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With no signs of the economic meltdown receding, people are desperately looking for alternate sources pf income. This has been a time of tremendous insecurity with even some of the largest organization shutting shop; relegating thousands of people to the status of joblessness; in this day and age a second income source is nothing short of a boon and the internet is just the place to find one. How you market you internet venture will finally determine how successful it is; savvy internet markets use several tolls to market their websites, service and products to customers; however, one of the most effective marketing tools for small online business is a yellow page style website.

This is the site that customers visit when they want to find a business like yours. Often the traffic generated by small business websites is not enough to take the site to the top spot on Google in which case maintaining your presence on such sites can come in handy. Au contraire to popular belief, it is possible for small businesses to generate enough traffic to make a neat profit. If you intend to start an internet marketing site , you do not have to put a major marketing pan into action just following a few tips can help you to make you a sizeable profit

#1 Tip: Take a good look at your competition: Like all businesses including offline establishments, its a dog eat dog business world and sizing your competition will be the first step to success; Look at what these businesses are doing and how well are their plans working; find out the information being offered by your competitors and check the number of links that they have. To put it simply, whatever your competitors are doing, you need to do it better to beat them at internet marketing. You will need better and more content than them and will need a higher number of inbound links. If your competitor only has a dozen or so links from crummy website, you have won half the battle.

Tip #2: Put aside a few buck to hire the services of a professional web designer: Do not as your tech savvy teenager or the nerd in your office to design your website; that would be the first ingredient in the recipe for failure a good, attractive and well designed website will be your business card and advertisement rolled into one. Your site is the first impression maker and how it looks will give people a perception about the type of organization that you are running. Also; needless to say, a poorly designed website would scream of unprofessionalism and utter lack of concern for customers. Visit one of the freelancing sites like elance.com to get in touch with web designers who will do a decent job at reasonable rates.

Tip # 3: Put your business on Google Maps: You will need to include your business address on your website but it is also a good idea to visit Google Maps and put your business on the site so that customers looking for businesses like your in your town or city will also be able to see your company.

Tip#4 Use the correct domain name: Do not; under any circumstances, use an inane or a silly phrase a your domain name. Do not include telephone numbers in the domain name because quite frankly they are hard to remember and also stay away from hyphens. Your domain name should be short, catchy, incorporate a keyword is possible and the name of your business. For instance, if you are operating a CPA firm in Dallas, you may want to have a domain name like DallasAccountants.com or CPA Firm Dallas.com etc.

When you include search words in the domain name, it becomes easier for people to find you and search engines are more likely to pick up your site; for instance, if you were to name the CPA firm as DavisBrothers.com nobody would know what the establishment does besides the fact that the Davis brothers own it. However, when you use the keywords accountant and CPA, people know what you are selling.

Seomul Evans is a Website Marketing consultant specializing in medical marketing services.

There is some amount of ambiguity on what generates income in an online venture; if you have a site that simply offers information about your brick and mortar business with no provisions for customers to buy your products or services online ; just driving traffic to your site will be adequate but if you are selling something or even if you have a website dedicated to internet marketing, increasing the traffic to your site will just be the first step to generating a profit because the next and most important step will be to convert the visitors; in other words, make them buy from you or a company that you are marketing. So it would not make sense to pump in a sizeable amount of money just to drive traffic to your site; you need a well rounded approach. So let’s discuss the various aspects of conversion:

What is website conversion?

We explored the concept with a one liner above but let’s did deeper this time. The people who visit a site have to follow a set procedure where they have to go through the desired point of action of the business and submit information; download files, purchase products or services etc. this would be the definition of website conversion. If the site offer ecommerce products and/or solutions; many people will add items to their shopping carts but not all of them will buy these products; in reality, only a small percentage of them will. The number of people who complete the transaction will be the conversion rate of the website. If you want to improve the conversion rate of your website, you will need to start by analyzing why customers do not buy the products that they add to their carts or why they drop out at certain points in the process.

What is a point of action or POA?

A POA can be defined as a set of actions that the webmaster would like the visitor to take; depending on the type of website; you can have a branch of POA’s where they are segregated into primary, secondary and sometimes even tertiary POAs. The primary POA is one which will generate the most amount of profit for the business; for instance, when a customer completes the purchase ; this would be primary POA while asking him to sign up for the websites newsletter will be the secondary POA. One of the primary problems that new website owners face is creating a website without a well defined POA; such websites are little more than brochures and they will not guide the visitors towards becoming purchasers.

What is the take rate?

