However, this understanding is rarely transferred when a business decides to ‘go online’. Perhaps the initial setup is so daunting that little thought is spared for anything beyond the layout and content of a website. The internet, however is still a marketplace, and one that is growing exponentially. Those same business skills need to be put to use here too.

If you want to learn from the success of your competitors you first need to think like a search engine. By mimicking popular keywords and phrases you can benefit from traffic that would otherwise be directed to your competitors sites.

Keywords are contained in what are called ‘Meta Tags’. These are tags that are found in the source code at the top of a webpage and include descriptions, titles and key words. Search engines use this information (in addition to content) to rank your page for different search strings. You can access this information by viewing the source of any website, just simply select ‘View’, and ‘Source’ from the toolbar.

If after looking at this code you fear it resembles some alien language, do not despair! There are many programs available that will search competitors’ sites for this information and provide a full report: in plain English. Just look for anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is one of the new hot topics; and you will be swamped with products. The danger is to believe too much of the hype, don’t pay for promises; search engines are not as easily tricked as we are!

Another key ingredient is links. Your page will be ranked favorably if it is viewed by the search engines as being an authority on a given subject. Links work a bit like votes, if someone links to your site they are effectively ‘casting a vote’ of approval. However the weight of this vote is affected by how many other sites they link to, so beware of ‘link farms’ (pages contained entirely of links) because they will not help improve your site’s positioning. The easiest way to obtain links is through online directories – although people may not visit your site directly through these links, it will help with overall search engine positioning.

Returning to the competition; you can discover who is linking to other sites by using an online link popularity checker. This way you can try and get these sites to link to you also. Remember, directed traffic is the best, so aim for links from sites which contain similar content to yours. If you are a business selling stamps, your best links would be from stamp appreciation pages – obvious really.

The internet has been established for a while now. It is no longer an unknown jungle. As a new business entering this arena you can learn from other people’s successes as well as their mistakes!

The first part of gaining profits through website promotion is to have an excellent website design. You cannot expect to gain any profits through a website that is designed poorly or that is difficult to navigate. Make it easy for visitors to your website to find what they need and make a purchase. This will gain you fast profits.

The second thing you should do to gain profits is to use search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO has been widely used to put people’s websites at the top of a search engine’s list. It is found that most people that use a search engine only visit the website that is listed at the top of the list. This is why you need to use SEO to help with your website promotion. With the proper SEO, you can attract more visitors to your website. More visitors means more profits for you.

Next, to gain more profits you can use email marketing. Be sure that when you use email marketing to gain profits that you are not using spam. Use an opt in list instead. Have an opt in list posted on your website. An opt in list is when people request to receive email material from your website. It has been shown that opt in lists give a 40% increase in response. This means that you will again have more profits.

In order to gain profits through website promotion, you must be sure that you go after your target audience. Be sure that your website design attracts the type of people that would be interested in your product or service. Also, be sure that your email marketing sends out emails and ezines to people that will actually read it and have an interest in it. If you don’t, you cannot expect to gain profits.

Lastly, you can incorporate the use of affiliate programs to help with your website promotion. Have links to your affiliates on your website. Your affiliates will also do the same. With you and your affiliates working together to promote your website, you will start to see more website traffic and more profits.

Website promotion is the only sure way to gain profits for your business. Without it, you can easily find yourself in a hole that is hard to dig your way out of. Be sure to utilize all of these methods so that you can attain more profits.

In order to learn how to do it properly, we need to take a look at others who are already doing it, and winning the never ending game of promotion.

Never ending is a bit of an understatement if you consider the vast opportunity you have presented to you through promoting your business online. Millions and millions of people log on every day, but what you don’t consider is that millions more have yet to log on for the very 1st time. If you’ve ever questioned the fact about whether or not there is an opportunity for yourself online, this small but powerful paragraph should end that doubt.

To make it big online, you have to think big. The internet is no different than real life… what you put forth, so shall you receive. There isn’t any greater statement than that.

So what does it really take to make it big?

