Best use of a marketing budget of $500
One of the most difficult things to do when starting out in SEO is to determine how to allocate the resources you have to guarantee the best ROI (return on investment). Ecommerce store owners have a harder time of it as they are trying to spread their marketing dollars out across literally hundreds of keywords for all of the products on their stores. Many times clients send us lists of hundreds of keywords and want to know how to best narrow the list down and how to best allocate the resources they have. Here is what we tell them.
1. Narrow your keyword list to 5 keywords. With a budget of $500 per month, it is best to focus on a short list of 5 keywords. You can much easier track your results and get results quicker which will in turn open up your budget to focus on more keywords. To avoid getting a penalty from google you will want to have 5 keywords but only 2-3 urls. This means that you will need to have some of the keywords be variations of the main keyword. First step is to narrow your list to a short list of 20-40 keywords. Organize them by search volume. The second step is to check the all in anchor ranking for all of the 20-40 keywords on your list. For any that you already have an all in anchor ranking in the top 20, then put those on your shortlist of keywords to choose from. If a keyword has an all in anchor ranking in the top 20 it is going to be easier to push it to the top 10 or top 3 in the search engines than a keyword that you are not ranking in the top 100 for according to all in anchor.
2. Article writing. For article writing you can choose to get a few high quality articles from a US writer or a lot more articles from a Philippine writer. My advice is that if you are going to be placing the articles on your website, then always use US writers. If the articles are going to be used for link building and you are not YET a Fortune 5000 company, then Philippine writers are awesome!
3. Article Marketing. Now that you have the articles, what to do with them! My recommendation is that the first place to always start is article marketing. You can create accounts on the article directories or outsource it. There are also some distribution services such as isnare.com and submityourarticle.com that will submit your article over multiple websites. The monthly fee for sites such as these range from a few dollars per article to about $47 per month. You can put a project on odesk.com for someone to submit your articles to the article directories and provide them the article and a list of sites and your work is done!
4. Blog commenting. Although thought of as a spammy link building method by most, when done correctly, blog commenting is one of the best ways to build up a lot of backlinks to your site on unique ips. You can either do the blog commenting yourself or outsource it.
5. Reporting. Before you begin you will either want to run a report on the allinanchor rankings and number of backlinks according to open site explorer or outsource the report.
There you have it! The above is pretty much the exact strategy we recommend and implement for a budget of $500.
Keyword Competition Report
People are asking so we thought we would explain exactly what is included in one of our newest services: Keyword Competition Reports
A keyword competition report is a report that clearly shows you exactly where your site is weak and how you need to improve to dominate the search engines for a specific keyword.
What we do is we analyze your site and compare it against your top 10 competitors for a specific keyword. We take over 20 different factors into consideration and allow you to see how your site stacks up against your competition for each of those 20 factors. Each item that we compare your site with tells us exactly what types of links we need to build to get your site into the #1 position in the search engines.
Have you been building links for a while but feel like you are just not getting anywhere? Have you hired other SEO agencies and are frustrated with the lack of direction and the cookie cutter approach to link building? Would you like to know exactly how many links and the potential cost analysis of what it will take to achieve top rankings? Does your boss need to know exactly how much investment is required before you start to see a return on your search marketing investment? Order one of our basic or advanced keyword competition reports today and stop wasting your money on links that are not helping to improve your sites ranking in the search engines!
Call 760-494-7883 to place your order.
Basic reports are $1000 and Advanced reports are $3500. With the advanced reports we compare your site with 20 of your competitors and analyze with over 40 different factors. We also provide a detailed SEO strategy that you can implement or hire us to implement for you.
Allow 6-8 weeks for report delivery.
How to find the best article marketing sites for your niche!
