Home Based Business Success

If you’re after targeted traffic to your website, you’re going to need some search engine optimization to rise above other sites in the search engine rankings. There are many factors that influence the diabolical little algorithms that determine if and where you’ll rank for the search terms of your choice.

One of the most important is choosing the right keyword phrase to get ranked for. You want a keyword phrase that targets your desired visitors, but in most cases you’ll want to stay away from the terms that have millions of other sites competing for them. You want to try and dominate the smaller niche terms.

To find the desired terms you’ll need a keyword tool to tell you what people are actually searching for when they use the search engines. It should tell you the phrase and how many searches it gets every month on Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live Search. There are many of these tools out there, both free, subscription based and requiring a 1 time fee.

 For years Google has had a fairly nice keyword tool. It gave you graphs that ranked the number of searches from 1 through 5. The problem has been that the Google tool doesn’t really tell you how many searches were done, just the comparative ranking against other keywords. That’s just not enough information if you’re trying to do some search engine optimization.

Proper optimization requires you to optimize on-page factors such as the title. The page title can make all the difference in the world, as I explained in my post on How to Choose a Title to Increase Targeted Traffic that I posted a few months ago. You want to actually write a post or create a web page that addresses the exact question people are asking, in the exact way that they asked it.

In order to do that, you either need to ask everyone that’s ever searched for things related to your site or blog, or you can use a keyword tool, such as I mentioned above. As I indicated Google’s free keyword tool had a major limitation in that it merely gave an idea of the relative amount of searches performed, not the actual number.

That has all changed now. Yesterday Google revised their free keyword tool (see it here) to include not only the actual number of searches performed for a specific keyword or phrase, but the average number performed over the past year, a graphical trend meter for the previous year, how much relative advertiser competition there is for the terms or keywords, and which month actually had the largest number of searches for the keywords. It does all this in addition to doing the same keyword suggestion functions as it did in the past. The best part is that this powerful bit of keyword and search engine marketing help is all free (not that Google really needs the money).

First, determine which phrases have the highest number of searches. Then you can find an idea of the amount of competition that you’ll face when you try to get high search engine rankings for the terms with the following simple technique. Just enter the phrase you want to rank for in quotes into the Google search box. The number of results you get from the Google search gives you a good idea of how many competitors you’ll face when trying to get ranked for a particular search term.

Typically you’ll face stiff competition when trying to get ranked for general terms with large numbers of searches. The key is to choose terms with a smaller number of searches, but very low competition.

As an example, the term ‘cars’ has 83 million searches a month in Google. While it would be nice to get even a small piece of that 83 million, you’ll have some problems. One is that the term is very broad. If you ranked well for the term cars, you’ll get people looking for cars, car sales, car insurance, used cars, new cars, car mechanics, car parts, car magazines, etc. You would probably do better to focus on exactly what you’re selling that’s car related, and concentrate on getting good rankings for terms related to that.

If you wanted to be a portal, you may get a good amount of traffic at some point with a term as broad as ‘cars’, but a number of well established sites already rank well for that. They have several advantages; they are well aged, have many good content pages, and tons of backlinks from other well regarded sites (Google reports cars.com has 195,000 backlinks, and they typically under-report backlinks). Currently, the number 1 rank for the term ‘cars’ is cars.com. There are 861 million other web sites besides cars.com that already rank in some manner for the term ‘cars’. You’d be number 861 million and 1.

Instead of directly taking all of them on directly, you would do better to focus on something which still had a fair amount of traffic, but still related to what you’re selling. The closer you can target the keyword to the interest of your visitors, (and more importantly buyers, not info seekers) the more money you’ll make with your marketing efforts.

For example, if you have a home based business brokering used sports cars, you’d want to target the specific types of used cars you have an interest in selling. If you have an affiliate website that deals in car insurance for high risk drivers, you’d want to target terms relating to those drivers that were actively seeking insurance.

For the first example, the term ‘used sports cars for sale’ has only 544 competitor sites. Now that’s more like it! If you do some things well, you should be able to rank well for that term fairly easily. It gets a much lower number of searches, only 590 per month, but those people are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Other very closely related terms, such as ‘used sports car for sale’ (170 / month), and can bring additional traffic. Brokering specific cars can be very lucrative, so you can make good money from such narrowly targeted traffic.