Create something bigger than yourself! Bottom line. Creating something bigger could be accomplished in a few different ways. I know there are some of you who are thinking, I don’t have the money to create a massive website! Who ever said you’re “something big” has to be owned by you?

For instance Authors a.k.a Writers / a.k.a Bloggers / a.k.a Columnists are taking the internet by storm and for a good reason… This type of promotion REALLY works.
With the vast amount of websites out there that accept articles, you’re practically guaranteed to create a resourceful website of your own. You don’t need to be the best web designer in the world to figure out how to buy a domain name, create a blog or two (that is programmed by someone else) and link to your articles that way. You can even talk about your products and services within your blog, you have every right.

Go to http://www.blogger.com to create a blog.

That is the easiest way in. Let’s also take a look at why you should have a website and promote it through your knowledge, we can only do this by taking a look at other peoples success. In this next small section, I am going to randomly pick out a couple of authors that consistently write articles and measure out their “visible” level of success.

Halstatt Pires (www.marketingtitan.com): We consistently see this author write articles and submit them to us. Halstatt is a good writer who talks about a wide range of topics including web design & SEO.

If we take a look in Google/Yahoo/MSN to see how many times we can find “Halsatt Pires”, the numbers would look like this…

There are over 45,300 web pages listed within Google with the name “Halsatt Pires”.
There are over 18,500 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 7,500 pages listed in MSN

Wouldn’t you like to have over 71,300 pages online with your name on them? I certainly would. Even if your articles get read a 10% of the time every day or every month for that matter, it would mean on average over 6,200 people could possibly read your articles every single day.

MarketingTitan.com has an alexa.com ranking of: 171,746 best ranked website out of millions of other websites.

Let’s now take a look at another author.. (all random)

Joy H Gendusa (www.postcardmania.com) Writes a great deal about postcard campaigns, direct mail campaigns and is quite good at it as well.

If we take a look in Google/Yahoo/MSN to see how many times we can find “Joy H Gendusa”, the numbers would look like this…

There are over 13,800 web pages listed within Google with the name “Joy Gendusa”.
There are over 24,000 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 4,800 pages listed in MSN

In only 3 search engines, “Joy Gendusa” is found 42,600 times!

PostcardMania.com has an alexa.com ranking of: 76,065 best ranked website out of millions of other websites.

Again, it begs the questions, wouldn’t you like it if that was your name at the bottom of those articles with your website right beside it?

You DO NOT have to be a professional writer to start writing. In fact, when I started writing, my grammar was so bad, people would actually call me to guide me through my articles and point out the mistakes within them. The point is, people still called. Now thanks to my editors, my writing skills are improving a great deal.

Don’t be shy. Just start somewhere and don’t stop. Before you know it, you’ll be writing 2-5 articles a week and won’t be able to stop. That is when the true power of your promotion will start kicking in.

Just for people who want to know…

Let’s take a look at my success as a writer. If you were to search for my name within quotations like so “Martin Lemieux”, here are the results you would find. (In quotes to narrow down to an exact match)

There are over 65,600 web pages listed within Google with the name “Martin Lemieux”.
There are over 32,300 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 17,600 pages listed in MSN

That is over 115,500 “registered pages” online that have my name on them. Just remember as well, I haven’t submitted an article in over 2 months due to illness. Only a fraction of those aren’t me, they are someone else. Again, I ask the question… Wouldn’t it be nice if that was your name and your website was right beside those tens of thousands of pages?

Just for curiosity, if you do a search for Martin Lemieux without the quotes within Google, you will get around 1,040,000 pages found. When I started out, those search results weren’t even close to that, maybe even 10% of 1,040,000 because of “Claude Lemieux” & “Mario Lemieux” two famous hockey players.

Does something like this happen over night? Absolutely not. In the last 4 years, I’ve been able to write around 70-80 articles in total! That’s it. There are writers out there that have personally written over 1000 articles in a matter of years.

What else can you do to increase your popularity? Accept articles from other authors of course! Why not share your success with others. Doing so will only increase your credibility online and increase your visitors a great deal. Not only will authors talk about you, your website will increase every time you list another authors article.

