SEO Quick Tips

1. Use your anchor text in links – Make sure your link text features your keyword phrase. Links tend to stand out on websites and most people will click them  if your keyword phrase is connected to their search query or their interest.
   Example: Here’s the code for linking to this site. <a href=”http://www.diymarketingcoach.com” target=”_blank”><strong>Do it Yourself Marketing Coach.</strong></a> Do it Yourself Marketing Coach is the anchor text and it is in bold letters. It has some of my keywords.
2. Include a site map – Site maps help search engine robots find every page on your website in just two clicks. What this means is better search engine results for all your web pages. Make sure you link all pages properly for the best SEO results. Here’s a site that will generate sitemaps for free and in the correct format for Google.
3. Use the correct keyword density – SEO experts have different guidelines for the ideal keyword density. You don’t have to guess what you should use. Run your keyword phrases through major search engines and find the top five listings. Now, run those through the free keyword density checker KeyDensity.com. It will show you the percentages for each of your keyword phrases. Use an average between the highest and the lowest for your own site.

PPC Affiliate Marketing

Have you heard of pay per click (PPC)? What about affiliate marketing? The two work well as a part of a marketing strategy to increase traffic and sales. What about putting both of them together for a double whammy? Learn what PPC affiliate marketing is and how your affiliate programs can benefit.

The basics of affiliate marketing are simple. A site implements an affiliate program to increase sales for their products or services.    As such, they partner with other website businesses to gain visibility.    The website business is looking to reap some financial reward from the partnership as well.    Top affiliate programs generally pay well for sales and provide incentives for top sellers.

You can advertise on a website that you have set up especially for your affiliate marketing purposes. Besides the product ads, you will need to add other content to the site that will interest potential clients.    Many affiliate marketers use SEO content, product reviews and testimonials to keep customers coming back.

Another marketing strategy some affiliate marketers have employed is pay per click. Search engine ads have become popular. When search results are displayed, appropriate keyword ads are listed in the sidebar area of the page. Buying keywords and the chance to be ranked here can be a bit costly as a business owner.

Pay per click affiliate marketing uses some of your profits from affiliate marketing and invests them in advertising to bring more traffic to your affiliate site. You create ads for the affiliate products using keywords that would be used when searching for that type of product.

There are some pros and cons to this strategy.

Pros:

• You are making money in two ways.    One, you are earning commissions on every conversion that results in a sale for the affiliate program.    Secondly, with the search engine PPC ads, you pay to rank and bring more traffic to the site for increased affiliate sales.
• If an affiliate allows you to use their product names in your ad and to use other programs to advertise, PPC affiliate marketing is perfect.

Cons:

• You could be losing website ranking to the affiliate site.    If your PPC ads link back to where the ads exist on your website for the customer to click on through, this can boost their website and not yours.
• Using programs like Google AdSense along with other affiliate ads on your website can reduce the performance of all of your programs. This means fewer sales and money for you.
• PPC affiliate marketing can be expensive in the beginning and not pay off as much as you think if you don’t have the proper keywords to do the job.

What are your goals with affiliate marketing? Pay per click affiliate marketing could be an option for you to increase traffic to your affiliate website.

What Color Hat Should I Wear?

You can wear three different “hats” when you are doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO), white gray or black. Let’s look at each colored hat.

White-Hat SEO tactics: These include internal linking, reciprocal linking, creation of optimized content, posting articles, modifying HTML code and the main navigation to make your site search engine friendly. These are all approved and acceptable ways to get your site ranked higher by the major search engines. You will not be penalized for using any or all these SEO tactics.

Gray-Hat SEO tactics: These tactics are legitimate when used correctly. However, they are often abused by unethical SEO companies. Some of the tactics that fall under this color are cloaking, duplicate content and paid links. Many blogs suffer from the duplicate content problem. There are two scenarios.

1. Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site
2. Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites

This post would become several pages long if I tried to explain how to avoid the first problem. Instead, let me direct you to Google’s Webmaster Central where you will find instructions for staying out of trouble.

Problem #2 is little more tricky. At the very least, ask your syndication partners to include a link back to your original content. For more ideas, visit Ranking As The Original Source For Content You Syndicate.

The key here is that you need to proceed with caution whenever you use Gray-Hat tactics.

Black-Hat SEO tactics: These include keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages and redirects to nameust  ja few. Using any of these tactics could get your site banned by the major search engines. Even though it may be your SEO Company or consultant that is guilty, you as the site owner will pay the price. Stay away from these tactics no matter what the short-term benefits may be.

Visit Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (www.sempo.org) to learn more about SEO and SEM.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a hot topic. Using it will help grow your business online and get you noticed. What is it really?

Search engine optimization is a term used to describe how search engines work for you, the website owner. Think about this for a moment: You want to research a topic online. You enter certain words into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. The computer spits out results and you view them to see what fits your needs.

How you get those results has a lot to do with search engine optimization. The words you enter into a search engine are called keywords or keyword phrases. If you ever look at the top of your search results, you will see the number of results returned plus the words that the search engine used to bring you those results. Now look at the results. The keywords you typed in are bolded either in the titles or in a line of content on that webpage.

By optimizing your web pages and content to match the most common phrases or keywords used for that subject, your content can be found. Ideally, content found on the first two pages of search results are the ones that people will click on. No one wants to sift through five million results. The top content or websites are the ones ranked first.

What makes them ranked at the top? For keyword-optimized content, keywords that show up three to seven percent of the time are ranked higher than content with less frequent keywords. This often referred to as keyword density.

Search engines index your content and WebPages for ranking. Keyword-dense content has a good chance of rising to the top in the rankings. However, search engine optimization is not just about single keywords, but also two and three word phrases. Longer phrases have become a great way to rank high, since most content tries to match single keywords.

Search engine optimization extends to your domain name as well. If your website has a specific niche, using keywords relative to that niche in your domain name drives traffic to your website. Don’t neglect your WebPages either. Individual pages that use search engine optimized headers can also ranked high.

For the website owner, using a keyword optimizer makes short work of calculating your keyword density. There are also programs that rank the popularity of certain keyword phrases when searching for information using search engines. Remember, if you can’t be found, it will be hard to sell your product or service to others.

Are you looking for a way to drive traffic to your website? Consider search engine optimization for your WebPages and content.

For an easy to use, do-it-yourself SEO solution, look at Web CEO.

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