Your web site marketing strategy is the essential factor that determines the success or failure of a business web site. This is true whether your web site is an extension of an offline business, or you run an completely online business. Web site marketing is unlike any marketing you may have done using other media.

However, marketing your web site on the internet shares many common core marketing foundations that underlie your marketing efforts regardless of the media you use. I am a strong believer that for a small business, all marketing should be based on the old direct marketing mantra of attention, interest, desire, and action. In this article I am going to discuss those aspects in terms of how they are crucial in marketing your web site on the internet.

Regardless of the media you choose, nothing will ever happen if you don’t attract the attention of prospective buyers. This is one of the very basic tenets of successful marketing. On the internet, this concept is evaluated by the traffic that you receive on your web site. But there are a lot of factors that affect how much traffic you get, and only part of it is the actual content of your web site. There are two ways you can get attention in any media: you can earn it or you can buy it.

All the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) show up two different types of results when a customer uses them.

The most relevant results based on the search algorithms used by the engine are called ‘free’ or ‘organic’ since they are the natural result of running a search.

The second type of result are actually paid advertisements, and they can be very difficult to distinguish from the results that are actually relevant to you query.

It is important to keep in mind that no matter how good the engine, the results are still hit or miss. It is a computer program sorting web pages based on mathematical formulae, not live people helping you select the best results, so as a person hoping to be indexed, you must be willing to put the time and effort into checking how you rank on the major engines and tuning your word choice to optimize that. If you can’t make it onto the first (or second at the very least) page of results, your traffic will drop dramatically! Most people don’t bother to wade through the hits on the pages after that. Even second-page ranking will hurt your ability to attract new users.

One of the most effective ways to increase internet traffic is buying some form of advertising. One of the most pervasive forms is banner advertising. Originally, these were very popular forms of advertising, but as they became more prevalent, their effectiveness waned. They can still be effective as long as you have a clear marketing strategy and are able to track your advertising statistics.

Text advertisements are probably the most common form of internet advertising today. Google has paved the way, and if done correctly, your internet traffic can multiply quickly by using Google ads. MSN and Yahoo also offer text advertisements on their sites. One downside to text advertising is that the cost can add up fairly quickly, depending on how many hits you receive for your ad. Each time a searcher clicks on your text ad, the provider charges you a set amount. Another way to increase traffic to your site is to buy traffic from someone who has an e-mail contact list or has a lot of traffic on their site already.

Any approach to publicizing your website or portal must begin with the aim of grabbing attention of the web surfers and internet addicts. To grab attention, you must deliver your message to surfers on websites they frequently visit. You can publicize your website by doing the hard work yourself or by availing expert help, or a mix of both.

Doing it yourself means you will have to commit your time, energy and money. It might sound daunting but ultimately proves to be cheaper as well. Availing expert help can get your results without eating your time. To set the cash registers ringing, it is suggested that you develop your own mix of both ways suited to your own needs and resources.

About the Author: You can get more information about Business Marketing at http://www.BizRave.com. Eric Menzies writes about Search Engine Marketing Firms and other topics.

By Matt Jackson (c) 2007

Want to optimize your online sales? Improve your understanding of your target market demographics? Need to improve your marketing ROI? What right minded webmaster or online entrepreneur doesn’t, right?

Your web analytics are your gateway to measurable success and provide a lot more information than most people give them acknowledgment for. Yes, they track the number of visitors you receive and indicate your most and least popular pages. However, they also guide you towards your best performing keywords, the countries that provide you with the most active visitors, and essentially provide you with a blueprint of the exact steps each visitor takes on your website.

Armed with this kind of information you should be able to improve the overall perförmance of your website and your online business. You can also improve your marketing efforts, enabling you to concentrate on the more effective, and ignore the least effective.

Keywords, Search Engines, And Popular Landing Pages

For many sites, the search engine is the leading producer of traffíc. An SEO campaign can produce excellent levels of highly qualified leads with comparatively little spend. The key to a good SEO campaign, though, is to continue the optimization process.

Good analytics packages provide detailed information that is vital to your SEO campaign. You can view a líst of the keywords that visitors have used in order to find your site. This information can be used to identify those keywords that are providing the most traffíc and any that can be improved upon.

By reading the referrer of each visitor it is also possible for most analytic programs to determine the search engine that directed visitors to your site. Again, it is possible to use this information in order to improve your optimization efforts, with a little online research.