In the other example, auto insurance is still too broad, even though it has 20 million searches a month. Ditto car insurance (9 million). Think more niche oriented. The term ‘high risk auto insurance’ is much better, with only 170,000 competing returns, but that’s still pretty tough for a new site.  You’ll face even more competition with the term ‘high risk car insurance’ (265,000 sites, with only 2,400 searches for the term).

‘High point car insurance’ fares better, with 4,400 searches and 81,000 sites to beat.  ‘Auto insurance for high risk drivers’ shows only 2,280 returns, but has 110 searches per month. The good news is that you’d probably get ranked for closely related terms such as ‘auto insurance for high risk’ (320 searches). Eventually you could get good traffic from other related terms as well.

There are two strategies; niche domination, and large market skimming. You’re either trying to be the largest, highest converting fish in a small pond, or a smaller (but hopefully still fairly high converting) fish in a massive pond. You can work wonders with either approach, and Google has just made you job a bit easier, especially if you have a small budget.

Until next time, may you experience home based business success! Have a great weekend!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 11:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

How to increase targeted web site traffic is one of the things that nearly all home based business owners would like to know. After all, no matter what you’re selling, and weather you operate exclusively in the on-line space or not, it’s vital for your businesses’ success. On the other hand, not getting that targeted traffic, the visitors that really want to buy, or desperately want to know more about your business, is a recipe for disaster.

In this business climate, even if you operate a business that has nothing to do with Internet marketing or selling online, it is key that you maximize the targeted traffic to your web site. Simply maximizing traffic will do little good, other than using up your valuable bandwidth. The traffic must be targeted for specific keywords that you want to be found for on the web.

How do you choose the proper keywords, and how do you help ensure you’ll be found for them? There are a few things to do when optimizing your site or blog to grab the traffic you want. Don’t have a blog yet? Get one, and soon. It‘s one of the most valuable marketing tools you can have, for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it can help increase your visibility and ranking with the search engines.

When choosing keywords to target your site for, there are specific things you should look at. First, you want to determine what will have the most value to your business. For example, if you have a business consulting firm, you obviously want to be found when someone does a search for business and consulting related terms, but it goes deeper than that.

Do you have a specialty within your general business discipline? If you operate in the physical space, what about geographical terms? You would do better to be found for people searching for business consultants in your area, if you are set up primarily to do consulting for local businesses.

The more direct your targeting efforts can be, the greater the value of the traffic to your business, and the better you can optimize your web site or blog to rank well for your specific keywords. There are many so-called ‘on page’ optimization techniques you can use to help your site rank well, but before you ever even get that far, you have to start at the top.

It all begins with the name of the page or site. If you choose it correctly, and optimize the title, and then the on page factors, you will have a much easier time of things when you are indexed, ten ranked by the search engines. You want to choose terms that people are actually searching for.

The reasons for this are two fold. Reason number one is that by choosing keywords that people are actually searching for you will obviously get more targeted traffic, simply because there are more people searching for those terms. But the second reason, and the more important one, is that you will provide value to your visitor. After all, if they are looking for a specific term that is what you want to be found for. Your visitor will have higher satisfaction and you will have a better chance of gaining a customer.

When choosing keywords, it pays to be specific in most cases. For example if you provide business consulting services, as in the example above, you would do better to be found for your specialty within the business consulting arena. By segmenting your broad area into a specific niche, you will be found by those visitors that will attach the most value to finding your site. Conversely, you will also be found by those visitors that have the most value to your business, because you are exactly what they’re looking for.

The secret you must know to increase targeted web site traffic - The most important takeaway from this post is this, however. It’s extremely important exactly what keyword phrases you optimize for. You can have multiple phrases, all specified, and all with the basically the same value to your visitors and your business. These can have subtle differences in phrasing, but the phrases can have wide differences in the number of searches that are performed for them, and perhaps even more important, the number of competing web sites that there are that rank for those keyword phrases. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about.

