Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and SEO

Indexing has always been considered a highly targeted science. Enter a search query into Google search and the pages that are displayed are generally optimized towards that exact word or term. However, in their continual battle to server the most relevant but most natural pages with genuinely useful information Google has injected latent semantic indexing (LSI) into its algorithms.

What Is LSI?

LSI is a unique indexing method that potentially takes Google search one step closer to becoming human in its way of thinking. If we were to manually search through web pages to find information related to a given search term we would be likely to generate our own results based on the theme of the site, rather than whether a word exists or doesn’t exist on the page.

Why Search Engines Might Adopt Latent Semantic Indexing

The extremely rigid form of “keyword indexing” also meant that black hat SEO techniques were easier to implement. Search engines could be manipulated into ranking a site highly by using set formula. Originally, cramming a page with a particular keyword or set of keywords meant a site would rank highly for that search term. The proceeding set of algorithms ensured that your link profile played more of an important part than your keyword density. Reciprocal linking soon followed once again making it possible to manipulate the search engine spiders by exchanging links with tens, hundreds, or thousands of websites.

Reciprocal linking was soon beaten as Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo and MSN gave less credence to a reciprocal link as they did to a one-way inbound link. Latent Semantic Indexing is another, particularly powerful, method to try and make their result pages appear more natural with natural pages filled with natural content.

The Effects

The introduction of LSI has seen some dramatic changes in the search engine result pages already. Sites that had previously performed well because of an impressive link profile based on a single keyword have found their pages slip in the rankings. Other pages with a more diverse portfolio of inbound links are taking the lead with search terms for which they had not previously performed.

SEO is far from dead because of LSI, in fact if anything, it has probably increased the need for professional white-hat SEO on your website. The field of SEO, though, has almost certainly changed. Website content copywriting for Google’s benefit is not merely made up of keyword density and keyword placement as it once was and link-building techniques will need to change to incorporate LSI algorithms but it can be done.

Writing Content For LSI

If optimizing solely for Google then a web page can, theoretically, be naturally written and naturally worded. When we write we instinctively include the appropriate keyword in our text. In order to avoid repetition (or keyword optimization, as it was once called) we would often alter some instances of these keywords for other words with the same or very similar meaning. We naturally include the plural or singular form of a keyword as well as different tenses and a number of different stems of that keyword. In the eyes of LSI algorithms this is all good news.

Looking At Your Link Profile

A link profile should no longer consist of thousands of links with the same anchor text (that of your primary keyword). There’s no reason to panic if you already have this kind of profile. Instead you should look at relevant and similar terms and improve your link profile by gaining links using these as your anchor text.

What It Offers Web Searchers

From the point of view of web searchers, LSI offers some distinct advantages over its earlier form of indexing. For example, LSI recognizes that the word “engine” in “search engine optimization” is not related to searches for terms like “steam engine” or “locomotive engine” and is instead related to Internet marketing topics. In theory, LSI results give a much more accurate page of results as well as providing a broader range of pages still geared towards a particular topic.

Where Google Leads, Others Generally Follow

It is widely acknowledged that Google is the search engine at the forefront of latent semantic indexing. On the whole they try to generate results pages that are literally filled with genuine, useful results and LSI certainly provides another string in their bow. Yahoo and MSN, for now, seem more than happy to go along with keyword specific indexing although Yahoo are known to look at singular and plural keyword variations as well as keyword stemming when judging keyword density.

The Effect On Your Website

How it affects the individual Webmaster is dependent on how they go about promoting their site already. If the pages are filled with natural content including keywords and keyword alternatives, and the link profile is similarly diversified for a number of related keywords then the fact is it won’t change very much. However, if all of your efforts have been concentrated, either on-page or off-page, with a single keyword then it’s time to readdress the balance.

The 52 Top SEO Tips – Here Are 10 of Them

From the obvious to the “Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before”, here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.

Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

There you have it: 10 of the 52 Top SEO Tips, a free tip sheet that comes with Don’t Get Banned By the Search Engines:

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings.

Easy, No-Cost Tips for Promoting Your Website

If you think creatively and plan to save your advertising dollars, you can promote your site very effectively on the cheap end. Some methods will generate quick results while others will slowly grow to a steady increase in traffic.