Why do you think that many of the article directories world wide get the most traffic on average beyond the Gorillas like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc? They all have one thing in common, they’re creating a community of people writing their hearts out and exposing their business further online.

In Conclusion:

If you’ve ever doubted why people write articles, think again. The internet favors the bold, the ones who are not afraid to speak their mind and put their thoughts in digital format get rewarded. More and more authors who have written actual books are now writing for the internet to get more sales for their books. It’s a proven fact that unique content is king and so are your thoughts.

Your website is now ready. It’s now the time to promote your website and spread awareness about your website and get visitors to come and view your web pages. Tips to get your website get going.

1. Page Title

Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many “filler” words from the title, such as “the,” “and,” etc. Mention appropriate keywords relevant to your website content. Remember search engines give this a lot of emphasis.

2. Meta Tags

Meta tags always go in the section of the document. META NAME tags include descriptions and keywords. This HTML code helps some search engines classify and rank a web page. META HTTP-EQUIV tags can indicate to the web browser how to display the page.

Write a descriptive META Tags. Many search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title. This sentence should describe the contents of the body text of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren’t used on the webpage content you could hurt the prospect of being listed in the search engine.

3. Linking Strategy

Link popularity is basically the number of links that point to your web site. Besides the optimization of your web pages for meta tags and search engine marketing and readiness, link popularity is considered as being a major factor for your ranking in the search engines. A large number of links that point to your web site will therefore improve your ranking significantly. Besides that, well placed links are an excellent source of consistent traffic to your web site.

Some of the important search Engines that consider link popularity as a factor for relevancy are Google, Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler & Altavista.

Linking strategies are an essential type of site promotion. The more links pointing to your site, the more traffic you’ll experience (and the greater perceived “popularity” will rank you higher in the search engines). To get someone to link to your site, you need to ask. The simplest way is to find complementary sites, link to them on a linking page, and ask them to link to you. The key, of course, is for your site to have content that so good that it’s worth linking to. Ask for links on sites that cover your industry, as well as from associations your business belongs to.

What is to be avoided here is link harvesting or just creating link database on your website of sites that have no relevance to your topic. Search engines have a negative rating for this.

4. Search Engine Submission

Now it’s time to submit your website to search engines. It is recommended never use automated tools, your website might end up never being spidered by the search engine. The best way is to manually goto the major search engines listed below and manually submit.

Google.com and Yahoo.com – A definite must. Over 90% of smaller search engines take their fodder from here.

Others to submit are Lycos.com, Altavista.com, Excite.com, Askjeeves.com, Wisenut.com, Toema.com & Overture.com

5. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

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Amongst the best forms of viral marketing are

Affiliate Programs

You signup and earn a commission per sale or referral. So you refer your friends and peers. When your peers signup their friends and peers you get an incentive for them too. What an excellent and automated way of publicity at extremely low costs.

Refer your friends

You just finished reading an article and suddenly remembered your friend for whom the article might be a valuable resource, so you simply email the article to them by using the “Refer-a-friend” link. An excellent and automated way of free publicity.

E-mail signature

Don’t underestimate the power of a innocuous email signature. You never know who and where it reaches. It doesn’t cost you a dime and gives your website free publicity.

6. Ezines

Write articles for others to use in their Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective “viral” approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time.

7. URL on Stationery

This is a no-brainer that’s sometimes overlooked. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company’s URL.

Beware of these promotion blunders

1. Spam

Spam or unsolicited e-mails don’t generate customers. They generate bad publicity and legal tangles. No website has ever made it big with Spam. Spam is like the scum in the gutter blocking precious Internet bandwidth, which brings absolutely nothing but abuses for their senders.

2. Abuse e-communities

While the former one is mass abuse, this one is direct abuse. Ecommunities are available on the Internet on probably every topic under the sun and e-marketers feel it’s a good place to deliver the promotional message. Right no doubt, but there is a Net etiquette for delivering such a message. Maybe in the form of a signature or participating in that community not sending stupid promotional messages which get nothing but bad publicity for the website.

