However, what does that mean specifically? We know that doubling conversion does not necessarily mean you have to double your traffic.

It means that you just have to create more lucrative cross-sections or co-occurrence of keywords (or pages) that appeal to your target audience. This feat is easily accomplished with SEO and within the context of your pages using cross-sections of keywords that will draw an audience based on the content and market focus.

This is the principle of funneling, which implies funneling relevant traffic based on “broad match” and “exact match” traffic as a result of information retrieval. What happens next is pure synergy, a person inputs words, search engine identifies patterns and based on indicators of reputation and relevance return a page from a website.

Considering there are millions of ways for each visitor to arrive at the same page or same conclusion, depending on their personal experience or manorisms. Since no two people are alike (although there are common denominators) each inevitably searches their own way.

Also, since most searches are unique (meaning they have never been executed before) that represents a tremendous opportunity for sites that target low hanging fruit (available keywords) while targeting more aggressive key phrases.

Keep in mind that every word when combined with another word is a potential keyphrase. Also, since you have no control over what a person may type in a search engine to find your website, you essentially do your best based on traditional keyword research tools, common sense and other metrics to gauge popularity and anticipated traffic.

However language barriers, personal preferences and other components of distinction can create hot spots as a website can double as a hub or springboard for other useful content. The gist is, by targeting enough low hanging fruit (root keywords within range), you systematically increase the volume of traffic and potential interactions with prospects.

This is the way a website can showcase a stable increase in traffic each month. By using content as spider bait, linking to more relevant pages in the context of each post and targeting non-traditional, less competitive keyword combinations.

Every top 10 ranking you produce is an indicator of your websites strength to search engines. Eventually your pages become powerhouses and funnel tremendous surges of link juice into different areas of the website which continually emerge is unique and uncharacteristic ways.

The conclusion here is to look beyond keyword research and tap into the raw and latent potential of LSI (latent semantic indexing and phrase rank) within each of the pages in your website.

Sitecore is based on the .NET technology. Setting up and deploying Sitecore is quite straightforward and you can get started with creating your new website rightaway. Sitecore is totally committed to the .NET framework and hence provides regular stable releases and updates thus complimenting the latest releases of .NET, Visual Studio, SQL server and Windows server.

One striking feature that you would notice once you have started creating your website with Sitecore is the ability to edit content In-Line. This allows you (or your editor) to browse through the pages of your site, just as a customer or an external user would normally do, and edit content by simply clicking on desired areas. This provides you an instantaneous feedback on the overall appearance and content of the edited area and saves quite a lot of your time. Editing content on one browser window and then testing the results on another seems quite a hassle, does it not?

Sitecore has a rich set of features some of which we shall discuss here. It provides you with a role based authorization scheme for your page content editors to edit parts of the site, based on their respective needs. Design is totally segregated from content and designers get a WYSIWYG environment to effectively create designs and page layouts without having to code. Sitecore claims to increase your page rankings and goal conversions, additionally providing you exhaustive reports on website statistics.

There is also some real good news for advanced developers. Sitecore has Visual Studio integration with intellisense and this enables programmers to thoroughly explore and customize the rich Sitecore API consisting of over more than 1,300 classes and 5,000 methods. It has a pipeline based architecture based on the .NET framework that is both open and extensible. Thus, advanced developers, proficient in Visual Studio can make use of this open architecture to their advantage and customize it to fit the requirements of their organization. They may even add new custom features.

However, it is worthwhile to mention here that mere installation and getting started with any CMS that has an extensive set of features is not just enough. If your content is not professional and well managed, you may get disastrous results. It is worth paying to ensure that enough research has been put to create content that best defines your product and your customer’s requirements. All you need to do now is install your desired CMS and see your sales soar!

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

To get started on writing a few personas, you have to think about your target audience for link building, in the same way that you’d think about it for anything else related to marketing. Who are these people, what are their age groups, what is their “culture”, what will speak to them and open up the connection in a positive manner? If you’re in doubt about your target audience, talk to the owner of the site you’re working on. Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail). Start out by identifying a few different segments of your audience, writing a persona for each. Once you have these, take one and read it until you can get into the mindset of it, and write your link request accordingly. Remember that this persona represents your target link partners, so make use of language and references that this group will respond to, and adjust as needed.

