Not long ago, they would have said a blog might help you do that. They likely wouldn’t have recommended that a blog serve as your main site.

Thanks to advances in content management software, however, that’s no longer the case. The line between conventional websites and blogs has all but disappeared.

“Blogging” programs have evolved into some of the most powerful and flexible content management systems available. One of the leading packages, WordPress, is completely free.

WordPress For Content Management

Sites built with WordPress can easily include static pages and sections. Technically, you will have a “blog,” but it can be made to appear virtually indistinguishable from any other site on the Web.

For new website owners who want to manage their own sites without learning code, content management systems like WordPress are particularly attractive.

Rather than compromising on your available SEO options by running your site with blog software, you are actually gaining some unique and affordable SEO advantages and opportunities.

Effortless Structure

Content management systems allow material to be easily categorized. Search engines love structure. Categorization options will allow you to keep a more orderly site that will naturally perform better with the search engine spiders.

By establishing and sticking to categories, you can effectively group relevant material and keep up with keywords and anchor text you’re optimizing. This includes:

- URLs with anchor text. Blog software makes it easier to create “crawlable” URLs that include your keyword phrases and anchor text.

- Relevant internal links. By grouping material in categories, you can make sure your internal links are relevant and doing the best job of dispersing PageRank across your site.

(All reliable online marketing consulting professionals stress the importance of relevant internal linking.)

Creating Fresh Content

Software like WordPress was specifically designed to handle the frequent creation of content. By regularly updating a portion of your site, either as a “news” section or as conventional blog commentary, you will:

- get crawled more often by the search engines,
- cultivate a regular readership to generate “word of mouth” traffic,
- more readily attract inbound links,
- and develop site “authority” faster.

The “blogosphere” is a social environment. Studies show that blogs trade links much more often than conventional websites.

By including a “blogroll” or list of links to relevant sites in your sidebar, you will find that other bloggers organically return the favor. Inbound links bring PageRank to your site and create a greater perception of site authority.

Traffic And Links Via Comments

Commenting plays a large role in link sharing on blog sites. Comments and trackback features further encourage interaction among sites and increase overall visibility.

Be warned, however, that for comments to best serve your site, you will need to engage you readers by answering their comments and by visiting their sites and leaving comments of your own.

(Note that comments can be turned on and off throughout your site with the WordPress system.)

Links In “Unconventional” Locations

Syndicating a site managed with blog software via RSS is a largely automatic process. By actively managing your RSS feed, however, you can include links and generate traffic that does not come directly from the search engines.

Further, your site will be eligible for inclusion in blog directories and will be crawled by blog-specific search engines where your competition may have no presence whatsoever.

Content management software like WordPress will:

- impose structure and order on your site,
- strengthen the use of anchor text in your urls,
- encourage the addition of fresh content,
- lead to organic links in the blogosphere,
- increase the frequency with which the search engines crawl your site,
- gain visibility for the site in areas your competition may ignore,
- and generate a greater sense of authority for you and your site.

So, how can using the software to manage your site be a bad idea in terms of SEO?

Wrapping It Up

Content management systems, when used with the basic principles stressed by online marketing consulting professionals, are simply another tool in an affordable SEO arsenal.

Such systems do not change the core purpose for establishing your site, they simply provide a different means of maintenance and improvement.

While you may spend money initially to have your site’s WordPress installation customized, overall, you will save on dollars that would otherwise go to a webmaster. Over time, that money can be spent on other SEO strategies.

With the ability to more easily and quickly manage your own site, you are not at the mercy of another person’s schedule. At the same time, the native controls built into the software will give you greater control over your efforts to gain search engine ranking.

That’s a win / win in anyone’s book.

Author’s Note: This article previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a
realistic budget. He’s an Online
Marketing Consultant professional marketing services and Affordable
SEO (and d-i-y Coaching). Get to know Paul, just visit Strategic
Web Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

Learn What’s Bad For SEO And Don’t Do It

If you take a drawing class, one of the first things you’ll learn is that it’s easier to look at the negative space than at the object itself. That means that as a beginner, you have a better shot at recreating the funky-looking space between the apple and the pear than drawing the fruit the first time you pick up a pencil. And you don’t get so discouraged when your results aren’t perfect. That’s a good concept to carry into online marketing.

Sometimes learning everything that can go wrong is a better place to start than trying to do everything right. Do-it-yourself, affordable SEO is too expensive at any cost if you’re constantly shooting yourself in the foot. Some of the biggest mistakes novices make are really the easiest ones to avoid!

Bad Navigation And No Sitemap

It doesn’t take a marketing coach to know that the entire point of “search engine optimization” on a site is to get that site crawled by the search engines. If you use images — or worse — Flash or javascript to design your navigation, the search engines will ignore you. (Also, any page that doesn’t have an incoming link won’t be crawled.)