Landing Pages And Referrer Pages

A good avenue of pertinent information is the líst of landing pages and referrer pages. The landing page is simply the page that a visitor first lands on when they reach your site, while the referrer is the page that directed them to your site.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that all of your traffíc emerges on your home page. At least, for most websites this shouldn’t be the case. Each page on your site is a potential source of search engine traffíc, and if you have well categorized pages then PPC campaigns should also be page dependent.

Alternatively, if you use any kind of advertising, it will pay to keep track of how each campaign performs. The referrer statistics will help you determine this very fact. If you have links all over the Internet, then this can point you to the more beneficial of those links so that you can attempt to gain more, similar ones.

Visitor Experience

How your visitors reach your site shouldn’t be your sole fascination. Once a person reaches the fold of your domain, you should attempt to learn whether they had a positive experience, and, if not, then why not. Fortunately, web analytics typically provide some very good statistics to help you with this.

Visitor and page load statistics. Whenever a page is loaded in a browser it is logged as a page load. However, any single individual can open numerous pages or may even open the same page numerous times. The unique visitor figure is the number of individual people that have accessed your site.

Visitor paths. You can track the actions of a visitor from the landing page to the exit page. This includes every page they visit in between, the amount of time they spend on each page, whether they make a purchase or click any links while on those pages, and more. This information is crucial to determining any problem areas on your site. If a particular page is leading to a lot of people exiting your site, then address it immediately. These statistics can also provide you with hot spots you weren’t previously aware of.

Translating The Results

Translating the results need not be any more complicated than actually reading them. Doing so, though, can seriously improve your profits. Here are a few guidelines that can be used when next viewing your analytics.

Lots of Visitors But No Conversions

A lot of people place too much emphasis on driving traffíc to their site, and not enough emphasis on actually converting those visitors to customers. If you find that the pages of your site are frequently being visited, but surfers are leaving without becoming customers then you need to take action quickly. Typically, your site content may need improvement or the traffíc you are gaining is not targeted to the topic of your website. Look at visit lengths and paths to determine which is the case for you.

Visitors are Leaving From a Specific Page

Again, this can usually be combated with improved content on that page. If the content of an individual page is poor, but the rest of your site is good, then you will usually see that your visitors are navigating happily around your site until they reach this one page. Look for broken links, inappropriate content, or just poorly written content.

Traffic From a Specific Source is Particularly Inactive

If you look at your referrer statistics and note that one source of traffíc is sending a lot of inactive visitors to your site there may be one or more explanations. Review where the visitors are being directed to and ensure that this page is well optimized for conversions. Also do some digging on the referrer’s end. A banner or link placed on an irrelevant page is unlikely to yield the positive results you are looking for.

These are just some of the ways that analytics can help you and your website. Experiment and look for trends. Question anything that you notice until you find the most reasonable answer, and then take action accordingly.

About The Author
Article by Matt Jackson. WebWiseWords, website content that sells.

With its empire expanding, the search giant can have an unprecedented breadth of knowledge about you. Can we trust it with so much data?

From search to e-mail, from calendars to spreadsheets and text documents, more and more of what PC users read and create flows through one firm: Google.

Google’s pending purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick (the deal awaited Federal Trade Commission approval as we went to press) will give it access to yet more information: the Web browsing histories collected by millions of DoubleClick cookies. Combine that data with what Google already knows through its homegrown services–Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Desktop, and many others–and the company has the potential to know more about you than any one entity ever has. (See the chart, “What Google Knows About You.”)

The question is, can you trust Google with all that information about you? And even if you trust Google, what about other groups that may try to access all that information–government agencies, hackers, and rival businesses, to name a few? Privacy and security experts say that the risk is significant, even if Google sticks to its famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

According to Harvard Business School assistant professor and researcher Ben Edelman, companies face many risks when they use online software services such as Google’s, namely loss of privacy, lack of physical data security, and lack of control over data retention. Who can access your Google-hosted data, and when, and under what circumstances? Google itself has full access to your files, which are unencrypted. In fact, searching and indexing stored data are essential if Google is to continue serving its contextual advertising.

Doubleclick Deal

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC, which must approve the deal, asking it to investigate the ability of Google to record and profile the activities of Internet users, whether they are personally identifiable or not.

The FTC appears to be taking the matter seriously, requesting additional information from both Google and DoubleClick. The European Union’s privacy agency and the New York State Consumer Protection Board are also concerned about the purchase’s effect on browsing privacy.

