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		<title>Search Engine optimization for Small Business</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/search-engine-optimization-for-small-business/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/search-engine-optimization-for-small-business/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:12:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Local Business Marketing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=158</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do you have a keyword strategy and is your website optimized for your business? What I&#8217;m getting at is that when someone is looking for a product or service on the internet they&#8217;ll type a word or phrase into the search engine and see what pops up, Right? You do it yourself whenever you are [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/checkmark1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-159" title="Internet Marketing For Small Business" src="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/checkmark1.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="58" /></a>Do you have a keyword strategy and is your website optimized for your business? What I&#8217;m getting at is that when someone is looking for a product or service on the internet they&#8217;ll type a word or phrase into the search engine and see what pops up, Right? You do it yourself whenever you are searching for something on Google, Yahoo, Bing or the hundreds of other places you can search from.</p>
<p>You need and should want to have a well optimized website for your business. I want you to understand that there is a difference between just having a site because everyone say&#8217;s &#8220;when you&#8217;re in business you need a website&#8221;, and having a website that becomes a Sales Force for your business.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s get this out of the way right here. If you just want to have a website there are a lot of low cost options available for you. I&#8217;ve seen offers for websites starting at $4.99 a month. Building a website is a technical function. With technology the way it is, designers have some point and click options where you fill in your business name and address, click a button and you have a site instantly.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s nothing wrong with this option if all you are looking for is an online business card and are okay with sending your own traffic to it. In fact for a pay-per-click program this would be similar to what is called a landing page. Building a Website for Search Engine Optimization is completely different.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s get back to your business and a search engine strategy for your business. What is the one, two, or even the few things you do in your business that sets you apart from your competitors? Stop and think about this for a moment. I&#8217;m not looking for a broad generalization here. If your business is Auto Repair you can&#8217;t just say &#8220;we fix Foreign and Domestic Automobiles&#8221; that&#8217;s too general. You need to be more specific here.</p>
<p>If you want to use the internet for marketing your business you need to zero in on what you do best and then start from there. Over time you will add all the other services to the site; however you want to make sure you&#8217;re targeting your optimal customer first.</p>
<p>To understand why you want to optimize for the core customer lets use the Auto repair business example. Let&#8217;s say that you do general auto repair you have a website built and it basically states that you repair Foreign and Domestic Automobiles. Well if you type into Google &#8220;Auto Repair&#8221; Google will give you over 45 million pages that mention auto repair to look at. How is your website going to stand out? It&#8217;s like trying to find a grain of sand in the desert that has your name on.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re a shop owner, and you have a well optimized website for the term &#8220;BMW 735i tune up&#8221; (without quotes). If someone types into Google, &#8220;BMW 735i tune up&#8221; they then are only given 26,600 page returns, (not the 45 million plus). Now this is something a SEO/SEM specialist can work with. If a geographic modifier is added in like&#8221; BMW 735i tune up in Las Vegas&#8221; we&#8217;re down to 6,440 page returns. You should definitely be able to get first page position on this search term with a little work.</p>
<p>Are you starting to understand why keywords and how a website or better yet, webpage optimization is important to you and your business? To further understand this importance, who would be a better customer for your business if you&#8217;re the shop owner, the guy that somehow found you by typing in auto repair, or the guy with the 735i who is looking for the tune up?</p>