Take this post, for example. I didn’t choose the post’s title arbitrarily. It actually requires research. When doing research for exactly what the title of this post should be, I was confronted with several options. I knew that I wanted to do a post to help home based business owners get more traffic to their web sites and blogs.

What I didn’t know was exactly how those business owners were asking for help when they went to search for it in the search engines. That’s where the research comes in. I needed to determine the exact search terms that were being searched for, and how much competition there was for each. There may be some keyword phrases that have very high search volumes, but if there are millions of other websites out there that rank for those phrases (not an uncommon scenario) I would stand little chance of ever being found for them, no matter how good my content other on page factors was until I had hundreds or thousands of links from other sites pointing to this post (the number of high quality links to your site from other web sites is one of the primary factors used by the search engines when ranking your site’s pages).

The key then is to choose keyword phrases with a relatively high number of searches, but a lower number of other sites that are found when searching for them. As I mentioned above the difference between good phrases and bad ones is often very subtle, and here are some examples of just what I mean.

When doing the research for this post I found the following different phrases were searched for on Google:
increased web traffic

increase web traffic

increase web site traffic

increase targeted web site traffic

boost web site traffic

generate web site traffic

get web site traffic

 

As you’ll notice, there is very little difference grammatically between some of the phrases. However, the differences between them in terms of how many people searched for them, and how many web sites can be found when searching for them is huge. Here is what I mean. I’ll list those phrases again, followed by 2 numbers; the number of people searching for them each day on Google, and the number of web sites that Google ranks for each phrase.

increased web traffic                            195 / 43,000

increase web traffic                             209 / 42,000

increase web site traffic                               260 / 337,000

increase targeted web site traffic          22 / 22,000

boost web site traffic                           12 / 7,420

generate web site traffic                      9 / 13,100

get web site traffic                              9 / 37,300

 

Note how some keyword phrases have much more competition, and thus would be much harder to be ranked for than others, even though the differences from a visitor value standpoint would be slight. For example, although there are a comparatively large number of Internet visitors searching for the phrase ‘increase web site traffic’, there are also many other sites that show up in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). That would make it a poor choice unless you were pretty confident that other factors would allow you to rank well in the results. A better choice would be one of the results that had far fewer competitors, so you would have a chance to actually be found for them.

To choose keywords and phrases that fit these criteria, you’ll need some help, but thankfully there is help to be found. There are several research tools that you can use when deciding on what to name blog posts or web pages. Google has a nice tool, the Google keyword suggestion tool. You can enter a keyword or phrase and it will show you a list of many other related phrases or keywords and how much relative traffic there is for them. You can also see how much advertiser competition there is for the keywords among Google Adwrods advertisers.  

Another one that I use on a regular basis is the free keyword tool from Wordtracker. It gives more detailed information such as specific numbers of visitors, and how many visitors the number one result on Google gives. Yahoo used to have a nice tool the old Overture as well, but it is no longer….RIP.

So, when trying to get the most targeted web site traffic for your businesses’ web site and/or blog, remember, it’s all in a name.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 02:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nothing occupies the minds of most Internet (and any other) marketers as much as the question of how to increase targeted traffic to their websites. If that traffic happens to be free, so much the better. One of the ways used by marketers to get more targeted traffic is through article marketing. Writing articles and letting others publish them in exchange for a link back to your website is a powerful technique. It's used by experienced and newbie marketers alike.

One of the big benefits to article marketing is that it's free, although it can be a bit time consuming. You'll get traffic driven to your site in two ways through article marketing. People will see your article and then be so compelled by your writing skill and boundless wit that they'll click on your link, eager to discover all they can about you, your product, and your company. The other way that they'll reach your site is through the SEO benefits that all those inbound links confer.

It's well known to all but the newest Internet marketers, and anyone else that  attempts to market products with the help of a website, that one of the main criteria used by the search engines to rank a particular web page is the number and quality of inbound links to the page. From what passes for common knowledge on the web, Google puts more credence on the power of the inbound link than do the lesser search engines, but all seem to use this in their algorithm to some extent. So, all those inbound links let people come directly to your site, but they also help it rank highly in the search engines.

