Wednesday, January 17, 2007
How to Get Local Targeted Web Traffic
How to Get Local Targeted Web Traffic
By Tim Frisch
Getting local targeted web traffic to your website, can require a few different adjustments for your keywords and website content. First let’s discuss how to increase your odds regarding your keywords, since this the foundation of SEO or (search engine optimization). Which keywords you decide on will depend on how specific of a geographic area you want to focus on is. For instance if you sell exercise equipment in Orlando, Florida and you have a brick and mortar store also, and want to drive visitors physically to the store. You might want to use the key phrase “exercise equipment orlando florida”, as apposed to “exercise equipment” or “exercise equipment florida” (by the way you shouldn’t have to worry about case sensitive words). This will give you a much greater ability to be found in the search engines, because your web site will be ranked higher and more visible.
One of the places to find the best keywords for this purpose is in Overture and Google. You will be able to tune and fine tune each keyword for your subject matter and geographic area. You will be able to get a feel as to how many searches have been done and how popular the words are. Plus you will get an idea how to use pay per click (non organic Internet marketing), maybe this is a type of marketing you may want to consider.
Of course all areas within the web site will need to be optimized with the same keyword criteria, such as your meta tags, body content, etc. An additional area to consider is locating the best places to link with. For example, a few places highly recommended are local business portals, national directories that would be exercise related and Chambers of Commerce.
Since this Internet marketing strategy is more locally targeted as apposed to most, which are marketed globally, the whole mentality should be geared toward local marketing only. Using printed collateral is an excellent way to drive people to your site, since you’re local, cards or mailers or flyers are good.
Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have search capabilities to help with local marketing. Plus when these are utilized your site will be picked by additional search engines and directories which will give you some what of a snowball effect. So to recap, when planning your local Internet marketing strategy, always keep in mind local methods to promote and be specific to your geographic area.
Tim Frisch is the owner of SEO Help Desk http://www.SEOHelpDesk.com and has been assisting companies build business online since 1998, and offline for over 25 years. SEO Help Desk is your resource for most aspects of SEO including, SEO training, SEO coaching, SEO campaigns, SEO consulting and SEO analysis. To see how your website is ranked in the search engines, get a free ranking report at http://www.seohelpdesk.com/free-search-engine-ranking-report
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tim_Frisch
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Get-Local-Targeted-Web-Traffic-&id=329884
By Tim Frisch
Getting local targeted web traffic to your website, can require a few different adjustments for your keywords and website content. First let’s discuss how to increase your odds regarding your keywords, since this the foundation of SEO or (search engine optimization). Which keywords you decide on will depend on how specific of a geographic area you want to focus on is. For instance if you sell exercise equipment in Orlando, Florida and you have a brick and mortar store also, and want to drive visitors physically to the store. You might want to use the key phrase “exercise equipment orlando florida”, as apposed to “exercise equipment” or “exercise equipment florida” (by the way you shouldn’t have to worry about case sensitive words). This will give you a much greater ability to be found in the search engines, because your web site will be ranked higher and more visible.
One of the places to find the best keywords for this purpose is in Overture and Google. You will be able to tune and fine tune each keyword for your subject matter and geographic area. You will be able to get a feel as to how many searches have been done and how popular the words are. Plus you will get an idea how to use pay per click (non organic Internet marketing), maybe this is a type of marketing you may want to consider.
Of course all areas within the web site will need to be optimized with the same keyword criteria, such as your meta tags, body content, etc. An additional area to consider is locating the best places to link with. For example, a few places highly recommended are local business portals, national directories that would be exercise related and Chambers of Commerce.
Since this Internet marketing strategy is more locally targeted as apposed to most, which are marketed globally, the whole mentality should be geared toward local marketing only. Using printed collateral is an excellent way to drive people to your site, since you’re local, cards or mailers or flyers are good.
Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have search capabilities to help with local marketing. Plus when these are utilized your site will be picked by additional search engines and directories which will give you some what of a snowball effect. So to recap, when planning your local Internet marketing strategy, always keep in mind local methods to promote and be specific to your geographic area.