<p>Take a look at your own business and I&#8217;m sure you can make the comparison with the services you offer. A well optimized website/webpage will get you targeted customers raising their hand and saying I&#8217;m ready to do business with you.</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Internet Marketing For Small Business</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/internet-marketing-for-small-business/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/internet-marketing-for-small-business/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:54:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[analytics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[optimization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SEO]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With small business marketing and the internet the first thing a business will need is a well optimized website. Internet marketing for small business relies on a marketing plan and the website is the foundation of the plan. The website must be optimized for related keywords or phrases someone would use to find a business [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/affiliate-marketing-mistakes-to-avoid.tmp_1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-129" title="Small Business Marketing Advice" src="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/affiliate-marketing-mistakes-to-avoid.tmp_1.jpg" alt="" width="351" height="162" /></a>With small business marketing and the internet the first thing a business will need is a well optimized website. Internet marketing for small business relies on a marketing plan and the website is the foundation of the plan. The website must be optimized for related keywords or phrases someone would use to find a business with. For some businesses a new website may be needed or an existing website will need to be tweaked.</p>
<p>If a website is more than a few years old it will definitely need some updating. With today&#8217;s web savvy population an outdated site will stand out for all the wrong reasons. With small business marketing the website is the first point of contact. The website or technically the web page, has to have a compelling message to grab the attention of the visitor. A website will have a half a second or less to say &#8220;HEY, LOOK HERE&#8221; (shouting intended).</p>
<p>Internet marketing for small business if done well can reward the business owner with an almost unlimited supply of new customers. If the search engines find a webpage with relevant content for a search term then the website that that page is on can gain first page placement in the search engine. The first page can receive over 90% of the search traffic for a term or keyword. We&#8217;ll talk about keywords more in a minute. The thing is, a website can dominate one page with more than one listing while showing up for multiple phrases on multiple pages. Depending on the term or keyword, there can be hundreds if not thousands of inquires for the term or phrase.</p>
<p>If you are a small business owner and you are not sure about your site talk to a SEM (search engine marketing) specialist not a website designer and here is why. Building a website is a technical function and a skilled designer can knock out a site pretty quick these days. Designers are now hiring SEM specialists to enhance their client&#8217;s web marketing needs. This is not to say that all designers don&#8217;t understand marketing or optimizing a website. You just want to make sure of the direction of YOUR marketing before designing the site</p>
<p>The SEM specialist will take the time to learn about you and your business in order to come up with a marketing plan that, number one fits a budget and is workable. A search marketing campaign follows a plan and the plan should have a way to measure the results. The technical function of building a site should come only after a solid course of action has been determined. The marketing plan can be put together in a few days after an initial meeting with a SEM specialist.</p>
<p>The SEM marketer needs to research your business to find a list of keywords that your best customer would use to find you on the internet. After a discussion with you and a review of the potential of the keywords, is when the website would be looked at. The Website should have one goal only and that is to compel visitors to take an action. The action can be as simple as to leave an e-mail address while requesting more information, make a purchase, book an appointment or call the business direct. Any one of these actions is called a conversion. Conversions are the goal.</p>
<p>When looking for someone or a company to work with on SEM for your business you will also hear about SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you look up SEO or SEM at Wikipedia you&#8217;ll get similar definitions. Suffice to say Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization go hand in hand. In this article I&#8217;m addressing natural or organic traffic, there is a lot more that the SEO/SEM specialist will take into consideration when organizing a plan for a business. SEM and SEO best practices overlap.</p>
<p>To get started marketing your business on the internet get a hold of a SEM/SEO specialist. And I also want to mention that you shouldn&#8217;t get too hung up about speaking to someone that says they are a specialist for your industry. Smart businesses look outside their industry for ideas and inspiration all the time. With SEO and SEM you are looking for someone that understands what it takes to get a website to the top of the search engines. Looking at a specialist that only works within one industry may result in a myopic solution. The search engines reward uniqueness, this is one time when doing what everyone else in your industry is doing may not be the right thing for your business future.</p>
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		<title>Ongoing Monitoring Of Search Engine Positions</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/ongoing-monitoring-of-search-engine-positions/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/ongoing-monitoring-of-search-engine-positions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:19:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Onsite Optimization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[analytics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[optimization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SEO]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=107</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor.
