If you want to become a truck
driver and enter the transportation industry, there are
several requirements that you must fulfill. A lot of companies
will pay for your training but you need to know what may be
expected of you. Most Trucking Companies will ask that you are
at least 21 years of age for interstate driving or 18 years old
for intrastate driving. They also require you to pass the DOT
physical exam, a drug test screen exam and ask that you posses a
valid driver license issued in the state in which you live. But
the most universal requirement of them all is the Commercial
Driver License (CDL). If you do not have this permit you can not
drive trucks of more than 26,000 lbs hauling capacity. Even if
you have experience on the transportation business you must have
this permit.
The CDL test is divided in two sections: the General Knowledge
Test and the Road Driving Test. The first part is a written test
which includes subjects like endorsements, air brakes, cargo
vehicles, combination vehicles, hazardous materials, passenger
vehicles, tank vehicles, school bus endorsement and doubles and
triples.
The second part is the driving test which includes: pre-trip
inspection and on the road driving skills. There are some
practical techniques that you can practice that will help you to
prepare to pass the CDL test. First, establish a study schedule.
This allows you to maximize your studying time. A good technique
for this is to study one hour before work and then one hour
after work but if you do not work yet the best moment to study
is in the morning when your mind is fresh. Later, do a review in
the afternoon and quiz yourself. It is best that you not study
very late at night as you will not retain the information as
well. Just do not wait to study until the last moment! You can
not rush memory skills. It takes time and dedication.
After you get your CDL and are ready to work, there are other
requirements/endorsements that you may be required to pass. This
depends on the kind of truck that you are going to drive, or the
kind of job you are going to do.
One common requirement is the airbrakes endorsement which is
required for people who are going to operate a vehicle with
airbrakes, which may include buses and/or trailers. Hazardous
material endorsements (required to operate trucks that transport
hazmat) are also very common. For this endorsement you must know
all the rules and regulations about the transportation of this
freight. Passenger endorsement is necessary to drive vehicles
designed to move 16 or more people including the driver but most
truck drivers will probably not be required to pass this.
Another is cargo endorsement for people interested in hauling
cargo. This mainly covers various safety rules. There is also a
combination vehicle endorsement which is required for people who
are going to drive vehicles such like tractors and trailers.
Truck drivers may also be required to pass doubles and triple
endorsements (to pull two or three trailer combinations, it also
requires special skills) and tank vehicle endorsement (required
for hauling liquids, this requires special training because the
center of gravity and the movement of the liquid may cause a
roll over more easy than other vehicles).
Visit http://www.us-truck-driving-schools.com and submit your
contact information to Trucking Schools all over the US. We
offer CDL Trainingand Information.
Initially, when the internet was in its infancy, webmasters used links as a way to complement the content of their website and to help their visitors find information. As the importance of links increased, the focus shifted away from helping the visitor to helping the webmaster.
This came about as a result of the Grandaddy of all search engines Google begun to implement its concept of “Page Rank” to classify websites in terms of their importance and perceived authority. Essentially Google defined links from any given website as a vote or endorsement of the site pointed to - the more significant the originating site, the more significant the endorsement. This in turn affects search engine results position as Google’s ranking algorithm gives significant weighting to this ratio.
To webmasters in search of ever more traffic, Page Rank or “PR” thus became an all important factor in choosing link partners, with the original purpose for linking getting lost in the stampede – helping your visitors navigate the net more easily.
Linking to other websites is nonetheless critical to any site, and crucial to a new site, which will be hard pressed to find any traffic at all. There are two basic reasons that a website will seek out link partners:
To increase traffic – tap into the existing traffic of the site the link comes from.
To improve search engine exposure – links from high quality sites will pass on page rank and therefore search engine results position –“SERP” - for specific keywords to the site linked to.
Obtaining Traffic from the inbound/backlink
Your new website will have a task to obtain traffic as it will be some time before the search engines index it and include it in their search databases. Therefore you will have to find other ways to give your website the exposure it requires to generate traffic.
