More individuals are now using the blog as a handy tool to carve a niche market for themselves in the field that they are involved in. This is a great way to make yourself known in the field you are in. Why of all the things – Blogging? Well, blogging, since its inception, has been a great way to easily add content and also increase your SEO rankings.

You might just be wondering what has blogging got to do with SEO.  Well … a lot actually.  Here are a 5 reasons blogs actually help boost your SEO.

1. Blogging talk of current events or happenings

Search engines love content. Fresh content. What the search engine does is  ‘decipher or understand’ your content and simply start indexing it under a particular category. That’s right. Your content is accepted and indexed right away such that search engines want to present its readers the best and latest contents from your blog.

Search engines are constantly updating the search index. Its like a 24 hour call center. Good blog owners are constantly updating their content. Sometimes more than once a day. Human nature – hence the best blogs talk about the latest topics in a given category. Which means fresh and relevant content. Sounds good eh?  Search engines think so.

2. Blogging is keyword rich

The relevancy factor is one of the most important features while an index is conducted. It indicates to the search engine that the most relevant search information is here while showing relevant search pages. Your content gives the search engine a chance to talk about what you have to say about a given topic. Blogging usually means pin-point concentration of relevant keywords about the subject or topic you are writing about. Example – you are talking about style sheets, then your blog would contain a lot of words like “style”, “cascading style sheets”, “CSS” and so on.  You are talking about Internet Marketing in Toronto.  So your blog will include lots of keywords related to the internet marketing industry and its place in Toronto, Canada.

3. Search engine friendly navigation

Blogs are structured in such a way that its very easy for the bots or crawlers to crawl. Blogs like WordPress are well structured, to the point you will find the menus sitting up nicely on the left with your latest post on a section and an archive of your posts.

The best part is that the interlinking and links to other prominent websites or blogs are easily administered. Due to strong interlinking policy that you follow, crawling your blog becomes that much easier.

4. A blog is a repository of rich information

Yes, a blog is considered an area of very rich information. This fact is assured when your blog speaks about the niche you have to present. Not only would you want to get linked to many such related niche websites, but you will find them wanting to link back to you. Awesome, isn’t it?  So, what follows next is that all search engines (that crawl your weblog) start to consider your blog as a niche for promoting your product or service and improve your position and rankings.

5. Linking to blogs is easily done

When you are linked from other websites its considered good for you. In the old world,  you would find it difficult to link to websites as the trust factor is not so high. With blogs, the trust factor is high!

So what are you waiting for?   If you need help figuring out who to start your blog with make sure you check out this article!

Do I sound crazy? Well, that’s exactly what it means to persuade somebody to buy something online – be it consumer goods, luxury items, offers, gifts or services of any kind. It’s not a hardcore scientific formula from the books of a physics book but the knack that many marketers and scientists (read marketing purist) would tell you to do.

The best way to tackle this is to understand human nature, understand YOU as a buyer. What makes you tick and buy items that you may not even need? Well, it involves understanding the basic human nature which is often repetitive and works subconsciously the same way.

Here are some tips to ethically persuade people to buy from your web site online.

Show Them The Trend – Show What Others Like To Do

The finicky mind often plays an important role while making a buy. People often tend to look at what others are doing. The more number of people doing the same thing means greater comfort level they have in buying. The psychological phenomenon is called ‘Social Proof’. This means decisions are often based on the reactions or doings in mass. The feeling of the buyer is that his knowledge is bettered by knowing others are buying too.

1. What can you showcase as ‘Social Proof’? Here are some ways to establish yourself.

• Show a ‘most popular items’
• ‘People who bought this also liked…’ (go to Amazon!)
• Top selling items testifying the product or service

2. Online ‘User-Generated’ Reviews

Another method of guaranteeing an online purchase is to have reviews and ratings for products or services on your website. User generated reviews have a great impact on the minds of the buyers. In the age of Web 2.0 and social media and networks like Facebook this is one of the most popular ways to promote your product or service.

It’s a good way to have reviews and ratings on your website. After all; it’s a FREE way to promote your products/services, isn’t it?

Reviews on a website have to be open, clear and true.

3. Show Only Limited Availability

If there is limited supply for the product the demand for it goes up. The social psychology is such that it makes a person feel that ‘he needs it no matter what’ and a loss is ‘felt’ more than a gain. Simply put, if a person loses a chance to buy a certain product the feeling of not having got it is more than the feeling of having gotten the product in the first place.

