Right now we have three major players in the internet  services arena- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. It would be a travesty if Microsoft was able to buy their way into a two way fight with Google. I am relieved that Yahoo has rebuffed them for now, but I remain concerned as Yahoo obviously has some real business problems. I hope that they invest in innovation to compete with Google and force the bar higher for first class service to internet users. That can only be  good for individuals and small businesses. However, if  Microsoft had been able to buy their way into a two way fight with  Google the tactics they would use  to compete would  likely to have little to do with innovation or service to the community.

Well done Yahoo!

With all that said I have decided to make a committment to myself to begin a more regular schedule of postings to this blog. The topics are entirely based upon what I feel like writing about and it is likely some will be general marketing and others related to internet marketing.  While  I don’t consider myself a newborn in internet marketing, I think I am an adolescent in that area. I still have much to learn but have spent a lot of time and money learning from some of the best minds in the business.  I think I now have a pretty good grasp of the realities of internet marketing and it isn’t that different than marketing on the street, just different tips and techniques. In contrast to my adolescent status in internet marketing, I consider myself a veteran of real world marketing of a small business in the community. I have learned a lot  about  OnStreet (as opposed to Online) marketing over the past 20 years.  In my opinion many of  the principals are the same regardless of  whether you are marketing your business in your neighborhood or worldwide on the web.

I am turning on the ability to comment on my postings here and I hope you do so. However, all comments are moderated to avoid spammers and other people with nothing meaningful to contribute to a discussion.  I encourage you to make comments and ask questions as you wish. Thanks!

Eric

Many people believe that visible pagerank is not as good an indicator of  the importance of a webpage as used to be the case, at least in terms of ranking in the search results for specific pages. It has been my experience that pagerank is much less important that the number  of links and link text pointing to a particular page in influencing the search results.  Anyways, regardless of the importance on places on visible pagerank, there does appear to be an update happening which came much sooner than was the case last time.

Keyword research is the  one aspect of building a web business should be the most closely managed project you have. Whether you are a do it yourself type. or outsource some or all of  the marketing of your business on the internet, you must be actively involved in keyword research.  Matching as many search terms as possible that are used by your target customer base is what determines the success of your internet business. You may think that you know what keyword phrases your potential customers use to find businesses such as yours, but more than likely you are wrong more than you are right. In addition you have no idea what the competition for any keyword phrase is going to be without doing the research. WIthout adequate keyword research you are almost destined to be disappointed in the performance of your website.

You start your keyword research by having a clear idea what specific products or services you wish to market,  and understanding exactly who you think would be interested in your offerings. If you skip this step, you might be successful in generating a lot of traffic, but very little would convert to sales and you would waste your time and money. Once you have an idea what you want to promote and to whom it is time to start brainstorming a list of initial keywords of interest to you. Once place to start this process is at Google’s keyword tool. Their tool is free and useful for this initial step.

Once you have a  list of initial keywords, it is time to start expanding the list. Here you want to take the core list of  one or two word phrases you just developed and expand them into many short two to five word phrases that will be the primary target of your keyword optimization efforts. Then you must determine how much competition you have for the keyword phrases of interest to you. You are generally much better off  to initially target a variety of less competitive terms relevant to your business  than to go after the most competitive ones.   If you are serious about your business, you need to invest in software to help you or use one of the online paid keyword research tools. Obviously another option would be to pay someone to do it for you.  This may be the best choice for many business owners that don’t want to become experts in the details of internet marketing. Only you can determine how your time is best spent.

So you have all these keywords now, so what do you do with them?  The keywords are used for all aspects of your internet marketing. You initially use them to plan the content and structure of your site. You want to have pages on your site who’s content is targeted at your primary list of keywords. You want to use links in your site that reflect the keyword terms of interest to you. After you have planned your site around the keywords it is now time to use them outside your site to drive traffic to your site. If you are using paid search advertising, such as Google Adwords, this list will guide your advertising strategy and budget. If you are going for top listings in the natural search results, the list will guide all your efforts to improve your rankings in the search engines. No matter how you intend to promote your site, you must make keyword research your first priority.

