2) Short Term / Long Term Goals

Related to the point above, setting realistic short and long term goals are great ways of staying motivated. Keep the short term goals towards longer tail search terms. If you already have a relatively established site, which terms are currently driving significant amounts of traffic? How easy will it be to increase the ranking of this term? Use click through rate data to predict the number of clicks you can achieve. For example, if you rank 9th for “purple mice”, and receive 22 visitors per month, if you increased this 4 places to 5th, you could expect to almost double this number. Look through all of your search terms looking for good short term search strategies. Longer term goals should be your more competitive keywords, often with a 6 -8+ month timescale (depending on industry) for achieving good rankings.

3) Research
Spend a lot of time researching every aspect of your strategy. Keywords, potential link building strategies, onsite work, content, industry authorities, competition. In order to have a credible search marketing strategy, all of these factors need to be analysed in as much detail as possible.

4) Competitors
One of the most important individual factors to focus on is the competition. How good is their onsite SEO? Have they missed obvious tricks? Can you take positive things from their site design /structure and implement it yourself? How impressive are your competitors’ backlink profiles? How are they going about obtaining back links? Is there scope to replicate strategies, or further improve on strategies your competitors have implemented?

5) Use available tools
There are a number of useful tools out there today to help with all aspects of SEO and search marketing. The use of Google webmaster tools, and rank checking software are a definite must. Google trends and Google adword keyword suggestion tools are great resources for keyword research. Other handy tools include SEO plug-ins for the firefox browser, spider simulators and keyword density tools. There are multiple versions of many tools, it is worth spending a little bit of time trying each tool.

6) Stay Up to Date
The SEO industry is changing all of the time, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest developments. Reading SEO blogs and browsing SEO discussion forums are a great way of staying informed of the latest developments. By doing so, you will also learn a lot, be it a new link building idea or a new handy plugin which may save you a lot of time.

7) Wider Picture
Look at your search marketing campaign from broader picture, what else could you be doing in online marketing that will have a positive impact on your backlink profile / traffic / rankings? For example, if your site has a blog, are you using blog pinging services (Googles own service or services such as Weblogs and Feedburner). Are you utilising local search, universal search elements? How appropriate is your site to social media outlets?

Stay White hat
There are a lot of SEO practices that are frowned upon by the search engines, if you are unaware of them, the chances are that you are not doing them. If you have heard or read of “new” SEO techniques, spend a lot of time researching their potential negative impacts before implementing them. Search engine algorithms are getting better and better at detecting techniques used to purposely manipulate their algorithm. Read their guidelines and stay within them, if you decide to implement grey hat or black hat techniques, it is only a matter of time before you are found out and penalised.

8 General Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Making Affordable SEO work for your site published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Most of the techniques in SEO are based on the following principals:

How to practices and the abandoned SEO techniques published at Start a Business Building Websites

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In the current economic climate, the days of burning through end-of-quarter budgets from lofty advertisers are unrealistic. Advertisers are increasingly looking to achieve their CPA performance goals while spending less on pure branding campaigns.

Publishers need to adjust.

To maximize your potential and deliver high CPMs, you need to be aware of your click-through rates and improve the performance conversion rates of your users. Matching campaigns with your user demographics will help this. One simple example: gaming campaigns work well on gaming traffic. Ideally, advertising should be an appealing part of your overall site content.

Too many ads seen in one day by your audience also hurts eCPMs. Frequency cap your traffic to generate higher CPMs. The first view is always the best quality, so displaying the ads with a “freq cap” of 1/24 can be a standard request from advertisers. Keep in mind that certain ad sizes and placements always perform the best: 300×250 medium rectangles and 728×90 leader boards are often the best performing sizes. Picking obscure sizes can result in not having the creatives to run in the placement, as there is a lack of advertisers and, thus low CPMs.

Placement is critical to performance too. Having a placement above the fold will generate better results than one at the bottom of the page which users may never see. Ever wondered why other sites have a 728×90 leader board at the top of the page on a site? Generally, it makes more money.

