Nowadays, it is almost crucial that you be able to expand your business internationally. Technology has allowed the world to become more interconnected and therefore, this has made it much more possible for businesses to spread their wings to worldwide territories. There are many factors you should take into consideration before you launch an international site. Changes will have to be made on your existing website so that it better suits the needs of your international clientele. Of course, this is easier said than done. However, the results will be surprisingly profitable and worth your time and money.
- Who is Your Target Audience?- First, you must figure out who your target audience is going to be. Will you be dealing with a specific country or continent? What languages will you have to take into consideration? If you cannot afford to have your website translated manually, you can look into features like Google Translate Tool. After all, communicating with that target audience is such a crucial part of any business plan. Know your audience first and build a campaign around their needs.
- Localize the Website- Once you have figured out who you are targeting, you can now figure out what changes will most effectively benefit your audience. Aside from language, you must also adjust your content and delivery accordingly. Take the culture into consideration while doing this! Every client or potential client wants to feel as if they are understood, so presenting a website that caters to their cultural inclinations will be highly beneficial.
- What Search Engine?- Google may seem like it rules the world but the truth is that some countries deal with their own search engines. Russia, for example, uses Yandex and in China Baidu is most widely used. This is important to know because when it comes to website marketing, search engines are an imperative part of the process.
- How Do You Want to Optimize?- Once you have established which search engine dominates the country or region you are dealing with, you must figure out which form of optimization will better serve you and your audience. This requires research! After all, keywords and link building are only two of the factors pertaining to PPC and SEO optimization.
- International Currency & Regulations- This may seem obvious but often, businesses do not take this into consideration when they are expanding internationally. Currency translation as well as tax regulations are highly important. This is especially important if your site offers shipping services. Similarly, be aware of laws and regulations each country has as far as doing international business goes. You do not want to end up in unnecessary trouble because of this!
Obviously, everything is easier when it is done automatically, but does it make it better? Software has made it easy for people to sit back and relax while the work is being done. Manual SEO has been around for a good while and any expert will let you know that it is time consuming and takes quite a bit of dedication and effort. So, like any good plight to the future, online marketing has now moved into an automated format as well! This is both good and bad because while you are able to implement the SEO without any effort of your own (save for downloading the software and clicking a few buttons), you may not be getting the same quality performance. In essence, automation strives for quantity over quality. Manual, on the other hand delivers substantial quality, but at a slow rate. So which method is better? Truth be told, manual methods will always be the better choice when it comes to SEO. Although SEO relies heavily on beating out the competition, it really comes down to how much real effort you have put into your SEO. Especially since the launch of Google Panda, search engines are dissecting the campaigns of all websites, ensuring that they produce quality backlinks, content and keywords.
- Quality Backlinks- You cannot produce a quality SEO campaign without backlinks. Furthermore, backlinks can be hard to come by. This is why it is crucial to make this a manual process. Automated SEO can bring you backlinks, but most of the time, these aren’t quality backlinks at all. In other words, all those automated results can be a waste of time and money. When you do these manually, you are guaranteeing quality because you are able to track and pick these yourself.
- Content- Content is also a component of SEO that cannot be done through automation. Algorithms are constantly searching for fresh content and this can only be done by hand. Content has to be relevant to your website as well as be able to captivate and hold your audience’s attention.
- Keyword Optimization- Knowing what keywords will be most effective for your marketing campaign requires you to not only understand your business to the fullest, but also do some research online. You will have to view which keywords are the most searched for, which are most highly used by your competition and which will benefit your business the most. Don’t leave it up to automated optimization to determine these things!
Article writing and distribution does a lot of good things for a website. It creates powerful backlinks, it drives mad traffic all by itself — and if you hire a spinner to multiply your articles, it’s a great form of affordable SEO. But one thing that many novice webmasters miss out on entirely is the ability of a solid set of articles to create an online reputation for an individual or a business.
Think about it — if you go to an article repository and you see three dozen articles by the same guy on several different aspects of the same detailed subject — let’s say it’s Italian art. Furthermore, each of these articles links to one of two pages on a website all about Italian art. You can scan these articles and find technical terms and details that clearly demonstrate that this guy knows a hell of a lot more than you do about Italian art. And, of course, the website he links to clearly indicated that he is the owner of the site and it’s attached business.