Go where your customers are! Ever feel like you are spinning your wheels and just hoping and praying that the SEO strategies you are doing are actually working? We already covered that one factor in determining what article directory sites are the best in terms of getting urls indexed quickly, but what if your client wants not only backlinks, but also traffic? How can we determine if a site will also send traffic! One easy way is using Google Adwords Display Network with Managed Placements. Basically you create an ad based on your keywords and main target and then set up specific sites in the display network that you want to test. Start with choosing all of the basic sites you can get content placed on easily such as ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com and squidoo.com. Set your dollar amount per click pretty high so you can get as many impressions and clicks as possible. If budget is a concern, then set the campaign to have a specific start and stop date.
After you have it set up, let it run for a few days or a week or so. Go back and look at the number of impressions and number of clicks. What you are looking for is which sites have a higher click through rate for your specific market. The sites with a higher click through rate are the sites you want to focus on to get your content placed on! If they have a high click through rate for the ads, they will also have a higher click through rate for the articles themselves on the sites as compared to other sites. Some other factors such as layout of the ads and where your links appear in the articles will of course factor, but we are looking at general numbers to compare different sites… not an exact science!
As you are researching the backlink profile of your competitors and as you find more sites, add them to your Google Adwords campaign. Go back each week and see if any of the one’s you have added have a lot of impressions and / or clicks for your target market and then work on focusing on getting links on those sites whether it be from getting a guest blog post placed or even paid advertising.
Have a question or tip? Leave your question below in the comments area and we will do our best to answer it!
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Web 2.0 Blogging Strategy for 2010
Link wheels, web 2.0 sites, Hubpages, Squidoo… all the big craze but what actually works? Some say to use web 2.0 properties as the search engines love them and they get spidered early and often. Others say why bother as you don’t actually own them and your web 2.0 property can get banned and deleted at any time.
When to use them.
Web 2.0 properties have two purposes. Ranking and links. First for ranking. If when you do a search for a long tail keyword and a web 2.0 property shows up in the search results, then that means that there is little to no competition for that keyword and it will be easy for you to also build a web 2.0 property and also get ranked for that keyword. Second for links. There are a lot of tools that allow you to research the backlinks of your competitors. If during this research, you find that your competitors have web 2.0 properties in their backlink profile, then you should too. These are some of the easiest links to go after and most can be gotten in a few hours of work… or less if you outsource it!
How to use them.
First step is to identify the top web 2.0 sites to build links from. The best ones are the ones that get indexed quickly by the search engines. Always remember that if a url is not indexed, then the links don’t count! After you identify which sites are the best, create accounts on them using your keyword as the subdomain. Upload 2-5 articles or blog posts of 100-500 words each. In each article or blog post include 2-5 links to your web properties. It is always better to link out to a variety of web properties versus sending 5 links all to the same domain for example.
So what are the best sites? Based on our 3 months of research we have found that the web 2.0 properties that are getting indexed the fastest are the following:
- Myblogsite.com 100%
- Blog.co.in 100%
- Ugetblog.com 100%
- Wordpress.com 81%
- Blogster.com 80%
- Diarist.com 80%
- Soulcast.com 71%
- Weebly.com 70%
- Bloggels.info 70%
- Bloguni.com 70%
- Gather.com 70%
- Blogspot.com 70%
- Blog.com 61%
- Blogetry.com 60%
- Bravejournal.com 51%
- Spaces.live.com 50%
- Wetpaint.com 50%
- Weblog.com 50%
- Sosblog.com 40%
- Sites.google.com 38%
- Zoomshare.com 38%
- Vox.com 34%
- Tumbrl.com 30%
- Livejournal.com 30%
- Multiply.com 30%
- Typepad.com 20%
- Xanga.com 20%
- Thoughts.com 20%
- Quizilla.com 20%
- Ning.com 20%
- Webs.com 10%
As you can see, the majority of the web 2.0 properties have a less than 70% success rate. So is the statement that the search engines automatically love the web 2.0 properties an accurate one? We think not! For web 2.0 properties to work successfully you will need to go the extra step and promote the RSS feeds and also build links to your web 2.0 properties.
Have another web 2.0 property you would like us to test? Tell us about it in the comments section!
