Attaining and keeping top 10 search engine placement requires constant work and aggressiveness in order to stay ahead of your competition, and being creative when it comes to building one way links is by far one of the most effective methods.

 Think of it, almost every inexperienced webmaster thinks all they have to do is build good copy tied to relevant keyword, sit back and let their automated search engine submission software do all the work. Well that is the farthest from the truth. If that were all a site needed to be in the top 10, then there wouldn’t be a top 10… it would be a top 100 or top 1000! In order to attain and keep prominent ranking on the SERPs you need quality and authoritative back links to your site in addition to quality content and keywords.

 If your site has a low PR, then the most effective link building technique you can ever use is to find similar sites with higher PageRank and send the site owner or Webmaster a polite email asking for link to your site. Make sure you point out that his site will benefit by linking to you because your content will be useful to his site visitors. Remember to be specific by including links to the content on your site, and an appropriate anchor text using a relevant keyword or phrase. Every Webmaster wants to build his sites value and usefulness and linking to a site with relevant and useful content is one of the easiest ways.

 To make your link building campaign easy to manage and simple to undertake create a few base email letters with the details of your request and links to your content and after each email request make a note with the site URL email address, date, and which link request letter you used. Don’t forget to include the anchor text you want used in your incoming link. After you have sent out your first run of link request emails, sit back and wait at lease a week for a reply. If you don’t get a reply to your email, then send your second email out, and remember to always be polite and friendly. The impression that the Webmaster gets in reading your email can be all the difference in getting a one-way link to your site. Don’t give up if your first run of email requests go un-answered. Keep trying; your diligence will pay off soon enough.

 Look for niche or sites similar to yours, quite naturally your direct competitors won’t link to you, but sites outside of your geographical location might. If your site sells real estate, target mortgage companies, home inspectors and moving companies. These types of sites will always want to offer their site visitors useful information and content that can help meet their needs.

 There are a number of software applications that can help you manage your link request campaign. Most are moderately priced and include many features to help you find and email potential link sites, but be careful when sending out your emails as sending too many at one time could get your email address targeted as a spammer!

Making your site useful to your visitors has many benefits. The main goal of all ecommerce websitesis to convert visitors into actions; i.e. sales, information requests, joining online groups or communities, or other ecommerce actions.

The method in which you present your content can be the very difference between marketing success and failure, and identifying mistakes early on can prevent the loss of visitor trust and confidence.

Identify Your Audience

Knowing who your visitors are and what information and content will be useful to them is the key factor in your websites marketing success, and failure to deliver that content to your visitors is just that, failure! Common approaches in designing the right layout are as simple as viewing your competitor’s pages, making notes on how content is presented and then creating a fresh and easy to navigate layout. 

Once you have a potential layout the best advice you can get is from family, friends and trusted colleagues. Ask them to review your layout and give you their feelings on the usefulness, easy of navigation and overall quality of the content. With this powerful information in hand you can then fine tune your layout to be of maximum use and value to your site visitors.

 Making your Offer Stand Out

Your marketing offers (actions) should be prominent and wrapped around your content in a meaningful way before the first page fold. If you are selling lawnmowers and guarantee the lowest price, that information will have more impact and be more useful if you include a price comparison of your competitors. Other helpful methods in marketing products and services are features and benefit comparisons. If you offer the same product as a local competitor, describe the benefits of choosing you over the competition. Your marketing offer should also be offered again at the bottom of your page.

Get to the Point

Many websites fail because they waste time in making their offer to their visitors. Most visitors already have a general idea of what they want or need, and are simply looking for the best price, or quality of services offered. Your home page is the starting point for your marketing offers, and should provide easy to understand options for every visitor. If you sell multiple products or services then your layout should include navigation options with descriptive content. It is also a good idea to develop landing pages for sites that market a large selection of products or services.

Sites that market a single product or service should be quick and to the point with their marketing offer. Your title text should be straightforward and descriptive, followed up with reasons to act or buy now. The urgency of your marketing offer will help to continue or increase the momentum in the sales or marketing process. The most common sales or marketing urgencies are limited time sale prices, and bonus or complementary goods or services. Creating an urgency to act or buy now can help to induce visitors to complete your desired actions, but don’t be pushy in your approach, let the urgency to act or buy now be the force in your offers.