Not having a sitemap is just as bad. Many website owners don’t think they need a sitemap because people don’t use them. It’s not about people! Search engines love sitemaps. They literally crawl all over sitemaps. Even if you have to maintain the sitemap manually, have one and link to it on every page of your site.

Poorly Constructed Title Tags And URLs

There’s nothing wrong with building your own website, but pay attention to what your software is doing. Many site building packages and content management systems repeat the same title tag on every single page. Good programs of marketing coaching teach you that the title tag is probably the single most-important SEO element of any page. The title tag must fit the content of the page itself.

But, don’t pay attention to the title tag and ignore the URL. This is especially a problem in content management systems and shopping carts. The URLs are full of numbers and letters. You need to be including your keywords in your URLs so the search engines pick up on them. Don’t waste the invaluable potential in either the title tag or the URL.

Banning A Search Engine By Accident

It’s not unusual for a novice site owner to mess up their robots.txt file. The file exists in your site’s root directory to talk to search engine spiders. You can tell them not to crawl pages or sections or send other individual instructions. Since the file is just plain text and is so easy to create, site owners wade in without really understanding what they’re doing. If you’re not careful, you can ban the search engines from your site altogether. Use Yahoo SiteExplorer or Google SiteMaps to make sure that your site can indeed by crawled.

Vague Anchor Text For Links

Using anchor text like “click here” or “next” is a waste. When you are cultivating incoming links or creating your own links inside your site, use useful, descriptive anchor text. You don’t want to repeat the same phrase over and over again. Get two or three relevant, keyword-rich pieces of anchor text and also use your company name. Empty phrases are just that — empty.

Doing accurate keyword research is fundamental to successful online marketing. It’s a huge topic in its own right, but you basically want to concentrate on phrases that are not overly general or that have too much competition. Good marketing coaches will spend a lot of time on keyword selection and you should too. Put that chore right up at the top of your SEO “to do” list.

In reading all the tips available on marketing coaching, you’ll find that most articles and courses focus on the things website owners should do. It’s also important to look at what you shouldn’t do. A poorly constructed site that fails to make good use of readable navigation, workable behind-the-scenes code, solid naming structures, and relevant anchor text will have a tough time online. Consider the fundamentals of basic SEO from the planning stage of your site to maximize your results and get the traffic you want.

Previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s a Marketing Coaching expert offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

More Is Not Better In Link Building

Just going out and getting a bunch of links won’t necessarily help your site. You need quality links to get higher search rankings. But sometimes figuring out what makes one link better than another is tough. This is where you do need to keep up with what the online marketing consultants are recommending or you may just be wasting your time.

Targeted Anchor Text Is A Must

When you start pursuing links on sites, you need targeted anchor text. However, you don’t want to use the same text everywhere. Google will notice that in a bad way. You want to use two or three different phrases and the proper name of your website. If you can’t get anything but an image link, make sure the site owner puts your anchor text or the name of your site in the ALT tag of the image.

Pay Attention To Links In And Out

Google looks at the site where your link appears and decides how much benefit your site gets back. A site with a lot of inbound links passes more authority to your site. At the same time, being linked on a site full of low-quality, outbound links probably won’t help you much.

PageRank Isn’t Everything

Don’t be one of those site owners who sees nothing but PageRank. A site with high PageRank can still have low link value. This is especially true of sites that sell links. Steer clear of sites that use phrases like “sponsored by” or “paid for by.” Google may not let that site pass PageRank at all. Move on. They’re not worth your time.

Concentrate On Site Relevance

Let’s say your site is about red widgets. You get a link on a site about purple doohickeys. That link isn’t worth as much as one on a site about red widget management. Make sure you’re pursuing links in relevant places and look at how those places are optimized. If a site owner gives you a choice of having a link on a page titled “About Us” or one with the title “About Red Widgets,” which one do you choose? The link on the optimized page, “About Red Widgets,” has more value.

An Online Marketing Consultant Checks What’s Not Obvious

Take your cue from the pros and check sites in ways that aren?t obvious. For instance, in any search engine, you can type in “cache:” followed by a site url and find out if the site has been indexed and when it was last crawled. But what do those dates mean?

Chances are good that if the site hasn’t been crawled in 30-45 days, it’s not a good place for a link. But some domains have more value than others. For example, links from .edu domains are better than from a .com, but .info is worth less. All these factors should be weighed in judging a site?s worth in your link building efforts.

Does Social Networking Matter?

We’ve all seen the little link bars under blog posts and in forums asking people to Digg or Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. Do you need to try to get links in places where social networking can happen? Yes. Alone those links may not have a lot of value, but Google is increasingly looking at the “active Web” in determining site authority.

It?s time consuming, but participating in forums and social sites and getting blog owners to run your articles with your linked anchor text included can be worth your time. But remember, relevance is a basic rule in online marketing consulting.

Are You Getting Clean Links?

When you get a link on a site, do you go look at the page’s source code? Is there anything extra in the “href” tag on the link? Is the site using redirect code? Is there a “nofollow” in the site’s meta data? If there is, the link is useless to you. It won’t pass any authority to your site because that code tells the search engines not to follow the link. Make sure you?re getting clean links.