Sample persona

Below is a persona created by one of my link builders for use on a restaurant review site:

Caren is a 43 year old mother of 3. Her children are 15, 17, and 21. Before having children, Caren obtained a degree in elementary education and taught until her second child was born. Since then, she has been a stay at home mom. She has been in charge of cleaning, cooking, carpooling to and from soccer and rugby practices. Her oldest child is attending a university in the city. Her husband is the local family doctor and can still be found making house calls. Caren’s happiness comes from her family and baking. She bakes often and makes the occasional trip into the city to check in on her oldest child.

This persona does make use of some serious specific. However, that’s just so we can get into the mindset of knowing how to approach someone like Caren. If you take the basics, you’ll see our target market for link building here, which is a woman in her 40s who wants a few restaurant suggestions for when she’s in the big city every now and then. We hope to approach the Carens of the world in such a way that they will find it in their hearts to link to our site. Thus, we probably aren’t going to speak to them as if they’re college-age males who are heavily into sports. We also can make more informed decisions on other relevant sites to approach for link building once we’re in Caren’s mindset, as we think about other interests that someone like Caren might have. Once you have the basics (woman in her 40s making a few trips to the big city), you’re well on your way to identifying other types of interests that Caren might have. Armed with this information, your link building efforts should be just the slightest bit easier.

A company should redesign their website for many reasons. For a company the decision to redesign a website may be more compelling than for a personal website or community website. A small company may have budgetary constraints that prevent a redesign of their website. However the increasing role played by online marketing on the success of a business will in most cases justify expenditure.

Some of the reasons a company should redesign their website are quite obvious when you visit the company’s website. Whist some of the reasons may not be as evident. A company that sells services to other businesses will have a different design and lay-out to a company that directly targets end consumers. As such different companies are guided by different factors.

Some of the reasons why a company should redesign their website are discussed below:

Outdated design

A company’s brand is affected by the design of their website. Like with any other things, a website’s design can become outdated with time. The design trends 5 years ago were different to the design trends now. A company with an outdated website will present the wrong image to its prospective e customers who visit the website. A company’s website should reflect a modern design in line with the present times in order to gain a competitive advantage.

The design does not represent your market

A company’s website plays an important role in establishing its brand. When users visit a company’s website they form an impression about the company and its values. If your company’s website does not portray the desired image for your company then it should be redesigned in a way that it does. The design of the website should be based on the expectations of its target audience. Different websites target different customers. The website of a business to business company is guided by different design objectives to a website that sells directly to customers. If your company’s website design does not reflect the needs of your specific market then it probably requires a redesign.

Updating content on the website is not easy

It is more important to update the content on your website today than it has ever been before. The market today is driven by information. It is important for a website to provide up to date information to its customers. It is a common practice today for a company to offer independent information on their website in addition to information about the company and its products. Building an online community around your customers is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website. Companies are increasingly using their website to provide additional information and services that provide added value to their customers and offer a reason to visit their website.

If your company’s website does not allow you to update content easily, then it is time to think seriously about redesigning the website in a way it can be updated with ease. Many powerful content management systems freely available today allow easy updating of websites along with many additional features that can add value to a company’s website.

Lack of interactivity and marketing opportunities

A company’s website should provide a marketing and public relation opportunity. A company’s website should allow the company to interact with existing customers as well as prospective ones. At a most basic level a company’s website should allow it to manage customer requests and also collect information on prospective customers.

Today a company has to rely increasingly on the internet in order to remain competitive. Commercially successful company websites often offer a range of features on their websites that allow them to interact with their customers in addition to information about their products. Companies have successfully used features on their website to encourage participation from customers. These include customer registration and login to access additional services; request a call back option, newsletters, email enquiry form, blog, and forum. Different businesses follow a different strategy based on the market they target.

In most cases the scope of static websites is fairly limited. In order to have a commercially successful website a company needs to adopt well thought of strategy for their website. If your company’s website lacks interactivity and does not present an effective marketing and PR opportunity for the company then it is missing out on opportunities. If the website is scalable then additional features could be integrated without a complete redesign. However if it a static website then the chances are that a complete overhaul and redesign will be required.