Lets face it, promoting your website or business online is time consuming and there may come a time when you are unable to meet one or more marketing deadlines. This missed deadline could result in losing valuable Internet exposure while you concentrate on your businesses other needs, and continual loses could cause irreparable financial harm. The bottom line is finding as many ways possible to have your cake can eat it too right?

Outsourcing your websites marketing has long been accepted as a cost effective and viable method to maximize your businesses Internet exposure while reducing the number of tasks you must undertake in the overall promotion process. With a solid marketing plan, and some research on finding the right individuals to outsource your marketing tasks, you can reduce your current workload and concentrate on other portions of your website management.

1.  Your first step to success is in developing your marketing plan. Define your sites needs and what your expectations are for each part of your sites promotion. Create task lists and general time frames for the completion of each task. You can use this list later as a “check list” for each task in your plan.Once your plan is compete you are ready to begin looking for qualified firms or individuals to outsource your marketing tasks to. There are many reputable outsourcing websites that cater to small businesses and websites. This service entails signing up as buyer and then posting a project request to the many pre-qualified applicants.

   Your project request should cover the exact details of what you want and the maximum price you are willing to pay, with a deadline or time frame you expect your project to be completed. Once you have chosen the applicant to undertake your project, the outsourcing website takes the amount you agreed to pay and puts it into an online escrow account. Once the task is completed and accepted by you, the funds are released to the applicant. Many of these outsourcing sites do not charge buyers for posting project requests, they make their money by taking a small percentage of the fee from the applicant.

2.  Recruit blog and forum posters to mass market articles about your websites products and services. Your can easily find experienced posters online or at your local community college. There are 2 basic ways you can pay these individuals for posting your marketing articles: Either per post or flat rate.
    
3.  Create an affiliate program. One of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your site and increase sales is by starting an affiliate program that pays commissions for each sale or lead to your site. There are a number of free scripts and applications available that can be added to your site to track sales and leads..
    
4.  Ask for referrals from existing customers. Referrals from your existing and past customers offer a wealth of potential new customers; all you have to do is ask them to help you. Start by creating a light request letter and mail or email it asking for referrals. This is one of the most powerful forms of promotion because if your customers are happy with your products and services they will easily be willing to recommend your website to their family and friends, and co-workers.

Many site owners or first time webmasters often overlook the most common mistakes when it comes to the SEO optimization of their website. By using these 7 simple steps your site will have the most common page elements designed to meet the ranking standards for the major search engines.

1.  Avoid the use of Flash and DHTML navigation menus and buttons. These require additional code that often makes it impossible for the search engine spiders to find all of your pages, thereby reducing your sites ranking potential! Use natural text menus with hyperlinks, this will insure that all of your pages are crawled and will allow you to use keywords in your “alt” text.

2.  Do not use “frames” pages. The search engine spiders will not be able to index all of the pages that are part of the frame and your sites crawl will not be complete. The use of “includes” pages will guarantee that all of your pages will be crawled and indexed.

3.  Avoid the use of internal scripting, such as javascript and other languages. This practice requires more time for the search engine spiders to crawl and index your pages. Whenever possible use external scripts that are placed in your cgi-bin or scripts folder in your web root.

4.  Always use a “robots.txt” file to help the search engine spider crawl and index your pages faster.  Every website has pages, and directories that do not need to be crawled and indexed, and by creating a robots.txt file you can speed up the crawling and indexing time of your site by adding a single robots Meta tag to each page. It is also important to add an inclusion tag with the full URL to your sites site map.

5.  Use keyword rich page names. This will enhance the relevant content value of each page on your site by telling the search engine spiders that this page relates to the keywords used in the Meta tag data for this page. Additionally only use keywords and phases that are related to each page’s actual content. This practice will add focus to your keywords and keyword rich content. Always use keywords in your header tags (H1, H2, etc) this highlight and add emphasis to your keywords when your site is crawled and indexed, but don’t over do it, it is important to keep your keyword density close to 2-3% otherwise your site could look like it is using stuffing techniques by the search engine spiders.

6.  Limit your Meta tags data to only use: Title, Description, Keywords, and Robots. Most of the other commonly used Meta tags are almost useless to the major search engine spiders and their inclusion will only serve to slow the indexing process and in some cases actually hurt your rankings. Keep your title tag under 70 characters and don’t use stop words.  Your sites description tag should not be longer than 100 characters.  Don’t keyword stuff and only use relevant keywords for each page. Always use relevant keywords in your page names, titles, and descriptions, and with your image alt tags.