The single most important thing you can do to try to get your website top search engine rankings is to optimize your choice of keywords. Your choice of keywords should guide every decision you make about building your website, putting content on your website, and marketing your website on the internet. Marketing on the internet is in some ways similar to offline marketing, but in other ways it is quite unique due to it being primarily a search oriented media.  In brief, the amount of exposure you get for your website is more dependent upon keyword research and optimizing your list of keywords than anything else you do.

Keyword research is the  one aspect of building a web business should be the most closely managed project you have. Whether you are a do it yourself type. or outsource some or all of  the marketing of your business on the internet, you must be actively involved in keyword research.  Matching as many search terms as possible that are used by your target customer base is what determines the success of your internet business. You may think that you know what keyword phrases your potential customers use to find businesses such as yours, but more than likely you are wrong more than you are right. In addition you have no idea what the competition for any keyword phrase is going to be without doing the research. WIthout adequate keyword research you are almost destined to be disappointed in the performance of your website.

You start your keyword research by having a clear idea what specific products or services you wish to market,  and understanding exactly who you think would be interested in your offerings. If you skip this step, you might be successful in generating a lot of traffic, but very little would convert to sales and you would waste your time and money. Once you have an idea what you want to promote and to whom it is time to start brainstorming a list of initial keywords of interest to you. Once place to start this process is at Google’s keyword tool. Their tool is free and useful for this initial step.

Once you have a  list of initial keywords, it is time to start expanding the list. Here you want to take the core list of  one or two word phrases you just developed and expand them into many short two to five word phrases that will be the primary target of your keyword optimization efforts. Then you must determine how much competition you have for the keyword phrases of interest to you. You are generally much better off  to initially target a variety of less competitive terms relevant to your business  than to go after the most competitive ones.   If you are serious about your business, you need to invest in software to help you or use one of the online paid keyword research tools. Obviously another option would be to pay someone to do it for you.  This may be the best choice for many business owners that don’t want to become experts in the details of internet marketing. Only you can determine how your time is best spent.

So you have all these keywords now, so what do you do with them?  The keywords are used for all aspects of your internet marketing. You initially use them to plan the content and structure of your site. You want to have pages on your site who’s content is targeted at your primary list of keywords. You want to use links in your site that reflect the keyword terms of interest to you. After you have planned your site around the keywords it is now time to use them outside your site to drive traffic to your site. If you are using paid search advertising, such as Google Adwords, this list will guide your advertising strategy and budget. If you are going for top listings in the natural search results, the list will guide all your efforts to improve your rankings in the search engines. No matter how you intend to promote your site, you must make keyword research your first priority.

An excellent way to utilize article marketing on the Internet is to employ the services of a search engine marketing company. These firms increase the effectiveness of the copy on your site by using key words which cause search engine spiders to target your site, thus increasing its traffic ranking. As a result, other sites will increasingly discover and post your copy, which will increase traffic–and sales–yet further.

A range of services may be offered by a search engine marketing firm. Through their expertise and experience, they can assist business owners in determining the best search keywords, as the most popular may not always be the most suitable. Such firms have their finger on the pulse when it comes to knowing how search engines gather and analyze information, and can share this expertise with their clients.

Some sites may have good copy but the content may not be tweaked for search engine optimization. Some sites may not have good content. In both cases the search engine marketing firm may be able to help. In the first case, the firm helps by tweaking content for search engine optimization. In the second case, these firms staff people who can create new, interesting content that can be interesting enough to be republished, get linked back and attract web spiders that are looking for specific content. Even the owner’s style can be duplicated.

Website marketing like all marketing depends on letting customers know who you are and what you offer. Online, the only way to do that is to have traffic, and traffic comes from being likely to appear on a search engine when someone looks for a related topic. Choosing the right search engine marketing firm will maximize your visibility and hence your traffic and traffic is the secret to profit.