If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor.</p>
<p>If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.</p>
<p>This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.</p>
<p>Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.</p>
<p>In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It&#8217;s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.</p>
<p>Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes &#8211; many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking &#8211; your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch &#8220;the market&#8221; closely.</p>
<p>Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn&#8217;t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.</p>
<p>You must also deal with your competition &#8211; a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor&#8217;s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor&#8217;s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.</p>
<p>Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.</p>
<p>This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present!</p>
<p>People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out <a href="http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html">http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html</a> for a current list of website favorites.</p>
<p>Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations &#8211; this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.</p>
<p>If all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders &#8211; those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions &#8211; have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.</p>
<p>Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.</p>
<p>Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.</p>
<p>Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture &#8211; your long-term marketing campaign.</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Increasing Your search Engine Rankings</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/increasing-your-search-engine-rankings/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/increasing-your-search-engine-rankings/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:05:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=105</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A high search engine ranking for your website is essential that if you to get the most you can out of your website.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through the main search engines Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A high search engine ranking for your website is essential that if you to get the most you can out of your website.</p>
<p>At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through the main search engines Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase.</p>
<p>The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the amount of traffic that is directed to your website. That&#8217;s what search engine optimization is about.</p>
<p>We like to start with a few simple items on your pages, then make some small adjustments, and most likely we’ll see some improvement to rankings.</p>
<p>The first item to examine is the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage&#8217;s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.</p>
<p>Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six to seven words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.</p>
<p>The next item to put under the microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords &#8211; the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.</p>
<p>Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.</p>
<p>To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, want your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.</p>
<p>Next we come to what is called meta tags. Meta tags is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it&#8217;s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.</p>
<p>We look at the source code to check this. If you would like to find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you can access the code. To do this, click the &#8220;view&#8221; button on the browser menu bar, and select &#8220;source.&#8221; This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page.</p>
<p>If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, once again you’ll want to ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.</p>
<p>The last issue we come to is link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.</p>
<p>If you type in &#8220;free link popularity check&#8221; in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren&#8217;t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website. Whatever you do don’t sign up for a linking program that promises hundreds or thousands of links for a cheap price. Those types of programs can hurt your search rankings beyond belief.</p>
<p>Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. If you are not comfortable with some of the processes we’ve discussed then contact us to review your site for you. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.</p>
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		<title>Evaluating Web Site Performance</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/evaluating-web-site-performance/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/evaluating-web-site-performance/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:17:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=103</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don&#8217;t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don&#8217;t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.</p>
<p>If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven&#8217;t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.</p>
<p>However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.</p>
<p>To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25? 00 X 100).</p>
<p>If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.</p>
<p>You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you.</p>
<p>In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.</p>
<p>Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it&#8217;s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.</p>
<p>Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.</p>
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		<title>Analyzing Web Traffic Statistics</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/analyzing-web-traffic-statistics/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/analyzing-web-traffic-statistics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:30:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=100</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.
Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.</p>
<p>Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don&#8217;t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let&#8217;s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.</p>
<p>These figures are the most accurate measure of your website&#8217;s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.</p>
<p>There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as &#8220;hits&#8221; and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. A hit simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.</p>
<p>The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.</p>
<p>The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.</p>
<p>It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.</p>
<p>Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page. If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.</p>
<p>As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.</p>
<p>Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice an exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.</p>
<p>After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it&#8217;s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor &#8211; meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.</p>
<p>However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed &#8211; or should I say misdirected &#8211; to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor&#8217;s needs and motivations.</p>
<p>Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.</p>
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		<title>Ranking Rules of Thumb for a Website</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/ranking-rules-of-thumb-for-a-website/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/ranking-rules-of-thumb-for-a-website/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:15:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Onsite Optimization]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=98</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Content counts, and content near the top of a page counts for more than content at the end. In particular, the HTML title and the first couple lines of text are the most important part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear in the HTML title or [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Content counts, and content near the top of a page counts for more than content at the end. In particular, the HTML title and the first couple lines of text are the most important part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear in the HTML title or first couple of lines of text of one of your pages, chances are very good that that page will appear high in the list of search results.</p>
