Search Engine Optimization for E-Commerce websites.

E-commerce is a very competitive and cut throat business. You have to prepare yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site stand out and become a cut above the rest. Each day there are, more and more sites that are clambering to optimize their rankings in the search engines and if you let your guards down, you may just get trampled down and get left at the starting line that are filled with so many other failed e-commerce sites. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term that is widely used today by many e-commerce sites and online business entrepreneurs.

For the past few years and the next ten years or so and thereafter, search engines like Google will be the most widely used internet tool for people to use to find the sites that they are looking for and need to go to or for them to find the product or information they really need. Most people who are looking for information who use Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. more often than not use the top ten search results on the first page of these sites..

Most website owners who are on the first page, mainly the top three to five determines a websites success in SEO rankings. Your sites link will have a higher than average probability of being clicked on when you have a high page ranking. The more traffic that you can get to your site, the more business success and profitability you will have.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

What is optimization and do you have to use it? SEO is a technique use to optimize your website so that the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. can rank your website as high on their pages as possible so that people who are searching for products or information that you may offer can quickly find your website. This is beneficial if you offer products on your websites and want to receive the type of traffic that you are looking for.

You need high page rankings to be number one or at least be in the three to five top rankings on the search engines. If you plan to generate income from your sites this is a must. The importance of optimizing your website is that you get the benefit of generating high traffic volume that can potentially turn into sales. So again, what is search engine optimization? SEO is utilizing tools and methods to make your websites top ranking in the results of the search engines.

The main point is to get yourself on the first page or better yet in the top half of the page which will ensure that your website will generate public awareness of your website's existence and therefore generate more traffic. And as anyone who has an online business knows the more traffic that finds itself to your website, the more leads and potential income for your business.

SEO Consultants and Experts

It is essential to aim for the top ten spots to make your website ranking better. As mentioned earlier, every day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to improve themselves so that you can rank higher by using search engine optimization. It is important that you learn how to use SEO to make your site better and better everyday. There are many tools and products out there that say they can help your website get better ranking but most are useless and fall short of the hype.

It is important that you use products that are tested and created by seasoned experts in the internet marketing field. My favorite product out there right now for search engine optimization was created by SEO Marketing Expert Brad Callen. His products are guaranteed and they do deliver.

Does Optimizing Your Site Really Work?

I will be honest and say that SEO requires work to be fully realized. That is one of the reasons why I use SEO Link Monster by Brad Callen. They help my websites rank higher during searches. However, there maybe some things or aspects you might have to change yourself on your site or add to get your website listed higher and this you will learn in the course which was very helpful to me. This may also include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases on your site without making it too commercial but rather light and informative. There will be certain rules and guidelines that must be followed when making your website's content search engine friendly and conducive to high page rank optimization.

This author has been an online business marketer for many years and desires to give valuable information to its many readers.When it comes to search engine optimization I highly recommend a wonderful resource of information

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What is cost per acquisition (cpa) campaign and how to run it?

CPA is just one of four ways that you can pay for your bids. It's the most recent one but here are all four explained.

Manual Bidding:

This is the normal bidding style that people use. It's the default setting when you start a campaign and it's basically telling Google the maximum you are prepared to pay for a click.

Preferred Cost Bidding:

In this case you set an average price you are prepared to pay for your clicks and Google manages your account for you to even out the amount you pay for clicks so that you are charged this average amount over time.

Budget Optimizer:

Here you don't set a bid price at all. You simply set a 30 day budget for your campaign and Google will manage the bid prices for you within that budget. You cannot use this for content bidding campaigns and if you have any content bids mixed into your search network campaigns (shame on you!) they will be turned off if you select this bidding option.

Conversion Optimiser:

This is their latest bidding option and the one we have been discussing above. It's also called cost per acquisition bids. With this option, you set a price that you are willing to pay for a conversion and Google will manage your click bidding in order to deliver conversions at that price.

Clearly for this option you will need to have conversion tracking on your campaign. Another limitation is that your campaign must have over 200 conversions in the last 30 days. This is because Google uses conversion history to determine the bid prices it will set on your behalf to get conversions at your requested price.

To set any of these options you go to the Campaign Settings and look under the section Advanced Options. The first option is Keyword Bidding. Just click on the View and Edit options link and you can select one of the four bidding options for your campaign.

