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SEO / SEM is Exceptionally Valuable

Al Alexander — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:23:33 +0000

SEO / SEM is Exceptionally Valuable

If you are selling a product that others are retailing especially if there are 1000′s of other vendors selling the exact same thing, then ranking higher for the brand name you are targeting will lead to more conversions.

The amount consumer demand will dictate the amount of succes you have. The SEO work doesn’t really create new demand in and of itself, but it can provide the opportunity to convert visitors to customers of adjacent products your website sells. The sort of demand creation needed has to come from broader generic search queries and/or arbitraging competing brands.

Not everyone’s website is based upon selling others products. Many websites are branding opportunities to help create demand for your product. This is in turn will drive sales on vendors websites there by increasing your brands sales. This is where Authority SEO comes in. We work to get your website ranked for keyword phrases related to your industry.

We Help Build Your Brand

Authority SEO we help you to gain exposure on broader related generic keywords. There are several ways to build brand, from socail media to press releases about your products and their features. Authority SEO covers all aspects of growing your presense on the web. With writing more frequently on our blog, setting up your Facebook page, to keeping your Twitter account buzzing. These are all things that take time away from you focusing on your business. The good thing about building brand exposure is that branded keywords tend to be the keywords with the highest conversion rates. When you build your brand you create a surge in traffic and a surge in conversion rates either for you or your vendors.

Using the internet is the most cost effective way to build your brand and Authority SEO is here to make sure its down correctly.

Converting Visitors To Customers

Al Alexander — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:46:57 +0000

In my last post I wrote about deciding on pay per click adverstising or to spend you hard earned money on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. I explained the reason why both are needed and one of the reasons to use PPC especially in the beginning phases of your business. I suggested testing your sites conversion ability by using ppc. If you find that after spending money of PPC that your website does not convert visitors in to customers. I also discussed that there are a multitude of reasons of why a visitor doesn’t spend money on your site. The first reason that may be causing issues is your price. If your price is to high a customer can click and go to the cheaper store. It is not like brick and mortar stores, where a customer physically has to leave your store and travel to another store to check prices. Does your website look and feel secure? Are you reasurring the potential customer about giving you their personal information, that it will be safe. Is your site easy to navigate? Are your items in stock? Are your shipping prices inline with other websites. Do you have to much information on your home page. Information overload will drive a visitor away. Do you have link or links going out of your website? Links leading out of your website are not always bad but they are not a good thing to have unless absolutely avoidable. You worked so hard to get customers to your site it is not good to send them away. There can be many other issues why a visitor does not become a customer but make sure that these potential problems are not happening to your website and you will see your conversions rise.

Affiliate Marketing makes good sense and money.

Al Alexander — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:28:49 +0000

E Commerce websites are always looking for solutions to cut their marketing expenses. Advertising is through traditional means is a educated gamble at best. Does not a 1 million dollar SuperBowl commercial make you enough revenue to justify the expense? Is that full page ad in a national magazine worth the $100,000 is costs for one month? Well it depends on you product, brand, prices, customer persona’s, and many other factors. Obviously a local restaurant would not take out a $100,000 ad, or a small website selling a niche product does not need a 1 million dollar TV ad.

This is where affiliate marketing comes in. Affiliate marketing is a pay on performance system to where you only pay the advertiser if they make a sale for you. What a great system. You only spend money when you make money. I know what your saying great sign me up! Well it’s not easy. There are many affiliate marketing programs out there and many are good and some are not.

The affiliate marketing program works like this. Publishers join the network and will drive traffic to your site. When a visitor visits their site and clicks through to your site a tracking cookie is placed on their computer and it can last for a duration that you decide. Which means that if the visitor buy anything from your site in that preset amount of time you have to pay a commission to the affiliate.

Sounds good? Well it is but as with anything there are people who learn to take advantage of the system. Some of the pitfalls are when publishers place fake orders on your site and get a commission and then you find out the credit card was stolen or no good. Another problem is orders that get canceled or returned, you have to go back in and cancel the order in the affiliate system and get your money refunded. You only have a week or two to do that.

