Why you need to choose your keywords carefully

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One of the most important keys to successful SEO is the selection of keywords. Choose the right ones and you will target the right audience 99 times out of 100. Selecting those keywords can be a bit tricky though and much depends upon what you are offering through your website. Some keywords will be very popular and if you are planning to use these for PPC, they could be quite expensive. Be original with your keywords but do try and use keywords and key phrases that are being used in searches. There is no point in using keywords that nobody is searching for. Cleverly weave your keywords and key phrases into your text, articles and blogs so that the search engines pick up on.

What are your customers searching for? Answering this question should should be the first step of any effective web marketing effort including SEO and keyword advertising.

The First Step is Acceptance…

…acceptance that we don’t know what is going on in our customers’ heads. We speak our own language very well, the language of solutions. Our customers speak in the language of problems. Often these two are quite different, and web marketing efforts that fail to take this into account will not reach their full potential.

It is tempting to think that years of experience and dealing with customers gives us a good picture of how they act. However, there are several inherent assumptions that limit the utility of experience:

  • Customer interactions are self-selected. You only talk to people that have found you and are interested in your products and services, not those that either couldn’t find you or think that your solutions are not applicable. The number of people that can find you is typically dwarfed by the number that can’t. Click here to continue

Further reading

The importance of keyword selection

Keywords – the most important item in SEO

The importance of keyword rankings for SEO

Improving conversion rates

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Right, you have got the all singing, all dancing ecommerce site but you are not converting as many visitors as you would like. Take a look at your site through fresh eyes, is it easy to navigate, is the basket easy to find, have you displayed your shipping charges and is your checkout easy to get through? One thing that really puts buyers off is not knowing how much it will cost for shipping or for other fees that are added at the end. There are many ways to increase your conversion rate but there are a few rules to be followed and these will put you in a better position.

Here’s How:

  1. Create “Sticky” Landing Pages

    Your Home Page is only one of many potential points of entry to your site. Use Google Analytics to identify the top landing pages of your site and the bounce rates for each. (Although most visitors come in through the “front door,” those who find your site as the result of a search may land on a specific product page. Some people will come to your site, take a look, and then bounce right back out again. Google Website Optimizer is another tool you can use to test one landing page against another to determine which is most effective.

  2. Build Trust

    You can begin to develop a trusting relationship with your customers by displaying your security seal and business association badges on your site. Put them in the header—rather than on your home page—so they won’t be missed if a shopper comes in through a “side door” such as a product or category page.

    Another way to build trust is to be approachable and willing to communicate with your customers by phone, email, LiveChat, or through regular blog postings. People like to know that there’s a real person on the other end.

  3. Make It Easy to Buy

    Make it easy to find products by listing the Top Sellers, Best Value, Specials, or New Products on the home and category pages. It gives people a measure of comfort to know that there are satisfied customers who have already purchased the product. Product Rating systems don’t work well for every product, but they can be very effective. Why not include a “Buy Now” button to take them directly to the shopping cart? Click to continue

Further information

Improve your conversion rate

Get the right traffic, get them to convert

54 conversion rate optimization tips

Getting followers to your blog

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We are often advising you to write your own blogs and get your message out there, but how can you make sure that your blog is being noticed and that you are gaining followers? It is all very well coming up with fantastic blogs and publishing them but if nobody is reading them, what is the point? If you can gain followers to your blogs, it can make a great big difference to your online presence and really boost your business. Making your blogs fun and interesting and then publicising them is the goal here. Take a look at these handy hints on how to produce good blogs and get people reading them.

I put a lot of pride into my blog. The pride of every blogger is to have many people visiting his or her blog and actually finding the experience enjoyable and useful. Knowing how to create a blog is not enough. Here are 9 great tips on how to get your blog noticed.Fotolia 44808389 XS 300x200 How To Get Your Blog Noticed Fast And Easy With These Top 9 Tips

Tip #1 How To Get Your Blog Noticed: Create Useful Information

Before you put any information on your blog, think about the readers. Who is your target audience? Think about them as you come up with compelling information. Remember that people search for specific information; therefore, you should not be vague and fill your blog with fluff. When your audience finds your blog useful, they will gladly share the content with others who they think may benefit from it.