Most methods to increase eCPMs and revenue are common sense, advertising needs to be seen as a partner to your site that needs to fit in and work together with your audience. The moment you ‘tack’ it on it will degrade your performance.

via Kitara Media

Maximize CPM published at Start a Business Building Websites

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But did you know that a properly used Resource Box is probably the most powerful tool in your article marketing toolbox? It’s the one thing that can have the greatest impact on the amount of website traffic your articles generate.

This video will explain how you can create and utilize the perfect resource box.

Downloadable Versions:

Bottom Line: If you really want to make your articles sell then you’ve got to craft the perfect Resource Box. You have provided your expert advice to the reader for free, now is your chance to get something in return. Update your Resource Boxes today and take full advantage of the power of a perfect Resource Box.

Create the Perfect Resource Box published at Start a Business Building Websites

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When people directly link to your website you cannot control what anchor text the other webmasters use. You can request them to change it but it is not practical to track every incoming link and then ask the webmaster to use the right anchor text. The best way is, submit articles that already have the right anchor text in the links.

Meaningless articles filled with loads of keywords are a strict no-no if you want your  article marketing campaign to be effective.

Often you will find publishers of article  directory sites rejecting them outright.  While SEO is an important goal for any  business owner to direct traffic to the site, it shouldn’t be the only goal of article marketing. The main focus should be on
imparting useful knowledge, ideas and practical tips that readers can use.

Only then will the publisher feel the article is of worth. SEO follows as an added benefit.

You can use strategic keywords in places where you deem it necessary. Randomly populating the article with keywords will just jeopardize your campaign.

Don’t write articles only for SEO purposes published at Start a Business Building Websites

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2. Longer article titles can also increase your reprint rate  and value. The narrower the focus, the more  specialized the reprint website and the more qualified  the visitor/reader. This results in a greater referral rate  of traffic to your website.

Tip: For EzineArticles.com, your article title can be up to 100 characters long. Make your article title just a little
longer than what might feel comfortable and you will often see a higher return from your article in terms of how much traffic it can attract for you.

3. A good article title length is greater than 70 characters   but less than 100 characters.

4. Get to the point. Do not use exclamatory wording like  “You Don’t Want to Miss This”  or “This is a Must Read”
in your article title to induce urgency.  It usually just  induces annoyance. If your article is good, you don’t
need it in your title. Focus on the article topic.

5. Rambling on and on in your article title shows a lack  of respect for your readers time. Most people make the
mistake of spending 99% of their time on the article  body and 1% on the article title. Instead, put 20% of
your time on the article title and 80% on the article  body.

6. Don’t use slang. It will often backfire, especially if your  English-speaking reader did not grow up in your same
country or with your same life references. Be direct  and be sensitive to cultural misunderstandings when
choosing your article title.

7. Brevity is golden. Start with a long article title with  multiple hooks into your key topic and then continue
to ask yourself how you could tighten up the article  title without sacrificing your intended article title
promise.

Get Free Website Content

Does my article title use clear and concise wording? published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Having money in the bank, of course, is different. The bank pays interest.

That’s how money differs from wealth. Money changes hands. Wealth accumulates.

I have created wealth with our write at home websites. Every page we post (and we have posted over a thousand!) is a page that will be earning for us tomorrow…and ten years from tomorrow.

Try to imagine how good that feels. We could stop working on any or all of our websites and they’d still be working for us.

THAT’S how wealth accumulates.

Want to accumulate some for yourself? For your family?

I can’t recommend SiteBuildIt highly enough. Once you’ve used it you can’t fathom building a website any other way.

We want a business, not a lottery ticket. We want to be able to count on getting results for our efforts, rather than merely hoping for a positive outcome.

Now, you may not have as much time to spare for your new website as we do.

That’s okay. Lots of great websites are written slowly, over time. You’ll take comfort and have pride in knowing that your spare minutes are being spent building something for your – and your family’s – future.

