Three Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills.With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is

Welcome

Welcome to the world of Internet Marketing. Now you can use the knowledge you gain in this Special Report to market your products and services using the web, and reap rich rewards.

Introduction:

Google has changed our world forever. We no longer ask people for recommendations; we no longer call our friends for long chats. We no longer idle our time at the coffee machine…

We are mostly busy at our Notebooks or PCs, finding something or the other on the Internet, using search engines like Google or Yahoo. There is so much happening in the world, and internet is becoming the key medium to stay in touch with everything – electronic greeting cards, MSN messenger, GMail, Net2Phone, grocery shopping, Amazon, eBay, Internet Radio & TV… you name it, and it is available on the Internet. So why would you or your customers leave home at all.

Small Businesses Need a Jumpstart on the Internet

With all this happening at warp speed, the small business owner has to think of ways to get their product or service in front of eager buyers. And where do you find such eager buyers? After all they may not visit your shop or office. Hint: Find them on the Internet.

Two Ways to Get New Customers

There are only two ways to get customers - either you find them, or they find you.

Push Method – You find your Customers

Competing in a global marketplace, you will have increasingly less time to find customers yourself. And the more you chase customers, the more they run away from you.

Pull Method – Your Customers Find You

A pull method, where the prospects eagerly seeking your products or services find you works the best. Because they seek you - “the expert”, you have a much higher perceived value, and consequently, you have to do much less of selling… (They are already sold when they found the expert in you).

Make it Easier to Find You

If you (meaning your website) is easy to find, more prospects will not have to hunt you down. Today, they may search high and low on the search engines finding your products and services.

If your website is listed high on the search engines (Hint: in the first page or two), you have a high chance of getting their attention. If you are among the remaining 432 million pages, you stand no chance.

Not everyone can be in the top pages of search engine results. But you can, if you follow certain principles, some guidelines, and show persistence and perseverance.

The art of optimizing your web pages, so that Search engine think they are highly relevant to what people are searching for, is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short.

Search Engine Optimization Explained

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your each page on your website work like a magnet to attract eager prospects. It starts will identifying those keywords that people are most likely to search your product or service for in search engines.

Keyword Identification

For example, if you sell rare second hand watches on the web, you want those people who search for “second hand Rolex”, or “used Patek Philippe” or “rare branded watches” to come to your website.

Optimizing your Web Page for these Keywords

So you optimize the pages with such keywords. You use these so called “keywords” in your web copy (body or text written on your webpage). There are many ways to get these words on the page.

For example – your page title could be “How to Select a Rare Branded Watch”. Then the various paragraphs on this page could have sub heading like – “Finding the Rare Branded Watch”, “How to identify a Fake Branded Watch”, “Negotiating Price for a Rare Branded Watch”, “Huge Collection of Second Hand Rolex Watches” etc.

Search Engines Find Your Goldmine

You might have noticed that the keyword “rare branded watch” has already appeared multiple times in the title, body, and description. The Search Engines think that you have a great content for the word “rare branded watch”, and move your listing much higher in the search engine results.

If you consistently and correctly do this, you have a much better chance of hitting the top pages for your keywords.

Don’t Over Do it, or you will get banned

This is just one of the techniques. Of course you can’t over do it, or else Google could punish your site and not show it at all if they think you have purposely “stuffed” your keywords in the body of your webpage, and the sentences do not make much sense. So do it carefully, and benefit from this technique, but don’t go overboard.

Other Ways to Get a High Search Engine Listing

SEO requires you to tweak so many aspects of your website – you could continue to do it for the next few months easily. And this is a key point too… continue to make changes to your site regularly. This show that your site is current, up-to-date, and not something that was setup in 1998. Of course, a current site is rewarded with a higher rank than an old site that is never updated.