Just signing up with a affiliate program does nothing. You will be competing against 1000′s of other website owners and you have to market yourself to the publishers. You have to to set up a data feed, create god graphics, and banners, write good copy for you affiliate page, create coupons for affiliates to drive more traffic, and the list goes on and on.

Doesn’t soud so great now does it. Well this is where Authority SEO comes in. Authority SEO is a affiliate program manager and will handle all of the above mentioned tasks and protect you from the problems associated with affiliate programs. Call us today to get information on setting up your affiliate program.

5 Items to Check on Competitor Websites

Authority SEO — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:14:52 +0000

A vital part that should be part of your SEO and Internet marketing strategy is checking and verifying what the competition is doing. Seeing what the competitions is doing can give you a great idea on what is working and what isn’t. When you start taking a look at your online competition you need to know what you are looking at. The goal would be start a list that you can track and update with new information. It is a good idea to do a review of your competition once a month.

Your competition can give you great insight avenues for more revenue that you are missing

5 Items to Check on Competitor Websites

Promotions: it is a good idea to keep up to date on your competitions promotions. Our there products or services that you could be offering. Also, checking to see what kind of promotions they are doing and how often. The frequency of promotions can tell you the success rate of using promotions to increase sales.
Conversion Funnel: good websites lead their visitors to the information that supports them making a buying decision or contact your company decision. Verify how your competition is doing this. Depending on your business model you may need more or less information to convert a visitor into a sale.
Validation: I call them “warm and fuzzies.” Look for external validation markers like the Better Business Bureau, Hacker Safe, or industry related certifications. Factors that increase reliability and give external validation that you are legitimate business are vital for increasing trust and sales.
Price: be careful of getting into price wars. You can find more success by offerings great value to your customers than just being the lowest price. You do want to pay attention though if you are way too low or high as it relates to your competition.
Payments: how are your competition receiving payments. Do they have a shopping cart? Do they use external payment methods like Google Checkout or Paypal, or do you need to make payments over the phone?

#1 SEO Mistake Most Businesses or Websites Make

Authority SEO — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:27:25 +0000

If you own a business than I hope you either have a website or are in the process of building one. Which ever state you are in you come to the realization that no matter how pretty or how much time you tool to build it you are getting no web traffic. So, as any good business owner you start an Internet marketing campaign. In my experience there has been one over riding factor why most Internet marketing or search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns fail. The answer is consistency.

Consistency is the reason most SEO plans fail

First, lets be honest how many people reading this post have at one time believed that SEO is just something you do once and then it is done? I know for myself years ago when I got started online I had no idea the level of effort it took to achieve massive amounts of traffic to my website. My original marketing plan for my first website was based on Google Adwords. Oh, how times have changed.

To be successful online you have to do the right things consistently everyday. I really mean everyday. I have always looked at that everyday I don’t have a person on my team working on gaining online visibility I have competitors who are. I believe the hardest concept for business owners to come to terms with is SEO doesn’t ever end. You are always on a constant journey of growth or decay with your SEO marketing campaign. I have worked on campaigns that receive millions of web traffic and you can tell on the analytics the exact day efforts were reduced and the exact day they were picked back up.

Consistency has one other facet. It is not just that we are doing things everyday; consistency is we are doing what makes our website successful everyday. For instance many business owners are talking about what they are doing with social media. I agree that social media is an excellent avenue for sales growth, though are you doing this at the expense of your bread and butter, Google. Right now Google is still king by more than a country mile. The consistency mistake I see business owners making is they are losing the grounds that made them successful with Google search rankings as they work on other areas.

The secret to successful SEO marketing is consistency with what you accomplish everyday and that you accomplish your primary Internet marketing strategies.

Top 25 Websites on the Web

Authority SEO — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:13:43 +0000

Added an update as of May 10th, 2010 – This post was originally done last year in June so almost a full year has gone by. It can be very interesting to see how the the top websites in the world wide web have changed. Facebook now holds the #2 position which is important as the rumor is that Facebook might become the first true challenger to Google dominance of search and Internet traffic.

Most people didn’t even realize that Twitter which has gotten a lot of publicity wasn’t in the Top 25 Websites last year though it is this year. With the new way Google SERP works to show Facebook and Twitter updates these two social media sites have real ecommerce value.

