Expert Articles Resource

THIS is the Search Engines Marketing Article You’ve Been Looking For

By Article Expert on Nov. 16, 2009.

You can’t have success on the Internet without traffic. For your Web site, blog, e-mail or advertisement to generate any response or activity, people need to see it.

To paraphrase a philosophical question, if you build the world’s best Web site and nobody sees it, is it really there? You can verify it’s there by going to the URL. But the information you published is not getting out if you’re the only one doing that.

As someone reading this search engines marketing article, you likely have an interest in learning how to increase your Internet audience. You may be asking, how do they know? It is not accidental that you found this article. It has been engineered, crafted and optimized so that it will show up in places on the World Wide Web that people who have an interest in this topic are looking. This practice is commonly known as search engine optimization, or SEO. It is performed on articles, Web pages and Web sites. This article is the first in a series which will shed some light on SEO, which you can do yourself with some basic knowledge of Web interfaces and software.

There are numerous facets to search engine optimization, which we will cover in this series of articles and then package them together in a step-by-step guide when we’ve reached the end. We invite you to bookmark this site and follow this series in the coming days and weeks.

We’ll start with the steps necessary to craft search engines marketing articles:

Determine the “keyword phrase” for which you want to optimize the article. As people search the World Wide Web, the keyword phrase is the equivalent of their search phrase. For best optimization results, the exact keyword phrase needs to appear at least once in the article for every 100 words. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it has to appear exactly in the position of every 100th word. This article is optimized for the keyword phrase “search engines marketing,” and therefore the phrase appears at least six times in this article because the article has more than 500 words. Make sure that you have a ratio of at least 1 percent, or one keyword for every 100 words. It is important to be at a minimum of 1 percent, because that is a key measurement in search engine algorithms for the worthiness of the article to be ranked for the keyword.

We suggest using your word processor’s word count tool to get an accurate number of words in the article. Check the number of words in the article when you are finished. In the case of this article, it was more than 500. The number of keyword occurrences must be one more than the number of hundred words (in this case, “5″). Therefore, this article, including the title, contains at least six instances of the phrase search engines marketing. It wouldn’t hurt to have one or two more, because it’s much better to have one or two more than needed than it is to have one or two less.

We’ll examine the importance of using hyperlinks within the article to SEO other Web sites that are important to you in the next search engines marketing article (a bonus keyword phrase occurrence).

Evidence and Proof: Phone Call Analytics and The Real Business Benefits

By Article Expert on Nov. 15, 2009.

When detailing the benefits of phone call analytics with Google Analytics integration, it’s often easy to fall into the trap of either preaching to the converted who already comprehend why this service is a good thing, while failing to clarify exactly what phone call analytics is for people who are encountering it for the first time. The purpose of this article is to clarify the process by which phone number tracking brings your company a significant increase in conversions and a greater degree of accuracy with your company’s offline ad campaigns.

In the most basic sense, phone call analytics allows a company to constantly monitor and adapt your offline advertising campaign, and also to receive telephone activity in a manner most conducive to leads and sales. There are many aspects to a phone call analytics system, and many levels on which the data can be integrated and applied in order to make active choices about an ad campaign. However, for the purposes of this article, the most self-evident benefits of website telephone tracking will be discussed. First of all, let’s explain how a company might use phone call analytics to monitor and adapt an ad campaign.

In a standard case of call tracking, the individual numbers generating calls are entered into the software so that they can be identified and the data from that specific number can be collected. For the entire call, the customer is entirely unaffected by the passing of the call through the software. Each call is recorded, and the advertising generating that call is collected as an individual piece of data providing a range of information about the call itself and its relation to a trend of phone calls to your company. What this means is that numbers generating calls can be identified, and a company can see for itself which numbers are costing valuable advertising investment but are delivering no sales. Effectively, phone call analytics saves your company valuable investment that is being lost through the inability to track which conversions happen from which offline-generated calls.

A further grey-area of the awareness of a campaigns success is brought into focus with the implementation of phone call analytics - numbers that are generating calls but are failing to result in conversions can be identified and modified, and important changes to a campaign can be made swiftly and with minimal loss of advertising investment. This is a common experience in the optimization of an ad campaign; call analytics simply minimizes the loss of investment, and the time it takes to identify and neutralize these problems.