Forum Posts

Forum posts work much like Yahoo Answers which is actually a type of forum. When you post in a forum you get to not only list the forum post, but you also get a personal profile with a signature. Usually you can list your URL in the signature tab and any posts you make will also be inbound links to your site. Also, when you post in a forum you are adding credibility to your reputation. Building credibility and a link to your site are two instant bonuses.

Fresh Content

Article marketing is becoming a very lucrative business. Many new search engine algorithms have changed to now look at the amount and quality of site content. In order to generate site content you could spend lots of time writing page after page of new information, but if you are like many you don’t have the extra time to spend on this aspect of marketing. There are several sites which offer fresh content on a variety of subjects and will allow you to use the information provided you include the author’s tagline intact. Offering this fresh information will give your readers a reason to come back and it will give them something to tell their friends about, thus increasing your traffic.

Opt-in lists

An opt-in list is the perfect tool for capturing important content needed to target your readers with sales and promotions. Anyone who is on your opt-in list has given approval to let you contact them with information about our products and services. You can use your opt-in list to promote new products that you will add to your site and to draw attention to your site’s offerings. When members of your list find something they like they will be more likely to pass that info on to their friends and after all, “word-of-mouth” is the most effective and most inexpensive form of marketing available to anyone.

These are just a few of the many ways to promote your site for free. If you think creatively and plan to save your advertising dollars, you can promote your site very effectively on the cheap end. Some methods will generate quick results while others will slowly grow to a steady increase in traffic.

You will need to track the overall effectiveness of each method for your own situation so that you do not spend too much time on a particular method that doesn’t work for you. SEO should always be your first step in the process and if possible, should be considered in the site design stages.

SEO-Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization

Title Tag and Meta Tags are the author-generated source codes that are positioned in the <Head> segment of your HTML document. Apart from the Title Tag, other information inserted is not visible to the person surfing your web page, but is visible only to the search engine crawlers. Title and Meta Description Tags are especially important as they can be used to influence the ranking of your site (to a certain extent) and the way it appears in some search results. There are several Meta Tags like Meta Description Tag, Meta Keywords Tag and more, but out of the existing Tags the most important and popular ones are the Title Tag and the Meta Description Tag. Though the Title Tag does not belong to the Meta Tag family (click for more information on Meta Tags), yet from the Search Engine Optimization point of view, the Title Tag is the most significant tag on your web site, followed by the Meta Description Tag.

What is a Title Tag?
The Title Tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the Title bar at the top of your web browser . These words do not appear anywhere else on your web page. For instance, the Title Tag of this page appears as ‘ Meta Tag Optimization : Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization ‘ at the top bar of your web browser. This is because these words were entered into the Title Tag of the web site’s HTML code. Usually, the Title Tag is the first element in the <Head> area of your site, followed by the Meta Description and the Meta Keywords Tags. Before, we discuss the Title Tag in greater detail; lets see how it looks in your web site’s HTML code:

<Head>

<Title> Meta Tag Optimization: Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization</Title>

</Head>

Why is the Title Tag Important from Search Engine Optimization perspective ?
Title Tag is an important Tag amongst other SEO related options, as it not only communicates the theme of your web page to the human visitors but is also considered very important by the Search Engine crawlers. Title Tag is not a Meta Tag, but nevertheless it is the most important of all Tags. Almost all crawler based search engines use the Title Tag to gather information about your web site. The search engines use the words or the content of the Title Tag during the ranking process to analyze the relevance of your web page. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb use your web page’s Title Tag to evaluate its relevance. Title Tag is the hyperlinked text title that is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). The users, in turn, click on this hyperlink to go to your web site.

The Title Tag is also used as the text when you ‘bookmark’ a page or add a certain web page to your ‘favorites’ list in your browser.

A carefully constructed Title Tag is very important for your page’s ranking with the search engines.

Of late, a large number of articles have been written with differing views and opinions regarding the relevance and benefits of various Meta Tags. Most experts, however, agree that the Title Tag is a significant tool in any search engine optimization campaign.

Working with the Title Tag
Since the Title Tag plays a vital role in determining your site’s ranking in the SERP, you need to pay a lot of attention to the words that appear in the Title Tag and the order in which they appear. You need to develop a crisply worded Title Tag that includes your most relevant keyword phrases and performs the function of announcing the summary of your web page’s content.

Title Tag and Keywords
Amongst all the places you can use your important keyword phrases, the usage of keywords in the Title Tag gives the highest weight.

