Archive for the ‘internet traffic’ Category

 

January 11th, 2012

How to Use Banner Ads


Banner advertizing is a method of advertizing in which a banner is displayed on a webpage. The banner can contain text, graphics, animations or their combination to give out a message and attract the attention of the web visitor.

There is a clickable link associated with the banner so that when someone clicks on the banner another web page opens where the advertiser intends to send the visitors.

The banner ads are of standard sizes and are embedded on the webpage using JavaScript program or multimedia object  that are run with technologies such as Shockwave, Java, of Flash. Sometimes sound and video effects are also used for drawing attention.

The advertiser would like to place banner on web pages with related content and with high traffic. The position of the banner on web page is also crucial and the advertiser would prefer to place it at a prominent spot where it can easily come to notice.

Banners can be put at different places such as below the header, left and right columns, bottom of the page and not infrequently within the main content of the page.

What sort of message should the banner give out? This is an advertisement and normal practices of advertising are all applicable.

The message coming out of the text and general appearance of banner ad should draw attention and provoke curiosity. It should not try to sell anything; it should only induce the visitor to click the banner so that they are taken to the landing page.

Should the banner stand out on the webpage or should it merge as an integral part of the theme of the page?

Opinions vary on this point. Some people say that visitors are offended by banners that stand out and therefore avoid it. Others say that the banner should stand out so that it has better chance of getting noticed. There is no general rule on this issue and the best is to experiment with various combinations until effective banner ad is generated.

Where do you put banners?

I would like to put banner prominently on a web page or blog that has high traffic. I would first find such web pages and blogs. These pages are generally on top of search engine results for related keyword. Many of them offer space for banner ads and charge for their service.

Before taking their services I would verify their Alexa ranking to ascertain that these pages have large number of visitors. I would prefer pages with traffic rank1 to 100,000. The page should have content similar to what I am offering so that visitors of that page also get interested in my banner ad.

There are banner placement agencies that can put the banner on high traffic relevant pages. There are various ways in which banner placement services are paid. It could be a sort of rent for showing banner for certain fixed time. Another way is by impressions which is based on number of times the banner is shown.

Yet another method is by action – payment is made on the basis of number of times the banner is clicked.

Although banner is among the oldest form of advertizing, it has its importance and continues to give predictable results.

To know more about banner advertising and any marketing method, visit this site where you can get tons of resources and information.

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December 27th, 2011

Search Engine Optimization for a Blog – Part III : Linking with Social Media


Continuing our discussions on building external links for our blog, we now come to Social Media Sites.

Some of social media sites have become a craze, particularly for our younger friends. You may be yourself addicted to Facebook which I believe has taken over position of highest viewership from Google.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are by far the most popular media sites, but there are numerous other sites that have their own followings.

Our job is to get links of our blog posted to these sites, by as many people as possible. In Facebook people can just “like” our blog post to create a back-link. Twitter members can tweet the blog post with or without their comments.

We can encourage the visitors of our blog to “like” and “tweet” our posts if they like them. To make things easier for the visitors, buttons are available for Social Media sites that can be placed on the blog.

Social Bookmarking plug-ins are available for blogs that are free and can be easily installed. “Sociable” plug-in works very well and is highly recommended.

Marketing is all about maintaining relationship with people, interacting with them. Social sites help you to do just that. They are the most cost-effective communication channels and it is up to the individual members to make best use of these tools.

The investments in developing skill for using these tools will be worth making. There are also sites for book marking that we should not forget. Some of well known sites are Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us.

These sites allow you to bookmark web-pages of your choice as “interesting”. Others who visit those book marking sites are likely to see these pages. When you bookmark your own web-post, a back-link is created. There are services such as livewire that can bookmark for you on several bookmarking sites.

In using social sites, it is necessary to maintain etiquette. In bookmarking sites the same pages should not be bookmarked again and again. Apart from your own pages other really interesting pages should also be bookmarked.

In twitter your tweets should be limited to 3-5 a day. There should be balance of people you are following and people following. They have restricted the following to 2000 until you have sufficient number of followers.

You can increase your followers by getting more interactive. You can post interesting tweets of your own and tweet others with meaningful comments. Twitter allows you to open multiple accounts, so if you have interest in several fields it will be advisable to open separate accounts for each of them.

Social sites such as Facebook and twitters should be used for making relationship, not for sales promotion. Any advertisement should be done in a subtle way that doesn’t look offensive. Same applies to the sites that share videos.

The real effect of social sites comes when other people start talking about your blog. Social sites are the future of the most effective type of advertizing – word of mouth promotion. The more “social proof” your product gains, the better will be its acceptance.

To have a thorough knowledge of Social Sites, visit this page:

http://sanjayjohari.com

 

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December 20th, 2011

Search Engine Optimization – Part III : Creating Backlinks


So far we have seen optimization of blog page that helps search engines to rank the blog page high and show it high in search results for specific keywords.

While optimization of a blog page is important to improve its visibility in search engine searches, off-page optimization has major influence on the ranking of the blog page.

By off-page optimization we refer to links from other websites pointing to our blog and to our blog pages. Both number and quality of backlinks are important.

By quality of backlinks we mean the ranking of webpage where links to our web-pages are placed. Higher the rank of the external web-page, higher the quality and value of the backlink.

There are several so-called authority sites that have high page rank such as Twitter, Facebook, WordPress etc. Backlinks to our blog pages appearing on these sites will give lot of weightage to our blog page helping it to rank high.

It should be the endeavor of blog owner to get many backlinks from authority sites. This will increase visibility of the blog on those sites as well as in the search engine searches. And you will agree that high visibility is crucial for any marketing strategy.

The authority sites that can give high quality backlinks can be divided into following types for sake of convenience and clarity.