When you’re on a tight budget and trying to develop your site and get higher search rankings, it can be a tough decision to work online marketing consulting into your thinking. The Web used to be pretty much a do-it-yourself place. That all started to change in 2004 when people began talking about “Web 2.0.”

It’s harder than ever to judge quality link building in the new world of Web applications and social networking. You can do it, but try to stay up to speed on what the online marketing consultants are recommending as good strategies. The Web is changing all the time. Good link building takes time and effort; you don’t want to waste those any more than you want to waste money during hard times.

Editor’s Note: This article previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consultants expert offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

Any good marketing coach can explain that easily. If your site is placing high in free (organic) search results, you’re getting free advertising. Notice the word “free.” That’s always a good thing. Building a strong PageRank (PR) by getting good quality links coming in to your site takes time, but it isn’t going to eat a hole in your pocketbook.

You want to work on raising your site’s PR to get “authority” with the search engines. A site with “authority” gets better visibility in search results. Really understanding the algorithm behind your site’s PR will likely have you reaching for a bottle of aspirin. In the beginning, just concentrate on understanding the basics and how they relate to your efforts to promote your site.

How Is PR Defined?

Google says PR is all about the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” and “using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” Basically, a link from one page to another is a vote for that page. However, not all votes in this democracy are equal. Some votes come from higher-quality pages and are weighed more heavily. (Other factors in determining PR include the relevance of search phrases on a page and actual traffic to the page.)

How Is PageRank Expressed?

PR values are expressed on a scale of 0 to 10. Sites from 0 to 2 are probably pretty new to the Web and have few incoming links. Sites that have made it to PR3 to PR5 are fairly well established; PR6 and above are really popular and have a lot of high-quality links. There are very few sites that make it to the PR7 to PR10 range.

The ones that are ranked that high are usually owned by big corporations or major media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (PR8). Improving your site’s PR by getting relevant, high-quality, incoming links is one of the most affordable SEO methods at your disposal. Rather than trying to get to a specific number, just concentrate on improving your number.

Is My Site’s Index The Only Page With PR?

No, each page in your site will be assigned a PR, something that is emphasized in marketing coaching as a valuable tool. You can use relevant interlinking to distribute PR throughout all your pages.

Huh? Well, just hang on to that thought for a minute. For right now, just understand the concept that some pages in your site may earn a higher PR than others, and that you can use that to your advantage.

PageRank Passes From One Page To Another

Here’s how it works. A page with a high PR passes some of its value to a low PR page over a link. You can use this to promote your site in a couple of ways. When your site’s pages are interlinked in a relevant way, PR gets distributed more evenly throughout the site. Also, you can “court” relevant sites that belong to other people through your link-building campaign. This is really how your site starts to gain “authority.”

Start By Building Your Index Page’s PR

Generally, marketing coaches will tell you to begin by working on your home page’s PR. This can be time-consuming, and not just because you’ll be building relationships with other site owners. You have to do your time in what’s popularly called the Google “sandbox.” This just means that new sites like yours probably won’t get any PR at all for the first few months you’re on the Web.

How Do I Check My PR?

There are a number of free, online tools for checking PR including PRChecker and SearchStatus. At PRChecker you type in a page’s URL to see its PR. SearchStatus is a FireFox extension that show a site’s PR at the bottom of your browser. (It also shows your site’s Alexa rating, another method to measure online “importance.”) You an also install the Google Toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer and enable the PageRank function.

Is Building My PR All I Need To Do?

A marketing coach will tell you that having a strong PR is only one part of your SEO campaign. For instance, say you’re looking around for a site to link to yours. You find one with a high PR, but it’s a site that sells links. Move on. Their high PR number doesn’t do you any good because a link from that site to yours will have a lower quality and will pass less authority to you.

Understanding the basics of PageRank is essential in putting together a high-quality link-building campaign for your site, but don’t get fixated on the PR number and ignore other important facts. Just gain a basic understanding of what PR is and how it functions and use that to your advantage in building a reputation of authority for your site.

This article published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s a Marketing Coach offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

Above all, know your audience. Understand what your readers want and give it to them. More content:

1. Feeds the search engines.

2. Encourages return readers.

3. Serves as a keyword platform.

4. Helps distribute PageRank (through relevant internal linking.)

Online marketing consulting emphasizes the need to build site authority. Information rich, relevant text is the most affordable SEO tool at your disposal to achieve that goal.

People Read Differently Online

Monitor resolution, color quality, available light, and the fixed distance and angle of the screen all cause eye fatigue. More importantly, links encourage distraction. Readers routinely jump ship in the middle of the paragraph with no guarantee they’ll ever come back.

Use Inverted Pyramid Structure

To compensate, put the most important information in the first paragraph. Journalists have been doing it for years, well aware that almost no one will read their entire story. Arrange the rest of the material in descending order of importance.