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Article Marketing Strategy for 2010
Recently here at StartRankingNow we have been running a test to see what exactly are the best article directories to submit articles to. There are many sites that will provide a list of the top 10 article directories to submit articles to based on Page Rank, but just because a site has a PR of 4 on their home page, does not mean that it will be valuable or profitable for you to submit your articles there. As we literally submit hundreds of articles per month to the article directories, we have run a test to find out which article directories get indexed by Google the fastest without having to do any external link building.
What we did:
We submitted 100 articles to each of the article directories over a 3 month period. Within 30 days of submitting the articles and the articles being published, we checked all of the submissions to determine if the urls generated by the article submissions were indexed in Google. We gathered the data and determined what percentage of the urls were indexed.
Here are the results:
- Ezinearticles.com 100%
- Buzzle.com 100%
- Goarticles.com 89%
- Articlebase.com 91%
- A1articles.com 100%
- Articleblast.com 90%
- Articlefeeder.com 96%
- Articlerich.com 83%
- Thefreelibrary.com 89%
- Amazines.com 32%
- Articlemonkey.com 30%
- Articlecube.com 35%
- Articlesfreedirectory.com 5%
- Articlesnatch.com 35%
- Articlepool.com 0%
- Ideamarketers 22%
- Ehow.com 40%
- Associatedcontent.com 40%
- Helium.com 40%
- Isnare.com 21%
Always remember to TEST your SEO activities and be sure it works. If your SEO company is submitting to hundreds of article directories but your articles are not getting indexed, then those links don’t count!
Do you know of another article directory we can test? Please let us know!
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SEOQuake Firefox Helps You Pre-Qualify Link Partner Sites in Seconds
For many SEO experts it may seem like their job is never done. This is so true because SEO is constantly evolving and changing in order to ensure that people get the best results possible in their online searches. The nature of Search Engine Optimization is such that any tool that can help speed up any part of the process can save SEO managers hours a day, allowing them to focus on other SEO projects. SEOQuake for Firefox is one of these such tools that no SEO manager should do without. It can help you analyze many SEO parameters literally in seconds.
Search engine optimization is basically the ability to optimize any internet content so that the major search engines can find it and like it enough to post it on the first few pages of their search results. Gaining these listings, organically, without spending thousands of dollars on Adwords costs can be the secret to the long-term success of a website. SEOQuake for Firefox is a tool that can help you analyze potential partner sites and help you compare your site content to your top competitors in seconds. The results can then be used right away or saved for a future date.
Let’s say that you are thinking of paying for a link from another website. You can simply run the SEOQuake tool to pre-qualify that site and see if it will be worth the expense. SEOQuake provides you with a wide range of default parameters such as Google PageRank for the current page, Google Index shows you the number of indexed pages, Google Link gives you the total number of links pointing to the page, and similar parameters for many other search engines. But SEOQuake does not stop there, it also offers you the ability to create custom parameters that you can turn on and off whenever you want to use them. This makes SEOQuake a truly powerful tool for anyone that is trying to maximize their site for SEO.
Here is a specific example of how SEOQuake for Firefox can help you with your SEO. If you kno
w anything about SEO, you know the term keywords. As an SEO manager you spend countless hours researching keywords to find the most profitable and popular ones that consumers use in their searches. SEOQuake has a density tool plug-in that allows the user to see key information about keyword frequency, density and page arrangement so you can compare your site to the top site on a specific Google search. This can give you the opportunity to closely examine how you can improve these parameters on your site which can have dramatic effects on your search engine results.
Having the ability to analyze your competition is a smart way to improve the performance of your site. Like they saying goes, “Why reinvent the wheel?”. If something is working well for another site it certainly should work well for your site. SEOQuake can make a huge impact on your SEO strategy quickly and effectively.
Great SEO Means Diversity
When you are putting together your SEO strategy it is important to understand that one of the most important steps is diversity. This means that not only should you be diversifying the keywords you are writing about, and the url’s you are pointing too, but also the places you are posting your content. The best way to keep track of each of these things is to create a simple Excel spreadsheet listing each article you post, the keywords used, the url’s you are pointing to and the place you are posting the article. This way you can have a clear picture of what you have accomplished and what you need to focus on.
