Archive for the 'Better SEO' Category

Drive Dealings to Your Website and to Your Motel Is Two Faces of the Selfsame Coin

Driving Dealings to Your Web Site and to Your Bed and Breakfast is 2 Sides of the Same Mint

Getting traffic to your website or to your bed and breakfast demands good expertise and lots of optimisation both for your web site and for your motel. The optimization for your web site will go via a well known SEO Supporter and the optimization for your bed and breakfast is mostly done by the bed and breakfast itself, a great model of a Purple Cow in hotels is the Fox Hotel in Copenhagen, which had a clean make over by creative people and was the base of the launch of the recent VW Fox in Denmark.

The basic affair to do is to find a good address, for your web site this means getting a good PHP ISP and a solid domain, for your motel, this means having a prominent address in the city where your motel is located, preferable in the very heart of the city.

Having a solid address for your bed and breakfast gets lots of visitants just by itself. For your internet site this is not so easy, you demand featured rankings in search engines and to find these you will need to do search engine optimisation. A properly optimized web site will land you loads of visitants to your web site, visitants who are possible clients at your bed and breakfast.

Search engine optimization in the traveling industry is really tough and you will demand the best SEO Party to do the planning and execution of all jobs involved in the work. You must also be mindful that SEO takes time, so patience is a virtue.

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Forget SEO - It’s All About Conversion!

Which SEO hat do you wear? Is it white or black? Or perhaps it’s a subtle shade of gray. Well, wherever you are on this spectrum, if you are like 99% of the SEO-fixated webmasters out there, you are doing all you can to get visitors to your site. Where you used to optimize your keywords meta tags, you now worry about anchor text and XML site maps.

So, you finesse your site, schmooze the algorithm du jour and begin to climb the slippery search engine rankings pole. But this is where you have to leave your SEO tricks behind and start thinking conversion.

Whoa there! Conversion? That’s all about making sales on shopping sites. My site’s a forum! I don’t sell anything. What has conversion got to do with me?

Everything, my friend. Everything….

SERP Conversion

You want visitors to come your site, right? That’s why you climb greasy SERP pole, after all. (And why you lay awake at night wondering when the next Florida, Hilltop or Bourbon algorithm earthquake is going to hit.) But what does it matter if you reach the peak, but no one clicks through to your site anyway?

The fact is that you have to convert prospective visitors even before they arrive. You have to pique their interest, tweak their curiosity and make sure they click your link and not the other guy’s. And all you have to use are words. No technical tricks will help you now - your only tools are plain ol’ words.

The SERPs will show words from two of three places. Two of these you can control and one you can’t:

1.Your title tag.
2.Your meta description tag.
3.A directory description.

(For example, Google is known to use DMOZ descriptions in their SERPs, and Yahoo uses their directory descriptions in theirs.)

Now, there’s not much you can do about how Yahoo or DMOZ editors describe your site, so don’t worry about number 3. But do what you can do: Place your value propositions clearly in 1 and 2, and use them to lure searchers into your website.

So you have to convert people before they even get to your site. But that’s not all…. You want them to stay, right?

Flash Conversion

No, this has nothing to do with being blinded by bright lights on the road to Damascus. Nor am I telling you to go and make a 100% animated website.

This “flash” is that split second, that tiny window of opportunity that opens up when a searcher arrives at your site and decides whether they have actually found what they are looking for… or not.

Typically, you’ll have a couple of seconds to persuade the new visitor to stay and hang out. That’s all you get. It’s the ultimate in speed-dating. So, how do you wow your “date”? Do you show him a page of scraped “content” interspersed with Adsense ads? Not if you want this to be a lasting relationship.

Follow these tips and be sure to impress your “date”:

1. Have a clear theme

Ranking high for “blue widgets”? Then be sure your visible title, copy and images are clearly focused on them.

2. Have a clean design

Imagine you are taking a first date to a movie. Do you pick her up wearing your pajamas in a dirty, trash-filled car? Or do you clean the car, wash your face and dress to impress? Of course you want to impress her, so you make sure you look (and smell) good.

It’s the same with your site: Clean design, a nice text size and pages that don’t scroll from here to eternity are going to float your first-time visitor-date’s boat.

3. Write clearly and focus on your “date”

Waffle on about yourself and your date will get bored. She wants you to be interested in her. And in terms of your site, that means giving her what she wants to know as quickly and succinctly as possible. This comes down to your ability to write and communicate. So, if you are like Steve Martin in “Roxanne”, make sure you get a someone else (a copywriter) to compose the lines to wow your “date” for you.

OK, so let’s say you have successfully wooed your first-time visitor date. He’s here and he has decided to stick around. You’re going steady, getting to know each other a little more. That’s all you want, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t! You want to pop the question, of course!

Getting hitched

You’ve made all this effort and spent money on getting your “date” this far, so you want to get the most out of your investment, right? You want to hear those sweet words, “I do”:

I do… want to click your Adsense ads. I do… want to become a forum member. I do… want to buy that cool digital thingy.

So how do you turn a whirlwind romance into a successful proposal? Try these ideas for size:

Have clear navigation

You want to make your date dizzy with excitement, not frustration! Make sure you have clear, consistent, well-labeled navigation and make your visitor-date’s time with you a pleasure, and not a reason to reach for the Advil.

