internet marketing for further information.
Best Savings Rates
What can you do with your hard earned savings in these difficult times we are in? Invest your savings in a Certificate of Deposit otherwise known as CD? With the uncertainty high based on the severity of the financial meltdown, investing your money in business is a very risky proposition. Placing your money in banks in a CD is the safest way.
A CD is commonly called “time deposit”. It is similar to your ordinary savings account except that you can’t withdraw it easily. A CD has fixed terms or a duration of time where you have to keep your money in the bank. The common term is 3 months but some offer up to 5 years. During these times, you can’t withdraw your money, but you are guaranteed to earn fixed interest rates. This service is offered by banks, thrift institutions, and credit unions. Your deposit is safe as it is insured by the government through FDIC’s, up to 50 million USD.
Based on the current situation it is very likely that banks will be increasing the interest rates. Why? Because banks need to accumulate cash, with people low on money they need to offer competitive rates in order to entice people to deposit. That being the case, you’ll find it difficult to find the best CD Rate currently offered, with the tons and tons of information you have to filter and consider. There are many financial websites that can help you on this as the sites collect and organize all the current promotional rates of banks. Just browse through their bank reviews which were made for your convenience.
Consider this example you might find on the internet:
“First Command Bank is offering one of the best CD rates for a 12 month CD, the CD rate for balances $10,000 and up is 3.93% and the APY is 4.00%. Balances under $10,000 receive an interest rate of 3.90% and a yield of 3.95%.”
If you’re not well informed you might consider this as a great deal. But this one might be the Best CD Rates:
“Dime Direct is offering a promotional 6 month CD that yields 5.00%. To qualify for this promo CD rate you will need to open a Prime Dime Checking Account. The offer is only available in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The minimum opening deposit for the CD account is $500 and the maximum deposit is $100,000”.
Now that’s way higher than the average rate being offered. Both of the information can be found at MonitorBankRates.com. That’s how comprehensive the reviews are in their site. The information provides balanced views of the promotions such that it’s easy for you to decide which one is best.
Aside from this, financial sites also have online calculators for CD’s. These calculators will help you determine how much interest you can earn on a CD. The calculators are very easy to use; you just need to input few values. To determine the amount of interest you will be paid on the CD, just enter the CD deposit amount, the term of the CD, the CD interest rate and how interest will be compounded and viola you have the amount.
The Skinny On Online Marketing Promotion
There are a bunch of misconceptions when it comes to online marketing strategies. Beginners in the field can easily fall prey to appalling internet marketing strategies that promise instant results. The thing is, “instant” doesn’t always mean long lasting. They can’t guarantee sure profits either. Some of these internet marketing activities might raise the number of hits to your website, but they won’t automatically bring in the cash.
Knowing your SEO hats
Article marketing makes up a big chunk of online marketing promotion. Businesses online rely on websites, and the blood work of all websites is content. You need to keep your content relevant if you want to attract customers. However, customers are not the only ones you need to write for.
To increase the page ranking of your website in popular search engines and directories, you must keep your content optimized. This means knowing how to place the correct amount of keywords inside the article. These “keywords” or key phrases will subsequently be indexed by search engine “spiders”. Since these spiders are software, they can’t initially gauge the quality of your articles depending on the significance of information included in it. Most pages are ranked on search engines because the correct keywords are frequently mentioned in the same article.
While this is good for the search engine, being too redundant in the article (e.g. saying the word “hormonal imbalance” 30 times in a 500-word article) is annoying for the human reader. Keyword stuffing this extreme is also referred to as “black hat SEO” or bad SEO. While this may produce top page ranking quickly, you can also lose your position in no time once your irrelevant content was “discovered” by human editors.
Some people use the phrase “white hat SEO” for article marketing that is more focused on human readers than search engine spiders. However, no online marketing tactic today can claim to be entirely white hat SEO. Because of the tight competition of businesses online, companies are bound to make use of a little black hat SEO trick one in a while, but likely not to the extent that they’re risking being expelled from the search engines.
The most common form of article marketing today uses some gray hat SEO strategies, which is a well balanced scheme that considers both the human readers and the search engine spiders.
Email marketing morals
If you are personally annoyed at spam mails, then you might instantly want to eliminate email marketing from your list. You shouldn’t do this just yet. Email marketing is a valuable internet marketing strategy if you know how to do it correctly.
Sending out advertisements and newsletters to a indiscriminate number of email addresses will not help you gain customers. Instead, you’ll be putting all your hard work in someone else’s trash bin. Think about your target viewers instead. Don’t just blast your advertisements everywhere.
What you are looking for here is a list that is more focused on quality, not quantity. A targeted list of 20 consumers, or potential clients, is more effective than 200 strangers who might just see your unsolicited newsletter as an annoyance.
Getting the list right
Targeted lists can be created from databases on your website. People who visit your website could simply drop a line, and voluntarily give out their email addresses where you can send product catalogues, newsletters, and whatever that is related to your product.
If you are a conventional business who also trades offline, you can acquire emails during tradeshows. If you have a shop somewhere in the city, you can invite your clients to fill out a small survey form, which also asks for their email addresses. It can be a plain line at the bottom saying: “Would you like to be updated about our latest products? Tell us where we can find you on the web so we can drop a line.”
Complete Savings - Helping You Save When You Need It Most
Just as the old song says, “You work hard for your money,” right? If you’re like most people, you do your best to stay on budget.. There may be times when you wish you could go shopping or enjoy dinner at a restaurant, but you restrain yourself because you might feel guilty about spending the money.
However, what if you were able to cut the cost of your favorite activities in half? What if you received hundreds of coupons each month to make your hard-earned money stretch? After all, you work hard for your money and should be entitled to have some fun at the end of a long week, right?
Enroll in the Complete Savings discount service and receive thousands of money-saving opportunities. Sign up today and enjoy up to 40 - 50 percent off:
* Movie tickets
* Restaurants
* Admission to museums, art galleries, theme parks and more
* Shopping
If you’re the kind of person who loves to get away on the weekend, you’ll be glad to know that your Complete Savings membership comes with comprehensive travel-related protection benefits as well. Travel with peace-of-mind thanks to our worry-free services which include:
* Road & Tow Protection
* Lost Baggage Protection
* Trip Delay Protection
* Hotel Overbooking Protection
As if all this isn’t enough, you can even cover your credit cards with the Complete Savings Credit Card Fraud Protection plan.
You do work hard for your money. That’s why it is important that you save. However, don’t let saving prevent you from enjoying life. With a membership in Complete Savings, you can truly get the best of both worlds - enjoying the things you love most, while saving money the entire time.
Call us toll-free at 1-800-826-1885 or register online at CompleteSavings.com. It takes just a few minutes to enroll. Once completed, you can begin taking advantage of thousands of money-saving opportunities. You work hard — enjoy life. You deserve it.