When it comes to developing and marketing a successful web asset, one of the most difficult aspects is identifying the link ability of the site. Business owners want to know if the site will make them money. Will the investment result in expanded business and higher ROI? Link Ability is one of the most important elements that will determine a website’s opportunity for success, one of the most difficult to assess, and almost always the last thing considered by web developers. When we make changes to an existing site, or are retained to redesign a website, you can bet Link Ability was the core cause of the revisions.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine came to me with a product that relates to an industry I have personally wanted to target for years, but just had never made the time. They wanted help from someone who has experience in developing multiple successful Internet websites from scratch. Naturally, enter Me…
Needless to say, I decided to get involved and help my friend to hopefully build a successful Internet company and profit on the side as well. Over the last couple weeks of work on this project, it struck me that I should really blog about the process and what we’re doing to actually develop the website so other people can learn firsthand how to create an Internet company from scratch and also what worked for us and what hasn’t (hopefully, there won’t be too much of the hasn’t topic).
Continuing with our series on Creating An Internet Company From Scratch, we move into the fundamentals of identifying our market and developing a business plan.
Many businesses fail because the owners of the company didn’t take the time to build a sound and detailed roadmap for success. They failed to do adequate research into the market they want to target, and did not fully understand what was necessary to penetrate and acquire a sufficiently large enough share to be profitable.
We know that you want to be the best at what you do (or it’s likely you wouldn’t be coming here for tips). Yet you have to ask yourself how far you are willing to go to get traffic to your website. Are you willing to bend the truth a little? How about a lot?
Honesty is a big issue on the web. You also hear it talked about as integrity, transparency, or trustworthiness, yet it all boils down to the same thing—millions of web browsers are out there looking for something real, and they’re having a really hard time finding it.
You’ve heard the term SEO—search engine optimization—but what in the world does it really mean, anyway? And how is it different than internet marketing?
Well, it’s actually simple…SEO is the use of techniques that help to optimize the results of searches done online. SEO is just one way of doing internet marketing. The term internet marketing encompasses SEO and many more marketing techniques. While SEO is extremely important, it isn’t the entire story when it comes to getting your website noticed.
Backlinks are an essential part of SEO (search engine optimization). Simply put, backlinks are the links that are used to reach your website from other sites online. Backlinks are also often referred to as in-links or incoming links.
Just as you may have links on your site to other sites, backlinks are the ways that your site can be found throughout the internet. Aside from search engines, backlinks are a very important part of your marketing program on their very own.
What is social media marketing? Social media marketing is a relatively new way of online marketing—one that many people may be wary of. Social media marketing uses social networking to distribute information.
The main thing here is that social network sites have user-provided content as opposed to website owner content. The most popular of these social networking sites include YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And of course, Twitter is also considered a type of social media network.
You’ve likely heard of MLM programs—they are a very popular online entity these days. Online MLM programs (MLM stands for multi-level marketing) are programs that are designed in a way that allows people to make money by marketing the program. The concept of MLM is simple—you pay a certain amount of money to join the program, and then you market the program to bring others on board. When you bring someone new into the program, you’ll receive some type of compensation.
When you’re designing a website, it’s easy to may concentrate on the graphics and other visual attributes of your site. While these aspects are important, you really do need to consider the overall web design when creating your site.
The number one factor that can make or break your site is to keep people coming back again and again. Research shows that most people who visit a website don’t make a purchase on the first several visits. This means you’ll need to have a great website in order to make people want to return.
Just wanted to publish a small note addressing the Google update to sitemaps. If you’ve seen a shift in the search rankings and more specifically, the rankings of your site, it’s to be expected. I have compared the data ever since google noted in the old sitemaps that they were changing over to a new system.
Long having been a popular “must-list” directory for website owners to get their sites listed with, is DMOZ.org still as important as it was in the past when it comes to building link popularity and enhancing search engine optimization? We’ll get to that in just a minute…
Finding a few extra little ways to step out and connect with potential customers (and existing ones too) shouldn’t have to be all that difficult or expensive. You’re probably already doing the big things—like maintaining a top-notch website and working with the pros (like us) for optimization. Here are 6 extra tips to get the most out of your existing efforts.