Write To Your Links

If you include a link in a paragraph, continue to control the narrative at the link’s destination. Regardless of where a reader goes in your site, make sure you are presenting a coherent message.

Repeat Without Copying

Don’t be afraid to repeat information, but don’t just copy the same chunk of text. Rewrite repetitive material to vary your keyword phrasing and anchor text. Every page on the site should appear fresh and dynamic.

Forget The Five-Sentence Paragraph

Online readers need more white space to make skimming the text easier. Forget the five-sentence paragraph structure you learned in English class. Keep online paragraphs to three sentences or less whenever possible.

When possible, use a mix of bold, italics and underlining to make skimming easier for the reader.

Keep An Active, Direct Voice

Action verbs create strong web copy. Don’t write that you “have been taught.” Tell the reader what you “learned.” Speak authoritatively, not passively.

Keep Your Text Concise

Work for a length of 500 to 1000 words per page. When an article runs long, pay special attention to paragraph length. Use subtitles to highlight main ideas and to create more white space.

Consider that the average reader reads at about 200 words per minute. Keeping them on a page for more than 5 minutes (1000 words) often isn’t possible.

Choose Common Vocabulary

Write your text on a 9th to 12th grade reading level. There are numerous tools online to measure the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of your text. Most require nothing more complicated than copying and pasting the material to be measured.

Proofread Your Copy

Misspelled words and poor grammar scream “amateur.” Ask someone you trust to proofread your copy. Writers get too close to their words and easily miss mistakes.

Avoid Common Grammatical Errors

Don’t be guilty of the most common grammatical mistakes. Making glaring errors will harm the reputation of your site and tell readers you don’t know what you’re doing. In particular avoid:

– Loose for lose. You lose your car keys. Your Hawaiian shirt has a loose fit.

– Lay for lie. When you have a headache you lie down. You lay your papers on the desk.

– You’re for your. “You’re in for trouble if you don’t mind your grammar.”

– Of for have. “I would have set you straight about this error if I could have.”

– They’re for their. “They’re suffering from the consequences of their bad manners.”

– Effect for affect. “A computer problem affects your ability to work. The effects of the situation may delay the project.”

Know When To Break The Rules

There are always situations that require that the rules be broken. This relates directly to the need to know your audience. Some topics call for a more in-depth treatment and more complex language.

Introduce deeper, more complicated material with a brief synopsis. Make it clear that following the link will take the reader to an extended treatment of the topic.

Formatting is even more important for in-depth material. Try to treat one idea per page with a clear indication of how many pages will follow. This lets readers find logical stopping points and encourages them to bookmark their place and return to finish reading later.

Always Remember The Basics

In composing text for your site, never forget the different mechanics of reading online. Focus on the wants and needs of your audience. Believe the online marketing consultant wisdom that content is king.

Keep the most important information in the first paragraph. Use sub-headings to improve visual scanning. Choose active verbs and clearly understood words.

Control the narrative throughout your site. Repeat without copying. Proofread and correct your work and update frequently to feed the search engines and encourage repeat visits from your readers.

Author’s Note: This article also published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consultant offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

More than 100,000 people descended upon California to find their own wealth in the hills and the streams of California. Fast-forward 150 years, and people are saying the same thing about the Internet today.

?Thar is gold in them thar Web pages,? for the person who doesn’t get their clock cleaned by the snake oil salesmen of the Internet.

By hiring a qualified online marketing consultant or successfully completing a reputable Internet marketing training course, you can succeed online.

Early Victors In The Online Business Success Story

In 1994, Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo created the Yahoo Web directory. One year later, they co-founded Yahoo, Inc.

In 1998, Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin created and launched the Google search engine, the largest and most popular search company on the Internet today.

In 2005, three former PayPal employees joined forces to create YouTube. The three founders of YouTube were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Only 21 months after the launch of YouTube, Google purchased the website for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

One Does Not Have To Be ?On Leave From The Stanford Ph.D. Program?

It’s amazing when you look at the biographies of the Who?s Who in Internet business startup success. Most everyone on the list has as part of his or her biography, ?currently on a leave of absence from Stanford’s … Ph.D. program.?

This reference is actually an inside joke, pointing to the fact that nearly all of these people dropped out of college to start their Internet businesses.

The founders of Yahoo, Google and Apple were all college dropouts. The founders of YouTube were simply paid staff of PayPal before striking out on their own with YouTube.

The point is that if college dropouts can make it online, then we can too, if we choose to learn from those who came before us.

But even if these people didn’t have a college degree, do you believe they created these tremendous accomplishments without education?

They became educated and performed marketing research to help insure their success. They surrounded themselves with people who had knowledge in areas where they weren’t as strong needed some help.

Creating Online Business Marketing Success Today

There are many companies online offering business-building services to others. Some are good, some are bad, and others may be good, but they may not be the right service providers for your company.