Tim Frisch is the owner of SEO Help Desk http://www.SEOHelpDesk.com and has been assisting companies build business online since 1998, and offline for over 25 years. SEO Help Desk is your resource for most aspects of SEO including, SEO training, SEO coaching, SEO campaigns, SEO consulting and SEO analysis. To see how your website is ranked in the search engines, get a free ranking report at http://www.seohelpdesk.com/free-search-engine-ranking-report
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tim_Frisch
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Get-Local-Targeted-Web-Traffic-&id=329884
Sitemaps and SEO - Do Sitemaps Help Your Google PageRank?
Sitemaps and SEO - Do Sitemaps Help Your Google PageRank?
By Philip Nicosia
With the millions and millions of websites in existence today, how do you get yours noticed? The most common way is for it to be high up in the rankings of useful and relevant websites. Google is the most widely used search engine today. When someone keys in a search term on Google, you can only hope that your website comes up in the first ten pages of results. You do not have to sit there and just hope, though. There are a number of things you could do to improve your chances of being noticed.
Google came up with a system to determine how important a website is. Everyday, Google’s automated programs called spiders “crawl” the World Wide Web. The purpose is to index all the existing web pages out there. The information these spiders gather is used as the basis for calculating what Google calls PageRank. This concept was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University.
What exactly is PageRank? It is an algorithm which assigns numerical weights to linked pages. The higher the figures, the more important the page is. The PageRank is resultant of how many pages link to your own page. It is of no use to make bogus incoming links to your page though. Google gives more weight to more reputable sites that link to your page. Bogus and paid incoming links can actually be detected. The algorithm takes into account all incoming links – both external and internal.
This is where sitemaps come into the picture. As can be gathered from the name, sitemaps are basically a guide to what can be found in your website. It is a page within your site wherein the user can see the overall structure and informational content. It contains links to all the pages in your website.
Will providing a sitemap increase your Google PageRank? The answer is simple: yes it may. As mentioned earlier, the PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages you have in your website, the higher you PageRank. A word of caution is necessary here. Pages should contain original content and not simply be copies of each other. Otherwise, your PageRank may actually decrease. As the spiders follow links to get to web pages, a sitemap will actually facilitate the “travel” of these spiders within your site. If each of the pages on your web site are interconnected and are easily accessible from one page, then chances are the spiders will find the necessary information faster and easier. Experts suggest that you put only a maximum of 100 links in one page. If you have more than that number of links, you should create different sets of sitemaps. In order for the idea of the sitemap to really work, you need to provide a link to the sitemap on every page on your website.
The keys to increasing your PageRank are fairly simple. Include original content in as many pages as you can. Link your pages together. Create a sitemap to make navigation easier. Provide links to the sitemap for each page. This way, both user and spiders can find all the information that you have to offer.
XML-Sitemaps.com provides an online sitemap generator that creates XML, HTML and text sitemaps and also helps find broken links on your website.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Philip_Nicosiahttp://EzineArticles.com/?Sitemaps-and-SEO---Do-Sitemaps-Help-Your-Google-PageRank?&id=206143
By Philip Nicosia
With the millions and millions of websites in existence today, how do you get yours noticed? The most common way is for it to be high up in the rankings of useful and relevant websites. Google is the most widely used search engine today. When someone keys in a search term on Google, you can only hope that your website comes up in the first ten pages of results. You do not have to sit there and just hope, though. There are a number of things you could do to improve your chances of being noticed.
Google came up with a system to determine how important a website is. Everyday, Google’s automated programs called spiders “crawl” the World Wide Web. The purpose is to index all the existing web pages out there. The information these spiders gather is used as the basis for calculating what Google calls PageRank. This concept was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University.
What exactly is PageRank? It is an algorithm which assigns numerical weights to linked pages. The higher the figures, the more important the page is. The PageRank is resultant of how many pages link to your own page. It is of no use to make bogus incoming links to your page though. Google gives more weight to more reputable sites that link to your page. Bogus and paid incoming links can actually be detected. The algorithm takes into account all incoming links – both external and internal.
This is where sitemaps come into the picture. As can be gathered from the name, sitemaps are basically a guide to what can be found in your website. It is a page within your site wherein the user can see the overall structure and informational content. It contains links to all the pages in your website.