It is very important to use different keywords so that you are maximizing your SEO strategy. This will help make your articles more appealing to the search engines and will help your site show up under many searches instead of just one or two. It is a good idea to use multiple keywords in your SEO strategy because certain keywords will have less competition than others and will move up in the search engine results faster than others. This will help to increase the traffic to your website as quickly as possible. The more traffic you get to your site the more products you will have the opportunity to sell.
Another way to diversify within your SEO plan is to point articles to different pages of your website. The more url’s you can have listed on the search engines the better. As you add content to each of these pages you will see them move higher on the search results. If you make the mistake of having all of your articles point to your home page you will be missing out on an important part of your SEO strategy.
It is also important to remember to post your articles to different sites, blogs and directories. Mixing up where you post your content is just as important as writing interesting content. This will also help your site show up on the search engines and give you exposure to different customers. Think about it, just as some people only use Google to do their internet searches, some people may only use Hubpages or EzineArticles to search for information online. By diversifying where you post your articles you are able to reach many more customers.
It is important to understand that diversity is one of the key ingredients to any great SEO strategy. There are a number of things to remember to diversify: keywords, url’s, and the places you are posting content. Understanding the importance of diversifying your SEO strategy is one of the key steps to your SEO success. It is also important to keep a clear picture of what you are doing and where things are being posted whether you are doing your SEO or if you decide to outsource these tasks. SEO can be time consuming, but it is one of the best ways to get higher rankings on the search engines and increase traffic to your website.
Why Search Engine Optimization is a Must for Your Business
Search engine optimization is understanding how to maximize both your website content and your marketing plan to gain high rankings in the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and now Bing. It is simple, high rankings give you more free exposure to online shoppers and therefore will boost your profits. Many people spend thousands of dollars each month in pay per click advertising when they can reduce these costs by paying a little more attention to SEO. Search engine optimization does take a considerable amount of time to accomplish, which makes it an excellent task to outsource to a reliable company. While you will be paying a fee for these services, in the long run you will save much more money by decreasing or even eliminating your PPC campaigns.
While PPC is a great way to get customers to your website, it can be extremely costly. With a few Search Engine Optimization techniques you can drastically reduce the amount of money you are spending on paid advertising and gain tons of free exposure. When building a Search Engine Optimization plan there are two things to remember. First, quality, unique content is what the search engines are looking for; therefore, this is not an area you want to cut corners. Second, Search Engine Optimization needs to be done at a moderate pace, consistently throughout the entire year. You don’t want to go pay a company to post 5,000 articles and blogs about your company in one week and expect to see amazing results. The search engines will not like this technique and it may even hurt you beyond repair.
With SEO your main goal is to get noticed by the search engines in a “natural” way. Therefore, it is best to post a few articles each week to article directories and blogs in order to build reputable back links to your website. The more unique each back link is the better. However, it is extremely important to understand that the content you are linking to your site needs to be useful. Taking a bunch of poorly written articles and posting them all over the internet will not only get you nowhere with the search engines, but potential customers may actually be turned-off by the lack of quality information about your company. While the main purpose of SEO is to get your site noticed by the search engines, it can also lead potential customers right to your doorstep.
Search Engine Optimization is definitely a task that you do not want to push-off any longer. Defining a weekly strategy is one of the best ways to make sure that you stay on track with your SEO plan. Like we said before, SEO is one of those tasks that needs to be done consistently throughout the entire year in order to see results. If you take this task seriously you will see amazing results which will allow you to minimize, if not eliminate, your huge PPC costs. Even if you choose to outsource these tasks you will still save thousands of dollars a month while increasing the profits of your business. Don’t wait any longer; you need to develop your SEO plan today!