Take for example the Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising system. Millionaires have been made through the Google AdWords system.

Just to put this into perspective, through June of 2007, eBay had been spending $25 million every quarter with Google AdWords.

When major businesses spend $100 million per year in advertising with one advertiser, you can believe that the company is making that amount back and much more from the advertising provider.

For Every Online Marketing Success, There Are Dozens Of Failures

Not all of us will create the next Yahoo, Google, eBay or Amazon. But good money can be made online if you don?t fall into the traps where many before you have fallen.

AdWords is a powerful advertising model. It can make millionaires and it does every year.

But the thing is that AdWords may not be the right advertising model for you to follow now and it may not be right for you ever.

If you understand that, you’re less likely to fall into the poor house using any online advertising method.

Unfortunately, too many people have mortgaged their homes and driven themselves into bankruptcy using online marketing companies to promote their online businesses.

Deep Pockets Are Not The Solution, But Wise Internet Marketing Choices Are

First and foremost, a business must design itself to make a profit on its’ activities.

I know people who have developed businesses online that did well in the sales column, but the business owner failed in his quest to turn those sales into a profit.

Imagine being the website owner who generated his first $120,000 year and then nearly went under because his prices were too low for the kind of service being offered.

After having been a successful sole proprietor online for five years, my friend said that his first six-figure year nearly put him out of business. He is just now beginning to recover financially from his mistakes, 18 months later.

We Can’t Know Everything About Running Our Online Businesses, Especially In Today’s Complicated World

When starting an online business, there are people who have been down the road you are getting ready to travel. They know where the potholes are in the road and they know where the landmines are buried.

To add an online marketing consulting coach of this caliber to your contact list could mean the difference between success and failure online.

It’s a real added benefit for online business people to have someone to turn to for advice, regarding how to overcome the hurdles they will face in their Internet business.

We might have the basics covered, but there’s always going to be times when the experiences of others can help light the path in front of us.

Online Marketing Consultants Can Help You Avoid The Landmines

A qualified online marketing consultant is an invaluable asset for many online businesses today.

There are affordable business mentors and Internet marketing coaches, specializing in helping small business start-ups and solo professionals.

What if you could benefit from their past experiences — both good and bad — without having to waste the money and the time they did?

Think of their services as being like an insurance policy, helping ensure your success.

Over my many years online, I have learned a lot both from Internet marketing training and from the school of hard knocks.

The 2 main mistakes I see new online business people making are:

1. Not being realistic about the money and time required to make an online business succeed, with the competition that exists today.

2. Not obtaining enough marketing education to succeed online.

Wrapping It Up

I encourage you to pursue your dreams and your online business.

Make sure you have the proper training to help guarantee your success. Strongly consider Internet marketing training through a qualified, reputable source…either through personal online marketing consultants or through online training courses.

Editor’s Note: This article published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consulting expert offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

We have to get our products or services exactly right.

Then we have to figure out how to explain them to others through our website.

We understand the reasons people should buy what we are selling. But can we successfully explain that to our website visitors in convincing language they relate to, instead of jargon and lingo related to our industry?

Finally, we have to develop an action plan to market online and within our budget, which is often limited when first starting our business.

And how do we develop that marketing plan? Where do we get the information necessary to formulate marketing techniques that will actually work for us? The number of sources out there is simply overwhelming!

This is when getting feedback from a professional outside our own industry can be valuable. You can turn to an affordable Online Marketing Consultants who understands and specializes in small businesses and new business start-ups.

What about Getting Internet Traffic to Your Site?

Some start by using pay-per-click marketing, like Google AdWords. The trouble is that AdWords can get expensive quickly. And it takes a LOT of time to set up and manage over time.

Starting out it may make sense to use AdWords. Plus, it can be a great way to test your keyword search phrases to find out which ones convert best. You can use AdWords for this purpose before beginning search engine optimization (SEO).

But ultimately…sooner or later…most businesses need to optimize for the search engines (SEO).

SEO can provide you qualified Internet traffic without per-visitor costs. Think of it almost as free advertising…well, free after the SEO costs in either time, money or some of both.

You should also utilize article marketing, getting your message in front of article directory visitors and ezine newsletter subscribers. This can generate faster sales, while you’re waiting on your SEO efforts to pay off.

Lastly, for most Internet businesses, they should use blog postings or opt-in email marketing to stay in touch with their prospective buyers, using a soft-sell method, over time. If ALL you focus on are people who make a buying decision the very first time they come to your site, you’re missing out on the great majority of sales you can make!

How Much Traffic Do You Need?

Here are some questions you’ll need to consider when making decisions about AdWords and SEO:

1. What is your monthly sales revenue goal from your website?

2. How much traffic to your website on a monthly basis will you need to meet your sales goals?

3. What is (or will be) your click-through rate, whether from AdWords impressions or organic SEO listings?

You need this number to determine the total number of monthly impressions or search queries you’ll need (for your AdWords ads and your organic SEO listings to be seen by searchers), to arrive at the monthly traffic number you need to your website.