The percentage of visitors who are interested in the POA is the ratio of desired actions divided by the number of visitors. For instance, if a B2B website is offering a downloadable demo as the POA; the number of people who click on the download link would form the take rate; whether they actually do download the page or not is secondary. The take rate is merely a figure that demonstrates the number of people who were interested in the POA. For instance, on an ecommerce website; the take rate would comprise of people who add items to their shopping art; whether or not they go through with the purchase will have no impact on the take rate. One of the simplest ways to improve the take ate of your website is to offer the opportunity to go through the POA on every page; you want to make it easy for your customers to purchase products from you whenever they decide to do so.

The website conversion rate: The conversion rate of a website is a figure that is calculated by dividing the total number of people who visit the website by the actual number of people who through the POA. For instance if 3 people purchase products from a website as opposed to the 100 visitors who fill out the contact form; this would put the website conversion rte at 3%. A simple principle is that improving the take rate of your site will also help to increase the conversion rate.

Seomul Evans is a SEO Services consultant specializing in Health Care Marketing .

Bounce rates are a hot topic of debate in the SEO community with most people wondering about the impact of the bounce rate on the search engine position of a web page and if the major search engines have indeed included this factor in their algorithms. There were reports of the inclusion of this factor almost 3 years ago when webmasters started reporting the difference in their search engine rankings when they made efforts to change the bounce rates. However, there are no concrete reports or tests that can prove that bounce rate is indeed a factor in the search engine positioning of a web page.

As a result, there are several people who refute such claims and are of the view that neither is bounce rate important to the position of a web page today nor will it be in the future.

Most SEO experts on the other hand hold an opposing view; as a matter of fact, they even provide answers to some of the claims made by the naysayer. But to begin with one needs to understand what is bounce rate. The bounce rate is a measure of people who leave a website. In other words, a bouncy website would the exact opposite of a sticky website that holds people and makes them stay for long.

The first objection presented by people who are opposed to the idea of bounce rate being one of the determining factor in search engine positioning is that there isn’t a specific definition of bounce rate: This unfortunately is one of the silliest arguments because a bounce simply refers to a visitor who leaves the website to return to where he/she came from.

These naysayer also go far enough to suggest that they do not like how bounce has been defined by Google Analytics; actually, for all those people out there who shares this opinion, there is a silver lining to the cloud and that is the definition of bounce in Google Analytics is not necessarily what is included in its algorithm; just as the little green bar may not be the Page Rank that they use in the Google Algorithm.

People go on to add that because many sites do not have Google Analytics turned on; the company will have no way of getting the exact data required. The folks who say this are conveniently forgetting that Google Analytics has nothing to do with the position of your website, actually, that is the dependent of Google, MSN or Yahoo search engines; these guys track their own traffic and how their users move around the cyber world and how these visitors return to their sites.

Then there is the age old question what is the threshold for a bounce, is it 10 seconds, 15 seconds or more; this is often the mot confusing part; after all, nobody is expecting a visitor to hang around a website for 24 hours so what would be a defined and acceptable threshold? A bounce is a bounce that is a person leaving a website regardless for how long he chose to stick on it, he could have stayed for a minute or for an hour but when he leaves it would still be a bounce. However, how the search engines treat bounce and the time lag that will make a difference to their algorithm is a totally different matter. Unfortunately, this information is readily not available because the search engines are in no mood to give you the download on the specifics of their algorithm so that you can ago ahead and exploit it. How many visitors they will follow and what count will be required to make a difference to the search engine ranking of a site is a difficult number to anticipate. But then again it is no different from any other algorithm input.

Then another ambiguous question is about a visitor leaving a site to go to one of the external link sites, people contest that even that even this would qualify as a bounce, actually it would not because this is a referral not a bounce. There is also no telling how the search engines will choose a visitor quickly closing the window and if they will treat it at all. However, this should not be considered as a bounce unless the search engines clearly mention that.

Seomul Evans is a Search Engine Optimization Services consultant specializing in Medical Business Marketing.

There is certainly no dearth of twitter patrons, it can be safely said that this is one social networking phenomenon that has taken the world by storm and people have already realized its potential and the power of its applications. However, it is equally true that there are also those who openly criticize twitter and don’t understand how to milk it for their benefit. So here is a list of some of the more unique ways in which you can use twitter:

A help desk for the community: This is one of the most innovative ways in which you can use twitter and at the same time garner a lot of attention, for instance, if you have a computer related issue that you would like to investigate, or a problem with a client, you will be able to point out the precise location of a domain redirect because your followers on twitter will e able to reach the site even when you cannot.

Get your own collaborative book read: This is another unique way of using twitter and its conversations along with your followers, you could actually use all your favorite tweets and turn them into a novel. The results can not only be hilarious but depending on your followers and the topic of your conversation can very well take a Shakespearean turn. One of the my followers of twitter recently told me about the popularity of japanned novels created entirely from mobile messages.