While using your keyword phrases in the Title Tag, it is important to be highly focused. You should use the same keywords not just in your Title Tag, but also in your page content and the Meta Description Tag of your web page. If the keywords you intend using in your Title Tag do not appear anywhere else in your page’s content, then avoid using them in your page title as the weight of the keywords in the Title Tag gets diluted.

It is essential to sequence your keyword phrases correctly in your Title Tag. The order in which they appear is of great importance. Having your most important keyword phrase towards the beginning of the Title Tag helps display your title in bold in the SERP (search engines result pages).

Other Do’s and Don’ts

• Consider using both singular and plural forms of the important words in your Title Tag. For instance, you may use both ‘loan’ and ‘loans’ while making the Title Tag. Google is still experimenting with Stemming (interchange of singular and plural terms); however, it is fluctuating in its deployment frequently. A word of Caution: Do not overdo it.
• Title Tag length : Google usually reads about 90 characters of your Title Tag. Therefore, a Title Tag of about 80-90 characters is good enough.
• Do not use keywords repeatedly as the density of your keywords does not matter in your Title Tag.
• The sequence in which keywords appear in your Title Tag is important. Try using natural phrases for your Title Tag, which read better and will likely conform to your Keyword Phrases.
• Avoid using the same Title Tag throughout your site. Try using a unique Title Tag for each web page and use keyword Phrases that holds theme relevance to that page. You also get to leverage more keyword phrases if you individualize the Title Tag in all pages.
• Most search engines are not case sensitive ; therefore, you can write your Title Tag in a way that looks most visually appealing.
• Title Tag should ideally read like a phrase that makes some grammatical sense, not just a collection of keywords. This is all the more important as the Title Tag usually appears as the text when you ‘bookmark’ or add a page to your ‘favorites’ list. Therefore, it should make sense when a person reads it later. For instance, if you want to include the keywords Home Loans, fast clearance, No credit check in your Title Tag, you can write a Title Tag that reads:

Home Loans: fast clearance with no credit check.

What to Include in your Title Tag ?

You could put the product or service you are offering in the Title Tag, instead of your firm or company name. This is because most users when searching for, information search for specific products or services, not company names. Also note that search engines read about 80-90 characters in your Title Tag. This is prime Real Estate for your important keywords. If you strongly feel like putting your company or domain name in your Title Tag, then, do so at the end. Wasting several characters by inserting your site name does you little good.

In a nutshell, the basic ingredients of a good Title Tag are :

• It should announce the summary of your web page content.
• It should read like a crisply worded sales pitch that is enticing enough to make the users click on your entry when it is displayed in SERP.
• It should include your most important keyword phrases or search terms.
• The sequencing of the keywords should make logical sense.
• Each page of your website should have different and customized Title Tag relevant to the context of that page.

The Title and Meta Description Tags are very important aspects of your search engine optimization campaign. This exercise begins with carrying out a thorough Keyword Phrase research. Keyword phrase research forms the most essential and important aspect of any SEO initiative. After selecting your most relevant keyword phrases and writing a keyword rich copy for your web page, you can now work these important search terms into your Title and Meta Description Tags. Read our detailed Article on Keyword Phrase Research .

The Title and Meta Description Tags are very important aspects of your search engine optimization campaign. This exercise begins with carrying out a thorough Keyword.

Phrase research. Keyword phrase research forms the most essential and important aspect of any SEO initiative. After selecting your most relevant keyword phrases and writing a keyword rich copy for your web page, you can now work these important search terms into your Title and Meta Description Tags. Read our detailed article on Keyword Phrase Research.

What is Meta Description Tag?

The Meta Description Tag is a part of HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. The words placed in this Meta Tag, are often used in the search engines result pages (SERP), just below the Title Tag as a brief description of your page. In the Search Engine Results Pages, after reading the Title, a user usually studies the description of the page and decides whether she wants to visit your site or not.

Some Search Engines prefer to ignore your Meta Description Tag and build the description summary on the basis of the search term for the SERP on the fly. They usually pick up parts of the text on your page wherever the search terms appear. The only exceptions are the Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content, and some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such a case, Google picks up your entire Meta Description Tag and displays it.