1. Article Submission
2. Social Media Sites
3. Directory Submission
4. High ranking blogs in the niche

Article directories such as ezinearticles.com have very high ranking. Articles on subjects related to the main keyword of the blog post can be submitted to such directories. The author of the article is allowed to write resource box at the end of the article in which he can give link to his blog or blog-post.

Leaving your comments on high ranking blogs can generate high quality backlinks. To do this, start with searching high ranking blogs in your broad-based generic keywords. Read the content of the blog post and write some useful information / observations as comment.

On most of the blogs comments are moderated which means the comments have to be approved by the blog administrator before it can appear on the blog. Therefore your comments should provide really useful information for it to be accepted.

You can have a backlinks to your blog in the comment. Normally the link is hyperlinked with your name or a naturally occurring keyword.

I would refer to my video “Promoting A Blog Using RSS Feed Syndication” for getting backlinks by directory submissions.

We will continue our discussion on backlinks in the next post.

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December 17th, 2011

Search Engine Optimization of a Blog – Part II


We continue with Search Engine the Optimization from the last post. There is bound to be some repetition but it is necessary to understand the concepts.

In the last article we discussed about keywords. They are important because they indicate the intent of the website and the article. They indicate the basic theme, the focus around which the website is designed.

In this article we will concentrate on using them within the website. We will be talking in terms of blogs rather than static webpage.

A blog is designed for a generic subject like, say, golf. The blog will talk about various aspects of golf such as swing, golf balls, golf clubs, golf courses and so on. There may be several posts in each of these subjects.

For sake of convenience and for giving more focus on each of these subtopics, it will be better to create a separate page for each of these sub-topics. All the articles on, say, golf balls can be placed under a page named “Golf Balls”.

Similarly all articles pertaining to golf clubs can be assigned to a page “Golf Clubs”.

On the home page of the blog all the articles will appear in chronological order, last article appearing first. But if someone clicks on the page “Golf Balls”, only articles related to this topic will appear.

This makes navigation of the blog and readability easier. Each page is more focused on one topic. A reader interested in that topic goes directly to that page and reads articles of his interest.

This arrangement can also help search engine optimization of the blog. Each page should have appropriate title containing a main keyword, meta-tags, and meta-description to tell the search engines what the page is about. The meta-tags can be the main and other targeted keywords.

Care should be taken not to spam the blog. Selected keywords should appear naturally in meta-description. Meta tags should not contain too many tags, about 10-12 closely related keywords should be good enough.

The individual posts should also have same or related keywords. The idea is to make the structure of the blog and its focus should be abundantly clear to the search engines. Then it can be expected that search engines will know which page or post to show for which search term.

In this article we are trying to see what can be done to a blog to make it more search engine friendly. We have seen that proper organization of pages, assigning relevant titles to them, meta-tags and meta-description can be of great help.

Another feature that can help in SEO is intra-linking of blog posts. Each blog post can have links to other pages of the blog. Inter-linking of posts and pages can be of great help.

But again a word of caution. There should not be too many links – say about 2 links in 500 word article should be ok. The links should be created on keywords appearing naturally within the article. There anchor texts should be selected carefully to make them appear natural.

We have been talking about doing things within the blog for its SEO. In the next article we will talk about the most powerful factor for SEO which is outside the blog. This is links to the blog from other sites, or back-links.

Links to the blog from other sites are by far the most important factor that is crucial for rank that the blog is getting in search results. So stay tuned for the next article.

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December 13th, 2011

Search Engine Optimization – Part I


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process intended to make a webpage rank high in search engine results.

For example, let us assume that I create a webpage which gives information on tuning a guitar. I would like that when someone searches the term “tuning a guitar” and other related keywords, my webpage should be the first one on page one of search engine results.

If it is not the first, then at least it should be among the first ten so that it is still on page one. This is because most visitors do not see beyond page one of search results.

My webpage should appear prominently on page one for targeted keywords so that I get more visitors to my webpage. This is the purpose of SEO.

There are really 3 parts to SEO –

1. Keywords
2. Webpage optimization
3. Links to the webpage from other sites

In this article we will talk about keywords and in subsequent articles we will discuss other parts of SEO.
Keywords indicate the subject of the webpage, they tell what the webpage is about. Normally a webpage should focus on one main keyword representing the theme of the page.

This helps search engines to figure out when the webpage should appear as a search result. The first step is to do some keyword research to find out the exact keyword that people are looking for.

There is no point in targeting a keyword which no one is searching, even if such a keyword “appears” to us as sensible.

Our objective should be to give the readers what they want, not what we want.

There are several very popular keywords that are searched many times. The chances are that there will be many webpages catering to those keywords. If we target very popular keywords we will be competing against giants.

While it will be good to be counted among giants eventually, it will be better to have a humble beginning and target for less popular keywords. By keyword research it should be possible to come out with keywords that are being searched, but still have less competition. It will be easier to rank high for those keywords.

Care should be taken to ensure that ALL the keywords we have shortlisted should be related to the main keyword and to the main theme of the webpage.

After deciding upon the keywords that we want to target, we should design our webpage around those keywords. The content of the page should contain those keywords “naturally” – in the write-up of the content the keywords should appear as a part of the narration. The keywords should not be repeated too many times otherwise it will look like a spam.

The keywords should be included in meta tags and meta description of the webpage. A blog can have several categories. Each category should be focused around a main keyword with few related keywords.

Other categories should be connected with the main keyword and the main theme of the blog. The better organized a blog is with respect to its subject matter, better chances it will have of appearing appropriately in search engine results for targeted keywords.

One of the most important keywords of all your blog should be your name of the name of your organization. Be sure to devote a page on which you tell something about yourself or your organization.

In other articles on serach engine optimization we will continue from here.

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