The placement and position of important keywords/keyword phrases on your website will help you get people to go to your website.  You don’t want to spam the search engines and your website visitors with a huge amount (overtly spamming) of phrases at the top of each page, try to add in some places as close to the top of the page as possible.

2.    Use Synonyms

Make sure that you include various synonyms for your keywords and keyword phrases in your content on your website.  Google will always look into these synonyms and tie the relevance of the page together with your main target phrases, which in the end, will help you to get more people to go to your web site.

3.    Use Keywords in Your Domain

There is definitely a benefit to using a target phrase as part of your top level domain.  If you are starting off in the internet marketing and are thinking about a domain name that would perfectly suit your business, then yes, I would suggest using a domain name that had your keywords in it.  Here are some other tips for domain names:

a.    Try to make it easy to remember.
b.    Try to keep it short
c.    Try to keep it relevant
d.    Register it for more than one year – Google likes consistency!

Keep in mind, older domains are generally easier to rank with than newer domains.  Head over to Flippa.com and see if you can’t pick up an aged domain.

4.    Make sure your website has keyword specific URLS

Using your keywords in specific URLs for specific pages can add some importance to your website in regards to search engine rankings and in turn, get more people to go to your website.  Name your directories according to keywords as well – that helps.

5.    Remember your link anchor text

This is the text that you would be able to click on in a link.  When you have full or partial keyword phrases in your link text, they help you to get people to go to your website by SEO.  This is also relevant when you’re talking about surrounding text.  When the actual content around the link is relevant as well, your link will be more important.  Click here for more information on anchor text.

6.    Optimize your alt images

Image alt text is still a slice of the search engine optimization pie, the bigger issue to get people to go to your website is with image based navigation.  If you have an image that will be linking to another page, then the text (alt text) on the image should be the same way as a standard anchor text is.  Image alt text should describe the image as well as use keywords – but keep it short.

7.    Inline links are important

An inline link is a link that can be found inside a paragraph as opposed to a simple list of links that is found in a menu or sitemap.  Links that are found mid paragraph usually pass on a bit more value than the surrounding text and can help get more people to go to your website.

1)    Remember that people are reading a blog.

Remember – people are sitting down to read a blog, not a technical report.  Try to get your main point out quickly and efficiently without boring the user.  Remember, less is better.

2)    Try blogging using bullets or numbered lists.
Generally, when I blog, I try to blog with bullet points, lists, or numbers.  90% of my readers are not going to really read anything except the bullet points, so I make them relevant, easy to remember, and useful.

3)    Use images in your blogs.

Blogging with images and other breaks can really help to keep a person’s attention span.  Don’t overdo it, but certainly use images to spice up your blog’s life.

4)    Bloggers should use a lot of white space.

By using white space, you’re able to keep the reader’s attention.  The less words there are in an area, the easier it is you’re the person reading your blog to keep focused on what you’re trying to communicate.

5)    Make use of font control.

Make use of your bold button.  Bold your key sentences and phrases, and make sure people can get the “gist” of your entire article or blog post by skimming your bolded sentences.

Andrew Hallinan invites you to discover more about your blogging potential by visiting www.synergy-seo.com

Blog to get people to go to your website!

1. Blog

That just so happens to be exactly what I’m doing now!  But, you don’t have to be a computer geek with no life (like me!) to blog – anyone can do it.  Just choose a subject that you are totally passionate about and write about it.  You don’t even have to know that much about the subject you are blogging about!

You can set up a free blog on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start writing on a subject that relates to your business or your website.  Another way to bring traffic into your new blog is to comment on other people’s blogs and include a link back to your own blog.

2. Create Loyalty

It’s a widely known fact that retaining your existing customers is much more cost-effective than finding new customers.  This same truth applies to traffic on your website or online business. Customer loyalty programs encourage people to come back to your website or online store.  Reward repeat customers with discounts, gifts, coupons, or other incentives – and always keep track of the success of each program!  By creating an emotional attachment between your customer and your online product/service, you will become a brand to them.

3. Get the Word Out!

Most new businesses share the news of their new online business venture more than the early Christians shared the gospel of Christ!  Verbally sharing (more about verbal sharing in point 5) it is great – and often helpful – but let’s learn to take this sharing a step further.  Free and low cost news release and press release distribution agencies (like PRWeb.com) can help you spread the word about your online business or new website.

There are free agencies that do somewhat of the same thing – such as i-Newswire.com, and TheFreeLibrary.com all distribute press releases as well.

4. Know Your Stuff

One of the major benefits of moving (or even just advertising) your business online is the ability to track your data.  You can track orders, most frequent shipping locations, most common age, sex, race, and all sort of other helpful information.  Tracking (and using) this information increase the conversion rate of your website by up to 50%.  Find out the core demographic group that is using your website, and market to them!

5. Speak Up!

Speak at whatever venue you can score an invitation to!  Local business association meetings, chambers of commerce, national trade events, or local colleges are all great venues to contact.  Having a physical location can sometimes be a benefit – you can invite local businesses to come participate in a speaking event that you host.