Here are two big mistakes made by Internet marketers and others that use article marketing that will keep you from maximizing both of the benefits you should achieve from article marketing.

The first mistake is to use copy in your resource box that's just not compelling. Although it is supposed to tell about the author, you should really use the resource box to compel visitors to click on your link. Unless you're a pretty interesting individual, your life story just isn't going to do that. Many people use a variation of  “To find out more information on “x”, go to our website URL” That's not much better, although it is a step in the right direction.

A better line would be something along the lines of:

“Discover the secret that's keeping you from whatever, at URL"
or
“Discover how you can easily get miles ahead of your competition (and they'll never know how your did it). Go to URL before we put the secret back in the box."

You need to create curiosity and make your resource box compelling. Make it so that they'll fell as if not clicking on your link will have them really missing out on something important, and don't tell them everything in the ad copy. Remember, you want to create overwhelming curiosity, with a sense of urgency.

The other mistake has to do with the link itself. If you're just using the URL of your website, you're missing the boat on 90% of the SEO benefits offered by article marketing (or any other technique where you get to put a link to your website). People aren't going to search for your website in the search engines. If they already know the web address, they'll just type it in. They'll search for words or terms related to the information they're after. These words or terms are known as keywords, and it's these that you want to rank in the search engines for.

So, how can you help yourself rank for your desired keywords? Well, the way you won't help yourself is to use your website address as your link. The search engines want to see the actual keyword in the link. When you're looking at a link and you see text, but no web address, is an example of what I'm talking about. That text you see is called anchor text, and it's this anchor text that the search engines use when determining what terms to rank your site for. You have to replace your simple web page URL with a link that uses anchor text containing the keywords you want to be found for. When you start using keywords in anchor text instead of just the URL of the web page you'll begin to get the benefit of this powerful, free targeted traffic technique.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 02:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Face it, if you operate your business in the online space, targeted web traffic is the difference between the success and failure of your business. If you are primarily selling off line, increasing traffic to your website can provide a dramatic revenue boost for your business.

In may last post I discussed some great, but more traditional ways to increase online traffic. In the last year or two, there has been a great furor over so called “Web 2.0” and how it can be used to greatly increase web traffic as well. Web 2.0 refers to the growing number of extremely popular user generated content sites, such as facebook, youtube, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, and myspace. In addition web 2.0 can include other businesses that could only exist in the online space, such as eBay, Google, and Yahoo.

Web 2.0 offers some amazing traffic generation possibilities and can generate tremendous interest around a site, blog post or on-line article in a very short time. In the past you’d have 2 choices to get targeted raffic to your site;

1)                          Wait for your page to get indexed, get links to build traffic and page rank and let the organic traffic come in. In time you could build up huge amounts of nicely targeted traffic this way, but it took time, sometimes months or years.

2)                          Use PPC or other forms of on-line advertising to send traffic to your site. This method is very effective, but can also be very expensive. The number of marketers that have lost copious amounts of money using PPC advertising is large and distinguished.

 Web 2.0 offers a way to circumvent the old traffic generation methods and get a huge amount of traffic to your site in hours or minutes, instead of months or years. The best part for marketers and business owners is that it is free. You won’t have that huge drain on  your marketing budget that PPC advertising can bring. Obviously free targeted traffic mean ROI is infinite.

If you are setting up a site these days, one of your first orders of business after it goes live and content is built out to the point where the site offers value to the visitor, is to get exposure on some of the web 2.0 sites, such as digg, del.icio.us, or stumbleupon. If visitors feel your content is valuable they’ll vote to drive it to the front or top of the appropriate site. That will create a (cliché alert) veritable traffic explosion for your site and a big smile for you. In future posts I’ll go into greater depth on just how to use these web 2.0 sites to drive more traffic to yours.

<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/x5scmv924" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a> 

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 02:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Traffic is the backbone of your business, no matter what you’re selling. If you’re an Internet marketer, it’s your lifeblood. The more traffic to your site, the more successful your business will be. To be more specific, the more targeted traffic to your website, the more successful your business will be. General traffic, while looking great in your server logs, really won’t help your business very much, it will only drive up your bandwidth costs. 