You walk away from that experience with the understanding that if you ever have a question about Italian art, that dude — and that website — are your go-to sources of information. You’ve just been hit by the online reputation building power of article writing and distribution.
On the other hand, the inverse is also entirely possible. If you submit a boatload of articles that are full of bad grammar, incorrect facts, and a childish tone of voice, you can utterly destroy your online credibility. It’s a double-edged sword. That means it’s worth a lot of time and energy to get your few articles done well — and also worth a little extra cash to hire a high-quality article spinner, and a top-tier distribution expert.
Some people have decided that the possibility of a negative impact is so great that they’d rather just skip out on the article marketing part of SEO altogether. On the other hand, if you love what you’re doing and you’re passionate enough to know the details, it should be easy for you to impress.
User friendly means a website that is for your clients to use and delivers essential information about your website. Too often, website owners do not build their websites with the user in mind. This is vital because websites are meant to attract potential clients! If you want to build and maintain a successful marketing campaign, be smart about the way you set up your website. Below are 5 key features you want to stress on your website to make it top-notch!
- Information & Content- This is probably the most important feature because it is what is going to attract an audience to your site. Stock your website with information and content that is relevant and interesting. However, don’t go over the top! No one wants to have to read an essay to understand what your website is about. Keep it simple and informative. Break up your content so it is not overwhelming to the eye.
- Navigation- Make sure it is easy to navigate around your website. Include a menu that enables the user to easily go from page to page. If possible, put the menu on the top of the page and include drop down menus if necessary. About and Contact buttons are extremely important. Users want to know what your site is about and how to contact you with questions or concerns.
- Accessibility- You want current and potential customers to be able to find you easily, right? Most users will use search engines and directories to find you online. Because of this, you want to market yourself accordingly. Apply SEO or PPC tactics to your website so that you can be more readily visible online.
- Website Speed- This may seem like a thing of the past, but a lot of users still have dial-up service and if your website is crammed with unnecessary junk, it may slow down the website and the user may leave the page in frustration before it even loads. Factors that may affect loading speed include image size, page size, flash features and excessive code installation.
- Smart Links- Links are important not only to make your users experience more favorable, but for your website’s benefit as well. Links will connect to other pages within your site and to the outside world as well. Make sure your links are functioning! The last thing you want is for a user to come across a broken link! This not only makes it impossible for the user to access the link, but makes your website look unprofessional.
Let’s face it, when it comes to SEO Companies, you have TONS of options. Not only that, but they all claim to be able to work magic on your website, or in other words, jump start your business and get you the traffic and profit you are looking for. However, it is smart to be wary of what is out there. Not every SEO company has your best interest in mind and will tell you anything and everything to dig into your pockets. That’s why you have to be proactive in your search and know the essentials of finding an SEO company. Here are 5 vital things you should look for in an SEO company.
- Make Sure They are Ranked on Search Engines- An SEO Company is supposed to get you ranked on search engines, right? If you can’t find them on the first page of any search engine for vital keywords like SEO Marketing then they probably don’t know what they are doing. Why would you want to do business with a company that can’t even do for itself what it promises to do for you?
- Look For Client Feedback & Testimonials- True, testimonials on a company website can be written up by anyone. However, people leave feedback all over the internet! Be a detective and hunt online for information on the company. Type in the company’s name on a search engine and see what you can pull up. The results may surprise you!
- Do They Practice White Hat SEO?- White Hat SEO are any and all legitimate SEO techniques used to get a website ranked online. There are many layers to this technique and trying understanding it all may be overwhelming. In general, you are looking for a company that promises quality traffic and inbound links, increased profit and a method of attracting potential prospects to your website. For a more descriptive outline of what White Hat SEO consists of, search online.
- Are They Making False Promises?- Be wary of any company that guarantees a #1 spot on a search engine or instant SEO results. No one can guarantee #1 placement on any search engine and SEO NEVER works instantly.
- Ask For Proof of Their Work- Why not ask for some examples of the work they are proclaiming they can do for you? Maybe they can show you a website they have successfully worked on in the past or a portfolio of their products and offers.