A Google FAQ page, however, insists that the acquisition, far from endangering privacy, will improve it, and that the company remains committed to respecting users’ privacy preferences.

Another danger in switching to hosted services like Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Google Calendar is that of losing access to your data. What happens when the office DSL connection goes down? And how would you make last-minute changes to, say, a critical spreadsheet while you’re flying coast-to-coast? The recent launch of Google Gears, which will let you use online apps from Google and other companies without an Internet connection, promises to overcome this limitation, but the service likely won’t become widely available for several months. Until then, your data is off limits when you’re offline.

“You’re accepting dramatically increased [file management] complexity–maybe for good reason–in order to get the benefit of having Google engineers keep everything running for you,” observes Edelman. He says that businesses need to consider not only the benefits of outsourcing server management but also the drawbacks of having to keep local versions of documents synchronized with the Google-hosted versions.

Despite the uncertainty of Google’s plans for your personal data, the company itself is probably the least of your worries. Instead, warns Edelman, hackers or your business’s competitors could try to infiltrate your Google accounts via forged documents or other illegal methods.

Warrant Search

The government, too, might like to see what’s in your Gmail inbox and your Docs and Spreadsheets files, including when you created, accessed, or deleted the data. Since you identify yourself whenever you sign in to your account, Google could use logs for the originating IP address of account activity, combined with ISP logs, to help confirm that it really was you who updated that spreadsheet or wrote that e-mail.

Google must comply with search warrants and subpoenas in civil or criminal cases that target your data, just as you would if you stored your data on your own servers. The difference, however, is that Google has no obligation to inform you that it has received such a warrant and has turned over your files to the authorities. “You lose both factual and legal control over your documents if you use an online service like Google,” says former Department of Justice computer crime unit head Mark Rasch, current managing director of technology for forensic consulting firm FTI in Washington, D.C.

“Google Apps makes [the situation] even worse,” Rasch adds, explaining: “This is not just communications, it’s all my documents and spreadsheets that are subject to subpoena, search warrant, or civil discovery. The hard part is that Google is under no legal obligation to notify me, and in particular kinds of investigations, they’re going to be prohibited from notifying me.”

Being left in the dark about these types of searches can also result in serious liabilities should your files contain sensitive client data and communications. “Let’s say I’m a lawyer, and I’ve got privileged information that I store using a Gmail account,” Rasch continues. “The government seizes that Gmail account and reads my files. Under the law, I must assert the attorney-Client privilege, or I have waived it,” he explains.
In short, if Google chooses not to inform you of such searches, you have waived that privilege. Only strong encryption–a technology Google currently does not support–offers real privacy protection for documents kept online, according to Rasch.

Harvard’s Edelman recommends using Google services just for specific business documents in which collaboration among geographically dispersed teams is unusually important. “I wouldn’t move my whole business onto Google Apps,” he counsels.

Google Apps and similar Web services certainly have appeal for many small and medium-size businesses. When San Francisco’s SFBay Pediatrics, a midsize practice, went looking for an interoffice communications, scheduling, and calendaring system, CIO Andrew Johnson considered “a slew” of products, including Microsoft Exchange and other systems that he would have to install and maintain in-house.

He selected Google Apps Premier Edition (the ad-free commercial version of Google Apps) because of Google’s good reputation and his staff’s familiarity with Gmail. Also, the Google services free the practice from setting up a significant IT structure. “We don’t want to spend the time tracking down server issues, maintaining servers, and paying up-front costs,” Johnson says.

So far, SFBay has had a positive experience with Google Apps, which it uses for such tools as a shared phone-call log that receptionists, nurses, and physicians can view and update. Though core features are still being rolled out, Johnson has configured SFBay’s Google Apps account to comply with the privacy rules of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) regulations. “We’re taking it in little baby steps,” Johnson adds.

Secret Life of Files

Last year it successfully warded off a Department of Justice subpoena demanding millions of search queries. (This request, the company countered, was excessive and an invasion of user privacy.)

The search giant also recently announced that it would begin deleting IP address information–which can be used to identify users–from its logs after 18 months. However, these steps may not be enough to reassure the most security-conscious users of Google applications.

“Even if you trust the service to do the right thing with the data, which I tend to do in the case of Google,” says Lauren Weinstein, cofounder of People for Internet Responsibility, “it doesn’t mean that someone won’t come along and make demands for access to that data that wouldn’t occur if the data was on your own machine.”

