There are a few secrets that I’d like to share with you.  You may have been privy to a few of them before.  Actually you may have heard of all 4, but I can promise that you will finish each article with a fresh perspective.  I will show you how 4 simple secrets can create a powerhouse web business.  This is the first part of the 4 article series.

Before I divulge the vault of successful web business secrets I must warn you of one thing.  All the information in the world will not take the place of determination and persistence.  A web business is just like an offline business.  It takes hard work and resolve to succeed.  However working smart is heads and tails better than plain old working.  These 4 secrets will turn any smart working, dedicated average Joe or Jane into a successful web business owner.

Web Success Secret #1) Content is king.

Heard that before?  I know I have.  The thing I never knew was how to use content to my advantage.  Content is useless unless it is optimized for the search engines.  It must also be optimized for your reader.  You have two customers- readers and search engines.  You must satisfy both with the same exact content.

Content is king only if you have exact and highly specific keywords placed in correct locations.  Unfortunately the hard part is determining what keywords to use.  A keyword can be a single word or a phrase.  It is the term that web surfers use to search for information.  Place yourself in their shoes and try to discover what search terms they use.  You must then evaluate the search term.  How many people search using that term?  How many sites already deliver information on that search term?  Simple demand and supply rules.  The more demand with the less supply equals more profitability.

You have several options for determining keywords and their profit potential.  Search yourself, pay a company to search for you or have your hosting company do a complete keyword search for your niche or web business topic.  If your hosting company does not offer this service I recommend you switch to a plan that does.  This feature alone can make or break your business’ future.  If you would like my recommended hosting plan, please contact me.

Without a proper keyword search and analysis you may as well forget about becoming successful with an Internet business.  Investing in this one secret is literally the start of planning your website.

Your next action step is to plan your site layout based on the 50-175 high-demand and low-supply keywords. Your site should be structured in three tiers.  Tier one is your home page.  Tier two is made of all of your main topics and also constitutes your navigation bar buttons.  Tier three keywords are sub-topics of tier two pages.  Organize your 50-175 keywords into three tiers.  Doing this makes it easier for visitors to navigate through your site and it makes it easier for search engine spiders to find all of your pages.

Search engine spiders do not like to fish around for all of your pages and links.  This is why many sites offer a “site map””.  A site map is one page that contains links to all of the content pages.  This is a fine route to take; however most people agree that pages with a lot of links on it are valued less than content pages that casually link to other content pages.

Using three tiers allows you to go from topic to sub-topic to sub-sub-topic all by natural in-content links.  For example, tier 1 is the homepage on a fitness site.  Tier 2 is a page all about cardio activity and its benefits.  A tier three page off of that tier 2 page is about different treadmill routines.  Do you see how the site visitor would like this structure?  They click on “Cardio” and are given links to more specific pages about cardio topics.  Search engine spiders like the three tier structure too.  It means they do not have to dig through layers and levels of useless links.

There is even more to content than finding profitable keywords and structuring your site into easy-to-navigate tiers.  You must optimize each and every page on your website to perform well and rank high at search engines.  Many people devote their working life to optimization secrets.  A full length article just on optimizing is possible.  Heck, a full length book is possible.  My recommendation is to use a hosting company that automatically teaches you how to optimize web pages for the engines.  Doing that will cause less headache and frustration and it will keep you focused on building content.

A quick education in optimization: place your specific keyword in the file name, title, description and keyword section of your page.  Then sprinkle the keyword throughout the content.  Also provide a link using your specific keyword in the link text.  If all of this has you spinning your head, I recommend going the hosting company I use.  They literally teach you to build a website using blocks.  It’s all simple and easier than you think.

There is one last piece to content.  It must effectively pre-sell your product or service and position you as the expert in your field.  When your website has 50-175 optimized pages for your visitors to read through it will start to position you as the expert.  Your site will become known as the place for information about (insert your niche).

When visitors find your site through search engines they are seeking information about a problem or question they have.  If they land on your site and you try to sell them something right away one thing is sure- they click the back button and find another site that will give them information.  This is why pre-selling your product or service is paramount.  Give your visitors what they want.  Answer their question and in the process let them know about your services and products.

All of the information develops rapport and trust with your site visitor.  It positions you as an expert.  It keeps your visitor on your site longer since they are actually reading content.  Search engines notice this and rank you better.  How well your site can keep visitors is known as “stickiness.”  Your site must attract and keep visitors for as long as possible.