The really great thing is that you no longer need to be an expert writer or marketer to make a go of an online business. Simply hiring the right marketing firm with strong internet business experience and expertise already know what makes a site noticed and will do what it takes to put your sites in front of more people.

If you have websites today is the day to check your pagerank in the Google toolbar or  by other means. There is an update happening right now. As is usual many sites go up and many sites go down in visible pagerank.  While pagerank is only one factor that determines where one of your web pages shows up in the Google searches, it is a good overal indication of the success of your efforts to promote your pages on the search engines. For an explanation of page rank  I suggest that you have a look a the short video I made to explain  Google PageRank . I also have a brief article which will help you undestand how to increase pagerank .

I have only been actively working on promoting this site, www.bizrave.com, for a couple of months at the time of this posting. This is the first pagerank export for this site. The homepage is listed as a PR 3 which is not bad for a first listing in my opinion. There is also a PR3 for one of my interior pages as well right now. I am actually somewhat surprised that I did get the PR 3 since there has been so little time that I have been working on this site.  Actually I obtained a higher pagerank of  PR4 on my alternate one page site I use for giving away my ebook "The 7 Keys To Business Marketing Success!" Google has gone about 8 months since the last pagerank export update, which is quite unusual. I hope they don’t go as long before the next one.

Although the pagerank update is an exciting event which is the focus of many interenet marketing professionals, I want to clearly emphasize that there are more important factors which help determine where you actually come up in the search engine results for any particular phrase. I am on the first page of Google with site for certain phrases that have almost all other pages listed as PR5 to PR7 . This has been true from witihin a few weeks after I started promoting this site and shows clearly that PR does not tell everyting about how Google determines search results. Very soon  now I will be opening a membership area of this site where we will discuss the details of search engine marketing stategies, as well as many other aspects of business marketing. If you want to know when this happens I strongly suggest you join my marketing tips newsletter by using the link at the bottom of any posting here or the form on the top right side of the page. Thanks for reading!

No matter what the media, nothing happens unless you attract the attention of prospective buyers. This a foundation of the successful marketing of any business. In internet marketing this concept is often evaluated by the traffic that you receive to your web site. However, the factors that determine how much traffic you can generate are only somewhat related to the actual content of your web site. The amount of traffic you can generate to  your web site comes down to how skillful you are at the  two fundamental ways one gets attention in any media. You can earn it, or you can buy it.  

On the internet earning your traffic  results in you being found in what are called the “free” or “organic” search results on the major search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.   When your prospective customers do a search on terms of interest to them using one of the major search engines they will be presented with a list of  web pages found that the search engine believes is the most relevant to them. These are the “free” or “organic” results. They will also see ads, but that will be discussed below. Many people are under the assumption that the highest raking results they get on a search engine are the “best” in some way.  In this game it really is winners take all! If you are not on the first page of results the attention you attract is greatly diminished. In fact, if you don’t make it to the second page of results, then you often might as well not even be in the listings at all because folks usually won’t search past the second  page at most. This type of web site marketing is often referred to as “search engine optimization.”  You can hire a search engine marketing firm or learn how to do it yourself. Winning at this game  is not rocket science, but it is part science and part art that requires a constant work  and attention to maintain your success.

Buying your traffic on the internet is usually done by purchasing some form of advertising from someone who already has high traffic to their web site or email contact list. The most widely used forms of advertising are the banner advertisement and text advertisements. Banner advertisements were all the rage when the internet first became popular. However, their  effectiveness diminished greatly to a point where many people began to see them as a waste of money. However, they can be used effectively as long as you have a plan and clearly track your return on investment.  More common now are text advertisements which were largely brought  into the forefront by Google. You can see Google text advertisements on their search results pages and on millions of individual web sites across the internet. If you want to generate traffic fast,  and are willing to  pay the money to do so,  text advertisement are the most popular method.  Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the major players in this market, but Google is still clearly the big dog in this pack.