Weinstein worries that if companies such as Google don’t take a stronger role in protecting user privacy, less-savvy groups, including legislators, judges, and federal government agencies, may feel obliged to step in with solutions that could hamper all online services. “Not being evil is good, but it’s not good enough,” Weinstein says.

“What you really need to do is not only not be evil, but you’ve got to try to keep other people from doing evil with your magic. And that’s a harder step to take.”

Author: Scott Spanbauer
PCWorld

Every website owner wants lots of traffíc directed to their website, but this can sometimes involve spending a lot of time and monëy. Fortunately, most website owners can íncrease their return on ínvestment simply by paying closer attention to their website log files. Most website hostíng companies have special software installed that will process these website log files and display the information in an easy to read format. From this information website owners can get an understanding as to how many people are visiting the website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting the website, the average number of page views per visit, and many more interesting facts. These statistics will allow you to better analyze the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and give you some insight as to how you can tweak your website to íncrease your return on ínvestment.

“Hits” Explained

There seems to be some confusion regarding the terms used to describe website visitor traffíc. We usually hear website owners speak in terms of “hits” to their website. Hits don’t accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website – they are actually just any sort of HTTP request made to your server. Not only are requests made for website pages, but also for all the images and other files associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits, and, if a single user visits many pages on your website, this visit could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can excite some website owners, but this number is not a reliable indicator of how many people have actually visited the website.

The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A unique impression will measure the number of actual people visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many “hits” a visitor registers on your website, the server will record the session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffíc the website is generating.

What to Look for When Analyzing Website Traffíc

Number of Unique Visitors: We’ve already determined that the best measure of true website traffíc is the number of unique visitors. What we want to look for is a trend in the average number of unique visitors. On a day to day basis, there may be a good amount of volatility in the number of unique visitors, but we want to pay attention to the trend of the average number of visitors per month. Optimally, we’d like to have the number íncrease on a monthly basis.

Entry Page Statistics: From these statistics we can learn which page people are using to enter your website. Most visitors will enter from your home page, but you may notice that up to 50% of your website traffíc originates from a page other than your home page. It’s important that your website have an easy to use navigation structure to ensure that visitors can find the information they are looking for, even if they don’t enter through your website’s main page.

Bounce Rate: The bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave. Don’t get worried if your bounce rate is high – most websites have a bounce rate of about 50% or so. If the bounce rate is unusually high, you can experiment with your website to try and retain more visitors. Maybe you need more enticing graphics, less text, faster loading pages, or a more engaging design.

Exit Page Statistics: These statistics will show you where people are leaving your website. When you know which page is losing the bulk of your website’s visitors you can experiment with some changes in an attempt to retain more visitors.

Average Time & Page Views Per Visit: Website visitors are very goal oriented and task driven. Upon visiting your website, most visitors will merely scan the page to quickly determine whether or not it contains the information they are searching for. By analyzing the average amount of time spent on your website and the average number of page views per visit, you can determine how engaging your website’s content is. The key to retaining visitors and increasing the number of page views is to have relevant and interesting information on your website. Remember – content is king!

Top Referring URLs: This statistic lets you know where the bulk of your website’s traffíc is coming from. This is important if you’re pursuing a website marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign because you can easily judge the campaign’s effectiveness by looking to see how many visitors each marketing method is generating.

Top Search Words & Phrases: This information will let you know which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for in Google and the other search engines in order to find your website. With this information you can gauge the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign, or get an idea of how your website’s keyword density should be altered to position it for the keywords and phrases that you’re targeting.

Browsers, Platforms & Screen Sizes: This information gives us some insight as to the type of software and hardware your visitors are using. You should ensure that your website looks the same across all browsers and operating systems. In addition, you must pay attention to the screen size and resolution in which your visitors are viewing your website. The goal is to ensure that no visitor has to resort to the horizontal scrolling bar to view your website – this is a major turnoff for most people.

Country of Origin: A good website stats program will also let you know the geographic region of your website’s visitors. This is important if your website only has appeal in a particular region. For instance, if you own a retail store that caters to Southwestern Ontario and you notice that 90% of your website traffíc is coming from the U.S., then it can easily be determined that you need to re-think your online marketing strategy.