Some of the other basic SEO Techniques are:

a. Optimizing your Page Title,

b. Using appropriate Meta Tags for Keywords, Description

c. Using Descriptive Headings

d. Having a Site Map on your website

e. Making your Site Rich with Content

f. Making Navigation to inner pages easier

g. Building Inbound Links from other Directories, & Authority Sites

Each of these techniques takes time, and you must do it carefully, correctly, and make sure you keep the site updated for continuous good support from search engines.

More information is given below for each of these SEO techniques. Use it to your advantage.

Optimizing Page Title

A page title is what is displayed in top of your browser’s window. Most websites don’t even have a page title. Others have the company name as the page title. Ideally, each page of your website should have a unique page title. It should be short, yet clearly summarize what the page is all about. Keep it within 60 to 100 characters. The Windows Title bar can’t show any longer than that anyway.

Using appropriate Meta Tags for Keywords, Description

If you have never heard of Meta Tags, do not be alarmed. These Meta tags are not meant for humans. It is more meant for search engines, so that they can assess what the site is all about. To check if your webpage has Meta tags setup, visit any page on your website, and do a View Source from your browser’s menu.

You will notice that just below the < HEAD > & < TITLE > are tags like meta name="keywords" content="Branded Watches, Second hand watches” meta name="description" content="Branded Watches Unlimited – Second hand branded Watch Store”

Many search engines use these Meta tags to show the description below your website in the search engine listings pages. The biggest Search engine who uses this kind of listing is Yahoo. Even Google uses the keywords to some extent.

Using Descriptive Headings

If you know basic HTML, using Header tags (starting from H1, H2 to H6), for your headings, sub headings gets these keywords a higher weightage in search engine rankings.

You can edit the HTML for your website using editors like Microsoft FrontPage or Dream weaver. Then add a H1 tag to your most important heading line. For sub headings, use H2, and so on.

Having a Site Map on your website

A site map is a virtual map of your website. It shows how the different pages are linked to each other. With this kind of map, it becomes much easier for the search engines to reach all pages of your site, and spider them.

There are many free tools available from the search engines that can help you make a Sitemap. Even Google offers its own Google Sitemap tool.

Making your Site Rich with Content

If you regularly add Product News, Happenings, Company News, Articles of interest, then your site becomes more lively, more interesting, and a place where your prospects may find much of the information they are looking for.

A deep, content rich site is a boon to you, which will help to get higher search engine listings with ease.

Making Navigation to inner pages easier Most sites use a Breadcrumb trail kind of navigation to aid the browser in finding information, and retracting to other branches as and when needed.

A breadcrumb trail looks like this

Home > Books > Marketing Books > Magnetic Marketing

This way, a user can navigate to any level. From “magnetic marketing” back to “Books” or Home in a single click.

Search engines love a site which makes navigation easy. You prove to them that you are thinking about your browsers, your customers, and not only yourself.

Building Inbound Links from other Directories, & Authority Sites

One of the most important aspect that can make or break your journey into the top pages of search engines is Inbound Links.

Inbound links means links to your website, coming from other websites, directories and authority sites. It is no longer about content alone. Today, there are millions of great sites that are rich with content. To compete with them, you can also build great content. But that is not sufficient.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo look at who links to you. If you have great content, an authority site, then a lot of websites, blogs must be linking to that content. If no one links to you, then Google does not give you a higher rank.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed learning about Search Engine Optimization, and how you can get your website to get High search engine rankings. We will continue to update you with latest SEO news from time to time.

Do let me know how you feel. We like to hear from you to improve this special report and make it more useful for you. All bouquets and brick-bats are welcome. Your feedback is important to us and helps us in improving this article and other workshops that we hold regularly.

Vinai Prakash, CEO of BrandRich Marketing, is a SEO & Internet Marketing Expert. Many of his articles are published in Books and magazines around the world. You can learn more about SEO by subscribing to his newsletter. Simply send an email to info@brandrich.com. You can visit his site at http://www.brandrich.com

His recent article on E-Commerce has been published in the Small Business Book of Lists, which is available at Amazon.