6.  E-Mail Marketing

In the future, I will be posting quite a bit about email marketing – I firmly believe that email marketing is a brilliant way to get new people to visit your website.  This is low cost and extremely effective.  The idea of email marketing is to offer something for free to a potential customer (something digital that they are able to download instantly) in exchange for their email.  You then send them weekly or bi-weekly emails with useful information in their email.

The idea is that you build yourself a marketing list in which you can advertise your products and services.  You don’t want to just sent them an email with an advertisement in it, but you want to send them something useful – tips or tricks that relate to your industry, or latest industry events.  Whatever it is, you now have a list of people whom you know are already interested in your products and services.

7. Become An Industry Expert

This is extremely valuable for your online presence.  Join forums, write blog posts, join social networking websites – do anything and everything in your power to meet other people who have questions that you are able to answer.  For instance, when I was building a church directory in Scotland, I was joining every Christian forum that I could and offering advice, suggestions, and relevant conversation.  My signature contained the URL to my web directory, and I was able to drive quite a bit of traffic to my website.

8.  Post A Video

I simply cannot stress the power of video.  The video that I show below is just a very light-hearted example of a marketing video.  The idea for this video was to get people to think that this video is funny enough to send to their friends, and at the same time I would get free marketing with it.

Another great way to drive traffic to your website or online store is to create a “how-to” article on a topic in your industry and then post it to free websites like YouTube.com or Google Video.  For instance, I will be creating “do it yourself” videos on YouTube.com in the future and posting them on YouTube.  This is an extremely effective way to drive traffic straight to your website, and also to identify yourself as an expert.

9. Websites, websites websites!

Websites like Digg.com and Yelp.com are both great ways to show off your new online venture.  Yelp.com is extremely effective – especially if you’re doing business locally!  Yelp is a website in which you sign up and post reviews about different businesses you’ve visited in the area.  If someone has a great transaction with you, it would greatly benefit your business if they were to write a review on your business on Yelp.com.

Digg.com is an extremely powerful traffic-generating website.  Users to Digg.com sign up and post interesting articles on Digg.com which then drive traffic to your website article.  Make sure to use this often with your blog!  As posted on their website, “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.”

10. Joint Venture

This is huge!  Pair up with another company that offers products and services that benefit your online business.  In this area, the more you give, the more you receive.  It’s not enough just to announce your business – meet local business owners who share the same passions that you do and offer to market them to your customers in exchange for them marketing to theirs!

]]> http://www.forgetmarketing.info/2008/10/how-to-get-people-to-go-to-your-website-free/feed/ 0 http://www.forgetmarketing.info/1970/01/3-tips-to-make-google-obey/ http://www.forgetmarketing.info/1970/01/3-tips-to-make-google-obey/#comments Sat, 01 May 2010 23:24:21 +0000 admin http://www.forgetmarketing.info/?p=160 Could you imagine what it would be like if you could make Google bow to your every whim and desire?  What if you could be at the top of the search engines for every search term that you wanted to be on top for – without spending a dime on PPC?  You could rule the business and informational world!  Alas, we all bow down to Mother Google and Queen Yahoo!, but there are some ways that we can direct the search giants (including Bing) in how they view your website and what functions to perform while visiting.  This article will discuss the fine points of your robots.txt file, your robots meta tag, and even the new nofollow HTML attribute.

1. Don’t use the Whitehouse.gov’s website as an example for your robots.txt file

Now-a-days, if you don’t disallow the search engines from indexing your website, they will default to indexing it.  There’s no real need to “allow” Google, Yahoo!, or Bing to access your website – the will by default.

If, however, you wish to keep the robots off of your website (maybe during development, a redesign, or whatever), use the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This will block Google from indexing your entire website.

To make all of the search engines blocked:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Now, in some cases you’ll want to block the search engines from indexing only a specific directory or subdirectory on your website.  Here’s what that’ll look like in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /yoursubdirectorynamehere

Make sense?

Now, here’s a hint – if I were you, I’d make folders on my server before the development of my application that were for “allow” and “no_allow” folders.  This doesn’t necessarily benefit the search engines, but the alternative is having a 200 line robots.txt file  that mirrors the stupid robots.txt file found on the previous Whitehouse.gov robots.txt file.

2. Disallowing a cached version of your website

If you don’t want the search engines to send a searcher to the search engine’s stored cached version of your website, you would use the following meta tag:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

Generally, webmasters use this in cases in which a page is constantly updated and refreshed, and the previous copy that might have been stores on the search engine is no longer applicable to the searcher.

3. Controlling Snippets

I bet you don’t know what a snippet is, do you?  A snippet is the couple of lines of words that are displayed under your website’s title on the search results.  Sometimes it comes from your meta description tag, but often times, it comes from a snippet of your page that Google deems relevant.  It’s been proven that when Google produces these snippets, people actually click your link more often because they see how relevant the website will be.

However, there are times when you simply want Google to obey – and to display exactly what is contained in your search engine results snippet.  For example, if you are a newspaper and your website is updated several times a day, Google may not have time to re-index your website, and so your snippets would be detrimental to your click through rates.

In that case, here’s what meta tag would look like:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”>