All About Search Engine Optimization and Meta Tags
SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is one of the key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a high-traffic website. Freeing you from spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotion, SEO allows you to grow your traffic organically with the help of page rankings. What many web designers learn only after much experience, however, is the difference meta tags make in how your pages rank.
There is no facet of search engine optimization more frequently overlooked than ensuring meta tags are placed on every page. Meta tags, written into the code of your page so that they are not visible to visitors, provide the search engines with specific identifiers for the page. Some websites create listings almost entirely with meta tags, yet many site owners never implement them to full effect.
There are two different kinds of meta tags that have a high impact on SEO. Take, for our first example, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag enumerates keywords to spiders, informing them what the website is all about. If you visit www.nytimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Source,” you will encounter a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, people, regional news, national news?” and so on. This keyword list includes dozens of words that relate to the New York Times but also to newspapers in general.
Most search engines also detect these keywords in page content, but it is helpful to include in a tag keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as unusual spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically mentioned on the page, and any other keywords it is difficult to inject into the text in a user-friendly way.
The second critical meta tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. Search engines use this tag to display information about your site when in search results. Most search engines allow 160 characters in this meta tag. The META DESCRIPTION tag is also a place you may include keywords that boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.
There are also other meta tags, but these two are vital for SEO. It is important that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not cram them with words unrelated to your content or use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Putting in too many keywords will cause the search engines to penalize your pages as spam. Not using enough keywords is almost as bad.
Finally, always different meta tags for every page. Changing the meta tags throughout your site makes it possible for the search engines to detect valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.
Lost Your Job? Start up With Home Based Employment
Unless you live under a rock right now then you have been told that the economy is in a bit of rough shape. So maybe it is time to think about being an entrepreneur consider home based employment. With home based employment you are able to work right from home, which will not only be more comfortable, but which comes with a number of other benefits as well. For instance if you have children, and you want to stay home with them rather than having to put them in daycare, this can be a great option for you.
There are so many different choices when it comes to home based employment, and you can find a job that you really love but without having to spend a ton of time doing it. You may not make as much money as you would like at first, but it does take time, and if you have patience you can end up like many people out there these days, who make a full-time work income right at home.
One of the most important things that you need to be aware of is to find out the source of the opportunity. There are certainly people that will seek to take advantage of Newbie Online searchers. Although the opportunity may sound interesting and worthwhile see how long they have been around and see what types of products or services they are offering. It may be hard for you to believe how much money you can make online, so you don’t want to turn down an opportunity, just because it sounds too good to be true for you.
Most online opportunities do not require much education or experience. That is what makes them so great anyone can jump in. Some opportunities offer you a chance that you will be able to make thousands of dollars in a week. Some opportunities offer you to do data entry. You know yourself what you enjoy doing so gear yourself to look in areas of interest. This is your new life, so you should be thinking about what makes YOU happy each day. As the saying goes “Follow Your Bliss and the Money will Come”
We are all grown ups here, so do your due diligence. You can really make a lot, and I mean a lot of money, in some cases you can make in a month what many make in a year if you work on line and from home. But it does not happen overnight. You want to make sure that you always read the details on a business opportunity very carefully when you are trying to find a business online.
As with any project that is worth building, ask around to your family and friends to see if any of them are already doing at-home work because if so they may be able to help you out. It might be possible that they even turn you on to a great opportunity you would not have considered.
In conclusion, home based employment can be a great option for you. Like myself you can make a living only working a few hours a day on the computer. Many of us that work from home doing Internet business have ended up with a very reasonable income, so you can do this too.
How You Can Use the AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool
Logging into Google AdWords, you will quickly find a large number of very useful tools at your disposal. These tools will make it possible to proof your ads for errors, choose their placement, optimize your website, and generate a huge number of reports so you can how your ads are performing against other sites, in their demographics, and much more. But probably the most powerful tool you will find the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, which uses ad data to generate a list of related keywords along with their recent search data and their cost.
To begin, you should generate your own list of some basic keywords. This list of no more than 15 words will give AdWords the data to generate new words and phrases for you. You can either find these keywords directly on your web pages, and Google can do that for you automatically, or you can brainstorm you own list based what you think your most profitable visitors would search for if they wanted what your website provides.
Next, enter your list into the keyword suggestion tool, one word or phrase at a time. You could enter multiple keywords all at the same time, but if were to do this, there’s a high probability the suggestion tool will return a list of hundreds of keywords that don’t really relate to your site. Usually it is a great deal more efficient to limit yourself to entering just one keyword at a time. Allow the keyword suggestion tool generate related terms that you may be able to use.
Whenever you enter a word or phrase into the keyword suggestion tool, it will come back with other keywords or phrases that match websites with similar content. It will also find keywords and phrases from the Adwords campaigns of other site owners who bid on the some of the same words you chose. The suggestion tool estimates traffic per month, tells you how much competition there is for the word or term, and gives you current prices for placement at various levels of the page.
Moreover, the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool provides you with several dozen more options to get even more useful information about your keywords. The tool allows you to generate monthly traffic charts. These tools tell you how the average monthly popularity of your keywords rises and falls throughout the year. Adwords will generate an estimate of the position of your ad on the page at various bid prices, and you can even retrieve an estimate of the number of clicks you can buy for your budget dollars.