Have a clear proposition

What do you want your visitor to do? Buy something? Sign up for something? Join something? Whatever the point of your site is, it does have a point, right? So don’t beat about the bush, and don’t hold back waiting for the right moment: Make your “proposal”, and make it clear and direct.

Happily Ever After…

You thought that was the end of the story? Wait a minute, it’s not over yet! I thought you were in this for a long-term relationship, not a one night stand?

I know, you were thinking that having made all that effort while you were dating, you could ease off now that you’re “married”. But don’t you know that the real rewards start here?

So what are the secrets of a long, blissful relationship with your visitors?

1. Feed them!

You convinced him to come visit once. But how often will he come back if all you give him are the same old leftovers? Cook him up something juicy and delicious, and have him salivating for more:

Enliven your content with new, relevant pages and, not only will you set the search engine robots drooling, but you will also find you have a hoard of visitors coming back for seconds. And in this age of fast-(visitor)-food creation tools called blogs, there’s really no excuse anymore.

2. Shower them with gifts

Everyone likes a gift - and not just on birthdays, anniversaries and at Christmas:

Money talks, and if you are selling anything through your site, then discounts and other offers to previous visitors and customers will draw them back like magnets. Throw in tempting freebies as well and you will have a potent marketing mix.

3. Send them “love” letters

Anyone who has been in a long-distance relationship (like my wife and I were for a year and a half), knows that if you can’t be together, the next best thing is a letter or email. For your website, this means an interesting ezine that is light on sales pitch and rich in information.

4. Start a family!

Not literally! But you can create a “family” atmosphere by adding a forum where your visitors can interact with each other - not just with you and your site. People are social animals, so use a forum to keep them coming back.

OK, so perhaps I overstated it a little in my title. SEO is not dead, so don’t forget about it quite yet. Just remember that it will only get you so far: If you want to actually achieve anything with your site, then you need to focus on conversion like a laser.

About the Author

Stephen Munday lives in Japan. His most recent project is a Japanese name translation website where you can get your name in beautiful Japanese calligraphy.

This article is © Stephen Munday 2005. Permission is given to reproduce this article in whole with the URLs correctly hyperlinked.

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Search Engine Optimization :: The Basics and Why Websites Need It

We all know that the most targeted traffic we can get for our websites is from search engines. If you have a little patience and time to set websites the right way you can have a great source of excellent traffic and, best of all, you get it for free.

I will outline first in this article the basics that you have to know to get started with the optimization the right way and, if you read it carefully, you will find out how to be one step ahead the majority.

If you want to have a complete optimized site you have to take care of both on-site and off-site optimization. I will first outline the basics of on-site optimization.

Title Of The Page

The title of the page is one of the most important elements of on-site optimization. Your title must contain your main keyphrase of the page,also make sure that the title describes exactly what the page is about.

Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag usually consists of 160 to 180 characters including spaces. You have to make sure that it describes what the page is about and, because it will appear as a description of your page in serps, you have to write it in a way to make the readers interested in your site. But also don’t forget to include the main keyphrases in it.

Meta Keywords Tag

For some meta enabled search engines, the meta keywords tag used to be one of the most important factor after title and description. In the meta description tag include the keywords and keyphrases from your title, description and some other important keywords but try not to exceed 20 words.

Heading Tag

Each page should contain at least one heading tag . You have to place it at the top of the page and should contain your primary keywords/keyphrases. Make sure that all the heading tags are relevant to the content of the page.

Alt Tag

When you place your cursor over an image a text will popup. This text is the alt text. Try not to stuff keywords or keyphrases in it. Make sure it will describe the image and will include your main keywords/keyphrases.

Content Of The Page

Along with the title, the content weights heavily for all major search engines. You will have to write it to grab users attention and include all your keywords and keyphrases in it in a balanced way. A good thing you can do for your site is to add at least a new page each week to give users a reason to visit your site again.

If you will build all your pages accordingly to all this basic tips, from the off-site optimization point of view, your pages will be optimized the way they should.

Although some engines still pay attention to the on-site optimization, what you need to do to achieve high rankings is a great link building campaign, also known as off-site optimization.

We all know the importance of inbound links for high rankings, but search engines algorithms evolved so much that it’s not only important the number of links. Algorithms will take in consideration many other factors such as if the link your site receive it’s an one way link or reciprocal link.

Almost all webmasters have only campaigns to build as many reciprocal links, which is wrong, because search engines recognizes them and gives them very little importance.

If you want to be one big step ahead of your competition you have to build as many one way links as you can. One way links have a very big impact on rankings. The algos will analyze the page from which you receive the link too. The best links you can create are from pages that are themselves optimized for your keywords/keyphrases.

The best and easy way to do this is writing and submitting optimized topical articles to articles banks over the Internet. Along with your article, you will include a short bio about yourself where you can place your website URL.

There are many places, like goarticles.com , where you can submit your articles in order to create many one way links with only one article. If you will write and submit one article per week you will have a great link building campaign for your site.

Because 42% to 86% of websites are found through search engines and there are over 300 million searches carried out per day, every day your website needs a good search engine optimization. If you will apply all the things I’ve outlined in this article, you just can’t fail.

Web Site Search Engine Optimisation - Guaranteed Results! Need Top Ten Rankings in All Major Search Engines? Visit us at http://www.worcesterecs.com

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