One way is to “ borrow” the traffic from existing sites. If you already have an established website, this would be easy – simply put a link on your old site to your new one. However, if you are just starting out, or your existing site does not complement your new one because it is in a completely different category, you will need to seek out other sites that might agree to carry your link. In this way, you can tap into their existing traffic.
To improve search engine exposure
Search Engines especially Google place great stock by the incoming links that a website has. As explained above, these incoming or backlinks are an endorsement or vote for one site by another. Google considers them a recommendation of one site – carrying the outbound link – for the other.
When a website links to another, it passes on some of its Page Rank (without losing any itself). This boosts the PR of the website with the backlink, improving its search position. This in turn increases the chances of the website being found in a search for a particular keyword/phrase and obtaining free targeted traffic.
How to Link
If you are convinced about the benefits of linking, the question in your mind must be
- “Yes, but how do I go about obtaining incoming or backlinks?”.
There are various ways you can go about this, depending on whether you are seeking pure backlinks - the best kind; or whether you are prepared to settle for reciprocal links – the most common; or whether you want to do someone a favor and give them free publicity by unilaterally placing an outbound link on your site without one in return – the easiest to do – just to it.
One Way Backlinks
A one way backlink can only be obtained if there is website that carries your link without one in return. This happens when your site is linked in an article, directory, by request, or cited as an authority or resource site by another due to its superior content.
Content
When a website has fresh, unique, informative and interesting content, when it is a recognized resource in as given area, other sites will naturally link to it if only to raise the profile of their own. For you as the webmaster, there is the double bonus of not having to communicate with the linking site. In practice, the context in which your link is carried would in all likelihood be complimentary to you, further raising your profile.
The search engines in order to improve the relevance of their SERPs are constantly on the lookout for such sites. Websites that achieve consistently high search positions do so because of the content aspect of their sites.
Articles
Writing and syndicating articles is probably the most effective way to obtain one way inbound links. In recent months this has become all the rage as blogging has taken on force of its own. The idea behind all this frenzied literary activity is not a new enlightenment, but the opportunity for people like you to plaster their website links in as many places as possible. One guy claimed to have had an article he wrote carried by 17000 websites, ezines, article directories etc. This would have greatly boosted his “link popularity”, organic targeted traffic, and overall business prospects – assume just 1% of the visitors and readers of all those websites and ezines clicked on his link – lots of traffic!
Directories
These days there are lots and lots of website directories on every theme imaginable. While they vary in the way they operate, they all have the effect of creating one way incoming links to your site, which as we have seen is both a source of direct organic traffic as well as a boon to your search engine defined link popularity.
The more significant the directory the more beneficial the link from them will be. A basic objective for seasoned webmasters is to get their sites indexed by and included in the DMOZ, and Yahoo! directories. These are the two major online website directories, and inclusion in either would be of greater benefit than inclusion in many of the smaller ones.
Request
These days, most webmasters will only consider a reciprocal link exchange. However, there are still a few webmasters who would consider a one way outbound link if they considered it beneficial to their own visitors, depending on the nature of their website. These will typically be personalized sites, intranets, or non- directory information sources.
Peruse such sites carefully to assess fit, and if satisfied that the website complements your own, contact the webmaster as politely as possible and request that they carry your link as well. Invite them to visit your site to make their own assessment, and do not be put off if they request a reciprocal link in return. However you will get the occasional webmaster who will not object to a one way link. Give it a shot – what’s to lose?
Reciprocal Links
As the term suggests, reciprocal links are a mutual exchange of links with another website. They constitute the vast majority of links found on the internet, and are established by mutual arrangement.
“So how do I get websites to link with me?”
Identifying Link Partners
The first thing is to identify websites that would make suitable link partners. These are sites that complement your own, and therefore have a similar visitor profile to the type you are looking for. For instance a website selling health food might link up with a website about physical fitness. Be creative about your choices; set up a spread sheet to keep track of your approaches.