Every one of these bits of information is important as you choose your keywords, but it is still up to you to select search terms that you know match your content. Don’t throw your money away on a low competition, high volume, cheap keyword that won’t bring you any visitors who will appreciate your site and buy your products. But be assured that if you do diligent research and stay creative, every keyword you choose for your Adwords campaign will drive traffic to your site.
How You Can Buy Google AdWords
There’s no bigger internet advertising option than Adwords, and Adwords has made Google an online giant since the 1990′s internet crash. Google has grown Adwords to offer an astonishing array of new options for building up traffic and generating website revenue. Largely due to Adwords, website designers have transformed the net from a place for your company gimmick to a profit-making dynamo, but before you get going to your on Google Adwords profits, there are a few basics you need to know.
Signing up for Adwords is something you can do in five minutes or less, and you can fund your new account with as little as $10. The first time you log into Adwords, you will notice a tremendous number of useful tools. But don’t spend time learning them right away. The first thing you need to do is to get a list of keywords.
There are excellent services for finding keywords, and you can use them on a trial basis for a week for free. But the best keywords are ones you think up yourself. Why? Users judge your site on content, not keywords. And to a large extent, Google’s page ranking algorithm does, too. Just because a keyword promises to bring in a lot of traffic does not mean you should use it. In fact, overusing any word in your content can hurt you, and hurt you a lot.
Brainstorm to find your own list of keywords, not somebody else’s. Think of the words and phrases that advertise the unique content of your web pages. Once you have your own list of words, only then try the Google Adwords keyword selection tool. What this tool can do for you is to remind you of terms that you simply did not think of in your brainstorming session, and tell you which terms are being searched for on Google and its partners. Anything that has a long bar for a high search volume and a short bar for low competition is a good place to start your campaign.
Limit the number of keywords you use in your first campaign. You won’t be able to test your results, at least you won’t be able to test your results very easily, if you start with more than 10 to 15. More than 15 keywords can make it very hard to control your budget while you are waiting to find out if the keywords generate revenue. Next create a single ad, direct, to the point, and suggesting at least one major feature of your site. When you have your keywords, and your ad, then it’s time to set your budget.
Adwords budgets are set in terms of dollars per day. For instance, if you set your budget at $50 a day, Adwords will never run more than $50 worth of ads in any single 24-hour period (although occasionally they may run one click over). You can set your account to run ads throughout the day at an even rate, or just spend the money as fast as possible, up to your daily limit.
With Google Adwords, you have total control over how your ads appear. You control when they appear. You control how much you pay for a click and where your ads are displayed. As you learn to use all these tools in ways that drive your traffic and generate sales, Google Adwords will prove to be your most useful tool for growing your site and your profits.
AdWords 101
If you don’t know about Google AdWords, get ready to learn about one of the most powerful tools on the Internet. Google Adwords is the best way of promoting your business and your site to the largest community of Internet users in the world, the users of Google?s search engine and Google’s search partners. There is no greater opportunity on the Internet to attract and hold traffic to your site through paid advertising. But it you are not firmly grounded in the principles of what Adwords is and how Adwords works, you won’t get the results you need, and you may even waste your advertising budget.
Step #1 for creating ads that get traffic to your site from Adwords is to make sure you know what your potential visitors are looking for. It’s not all about keywords. You need to get into your visitors’ heads to know what they are looking for when they visit your site.
You still start with keywords before you use Adwords. Look at the keywords you have on your website right now. Use WordTracker to find additional options and long-tail keywords that place your site in a unique niche. Make the list of keywords as long as you can. Later, as you narrow down your list of keywords, you will find a few high-performing gems that are perfectly matched to your content. Right now, just get all the keywords you can. The match between keyword and content that bumps up high Click Thru Rates (CTR) and conversion rates comes in Step #2.
After you have your master list of keywords, create and fund your Adwords account. You will choose the most promising keywords from your brainstorming list to start an initial campaign. Start with just one ad for the keywords you choose. Then write at least one variation of your ad to see which copy brings you the most visitors. This process of testing one ad against another is called split testing. The process of split testing allows you to establish which ad’s wording is more effective. You do this by analyzing your conversion rates and CTRs. As your Adwords campaign matures, you will repeat this fine tuning of your ad copy and your choice of keywords over and over again. You will create new ads that are slightly different each time to see if small changes in copy and keyword lead to small (and occasionally large) improvements in CTR and conversions.
If there’s a basic rule for Adwords survival, it’s setting your advertising budgets low until you have completed your Adwords testing. Sometimes just $100 a week will get you the data you need to make your site truly profitable. Other times, it takes a lot more than $100 a week to test ads for a broader niche. Either way, always check your returns against your investment. Adwords allows you to do this by inserting values for goals, such as a sale of a product. You will measure conversions to compute whether you have made your money back and by how much.
The measure of a financially successful Adwords campaign is that it earns at least 50% return on investment. A 50% return will ensure that you can take some profits while still having money to grown your site. If you carefully test and retest every advertising decision as you go along, you can increase your ROI, pumping up your ad budget from the sales you get from Adwords.