Host a live webinar or a training session: You could also increase your fan following on twitter by hosting a webinar or a training session, create a new twitter account for the purpose and send out updates and invitations, only to participants who follow you. Then, you could use twitter as the cheapest yet a very powerful tool for your business webinar without buying expensive equipment or software for the purpose. Twitter has a lot of features that can come in handy when hosting a webinar such as live chat, photos, ability to post links, videos, text and audio files all of which can be used without the need for plugins.

A free way to conduct market research: Why would you want to offer a small fortune to a market research company to find out how your company or products are doing in the market when you could use twitter for the job. Simply send a link with free samples or a short survey that has a prize attached for a few lucky winners and you should get enough feedback to get a gist about the performance of your products.

Use a twitter for internet reputation management and SEO: Work o your online reputation: Twitter is not only a social networking site but it also has huge potential for online reputation management; this is one way for other people to find out what your customers and other are saying about your company, so it can prove to be instrumental in breaking or making your company’s online reputation. You can easily use the twitter search tool to find out what people feel about your company. Alternatively, you could also use twitter widgets like the TweetBeep which is similar to Google Alerts; the widget sends you regular emails about any discussions that involved the chosen twitter account. Needless to say, this can also work for competition tracking.

Use competitions effectively: There are several twitter accounts by most notably companies like Zappos and Hand bag Heaven which have garnered a huge fan following by using competitions, the strategy is very simple, you simply try to get an answer from your followers and in return you give them a chance to win something. For instance, this can be something as simple as a question about one of your products or it could be a question related to the niche of your site; for example DVD quotes uses question “Which stands for which movie is this from” and the winner gets a DVD.

Seomul Evans is an Internet Marketing consultant specializing in Dental Marketing.

If you have been looking for information on what a webmaster absolutely must have in his kitty, look no further; here are some tools that will not only prove useful for the experts but also for the newbie’s; so go ahead and get yourself these tools to make your online presence professional.

URL Trends: This is a service that will help w web master locate the historical trends of a website so that he/she an determine the results of his SEO campaign in search engines. It is recommended that you use URL trends with a web logging program.

Custom 404: This is extremely important because if the users type the URL incorrectly, they will still get the options to navigate within your site and will also be given other solutions. When the domain is correct; however, the URL of a specific page is incorrect.; the page that is displayed to your visitors will be your custom error page which will include further assistance and a navigational bar instead of a generic page that incorporates nothing of value and only flashes a standard and sometimes rather annoying message “page not found”. On the other hand when you offer your customers navigational facilities, you are helping them to stay on your site.

Favicon: These little images are fast turning into internet favorites; with every second website using a favicon. These images can be equated with the brad images of a company because they are displayed in the URL bar along with the address of the website. This also gives the website a more professional look.

Online Editing for WYSIWYG: Through this you can allow different users to edit the web pages on your site to suit their specifications.

Match the colors on your site with that of your logo: You can us the primary colors used on your site with those in your logo; all you have to do is use a service known as colorblender that allows you to choose preferred colors from a 6 color matching palette and you the blend will be calculated for you automatically.

MaxEmail: This is not only an affordable but also an extremely useful internet service that lets you use the internet for sending and receiving fax messages in your email id in the PDF format and it can also be used as a voicemail service. The benefit of using this service is obviously the fact that it allows you to receive the fax messages regardless of where you are; also you will not have to spend extra on a telephone lie that lets you send and receive fax or a dedicated fax machine.

RSS Feeds: RSS feeds are not considered a luxury in the cyber world anymore; today they are a necessity; after all, ensuring that your website enjoys a high Google rank is primary job of any web master; not to mention, that it will make a big difference to the number of visitors that your site receives. So make sure that you have RSS feeds for educational articles; press releases, newsletters, product promotion messages, product tutorials and all other web content.

Images: There are several websites that offer royalty free images either free or for a very small price, make sure that over time you build your database of images which can them be used on your website. These will add a professional touch to your website; however you need to ensure that the images do not increase the page loading time of your site and that they are of a high quality.

The Web master Toolkit: This is a collection of tools that are vital to the success of any webmaster; they were developed by webmasters for their brethren in the profession; hence you an be absolutely sure that you are getting quality stuff. The resources and the collection of free tools in this package is simply astounding and the best part is that these resources will come in handy regardless of your expertise as a web master, certainly a must have kit.

Web Assessment Tools from Submit Corner: The site offers scores of tolls that will help you to keep a tab on the links to your website and those of your competitors. The set of tools contains everything from a link tracking program to search indexing tool and also competitor identification tool.

Seomul Evans is a SEO , consultant specializing in Internet Marketing for doctors .