3. Automated submission

Unless you want your Website to be blacklisted or removed from the database of the search engines don’t ever attempt it. Incidentally, the best and the biggest directory is human edited. Dmoz.org is the name; the same directory used by google.com, aol.com and other search engines. Manual submission to major search engines takes not more than a few hours and is fairly sufficient for meeting your e-business goals.

Unfortunately, hiring an SEO expert can be quite expensive. For those who want to do it themselves, here are the steps.

Bookmark these tools! you WILL need them!

The first step in website optimization is to make sure you have well-formatted HTML. I would encourage you to use the following tool to check this: http://validator.w3.org/ Do your best to get your website as close to conformance as possible.

If you use CSS, then use a CSS validator at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html There is rarely an excuse for not having it validate here.

If you follow most of the suggestions for having valid HTML code your web pages will be more digestible for the search engines, as well as being much more cross-browser compliant. You should also do this after any significant edit of the web page – to ensure that it is still compliant.

The second step in website optimization is to work on the Meta tags and the title tag for each page in your site. These are in the header of your web page document and need to be tailored to attract users who type in one of a select group of keywords. If you need a tool to help generate these, use this meta tag generator tool here (http://www.spiderweblogic.com/HTML-Meta-Tag-Generator.aspx) that I built.

The title tag:

The title tag is, of the three, the most important for the major search engines. Don’t make this too long – normally no more than 6 words. But have your most important keywords here. Some SEO specialists advise that even the order of the text here is significant. They suggest that if you place your company name in the title, that it should be placed last so the other keywords are being considered with greater weight.

The meta-keywords tag:

This is now of lesser importance than before, due to abuse by webmasters to achieve high rankings. However, it is still important and is required by many of the smaller search engines. Make sure that you don’t repeat any keyword or keyword phrase more than three times. That would be considered Spam (bad SEO tactics) by the search engines. Remember, your visitors will see the title of the web page. Make it useful to them as well.

The meta-description tag:

This is of higher importance than the keywords tag. Several search engines use it when they show your listing. It needs to encourage your potential visitors to visit your website. Of course, having keywords in here is important. But keep the primary purpose in mind as you write it. Here too, you should make sure that you don’t repeat any keyword or keyword phrase more than three times.

Each page in your website needs its own tailored title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tag. These need to be focused on the keywords you are trying for. (These are the words or phrases you want to be found at when people are doing searches.) These shouldn’t normally be the same on every page. They should be customized to the content that is on that page. You should also keep your visitors in mind as you write them.

The third step is to work on your content – especially on your home page. Ideally you would have between 800 – 1200 words of text. It should have your most important keywords at the top, middle and the bottom of the text. If possible, use an “h1″ tag at the top for your title – and have your most important keyword embedded in it. Also, have some of your keywords in a sentence or phrase that is bolded. Keep it natural for your visitors to read. If it doesn’t look natural, you will loose any visitors you have attracted.

The fourth step in website optimization is to edit your links and your images to make full use of the “title” and “alt” attributes.

Text links can have a “title” attribute. The content is to more fully describe your link. When you put your mouse over the link, the content of the “title” attribute is displayed. I would encourage you to tailor the description so that it contains at least one of your keywords – but keep it accurate – that it really does describe the link. It must make sense to the common user.

Images HTML tags can have an “alt” attribute. It is used to describe an image when you put a mouse over it. It is also used for different devices for seeing impaired. Also, it is used when the user decides not to show images with the web site. They will see this text instead. (It is the “Alternate Text” for the image.) Try to incorporate some keywords here too – but keep with the spirit of being the “alternate text” for the image.

If you are using tables, you may even include a table “summary” attribute. The purpose of this attribute is to assist for those with disabilities to understand the contents and structure of a table. Keep all summary comments within that purpose – and add keywords only where appropriate. Note that these summary attributes may cause your web page validator to spit up an error – but this is newer item that is encouraged.