Imagine waking up each morning to see how much traffic – and income – your write at home website has generated while you sleep. That’s what we do!

What can an SBI site be about? Just about anything! (Scan this list of 500 successful SBI sites for proof.)

And of course, we’re not the only write at home SBIers with a story.

And get this…

A SiteBuildIt site doesn’t even need a product to make money. Many SBIers (including Suzette and I) are essentially infopreneurs. As long as you’re providing sought after information, income opportunities will follow.

Imagine using your spare time to simply write at home and build a web business on the side. Imagine growing that business to the point where you could quit your day job.

Imagine all the time you’d get back!

It can happen. But only if you get started.

How building an SBI (Site Build It ) site grows wealth published at Start a Business Building Websites

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• be in demand. A reasonable number of people must be searching for information about your theme. If your theme is too narrow (ex., an unknown off-island-off-an-off-island in the Caribbean), there is not enough demand for you to monetize, even if your entire (too tiny) market finds you!
• not be too broad. If your Site Concept is too broad, the competition will be severe. The number of competing Web pages (the “Real Supply”) is just too great, especially since broad themes usually have major competitors. For example, it is impossible to “own” the theme of “travel.” Leave those super-broad themes to companies like expedia.com. Even the Site Concept of “Caribbean” is highly competitive. If you have 60 hours per week and are ready to work for a year, you might succeed. But creating a site about one of the islands is your best opportunity…
  • You most likely know a lot about one island. And that goes for “islands of knowledge,” not just geographic islands!
  • The competition will be less intense. So it will be easier for your well-written content pages to rank highly with the free Search Engines.
  • Those who find you will be highly targeted. They will be much more interested in your Content. It is far easier to PREsell those searching for topics (”keywords”) related to narrow themes than broad ones.
• excite you. Choose something that you know and love (or that you are willing to find out more about). If you do that, writing lots of information-packed content pages becomes an easy pleasure instead of work. Think “passion” and “knowledge” — if you have it, it will shine in your content.
• deliver high ROI potential. It must offer excellent options for monetizing traffic to your site. This ensures the ROI (Return On Investment) you want. Make every visitor to your site a possible income-generator.

Merely understand the above factors for now. When the time comes (at the end of this DAY), SBI! provides you with a foolproof tool (Niche Choose It!) to gather and evaluate all these factors and then find the best Site Concept for you.

Bottom line on choosing your Site Concept?…

It takes just as much time to build a low-potential business as a high-potential one. So invest the time now, get the Site Concept right, and you will maximize your returns later, earning far more income per hour invested down the road.

The Plan… How to Develop Your Best Site Concept

Most people fail in any business because they don’t plan adequately. If you pick the wrong concept for your site, if you develop the wrong topics for your Web pages… you’ll get the wrong results.

Build Niche Websites with:

1. Build A Niche Store – Succeed As An eBay(R) Affiliate.
2. SiteBuilder Elite – Instantly Create Content-Rich Websites

How to look for a “Niche Website” Concept published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Content Traffic PREsell Monetize

C T P M

Brainstorm It! is SBI!’s powerful keyword brainstorming and research tool. It helps you verify that your site concept has acceptable profit potential. SBIers are saved from making that common fatal error. With Brainstorm It!’s help, they know they are on track, right from the start. Brainstorm It! also helps you to find topics related to your niche that will pull in traffic and generate income.

Niche Choose It! is your final decision-making tool. It uses a complex decision-matrix theory that makes choosing the best niche for YOU simple… and flawless.

Choosing your best site concept is not always as obvious as you might think. Brainstorm It! and Niche Choose It! show you the best path for your particular business, reveal some surprises, and help you make the right choice.

Monetize It! helps you choose the best monetization options for your site concept. Creating a diverse monetization mix will help you maximize your site’s profitability and ensure long-term growth.

SBI! – Niche Research published at Start a Business Building Websites

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