Visit the top 10 or 20 sites ranked in Google and Yahoo! for your keywords and do some research on their link partners. You will find not only do they have several link partners, but partners that are quality sites for their content, linking strategy, aesthetic appeal and so on. These are the sites you should target for a link exchange request. Note: The major search engines are reducing the number of links they’ll show for each site, to cut down on search engine spamming. You may thus find a specialized tool is necessary. A good one for his purpose would be SEO Elite which is a complete reciprocal links exchange management tool.
Assess the sites you short-list for their relevance and complementarities to your own. Ensure that they are quality sites (if they are link partners of the top ten sites in your niche they generally will be, but take nothing for granted).
Assess them for:
Linking Website - this is the specific website linking to the rival websites in your niche that you are benchmarking. In order to find all of the websites that link to them go to Google and enter this search criteria: link:www.targetedwebsite.com. Once you do this Google will return a list of websites that link to www.targetedwebsite.com. You will get a larger list by going to Yahoo! and entering link:http://www.targetedwebsite.com. Note: that for Yahoo you must include http://
Anchor Text used - is the actual text used within the link, linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text in the following link would be “health food”. Health food website.
Page Rank - is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking to www.targetedwebsite.com. In order to see the Google Page Rank, you’ll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from: http://toolbar.google.com
Link Popularity - is the number of links that are pointing to each of the webpages pointing to www.targetedwebsite.com. The more the
merrier. Go to a website like http://www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link popularity quickly and comprehensively.
Page Title - is the title of the page that is linking to www.targetedwebsite.com. Does it contain the main keyword(s) for your niche? If so, you should bookmark the url (web address) of those pages. You’ll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
* Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.
Number of Outbound Links– is the number of links located on the webpage linking to www.targetedwebsite.com. The fewer links there are located on the page, the more a link from them would increase your ranking.
Once we’ve collected all of the information, we now can see www.targetedwebsite.com’s linking strategy. We’ll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the main keywords/phrases in the page title, and the percentage of websites that contain the main keywords in the actual anchor text linking to www.targetedwebsite.com.
You’ll have to do this for the top 10-20 websites in your keyword niche in order to properly establish the most beneficial websites to seek link exchanges with.
The most beneficial sites will be those that:
a) Allow you to specify the anchor text that will be used in their link to your website.
b) Websites with a PR OF 4 or more – don’t get too hung up on page rank though.
c) Websites that will preferably carry your link in a relevant page. Failing that, a website that has a well-organized links page with a visible and hopefully prominent link in the navigation bar, so that visitors can find it easily.
d) Should the website use a special links page, then ensure that it carries no more than 30 links, otherwise the PR benefit from that links page will be so diluted as make it worthless. Also, there’ll be too many links competing with yours to get any significant traffic boost.
Making Your Link Request
Now that you have established the websites you want to link with, you need go out and actually ask them. How you do this will determine whether your linking campaign will be effective or not; it would be a great pity to do all the work above only to mess it up with a shoddy links exchange request.
Firstly, websites that are worth linking to receive hundreds of link requests. In order to get your request any attention, prepare well so that it stands out from the crowd. You want to show the webmaster that you have taken the time to peruse his website and that your links exchange request is well considered. You need to convince him/her that your website would make a good fit with their own, that it is interesting, and his/her own visitors would find it useful and beneficial. You also want to make it as easy as possible for them to link up with your site.
When you write the links exchange request letter, personalize it by using the webmaster’s first name if you can find it on his/her site, make sure you have specified the website’s name, and note and comply with any instructions the website may have for exchanging links e.g. a web-based form, a code to cut and paste on to your site and so on. Failing to do so would not just be irritating; it shows that you have not really browsed the site.
Be creative and bold with your email subject header. Being timid and using a generic subject header like “Link Request” will probably see your email deleted unread. Explicitly state which page you’d like your link carried on and why. Oftentimes, interestingly, you’ll get your links request approved without a reciprocal link exchange. Some webmasters will consider either that it may not make sense for them to have their link on your site, or that your site is a valuable enough addition to their site without a link in return. Most times though, a reciprocal exchange will result.