Cheers

Local SEO for Your Small Business Success

What is Local SEO? Before we move into leveraging the power of Local SEO, we need to understand what it is! While Local SEO is much like Regular SEO, the only difference is the optimization for local results. With search engines listing local results for local searches and based on location, it is all the more important to concentrate of local results. However, there are few differences with the way listings are listed under local results.

As a small business, you are more likely to limit your business to the area you are located in. This makes Local SEO more important to small scale businesses. You would definitely know who you are targeting and the type of customers you are looking at. This is an advantage when optimizing your site for getting listed in the local results. Your keywords should be targeting these customers and how they would probably search online. A good idea would be to do a keyword research and see how the search results are listed for the keywords chosen. Then you can make changes if needed.

Contact Address: When looking to rank for local searches, you need to give more importance for the terms associated with that. So the business addresses and contact details should be given importance in the site. This is a major difference from regular SEO and Local SEO efforts, where business address and contact details aren't given priority with the latter.

Think Beyond Google! While Google is where most head to for any information, there are other reliable sources besides Google Places and Search Results. Yelp is one such place where many head to. Remember such sources and other leading search engines including Yahoo and Bing, during your Local SEO efforts.

Think Citations & Reviews: This is very important to get listed in Google. You can create your own citations and reviews, though persuading your customers to do that would be ideal. This helps get better ranking in search results. While only Google Places reviews are listed in Google, getting reviews in other prominent sources including Yelp, will aid with rankings.

Go Social: Search results are now inherently related to your Social Media presence and are no different with Local SEO. Make sure you use them in your marketing campaigns. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other prominent social sites are vital for your marketing campaign. Google and Facebook pages are also important for your brands.

Content is the King: Any ranking and result is only based on the content. Having quality content with backlinks, quality site content and regular updates to the site are the key for indexing. With the recent Google panda update, site being regularly updated will be listed better.

Think Mobile: With the surge in smartphone users, mobile internet and mobile searches have increased by folds. It is important to have the site optimized for mobiles and also, consider how listings are done for mobiles. As we all know, iPhones are trendy and most go for it not only for the luxury it offers, but also for the features. With SIRI in iPhone 4, search engines results are no longer the same. It is important to get the business listed beyond Google and in places like Yelp and other public sources, to be able to get listed or seen by SIRI. This is an important aspect in any Local SEO campaign.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6870150

Free monitoring tools:

TweetDeck - allows you to schedule tweets and monitor them in multiple columns.

HootSuite - similar to TweetDeck, for most the difference is just preference.

Social Mention - beats Google Alerts as it lets you search Google and a number of social networks for mentions, including Delicious, Twitter,

Google Alerts - Schedule alerts to track mentions of your brand, competitors and anything else you want to keep track of.

Kurat, - can be used as content discovery and publishing tool behind company social media efforts and of course as a personal newsreader.

NetNewsWire - An RSS aggregator that allows you to create “Smart Lists” to find keywords within your RSS feeds; can create RSS feeds for Google Alerts that sync here as well.Social Media Tools


Paid monitoring tools:

Actionly - They tag themselves “one dashboard to rule them all.” Allows you to measure “everything” including page views, clicks, revenue, retweets, etc. and set up campaigns; publish from multiple networks and accounts and integrate sm teams; track conversations; puts metrics from all over in one place; analyzes sentiment; and create custom reports. Seems a little limited for the cost, but they do offer a free trial.

Sprout Social - They monitor Twitter, Google Analytics, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn profiles. You can dig deep into the info or look at the highlights in the Reports section (which can be downloaded by PDF or CSV)

CustomScoop - This scans not just YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but also online news resources. Pretty intuitive for research - you can set it to automatically email reports/PDF’s/excel docs/etc. You can also create graphs and charts for comparison features.

Radian6 - One of the most well-known social listening tools - has a somewhat confusing pricing structure but it’s robust, has a great back-log and gives you pretty much everything you need! If you aren’t an agency or a corporation it will give you too much.

Sysomos - “Like Radian 6 but on steroids” - extremely expensive but if you can afford it, do it!

Webfluenz - An easy-to-use social media intelligence system to listen, monitor and engage with social media and the real-time web. With affordable pricing, it offers powerful analytics pertaining to influencers, trending topics, sentiment, geographic chatter and much more.

Hubspot - Probably has some of the “prettiest” reports out there. Good at pulling data for a mid-sized business or for doing research. Great for a small- to mid-size business. It also does both measurement and listening - a rare combo.