This is the way Meta Description Tag appears in your site’s HTML code:

<Head>

<Meta name=”description” content=”Meta Tag Optimization: Title Tag Optimization and Meta Description Tag Optimization. Tips about how to optimize your most important Tags.”>

</Head>

Importance of Meta Description Tag
All search engines do not give very high prominence to the Meta Description Tag and may generate a description on the fly while listing your web page in SERP. However, in some search engines, a good Meta Description Tag might help a page to rank higher for your targeted search terms. This holds true for Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content as well as some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In such cases, some search engines pick up the exact Meta Description Tag and display it in its SERP, just below the Title Tag. Hence, it is important to write a crisp and enticing Meta Description Tag that includes your important keyword phrases and manages to interest your user, thus making her click on your entry.

Working with Meta Description Tag
Keyword Phrases and Meta Description Tag: Include your most relevant and important keyword phrases in your page’s Meta Description Tag. As in the case of Title Tag, focus on the same keyword phrases as you used in your page’s Title Tag and body text. Fewer and highly targeted search phrases can boost your web page’s relevance in the search engines results. Hence, stress should be on writing a brief yet informative description for your web page.

The Meta Description Tag of your web page should not read like a collection of keywords, but should be written as an informative and interesting summary of your web page.

Do’s and Don’ts of a good Meta Description Tag :

• Excessive keyword repetition should be avoided. Instead, pay attention to the sequence in which your keywords appear. Your most important terms should be placed in the beginning.
• Make sure each page on your web site has a different and a unique Meta Description Tag using the keyword phrases that are relevant to that web page.
• A Meta Description Tag of 25-30 words should do fine.
• The most important keyword phrases should, ideally be placed at the beginning of your Meta Description Tag, which increases your chances of better Search Engine Rankings.

5 Rules of (SMO) Social Media Optimization

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client’s website:

1. Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites.  Many sites are “static” – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront.  To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.  To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards.  From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
5. Encourage the mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).  YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.  Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

9 Easy Tips For Online Success

Online marketing is an interesting prospect to generate income from the internet. To make money from the internet, you can either create your own product or an easier way is to sell product created by someone else or a merchant. In simple terms, you become their affiliate. This article will provide 9 easy tips on affiliate marketing for beginners to generate their first online sale.

1) Be patient. Everyone wants to make money fast. They want to be able to run before they can walk. Patient is a virtue even on the web. It is better to learn something thoroughly the first time then to rush into things quickly and have to correct your mistakes later.

2) Put in the work. Action is the key to success in online marketing. Plough the field and put what you’ve learn into practice.

3) Promote one affiliate program at a time. Put your focus and energy on one affiliate product or program at a time. Do not promote too many product simultaneously. You can try to do it but your results will be mediocre.

4) Go for the long haul. Look at affiliate marketing as a business and not a hobby. Think long term.

5) Keep things simple. Some of the most effective internet marketing strategies are the simplest. Strategy such as blogging and article marketing are simple systems and yet they generate good results.

6) Learn the basics. Commit to getting good at internet marketing basics such as article marketing, traffic generation, sales copy writing, testing and tracking promotional campaign etc.

7) Use leverage. Think of ways how you can do more with less. If you have money for your affiliate business, think of how you can leverage it to generate more valuable time for you.

Have a business plan on the first day. Write down what you want to achieve from your affiliate marketing business from day one. Put it down on paper your goals and the necessary steps needed to reach them.

9) Set a dateline for everything you do. This will help you get rid of procrastination. By setting a time frame, you will know how long it will take you to achieve your goals.

Affiliate marketing for beginner may seems a daunting task. However, every successful internet marketers started off as a newbie. The 9 tips above will help you to get started on making your first sale from your online business.

Tips for Better Pay Per Click PPC Ads

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, there are two ways to decrease your spending. You can lower your cost per click (which will lower your position and your CTR) or you can improve your ads (which will increase your CTR and your position). Great ads will attract more clicks for a given amount of impressions, which will be rewarded by Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing with lower bid prices or higher rankings.

The real secret to writing “the best ad on the page” is to ruthlessly test and track multiple ads over multiple test iterations. By doing this, you will improve your ad over time, and will eventually have a great performing ad with a very high click through rate.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few tips you could use to give your initial ads a boost, or to help you beat your personal best performing ad time and time again. So without further ado, here are 18 tips for writing better PPC ads:

