The truth is, they are easily avoided when you pay close attention to the basics. My goal is to share with you four basic errors made when trying to optimize for a front page ranking. They are, of course, easy to correct.

Keyword Research Errors

When a person goes to Google, Yahoo or Bing and enters a word or phrase to search for what they are doing is searching on a keyword.

In good SEO you want to match the search words with the keywords on your page so that when someone searches for a particular word or phrase your page is likely to show up on top.

There is a method to choosing keywords that is proven time and time again to work. The best keywords or phrases are those that are relevant to your website, to your product or service, that have a high search volume, anything over 7,000 monthly searches is okay, and shows little competition for that keyword or phrase.

Relevancy is obvious. If you sell purple widgets then a keyword like silver earrings is not relevant while violet widgets may be one that works well for you.
To understand the relationship between popularity (p) or global monthly search volume and competition (c), I use the Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI. It is computed as follows:

KEI=p2/c

The KEI will return a number, a ratio (n:1) that gives you an indication of how easy it will be to rank for any given keyword or phrase. The higher the number the easier it should be to rank for that keyword or phrase.

Many people, however, make the mistake of choosing keywords that look cute or appeal to them without doing the hard work of ranking those keywords against a particular standard. That is an error.

Keyword Stuffing

Another significant keyword error is keyword stuffing. This error manifests itself in two forms.

Too Many Keywords in The Keyword Meta-Tag

Many people put every possible keyword in their meta-tag for keywords. That is a mistake. By stuffing the meta-tag with too many choices, the search engine spider has no clue which keyword you want to rank for so it discounts them all.

The solution is simple. Include two, and only two, keywords or phrases in your keyword meta-tag. First list the keyword you want to rank for on that page and then list the site core keyword. Say, for example, I sell purple widgets and I have a page on widget uses. Widget use has a KEI of 345.32, pretty good. My page keywords for my page on widget uses will be “widget use, purple widgets” and that’s it. No more.

Now when the search engine robot sees the page it will know that I want to emphasize widget use and the site is all about purple widgets. No need to try to fool the robot, it doesn’t work anyway.

Too Many Keywords in the Content

The second instance of keyword stuffing is to place the keyword you wish to rank for in the body of your content more than 3% of the total content.

My basic rule of thumb is to include the keyword I want to rank for three-times in the content of any page. I place it in the first 50 words in as natural a position as possible, in the last 50 words again worked in naturally and one time in the body of the page. Any more than that and Google especially will penalize you big time.

Quality Content

In real estate the three most important things are location, location and location. In SEO the three most important things are content, content, and content. Yes, content is king. Presenting poorly written, irrelevant content is useless to your reader and the current level of sophistication of the search engine spiders is such that they can sniff out poor and irrelevant content better than any human can.

So the key here is to write quality content and present it in a straightforward manner. Anything else is a grave mistake.

Graphics

Search engine robots detect text and skip over graphics. The only exception to this general statement is that when they see a code for an image, the spider looks for the “alt” tag, a textual description of the graphic. If it is missing then your site is penalized.

So graphics have a negative effect on your site if they are overused, there are more graphics than text on a page or if they are missing an “alt” tag or the tag is empty.

Follow these few search engine optimization tips and you’ll increase your chances to rank high, perhaps even on the front page of Google.

Website content must be written in a specific way, because website readers are looking for something a little different from what the average reader wants.

Those who visit a website want to see:

* short punchy sentences
* sentences that allow them to scan
* bullet points that offer them a quick look
* visual tools such as images placed strategically in the content.
* easy to find main points
* relevant information or highlights in bold text.

The average internet website visitor wants to review the information that you are offering them in a specific way. Typically they want to review what you are offering to them in the most rapid possible way.

This means scanning the information that you offer, rather than spending a lot of time reading it.

While some visitors may want to read longer paragraphs, most do not.

The average website reader wants shorter sentences in the content that you offer. It should be easy to grasp the concepts that you are offering. Simplifying the most important information that you are offering is very important.

The biggest mistake that is made when writing website content for the internet is to leave gaping holes in the directions, or to fail to create your sentences in ways that people can understand.