Tip #2 How To Get Your Blog Noticed: Create Compelling Titles

A reader should be able to know what the article in your blog is all about by reading the headline. The article title should be bold, interesting and captivating. It should make them want to read the entire article. For example, the title, how to get your blog noticed fast with these 9 tips sounds more interesting than Get traffic to your blog. Readers are more likely to stick with the first one and ignore the second one even if the content is the same.

Further information

6 tips on getting your blog noticed

How to get your blog noticed

5 guaranteed ways to get your blog more noticed

 

Using Pinterest to improve brand awareness

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Using Pinterest is one way of creating or increasing a brand image and many small businesses are making use of this method of raising awareness. Without awareness, businesses will struggle and being able to show off your goods enables potential shoppers to view your range from the comfort of their own home or from their smartphones whilst on the move. Pinterest has created quite a niche for those who are able to show their goods in photographs. Good photography will go a long way to improving brand awareness and is worth doing.

In today’s digital world, communications and consumers move quicker than ever before. Once something is said or done, it’s hard to put that genie back in the lamp, so to speak. As king of the imagery hill, Pinterest naturally faces a lot of challengers – but by voicing certain shortcomings of the site they may soon face a major challenge.

Pinterest holiday boards

To wit: Pinterest recently began curtailing the number of spammers and fake accounts on their system in an effort to clear its platform of unwanted elements.  There were major adjustments – and then they chose to start testing secret boards a midst very high-profile attention. Pinterest said “the holidays were a perfect time to test one of our most frequently-requested features: secret boards!”

Is Pinterest saying it’s ok to hide your gift requests, or likes and dislikes, only for the holidays? In trying to be all things to all people and please consumers during the holidays, Pinterest is inviting a lot of criticism – which could escalate into a larger issue. By only allowing users to create up to three of these Secret Boards (which won’t show up anywhere else in Pinterest), you’ll need to delete one or make one public before you can create another. You also can’t transfer any of your existing pins – far from ideal. Click to continue

 

Further information

Updating previous Pinterest boards

The 10 commandments of Pinterest blog promotion

6 ways to create buzz for your brand on Pinterest

Making your PPC campaign work for you

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Using pay per click or PPC can really help to get your business noticed while you build up your organic listings or if you wish to promote a particular product or service. The first thing you need to remember when planning a PPC campaign, is that you need to use the right sort of keywords and key phrases so that you reach your target audience and therefore, attract the right sort of clicks. That way, you will have the best opportunity to convert visits to sales and will get a decent rate of return for your spend. Being prudent with your budget and careful in your choice of keywords, you could find yourself quite busy from enquiries. Take a look at these articles which may help you find the formula that works for your business.

Pay-Per-Click (or PPC) advertising is a cost-effective way to reach your target audience online. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up spending a fortune and seeing little return on your investment. Here are some important tips for creating a winning PPC campaign for your business.

Get your website ready. What good are all the quality leads your PPC campaign will generate, if you aren’t sending them to a great site? Not only should you get your site looking and functioning at its best, but you want to direct the PPC ad right to the spot where you want to make the most impact. Why not create a landing page, with the call-to-action and copy that is most crucial to your business?

Set a budget and stick to it. Before diving headfirst into your first PPC campaign, set some limits for your monthly spend. Vary your initial investment in your Pay-Per-Click effort according to your comfort level. It is recommended that you “dip your toe in the water early,” then make a more significant investment only after you see which keywords and ad copy are producing the best results. Click to continue

Further information

Maximizing your PPC profits

Upgrade your PPC with these advanced strategies

10 tips to maximize your PPC campaign efficiency

Prepare well before redesigning your website

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There comes a time when you need to redo, revamp or redesign your website and the worry could be that you will lose your organic placings when you have made major changes. It is important to keep your website fresh and interesting with new content in order to remain attractive to the search engine spiders. There are ways to reduce the risks and as always, make sure you do a complete backup before you begin. This is a major undertaking and one which deserves a proper amount of time spent preparing. We have found some helpful information for you to look at, it may help you to avoid the many pitfalls.

When a redesign or platform change looms in your site’s future, it’s easy to turn off all search-engine-optimization work and focus on planning the new site. After all, why bother making changes that will just be overwritten when you launch the new site? Focusing on a few key areas will enable you to continue improving SEO without fear of wasted work when the new site goes live.