1. Write ads for small groups of keywords. By grouping your keywords very tightly, and writing your ads specifically for those keywords, you will give yourself a large advantage over your competition. Many people are too lazy to take the time required to do this properly, yet it is something that will increase your CTR every single time.
2. Work your keywords into the ads as much as possible. If you took the advice from the previous tip, you will have an easier time with this one. You should try to get your keywords to appear multiple times in your ad so that you can take full advantage of keyword bolding. I sometimes include the keyword in all four lines of the PPC ad for maximum bolding.
3. Give the ads some visual appeal. This takes some additional creativity and planning, but can really help your ad to stand out. You can make each line progressively longer (or shorter) for a cascading effect, you can alternate lengths to create a visual “arrow” or “reverse arrow” shape within your ad, or you can make your ad intentionally extra short. All of these will help you ad differentiate itself from the competition and will hopefully attract some eyeballs.
4. Write ads with your audience in mind. When you are writing an ad, think to yourself “what is my audience looking for when they search for this keyword?” If you can “read their minds” and guess their internal dialog, you will be able to answer their exact questions and get their attention. This is another tip that is immensely easier if you group your keywords very tightly.
5. Create an attention-grabbing headline. Nothing in your ad is more important that your headline. The problem with PPC ads is that you don’t get much space for it (25 characters with AdWords). Craft your headline wisely, but don’t stress over it too much, you will probably be split testing many, many different variations before you find the great ones.
6. Ask the audience a question. This is definitely a good strategy for certain markets. If you can work a question into your headline or description, test it out and see how it impacts the CTR. If someone is searching for something, and then you confirm what they are searching for, they are likely to click on your ad. Additionally, the tone of the question, along with the question mark, helps differentiate your ad from the others.
7. Use specific numbers. This is a common copywriting trick that has been used for decades. Numbers create interest and specific numbers create curiosity. They won’t always perform better, but try to test the impact of including numbers in your ad. If you can, include a very specific number such as “314″ instead of “300+” or “76.83%” instead of “75%”. You don’t have to be 100% accurate with the numbers either, as long as you aren’t blatantly lying.
8. Capitalize strategically. It is better to capitalize the first letter of every word? The first letter of important words? Just the first letter of words in the headline? Should you capitalize words in your display URL? You can never be sure until you have tested it, but it is something that you must test. I usually start out capitalizing everything, then try out any combinations I can think of.
9. Borrow ideas from others. Another copywriting principle that has been in practice for decades is borrowing ideas from other ads. Although you should technically only take “ideas” (such as rewriting an ad about “pens” to work with your “cheese” keywords), you won’t get into any trouble copying direct competitors. Take some of the top (or your favorite) ads that are being shown for your keywords and mix them up to create something new. It they are at the top of the listings, they probably have a pretty good ad (or are paying out the nose).
10. Emphasize the benefits of your offer. Yet another age-old copywriting principle. Your audience doesn’t care how many features your are offering or how great they are, they want to know “What’s in it for me?” If you can tell them, in your ad, what benefit they will get from giving you their click, you will likely have a successful ad.
11. Use words that evoke emotion. If you can effectively get people to feel emotions when reading your ad, they will probably feel compelled to click it. The list of emotion words goes on and on, so here is a nice guide to emotion words.
12. Test multiple versions of your display URL. This was touched on in tip number 8, but needs to be expanded. While you should experiment with capitalization (i.e. “DomainName.com” vs “domainname.com”), you should also experiment with “www”, sub domains, and pages. It usually, but not always, increases the CTR when you include the keywords in your URL. You can essentially do this one of two ways: “Key-Words.DomainName.com” or “DomainName.com/Key-Words.” Although some uptight editors might disable these ads if the pages don’t actually exist, you can resubmit them and a nicer editor will realize that there is no harm done.
13. Be cautious with prices. Although prices do have their place as negative qualifiers, they will usually be detrimental to your CTR. Unless your price is the lowest, it is probably best to leave it out of your ad. You can, instead, state the savings as a benefit to the user.
14. Include a call-to-action. Sometimes, the most effective way to get someone to do something is to simply ask them to do it. That’s the principle behind the call to action. Because you have such limited space in a PPC ad, the call-to-action might not be beneficial, but is is at least worth a test. Just including something like “Click here to receive this benefit” is sufficient.
15. Double check spelling and grammar. This might seem obvious, but is can very easy to make a stupid mistake. Having a grammatical or spelling error in your ad hurts the credibility of your ad and will most likely get it disable by an editor, costing you valuable testing time.
16. Don’t waste space with useless words. Like I said before, the space available to you in a pay-per-click ad is extremely limited. Although your ads should be grammatically correct, they do not need to be sophisticated sentences. Keep them simply and concise so that it is easier for the reader to quickly understand what you are offering.
17. Use negative keywords. This isn’t directly related to actually writing your ads, but it is definitely important. It goes along with tip number 1. If you don’t use negative keywords, your ad is going to be triggered by keywords that you didn’t intend for. When this happens, your ad will not match what the consumer was searching for, they will not click your ad, and your CTR will suffer.
18. Make the ad relevant to the landing page. I saved this suggestion for last because it will not effect the CTR of your ad in the least bit (it can, however, effect your landing page quality score). With that being said, it is still very important that you make your ad relevant to the landing page. If a visitor reads a particular offer or benefit in your ad, they are expecting to find it when they click through. Give them what you promised in your ad and you will experience higher conversions. Give them something that doesn’t match the ad and you will have a lot of confused visitors who reach for the back button.

