Search engines LOVE good content or as we often hear “Content is King

So what makes for good content? Good content is HTML text, well written page titles and descriptions with solid, clean programming presented by way of well graphically designed content layout.

Good content is driven by the right “keywords” and “key phrases”:

1. Use keywords and phrases that encapsulate what your website is all about;
2. Make sure that the keywords and phrases are consistent with what website visitors would use with the search engines and directories to locate your website.

Techniques you can use to help determine the best keywords and phrases.

These should be used when defining your website design as part of the overall marketing concepts that should be inherent in all websites preferably before building your website.

Why is online competitive analysis so critical to your marketing strategy

Quite simply – Analysing your competitors can identify your strengths and weaknesses and strengthen your bottom line.

In conducting a competitive analysis you partake in a formal evaluation whereby you review the businesses of one or more companies that compete, directly or indirectly, with your own.

Online, competitors have access to each other’s company information and marketing materials that they might not be able to gather as easily in the offline world. This provides greater opportunities to arise out of the competitive analysis data.

Questions that you might ask of yourself might include:

How Link Text Can Make a Difference in Your Rankings

Admittedly it is very difficult to get high rankings with Flash sites, however it is not impossible. As a total Flash site has no text content, you obviously can’t optimize your web page content. What you can do however is to optimize the links to your site.

For example, the top result on Google for the search term ‘miserable failure’ is not on position one because the web page had been optimised for that particular search term. In fact the website is on position one because of the number of backlinks to this website with the text ‘miserable failure’ in the link text (or anchor text as we refer to it technically).

What this means is that you can get top rankings on Google without optimizing the content of your web pages. The problem is that you have to get many incoming links that contain the keyword for which you want to get high rankings in the link text. Achieving this is not easy however this has been used to illustrate the power of backlinks. We will discuss this in a number of other articles but other factors such as relevancy are also important and can not be overlooked.

To get your web site to the top of Google’s search results, search for web sites that are related to your site. Ask the webmasters of these web sites to link to your web site and ask them to include your search term in the link to your site.

The more links you get, the higher your rankings will be. Getting links is a time-consuming task because finding the right sites is itself time consuming and setting up the links itself needs to be followed up carefully. The search engines are also smart enough to recognise that true links come from manual effort and any sharp increase in backlinks are viewed unfavourably by the search engines.

Creating backlinks is most appealing to those who cannot change the contents of their web pages. If you have many good inbound links, then you can improve your search engine rankings without optimizing your web pages.

At the end of the day however the best results for any internet marketing campaign can only come from the implementation of a number of different initiatives that include both having many inbound links and optimised web page content.

Building Credibility and Trust as the basis of building sales

For the vast majority of businesses, any market worth being in or with most sustainable business models, sales is not a one time event, but a process.

You first have to create awareness, firstly build trust, then finally make the sale. Do all 3 happen at once for some people? Sure, but probably not for the majority of customers.

The problem for many websites is that they do not actually build credibility. With external links you are going to only have marginal success building your brand if you start by focusing on sites that are outside of the area of your area of focus.

If a person who has trust and a broad base of readership recommends you that creates immediate sales. We see this evidenced in many websites daily sales data and their affiliate statistics. In spite of the hype, if you get featured on social media and generic business directory sites it does not necessarily lead to many sales. Perhaps that exposure leads to awareness, which can further be enhanced by writing about that community, buying banner ads from sites, or by writing other create subscription-worthy content, but generally in content editorial link from a trusted expert creates more sales than exposure on a nearly automated hollow social news site.

If your site is new to the market and you want some exposure you have two options

Create a viral marketing campaign (read Seth Goddin’s ‘The Purple Cow’, or create things that people inside you business community will find useful

One of those strategies may get you in the Guinness book of world records. The other will make sales.

What you need to ensure is that everything in and about your website and any references to it totally substantiate the position of BUILDING TRUST.