4. What is (or will be) your conversion sales rate from your traffic? Again, you need this number also to determine the amount of monthly impressions or search queries you’ll need.

Especially when first starting up, finding this type of data, evaluating the accuracy of it and then implementing a plan can be very time-consuming and can almost drive a person crazy!

There are a lot of so-called experts you can follow. But how do you know if they know what they’re talking about?

And without having these numbers (at least good estimates), starting AdWords or SEO is like throwing darts with a blindfold on!

Again, this is where talking with 1 or 2 Online Marketing Consultants can help light your path. Your result can be more sales, MUCH faster.

Which Keyword Search Phrases are Right for Your Business?

Think of keywords as the windows or doors to your website. Without using the right ones for YOUR business, your website is like a house without windows or doors — no one is coming in. Kinda the opposite of what you’re going for.

What makes good keywords for your business?

My advice to clients I coach is your keywords should:

1. accurately match what the search engine users INTEND when they type in their keywords to the services or products you offer (get inside their heads);

2. bring you enough traffic to be worth the AdWords or SEO effort;

3. offer affordable enough AdWords bid prices, if you’re using AdWords;

4. have obtainable first or second page SEO results;

5. contain words in the phrases that suggest a searcher who is ready to spend money (unless you’re offering something that is truly free);

6. CONVERT directly to a sale, a sales lead, a sign-up…whatever your goal is.

Wrapping it Up

Be open to the value affordable Online Marketing Consultants offer you. Someone who has already gone down the road you’re on can help you avoid the potholes along the way. And those potholes can be very expensive…

There are talented advisors out there who understand small businesses and new business start-ups. And they price their services for these businesses.

Using someone talented, you’ll almost certainly make more sales, more quickly.

And following that advice and the other suggestions in this article, your Internet marketing plan should be off to a great start!

Author’s Note: Also published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consultants expert offering marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). You can learn more about Paul on his Search Engine Marketing LinkedIn profile and at Strategic Web Marketing.net.

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

As an Internet Marketing Coach, I hear all the time from new clients how they’ve wasted hundreds to thousands on Internet get-rich-quick schemes before coming to me.

Desperation and inexperience are the breading grounds that allow these scammers to prey.

Just this last week, one of my colleagues replied to a guy on a forum who wanted to start earning $5,000 each month — oh, and within the next 30 days. And he had $80.00 to invest, a whole eighty dollars!

I’m sure the guy is nice, but he also sounds desperate. How is anyone going to start earning literally thousands of dollars a month within 30 days on just an $80.00 investment?

Isn’t this scenario as realistic as saying ALL the employees at your local fast food restaurant earn $100,000 per year?

Yes, Saint Nick is gone and did I mention that The Tooth Fairly is on life support?

Let’s get real.

Are You Real about Internet Earnings and the Business Costs Required?

Back to my big spender above who has just $80.00 to invest…where did he get the idea he could be a successful Internet marketer on an $80.00 investment?

My guess is he probably got that idea from some forum.

And that may bring up a good point: are you likely to get good advice going to forums?

Me personally, I’m too busy to participate in forums. Although to be fair, I do have successful SEO (search engine optimization) colleagues who do. But while you could encounter a talented person to give you — free advice — on a forum, my best advice to you is you are more likely to encounter people with — free time.

If they have so much free time to participate in forums, how busy are they with paid work?

And about free advice…how many people do you personally know who work for free? How would they pay their bills?

Do YOU work for free now?

Are you going to be working for free with your online enterprise? If you’re not, then why should someone else?

If you want to earn $100,000 per year form your Internet business, do you want your advice coming from someone offering free advice OR only charging $20.00 per hour?

OK, You’ve Got Some Money to Invest in Your Internet Business, What’s Your Next Step?

Well, protect it and spend it carefully! Watch out for “blue sky” promises of anything that sounds too good to be true.

Compared to conventional advertising and marketing, you don’t need that much money to market online. But you do need some.

You need money for a Web site and you need some for marketing, likely PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO.

The more cash you have to invest, the less time you have to invest. You can hire an Internet Marketing Company to perform much of the work for you.

OR, the less money you have, the more of your time that will be required. This can be a very good time to considering hiring an Internet Marketing Coach, to save you money and speed up the timetable for you to earn income.

The problem is the people with no money to invest OR with unrealistic expectations are the ones who fall prey to the Internet marketing scammers. Often, these are the same people who don’t have the skills to do any of the work themselves or the desire to develop the required skills (sigh).

An Example of what To Do…and what NOT To Do

Consider another one of my clients who paid $1,000 for a well-known Internet marketing program. My client was told all sorts of inconsistent things, including that the course was for people new to online marketing, which that wasn’t the case.

And he was told to market something online that he didn’t know anything about or have any particular interest in.

Huh??

How does THAT make any sense?

But at that moment, that was what he wanted to hear, because it was easy and didn’t require much effort or time from him.

