12 Useful Online Marketing Resources for Small Business Owners - A self check

In this post small business owners can find list of Webmaster resources and tools that can help to track and improve existing SEO work performed in Business website or Blog

But don’t forget to leave SEO work to experts :) and suggest your thoughts on your type of business and customers using below Webmaster resources and tools

(1) Google Webmaster Tools to improve traffic
(2) Analyze your visitors, search engine visibility and keyword search through Google Analytics
(3) Find pages that link to your site and competitor site using Site Explorer
(4) Track search engine result placement for your keyword and URL
(5) Check your web page in different screen resolutions
(6) Type out your domain or keywords in search box to find relationship between linking sites and topics, a Visual Meta search engine
7) Check you site load time and fix if it is too slow. This will help search engine spiders to crawl easily
(8) Find out how search engine spiders look at your site
(9) Find how your website is targeted in local search engines
(10) Find insight of your website keyword search terms and location; target your business accordingly
(11) Get quick traffic and cost estimates on your keywords for sponsored listings
(12) Measure your ROI from SEO, PPC and conversion rate optimization

The above Online marketing resources and tools are easy to use by Small Business Owners and using this you can support web site promotion work performed by an individual or SEO company.

You are NoWhere on the Search Engines Why?

You have wonderful products and services, you always hymn “Customer is our king” and you have showcased some of the best services that anyone in your industry can feel proud of! Then wondering why still is your website not visible in the top searches of search engines? There could be many reasons why still your website is being buried somewhere deep inside the search engine results.

Let us analyze one by one as to what the probable and top reasons could be:

• First and foremost thing to start with is to choose URLs that are keyword driven, so that users land exactly on your website when they type those keywords!
• The first best thing would be to check if your website has been listed in the search engines or not. This can be checked by typing out the website URL in the search engines and checking out if the result is showing your website as a result or not. It should ideally show a result of your own website, thereby proving that your site is actually listed.
• Getting search engine visibility takes time. It does not happen just like that. You need to spend more of your time and effort on it, just like it takes time to build up a new business and establish it. Though the results are not SO long to be seen, still it done need to have some time for itself too, to get established and familiar for the search engines. Give it more of time and consideration and hard work, and am sure it’ll pay off. So don’t be lazy start off right away
• Another essential thing to be noticed is to have more of written and relevant content in your website. Now this does not mean you just fill your website with keywords, just for the sake of getting listed in search engines. You must write articles in such a way that are meaningful, relevant to your website at the same time uses important keywords that your visitors might search for in search engines.
• Title tag title tag title tag!!! Get this phrase embedded in your brain! The area in the HTML pages that asks for page title is where you must include keyword or keyword phrases, in order to get attention of the search engines.
• Next thing would be to include ALT tags to the images in the website. This also helps in the images in your website to participate and contribute its share to search engine optimization.
• How popular is your website among the search engines? This is the next question that you must be asking yourself. Popularity of a website increases with more of quality inbound links. The more other websites would link to your website, the more your website’s popularity increases among the net, thereby the search engines. This is done by link building, wherein you submit your website links to other quality and related websites, in order to develop site popularity.
• Finally create a business blog and update your current key services, products or any value added information which can help your business as well as your visitor. This can boost your search engine visibility and traffic

Well as I already said, there are many other things that might be one of the reasons hindering your website from coming anywhere near the top search results. But these are few of the important reasons.

With these tips, don’t be no-where in search engines, you are Now-here, get noticed!! Keep going!!

Does Blogging help SEO?

A much talked about topic of discussion, with respect to blogging and SEO. So does blogging actually help SEO? Well I would definitely say a strong and bold YES!

Having been in this optimization industry for quite some time now, I have always found myself preaching people interested to make their blogs work for them and their organization, about many advantages that blogs are sure to bring, when seen from the SEO point of view.

I have put some of my ideas that I have always found as reasons how blogs can be useful for search engine optimization:

Refreshing and latest content:

Blogs usually contain content relating to the present state and also stuff that is fresh and good to be read, apart from the stale information that has been repeated by every other site. This kindles an interest in the readers to come back to your blog and keep them updated of whatever you write. This helps in getting more traffic to your site, thereby helping in optimizing your site.