That being said, just how do you get more targeted traffic? If you are on a budget you may be more interested in free methods to drive more traffic to your site. After you are more successful, you may want to investigate paid methods. On the other hand, you may well be successful enough with free traffic sources.

1)      Get more links in
Traffic to your site will come from two sources; search engine results pages (SERPs) and links on other sites back to yours. In fact, those links back to your site do far more than generate traffic to your site. They play a primary role in garnering better search engine rankings as well. That being the case, a solid linking strategy is one of the single best things you can do. You’ll be rewarded with robust traffic from both the links themselves and the search engine results they help generate.

Here are some great ways you can get links to your site.

A)    Ask other site owners – this isn’t as easy as when the web was young. There is more crap out there today and site owners are less likely to give you a link just for the asking. If you do ask for a link, send them the preformatted html code. Not only will it be easier for them, but it will allow you to achieve specific search engine benefits, as I discuss in greater detail below. Be professional when you ask. Remember they’re established, and you’re not.

B)     Write articles – This is a powerful strategy that can get you many links from authority sites for nothing but some time spent writing. You want original articles, either ones you’ve written yourself, or those you paid someone else to write for you and you retain the exclusive rights to. You can submit these to article directories, such as ezinearticles.com, articledashboard.com and goarticles.com.

Other site owners and ezine publishers that want content can then syndicate the articles. You’re given a resource box where you can put information about your company, yourself or any other information that may entice people to visit your site. You get to include the all important link back to your site to facilitate the whole thing. Not only will the article give you a link, but it will help establish you as an expert in your field, giving people yet another reason to visit your site.

    C)    Submit your site to directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org). These will get you traffic on their own, and are viewed as authority sites by the search engines. Always remember, you want to link with a dual purpose in mind; search engine juice and the traffic generated by the links themselves.

    D)    Blogging. A blog can be a great way to get links. One of my blogs has over 1,400 links in to it from other blogs, and that doesn’t count websites linking to it. Many bloggers have far more than that. It is kind of like the good old days when the web was young…. I digress. You can use a blog as a great marketing tool, to showcase your products or services or pass along information related to your business. It helps you build a community, something that’s extremely valuable. After all, business is about relationships, and a blog is a great relationship builder. You can build some long lasting relationships and get some great links to your main site at the same time.
 

2)      Make the link structure correct

You want as many links in to your site as possible, but you can’t just go getting links willy nilly from anywhere. The search engines, and Google in particular, look for two main things when evaluating how the link will affect your site’s ranking; the authority of the page your link comes from, and the link’s anchor text. The anchor text is the text that is actually displayed that you click on in the link. It’s essential that the keywords that you’re trying to get ranked for are in the anchor text. Don’t just use the name of your site as the anchor text. That’s a terrible waste. Who cares if your site is well ranked for it’s own name?
 

For example, if you have a site on digital camera accessories, you don’t want to have the links that point to your site just be www.yoursite.com. You’ll get minimal benefit from that. Instead link to the page with the terms that you want to found for. In this case, you might have a page on SD memory cards. You’d like people who are looking for SD cards to buy them from you, right? In most cases, the more specific, the better. As an example you’d make the link so that the anchor text would read “1MB SD memory cards”.

You want to do a little keyword research first to find our exactly which phrases people are actually searching for. Wordtracker or Google’s keyword tool are great for this. You can then match your anchor text to the exact search terms people are typing into the search engines. That’s not just good for you from a search engine perspective. It gives value to your visitors, because you are actually giving them exactly what they’re searching for.

You should do everything with an eye toward value for your website’s visitors. The more valuable you make their visit, the more likely they are to make visiting your site a regular occurrence and tell others about it. If they own a website, they may even give you a link. The more value you can provide to your visitors, the easier it will be for you to get links from complementary sites, establish affiliate relationships, and form a long term bond with your visitors. Ask any marketing expert; it’s much easier to retain visitors and customers than it is to generate new ones.

Remember, give it time. In a few months or so you can start to see the fruits of you labor pay off. Stick with it, it will pay off. Persistence was the missing ingredient in many failed businesses.

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