There you have it, eighteen tips I have learned through my experience with PPC marketing. Keep in mind that these are merely suggestions, they can’t possibly be used all at once, and they won’t always make for a better ad. You need to test every change you make to your ads to determine if it has a positive or negative overall effect.

PPC Tricks and Tips

PPC can be a minefield, creating as many problems as it solves – especially if money is an issue. PPC can get very expensive very quickly.

Here are some tricks and tips:

Don’t use any words that could be considered trademarked, such as “McDonald’s” or “ToysRUs.” In many cases, these phrases will result in your account being suspended. Even worse, you could find yourself in a bit of legal hot water – companies like these take their trademarks very seriously, and do not take kindly to people who use them for their own purposes. If for some reason you need to use a trademarked word or phrase, do yourself a favor and get permission before you use it.

Be wary of the promises you make. People are motivated by promises of free stuff beyond, but oftentimes that motivation only goes so far. If you offer something for free, chances are you’ll get lots of click-throughs, but most will only be people in search of something for nothing, which doesn’t do your business any good. In fact, it will cost you money because you have to pay for the fact that they clicked on your ad. If you don’t make such promises up front, you may get fewer click-throughs, but the people who do click on your ad will more likely be serious buyers.

As mentioned above, it’s imperative that you create destination pages. But that job doesn’t stop once the page is created. Periodically check your conversion rates for each page, and if you find that one is suffering much worse than another, change it up. Just as it is important to change the order of your words in your ad campaign, changing your destination pages will help you optimize your conversion rate.

PPC, then, can be an inexpensive easy way to drive traffic to your site, but it can easily get out of hand. Make sure you crunch the numbers are bid according to how much you can actually afford while still potentially making a profit. It won’t do you any good to big so high that your site is ranked first if you can’t afford to sell your product at a rate that will still garner you a profit. Stay on top of things!

Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to targeting prospective customers to your business products or services. A website can contract with one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN and bid on keywords. When a person using the search engine enters one of the keywords in the search box, their ad pops up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Here are some tips to make sure your ad is seen above your competition.

Know Your Niche
Knowing your niche when it comes to pay per click advertising involves knowing what search terms surfers are most likely to type into an internet search engine when looking for a site such as yours. Coming up with as many phrases that describe your website or your product or service is your most handy tool. With this basic list of keywords that describe your niche market you can then proceed to use the internet to help you find more words or phrases that you might not have thought of to add to your list. You can also find derivatives of the main words you thought up to give you a broader scope of keywords to bid on. To find free tools to use online to assist you simply type in “keyword too” into any search engine.

Pick Low Competition Keywords
The world of pay per click advertising is very competitive and the words you might want to bid on can be out of your budget. The key is to find the low competition variations of your main keyword that are less popular and therefore will cost less. The best tool one can have when looking for low competition keywords in their niche is a keyword analyzer software which can be purchased or found for free online. Some keywords tools are very good for doing pay per click research because they not only give you a list of alternatives for any search word you enter, they will also display the number of searches for that keyword and the number of campaigns already running for the keyword phrase you entered. This gives you a good view of what words you can bid on without going over budget, and also allows you to find keywords to bid on that are uncharted, meaning they get a good number of monthly searches but there are no campaigns running for that keyword. Without a keyword analyzer tool you can also find out how many campaigns are running for any keyword by simply typing the word into in the search engine and counting the ads.