Bear in mind as you are writing, that your content may be used by everyone. Age limits are not typical for any website. If you’re writing about animal husbandry, or how to create a given craft, it should be written in such a way that anyone can understand it.

Taking very complex information and simplifying it is imperative. Give everyone the means to read it, whether they are in high school or in graduate school.

The best way to accomplish that, and the recommended method by every marketing company, is to write text that is geared toward high school level readers. Keep it neat, write short sentences and keep your text in a vocabulary level that is easy to read.

Typically, unless your website is geared toward another language and ONLY that language reader will be reviewing and reading, you will want all of your text written in English. ESL is not an option for most websites.

Creating pages that are easily understood means that your keywords should be kept to a reasonable level and appear naturally, not look as though they are stuffed into the text.

The most important component of your writing for the internet will be that you are developing content for humans to read. Too often we create content for the internet and base it on what we believe Google or some other search engine would like to see. That is a huge mistake.

Google puts their emphasis on a good customer experience. If you write for the human who is behind the computer, create your website content in such as way that it is impressive to them, the search engines will normally notice that and your content will rank higher.

In other words, the ratio of your actual business leads to the total number of your site’s visitors.

By nature, not everyone visits your site actually contact you to inquire about your goods or services. So how can you increase this ratio, and increase the number of actual business leads out of the total site’s visitors? Is there any practical steps you or your Internet Marketing Expert can follow to increasing this ratio?

The answer is defiantly Yes…The process is called Conversion Rate Optimization CRO…So what should you do?

Market & Competition Research

Always start your Internet Marketing campaign with Market and Competition Research which means determining who you are competing with and what are their points of strength and weakness. This will provide you with a clear vision about what you need to do in order to penetrate this market and gain your market segment.

Also you need to know what your prospective clients are looking for, and how. This will help you craft a more targeted message, and design your website towards their appeal.

Bear in mind that you need to review your market and competition research periodically, to keep up to the changes in the market trends and the latest in your prospective clients’ behavior.

Also, you need to be careful not to quickly jump to changing everything around that you might turn off some of your loyal customers specially those who don’t like to change much.

Geo Targeting

If your products or services are designed to or can serve the audience of specific geographic location, you should consider gearing a portion of your site content towards this geographic location’s audience. This process is called Geo Targeting it aims to fine tune your website traffic and target prospective clients according to their location.

Suppose you are selling a book online with several translated versions offered, having a localized page for each of the offered languages on your site would be an effective Geo targeting method.

Also, if your products or services are offered say for only the Irish people, it would make a lot of sense to get an .ie domain and host your site with an Irish web hosting company.

How to tell if I am experiencing low conversion rate?

If you site is having very high traffic with very few leads, then you are experiencing very low conversion rate!

Contact us now to diagnose your site’s case and help you resolve it!

However, it soon became apparent to savvy, forward-thinking businesses that these sites could be utilized as promotional tools for their products and services. And with this, social media marketing was born.

As a result of this realization, the manner in which businesses communicate and interact with their customers has been completely transformed. And if you’re not following suit, your business is missing out on a huge amount of potential custom.

So if you have an online business (or an offline one for that matter), it’s absolutely crucial that you sign up for both a Facebook and Twitter account at the very least. These are the most widely used social media sites available, and therefore the most powerful resources.

Get Friends & Followers!

By signing up to these sites, you’ll be able to give your business greater exposure online, and post information about your products and services, such as discounts, 2-for-1 offers and new releases, to name just a few.

And if you post useful and good quality content that provides value for the reader, then more and more people will “follow” you (in Twitter’s case) or become a “friend” (on Facebook), which will help you to build positive, long-term relationships with customers who might not have previously found you.

Naturally, the more friends and followers you have, the more potential customers you’ll be able to promote to, and this is where social media marketing can be so profitable.

After all, you’ll be able to search for people in YOUR niche who might be interested in YOUR products, and then look to befriend people who follow them, thus pulling in more and more targeted prospects that you might be able to promote to in the future.

Improve Public Relations

Another great advantage of using social media marketing is that it allows you to follow what’s being said about your products and services, and react to any negative news flow. So if any complaints or negative comments appear on your pages (or your customers’ pages), you can head them off and deal with them before they get out of hand, and before they begin to damage your company and its reputation.