The Microsoft adCenter service allows business organizations to manage all their online advertisements as well as their content, form one unified environment. Users can sign up for the service for just $5 and can get started. All they need to do is specify the target audience/market and specify the budget. Microsoft prefers to call this concept, “search advertising”. You need to pay only when a user clicks on your ad while surfing and cost-per-click (CPC) bids start as low as $0.5/click. The Microsoft adCenter service determines how frequently an advertisement is shown by using two similar concepts as used in Google AdWords, pay-per-click (PPC) and click through rate (CTR). Potential advertisers are encouraged by the service to advertise only on searches and write effective advertisements. The Microsoft adCenter allows advertisers to run their ads on specific days of the week. The advertisers also have the option to specify the time of the day during which the ad should run. This intuitive feature ensures that using the Microsoft adCenter service is not only economic but also cost-effective.

The Microsoft adCenter permits the advertisers to target their ads to a given set of demographics. When a user of a certain demographic views the ad, the bid associated with that ad is increased.

The front end provided to the advertisers by Microsoft adCenter is both UI and Web service API based. With the advent of the adCenter service from Microsoft, the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry thus continues and as a matter of fact is good for the end-users.

Competition breeds better products and services.

It is a simple fact that all traffic is not created equal and it is the synergy between the searcher and the searched that determines if you get the thumbs up (in reference to user engagement) or fail to impress your target audience as they slip away (often times never to return again).

There is a remedy however, which involves developing topical relevance with fresh content and cross-linking it with other useful pages (much like Wikipedia). As each page gains a foothold in search engines, this reciprocates back to the homepage and the homepage then redistributes even more relevance throughout the rest of the site. The more pages that appear for a given topic, the stronger relevance score your website has for that topic.

#1 Staying On Topic

Continuity is important for establishing the theme of your site – Aside from inbound links from other sites, design and usability, reputation is important. Based on its reputation (such as referrals from other sites, RSS subscribers, editorial links from trusted sources or word or mouth) each page has the potential to set off a chain reaction and virally spark interest to funnel traffic to your pages.

If your website or blog is not focused however, you will be sending conflicting signals to search engines, who if left to their own demise could devalue intentional areas of interest.

By staying on topic and maintaining a regular posting schedule, your website will benefit as this behavior is one method to fast-track website authority (which is the ultimate SEO goal).

#2 Create Compelling Click-Worthy Headlines

Does your headline make you want to click and read more? - To increase click thru rates in search engines use an appropriate headline – Your page can rank or tank based on this vital piece of information. Not only is your headline your first line of offense in acquiring an “exact match” position in the SERPs (search engine result pages), it also is your ticket to grabbing and maintaining the readers attention right from the start (which will determine the effectiveness of the content that follows).

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/how-to-use-seo-to-increase-website-traffic/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/seo-is-not-the-only-solution/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/seo-is-not-the-only-solution/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:57:19 +0000 Jeffrey Smith http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/?p=281 SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "SEO is Not The Only Solution", url: "http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/small-business-marketing/seo-is-not-the-only-solution/" });]]> Search engine optimization is not the only solution, SEO, like a tool, serves a very specific purpose and function, which is to increase exposure for your website. However, just because you gain exposure and drive traffic to a page or a website, does not ensure success alone.

Factors such as usability (navigation, image placement, font selection, color choice), having a clear call to action, having impeccable content and using the right triggers to engage your target audience are all part of achieving a successful online marketing campaign.

The tendency to rely too heavily on one marketing medium is a crutch that must be balanced and evaluated for its overall performance, it either works or your attachment to it prevents you from letting it go and finding other alternatives.

SEO is inevitably chained to the calculation of relevance and the whims of engineers who program the search engines to return the most relevant results. The parameters are based on the search query and the ability for the search engine to find relevant information on a topic.

As a result, search engines constantly scour the web looking for websites and solutions to quell such inquiries and provide the ideal solution to each proposed impulse. The obvious attraction to search engine traffic is, if you understand what the search engines are looking for, and your content provides that, then you are a likely candidate for high placement and visibility in their index.

The key is, understanding “how to create and position your content” and how this component is entirely up to you. This is where most fail to see how they can take control over search engine positioning. The days of the 5 page website ranking as the most relevant result are coming to a close, if you want the spotlight, you have to earn it with useful information or immense link popularity from a highly trafficked and trusted site to vouch for your pages.

Topical relevance, trust of the domain (how long has it been around, who links to you, who you link to), site architecture, proper titles and tags, proper use of keywords and context and link popularity all comprise relevant factors that have impact.

Although you may not have control of some of these factors, when you start and how you refine your website is still under your control. No amount of SEO is going to make someone purchase a product they don’t need, just like no amount of SEO or keyword positioning is going to appeal to a person who is not interested in the topic.