Do not balk at approaching your competitors. Since no two business entities are identical, it is possible for competing websites to carry each others links and still benefit from the total traffic carried by all. Imagine sites that sell unique and therefore hard to find gift items. While obvious competitors, if a surfer fails to find what they’re looking for on one site, they may find it on the other, and vice-versa.
Page Rank
A word about Page Rank. PR is a measure of a website’s significance derived and used by certain search engines chiefly Google. While a positive indicator, you should not get too hung up on it when identifying link partners.PR is gained and lost often (every 3 months or so) so current PR is no indicator of future trends. Further, PR is largely an indicator of link popularity, is obscure in its derivation, and does not tell you how suitable a website is as a link partner. Use it as an indicative measure rather than a deciding factor.
Google PR increases as your link popularity does. Building links with quality websites many of which will have low PR initially, but websites that have the type of traffic your site needs will invariably lead to a higher PR evetually.
Enjoy your Link Building.
Al Bert is the owner of http://seoelite.mywebhut.com Visit his website to discover the best link exchange management software.
Networking with others is very important. Getting good contacts will increase your companies chances at obtaining some great, pre-qualified referrals.
I have not heard of one company online that has ever made it on it’s own without any outside help. Sharing business ideas with others increases your chances at success.
Yahoo Inc, a household name, owes part of it’s online success to small business entrepreneurs who loved to talk about Yahoo within their website. If you where to take a look at yahoos link popularity, you would see incoming links within the millions. Getting people to talk about your business should be looked at, as something fun, creative, and inspiring to do.
The universe and all it’s energy is straight forward, “what goes around, comes around”. Same applies online.
Let’s see how we can implement this on the web…
There are many ways to spread good fortune on the web. For instance, try complimenting people on their website and let them know that you enjoy visiting their site. This usually gets a really good response and it is a great way to start a business conversation.
Get to know the people who own popular websites. They usually hold the doorways to online treasures. We all search online, some of us daily, some of us once in a while. We all find different things. You can’t be expected to find them all, the key is to find useful tools on your own to share with others and they will do the same for you.
With over 4-6 billion websites out there and growing rapidly, it’s really hard to keep up with every new idea and/or group out there. By positioning yourself with key people, you will subject yourself to new ventures, different openings, and better contacts.
Popular web sites love to talk about their website, try and brain storm some ideas on how you can create new resources for your site by helping others to promote theirs. Find something related and useful for your visitors, add it to your site and then tell the people who provided the resource, they will really appreciate you for it.
It really works..
There’s no better feeling then when someone takes the time out of their busy schedule to email me and let me know that my latest article will be featured within their newsletter this week!
What Else Can You Do???
If you’ve followed some of my articles, you would have read me say before, “increase the content on your site, daily”. Here are a few web marketing methods that you can not only increase your content but, help others as well…
How Can You Help Others?
* Listing their business on your site * writing an article about them * featuring their products * adding their banner * writing a review and linking to them * collecting great tools online * featuring writers from all over the world * starting online contests * hosting a daily motivational thought * creating free graphics for others * featuring “a site of the day”
These are only some of the things you can do for others. Whatever it is, it should be related to what you do.
Work With Competitors Away From Your Market Reach:
Don’t be afraid to hook up with your competitors from across the globe.
Here is one method you can gain major traffic for your web site by working with competitors that are out of your market reach…
Try featuring companies in Australia while you operate in Canada. Your website will get Canadian visitors from their site and vice-versa. The immediate results aren’t what matter, it’s when the loop starts to form to each others search engine results. Their web site will eventually get listed in Canadian search engine results and vice-versa. By targeting the same field or profession, both websites can refer the right people to suit their area.
Once the Australian website starts to attract Canadian visitors from other search engine listings than your own, it will then start to refer Canadian visitors that you didn’t have to go get.
Don’t be afraid to expand you thoughts to neighboring countries, they too can prosper without ever harming you as their competitor.
I hope this opens your mind to competitors and helping others!