This ability to monitor what’s being said about you and your business, and respond positively, is absolutely crucial to your long-term success.

The fact is, the growth of the internet has made it incredibly easy for people to post derogatory remarks about individuals and companies, knowing that these comments will reach a huge audience, very quickly. So spotting these comments, and dealing with them in a professional and positive manner can be very beneficial in terms of PR.

Be Alert

And talking about monitoring what’s being said about you, here are two fantastic tools that will enable you to do just that.

Google Alerts – All you need to do here is type in a relevant search phrase (such as your business name or the name of your product, for example) and whenever that phrase is mentioned online, you’ll be sent an email telling you when and where it was found.

Social Mention – Similarly, this social media search and analysis tool will send you an email alert every time your chosen phrase is mentioned online, enabling you to keep up to speed with what’s being said about you and your business! For both of these tools, I’ve requested an alert every time my business name, My Freelance Copywriter.com, is mentioned.

Again, this is great if someone has posted something uncomplimentary about one of your products, your business, or you personally, as it enables you to spot it quickly and deal with the issue before any negative press circulates and grows.

Being a lowly copywriter, I don’t get much negative press or complaints, but I know of a lot of online businesses that do. And these tools are an absolute god-send for them.

So if you want to expand your business and reach more customers, make sure you sign up to some social media marketing sites like Facebook and Twitter, and use others like Google Alerts and Social Mention to keep track of what people are saying about you and your business.

If you do, you’ll have more customers, better communication, an improved online PR machine, and ultimately more money in your bank account!

In addition to making sure that the design and web-tools on your new site are effective and easy to use, you also need to consider what your website is going to be called and how people are going to be able to find it online. This name for your website is referred to as a “domain name”.

Domain names are the part of your web address that comes between the “www.” and the suffix that you choose, be it “.com”, “.biz”, “.org”, etcetera. This is how people are going to remember your website, and come back to it time and time again.

If you choose the wrong one, you may end up shooting yourself (or your company) in the foot, as you will not be able to effectively attract new customers and clients to your website.

But what makes finding the perfect domain name difficult these days is the fact that all of the very simple ones are taken. If you have a used car dealership in Akron, Ohio, you are never going to be able to register a name like “cars.com”, or “usedcars.com”, because names like this will either all be taken, or will be extremely expensive to buy. Instead, you must think of something more innovative.

If the name of your car dealership is short and easy to spell, then this would be a great domain to register. But if your dealership is named Kowalcyk´s Lot or Nguyen Cars, you might not be able to count on the public to find your website if it uses those hard-to-spell names.

So what is the solution in a situation like this? Often, the best thing to do is find a simple combination of words that will stick in the public´s consciousness, and be easy to spell. Try something like akroncars.com, yournewcar.com, or buyusednow.com.

Depending on how basic the combination is, the domain name might have already been purchased by someone who is “sitting” on it, trying to sell it to prospective buyers. Try to avoid this situation if you can. For example, buyused.com might go for a high price, while you can purchase buyusednow.com at a more reasonable rate.

The one temptation that you want to stay away from is choosing a suffix other than “.com”. The majority of the Internet-using public will assume that any website name ends in this most basic suffix, even if they are told and constantly reminded otherwise.

You do not want to lose traffic because everyone assumes that your website is usedcars.com, when it is really usedcars.org.

The final pitfall you want to avoid is altering a spelling in a way that might confuse people who want to come to your website.

If you go with usedcarz.com, with a “z” instead of an “s”, this might be passable, if you mention it in your ads repeatedly, making sure that it is driven into people´s heads that there is a z at the end of the website name.

In theory, the more content you have out there, the more readers you can attract, and the more customers you’ll subsequently receive as they follow the links back to your website.

As a result, large and small businesses alike are now employing copywriters to produce things like articles, press releases and blog posts for them, in an attempt to dominate their marketplace with relevant, search-engine friendly content.

But while this content might be search-engine friendly, it’s often anything but reader-friendly!

And this is the problem with a lot of online content that I see these days. The prevailing attitude seems to be one of quantity over quality, and it’s an attitude that is hurting, rather than helping many new businesses.

Think Quality, not Quantity

It’s not hard to find “economy” copywriters who will churn out a bunch of articles for you, but it’s important to remember one thing: will your potential customers be impressed by it? Will this content make them want to buy YOUR product over your competitors?

After all, the whole point of paying someone to write content for you is so that when people read it, they’ll be compelled to click on your website link to find out more, right?

Well, if the content is of poor quality, will this happen?

Quite simply, the answer is no, because there’s a lot more to a successful content-writing strategy than quantity.

Indeed, if you really want to attract a horde of enthusiastic buyers, your content needs to be top-quality. It must excite and intrigue, and it needs to be so powerful that before the prospect has even finished reading it, they’re ready to whip out their credit card and click on the order button!

The cold, hard truth is that you probably won’t get this sort of quality content from the Philippines or India!

Content is King!

Yeah I know, I’m sure you’ve read that phrase at least a hundred times already, but the truth is, the quality of your copywriting really is a crucial determining factor in whether or not you make sales. And whether or not your website moves upwards in the search engine results.

This brings me to another important point – that of link building, which is a huge part of any search engine optimization strategy. The bottom line is that internet users will typically only follow good quality content. They won’t stay on a website, read an article, or indeed, link to it, if the content is poorly written.

And this is crucial.

You want people to not only click on the link in your article and thus land on your website, but also to link to the article itself, because this will help your site’s rankings. And people will only do this if they value the content they’ve read.

So if you want your website to achieve high rankings in the search engines, you absolutely must provide good quality content that your readers will enjoy, act on, and link to.

In order to get high quality content that’s written with both the search engines AND human beings in mind, it’s a good idea to hire a professional freelance copywriter who will not only be able to sell your product, but will also be able increase the likelihood of readers linking to it, thus boosting its search engine ranking.

1. What Is Your End Goal?

In other words plan ahead what you want to do with your content. If you have a great idea you probably want to create an ebook or training course eventually, so you need to have a plan on how you can do that, and get maximum exposure for your content.

Any content you create should be your big idea broken down into smaller pieces such as blog posts, articles videos or podcasts.

All your content should just be different parts of your idea or message you want to get out there and form part of the whole, like an ebook or video training.

For example lets say you’re creating an ebook. Break the ebook into digestible chunks and use those as articles and blog posts. You don’t want to give all of your content away but make sure there is enough information to keep people interested in what you have to offer.

2. Create Your Content In Different Media Formats

If you write an article, it’s very simple to turn that into a video. Just create a PowerPoint presentation listing the main bullet points in your article, then use camtasia or any other screen recording software to talk through the bullet points and explain them to your listeners.

Voila, you’ve not only got a video, but you can easily extract the audio from the video and turn that into a podcast. Use your articles as blog posts, and even turn several of them into pdf’s for uploading to pdf and ebook sharing websites.

3. Syndicate, Syndicate, Syndicate

If you’ve followed the above suggestions for creating website content, by now you should have a massive amount of content. But what do you do with it to give it maximum exposure?

Syndicate it. Syndication means sharing it to as many other websites as possible.

Here’s a few quick tips of whats possible.

- Submit your articles to as many article directories as possible.

- Submit the videos you created to as many video sharing sites as possible.

- Submit your podcasts to as many podcasting sites as possible.

- Join two to three related articles together and create a pdf and submit to pdf websites

- Look at the articles you’ve created and take the main points out of them, to create more in depth articles on each point.

- Take those new articles and start creating more videos and other media.

That all sounds like a lot of work, but there are many websites that can do the hard work automatically for you. Pixelpipe and Traffic Geyser are good places to start looking.

Bear in mind that some article directories will not accept articles if they’ve been submitted elsewhere, so you may have to rewite some articles. But you’re doing that anyway when you break your content into more in depth articles.

Always remember the more places your website content appears on the more likely it is to be discovered and therefore gain you exposure and traffic to your website.

The first step to consider is the niche you are in, and the products or services that you are promoting. You should come up with a list of potential keywords that your customers would use to find you on the web.

After that you could use the Google keyword search tool to analyze your list, checking the competitiveness, number of monthly searches and the strength of the competitors currently on page one.

A competitive market analysis is the next important step you should take. After you have your final keyword list, create a spreadsheet with all the keywords, and then list all the competitors from page one of Google.

You could use a program like SEO quake to collect some of the data that you will need, such as their page rank, number of indexed pages, inbound links, whether or not they have a site map and much more. This will tell you how difficult and how long of an SEO campaign you will be embarking on.

Next step should be the on page SEO factors of your website.

First and foremost is content, if you are not providing quality content that solves people’s problems then your efforts will be in vain. Great content will keep your visitors coming back on their own which will greatly assist your SEO efforts.

Make sure all the on page dynamics such as header tags, meta tags, alt tags for images and HTML code is done correctly.

These are the simple things that improve your ‘findability’. You also want to ensure that you have a proper site map created and submitted to the search engines, this will increase your chances of all your pages being properly indexed.

Number four is off page SEO strategies.

The biggest and most important overall here is back linking. Google views every back link your site has as a vote for your site from someone else. The best back links you can get are called one way links. One way links are where another website links to you without you having to link back. Good examples of this are article marketing, blog commenting and directory submissions.

Reciprocal linking is where you link out to website a and website a in turn links back to you. These are also good links but you should only focus on the ones targeted to your niche and those having a higher page rank than you. Good back linking takes time and effort, this cannot be accomplished over night.

You should also avoid any link scams, link farms or questionable linking strategies. If you have to stop and wonder if it’s ok to do it then it probably isn’t.

The last step that is very crucial to your SEO success is the overall promotion of your website. There are several ways of effectively promoting your products and services via the internet.

1) Video marketing
This can be promoted in conjunction with your website or separately for added exposure.

2) Email marketing
This allows you to keep track and communicate with your customers and potential customers.

3) Web 2.0
These are blogs, hub pages, wikis and such. Also a great source of quality back links for your site.

4) Article marketing
If done correctly this will establish you as an expert and help you to generate back links and additional traffic to your offers.

5) Local search marketing such as Yahoo local and Google places
If you have a business in the offline world you certainly want to use this method to promote your business. Google places for instance typically will come up first in the search results.

These are just a few of the strategies that you can use to begin a successful SEO and web promotion campaign. The most import step you will take is to take action. Everything you do should be with the intent of growing your business.

Used well, Twitter can provide good exposure for your business; but you can also damage your brand with social media marketing if you’re not careful, so it’s worth learning the biggest dos and don’ts before you start using Twitter.

Tip 1: Be yourself and be human

The beauty of Twitter is that it’s a huge global community of human beings (mostly; there are spammer accounts but they’re easy to spot, block and report). So do show your human side, especially when using your business account. Talk about things that matter to you: funny things your children say, recent achievements, your favourite band or TV show, and so on. Join in with conversations that interest you – be friendly, show emotion, and use smilies if you want to.

On the other hand, don’t be too human. Don’t share anything you wouldn’t share at a real-world business networking event; keep intimate health problems and controversial or potentially offensive opinions to yourself.

Tip 2: Watch how you write

Some people write well, others don’t – that’s true in all areas of life, not just on Twitter. You don’t need to be a bestselling novelist to use Twitter, but it helps if you have basic literacy skills (and if you use Twitter at the website instead of through a client, your Tweets will be spellchecked as you type anyway – which helps).

However good (or bad) your writing skills are, with Twitter’s 140-character limit you’ll need to be creative with your Tweets. Your Tweets need to be concise yet informative, and often you’ll be trying to squeeze in a URL too (URL shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com are lifesavers).

One definite don’t is using text speak. Text speak is fine if you’re 13, but as a professional adult promoting your business you’re just going to look silly, and won’t communicate your messages efficiently – unless you’re targeting 13 year olds.

Tip 3: Share and share alike

If you have some good news – related to your business or your personal life – share it; everybody loves a good news story.

Do share links – to your website, your blog, your local news service, or anything else that interests your followers – this is a great way to get conversations going. But do remember to explain what the link’s about, or your followers will feel less inclined to click it. And don’t Tweet the same link over and over; people will quickly become bored and may stop following you.