More Tips for Tweeting on Twitter
If you signed up for Twitter and just love sharing things that you have learned that are making your business bigger and better you probably have some of the basics of tweeting down. Maybe you read our post “Tweet, Retweet, Hashtags: The New Language of Social Media” that showed you a few of the basics. If you are finding that Twitter has been an amazing tool for your business and are in need of more, this article will take your tweets to the next level. While tweeting can be a great way to share information you shouldn’t forget that Twitter is a two-way-street and may teach you a few things, too.
A great tool, that isn’t the easiest to find, is Twitter’s advanced search. The advanced search feature can help you find posts about a term, 
a person, a topic, a location or even a certain date. The tool can be found by scrolling to the bottom of any page on Twitter and look for the “Search” link. There is also another link there that lists all the Twitter search operators like “from:” which allows you to find tweets from a specific person or shows you that putting words in quotes to find tweets about a specific term. Advanced search can really help you find information on exactly what you may need help with at the moment you need it.
Another cool feature that is available to Twitter users that also have a Facebook account is the ability to install Twitter on Facebook. This allows you to update your status in one place, instead of two and keep your social media endeavors efficient. All you need to do is go to twitter.com/widgets/facebook and click on the button that says “Install Twitter on Facebook”. You will be taken through a few steps and you can choose to either let Twitter update your Facebook or Facebook update your Twitter status. It is a bit easier to configure your Twitter account to update your Facebook and doing things this way will help you keep your tweets to the 140 character limit.
If you are used to desktop applications like AOL Instant Messenger there is a Twitter application that can be added to your desktop to make tweeting a breeze. Digsby is an application that Windows users can use to view postings from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all your email accounts in a long window that looks like an instant messenger window on steroids. It is a great way to keep track of things without having to sign in to multiple accounts. If you like a larger view you can use an application called TweetDeck which allows you to personalize how you see your tweets and can also be configured to see your Facebook updates and also has a ton of other features.
If you have realized how important social media marketing is to your business, it is important to make the process as efficient as possible, or you can easily find yourself spending all your time tweeting and updating your Facebook account. While these tools can be amazingly beneficial to you, it is a good idea to specify how much time each day you want to dedicate to this form of marketing. Remember, it is very important to utilize multiple marketing techniques for your business and never put all of your eggs in one marketing basket.
Keeping Your Social Media Strategy Professional
For those of us that have Twitter and Facebook accounts it can be a difficult task to determine how to keep things professional if your main focus is to build a strong business network. Even if you start with the intention of keeping things professional, all it takes is one tweet or one photo to transform a professional site into something that some may find a bit unprofessional. We love social media sites because things are so instantaneous, but we forget that a single tweet can generate a rush of replies in mere seconds. So, policing your own accounts can become a full-time job. It is very important to make the purpose of your account clear from the first moment it is activated.
One of the things that can cause an issue on Facebook is the fact that people can tag you in on pictures they post without your approval. Therefore, your profile can be open to risk of unprofessional exposure. It is very important to monitor your Facebook on a daily basis for photos that may not align you as a business professional. All it can take to turn a potential business contact away is an unprofessional photo
that you may not even be aware of.
Facebook has a number of privacy settings that can help you keep things separated. For example you can create a number of different friend lists so that you can have one group for friends, one for family and one for business contacts. This allows you to set up privacy settings for each group. For example, you may want to share photos of your family vacation with your friends and family contacts, but not your professional contacts. There are also settings on Facebook that allow you to remove yourself from public search results. This will help keep your personal information separate from your professional information. It also may be helpful to remove yourself from Google. This can also be done by going to your personal settings page.
There are also settings on Twitter that can help keep your postings private so that only people that you approve of can see them. It is important to understand that once you change this setting it will make any new postings private, but postings made before you changed the setting will still be public.
Doing a little research and taking the time to learn how to safeguard your personal information is a good idea on many levels. It will also help you to separate the information that you want to share with your family and friends from that which you want to share with your professional contacts. These things will help you to keep a professional rapport with your professional contacts while still sharing photos of your vacations with your family and friends. This will help you keep things professional with your professional contacts and they will not be distracted by personal information. Social media sites can be a great benefit to your business if you just take a few precautions.