As you can see your web site marketing strategy must first be focused on getting attention. Attention first requires that someone is exposed to your message. You can earn the exposure, you can buy it, or like many businesses you can do both.  Earning the attention is a long term focus and requires skill and consistent commitment of resources. However, it pays off almost indefinitely and likely much cheaper in the long run than buying it. Buying the attention is much faster to get results and allows you to test ideas without committing the resources to earn attention. Any comprehensive web  site marketing strategy is likely to include both methods.

Most people are aware that Google offers a free keyword suggestion tool that can help you find keywords that are relevant to your business. Keyword research is fundamental to almost every aspect of internet business. If you fail to pay attention to this very basic aspect of internet marketing then you are almost certain to struggle in your business. The keyword suggestion tool can be found easily by doing a search for “Google keyword suggestion” and going to the google page at the top of the search results.

The next very powerful tool is their site analytics software. You need an Adwords account for this one, but it is an amazing tool that tracks visitors to your site. This tool allows you see a wealth of data about how they found you and whether they are converting to customers and/or leads on your site. Similar software costs hundreds of dollars and is not nearly as user friendly and powerful. Using this software is an absolute must for any serious webmaster.

Last, but by no means least, is their suite of tools appropriately call webmaster tools. This is a collection of tools to allow you to find out many things such as how many  pages you have in their index, any problems with your pages,  and most importantly a very detailed list of the pages on the internet that link to you.  This list is the heart of understanding why you do, or do not, rank for search terms of interest to you. In my opinion this is the most valuable tool that Google could have ever created and is a relatively recent addition to their offerings.  Simply said, it rocks!

The most convenient way to be able to monitor the page rank of your site, and any others that interest you, is to start using the Firefox web browser. I have included a link below which gets you a FREE copy of Firefox with the Google Toolbar installed. Firefox is one of the most powerful free tools you can use for monitoring the success of your internet marketing efforts. I works on Windows and Macintosh equally well. There are numerous extensions you can add to it in order to do things not possible with either  Internet Explorer or Safari. I suggest you get it now!

Here is where you can get the Firefox with the Google Toolbar installed to view page rank of any site!

The quality of the screenshot images rendered by the google video service I used to present this presentaion was not good enough to clearly show a PageRank green bar in the firefox browser. Here are two images that should give you an idea what the PageRank bar looks like. PageRank is shown in a small green bar just above the top of the page displayed in the browser next to another label that says "bookmarks."

In order to see the page rank of a particular web page you must either use a web browser that can display page rank data or go to a site where you can enter the url of a page and get it’s page rank. The problem is that the number you see is always out of date and reflects the last time the public display of  the page rank algorithm was updated. There can be a lag of many months since the last update. So in truth the page rank as used by Google is not accurately reflected in the numbers you can see in many cases.

Despite these problems, page rank is the most visible aspect we have to understand how Google ranks pages in the search results. Please note I said ranks pages, not sites! Each page stands on it’s own to a great extent, though there is some belief that it may be considered in the context of the reputation of the whole site. At the least the page rank of any page can be affected by the page rank of other pages on that site which link to it.

So there is a very simple answer to the question of how to increase page rank rapidly. However, you must first understand what most people think is the basis of page rank. Page rank is in many ways  a popularity contest on the internet. It believed to be based upon the number of links to your page and the popularity of the pages that link to you. In other words the more links, or votes, you get to your site the better in general. The higher the page rank of  the pages that link to you, the more valuable they are to your page rank.

So here is the answer to how to increase page rank rapidly. You have to get as many good quality links to your page that are relevant to the content of your page as you can. It is just that simple. There are many ways to get links including, reciprocal linking  with other sites, posting on blogs and forums, article marketing, and press releases just to name a few.  I believe the most effective is to write articles and submit them to directories for publication distribution.

I will cover each of these methods in some more detail in future articles.