Scarcity can be portrayed online by showing messages like:

• For 5 days only!
• For the 1^st 100 customers only
• Sales end on December 30^th
• Offer valid until stock lasts
• The offer will end in 4 days 2 hours 34 minutes 18 seconds (this could be a countdown timer on your website)

4. Seeing Is Believing – Entice Them With Pictures And Videos

Images play an important role in conversion of product. It’s said that ‘A picture is worth 1000 words’. Images are good for luxury items and high value goods.

Just make sure the images you provide a good visual appeal, high quality images.

• Professional quality
• Different views of the same image
• Zoom for better viewing
• Get innovative – maybe a short video (of 15 to 20 seconds) is good to show WHAT exactly you want to promote. Novel, isn’t it? Sure, because watching a video is less cumbersome than reading and digesting facts.

5. Cross and Up-Sell

I went to McDonalds once and ordered for Bic Mac. The server asked me if I’d like to have some fries and a drink along with it. Duh!

It’s no different online! Once you have committed to purchasing / consuming any product it’s then easier to offer product that relates to that product.

It’s a good idea to display related items / products near the product you want to sell like – French fries and a drink with burgers or sandwiches or a pair of laces along with a pair of hockey skates. The craving to buy never stops!

6. Show Authority

We are easily overwhelmed by authority or influential icons. Let us take the example of basketball. If Kobe Bryant promoted a certain brand of basketball shoe you may be more apt to buy it, rather than if your friend recommended the same product.

Websites that show authority are trusted more easily as they are considered experts in their field and this holds well for B2B websites.

• Show you are an expert
• Link to 3^rd party websites and back up your facts
• Give reference to authoritative bodies
• Display symbol of shopping cart confidence like VERISIGN.

7. Dispel The Fear In Them

Numerous questions such as ‘can I return the goods if I don’t like them?” or “are there any additional costs that is not shown?” can arise while buying online.

Dispel such fear by providing an exhaustive FAQ which helps them clear up any questions in their mind. It also generates a positive influence on you.

Persuasion in short helps the user get all the information he needs and changing his stubborn mind into one who is urged into buying from you. But remember, along with such persuasive tactics you need to also have a solid website to back it up with good service and usability.

Its November – Christmas shopping is already started. Use these tips when considering the upcoming Christmas blitz!

Not many people think about another way of marketing and its through adding video to YouTube.

So what is YouTube Insight?

Well, it’s a handy analytics tool (very similar to a scaled down Google Analytics). It gives you the following features:

1. How many views your video has over specific periods of time,
2. The demographic and geographic breakouts of the views and
3. How people are finding the video content (web search, YouTube search, embed, etc…)

Though not always 100% accurate it’s a good medium to learn and gain insight about your video performance.

Youtube launched this product in March 2008 and mentions that it’s a medium to view detailed statistics about the video they have uploaded, how often their videos are viewed, the geographical area of popularity and so on.

So how do you get started? The first step is to create an account with YouTube.  In my example I am going to be a 'hair transplant centre'

Fill in your profile correctly. Don’t forget to fill in the place or location where you are from, age, sex as these are some important factors while getting you results from YouTube Insight.

Tips For Optimizing YouTube Videos

1. Optimize your video file name – make it more meaningful. For example – if your video was named “vid001.flv” then rename it to a meaningful “hair transplant surgery.flv”. Makes sense? Yes, because you are helping spiders pick your file more easily, will be more easily indexed by Google.
2. Optimize your title – make it sound sensible. Throw in a few keywords so that its easily picked up. Make sure the keywords are related to the video.
3. Optimize your tags / keywords – throw in your most relevant keywords. Use descriptive keywords, combine them, separate them – mix it up.
4. If possible add in your company URL or name on to the video.
5. Network your video –
a. Post a video response to a similar looking video. That way you will get a good response and even get linked back and more exposure due to such comments.
b. Comment on other videos – go on commenting other such similar videos (as the ones you have posted) and also add your post if you’d like to. Build up a good network of like-minded users / business group.

Okay, so here is a snapshot of what I have got for you from Youtube Insight. The client here is a Hair Transplant example.

You can find the Youtube Insight on the My Account – All link

The views as seen (for a week) and the mostly watched video and least watched video 

 The 'views' bar for 2 months – July and August showing variations in viewership

 Geographical viewing – worldwide or all countries. You can see that US has a higher viewership followed by Canada.

Here is an interesting figure showing which of your videos were the most popular ones.

The popularity graph showing how popular your videos were compared to other channels, interestingly also shows how popular it was in different countries. 