Here’s the real deal: there are dozens, hundreds or thousands of people and companies marketing the same or similar product or service to yours. You have to do it BETTER.

That requires time and effort. It requires making an effort and using one’s brain.

And this is where a qualified Marketing Coach or a Search Engine Optimization Firm can help you.

If you select well, the money you spend you will more than save in increased profits, much faster and avoiding the potholes and pitfalls that come with Internet marketing. Those pitfalls can be very expensive (and time consuming).

And there are actually Internet Marketing Coaches you can begin with for only a few hundred dollars, which could be money very well spent.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget. He’s a Marketing Coach expert offering marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). You can learn more about Paul on his Marketing Coach LinkedIn profile and at Strategic Web Marketing.net.

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

If you miss these, you won’t increase conversions.

What good is a Number 1 organic search engine ranking or AdWords ad listing, if you don’t have increased sales or if you don’t generate more sales leads?

Too often, we get all focused about the Internet marketing — the ads, the offer — that we don’t think the whole process through step-by-step and consider the experience our website visitors will be having.

If we did, we’d be thinking “big picture” and we would head off some of these potential problems before they occur.

Overcoming Your Website Visitors Anxiety

When people come to our website it’s natural for them to feel anxiety. After all, look at all the cr*p on the Internet today, all the too-good-to-be-true products and services.

But when you and I offer REAL products or services, we have to overcome that concern, even if we’re treating our site visitors fairly and not making outrageous claims.

So, how can you overcome these anxieties?

1. Offer more than a 1-page website. Credible companies have multi-page websites, including Privacy Policy, Terms of Use | Service and About Us pages.

They also have more than 1 page about their products or services.

I’m surprised by the number of 1-page websites I see from companies using infomercials to advertise their products. Often, they have the purchase form right on their home page, their only page (and often their page isn’t secured for credit card ordering).

Websites that are only 1-page don’t seem credible. And having the purchase form right on the home page comes across as very pushy!

Doesn’t this type of site seem all about the company and NOT about their customers? Why would we want to buy from that type of company?

What kind of online marketing consulting firm did these companies use…or did they use any??

2. Next to any sign up or contact form buttons clearly state that you don’t sell your customers’ private information and link to your Privacy Policy page.

3. Effectively communicate what your Value Proposition is, also called your Unique Selling Proposition. If you don’t know why someone should buy your product or service versus your competitors’, now is the time to figure it out. (And by the way, based on my experience, if you don’t know this, you’re not alone, by any means.)

But our websites have to be about more than just us. They have to be about our visitors. What’s in it for THEM, to do business with us? What unique voids in the marketplace can we fill?

As a Small Business Owner, Personally Relate to Your Site Visitors and Communicate Directly with Them

People don’t buy from websites, they buy from people! So, how can you apply this to your own website?

1. For many small businesses and solo proprietorships, their website text should speak to your visitors directly in first person.

This should be written from the voice of the Owner or President. They shouldn’t use third person, institutional-sounding language, getting rid of “we” and “our”, using “I” instead, speaking first person, in an actual conversation. Don’t try to sound like you’re Microsoft!

And while your at it, be careful about overuse of words about you…whether “I”, or those words, “we”, “our” or “us”.

Check out the WeWe calculator (Google: wewe calculator). Make sure to focus on customer-focused words and NOT on words about you or your company.

2. Include your picture on your Web pages.

For a larger small business trying to make that personal connection with their website visitors, try the idea used by the nutritional supplement company Lumina. (Google: Lumina Health Contact Us)

In this execution, notice how Lumina gets you to relate to their customer service department. I still remember it was John I spoke with and that’s been over 1 year ago that I called them!

Again, people buy from other people, not from websites.

For us as small businesses, why should we sound large, pretending to be something we aren’t? And why should we run from our advantage of being small: low overhead, friendly, personal service and accountability, among other advantages.

Make Each Step in Your Marketing a Smooth Handoff from One Step to Another

Whether you’re using AdWords, SEO, or both, make sure your title and description matches the experience your website visitor will have when they come to your landing page.

Quite often when I’m Coaching my small business owner clients or performing online marketing consulting, I find the wording for their organic listing or AdWords ad says one thing and their landing page says something that doesn’t sound the same.

This causes confusion is the best case scenario. In the worst case, it causes a lack of trust. Dangerous!

We should understand our products or services. And we know what we want our visitors to do on our site.

Our potential customers may not understand either. We need to think like them, when we explain what we have to offer them and how to use our website to take advantage of what we have to offer.

And when “shifting” from one page to another, we need to hand-off from one page to another naturally and smoothly, like a car with a smooth automatic transmission.

Don’t advertise one offer in AdWords or organic search, only to have your landing page sound like it was written for another advertising offer. I see this problem a lot!

Often times, having an affordable online marketing consulting firm reviewing what you’re doing can offer easy, inexpensive fixes that can yield big improvements in your search engine advertising and SEO conversions.