One of the keys to a profitable web site is analyzing your hits
to visitor ratio. What does it mean if you have a low hit to
visitor ratio? This article provides the answer
No Depth
An effective means for analyzing web site traffic is to look at
the number of hits per visitor for a time period. To do this,
you simply divide the number of hits by the number of visitors
for the time period in question. Time periods can be a day,
week, month or quarter of a year. Don’t look at any time smaller
than a day as the data may not create an accurate picture of the
traffic.
Assume you have the best damn dang hair net site on the net. You
have over 1,000 hair nets of every variation, color, material
and weave. For those of you not “in the know”, a hair net is one
of those things people working in fast food places have to wear.
I have no idea why, but I am sure there was a lawsuit once that
makes complete and total sense.
Anyway, a site with over 1,000 hair nets should have a massive
number of pages. Logically, every visitor to the site should
click through more than a few pages while looking for the
perfect specimen. Unfortunately, you find the server stats tell
a different story.
In reviewing server stats, you learn that on average the site
receives 5,000 visitors a day and 10,000 hits. Dividing hits by
visitors, you discover to your dismay each visitor is looking at
only two pages on average. This information is supported by the
fact you’re only averaging a few sales a day. Aye, Carumba!
There are a few possible reasons for this poor performance:
1. Slow Site: A site with 1,000 products is going to require a
very careful database design. I would guess 70 percent of
database sites are fatally slow. By fatally, I mean they load so
slowly that most dial-up users can’t navigate in the site. We
are talking 30 to 40 second page load times. If you have this
problem, you are immediately losing the 45 percent of people
using dial-up.
2. Click Fraud: If you are running a PPC campaign, you must
track the clicks in the campaign. A low hit to visitor ratio can
often mean your PPC ads are being artificially clicked as such
clickers rarely venture into the internal pages of a site.
3. Poor Advertising: This one is purely your fault. Your
advertising must focus on keywords that are relevant to your
site. If you are selling hair nets, don’t place ads under “hair
styling.” If you do, people will click your ad, see hair nets
and immediately leave. Know your limitations!
There can be a variety of reasons for low hit to visitor ratios.
More often than not, slow load times are the answer. If the site
is fast, then you need to dig deeper so you can figure out a way
to make your visitors do the same.
Building a successful web site is a process that works best when done in a deliberate, logical step-by-step manner. The first step is to build a top quality web site that is packed with interesting and useful content.
Next, you need to submit your site to the major directories and begin a well thought out advertising campaign.
But the single most important step is getting a top ranking in the major search engines, most notably Google and MSN.
When ranking the sites in their index, Google places a very high importance on “link popularity”, that is the sites that have the most high-quality incoming links generally rank higher in Google. Getting links to your site from other sites is an absolute must for a top ranking in Google and the other top search engines (top 10 at a minimum).
The question that you may be asking is “How do I get these links?”. There are many ways to attain links to your web site, but it can be very difficult for new sites to get other sites to link to them.
There’s a simple way to jump-start the process however. It’s called “reciprocal linking”. This is how it works: You search for sites that are in the same general topic area as yours (but not sites that compete directly). After you find a list of suitable link exchange partners, you place a link to their site on your site. Then you email the webmasters of the other sites and ask for a link exchange.
Do not send generic copies of the same email to each webmaster however. Rather, take a few minutes to browse each site. Then write a personalized email to the webmaster explaining what you liked about the site (be specific) and why you think a link exchange would benefit both parties.
Be sure to address the webmaster by name if at all possible. Also, be sure to give him your link exchange information. This should include the title of your site, a short description, and the URL that you want his site to link to (this doesn’t have to be the home page). And be sure to include the URL of the page that already has his reciprocal link on it.
After you have sent the emails, expect a few rejections for various reasons. This is normal and expected so don’t be at all discouraged. You will also quickly get a few emails from webmasters accepting your offer. Verify that your reciprocal link is in fact on their sites and then send a “thank you” email.