Another interesting feature is – WHO is watching your video? You can see from the image below, the age group in which its most popular and the sex (whether the viewership is male or female dominant) is also seen. Of course, this is all based on the information that YouTube gathers from the personal account of the users.

You can see that 90% male members viewed this video as compared to 10% female and the highest viewership was for the age group 35 to 44.

Interesting? You bet!

There is much more to learn about teh analytics of YouTube videos.  The real point however, is that your videos performance can be measured and also can provide your actual site with very valuable website traffic.

Start posting your videos now and have fun!

Lets explore site architecture, and how it is related to making online marketing campaigns successful.

Most websites miss out on valuable traffic through search engines. The reason being that the basic design did not figure the ‘search engine crawlers’ into the designing concepts, and most of the companies who own websites do not know how much traffic they can generate simply by having appropriate website optimization fundamentals in place. Including the development of pages individually optimized for specific products or services.

Here is a live example from Hollywood. If you look at the home page (as on November 2, 2007) you will find the top story is propagating the movie “Wristcutters – A love story”.

Let’s search for the keyword “wristcutters” in the top rated search engines namely Google, Yahoo! & MSN. As of today that is – November 2, 2007; you can find the results for the keyword “wrist cutters” gives you ranks for Google as 9th, for MSN its 77th and Yahoo! its way beyond the 150th position.

This site (http://www.hollywood.com) does not sell product directly on the site, though it is still imperative, that to achieve in store sales success, they receive top rankings for products or brand name’s they sell in store, due to the fact that online exposure can draw traffic in store.
If you look at the website, the link to “Wrist Cutters” takes you to the website for Wrist Cutters. Take a look at the page title and you will see that there is no mention of the movie title, even in the title tag.

Since the information about the movie is lost within the content of other movie info, its not easy for the search engine to rank it as relevant for keywords specific to that movie.

Had there been a section on the website like http://www.hollywood.com/movie/Wristcutters_A_Love_Story/3465172 and a title that included any variation of the following key phrases, Wrist Cutters Love Story, Wrist Cutters movie times, Wrist Cutters movie reviews, Wrist Cutters  celebrities, Wrist Cutters celebrity photos and Wrist Cutters celebrity news, There would have been a better chance that the site be found for these terms.

Having a page permanently with information about a certain movie or for any specific topic, is a great idea, as you will not only create a more content rich site, but you will attract more targeted traffic for more key terms which relate to that specific movie, or topic.

Here are some definitions found on the web for SEO. Not that it’s the best definition, but they do convey the best meaning for “Search Engine Optimization”.

“The act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines”

1. One of the leading SEO software developers, Trendmx, defines it as “The process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.”
2. Another definition goes like this – “Designing a website so that it ranks highly in the search engines when someone searches for specific phrases related to the site.”

Introduction to SEO copywriting

In the world where we promote our business we have to choose the medium and it better be the best. One of the most viable options available is the internet, the World Wide Web – your website. Moreso the effort you put in to make your site be “seen” by a lot of potential customers – better are your chances of getting popular and make decent money and gain search engine visibility for it.

Your website is the key to your success. It’s your baby – and you need to make it healthy so that it grows.

How do we do that? We promote our website. We market our website using latest internet marketing strategies.

One of the ways in which you get your site promoted is Search Engine Optimization copywriting – SEO copywriting in short.

So what is SEO copywriting?

Search Engine Optimization copywriting is a technique of writing text that’s viewable so the website visitor (potential client) can easily read the highlighted text which targeted to search engine specific terms. Such terms are called keyword targeted key phrases or keywords. So it’s important that we get regular visitors and keep them interested – thus targeting sections of your site visitors with topics of their interest; at the same time keeping including related keyphrases inside of the text your are writing about.

The purpose here is to rank highly for the targeted search keyword terms. It’s important to also optimize other on-page elements on the page like the page title, page description and selected keywords or key phrases anticipated to get good rankings.

Another reason why SEO copywriting is done is to build genuine, keyphrase rich content for your website. (back in the day, many people tried to manipulate rankings by creating "doorway pages".)

A recommended number of words that are viewable should be 250 / page with 2-6 strategically placed targeted terms within the content area and on the on-page elements as well. On-page elements can be buttons, images, hyperlinks, page title, meta title, meta description and meta keywords.

What makes SEO copywriting run? Its strengths

The best part about SEO copywriting is that it works well with theme based websites. If done properly, SEO copywriting tends to achieve rankings that place well in search engines and also is still highly interesting to read.