The goal of website traffíc analysis is to assess how well or how poorly your website is working for your visitors. From these statistics you can figure out what the problem is and try out some possible solutions. The problem often lies in the website’s visual appearance, layout, navigation structure, or keyword optimization. When making modifications to your website in order to remedy these problems, it’s best to only make minor and gradual adjustments, and then assess the progress over the next month or so to truly understand if your changes were for the better. Also, remember that sites with a greater number of visitors will have more accurate web statistics. Sites with smaller numbers of visitors are more prone to have their averages thrown off by a few anomalous visitors.

Author: Paul J Coulter

Every web site owner wants to íncrease search engine traffíc. It’s free and the visitor is targeted to your subject matter, product or service. What more could you
ask for in search engine traffíc? The downside is that you need to understand search engine ranking methods and that is quite a challenge for many.

The number of opinions and “experts” on ways to íncrease search engine traffíc is overwhelming. And regardless of what anyone might tell you, they’re all guessing. The search engines themselves don’t divulge how their methods work for one simple reason. As soon as anyone figures out the method, there’s a mad rush to implement changes based on the method.

In a perfect world, where there were no scoundrels, this might not be a factor.
Everyone would organize their web site information so that a visitor could easily find what they are looking for, and life would be good. But we certainly don’t live in a perfect world and scoundrels are everywhere.

So we are at the mercy of the search engines to help us sort through the clutter to find what we want. And that’s the value that the search engines provide, accurate and meaningful search engine results that are related to the search terms or phrases. So it goes back to the quality of content, that’s the only common factor in all 3 major search engines’ ranking methods.

Each of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) search engines use a little different method and technology to arrive at any given web site’s ranking under specific search terms. As mentioned above, no one knows exactly how each method works. But you can test different strategies and methods to see how they impact your rank.

And therein lies the only true method of determining what the search engines might look for when ranking your web page on specific search terms. I’m sure most of us are aware that most processes can be expressed in mathematical equations. I’m not sure if that’s the best method for search engine ranking, but it is the most popular for the search engine ranking process.

And consider the fact that when someone has determined (or thinks they have determined) one of the factors used in search engine rankings they beat it to death. Every discovered aspect in the past few years has been exploited immediately to the point of the search engines abandoning the tactic. As soon as the search engines see that someone can beat the system, they change it.

That’s one of the big reasons you see constant change in ranking methods. Since there is a tremendous amount of revenue at stake for all concerned, i.e. sales of products and services for the web site owners, plus the advertising revenue for the search engines, any advantage is huge.

If you would have tested and tracked all the changes and methods in search engine rankings for the past few years, one constant factor would stand out. This is also one of the most misunderstood and often overlooked elements in search engine ranking for a specific term.

So what’s the one thing that the search engines can’t change about their mathematical algorithms? You got it, CONTENT! The search engines can play with the process, methods, or means to judge web site content. But, if web site owners stick to the basic philosophy of providing meaningful content, in relation to the search term, the impact of changes are far less, if even felt.

And that is where many web site owners run afoul of getting good search engine rankings. Many jump on the bandwagon with every new revelation in search engine strategies based on the latest changes. It’s the old forest and trees scenario, Internet style. Even if you get a slight advantage from all these “new” tactics, it will be short lived. As soon as the search engines catch on that you are working the system, they will change the system.

So the best way to íncrease your rankings for a particular search term is to provide meaningful information or content based on that search term. Here a few guidelines I’ve found that help:

• Make sure you focus on the subject matter (don’t try to satisfy too many terms with one web page).
• Get inside the searcher’s head – figure out what they want and give it to them.
• Be specific and provide details – don’t generalize and be descriptive.
• For a sales page use benefits and features to fully explain the problem and the solution.
• Update your information often – setup a schedule to update and add more content.

There are many sub factors that can have an impact on how well the search engine bots can determine the value of the content. The search engine bots are software programs that go out and “read” your web page and then provide the information to rank your web pages on what they discovered.

You’ll find many “experts” who will give you a hard líst of items and how to present this information. And I don’t disagree with suggestions to include the search term in your web page in key areas like title, description, and font designations like H1. That helps the search engine software bots to determine the content.

Author: John Dow

This report is designed for entrepreneurs, small business owners, independent contractors and anyone who needs to build relationships and develop leads or referrals in order to promote and increase their business.

The information in this report is given based on the assumption that YOU know your product and service inside and out and you have already defined your business goals and have somewhat of a business plan in order.

The next step would be to narrowly and clearly define your target market, your ideal prospect.

