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Search Engine and Promotional Tools and
Tips:
10 Secrets for a Successful Web Site and enjoying a 10% - 350%
increased profits
It's a jungle out there.
Web site owners these days find themselves in a very competitive
situation. Daily our customers call and ask us what the can do to
either generate more traffic for themselves or how to rank higher in
the search engines.
Because of the
overwhelming demand for this information these are the tactics
and tip we have used to make this site, as well as many of our
customers' sites highly successful:
The Golden Rules of
Owning a Successful Web Site:
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Search Engine
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Pick the
right domain
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Design Your
Site Right
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Meta Tags
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Submit your
site frequently
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Review your Rankings
Daily
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Website
Statistics- Not just a counter
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Newsletters: Selling to who you know
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Google AdWords
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Accept Credit
Cards
We now offer these tools
as part of our hosting packages. These tools, over a $750 value
if you purchased separately, give your website a competitive advantage
over your competition. Because we recognize that if your site is
successful, coupled with outstanding customer support, you will keep
your web site active, we have designed our hosting packages to be the
most complete web hosting solution available. If you already
have a website does your current hosting company provide you with
advice and tools to help you have a successful site?
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Search Engines: No matter how much
paid for advertising you may choose to do, undeniably search engines
have the ability to drive the best leads to your site and best of
all if you do it right it's free. With 80% of all website traffic
coming from search engines is it very important for any website that
wish to have a successful web presence to try and get into the top
30 of at least one of the major search engines.
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Pick the right domain-The
most important thing you can do for yourself is to pick a domain
name that is rich in Keywords. Search Engines love these type
domains. Look at the site you are visiting, the original reason for
this domain's purchase was to pick a domain that had the phrase "web
hosting" first. As a company we have over 40 different keyword rich
domains, which help us place our site so that people can find us.
Click here
to read our in depth how to pick a killer domain name.
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Design Your Site Right-
Believe it or not the way you design your site has a lot to do with
how well you page ranks with the search engines. We have seen some
great site designs, but the sites rank poorly with the search
engines. Take this site for example. There are far better designs we
could come up with for this site however, because we designed it
with the search engines in mind, we had to forgo on some of the more
fancy options available, such as a flash movie or an intro page with
just a picture on it. Study our home page, it is rich in keywords,
rich in text and makes sure a search engine understands what our
site is about. Unfortunately search engines cannot read the contents
of a picture. You can put extra coding on the picture but it does
not count as much as true actual text.
Avoid frames at all
costs. They are too difficult to compensate for, especially for a
search engine novice. Avoid splash pages; again they are too
difficult to compensate for. The more text the better! The more
keywords you have in that text the better.
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MetaTags and Keywords-The next important thing you can do
for yourself is to title your pages with keywords in them. For
example, of course you are going to want your index page title to be
rich in keywords. One of the most common mistakes we see is people
who title their pages with their company name. Its very natural to
do this where as its been drilled into our heads from the time we
young and in grammar school. If your site is about medical supplies
and your company name is XYZ, INC, the title of your page needs to
read as follows:
"Medical Supplies, wheel chairs, breathing machines from XYZ, INC.
Unless your are Microsoft, Amazon or other well recognizable brands,
who you are is the least important part of a title tag and least
important to a search engine. Because its important to have proper
MetaTags, we have added a MetaTag builder to our list of features
for you to use in building a successful website.
Remember when selecting your keywords. Do your homework. Don't just
use the words you think you would use. Ask your friends. Visit
goto.com. They have one of the best keyword selection tools. It
allows you pick the strongest keywords for your site, based on how
many searches are done. We also use this tool for recommending
domain names to customers.
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Submitting your site- After
you have created and inserted your meta tags, and organized your
copy so that it is rich in keywords, next comes the submission
process. Another common error we see our customers make is the
theory that all you have to do is submit your site once and it will
forever stay wherever the search engine places it. Wrong! Wrong!
Wrong! On average in order to maintain a position on search
engines that spider the web generally you will need to submit your
site every two weeks. Spidered sites are search engines like
Google,
Alta
Vista and
Hot Bots.
Resubmissions to
Yahoo
and
DMOZ.org are not needed,
where as they are directories. In
Yahoo's case you will be required to pay $199 to list a commercial
site though them. They no longer except free business submissions.
DMOZ is a great directory with all its entries being approved by
volunteer editors. As with the Meta Tag builder you have access to
our site submission area, which will help you submit your
site to search engines as frequently as you want to. However we
strongly urge you not to submit more than once a day because some
view that as spamming.
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Review your Rankings
Daily- Everyday we check the placement of this site.
We make sure where we rank, or where we don't rank. If our rankings
have gone down; if we need to tweak our keywords or rewrite our
website words to score better. Any website, including your site,
needs to be monitored for where you place. If you begin to
slip and do nothing about it your site will sink to the bottom of
the list and visitors are less likely to come and your profits will
drop. Because we think this is so important to the success of your
site we have added a tool for you to review your site and see where
it ranks on the search engines.
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Comprehensive Web Statistics-One
of the most important tool you can have available is a web
statistics program that will give you a clear picture of your
visitors. You can use this information to track your visitors, see
which pages are being used and most important what words people are
using to find you. Once you have this information you will know
where your search engine positioning strategies are working and
where they aren't. We always advise our customers NOT to use a
counter where as it may help your visitors formulate an opinion that
you may not want about your website. If you don't have many
visitors, it may convey that your have a bad product. If you have
many visitors, it may convey that you are to busy for another
customer. Our program runs complete behind the scenes and can only
be viewed by you. It gives you a full snapshot of what is happening
with your website and gives you the information you need to properly
set up your keywords and fix you search engine information.
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Newsletters: Selling
to who you know- Another way of generating and keeping your
site profitable is to have a newsletter. People who have bought from
you in the past are 45% more likely to buy from you again in
the future. With that said by sending a newsletter to your customers
you are sending them a reminder to come and visit your site.
Announce specials just for emails recipients. This will help you
track the success of your e-mail campaign. However, keep in mind
that customers who receive unsolicited email from you are less
likely to buy. Most view spam mail very negatively and with the
negative speak across the Internet that opinion tends to grow. We
never advocate the use of spam mail because of the negative impact
it can have on your business.
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Google AdWords- One very low-cost
high expose advertising program that all website owners who need
traffic should consider. Unlike goto.com you pay per impression,
some as low as $.08 per view. It is a very affordable means of
advertising in an extremely visible place.
https://adwords.google.com/AdWords/Welcome.html
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Accept Credit Cards-This
one is huge. Although it's last on our list, quite possible it's the
most important. If you walk away with nothing else about having a
successful website, remember that accepting credit cards will
explode profit. Over 80% of online purchases are paid for with a
credit card. By not accepting Visa and MasterCard you are limiting
your profit potential as well as limiting the impulse buy, people
who didn't intend to buy something but see you product and buy it.
If you make it hard for them, you will lose the sale. Its a proven
fact. Because we feel this is so important to having a successful
site, we have negotiated a low cost merchant account program for our
customers with a highly reputable bank.
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