Many factors can attribute to your rankings.  SEO content writing if done properly can be one of the most efficient factors in getting your site ranked high on the organic rankings.  Some other items include:

• effective and related meta tags unique to each page
• interlinking relevant phrases to other pages on your website and on the web.
• tagging your links and images with an effective summary.

For a full summary relating to how to set your website up properly for search engine optimization, I recommend reading our blog posted a few months ago.

1.  Choose the right keywords

It’s important that the keywords chosen are the most relevant to your industry.  Keywords chosen are the means to target your site with the most relevant visitors. There are many tools which help us select good keywords and the search volume done in given month. One good tool is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com.   Of course we all like free versions don’t we?

It’s absolutely critical that this step is not missed because the rest of the SEO depends a lot on this. 

2.  Choosing the right domain name

It’s imperative that the domain name you choose should be relevant to the product / concept you sell. It would be great if you could include one or more of the keywords in the domain name which enhances your chances of being searched!

Now, let’s say you sell “steel buildings”, so it would be good to have a domain name like www.steelbuildingsinc.com.  The best way is – to find a domain name that’s easy and matches the product / concept you sell.

Secondly, if you ever want to change your domain, think twice. Changing a domain name can be catastrophic for search engine purposes. The older the domain name the better it is recognized by search engines as they consider the aging factor for a domain to be of high importance.

3.  File Naming Convention matters for SEO

When you save a file to be hosted on your website, its wise to save it with the most relevant keyword you have for that page.  For example, if you had a boat cruise website and had a page talking about ‘our planners’ a good page name would be “http://www.upstreamcruises.com/our-planners.htm"

There is no restriction in naming the file the same as that of our competitors. Regardless of what you use – FrontPage or Dreamweaver, make it a habit to save the file names that way. It’s just a step closer to your search query!

A tip – do not leave a blank space between words for your file name. For example – “two way watch.asp” could be renamed as “two-way-watch.asp” or “two_way_watch.asp”. Either will do.

4.  Using keywords between titles

It helps a lot to have the most relevant keywords in the title bar of your web page, instead of the age old convention of mentioning the company name in the title.

Also it’s best to avoid using conjunctions and prepositions in the title. We should avoid using words like “the, a, an, and, for, with” and so on.
For example, “Hard Bound Cardboard – Oakwood – Pinewood art”. Notice that in this title the spaces between the hyphens can be avoided and used (or wasted!) at the end of the sentence. Thus “Hard Bound Cardboard–Oakwood-Pinewood Art” would make more sense.

5.  Use keyword text to navigate

It’s good practice to use html keyword text to navigate to other pages instead of using conventional images with a hotspot linked to a page. Image links are counter productive when it comes to SEO. This is because an image is not readable by the search engines while HTML text is!

Although the image links can have keywords in the tag, linked text carries more weight in the algorithm for search engines. So start linking your HTML text instead of images!

6.  Repeat keyword content

The adage “Content is King” is true. This simply means – repeat your most relevant words 5-7 times on your main pages. Make sure you don’t overdo it to make it look like a spammed content or is grammatically incorrect.

Updating your content often will also help the search engine spider your site and get noticed. The more content you have the more likely you are to get noticed and have an opportunity to cross link to other keyword focused content.

7.  Making Keywords a part of the Meta Description

This will compel a user to click on the relevant ad (which in turn takes them to our site). Being ranked higher does not mean that you can get clicks on your website links. The more relevant keywords your meta description contains – the better it will be ranked.

8.  Secure High Quality Incoming links

Securing high quality incoming links are important. Its always good to get listed in a reputed and frequently consulted web directory (such as DMOZ). Admittedly DMOZ takes time to get you listed, but it is a good bet to be a part of the online directory. You can add your content on many other sites which will list you free for their referral / exchange link.

9.  Use keyword links instead of conventional words

The best way to get linked to another page is not using the “Click Here” but using the keywords instead. So if you want to go to a particular page for say “Sunmica Redwood Tables” in a website – the line should be like “You can get more info about Sunmica Redwood Tables(and link the words Sunmica Redwood Tables to the respective page instead of using the conventional words “Click Here”)

10.  Use of Sitemap

A sitemap is a separate HTML page that acts as a directory of your website. Each page linked on your website is hyperlinked. Usage of keywords in the linked anchor text is a good habit. Consider using synonyms instead of the regular keywords is a good practice.

A sitemap not only helps search engine spiders to easily crawl on to the site but it also helps a surfer to look for info / pages that he/she might have overlooked.

Hope this short list has helped!   Feel free to post your own comments!