Some people believe that their products or services would be perfect for everyone. For example, Mary Kay Cosmetics - no offense to my MK friends or other people in the health industry who say ‘anyone with skin’ needs a facial or ‘anyone who has stress need a massage. Then there are people in the home improvement industry who say, ‘anyone with a house’ needs my landscaping, my windows, my furniture or my loan, etc.

For most small businesses however (1-5 employees or even more), I don’t believe this is the most effective way to try to generate new leads and customers. If you determine the right target market to fit your business, you figure out the best ways to reach them AND if you figure out the best message to reach them with you will be spending your marketing dollars wisely. Business owners who don’t plan ahead to figure out who their target market is before they open their doors end up spending a whole lot more money trying to figure it out by trial and error and that’s expensive.

Would you shell out $200 for a pair of shoes without trying them on? Plunge into a steaming bath without dipping a toe in first? Of course not-but people do the business equivalent every day. Many an entrepreneur has found out too late that nobody wants to buy hand-quilted Christmas stockings at $24.99 a pop, or that wealthy customers won’t schlep to the unfashionable part of town for luxury stationery.

The irony: Conventional market research is expensive (corporations regularly budget tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for it), but no one needs it more than a startup entrepreneur. A couple of marketing blunders won’t put a giant manufacturer out of business, but just one can sink an entrepreneur like a bolt of lightning.

Defining Your Target Market

Your “target customers” are those who are most likely to buy from you. Resist the temptation to be too general in the hopes of getting a larger slice of the market. Try to describe them with as much detail as you can, based on your knowledge of your product or service and how it will benefit them.

Step 1: Ask yourself some questions to get started

1. Are your target customers male or female?
Figure 75-80% of your target customers would be which? If it’s split, narrow it down another way but more than likely you can narrow down the gender.

2. How old are they?
Give an age range of 10-20 years max, otherwise you might have two target markets. Remember, the marketing messages towards different age groups will be quite different most likely depending on your product or service.

3. Where do they live?
Is geography a limiting factor for any reason? Can you narrow it down to specific zip codes or counties? The larger the geographical area you choose, the more people you will find but the less likely you’ll be able to afford to market to all of them so narrow it down and expand out later.

4. What do they do for a living?
You can get a mailing list by industry or profession and specific title for example.

5. What does their specific profession say about their lifestyle?
Is it very busy with little time to shop? Would they be likely to be familiar with the internet for their shopping, researching, news and event information? Would they be commuting more in their car?

6. How much money do they make?
This is most significant if you’re selling relatively expensive or luxury items. Most people can afford a latte. You can’t say the same of custom murals. Narrow this down to a specific range also and high enough that you will weed some people out or again, you’ll have way too many people to afford to market to.

7. Are there kids in the household?
What ages might they be? How many would there likely be? What does this say about their lifestyle - are they carpooling, or soccer parents where they are rarely home? Do they possibly eat out a lot or have less ‘family’ bonding time? Or are they empty nesters where they might spend more time at home watching television or reading?

Step 2: Get specific

What other aspects of their lives matter? Here are some examples to think about, see how your target market compares or how you can get more specific with them.

* If you’re launching a roof-tiling service, your target customers probably own their homes. In addition, they probably own homes with older roofs like shake roofs; you can get a list of homes by their age.

* If you’re a realtor, you might be interested in targeting first time homebuyers in which case you might find them to be likely to live in apartments or rentals of which you can get a list of those too.

* If you’re selling your own individual artwork but you can’t create multiple paintings with the same picture, you may have to sell the unique pieces at local art shows rather than selling them online.

* If you’re planning to open a custom-tailoring shop and need busy executives to come for three fittings, you may need to limit it to your local area.

* If you’re a direct jewelry consultant needing women to gather for parties in someone’s home, you’ll want to go where many women meet like mom’s groups, women’s professional organizations, day cares or grocery stores.

* If you’re a business or life coach and want to coach only over the phone then you’ll most likely want to do more online marketing and make sure to have a really top notch website since that’s mostly what people are going to see for their first impression. You can network locally too but the more ‘known’ you are in person, the more people will want to do business with you in person. Step 3: Keep your mind open to any information

Keep a list of primary research questions handy, such as:

* Who influences your customers and how? Spouses, neighbors, peer groups, professional colleagues, children and the media can all affect buying decisions. Look for hints that one or more of these are a factor for you.

* Why do they buy? Distinguish between the features and the benefits your product or service offers. Features describe what it is; benefits are what your customers get out of it. The latter is why your customers pay you. Are they looking for a status symbol, a savings in time or energy, a personal treat or something else?