A great way to find potential link partners is to do a Google search on one of your main keywords or phrases. You will most likely have many pages of sites listed in the search results.
Here is a simple way to find out which of these sites actively exchange links: Go to the bottom of the Google search results page. Click on “Search within results”. In the text box type in “Add URL”. This will return only the sites in your original search results listings that have an “Add URL” link on their web site. You can also do a search for “link exchange”.
If you aggressively pursue link exchanges on a regular basis, within a few short months you’ll have built up good rankings in the search engines with a steady flow of targeted traffic to your web site!
About The Author
Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Webmaster Resources and the author of “Super Webmaster SEO Toolkit” which gives step by-step instructions for getting a top 10 listing in Google & Yahoo. Visit his web site: http://www.rlrouse.com/SEO.html
It is worth looking at some values and strengths of a few technical and promotional elements of your website that will help you to lay a foundation in building profitable online success. Once you have decided on your market and have chosen a relevant domain name for your online business, you need simple and effective tools and methods to put and keep your business on a profitable track. Ideally you will want to make use of easy-to-use methods for your business that keeps the visitors coming to your website and deliver results. Lets look at a few practical ideas.
When a visitor comes to your website you have to get their follow-up information by collecting their email address. It is important to ‘enable’ your web site to automatically deliver quality content to visitors and allow you to follow up with extra information when necessary. Top marketers agree that this forms a large percentage of their online success. How do you do this? You create forms on your web pages, giving visitors the chance to subscribe to your opt-in list, newsletter or report. This allows you to introduce your service and offer something valuable in order to build relationship. Email follow-up through autoresponders is totally free and an absolute necessity for implementing. All you need to do is integrate the autoresponder into your web site via a form so that you can pre-load it with your newsletters. Subscribers can now begin to see you as an expert on the subject and look to you for the solutions that your business is already offering.
Once your newsletter is up and running, you can use these very same tips and ideas you share with your subscribers and also write a weekly article about your product or service, and then submit it to ezines online. This is very easy to do and will have great response for your business. There are tens of thousands of ezine publishers online that needs good content, and will give you valuable exposure for your business. You will have many sites linking to your site and people will be able to read what your business is about and visit your website. Then they will also be able to subscribe to your newsletter which provides even more information about your product or service.
Each article has got a resource box at the bottom which allows visitors to visit your web site. Write your 4 to 6 line resource box by viewing some samples online and making up your own. Finding details of ezine publishers can quite easily be done through looking up in search engines.
Let’s go a step further and look at newspaper classifieds. By using little snippets of ideas from your newsletters and articles, you can come up with short eye catching promotional messages to use in newspaper classifieds. There are newspaper companies that offer state wide and nation wide advertising in their papers, often covering readership in excess of 2 to 3 million. By placing 10-15 word tiny classified ads all over the globe can dramatically increase your website traffic. When placing these ads, you should try to purely generate leads to your web site for later follow up, and not try to make a sale directly from your ad. You would want to get your leads to your web site first from where they can subscribe to your automated content, which will incorporate your selling elements.
Lastly lets consider the eye opener an affiliate program can have for your business. With the right product or service it is by far the hottest way of building your business and customer base. Submit your program to affiliate directories across the web. You’ll have affiliates making sales for you and not paying a cent in advertising until you’ve made the sale! Your advertising will be covered by your affiliates, and you can concentrate on providing customer service and continue follow-up with your increasing customer base through newsletter delivery and other product offers. By becoming familiar with how important it is to stay relevant in implementing these factors will benefit your business and you will find that you’ll be achieving better results.
Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the
experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until
at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s
visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you
cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and
beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it’s pretty obvious
that high search engine rankings still are the
be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning
to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are
accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what
are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local
marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this
time?
‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the
professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers
up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words
themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this
in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’
has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double
that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a
word like ‘shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product
you might be selling, but then –luckily- there are not as many
SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.
So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies?
Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital
elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising
strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way
and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to
describe your business, it´s time to integrate everything yet
again and focus on your site´s usability and accessibility.