Write Engaging Ads
Pay per click ads are typically less than 125 characters. You don’t get lots of ad space to sell, so the object is to get into your customers head and ask yourself how they will benefit from your product or service. Listing a benefit in the form a question is a good way to engage those who view your ads. Some search engines such as Google allow you to score points through relevancy to search terms. Meaning the more relevant your ad is, based on how many times it is view verses how many it is clicked, the higher your ad will be on the list of ads bidding for that keyword. Using your main keyword in the title of the ad and in the ad itself will show your ad as having the exact phase that surfer searched for and thus increases the likeliness that they will click through to your web page.

Test Your Ads
Once you’ve written an add and included the keywords you’d like to bid on, your next step is to write a different ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more click through’s or sales. Once you’ve found this out, write another one and try and beat your previous stats. This will eventually lead to you having the best ads possible. Most pay per click companies will allow you to run two ads simultaneously, sharing the account funds to each and displaying each ad the same number of times.

Once you have a few pay per click campaigns under your belt this system for choosing the right keywords and creating relevant ads will become routine. Done the right way pay per click advertising can be a very cost effective way to promote any online venture you are involved in.

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of Your Website

Alexa toolbar also useful to Browse expired websites database. Many times when we visit any website we got error message that website is not available. We have to simply click The Wayback Machine button on Alexa toolbar and we can see the old data of that website.

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your website?

Alexa Toolbar using millions of users. Alexa Gives Ranking by Analysing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar Users. Alexa Sorting Millions of websites thru Alexa Toolbar and giving numerical rank for each website browsed by Alexa Toolbar.

First Step of increasing your websites Alexa Rank is Download Alexa Toolbar and start browsing your website regularly.

When you completed downloading of Alexa Toolbar, then you can see your websites Alexa Rank on Alexa Toolbar. May be if you dont have Alexa Rank it will Display “No Data” rank. Dont worry after couple of days your website will get Alexa Rank in number.

Keep browsing thru Alexa Toolbar within couple of months period your website will get good Alexa Ranking. Suggest & encourage your friends, relatives, your Company employees to download Alexa Toolbar in their computers. You will see the miracle your compnay websites will get very nice alexa rank.

You can download Alexa Toolbar here also. please click following link to download alexa Toolbar. forward this link to your friends, employees and many others also.

Download Alexa Toolbar

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.
In this article, I’ll examine the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

Lastly, I’ve also included an extensive list of twenty methods and strategies you can use to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.
What is the Alexa Rank?

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.
See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree.

Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

Updates in seo’s Alexa Rank

Since moving to my own domain (from Blogspot) in the middle of January 2007, Dosh Dosh has moved from a rank of around 3 million to the current Alexa rank of 21, 709 within two months.
The growth has been consistent and I think most of it was due to the fact that the content on Dosh Dosh is orientated towards webmasters. Another plausible reason is because overall daily traffic for Dosh Dosh has been growing steadily day by day.
The increase in Alexa Rank was also partially due to the fact that I’m active in several webmaster forums, notably Digital Point which sends me some visitors every day. Getting stumbled and receiving thousands of visitors in a day has also undoubtedly helped to increase Dosh Dosh’s Alexa Rank.

How do I get started with Alexa?

There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

I highly recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.

Can one actually game or manipulate the Alexa Ranking?
I believe that there are methods which will allow you to easily bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the 100,000 level. However, bringing it past the 10,000 or 1,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process, because of the stiff competition among websites.

Some have adamantly stated that there are no proven ways to game Alexa, while others have claimed that auto-surfs and scripts do work to some degree.

I’m not going to take any sides because I can’t guarantee that auto-surfs or other artificial methods will have similar effects for every blog.

The easiest way to know to know if any of the tips mentioned below really work is to actually try them for yourselves and monitor the results.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?promotingwebs.wordpress.com . Replace promotingwebs.wordpress.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Resources on Alexa Rank

Several of the tips listed above were taken from Aaron Wall’s article on Alexa Ranking. This post by Aaron will also give you some insight on Alexa’s webmaster bias.

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic.

Peter Norvig writes about Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design. He examines some problems with Alexa as a traffic measuring tool:

But one bias they don’t really comment on is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, so it overrepresents those people.

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so it’s natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar.

Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexa’s stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa

Marketing Scoop has some tips on improving the Alexa Rank. (Thanks Beth!)

A very long thread on Digital Point which sees webmasters having a discussion on how Alexa Ranks can be gamed or manipulated through scripts and auto-surfs. Worth a read.

There you have it… twenty ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.
What do you think of Alexa? Have you tried increasing your Alexa Rank by any of these methods?