The internet marketing world is filled with information- some of it is accurate but let’s face it, most of it is a bunch of boloney. SEO is one of those marketing methods that continuously changes and transforms. What is pertinent one day, can be completely disregarded the next. This is partially due to search engine algorithms that no one truly understands. Search engines, especially Google, give vague ideas of what their algorithms are comprised of and webmasters are left to decipher it to the best of their abilities. This is also why there is so much mixed information online; what one webmaster may find true about SEO, another webmaster may say is false information. Thus, SEO myths are born. The problem lies in that innocent bystanders get affected by these myths because they believe them to be true and can often be fooled by a shady SEO company who promises them the world. The important thing to remember is to always do some research before jumping into bed with any SEO company. To make your research a bit easier, we have comprised a list of 10 SEO myths that most, if not all, webmasters agree on.
- SEO Can Be Self-Taught- While SEO isn’t exactly rocket science, it isn’t easy either. There are so many components of SEO that trying to learn it all on your own and apply it would be extremely time-consuming and difficult. Not to say that it is impossible, but if you want it done right the first time, free of mistakes, you may want to hire an SEO company with years of experience to help you out.
- SEO Works Instantly- This is a common myth that scam artist SEO companies claim to provide to their clients. Effective, profitable and long-lasting SEO takes lots of time to provide results, but if done correctly, can be extremely worth it. Be patient!
- Number of Visitors Affects SEO Rankings- Many believe that if you don’t have a plethora of people streaming into your site daily, you won’t be ranked at all on search engines. This is not true! Google and all other search engines have no way of judging how many visitors you get on a daily basis and do not use this as a determining factor as far as ranking goes.
- Meta Tags Make a Difference- Meta Tags used to be a big deal but now search engines don’t give them a second look. Don’t bother trying to optimize them, in other words.
- SEO Is a One-Time Application- Many believe that SEO is a one-time application deal and you’re set for life. This is not the case! SEO algorithms are continuously changing and therefore, your website has to keep up or you will be left behind for sure.
- It’s All About Rankings, Not Users- A lot of times, website owners will be so obsessed with getting their site ranked, they forget about their current and potential clients. While ranking is important, if your site lacks appeal to visitors, they won’t be coming back to your website anyway.
- Guaranteed #1 Placement- Bottom line, if an SEO company is guaranteeing a #1 spot on Google or any other search engine, they’re lying. No one can guarantee this, not even the top SEO companies out there!
Have you ever talked to a nutritionist about the difference between organic food and non-organic food? They’ll tell you without hesitation that organic food has a lot of things going for it that non-organic doesn’t. It’s got more nutrients per bite, which means that you don’t have to eat as much for your body’s cravings to be satisfied.
Organic SEO is very much like organic food for your website. Websites don’t get hungry, of course, but all websites compete for space in the search engine results pages (SERPs) in the same way that living creatures compete for resources in the wild. The difference is that creatures evolve very slowly — but every organic backlink your website gains is like a new boost of energy it can use to climb up the SERPs and obtain alpha status.
You might be asking what the alternative is — if organic SEO is like homegrown tomatoes, what exactly is a McNugget in this increasingly tortured analogy? There are actually a few different answers.
Pay per click advertising is the equivalent of going out to a high-end restaurant to eat every day. You’ll probably see good results, and (especially if you get a good PPC management team) you’ll see them fast — but you’re paying an awful lot for that success.
Traditional advertising is like generic supermarket food. You’ll see good things…eventually. But it’s nothing special, and everyone is doing it. Email advertisement, banner ads, and similar tactics are everywhere — you’ll never get ahead using tactics like these.
Black Hat SEO is the worst of the worst. You know those companies that put stuff like hydroxypropylmethylcellulose and bisphenol-A in their food? That’s these guys. Their “nutrition” might sustain you for a few weeks apparent online dominance, but when it fails you, you’re out of business for good.
If you want your website to succeed, give it the tools it needs to go alpha. Get some organic SEO under your belt, one way or another, today.
One of the worst feelings that can creep over a webmaster is logging on to their analytics page and seeing 1000 visits in 24 hours — with 984 bounces. A bounce, in this context, means a visitor who came to your webpage, stayed for less than ten seconds, and vanished without following a link away (usually by closing the window that was open to the page.)