Usability
What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be
navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising
efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does
your site still provide valuable information to your human
visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is
key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights
on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense.
“Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal
being to intertwine search with a consumer’s daily activity. As
clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the
marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will
continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data
currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is
totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies
fail simply on wording and text writing.
It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to
your site are not going to be impressed by what they read.
Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past
and using common sense, neutral language will open up the
content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a
copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your
site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools
you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make
sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool
(free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance
copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered; http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.
There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you
quite a good insight into your content. If you think your
content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to
match content and keywords.
Accessibility Accessibility of sites is way more of a
technological issue. You will have what is generally considered
an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers.
Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible
perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware
of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching
between your content and the search engines. The various
limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and
Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during
this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx
browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS,
images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are
various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text,
JavaScript through the
There are two good ways you can check how accessible your
website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can
successfully access all your pages and download the Opera
browser and follow their instructions to enhanced accessibility.
Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’
guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying
coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other
languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are
not excluded from your site because of some silly technical
hiccups. Where an SEO says he’s making all the difference for
his clients is that he has numerous checklists to make sure your
business in whatever location or segment it is, is optimised. He
likely will market his services saying that he will make your
site more localised than your competition.
There is a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use here and
it remains to be seen whether better accessible local business
site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher
Return on Investment numbers. Local search appears to be
performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment
markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn’t have (or probably
need) a Web site so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the
value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results
from comparable segments to the one you are in!
All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher
are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy,
prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce,
communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can
be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. It is not deemed
100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist
consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and
programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are
likely issues you’ve comply with for years already, but it’s
always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you
that edge over the competition you need!
Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use
hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make
sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your
business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a
hyperlink is removed from the text –something that easily
happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in
the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple
hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such
as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.
Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets
the standard and you can run your site through their validator
tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to get it analysed to see if
search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your
content/page into sections before indexing it – e.g. header,
metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has
difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of
the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out and
optimise!
When many of my clients first come to me for coaching, they share that one of their biggest challenges is getting enough visitors to their site. Attracting traffic isn’t a cut and dry process — there isn’t one perfect way to do it. But there are many ways that, when used collaboratively, will build you a nice stream of visitors.
To get your marketing wheels turning, check out these 15 simple ways to attract new visitors to your site. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it will give you several fresh ideas to try.
Now, remember — you don’t want to expel effort in getting just anyone to visit your site. You only want people who would likely be interested in what you have to offer. So before you read on, answer this question:
“WHO are your target clients or customers?”
Are they men, women, or both? Do they own a certain type of business or work in a certain profession? Are they young, old, or middle aged? Are they left handed? Do they own pets? Can they juggle?
I hope you see where I’m going here. The more you know about your ideal clients/customers, the better you’ll know where and how to find them .
So … keep that information in mind as you consider these traffic-building tactics:
___ 1. Search Engines and Directories
Why not be in front of people who are actually searching for your product or service? Get your site listed in the top search engines by either learning about this topic on your own or investing in assistance. Because there is A LOT to learn and the rules keep changing all the time, this is an area I advise you get some help in. (I recommend my friend Marc Harty at http://www.SearchEnginePatrol.com.)
___ 2. Pay-per-Click Directories
In pay-per-click deals, you only pay for how many people actually CLICK on your ad to get to your Web site. Services such as Overture (http://www.overture.com/) and Google AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/) let you bid on how much you’d like to pay per click, and many times your listings appear above the regular listings in the major search engines. (To learn more, see my article, “Pay Per Click: What’s It All About ?” at http://www.ezinequeen.com/payclick.htm.)