7.  Create an xml site map for your site. The use of a site map will further enhance your site’s ranking potential by providing links to all of your sites pages in a friendly XML format. Google and yahoo, as well and many other search engines and directories consider a site map an important aid in crawling and indexing a site.

Getting your site indexed and ranked requires many different elements in your site’s overall SEO strategy, but the most important part of your strategy is researching and using the right keywords. Fine tuning your sites keywords should never use a hit and miss approach, using the wrong keywords can actually hurt your sites ranking and keep it out of top contention on the major SERPs.

In the SEO optimization of your site you have concentrated on making your content useful and easy to navigate for human visitors, with the addition of the most popular keywords and phrases in our Meta content we will make those pages easy to find on the SERPs.

Your keyword research should be focused on identifying the most common search queries for your website’s targeted audience. While there are many useful tools available for your keyword research, there are 2 websites you should make your primary research around: WordTracker, and Overture.

There are some quality professional tools available for conducting keyword research that have the ability to create multiple keyword research projects and export your search results to a spreadsheet that can be saved locally on your PC along with other tools for promotion and tracking. The price varies for these types of tools and programs with the higher priced programs offering additional tools for website promotion.

To begin your keyword research you should start with broad terms and work down to more refined keywords.

Example: Real Estate… Real Estate sales… California Real Estate sales…Los Angeles Real Estate sales.

Knowing what consumer’s are looking for in a product or service is just as important as the specific keywords commonly used, because knowing how a consumer thinks will give you additional insights that can be used to identify keyword phrase variations such as; regional information, misspellings, and slangs. These variations on your common keywords and phrases could potentially offer additional keyword Meta content on your pages.

To maximize your keywords research results, test your search queries at Google and the other major search engines, you will be surprised to find out that the same keywords queries will return slightly different results because each of the major search engines place a different weighted values on certain word combinations, and this why your SEO optimization campaign will include the building of some pages optimized for each of the major search engines.

Another helpful trick in researching keywords is to look for common misspellings. There are many websites that have free web based typo search tools that will help you locate the most common words that are misspelled. Once you have indentified these words you should create pages using this misspellings in your Meta tags.

One of the most common research practices is to see what keywords and phrases your top competitors are using. Look for variation, and keywords and phrases you are not using and before you include them in your list of keywords research them via WordTracker and Overture.

Another powerful research tool is your own sites tracking logs. They will show you the exact keyword query used and the search engine that returned the results. When you spot typos make note of then and add them to your research.

Not too long ago a website that had a high volume of daily visitors was seen as King on the internet, but today having a large daily flow of visitors without making any sales, generating new leads or other ecommerce “actions” really means your website is just treading water in the internet marketing pool!

A conversion rate (also known as a metric) is a measurement of actions that a Webmaster wants from a visitor; some examples would be making a sale, generating a sales lead, joining an online community, or other ecommerce website functions.

Your sites conversion rate is the amount of actions from visitors divided by the total amount of visitors. This rate can be calculated from your web stats on weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis.

The typical conversion rate is around .5-8%, and highly successful ecommerce sites can be higher. The most successful websites have their “action” content wrapped around the site in an effort to help induce their visitors into completing the desired actions. Many Webmaster will deploy multiple landing pages optimized for specific keywords or phrases with the action content placed to easily gain a visitors attention.

Knowing how your visitors find your website is valuable information that can be used to fine tune or edit your content to increase your visitors user experience. Everything you need to know can be found in your sites webstats. The most useful information will be found in your keywords, referrers, entry and exit pages. Other useful data is geographical location and time of day.  Once you have a clear picture of how your visitors find your site you will want to examine the amount of time a visitor spent on your site before an action was completed versus the time spent by a visitors who left without completing an action.

Examining your keywords will show you which ones are the most successful, or most commonly used. Referrers are the sites, such as search engines or directory’s that a visitor used to initiate a search using a keyword or phrase. If you find that many visitors left your site from the same exit page without completing an action, you may want to review that particular page for missing or incomplete content or anything that may disrupted the user from completing a desired action.