Bounces are bad, because they tell you that something about your site is fundamentally flawed. It might be that you accidentally linked a forum post about the latest MLS game to your site about fly fishing, but more likely there’s something about your site that people are instinctively distrusting.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do about it, one of which is to have a web presenter made for your site. A web presenter is nothing more than a pop-up video of a live person that talks your visitor about your business and your site. In some cases, they can be extraordinarily distracting (this is particularly true on modern adult sites) or annoying (if the ‘close’ button is particularly hard to find.) But that doesn’t need to be the truth.
Assuming you can avoid an irritating web presenter, you’ll find that having one reduces your bounce rate significantly. After all, a surfer who came to your site of his or her own volition had a reason to be there — they just decided against it. If you can capture their attention with a web presenter, you can get them past that initial reaction and get them interested again.
It works because of two factors. First, a web presenter has a voice, and it’s a lot harder to walk away from someone you believe is talking to you than it is to click away from a website. Second, the presenter will load and start talking while the surfer is still deciding whether to bounce or not, so having the presenter start with an intriguing or controversial statement can quelch the bounce reflex in it’s tracks.
All that you have to do is make sure that once they’ve decided to stay, they’ll go on to make you some money. We suggest targeted Email marketing.
There’s a set of tools out there for everyone who wants to turn a profit with their website: SEO. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an umbrella term for any technique or system used to cause a website to rank more highly in the results pages for specific keywords.
For example, let’s say your website is all about Venezuelan Criollo cocoa beans and the chocolate that’s made from them. You might be on the 4th page of Google if you search for “Venezuelan chocolate”, the 2nd page for “Criollo beans”, and the 23rd page for “Criollo chocolate”.
Anything that you can do to improve any of those ‘Xth’s up there falls under the desmesnes of SEO. Follow a variety of SEO techniques (on-page, off-page, backlink building are the categories, but there are a lot of specific items within each category. For example, on-page SEO means writing copy with an eye toward keyword density; it means watching the contents of your metatags, and it means adhereing to the customer-oriented philosophy of the latest Google requirements.
The result of a few months’ SEO work is the eventual ascension of your website onto the first page of Google for some of your choicest keywords. That, in turn, will cause an explosion of traffic to your site, which you can then turn into money using a variety of techniques from AdSense to affiliate sales to selling, say, Criollo cocoa beans through the mail.
Without traffic, you have no visitors to monetize. Without SEO, you can’t get respectable levels of traffic — unless you replace SEO with some other traffic system, all of which require significant upfront investment (advertising) and/or have a profound potential to fail and cost you a load of money with no real benefit (pay per click marketing).
So website owners who want to turn their sites into cash are left with two options: spend money getting professional <a href="There's a set of tools out there for everyone who wants to turn a profit with their organic SEO performed by a respectable SEO company, or do it themselves. Either way will eventually work (assuming in the latter case they do it right), but the point is that if you want to make money on your site, get to know SEO — it’s how websites turn into money.
There are a lot of parts of a typical SEO campaign that are kind of replacable. You could, for example, get backlinks through social bookmarking instead of by directory submission. But custom blog creation followed up by regular blog posting — there’s nothing that can replace that.
Custom blog creation is unique because it has an effect on your web presence that nothing else can achieve. In fact, it has a few of them.
First, a custom made blog that you post regularly to gives your website continuous content. The search engines love new content, and with regular blog posting, you’re giving it to them. Assuming your blog is hosted on the same domain as your main content, every new blog post will give your landing page a bit of it’s ‘new content juice’ and keep your landing page higher in the rankings.
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Second, a custom blog allows you to control your internal linking structure, which is a complex way of saying you can use it to tell the search engines which keywords to hook to which page. If, for example, you have a landing page about poisonous mushrooms and another about magic mushrooms, you can use a blog to link several keywords related to poisonous mushrooms to the poisonous page. Then, the search engines will see, “hey, all of the poison-related keywords go here…so should we!”.
Third, every blog post offers you a chance to expand your sales funnel. Write the blog entries well, and other people will link to them — and thus, to your website. This is why many businesses go out of their way to create particularly attitude-laden blog posts — because a funky outlook can make people more inclined to link to you.
Finally, blogs are a top-tier method to perform reputation management. Because every blog post is you — your story, your knowledge, your expertise — every time you put something out there, you’re giving your potential customers further evidence that you’re the person they should turn to for all of their (for example) mushroom-related needs.
SEO Articles | seo_expert November 23, 2011 | 
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