When it comes to targeting traffic, which strategy is better—keeping it local or going global? For every business or organization on the web, the ideal targeting is going to be different from even the closest competitors. The most effective way to obtain results is to combine local and global for a balanced, even-keel approach.
Now, Let’s Examine A Few Key Points For Each Tactic…
If you happen to be like most web property owners or developers, you probably totally understand how difficult it really can be to attract significant levels of targeted traffic to your website. This traffic—or actually, the traffic’s visitors themselves—are the lifeblood of a successful web presence. After all, without traffic and visitors, a website is a lot like some long-forgotten about book that’s fallen behind the shelf in a huge library…it’s basically not even known to exist.
Now that’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? However, as harsh as it can be, the cold hard truth of the matter is that it’s still true.
The moral of the story is simple. Attracting traffic one way or another is what almost every website owner works so diligently at doing because we all know exactly how important visitors are to having a site that’s meaningful and successful.
But wait…There’s more to the story! Read the rest of this entry »
What really makes a website good? If you were to take poll among a handful of friends that happen to be mostly average when it comes to using the web, the chances are really likely that the answers would vary substantially from asking a different group made up of technology proficient experts. But here’s the kicker…
Both groups are probably right and wrong at the same time.
How can this be so? Well the truth is that defining what makes a website really good is largely an objective preference among a site’s users—inclusive of factors such as what graphic design scheme has been used, what information is presented, where the navigation is located, how easy it is to use, and so on. Some business categories are practically expected to deliver a certain type or “look” when it comes to their sites, while other organizations have much more freedom to explore and push the boundaries with their websites. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a reason that three years ago I trademarked “Building Your Internet Brand®” as part of the SEO King, Inc. business strategy. The reason is made evident by the natural evolution of Google’s algorithm, where trust rank is the key to a successful organic ranking campaign.
What is brand development?
At its most fundamental level, branding is the process a business must go through to build trust with a target audience (the consumer) and the related target industries (manufacturers, wholesale distribution channels, product/service review channels, etc.).
As we’ve discussed in the past, the most important factor to any website is the “link ability” element. It’s simply not uncommon for many website owners and web masters to as the question “What is this link bait I keep hearing about?” when trying to figure out how to promote their site for outstanding organic search rankings.
Is your site valuable to its visitors? While nailing down a website’s value is sort of an elusive thing, here are seven remarkably simple ways to put your site’s value to the test…
One – Ask Yourself If Your Site Presells. Instead of just coming out and asking for the sale, one of the best ways to test a website’s value to its visitors is to analyze what information is given to the visitor upfront at no cost or with no further request. Giving visitors answers to their questions before expecting further action from them builds trust. That’s what preselling is all about!
The iPhone is an unbelievably functional and popular little gadget that is definitely taking strides towards making the web more mobile. Sure, other mobile devices are also popular and will certainly add to improved mobile web technology too (especially with the much anticipated Google Phone making its arrival), but this shouldn’t really make things much more complicated for optimizing sites for mobile. If it works for the iPhone’s built in web browser, chances are good it will work well with the browsers on other mobile devices as well.
If there’s one myth that’s definitely become common – more than ever with the ever-increasing popularity of content management systems (CMS) or blogs – it is that meta tags are no longer important. Well, we disagree - to some extent. Meta tags still play an integral function in the usability of a website and a site’s overall optimization for search.
Blogs like WordPress, by their very nature, are not usually optimized for the best possible search engine friendliness. It’s true – because blogs tend to be set up with a chronological content organization system, the posts become dated very quickly. Search engines and readers eventually disregard the non-recent material. However, there are a few tricks to tweaking a WordPress blog so it behaves more like a traditional web site for search.
My 4 small niche websites have served over 2.1 million visitors and over 12 million page views over the past 4 years. Had I not moved to dedicated servers and kept the site records, traffic and page view numbers would be even higher still. My sites are true niche websites that drive search traffic every month to the tune of tens and tens of thousands of search terms. All this without one DMOZ listing - who needs DMOZ anyway, not you, not me! By the way, never, ever, piss off a senior DMOZ.org editor..lol