<p>A crawler/spider search engine can base its ranking on both static factors (a computation of the value of page independent of any particular query) and query-dependent factors.</p>
<h3>Values</h3>
<ul>
<li>Long      pages, which are rich in meaningful text (not randomly generated letters      and words).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Pages      that serve as good hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have      related content (topic similarity, rather than random meaningless links,      such as those generated by link exchange programs or intended to generate      a false impression of &#8220;popularity&#8221;).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The      connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a      page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the      &#8220;quality&#8221; ranking of those particular sites. This is calculated      for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is      &#8220;good&#8221; if many pages at many different sites point to it, and      especially if many &#8220;good&#8221; sites point to it.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The level of the directory in      which the page is found. Higher is considered more important. If a page is      buried too deep, the crawler simply won&#8217;t go that far and will never find      it.</li>
</ul>
<p>These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new good pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it, so others can build links to it, and so you know that it&#8217;s in the index</p>
<h3>Query-Dependent Factors</h3>
<ul>
<li>The HTML      title.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The first      lines of text.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Query      words and phrases appearing early in a page rather than late.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Meta tags, which are treated as      ordinary words in the text, but like words that appear early in the text      (unless the meta tags are patently unrelated to the content on the page      itself, in which case the page will be penalized)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Words      mentioned in the &#8220;anchor&#8221; text associated with hyperlinks to      your pages. (E.g., if lots of good sites link to your site with anchor      text &#8220;breast cancer&#8221; and the query is &#8220;breast cancer,&#8221;      chances are good that you will appear high in the list of matches.)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Blanket Policy On Doorway Pages And Cloaking</h3>
<p>Many search engines are opposed to doorway pages and cloaking. They consider doorway and cloaked pages to be spam and encourage people to use other avenues to increase the relevancy of their pages. We’ll talk about doorway pages and cloaking a bit later.</p>
<p><strong><br />
</strong></p>
<h3>Meta Tags (Ask.Com As An Example)</h3>
<p>Though Meta tags are indexed and considered to be regular text, Ask.com claims it doesn&#8217;t give them priority over HTML titles and other text. Though you should use meta tags in all your pages, some webmasters claim their doorway pages for Ask.com rank better when they don&#8217;t use them. If you do use Meta tags, make your description tag no more than 150 characters and your keywords tag no more than 1,024 characters long.</p>
<h3>Keywords In The URL And File Names</h3>
<p>It&#8217;s generally believed that Ask.com gives some weight to keywords in filenames and URL names. If you&#8217;re creating a file, try to name it with keywords.</p>
<h3>Keywords In The ALT Tags</h3>
<p>Ask.com indexes ALT tags, so if you use images on your site, make sure to add them. ALT tags should contain more than the image&#8217;s description. They should include keywords, especially if the image is at the top of the page. ALT tags are explained later.</p>
<h3>Page Length</h3>
<p>There&#8217;s been some debate about how long doorway pages for AltaVista should be. Some webmasters say short pages rank higher, while others argue that long pages are the way to go. According to AltaVista&#8217;s help section, it prefers long and informative pages. We&#8217;ve found that pages with 600-900 words are most likely to rank well.</p>
<h3>Frame Support</h3>
<p>AltaVista has the ability to index frames, but it sometimes indexes and links to pages intended only as navigation. To keep this from happening to you, submit a frame-free site map containing the pages that you want indexed. You may also want to include a &#8220;robots.txt&#8221; file to prohibit AltaVista from indexing certain pages.</p>
<p><strong><br />
</strong></p>
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		<title>Onsite Optimization For Local Business Website</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/onsite-optimization-for-local-business-website/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/onsite-optimization-for-local-business-website/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Onsite Optimization]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=91</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Optimizing a website for a Local Business
important tips and tricks that can be employed.
 


Do’s

A      website should have crystal clear hierarchy and links. And preferably the site should be easy to navigate.
A site map is required to help the users go      around your site and [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h1>Optimizing a website for a Local Business</h1>
<h3>important tips and tricks that can be employed.</h3>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<h2></h2>
<h2></h2>
<h2>Do’s</h2>
<ul>
<li>A      website should have crystal clear hierarchy and links. And preferably the site should be easy to navigate.</li>
<li>A site map is required to help the users go      around your site and in case the site map has more than 100 links, then it      is<a href="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/green-checkmark1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-94" title="green checkmark" src="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/green-checkmark1.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="194" /></a> advisable to break it into several pages to avoid clutter.</li>
<li>Come up with <strong>essential</strong> and <strong>precise keywords</strong> and      make sure that your website features relevant and informative content.</li>
<li>The Google crawler will not recognize text      hidden in the images, so when describing important names, keywords or      links; stick with plain text.</li>
<li>The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive      and accurate and the website should have no broken links or incorrect      HTML.</li>
<li>Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’      character) should be kept to a minimum as not every search engine spider      is able to crawl them.</li>
<li>The robots.txt file on your web server should      be current and should not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells      crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.</li>
</ul>
<h2></h2>
<h2></h2>
<h2>Don’ts</h2>
<ul>
<li>When making a site, do not cheat your users,      i.e. those people who will surf your website.  Do not provide them with irrelevant      content or present them with any fraudulent schemes.</li>
<li>Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to      increase your site&#8217;s ranking.<a href="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/red-x.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-96" title="red-x" src="http://businessmarketingally.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/red-x.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a></li>
<li>Do      not employ hidden texts or hidden links.</li>
<li>Google frowns upon websites using cloaking      technique.  Hence, it is advisable      to avoid that.</li>
<li>Automated queries should not be sent to Google.</li>
<li>Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and      content.  Also don&#8217;t create multiple      pages, sub-domains, or domains with significantly duplicate content.</li>
<li>Avoid &#8220;doorway&#8221; pages created just      for search engines or other &#8220;cookie cutter&#8221; approaches such as      affiliate programs with hardly any original content.</li>
</ul>
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		<title>Local Business Marketing-Business Marketing Ally</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/local-business-marketing-business-marketing-ally/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/local-business-marketing-business-marketing-ally/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:13:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=88</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to Business Marketing Ally. Business Marketing Ally is dedicated to helping the Local Business owner. We believe that the internet and the World Wide Web hold the key to success for local business.