Will providing a sitemap increase your Google PageRank? The answer is simple: yes it may. As mentioned earlier, the PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages you have in your website, the higher you PageRank. A word of caution is necessary here. Pages should contain original content and not simply be copies of each other. Otherwise, your PageRank may actually decrease. As the spiders follow links to get to web pages, a sitemap will actually facilitate the “travel” of these spiders within your site. If each of the pages on your web site are interconnected and are easily accessible from one page, then chances are the spiders will find the necessary information faster and easier. Experts suggest that you put only a maximum of 100 links in one page. If you have more than that number of links, you should create different sets of sitemaps. In order for the idea of the sitemap to really work, you need to provide a link to the sitemap on every page on your website.
The keys to increasing your PageRank are fairly simple. Include original content in as many pages as you can. Link your pages together. Create a sitemap to make navigation easier. Provide links to the sitemap for each page. This way, both user and spiders can find all the information that you have to offer.
XML-Sitemaps.com provides an online sitemap generator that creates XML, HTML and text sitemaps and also helps find broken links on your website.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Philip_Nicosiahttp://EzineArticles.com/?Sitemaps-and-SEO---Do-Sitemaps-Help-Your-Google-PageRank?&id=206143
SEO: Using Your Website Statistics To Help Choose The Right Keywords
SEO: Using Your Website Statistics To Help Choose The Right KeywordsBy Chris Le Roy
There are literally thousands of tools that are available on the market to help you choose keywords to optimize your WebPages, but one of the most underutilized tools that you should be using is your web logs. Your web log is the key to telling you who and how people are finding your website. It will also tell you if there are new trends in which people are actually finding your website by keywords or phrases that you may not necessarily have optimized for.
All internet marketing and search engine experts will tell you that if you are not in the top 5 records of any search engine results then you are simply not going to get any traffic. This has a certain element of truth to it but is not totally correct. In fact we have had a couple of WebPages recently that were not optimized for any specific keywords or phrases, but these pages have been pulling 50 hits a day, leading to sales even though it was on the 95th page of the search engine results.
To pull 50 hits a day off a keyword on the 95th page obviously prompted my interest and this is the point that I want to bring to your attention. The only reason that we were able to find this out was that we have the ability to review our own web logs. Let me explain how this works …
Every time you visit a website you leave a small piece of information that the website owner can in fact collect. The information you leave behind includes the page you visited, your IP number and a series of raw data that includes the website that referred you to the site, your browser, the language you are using, the operating system you are using, session details, character set etc. As the website owner you are able to collect this information and use it to help you focus your site or identify that your search engine optimization program is working.
For example, if a person goes to the Google search engine and searches on the term "car detailing", when the person clicks on the link in that search result to your website, the website that they goto will see in the Raw Data the following:
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&q=car+detailing&btnG=Search&meta=
The HTTP Referer in the example above is the Google Singapore website and the search was done in English. You can tell this by the en after the question mark. After the q it tells you that the search term was "car detailing".
What you should be doing on a daily basis is to look in your web logs and to look at who is referring people to your website. For example if you find a keyword or phrase that people are using at Google, MSN or Yahoo to get to your site that you have not optimized for, then you need to first do a search on those search engines using those keywords to find out where you are positioned in the search results. Obviously if you are positioned highly, then you may not need to do any work but if you were not ranked in the first page of results, then you could certainly look at optimizing your webpage for those keywords.
One of the challenges I know that many people have is that they use a third-party hosting company to actually host their websites. Often these companies do not give you access to the web logs. They will though give you access to a statistics program that usually only looks at the number of hits you get, where the hits are coming from a country perspective and the domains that are referring people to you but they often do not include the key terms used by individuals at the search engines to find you.
I should note that you can in fact build your own statistics program. It is possible for you to collect all of the information discussed earlier when a visitor visits your website. All you simply need to learn is a little bit of ASP. There are lots of great ASP programming sites that will be able to help you achieve this.
One of the other free tools available on the internet that will allow you to track what search terms are being used to get to your site is available on Google. Under the webmaster function in Google, they provide a Sitemap function that tracks what search terms people are using to visit your site and what search terms are being used where your website shows up in the search results. The downside to this tool is that it only shows the top 20 results and is only for searches done on the Google search engine but it does cover results from all Google Search Pages across the Globe.