Provide content that pre-sells your products, positions you as the expert and focuses on highly profitable keywords.  You cannot go wrong with your web business if you do those things.  The secret to content is to satisfy both your visitor and search engines.  Lose one or both and you are doomed.  As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.  Your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge.  There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.  Having a successful web business starts with effective content.

Download Here The FREE eBook “Make Your Content PreSell” (139 pages!)… and learn all about how to optimize the content of your web site…

A savvy and free way to increase your business sales is through blog marketing. No matter what business you’re in, you can increase your business with a focused blog marketing campaign. You may shy away from blog marketing because you feel that you might not be a good writer, or simply don’t like to write. This is understandable. But the truth is that many blog marketers nowadays don’t even write their own content. They pay someone else to do it.

In fact, you can pay someone else to write dozens of articles to keep your blog going. You can come up with ideas if you want to, but you can just as easily give your writers a broad general topic idea and have them come up with streamlined topics for blog entries. The best course of action is truly up to you, but paying writers to craft your blog entries is not expensive and may save you trouble in the long run.

Once you’ve determined how your blog will be written, the next thing you must do is focus on the keywords that your blog will include. There is a lot of information out there on keyword research and niche marketing but, in essence, what you want to do is find keywords that are searched highly and don’t have a lot of competition. Competition means that there are a lot of other pages that come up when you search under that keyword.

You want to have less than 30,000 pages of competition in the Google search results in order to determine that a keyword is viable. And you want to use a keyword tool like the one on Wordtracker to determine how many searches the term receives per day. Go for keywords that get close to or over 100,000 searches with very little competition. This way, you have a really good chance to get to the top of the search engines with your blog.

The reason blog marketing is so effective is because blog marketing allows you to provide the ultimate content that the search engine spiders are looking for when they crawl webpages. The search engine spiders are looking for pages that provide content which contains a fair number of the keywords that the Internet user is looking for, along with information that the user might find useful.

The search engines know that readers don’t just want a blatant sales pitch all the time. They want the reader to get the most accurate information for his or her needs.

Blogs provide information about products and services that customers might enjoy. Some of them contain reviews, opinions or instructions. There are no hard and fast rules for blogging.

Blogs are not ecommerce sites and are, therefore, viewed favorably by many of the search engines. You want to make sure, however, that you don’t have too much keyword-density and too little real content filling up your blog. You want to have truly useful articles that people will find interesting.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that it can provide people with informative content that makes an interesting read. If you can become an information resource in your field, people will be more likely to buy from you. Why? Because they will trust you. They might not buy from you right away, but they will probably patronize you at some point in time.

The audience you build with your blog can help you in a number of ways. Some people will, of course, purchase from you. Others may help build your business by telling a friend, mentioning you on their website, or promoting your products or services on their blog.

Another important step in blog marketing is determining where you want to host your blog. There are many options and some of them are free. If you like, you can also build your blog within your website, but then you won’t be taking advantage of an external link that your blog could provide to your website.

After you set up your blog, make sure your blog meta tags and titles are optimized to the best of your ability, just like your website. You may also want to add media, like videos. This can make your content more diverse and interesting to the search engines, as well.

Submit your blog to social marketing sites every day and submit unique keyword optimized articles to some of the most popular article directories every week. Eventually people will begin to read your blog and if they find the information useful, they will want to know more about your business.

Blog marketing, used in conjunction with many of the other online marketing strategies, is a valuable way to increase the public’s view of your brand, and hopefully your sales.

Read more about working at home here!

Directories have existed since the early days of the Internet, even before Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. Originally, search directories and word-of-mouth were the only ways to learn about new websites. Google changed that! Today, search directories are used to build links into websites. But, by default, search directories have three major problems.

Problem #1: The Moving Target

Search directories use one of several methods to display their inventory. The following list is a short representation of how the inventory is presented to visitors and search engine spiders.

First In First Out (FIFO) – as the name describes listings are displayed in the order in which they are submitted. This method is good for the early listings. As more listings are added to the category, the number of pages in the category increases. This decreases the value of the category to both the owner and the company desiring to submit its site.

Last In First Out (LIFO) – as the name describes listings are displayed with the first submissions appearing last. This method is good for the later listings, but who wants to be first when they’re going to show up last? As with FIFO, the number of pages in the category increases.

Alpha-Numeric – company names or keywords receive the earliest listings. As new listings are approved those listings could easily move one’s listing to oblivion.

Votes – unlike government election, presenting the inventory based upon votes is extremely biased and ballot stuffing can occur. As others come in, submit themselves, and add their votes one’s listing can easily fall to other pages.