Top 25 Websites – May 10th, 2010

1 google.com
2 facebook.com
3 yahoo.com
4 youtube.com
5 msn.com
6 live.com
7 wikipedia.org
8 microsoft.com
9 ebay.com
10 myspace.com
11 bing.com
12 amazon.com
13 twitter.com
14 aol.com
15 craigslist.org
16 wordpress.com
17 ask.com
18 go.com
19 photobucket.com
20 adobe.com
21 cnn.com
22 about.com
23 bbc.co.uk
24 flickr.com
25 weather.com

You many be wondering what websites get the most traffic on the web? Your first guess is probably Google and you are right. The Internet is a very vast place so there is still room for your website to get traffic. The top ranking websites are search engines which is no surprise. What is important to understand about that is the #1 websites people use are services to find a local business or ecommerce store like yours.

Photobucket receives more traffic than Twitter. Do you have a Internet marketing plan that involves photos? If not you should.

You can learn great insight into what people find important and how to create your SEO strategy by looking at the sites people visit to most. First as Google is #1, ranking is Google’s organic search is the top priority for your website’s success. You probably already knew that though here are a few other observations you may not have. Youtube is #5 and Photobucket is #23 which means that having a search engine optimization strategy for using videos and photos can allow you to get a leg up on the competition. Twitter may be all in the news right now though Youtube and Photobucket still receive more traffic.

The rankings were gathered by Ranking.com

Top 25 Websites on the Web

google.com
yahoo.com
msn.com
live.com
youtube.com
aol.com
myspace.com
facebook.com
google.co.uk
microsoft.com
ebay.com
ask.com
wikipedia.org
go.com
google.ca
blogspot.com
casalemedia.com
findstuff.com
starware.com
att.net
cnn.com
mywebsearch.com
photobucket.com
netzero.net
amazon.com

5 Factors You May Not Know that Affect Your Websites Google Rankings

Authority SEO — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:37:41 +0000

For every website, the goal is to rank in the top of Google search results for the keywords that are important to their business. As businesses develop strategies for increasing their rankings and overall traffic there can be factors that affect their Google search results that they don’t even think about. These more obscure factors become more important the more competitive the terms you want to rank for are.

5 Factors You May Not Now that Affect Your Google Rankings

Poor links: you may have heard that links for poor sites don’t have the importance that high quality links do though did you know that if you are sending links to poor sites that Google can perceive your site to be part of thier ilk.
Hosting issues: websites on not very stable hosting accounts can go down from time to time which means Google can’t spider your website. If this is a common problem Google determines your site to be unstable and can drop it in the rankings.
Duplicate titles: a good website will always have unique titles for every page on their website. Having duplicate titles even on low ranking pages shows lack of quality for a website.
Same anchor text: We know that effective anchor text can support your keyword rankings. If you only get links with the same anchor text then Google sees that you are attempting to manipulate search results and can punish you. It is important to change up some of your anchor text links.
Spamming your page: You need your keyword on the page to rank for it. Spamming your page with a high percentage of the same keyword over and over will drop your rankings instead of improve them.

Content Management

Authority SEO — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:56:55 +0000

Content management with Authority SEO can have multiple meanings. If you are looking for web based applications to organize and publish online content than please visit our Web Development section. What Authority SEO specializes in is developing SEO friendly content that is targeted towards your specific products or services.

Online search engines like Google think of themselves as web encyclopedias and rank websites that they determine to have the best and most update information on a particular subject matter. The goal is to make your website an expert in your given field or genre of products and services.

“WorldClassNutrition.com has over 1,600 pages indexed in Google that combine for 23,000 different keywords that send targeted web traffic on a monthly basis”

SEO friendly content
Consistent content updates to your website
Professional writing for visitor experience
Your website an online expert in your field

Also, important with creating your website as an expert in the eyes of Google is that the information has to be searchable. Authority SEO utilizes vast keyword matrix to identify the thousand of keywords people are search for your products or services and targets the content to capture the search engines to rank it high in their search results.

The best websites have the ability to have constant updates of content on their websites. Authority SEO provides a cost effective solution to content updates that drives targeted traffic to your website.

Contact Authority SEO about a free consultation