Focus on Stable Areas

If the redesign doesn’t encompass the entire site, the sections that aren’t involved are safe to optimize. Oftentimes companies will revamp their primary ecommerce sites but leave the blog, promotional content, or other sections that are hosted on separate platforms out of the redesign project. Typically the portion of the site not being redesigned will also be a lower priority, so there may be resistance to optimizing it. However, if the redesign has you spinning your wheels in higher priority areas you can also think of this as the perfect time to gain some traction in the lower priority area.

Target Title Tags

Title tags are an evergreen optimization target because they’re the most influential SEO element on the page. They’re also typically easy to modify and require no development support. In addition, title tags can be optimized for pages that will be redesigned for a couple of reasons.

The title tag is not part of the creative design of the page. Because it lives in the head of the HTML code of the page, it does not affect changes to the design of the page. True, the content on the page will likely change and the title tag needs to relevantly reflect the content of the page. But the most optimal title tags are also typically descriptive rather than creative in nature. So as long as the topic of the page stays consistent around the same keyword theme, the title tag should naturally remain relevant to the content of the page. Click to continue

Further reading

Using content marketing to improve SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing

8 necessary SEO steps during a website redesign

Common SEO site redesign mistakes

Making your ecommerce site work for your business

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If you operate an ecommerce site, you will know that capturing visitors and converting them to sales is the name of the game. Achieving this is not always so easy though. You need to have a top rate ecommerce site which is easy to navigate, easy to make a purchase, available on all the popular platforms including mobile and that shows goods off to their best. Your company needs to be reliable and not charge too much for shipping and have excellent customer service which will resolve all issues quickly. Making sure your website contains all the relevant information is vital, so begin with good quality content that is interesting, grabs the attention and is part of a long term strategy.

ecommerce contentmany e-commerce stores don’t have a content strategy

The owners of many e-commerce sites don’t understand the importance of good content, they think that having a nice design and easy to use shopping cart is all they need. Their mentality is that providing a product or service that people want to buy, and setting up their site to easily purchase is all they need to do.

By having this narrow focus, they’re missing out on the benefits of utilizing a strong content strategy. Having high quality information on your e-commerce site delivers two main benefits:

SEO: Firstly, having a lot of unique, keyword loaded content is going to allow your product pages to rank a lot higher on the search engines which means more traffic which should convert into more sales.

Sales Facilitation: Think of it in real world terms. What kind of store are you more likely to buy from; the one with the helpful staff who assist with your purchase decision, or the one with the staff who stand behind the counter and play with their phone. For most people it would be the first; and it’s the same with e-commerce sites, those that provide relevant and helpful information are more successful than those with skimpy product descriptions. Click here to continue

 

Further information

How to maximize your ecommerce site in 2013

Ecommerce website, is it working for your business?

Pinterest is business friendly

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Many businesses are now using Pinterest to showcase their products. It is an excellent way of showing prospective customers your choice of goods, a bit like a virtual shop window. You can also use it to publicize events that your business is hosting or is involved with. Pinterest is also available on mobile devices, it is now possible to reach even more potential customers without having to do anything else yourself. Finding new customers is the goal of most businesses and if you can gain a bit more interest then this can only be good. Pinterest has really gained momentum this year and has become a very popular social media site. Make sure that your business is not missing out on this opportunity.

 

Pinterest Just Got A Lot More Business-Friendly

Pinterest has launched new tools (as well as some new terms of service) for businesses.

“Organizations can now sign up on the Pinterest for Business site to specify their business name (instead of first and last name) and to secure access to new and upcoming business-specific features,” a spokesperson for Pinterest tells WebProNews. “Brands with an existing account on Pinterest can easily convert their account.”

“The site will also host case studies, best practices and guides to help provide businesses with inspiration,” she adds. “Thousands of businesses are already part of the Pinterest community, and we’re excited to take this step towards working closer with the great organizations that leverage Pinterest every day.”

There are two sets of terms – one for people and one for businesses. “The business terms help guide businesses on how to use Pinterest,” says product manager Cat Lee in a blog post. “They also enable us to separate the provisions meant for businesses from those meant for regular people. As a result, we updated our user terms to be half as long. We also took the opportunity to simplify the language as much as possible. Unfortunately, terms of use are one of those documents that requires a certain amount of legalese, so we’ve offered “translations” of these sections, too.” Click here to continue

Further information

Pinterest just got more business friendly

Want to increase your sales with Pinterest?

Pinterest as a tool for planner-client collaboration