Page Rank (PR) Values – Page Rank values adjust based upon numerous factors and an algorithm controlled solely by Google. One’s PR value could be a five today and tomorrow it could be a three. On the other hand, one’s PR value could increase. However, as PR values fluctuate so do the positions of the listings.

Problem #2: Rel=NoFollow

Over the years, search engine optimization (SEO) consultants have suggested using the online yellow pages to build quality links into one’s website. This thought was based upon the idea that online yellow pages were authority sites. Whether that still holds true today is debatable.

What isn’t debatable is the online yellow pages use rel=nofollow to tell the search engines to not count the links for search engine placements. With prices ranging from $100 to $300 per month, the expense of getting a link from the online yellow pages is really worth paying. One may determine that a listing in the online yellow pages will result in leads coming to one’s business.

Other directories use the rel=nofollow, as well.

How do the search engines use rel=nofollow? According to WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_follow), Google ignores the link and therefore the link does not count in the search placement algorithm or in determining PR values. Yahoo follows the link, but does not use it to determine search placements. Bing provides no indication if it follows link with the rel=nofollow attribute, however it does not use the link in determining relevancy.

Problem #3: Limited Marketing Capabilities

Most search directories provide a link to one’s website. Some search directories list one’s link in multiple categories. Still even, some directories allow deep linking (links to internal pages).

Top search engine optimization (SEO) consultants suggest that one should build a natural inbound link profile to one’s website. The natural inbound link profile uses more links to internal web pages than to the homepage. Additionally, the anchor text for the inbound links should be relevant to the linked page.

Search directories by nature allow only links to the homepage. Since the homepage cannot be relevant for every search term available to one’s business, making all inbound links point at the homepage is not plausible. Even if it were, leading your customers to one’s homepage and making them search one’s website for the product or service they want is not user-friendly.

Therefore, traditional search directories provide little or no real value beyond increasing PR values. For this reason, search engines like Google hold little or no regard for search directories.

In Conclusion

The top three problems of search directories do not destroy the ultimate value of search directories. The importance of choosing the right search directory from which to acquire an inbound link cannot be overstated. One should carefully review the search directory before submitting and ensure the directory provides quality links, not just a link.

If you are seeking online success with your business, then SEO search engine optimization is essential. Without adequately optimizing your website for search engine spiders or algorithms, you have little chance of your site receiving visible listings on the search engine results pages. That spells death to most online businesses.

Free traffic is by far the best, and if you are unsure how to use pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords properly, it could cost you a lot of money to correct inadequacies in your SEO. Only 1% of those that start in internet marketing actually make any money: largely because they do not know how to promote their website. There are other reasons of course, and a website is not always necessary, but if you have one then you must learn how to optimize it to attain as high a listing position as possible.

SEO search engine optimization is about telling search engines exactly what each page of your website is saying, and that it is highly relevant to the keyword, or search term, for which you have optimized it. Having a great looking website with a lot of well writen content on each page is not sufficient to earn you a listing on Google, let alone a high one that will bring you free traffic. It is essential that manipulate the search engine algorithms to calculate a high degree of relevance of your page to the requirements of those using Google and other search engines to find information.

Algorithms are mathematical formulae with no eyes. They are blind to your fabulous graphics and fantastic web design skills. They read the source code of your site, including the text. The way you format your text gives weighting to certain pieces of text, and lets the algorithm know what your important keywords are.

The spiders that crawl your site should be led to where you want them to go to, and good website design, site navigation and internal linking structure is part of achieving that. It is also a component of your SEO. THere is alot more to SEO than just soem H heading tags and keyword meta tags – much more. The majority of people do not understand what SEO is or how to optimize their site, even if learning how to do so could immeasurably improve their chance of online success.

However, there is more to search engine optimization that simply reading about it. You have to see it in action, and fully understand what you are doing when optimizing your website. There are still professionals who believe that you must have 2% – 3% keyword density on your page. They have disagreed with me strongly yet I know that what they say is rubbish: contextual relevance is what search engines are seeking these days, not interminable repetitions of keywords that will achieve nothing but get your site lost in the supplementary results that nobody sees.

There have been a large number of changes in search engine optimization over the last few years, and SEO is no longer what it once was. However, what won’t change is the benefit to you of having a full understanding of the principles behind the actions you are taking when optimizing your website form search engines such as Google.

SEO search engine optimization wil make all the difference to the success of your site, and likely even that of your business. Don’t just read about it: see it in action and understand it.

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