* Why should customers choose you and not your competition? What can you offer that the competition doesn’t?

* How do your customers prefer to buy? Many businesses benefit from the broader market provided by the Internet and mail order, while others do better with a physical presence. Don’t assume you fall into one category or the other; customers may surprise you.

Step 4: Identify Your Ideal or Favorite Client

Think about your favorite client - who are they, name them, write down everything you know about them, their family status, age, sex, marital status, where they live, where they work, possible income level, their shopping characteristics.

* Do they like to use coupons or shop on certain days? � Do they call you at the last minute to get something from you?

* Do they value your service/product? � Is that type of client the most profitable type you have or the most non-profitable and you just like them?

Step 5: Determine their profitability to your business

Which type of clients will make you the most money, bring you joy and refer you tons of business? These are the types of clients you ultimately want, now where are they?

Ask Yourself:

* Who is the most profitable type of client? The one who will make you the most amount of money the fastest and with the least effort - do you like working with them? If not, you won’t be totally happy with only this type of person, maybe you need a combination of the two.

* How often will they be able to buy or consume your product or service? If they can only possibly purchase your services every 10-20 years (getting a new roof for example), do you never market to them again after the sale or do you heavily market to them after the sale by every means possible for at least 1 year to get all the referrals you could possibly get out of them in that time?

* How likely are they to know others like them they can refer to you? Normally, very likely, in which case following up with them before, during and after the sale is huge - and if you don’t ask for referrals in each stage of the sale continuously then shame on you.

* What is really important to them when it comes to your product or service? Not what you think they should know or like, but actually what they care about, like, ask for, thrive on, are passionate about, etc. These are your target market’s “Hot Buttons” and these are what you should be addressing in your headlines, letters and marketing efforts at all times because these are why the client would choose to buy.

Defining your business’ target market is absolutely critical to any small business. Everything you do in your marketing, advertising, design, publicity and networking will depend on who your target market is and what matters to them. Making decisions on your marketing and advertising without fully defining your target market or knowing them in depth could be detrimental to your business and you could be making some costly mistakes!

Author: Katrina Sawa

Katrina Sawa is a Solopreneur Marketing Coach and marketing and promotional expert who helps small business owners and entrepreneurs make the most of their marketing dollars and time. For more info on her services or to get her FREE REPORT: “The Top 3 Ways to JumpStart Your Marketing”, visit her at www.JumpStartYourMarketing.com.

Every web designer is familiar with the HTML programming language, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. The language has been in use since the advent of cyberspace, and although it will probably always be used, it is already being supplemented by newer, more versatile versions of HTML.

The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is a family of current and future document types and modules that reproduce, subset, and extend HTML, reformulated in XML. XHTML family document types are all XML-based, and ultimately are designed to work in conjunction with XML-based user agents.

Unlike HTML, which focuses on describing how data or text is supposed to be displayed, The XML language instead describes what the data is. So, XML is not something that is apparent on a web page, because it does not actually tell your browser how to display the data.

As information and data presented on the world wide web became more complex, XML was invented to effectively structure, store, and send this information.

What makes XML truly unique is that there are no predefined tags as is the case with HTML. All of the tags used in HTML have already been defined, such as the paragraph tag, the header tag, and all the various style tags. XML is not defined. You can make your own tags!

XML, forms the basis for a language called XHTML. XHTML is what is known as a meta-language, which is a language for defining a markup language. To put it simply, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is the basis for HTML. XML is a more refined subset of SGML, and forms the basis for XHTML. On the whole, XHTML is more flexible than HTML.

XHTML was developed for two reasons:

(1) to try to create a language that could more effectively convey the meaning of a particular webpage to a computer.

(2) to create a layout for webpages that would be universally understood by browsers running on different platforms or on different types of screens.

This is extremely important, because people are now using a wide variety of gadgets to connect to the internet, as almost every electronic device on the market now comes equipped with email and internet access. Cell phones, palm tops, computers installed in automobiles; they all have built-in web access.

Each of these devices display text and graphics differently, and utilize different platforms and a variety of web browsers. As a result, someone using a cell phone to access a certain web site may not be able to view it properly because the browser running on that cell phone might not be able to display the HTML. The platforms that run on some of these new products and devices are not totally compatible with HTML.