Local Business Marketing
The use of local search is growing at a tremendous rate. Local businesses with a Web based marketing strategy can [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Welcome to Business Marketing Ally. Business Marketing Ally is dedicated to helping the Local Business owner. We believe that the internet and the World Wide Web hold the key to success for local business.</p>
<h1>Local Business Marketing</h1>
<p>The use of local search is growing at a tremendous rate. Local businesses with a Web based marketing strategy can maintain and grow market share. If a local business is struggling we believe that the internet can be used to find or locate a complete new customer base.</p>
<p>We believe that the internet can save main street USA. We provide the information and the services you need to make the adjustments to your Marketing. We make on-site and off-site improvements to increase your search rankings and your business will benefit from the increase in organic search traffic. We provide On-site and Off-site Marketing Strategies to increase revenue to businesses. We use websites to funnel traffic, business and revenue. We are Search Engine Marketers (SEM). We optimize the pages of your website to be easily accessible by search engine spiders so they can be easily spidered and indexed.</p>
<p>A spider is a robot that search engines use to check millions of web pages very quickly and sort them by relevance.  A page is indexed when it is spidered and deemed appropriate content to be placed in the search engines results for people to click on.</p>
<p>The art and science of understanding how search engines identify pages that are relevant to a query made by a visitor and designing marketing strategies based on this is called search engine optimization. Search engines offer the most cost effective mechanism to acquire “real” and “live” business leads. It is found that in most cases, search engine optimization delivers a better ROI than other forms such as online advertisements, e-mail marketing and newsletters, affiliate and pay per click advertising, and digital campaigns and promotions.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>Video Marketing For Local Businesses</title>
		<link>http://businessmarketingally.com/video-marketing-for-local-businesses/</link>
		<comments>http://businessmarketingally.com/video-marketing-for-local-businesses/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:54:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Don</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://businessmarketingally.com/?p=83</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Video Marketing for local Business works. It is a shortcut any small or not so small business can use to catapult to the top of the search engines. Search engines love video and a video on Youtube can get indexed in a matter of minutes.
If you want to use Video Marking for your local business [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Video Marketing for local Business works. It is a shortcut any small or not so small business can use to catapult to the top of the search engines. Search engines love video and a video on Youtube can get indexed in a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>If you want to use Video Marking for your local business and get it posted don&#8217;t worry about coming up with perfect content. Getting the video online is the important part. All that is needed is a 60 to 90 second video to start with.</p>
<p>You want to think of the video as a short commercial for your business. You need a short message and some photos to link the message to. Remember that people have a short attention span. Most people will not sit through a long message so you want to get to the point quick.</p>
<p>Using this type of Video Marketing for a Local Business you want to be sure and have your website url embedded into the video. When you think of the placement of the url think about how to use it early in the video. You don&#8217;t want to wait to the last frame of the video to announce your website. Always keep your target audience in mind.</p>
<p>So what will you say in your video-commercial? Just look to give a few high points about your product or service. Keep in mind that the cost of producing a video in comparison to a commercial on TV or radio is substantially lower. A good plan is to make multiple videos retelling your message. The more videos you produce and submit the better.</p>
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