Alterian SM2 - Another agency/corporate model of a listening tool. They’re sorting functionality is horrible, but the robust features are great plus they don’t limit you in searches which all the other big shots do in this space at this time.


Free scheduling tools:

Buffer - Finds the best times to schedule your tweets and Facebook posts; allows multiple bit.ly accounts.

Dynamic Tweets - A very basic, easy tool that schedules tweets, but you can search through old tweets.

TweetDeck and Hootsuite

TweetGrid - Create a Twitter search dashboard the updates in real time.

Timely.is - Finds the best times to schedule your tweets (after testing, not quite sure it actually does know the best times); allows multiple accounts but only allows one bit.ly account.

Crowdbooster - Freemium model; analyzes account to show when users most engage with tweets and suggests scheduled time based on the algorithm; multiple bit.ly accounts as well but only with paid program.

Save tweets:

The Archivist - Uses the Twitter Search API to find and archive tweets.

Twapper Keeper - Archive tweets from your conference, trending hashtags, keywords and personal tweets.

TweetReports - You can put in a search (such as a hashtag) and you can download the report and even customize it beforehand with an intro (great for Twitter chats) - you can only download to Excel w/ the agency model which stinks but the PDF gives you clickable links and accounts, etc.

Storify - You can search for terms, tweets, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, Google, other Storify articles, Flickr, and Facebook - then you drag and drop the updates into a Storify “article”. You can also add text/headlines/etc. to package the recap in a very pretty way.


Free measurement tools:

Hootsuite: Provides graphs, etc analyzing your social media engagements. More detailed graphs are available with the paid versions.

Facebook Insights - See how many new ‘likes’, comments, etc your page has.

SocialProgrss (In Beta, you can sign up for an invite) - Instantly generate an enterprise social media progress report.

TweetGrader & FacebookGrader - gives you a score based on account activity and engagement and shows the users you interact with the most

TwentyFeet - Shows engagement and reach of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube & Google Analytics over time.

Twitalyzer - Limited analysis for free, with three paid levels for more info.

Paid measurement tools:

Actionly


Extras:

Tweetchat - An easier way to participate in Twitter chats. You don’t have to add the hashtag to your tweet each time, you can easily mention and RT others.

Echofon - Echofon automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between your computer, your iPhone and your iPad.

TweetGrid - Another tool for Twitter chats. A little more cluttered than TweetChat, but you can follow multiple streams at the same time.

• Goo online tools:
• Crowdbooster.com
• SocialMention.com

15 SEO Optimisation Tips

1. Tags no longer play a vital role in SEO optimisation - gone are the days when populating Meta descriptions with variations of keywords will guarantee a high page ranking. However, a thorough research and use of unique keywords in titles and descriptions can still help in your quest for better ranking.

2. Your domain name is very important, and it's advisable to include your keywords in it. I suggest you use dashes to separate the keywords; Choose a domain name that's legible: for example "handmade-womens-clothing.com" is much easier to read than "handmadewomensclothing.com". Moreover, search engines have a better chance of finding your site. And I highly recommended that you choose a.com or.net domain.

3. Links and backlinks are the order of the day in current search engine optimising technology. Every effort should be made to seek backlinks from reputable sites. You must be mindful that although backlinks are very important in achieving a high page ranking, it's the quality, not the quantity that matters. Not only that, the relevance of the link is important. Search engines can even penalise you if your blog design is deemed to contain excessive number of irrelevant backlinks.

4. Having a backlink from a top ranking site, for instance Wikipedia with a PR7, is highly beneficial because the algorithms that the search engines use dictate that your site must be very important, if Wikipedia was linked to you. Essentially, your blog is awarded a proportion of their PR value. Matt Cutts from Google, gave a talk some time ago about seo optimisation in which he discussed, at length, the importance of backlinks. Incidentally, part of the talk was to endorse the effectiveness of WordPress.

5. If possible, link to.edu and.gov websites, because they're highly valued by search engines. You can compile a list of .edu site by entering the following query term in Google search box: inurl:.edu/forum. This will return a list of educational establishments that have forums in which you might want to participate, and subsequently get linked to.

6. Personally, I'm not enthusiastic about purchasing backlinks when working on any search engine optimising campaign, the obvious reason being their quality is invariably poor. If you must purchase backlinks, then I recommend that you check the cache date of the webpage to which your blog will be linked and be located in Google. The newer the cache date, the better. You can check the date on Google by entering the search term: "cache:URL", where URL is the page to which you will be linked. If the date is older than a month, or the page doesn't exist, then it's not worth purchasing.