Your Action Plan

Let’s review what we’ve talked about.

First, overcome visitors anxieties by offering a multi-page website which answers questions about your company and your services or products, while inspiring confidence in your company. Effectively communicate your Value Proposition.

Second, personally relate to your site visitors. Avoid using the wrong words that may put off your site visitors. Use your picture on your Web pages.

Third, hand-off from one page on your website and one step in your selling process to another smoothly and naturally. We should understand what we want our site visitors to do, but they won’t unless we make the process really clear.

Whether your using an online marketing consulting firm or doing the work yourself, if you take these steps, your search engine optimization | advertising plan will convert at a MUCH higher rate, when you take these steps.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consulting expert offering marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). You can learn more about Paul on his Internet Marketing LinkedIn profile and at Strategic Web Marketing.net.

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

The key is for your website optimization to out-perform your competition, without over spending with an online marketing consultant (or without taking up too much of your time if you’re going the do-it-yourself route).

Remember, affordable Search Engine Optimization is about increasing quality traffic, then

If you miss these points I describe below, your SEO goals of increased conversions will tank, even if you have a Number 1 Google Ranking.

I often notice these missed areas when I’m Coaching a business owner about their Web site and their need to increase sales and sales leads.

So, here are 3 points for you to review that I hope will help your SEO goals of increased conversions.

What’s Above the Fold Counts Most, so Consider Monitor Resolutions

Living in the world of TV remote controls and browser back buttons, we have to capture our website visitors’ attention ASAP. Our visitors aren’t going to give us much time before making a decision to stay or to leave our website.

As much as this subject is discussed these days, it’s amazing the number of sites I review that have critical information missing from “above the fold”, in that area visible before your visitors scroll down.

This is the area to briefly summarize what people can do on your site and make your best case for your guests staying on your website and not clicking away. This may also be the area to place your contact information.

Keep in mind that what’s above the fold on your monitor will likely be different from what’s above the fold on the monitor for someone visiting your website. Browser resolution is set differently for various computers.

For instance, on my website, I know the top resolution of my visitors is 1280 by 1024 (53%) and the second most popular resolution is 1024 by 768 (37%). I get this information from my site’s analytics script, although not all analytics programs provide this critical information.

Since I make sure my site looks great for these 90% of my visitors and make sure I communicate reasons to stay on my site above the fold (my value proposition), I draw more people into my site, encouraging them to scroll down.

Remember to cross test your site with recent versions of the most popular Web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and maybe even Google’s new Chrome.

These steps raise my conversion rate and they will raise yours, too. And increasing traffic and conversions is the whole point of affordable search engine optimization, whether using an online marketing consultant or d-i-y, right?

So, don’t miss this important step.

Carefully Select Your Type Size and Font and Remember that White Space is Your Friend

I’m astounded by the improper text choices made by so many website owners today. Is there really any good reason to make people squint at your website, struggling to get the information they need?

Consider reviewing The Easy to Read Standard at Information Architects (you can Google it). I would encourage you to review the size of your text, the white space between your letters and words and between your paragraphs and headings.

Designers often believe whitespace is your enemy; if you want people to understand your message and stay on your website, whitespace is in fact your friend.

Also consider that fonts with serifs are easier to read than fonts without serifs.

If you want to successfully convey your message to as many of your site visitors as possible, then make it as easy for them as you can. When we’re talking about increasing conversions, it’s all about the numbers and appealing to the largest number of people possible.

Use Opt-in Email or Blog Postings to Maximize Your Sales

All website owners would like for people to buy from their website the first time they visit. But is that realistic?

Consider these statics from the National Sales Executive Association:

For most businesses, if you don’t offer an opt-in contact, like a regular email newsletter or blog postings, you’re missing out on most of your potential sales!

When setting up an opt-in Internet marketing campaign, you should offer incentives to subscribe. To entice people to opt-in, you can offer:

Using opt-in contact allows you to significantly increase conversions by introducing yourself over time to your potential customers, in a soft-sell manner.

Website optimization is important; the goal is increased Internet traffic, sales and sales leads. But whether you’ve hired an online marketing consultant or you’re doing the process yourself, Affordable search engine optimization by itself doesn’t accomplish those last points of increased sales and sales leads.

You’ve got to remember to design your website to alleviate visitors natural apprehensions and make buying from you as easy as possible.

Properly mapping out the above the fold area of your Web pages, using appropriate size text, using adequate whitespace and offering an opt-in process to nurture your buyers will all help you accomplish the real goals you have with SEO and website optimization: increased sales and more sales leads.

Editor’s Note: Article previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consultant and an href="http://strategicwebmarketing.net/search-engine-positioning.html
target=_blank>Affordable Search Engine Optimization specialist offering marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). You can learn more about Paul on his LinkedIn profile: href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmarshallwebmarketing>http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmarshallwebmarketing and at Strategic Web Marketing.net.

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall