The Keys to Search Engine Promotion

Websites need to be marketed or promoted in order to receive traffic, and getting to the top of search engines require a strategy. Discover the keys of search engine promotion here.

All websites need to be promoted and advertised and listed on search engines in order to be found on the Internet – and while getting your website indexed on search engines maybe as easy as getting a link from an already indexed site, getting to the top 10 listings of a particular keyword does require a strategy of some sort.

This strategy is based on five main factors, and all these factors need to be taken into consideration before you take a single step. So here are the five!

1. The Objective of The Website

To get started you will need to know what is the main objective of the site. Is it to create awareness for a particular product? What kind of product? Is it to provide information? Is it, to persuade someone into buying a product?

When you have decided on your website’s objective, keep them in mind. You need to create you entire site based on that objective! This is very important, because you need to get the search engine to know your site’s objective quickly!

2. Who Are Your Customers and Who Are You Competing With?

This again is critical. Your website content and design must be catered for the target audience! What do the people in you target audience need? What do they value? Are they computer savvy? What kind of terms have special meaning for this group of people?
The best place to learn and model after is your direct competition! Search the web for a site that does something similar to you, and see how others do it! This is one of the best way to start on something that will work, if you don’t want to spend the money hiring a marketing specialist to analyze your target demographic behavior!

Knowing how much competition you have is also important. Do some keyword research on the number of pages that appear on the keyword, versus the number of times the keyword is searched every month. Find out who the top 10 listing are. Of course, finding out the numbers is not enough. You need to find out what these numbers mean, and that requires a certain degree of experience.

3. How You Write Your HTML

Websites do not just get top listings by itself. Very often, these websites are results of months of hard work and tweaking. Remember, the search engine sees only the HTML, behind that pretty face that Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox shows to you. You need to write your HTML for search engines, and at the same time, appeal to human visitors.

This again, requires practice. Just remember the rule that the simpler and the clearer your site, the greater the likelihood it will be accessed and ranked in the correct category. Imagine an SE spider coming in and realising there is a huge load of text without proper headings and information hierarchy. How is it going to find out what is important and what is not?

SEO specialists normally keep tweaking their code to achieve maximum effect. This takes up a lot of time, and requires constant monitoring. SEO is a process, not a destination!

4. Appeal to Humans!

While it is important to appease the search engines, it is also important to appeal to your human visitors! After all, you want humans to visit your site, isn’t it? What would be the use of a site visited by millions of spiders and irks the hell out of human visitors?

Web design and usability comes in to play here. As a simple rule, buttons, links and navigation should be clear cut and simple. The site should be clutter free, and it should be obvious where you want the human visitor to focus on. Remember to add some images to spice up the aesthetics of the site too.

5. Search Engine Promotion and Optimization

When you finally upload the site on to your web server, you are only half done. The second half of the game is to promote your site to people! You can have a wonderfully designed site, but nobody is going to visit you if you don’t tell anyone about it. Zero visitors! I’m serious! (Well, because I’ve been there!)

Again the rule is simple – the more people you tell about your site, then more people will be going to your site! And remember, always get feedback. Find out if your site design is serving the visitors well, and continue to tweak it until you find the right configuration.

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore

Why Start a Blog and Monetizing Your Blog

Blogs are becoming very popular nowadays, as people are publishing their thoughts online at the speed of a click. Find out how you can use your blog to make you real money!

I guess that by now most of us would know what a blog is. The word Blog is the short or Web Log, and the term Blogosphere refers to what the online community of people who blog, sometimes which are hyperlinked very extensively with each other.

The key differences between a blog and a normal website is that blogs are frequently updated, and most blogs use a very personal language, representative to the personality of the author the blog.

Through the past few years, the numbers of blogs have grown tremendously and exponentially, and today, even people without technical education can set up an account on Blogger.com and get started with blogging.

Blogs have indeed become a very important part of the Internet, and information age.

So, why are blogs so important today?

Companies and businesses can use blogs as a medium to interact directly with their customers! One very powerful property of the Internet is “instancy” – real time information, real time news, real time feedback! What traditionally took one day to appear on the newspaper will take 2 seconds to post on a blog!

In fact, during the recent world cup finals in Germany, I was frantically refreshing the news page of New York Times to see how fast these journalists are in updating their site. 45 seconds! Yes! The moment the winning goal was made, the articles are already on their way to the web server.

The Internet has also become one of the primary mediums of research today, and by marketing your blog will with quality content, blogs can help to position you and your company as experts in the industry.

Most blog engines also make marketing easier by publishing RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds. So for people who are interested in your blog, they can just subscribe to your blog feed and receive instant updates when you update your blog.

Also, while it sometimes takes hundreds of dollars to post an advertisement on the newspaper, adding another page of information on the Internet cost virtually nothing. With that, people are also more generous in adding links from their websites or blogs to your blog, especially if your content is good – and this means better search engine rankings.

After you have marketed your blog, the next step is to monetize your blog!

How do you monetize your blog?

There are several ways in which you can make money from your blog, and here are just a few ways:

1. Selling advertisements – When your site starts to draws eyeballs, it is time to offer advertisement space out to interested parties to put their advertisements on your site. Whether it is a banner, graphic or text link, people out there will be interested to have a piece of your traffic!

2. Using Google’s AdSense – or other pay per click engines. If you are lazy to manage your own advertisements, just sign up for a Google Adsense account and use the code provided by Google. When people click on the ads on your site, you get paid. Simple as that.

3. Affiliate Programs – Search through ClickBank.com for a suitable affiliate program to sell, and get paid when you make a sale.

Al of these three schemes can make you enough money to live on blogging, when you have enough traffic!

So, are you ready to start blogging?

For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore

Hi and welcome!

Welcome to Blog Marketing Articles for Thought. Over the coming months, let me share with you some of the articles I have written about blogging and blog marketing.