Do retweet your friends’ links, too; they’ll be grateful, and so will your followers if the link is interesting and relevant. But here’s a very big ‘do’ – DO make sure you click the link and read the content before sharing it with your followers, or you could end up sharing a page that’s irrelevant or offensive, or which contradicts your usual position on the subject.

Tip 4: Be part of the community

Don’t treat Twitter as your personal billboard. It’s not: it’s a community, millions of members strong, and the community as a whole is not very tolerant of users who constantly advertise. Try to stick to the 80-20 rule when you use Twitter for business: no more than 20% of your Tweets should advertise or self-promote, and at least 80% should be non-promotional. If you can get the ratio down to 90-10 or 95-5, even better.

Listen to what people are saying, and join in. Twitter is a network of conversations, so it’s good practice to listen and respond to parts of those conversations that interest you; don’t just stand in the middle of the room with a megaphone, shouting “I’m fabulous! I’m selling widgets at 20% off this week!” Again – if you wouldn’t do it at a business networking event, don’t do it on Twitter.

Do retweet your friends’ requests for help (for example, charity appeals and sponsorship requests), and do introduce friends that are new to Twitter and could do with some followers. And again – do retweet useful, interesting links from people you follow, but always check links before sending.

Tip 5: Mind your language

Don’t use offensive language when representing your business on Twitter; even mild swearwords can put sensitive souls off following you (and besides – cursing in public is hardly professional).

Use Twitter to answer customer questions and solve their problems, by all means; many organisations use Twitter as a customer services tool very effectively. But never, ever use an impolite or impatient tone with a customer. On Twitter, everything you say is out there for everyone to see, so leave your followers with the best possible impression of your brand at all times… the Internet has a very long memory!

Finally – consider this a bonus tip, since it’s not really connected to any of the previous ones – try to enjoy yourself when you use Twitter. Try to embrace all that’s good about Twitter – the new friendships and business contacts you’ll make, the fun hashtags and trending topics, the strong community spirit – and before long you’ll be singing (or is that Tweeting?) Twitter’s praises to anyone who’ll listen.

Initial Analysis

These six questions will help you understand how your current marketing efforts are affecting your business. Ask yourself each question and answer honestly; no one’s watching.

Really take the time to analyze each question and decide on actions to take to create the results you want.

• Am I getting enough traffic to my website?

• Where does my current traffic originate?

• Is my current traffic prequalified to visit my website?

• Are my conversion efforts paying off?

• What am I doing to increase traffic or conversions?

• Am I spending too much on SEM?

Your answers to those questions will help you decide whether to hire one of the many SEM services at your disposal. Research and time will help you find the service that best fits your needs. Don’t settle for the first affordable service you find, make sure they understand your business and your marketing needs.

Define Your Goals

Goals and objectives help determine the type of marketing techniques you use. Traffic and page rank require much different techniques than conversions and sales, for example.

The primary goal of your organic web marketing strategy will go a long way in helping you decide which SEM service to hire.

Set short term objectives and long term goals. Goals need to reach as far out as six months while objectives are shorter steps to achieve the ultimate goal. Each objective should be set as a stepping stone toward a higher goal.

Define Your Budget

Not everyone can afford a huge marketing campaign, and that’s OK. Prices often range from the very inexpensive to the elaborate, depending on the SEM service and the work required to achieve the end goal. Define your budget with a little breathing room so if it goes over a little, you’ll still be in business.

Talk with each SEM service you consider hiring to make sure they understand your needs as well as your budget. Narrow your selections down to one or two companies then make the final cut. Don’t settle for anything less than the best.

Define What’s Right for You

Each business is different and so are their marketing needs. Small business owners often require different marketing techniques than larger, more popular businesses. Understand what’s needed in your organic web marketing campaign and decide what’s right for your marketing strategy before you hire anyone.

Choose the Best Organic SEM Service

You have a lot to think about before actually hiring an SEM service. Review the questions posed in this article, and then define your goals and budget.

Goal setting is probably one of the most important steps, because any good SEM service is going to ask about your marketing goals.

SEM services offering organic web marketing strategies are all over the Internet. Choosing the right one for your marketing efforts is as simple as doing the research necessary to figure out what you need. Take your time and choose the right company the first time.