Planned writing and proper content categorization:
When blogs are written on specific themes and categorized based on the topics, it makes it much easier for the search engines to spot your blog content easily, as they understand your blog much better when categorized properly.

Easy URL structure of blogs:
Usually blogs have simple URL structures. This helps the search engines to track the blogs easily, thereby conveying the message in your blogs to many other readers out there.

Deep linking:
Deep linking of anchor texts in service related blogs, to information about the product or shopping pages, that are located deep inside the site, also proves to be highly useful, especially for long keyword phrases.

Linking among blogs:

When the content in blogs relate to each other, blogs can be linked together. Also when media attachments like audio, video and the likes are attached to blogs, they attract the attention of readers, which also adds to blog marketing.

Interactive advantage in blogs:

Make use of the advantage of interaction among the writer and the readers, in Blogs, among the readers. This is possible using trackback features, comments section in the blogs and the likes. Also, readers who have liked a particular blog or post, might even mention about your posts in their blogs or any other social media communities, that assists in getting more visitors to your blog, further resulting in incoming links. This, in turn, helps in the search engines to spot your blog easily, thereby ranking it among the top pages.

Register in Twitter.com:

Twitter is one of the best social messaging site that is free to use. Register in Twitter by adding your profile to it. Don’t forget to give this link when you give any good and valuable suggestions in other top blogs, along with following profiles of people who relate to your kind of writing. This way many will follow your profile as well. Now once this is done, as and when you write blogs you can post the link of it in your twitter page. Automatically your (my) profile followers would get the link and they would go through the content as well and also get benefit of tweets. This results in many inbound links and clicks, thereby increasing my SEO ranking as well.

RSS traffic:

Subscription to your RSS feeds would get in a good source of traffic into your blog site. And once the traffic is in, automatically the search engine rankings also increase.

Additional benefits of blogging:

The Directories advantage! Now that your blog has RSS feeds, it is possible that your blog would be clearly seen in the RSS and blog directories and search engines.

Hope above Tips and Ideas will help you understand how much Blog helps SEO :) Try out and let me know your feedback, cheers!

Tips For Affordable Pay Per Click Advertising

As we all know advertising using pay per click has become one of the effective ways for targeting the most prospective customers to your business. Your website can have a contract with any one of the search engines and can bid on the keywords that best suits your website and business. When your target customer searches in these search engines using these keywords, the search engine pops up sponsored ads as its search results.

Here are some useful tips to have your ad seen in the above competition:

Identify your Niche
1. Get to know what your search engine surfers generally type when they look for a site related to yours.
2. Come with as many as keywords possible to describe your website and products.
3. With this list of keywords, with the help internet, try to identify more keywords that are widely used by the surfers. Free online tools also can be used to simplify this task for you.

Choose Low Competitive Keywords
1. Pay per click advertising is quite competitive and can also go beyond your budget. So always try to bid on low competitive keywords that can also cost you quite less.
2. Keyword analyzer software is the best free software that can be purchased online and used for identifying which of your keywords are low competitive.
3. Keywords tools act very useful for PPC research as they give the low competitive words as well as the number of searches of that keyword and number of campaigns going on for the keyword, hence helping you not to exceed your budget.

Write Engaging Ads
1. PPC ads are written using less than 125 characters. Not much space is available to sell your service or product to your customers. So have the benefits for the customers written in the form of questions and numbers
2. Search engines like Google also allow you to score points through the relevancy of search items. Which means, more relevant is your ad – that is more times your ad is clicked, more points, hence your ad will be in the list that bids for the keyword.
3. Hence you can use your major keywords in these ads, which when displayed in the surfer’s search result has high possibility of the surfer opening your website.

Having a couple of PPC campaigns, identifying the best keyword and to creating the best ad will become a continuous process for your website. By following the above tips PPC can also be an affordable internet marketing way to promote your online venture :)