The best tool to help you work out how people are finding you and what terms they are using to get to your website is your web logs. If you do not have access to them, you are limiting the potential of your website as you may have a clear niche market and not know it exists if you do not have quality web logs.
For other great online and offline marketing ideas visit our website Online Marketing Business Opportunity. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill will teach you the 13 secrets to become rich. To help you in learning this material I strongly recommend our High Performance Meditation Music at - Meditation Music
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chris_Le_Royhttp://EzineArticles.com/?SEO:-Using-Your-Website-Statistics-To-Help-Choose-The-Right-Keywords&id=392039
There are literally thousands of tools that are available on the market to help you choose keywords to optimize your WebPages, but one of the most underutilized tools that you should be using is your web logs. Your web log is the key to telling you who and how people are finding your website. It will also tell you if there are new trends in which people are actually finding your website by keywords or phrases that you may not necessarily have optimized for.
All internet marketing and search engine experts will tell you that if you are not in the top 5 records of any search engine results then you are simply not going to get any traffic. This has a certain element of truth to it but is not totally correct. In fact we have had a couple of WebPages recently that were not optimized for any specific keywords or phrases, but these pages have been pulling 50 hits a day, leading to sales even though it was on the 95th page of the search engine results.
To pull 50 hits a day off a keyword on the 95th page obviously prompted my interest and this is the point that I want to bring to your attention. The only reason that we were able to find this out was that we have the ability to review our own web logs. Let me explain how this works …
Every time you visit a website you leave a small piece of information that the website owner can in fact collect. The information you leave behind includes the page you visited, your IP number and a series of raw data that includes the website that referred you to the site, your browser, the language you are using, the operating system you are using, session details, character set etc. As the website owner you are able to collect this information and use it to help you focus your site or identify that your search engine optimization program is working.
For example, if a person goes to the Google search engine and searches on the term "car detailing", when the person clicks on the link in that search result to your website, the website that they goto will see in the Raw Data the following:
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&q=car+detailing&btnG=Search&meta=
The HTTP Referer in the example above is the Google Singapore website and the search was done in English. You can tell this by the en after the question mark. After the q it tells you that the search term was "car detailing".
What you should be doing on a daily basis is to look in your web logs and to look at who is referring people to your website. For example if you find a keyword or phrase that people are using at Google, MSN or Yahoo to get to your site that you have not optimized for, then you need to first do a search on those search engines using those keywords to find out where you are positioned in the search results. Obviously if you are positioned highly, then you may not need to do any work but if you were not ranked in the first page of results, then you could certainly look at optimizing your webpage for those keywords.
One of the challenges I know that many people have is that they use a third-party hosting company to actually host their websites. Often these companies do not give you access to the web logs. They will though give you access to a statistics program that usually only looks at the number of hits you get, where the hits are coming from a country perspective and the domains that are referring people to you but they often do not include the key terms used by individuals at the search engines to find you.
I should note that you can in fact build your own statistics program. It is possible for you to collect all of the information discussed earlier when a visitor visits your website. All you simply need to learn is a little bit of ASP. There are lots of great ASP programming sites that will be able to help you achieve this.
One of the other free tools available on the internet that will allow you to track what search terms are being used to get to your site is available on Google. Under the webmaster function in Google, they provide a Sitemap function that tracks what search terms people are using to visit your site and what search terms are being used where your website shows up in the search results. The downside to this tool is that it only shows the top 20 results and is only for searches done on the Google search engine but it does cover results from all Google Search Pages across the Globe.
The best tool to help you work out how people are finding you and what terms they are using to get to your website is your web logs. If you do not have access to them, you are limiting the potential of your website as you may have a clear niche market and not know it exists if you do not have quality web logs.
For other great online and offline marketing ideas visit our website Online Marketing Business Opportunity. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill will teach you the 13 secrets to become rich. To help you in learning this material I strongly recommend our High Performance Meditation Music at - Meditation Music
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chris_Le_Royhttp://EzineArticles.com/?SEO:-Using-Your-Website-Statistics-To-Help-Choose-The-Right-Keywords&id=392039
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