___ 3. Your Own E-zine
If you publish your own e-zine, you already have a warm pool of prospects who are likely interested in what you have to offer. Give them a reason to visit (or re-visit) your site by adding new content, giving away a free report or e-book, or offering a special subscriber-only promotion on your products and services. (To learn more about publishing your own e-zine, sign up for one of my FREE monthly teleclasses at http://www.ezine-queen.com/teleclass.htm)
___ 4. Your Articles in Other E-zines and at Other Web Sites
This has been one of my most successful traffic-building tactics. There are thousands of online publishers who would like to use YOUR articles in their e-zines and on their Web sites! Find them via the Directory of E-zines (http://www.1automationwiz.com/app/aftrack.asp?AFID=44985) (my favorite) or search for Web sites that accept “free content” submissions. Be sure to add an attention-getting blurb at the end of your article that gives the reader a reason to visit your site ASAP. (To learn how to do this, see my article “Recycle Your Articles and Gain Tons of New Subscribers” at http://www.ezinequeen.com/recycle.htm.)
___ 5. Ads in Other E-zines
Identify other e-zines whose readership matches your target market. Search the Directory of E-zines (http://www.1automationwiz.com/app/aftrack.asp?AFID=44985) and the Web. Find out if the e-zines accept advertising and learn what their rates are. Run at least three ads in a row, preferably five to seven, to get an accurate representation of how the ad pulls. Use an ad-tracking program to determine how many clicks each ad is getting. My shopping cart program has this built in, but if you’re looking for a separate ad tracking service at a low cost, AdMinder is a good one. (http://www.adminder.com/go.cgi?id=akb1)
___ 6. Ads on Other Web Sites
Research other Web sites where your target market visits and inquire about advertising. Have ready both text ads and banner ads of different sizes. (For examples of banner sizes, see some of the banner ads I provide to my E-zine Queen Affiliates at http://www.ezinequeen.com/graphics.htm)
___ 7. Online Forums and Discussion Groups
Where do your prospective clients and customers hang out online? What organizations do they belong to? Identify popular forums and discussion groups that are related to your subject area and where prospects in your target market may be lurking. You’ll find more than you ever knew existed just by doing a few online searches. Don’t be self-promotional in your postings — be helpful and answer questions as related to your area of expertise. Let your value shine through and include your Web site address underneath your name.
TO BE CONTINUED …
(c) 2003 Alexandria K. Brown
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexandria K. Brown, “The E-zine Queen,” is author of the award-winning manual, “Boost Business With Your Own E-zine.” To learn more about her book and sign up for more FREE tips like these, visit her site at http://EzineQueenTutorial.com/
Some people have done a lot online but failed. A man started his first site, it failed. He started the second site, then third, and fourth, and fifth—all failing. I looked at his failed sites and I knew from experience why they failed. Nothing is wrong with the products, he just couldn’t secure people to buy.
There are two things to online business success: product and people. That is, develop a product and find people to buy.
The product is easier to get. To get a product, simply become a consultant. That is, you have to research and teach others. It could be an affiliate product or one you created, let it be something you have passion for so that you can be able to teach. But because the average human being is too dumb to understand, they will want to know more, hence you help by selling them solution.
Getting people to buy the product is the difficult part. That is why so many sites fail. You see, no matter how awesome your product is, if people cannot find your site, it will fail. But if you have traffic, no matter how stupid your product is, people will buy.
Then how does one get targeted traffic? Listen to this: traffic is not a transaction, it is a process. Process simply means learning. If you cannot trade with the trend and learn traffic tricks, methods, and new techniques, you will never make money online.
The report “Why your site is not making sales” looks at the merit and demerit of traffic techniques like link exchange, submitting articles, pay-per-click, search engines, email marketing, autoresponders, forum posting, popups, offering freebies, classified ads, banner ads, blogs, targeted hits, plus others, and declared “Traffic generating is full of confusion, guesswork, and scam. It is not ridiculously simple.”
The report, which you can download free at http://superriches.com, made it clear that “You will not get traffic while sitting on your pajamas, feet up on your desk, sipping your coffee. You need to work very hard.” It is not really hard work but smart work. Avoid traffic fraud like linking farms, automated link exchanges, and linking software. And instead chase cheap holistic traffic methods that will bring not just visitors but customers.
If the learning never stops, the traffic will never stop. You just have to be a student for life.