The fifth step is to have a good menu system or a site map. Search engines follow links to find the different pages in your site. If your navigation is one of those JavaScript drop-down menus or Flash menus, the search engines may not find all of your pages unless you have an alternative non-JavaScript link path that they can follow. If you use the fancy JavaScript links, you should have a hard link to a site map on every page. The site map should have a real non-JavaScript list of links that the search engines can follow to map out your whole site. As a standard policy I tend to avoid the JavaScript links in the menus.

Optional:
If you haven’t chosen a domain name yet, you may strongly consider having your top keyword phrase in the domain name, with the words separated by dashes. This is an excellent idea, but not always feasible. Many companies already have a domain name selected, or prefer to use their company name as the domain name. This is a business decision left up to the customer.

Things not to do:
Don’t create and market mirror sites though to accomplish this trick either. Sites that are identical in content, but have a different domain name are considered SPAM (bad/taboo) by the search engines. They don’t appreciate such tricks, and the ranking of both websites will suffer for it.

Also, don’t get too crazy with stuffing keywords where they don’t belong or by repeating keywords or by having keywords in hidden layers. Search engines don’t like that and will ban your site.

SEO Software to buy:
I have used SEO Studio to do website analysis during my optimization. This has been an invaluable tool for analyzing how saturated my keywords are in a particular web page. It is reasonably priced and I have been very satisfied with the performance. It is easy to see such things as keyword density relevance for the whole web page. It also is helpful in showing where the keywords are not (and can be). Y ou will learn a lot about website optimization just by using this tool!

NOW WHAT?
After all this “Search Engine Optimization” you need to do a human review your website – is it natural/useful/helpful for the human visitor? Remember, getting website traffic is only half the game. This site needs to quickly convert them into paying customers.

Once it is “Optimized”, then you need to let the search engines know that you exist. Only after it is ready should you tell them about it. But this is a subject for another article. Do a search of different article warehouse or SEO news sources. You will find a lot of information on this.

Website optimization news sources:
Since there are new quirks in the website optimization and website promotion that come out all the time – some that apply to all search engines, and some that apply to a particular one, it is wise to keep up to date. I strongly encourage you to join a couple of relevant mailing lists!

I really like the news sources from Entireweb.com. If you submit a site through them, I would encourage you to accept their free newsletters. They have great content. http://www.entireweb.com/submit_site/

Another place to get really great articles on website optimization or promotion is http://www.SiteProNews.com They also allow you to subscribe to their articles. Do this!

If you are serious about keeping up with your website positioning, keep up with the news. You will find these resources invaluable!

Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes in making dynamic search engine optimized websites.
http://www.SpiderwebLogic.com | http://www.SchoolAndTeacher.com

Sure, the content has to be worthwhile; it has to be helpful, informative, and not just a sales spiel. And there’s no denying that a well written article can be very compelling. But if your headline doesn’t cut it, the article won’t stand a chance. The best article in the world will never see the light of day without an effective headline.

Now, more than ever, article submissions need a good headline. But it’s not just the reader you have to worry about. In fact, the reader is secondary! When it comes to reprint article headlines, your main focus should be the publisher.

You may think the requirements of a good headline haven’t changed over the years, but they have. Unlike headlines for traditional newspapers, magazines, etc., which target only the reader, online article submission headlines target first the publisher, then the reader.

So how do you write a headline for an online publisher?

Here’s a few tips…

1) State your domain

No matter what your business, you can be sure that potential publishers of your article are inundated with information every day. Imagine hypothetical ‘Publisher Pete’. He’s the webmaster of a high PR site. He receives hundreds of article submissions every day. Additionally, he farms article submission sites (aka ‘article banks’, ‘article submit sites’, ‘free-reprint sites’) for articles on a regular basis. Because so many of the article submissions he sees are spam or unrelated, Publisher Pete is quick to dismiss anything that isn’t obviously – and immediately – relevant to his website. So make sure your headline signals the general subject area of the article submission, not just the exact topic.