So, it is imperative that most web designers learn to design web pages in XHTML. As almost every electronic device on the market is now equipped with internet access, it is important to use a versatile programming language like XHTML so that your web pages can be viewed and properly formatted across a wide variety of platforms.

Author: Jim Pretin

1. Tight writing. That doesn’t mean bad or easy writing.

2. Copy of about 600-800 words is better for SEO and catching the long tail of search.

3. Title – Subject – Support, in that order, like subject, verb, object.

4. Titles should be snappy and informative – clickable, but clear.

5. Leads (first sentence or paragraph) should get to the point. Tell the reader what the article’s about first thing.

6. No fancy, wordy intros where it’s not clear what you’re talking about.

7. Information beats fluff every time. Pretty is for books and newspapers (and only sometimes).

8. Information does not beat style every time. Style keeps people awake.

9. Sans serif fonts are easier and faster to read on computer screens.

10. White space is awesome – even better than big, pretty pictures.

11. Content should be scannable.

12. Think in bullets and subtitles.

13. People like lists.

14. Pictures should be specific and informative, not generic, decorative and ad-like

15. Photos should be relevant to content.

16. People in pictures should look friendly and approachable (and have their whole head).

17. Photos should be full body if possible (so guys can check out packages and stuff).

18. Spell stuff right. It makes you look smarter.

19. Grammar IS important. Unless you’re not really a professional.

20. Online press releases should be even tighter than Web copy.

Author: Jason Lee Miller

Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top of Google, you will rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). But, before we talk about how Google measures linking, we need to cover some basics.

Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.

Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. Google uses a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.

One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.

The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.

Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry is being written or discussed.

Also, Google gives an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.

Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.

It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site. As long as you are persistent and tailor your strategy towards Google, you will do fine.

Author: Jim Pretin

I’ve looked at a lot of websites over the years and helped a lot of clients, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who is totally committed to making their site as successful as it could be.

This is particularly true when it comes to search engine optimization. Most online businesses make a half-hearted attempt to get better search engine rankings, but rarely implement anymore than one or two things that could really help make their site a success.

Which of the following does your website have?

1. Unique Page Titles.

Take a look at a selection of web pages that come up high in the search engine results for any search term and you’ll notice they all have one thing in common: unique page titles. Denoted by in HTML, page titles tell the search engines what your web page is about, and are thought to be a critical factor in how search engines determine the order in which pages are displayed in the search engine result pages (SERPS) for a specific search term.

2. Descriptive Keyword Links.

How do search engines find and index your site? They follow links from one page to another, indexing content as they go. If the links they follow contain keywords and phrases that are relevant to the page content, the search engines will boost the ranking of that page in their results. You should also use keywords and phrases in the site’s navigation (menu), as those terms are (or should be) highly relevant for the page they link to.

3. Keywords in Your On-page Copy.

If you want the search engines to know what your page is about, and rank it appropriately, you must scatter keywords throughout your on-page copy. Keywords in your copy establish your site’s relevance for words searchers use when they’re looking for your product or service.

4. Clean, Accessible Website Design.

Messy, bloated HTML code, 404 errors, re-directs, too many graphics, content hiding behind forms etc., all hinder the search engines’ ability to index your site. And if they can’t index it, they can’t rank it. Follow W3C’s accessibility guidelines when building your website. Better yet, ask your website designer what he knows about standards compliant website design. If he or she can’t answer, find someone who can.

5. Focused Site Topic.

It seems logical that the more focused your site is, the higher it will rank for related search terms. For example, a site that is focused on the sale of exercise mini-trampolines will probably do better for the search term “mini trampolines” than a site that tries to sell a number of unrelated or a selection of different exercise equipment. In addition, it makes sense to create specialty websites whenever possible. That way, you don’t fall into the trap of trying to do too many things and end up doing none of them well.

6. Relevant Incoming Links.

The number of other sites that link to your site’s pages is important but the quality of those sites, and the text used in the link, carries much more weight with the search engines. For example, one relevant link from an “authority” site such as a .org, .gov, or a site that’s proven itself as a reliable source, provides more value than several links from unrelated or “unproven” sites.

Of course, there are other several other factors that go into determining a site’s ranking (far too many to go into here) but these are some of the most important.

They’re all easy to implement, so there’s really no excuse for not taking advantage of them especially if you want to make sure your site is found and visited by as many people as possible. Then all you’ll need to worry about is getting those people to buy something from you on a frequent basis.

And that’s really what it’s all about.

Author: Julia Hyde