7. Submit comments and posts on as many high ranking blogs as you possibly can. A method you can employ to identify blogs that permit posts and comments submission is to enter this search query on Google: inurl: blog "your keyword" "leave a comment". This will return a list of blogs (relating to your keyword) that accept comments from readers.

8. In your blog design, be mindful that the number of images must be kept to a minimum. Put simply, search engines crawl text, and not images. Moreover, an excessive number of images slow down the loading time of your blog.

9. Submit your URL to search engines, using one of many SEO optimisation tools, including the free version of CEO. The tools give you a selection of search engines you want your blog submit to, and they make bulk submission possible.

10. Post new content on your blog frequently. I suggest at least twice a week. That gives your blog more chances of being crawled. Ensure that you include keywords in the title and body of your posts.

11. Optimise the text in your RSS feeds by including keywords in the titles and descriptions. Remember not to clutter the description with keywords, but to give it natural flow and make it understandable.

12. Blog design in general should have a sitemap. It makes it easier for search engines to navigate your blog. You can use XML-Sitemap, which is one of the plugins available.

13. Diversify the content of your blog... include podcasts, videos, news, social media contents - preferably not all on the same blog. That might have an adverse effect on the performance and loading time of your blog.

14. Give your visitors the opportunity to leave comments on your posts. Moderate them promptly, and reciprocate their action by visiting their blog if they have one, and leave comments.

15. Finally, write about things you know, care about, and have a passion for. Visitors who read and enjoy your posts are likely to return!

Wishing you every success!

I run a business called Internet Commerce and I have been operating in the internet industry for over 5 years, and designing websites and blogs is one of the many business areas of IT I am passionate about.
My blog is blogs design.com, and it provides a step-by-step tutorial of how to design a blog using WordPress.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6764945

Boosting Conversions in Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click, or PPC, advertisements are one of the fastest and easiest ways to target traffic and drive it to your website. If you don't know what PPC ads are, they are sponsored links, or ads, that show up when a user performs a search on a search engine, and they can also be an advertisement on a website or blog.

PPC ads are more effective than banner ads or offline advertising because they are a more targeted form of advertising. However, many businesses fail to carefully select the keywords and phrases for the PPC ads or fail to send the user to the right page of the website when someone clicks the ad. These mistakes can be very expensive for the company.

The point of a pay per click campaign is to get your advertisement in front of searchers who are looking for what it is that you have to offer. This means that a lot of keyword research needs to be done and an impressionable ad copy needs to be created to get the user to look at the ad and then click through to your site. The wrong keywords will get your ad in front of the wrong people.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make in their PPC ads is sending the user to the main homepage of the website when they click on the ad. They also make no attempt at establishing a relationship with the site visitors that don't make a purchase.

Instead of sending visitors to the home page, visitors should be sent to a webpage that is very specifically relevant to the keyword that was searched. For example, if you have a website about beauty products and you are running a PPC campaign targeting hair brushes you should not send a visitor who came to your site through your ad to the homepage of your site. The visitor will potentially be frustrated that she now has to determine where the hairbrush section of the site is and she might leave quickly. Instead, the link in the ad should take her directly to the webpage about hairbrushes. If there was a specific style or brand of hairbrush mentioned in the ad, then when the link is clicked the user should be taken to a webpage that is about that specific hairbrush.

The landing page does not need to sell the product. Instead it is wise to allow the landing page to help build a relationship with the visitor. One suggestion is to offer the visitor something free such as an ebook which requires a signup, an online seminar, a newsletter, educational information etc. Teaching the visitor more about the product or service helps to build a relationship.

Landing pages should not offer the visitor too many navigation choices that lead away from the page. Instead conversion choices should be offered. If the visitor is offered a download, newsletter form, free drawing entry form, link to the "Contact Us" page etc. all of these paths will lead to a conversion.

An effective pay per click marketing campaign can be very time-consuming and requires a great deal of planning so it is highly recommended that a marketing company with expertise in PPC advertising be hired to handle all PPC campaigns. They will perform all the necessary research to determine which keywords should be targeted and will work to create ad copy that will make an impression. They will then be able to execute techniques that will bring you positive results by improving your conversion rate.

Visit StLouisPayPerClick.com to get more information and resources about pay per click marketing for St. Louis pay per click users and companies.

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Infographic by – Conversion Optimization Company Invesp