2) State your argument

Every website has an agenda. Whether it’s to sell, persuade, or inform, there’s always an angle. When our friend Publisher Pete looks for free reprint content for his website, he wants something that complements his agenda. If he’s selling chemical garden fertilizers, he doesn’t want an article about the evils of chemical fertilizer. Nor does he want an article espousing the virtues of organic fertilizer. He wants an article promoting the value of chemical garden fertilizer. If that’s what your article is about, make sure the headline lets him know.

3) Don’t make empty promises

Sensationalized headlines may work in traditional media, but they’re not so effective in online article submissions. Few things frustrate an online publisher more than being lured in by a promising headline which turns out to be nothing more than hot air. For publishers who take the time to carefully filter content before publishing, empty headlines are nothing more than time-wasters. For publishers who are a little less meticulous, empty headlines result in a site which is characterized by disjointed, contradictory, low-quality content. Either way, the publisher isn’t impressed, so make sure the headline of your article is relevant to (and validated by) the body of your article.

4) Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes

Always think about ways to make the publisher’s job easier. It’s as simple as that. Brainstorm 5, 10, 20 headlines, then put yourself in the publisher’s position and ask which one you’d choose. That’s the best headline for your article submission.

5) Think about your publisher’s readers

Publishers want articles that readers will open. But remember, your publisher’s website may cater to an entirely different type of reader to your website. Whenever you find yourself thinking about your secondary audience (the reader), make sure you’re thinking about the publisher’s readers – not your own. That settled, you can go on to focus on regular audience-headline considerations such as making the headline attention-getting, targeted, and benefit driven.

Conclusion

With the emergence of article submission as a great way to generate a high search engine ranking, and the associated proliferation of article submission spam, the right headline is more important than ever. The important thing to remember is that you’re faced with a gatekeeper, and you need to address their needs first.

By following all the publisher-focused tips above, you’ll not only see your article published many more times, you’ll also see it published on more relevant websites. This will help both your ranking (because links from relevant sites are always the best) and your click-thru traffic (because the audience will be more relevant).

Happy headlining!
* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter, advertising copywriter, and Article Submission Specialist. He is a director of article submission alternative, PublishHub, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com or http://www.publishhub.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to purchase his e-book, SEO Secrets.

Source: http://www.365articles.com

While that change caused many sites to be dropped from search results, many came back in a few months – prompting a never ending stream of conspiracy theories and chicken little warnings about an impending change – my site is falling!

But – I digress. According to Google PageRank is more than alive and kicking – in their own words “PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools”. Techies may want to read some whitepapers on the topic – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brins stanford paper is a good place to start.

So understanding Pagerank and monitoring your sites PR ranking is a good idea. How do you find your rank? Best way is from the google toolbar – install it in your browser and accept the advanced functions version (different terms for firefox and internet explorer users – but you get the picture). Once pagerank is installed, surf to a popular page (anonymous surfing online perhaps?) and look at the bar. As I write this, netcloak.com has a PageRank of 5 – which could change as time progresses. Yahoo.com has a PageRank of 9 and a lot more traffic than netcloak – so it ranks higher.

There are other browser toolbars that report pagerank – Quirk has a firefox extension that reports PageRank and Alexa rank – another site popularity ranking system. Alexa has come under fire of privacy / spyware advocates – but it does provide another useful view of the surfing cosmos. Quirk has a anonymous mode that uses anonymizer.net – but there is a slight delay in retrieving the ranks and if anonymizer is overtaxed / offline no ranking is reported. Another nit – the pagerank results in quirk are sometimes different than the pagerank results from the google bar – in one situation, quirk incorrectly reported a site as unranked (meaning that the site was removed from google) while google reported otherwise. So if you’re trading pagerank stories, make sure that your using the same source – otherwise, you may be in for a shock [no more chicken little links ] . Quirk is at version 1.11 right now, so one can’t be too critical of the tool just yet – besides, it provides a lot of other good info in a small amount of screen space.

Does Pagerank matter? It seems to matter to Google – perhaps less than before flordia, but important nevertheless. PageRank may not be the end all metric, but it is one to watch – and its better to have some information that nothing at all.