The implementation of call analytics provides the evidence you need on which to ground further decisions concerning your campaign; with call tracking, keywords generating conversions can be distinguished from those failing to reach their potential - without call tracking, making potentially-costly decisions as to the performance of an offline ad campaign still holds an aspect of blind trust in the total performance (or lack thereof) of an individual campaign. For SEO workers, call analytics makes it possible to prove to the client the validity of ad investment expenditure with exact statistics recorded in real time by the phone call analytics software. For an SEO, this is becoming a reality as more and more competitors can offer clients this level of accuracy and evidence of their positive work.

Call recording and e-mail notification for out-of-hours and missed calls can scoop up a tremendous amount of leads that would otherwise run totally cold. With a call analytics system, there is no longer any need to fail in following up on calls. As each call is logged and recorded, missed calls and out-of-hours calls no longer need to be a problem - many companies have been shocked to find the amount of missed calls and out-of-hours calls they had been unable to pick up. Often with companies with very little manpower, a huge amount of conversions can be picked up by reorganizing work hours around peak times that were being missed unintentionally. Being able to recapture lost leads rescues a great amount of revenue and custom that would otherwise vanish without call tracking - whether a sale is £10 or £1000 per conversion, this aspect of call tracking is sure to dramatically boost your conversion ratio.

Hopefully this article has managed to explain in more detail the active benefits of phone call analytics, and various ways in which a call analytics system will serve to boost your conversion ratio. Though this article deals with the basic advantages of phone call analytics, the advent of Google Analytics integration with call tracking is currently huge news in the SEO/SEM sphere, so expect to hear a great deal more about the power of call tracking, whether you are an SEO worker, an online marketer, or are looking to develop your online sales presence.

Keyword Research: In House or Outsource

By Article Expert on Nov. 13, 2009.

When it comes to determining all relevant keywords, should we attempt to do it ourselves or is it preferable to hire an experienced company or freelancers to perform this task?

The answer to this central question depends upon a number of related variables. Among the most important of those are these:

1. The extent to which you understand how to locate keywords and track down keywords that are closely related

2. The keyword software that you have at your disposal

3. Familiarity with using those keyword research tools

4. Your knowledge concerning determining which keywords are actually beneficial from a business perspective

5. Your budget

Glancing at those five, notice that they boil down to how much you have studied the process of keyword research and whether the outsourcing alternative is within your financial resources. I’ll go into each of those a little more deeply

What You Need to Know

Identifying relevant keywords and phrases is as important as any other part of your new business. In fact, it is more important than most of your planning. The lengthy list that you generate is central to all of your marketing efforts. The tactics impacted include your article marketing, your search engine optimization, your paid advertising and your copywriting. The entire future of you business is directly related to the quality of your keyword research.

Some available tools are free to use, such as Google’s keyword research tool. Others can be purchased as desktop software or as online membership applications. You must be willing and able to use a mix of these resources in order to develop the most comprehensive list. You should gather information comparing various keyword research software options.

Most of the tools are relatively easy to use, but the interpretation of your results can be difficult unless you have experience in doing so. Not all of the keywords that are uncovered are of equal value to a business, and a high volume of searches for a certain keyword does not necessarily make that keyword of greater importance to you than another term or phrase for which there may be substantially fewer searches.

Budget

I believe that even if your funds are limited, keyword research is so important that, if you are not capable of conducting and interpreting the study, this is a place to spend those precious financial resources. The expense of outsourcing keyword research is relatively small when it is compared to the potential benefit. I recommend that, if you do hire professionals for this task, that you make sure that they also do a competitive analysis of your industry or niche and offer advice concerning how to use the findings of the study to your competitive advantage.

Often keyword research is bundled into an overall search engine optimization (SEO) contract. These contracts are considerably more expensive. However, if you choose to go this route (contracting for an SEO package), make sure you understand exactly how thorough your SEO company will be.

It is possible to handle all of this on your own, if you are willing to take the time and invest the money in learning how to do it the correct way. Of course, you must also plan to invest in some of the software tools, as well.