In the constant quest for higher conversion rates and ROI in general, knowing what your visitors want and delivering that content in a package that is easy to understand and navigate is just a matter of researching and developing your pages to highlight your visitors needs with information that is friendly and trusting. Many successful websites employ surveys or user polls on their site to gather input from visitors on what they are looking for in a product or service, and these techniques when presented in a relaxed and friendly manner help build customer confidence and trust.

Once a successful content formula has been developed, it should be used to create additional keyword dense landing pages optimized for specific search engines and directories that will aid in attracting more visitors to the site.

As I click on google search result, I’m brought to a page and a voice begins “Welcome to super soap dot com.  Super soap is a revolutionary soap that uses nanotechnology to clean one hundred percent of all germs and bacteria and sterilizes any surface to hospital standards….”.   Within just a few short seconds before the reader has had a chance to even scan the page, we’ve captured their attention with a few product highlights.  From here we can go on and detail more of the features of the product to SELL them on the product.  And there are plenty of ways to exploit this approach to your advantage.

You really have the opportunity to create a connection with your website visitor.  Using words like “we” and “our” takes the brief relationship between yourself and them to a further level even on brief visits to a site.

There are some other great techniques that can be employed through audio usage.  One is the use of silence.   By using silence you stop the flow of information to your captive audience for an instant giving what you said a chance to sink in.   This is very effective and helps to really drive home a point.  You can also use phrases like “Let me say this again, you will not find a more effective soap anywhere”.  You see in creating a website audio message, it would be completely appropriate to use everyday conversation.  Everyday conversation uses short to the point sentences that can be much more effective at driving points home.  Some other things to be aware of are you probably want to round off numbers make 14,238 become 14,000 to have it roll of the tongue smoother.   You also can use contractions and simpler words to again keep that connection with your site visitor and have the visit come off more of a friendly conversational chat that a pushy sales pitch.

When you are ready to create your script and get it recorded, take some time to practice reading it.  You may even want to make a point to watch news broadcasts and really focus in on how they are delivering the news.  Delivery is an important aspect to this approach, but remember you can always get a spouse or friend who has a knack for this to help out and if you really want to go all out, you can always outsource this task to a professional speaker.

The power of using audio testimonials should not be undervalued!

You would not believe what a difference 3 easy improvements can make to the bottom line on an affiliate website. 

1. Make sure the focus of your website is correct and that the preferred path you want a visitor to take is evident.  When you look at the whole process of events of a successful interaction with a visitor, they go to your site click whether by means of organic traffic or by paid advertising (Adwords, etc.) and on your site they click on an affiliate link.  This is what you want to happen with every visit.   You hope that they go on to purchase something on the affiliate site.  In order for this to happen you should put clearly display the action wether it be a signup form or a link to click prominently on your site.  It definitely needs to be before the fold where your visitor can see it immediately without scrolling.  Also make sure any adsense advertising is not distracting them, I would recommend a three column layout with navigation manu on the left, your main content in the middle, and then any adsense advertising on the right. 
2. Focus on how you are getting your traffic source.  Why are people coming to your site?  Is it to fix a problem, to satisfy a need, a want?  More specifically look at the keywords a person who is ready to buy is going to use for example if your promoting a debt consolidation product maybe should consider focusing on “debt collectors” since anyone who has or is fearful of debt collectors want to fix their problems now.  Also you need to know what the competition for your affiliate product is doing.   There is no substitute for tools like affiliate elite which systematically break down the competitions activities.  The best thing I like about it is it immediately lists all your competitors and the urls from which they are promoting their products.  There are a lot of software vapor ware downloads out there, but this is not one of them.
3. Engage the user.  When I’m searching around on the internet for something, I usually go to a handful of sites where I either don’t immediately find my information or nothing catches my eye because I see the same basic layouts and sales pitches and nothing jumps out at me.  I two best ways to quickly capture the visitors attention are to either give them a visual or incorporate sounds.  The way to do this is to have a speaker telling them exactly what they need to hear about your product.  This does so many things.  It personalizes their experience, it keeps your lazy visitors who don’t feel like reading your sales pitch on your site, and it almost makes as if you are there in person selling them on your product.  This is so powerful and so underused.  It is also so easy to add audio to your website. 

So you have decided to move on from Adsense revenue and really bump things up a notch with promoting a product as an Affiliate.  Achieving the goal of actually having the user purchase a product can be a whole different challenge than having them just click on an ad.  There are some things I have found