I received an email from Eric this morning. Well, he has been trying to sell me something since I subscribed to his Eric’s Tips several months ago. I think he is a great internet marketer and want to keep track what he’s marketing.
Here’s the unofficial market share data I collected from a quick survey done on Friday, 31 March 2006.
Google 50% - Yahoo 50% - MSN 0%
Last Friday evening, I gave a talk on hobby and the Internet to a group of more than 20 people. These are people who represent a large cross-section of the Internet search users in Singapore. And many of them are business owners.
It was quite surprising that no one in the audience used MSN search. But I am sure Microsoft has the financial power to embark on a marketing blitz and splash their ads all over my TV programmes, newspapers and even bus ad.
For now, it’s Google and Yahoo. It is no doubt that even for webmasters targeting a small market like Singapore (in terms of population but not in terms of spending power) will have to focus on getting good ranking on both Google and Yahoo. For some keyword terms, it is quite inexpensive to use Adwords and it costs only pay a few cents for a first page listing on Google search. However, advertising on Yahoo search is more costly as you have to go through Yahoo South East Asia office based in Singapore. And you pay by CPM. A typical campaign will cost $5,000 per month upward.
So if you are not on the first 3 pages of Google search listing, you should seriously consider using Adwords to get some traffic to your website while it is still inexpensive for you to experiment around.
The keyword that I targeted are SEO Web Design workshop, internet marketing training, learn seo, internet marketing singapore and so on - just a handful of keywords and not too expensive ones. I still prefer using Google Adwords as I could get my marketing campaign up and running within hours. Unlike Yahoo Search Market (Overture), it would take at least 24 hours. So I can start monitor the ad-copy and the click-through. Usually, I will leave it there for 48 to 72 hours before tweaking the ad, the keywords and the bid price.
One trick I learned was to start with a slight higher price than you can afford for more competitive keywords. Usually, I will bid up to 50% higher my default bid price for such keywords. And I have to monitor closely for that I will not have to break the bank to pay Google. I will spend about $7 to $10 before I lower my bid price. So far, this technique works well.
Now, back to my Internet marketing workshop. I will have a 2-day workshop in April that will focus on SEO. Not just building a basic website but also to do it with SEO in mind so that even for a new domain the search engines will rank it well for less competitive keywords - those that have between 800k to 2 mil results. There is no real secret here, and I have not invented anything new. I learned from books and… webmasters’ guideline provided by Google, Yahoo and MSN! However, with my experience, I can help you to get there quicker. And I charge a small fee for showing you the open “secret”. Go to this URL,
http://DesignerSEO.com/workshop
and find out if you agree with me.
I have been thinking of building a human-edited web directory for Singapore. This will be a Singapore directory for local businesses and websites to gain visibility on the Internet - and also search engines ranking. (more…)
Last Saturday, Jolly helped me to organised a workshop on Blogging and Mini-site for the group of Singapore graduates from The Internet Marketing Machine Super Seminar. We had 16 participants and they were very enthisiatic - initially. The blogging part was relatively easy and they could use Blogger.com to publish their first blogs.
Beside hands-on, I also explained how they can optimize their blog writing for search engines. And by using subscribing to their own blog with MyYahoo!, they can get their blogs indexed quickly.
At the end of the workshop, all participants were expected to submit their blogs and mini-sites for judging. And the winner will be given a book prize. The submission deadline was 12 noon, 3 August 2005. However, I received only 2 qualified entries.
Yeo’s submission:
Calvin Foo’s submission:
Blog Criteria:
Mini-site Criteria:
Jolly telephoned me this morning and told me he would like to help graduates of Richard Quek Internet Marketing Seminar. He found that most people had difficulty in starting their websites. He want to start a support group to help those who are keen but lack the technical background to start an online business. And that was the start of his Internet Marketing In Action blog.
I offered my help to be his trainer in “cooking” up search engines friendly websites. And using Blogger is probably one of the quickest way to have an Internet presence at virtually zero cost.
As a Web site publisher and search marketing consultant, I would like help more people to express their idea and publish their experience to share with others. The Internet is becoming a way of living for more and more people. People use the Internet to keep touch with their families, friends, co-workers and even their competitors. More people are willing to shop online with more secure payment methods. The Internet is no doubt one of the most fertile ground to plant your money tree if you know how.
By Mark Daoust
Browse through any search engine forum, or simply do a search on Google to look up search optimization for Google, and you will find incredible amounts of information on the latest trends in website ranking, webmaster tricks, and theories as to what the future holds for Google. Website owners are simply obsessed with Google, and many are spending too much time trying to appease Google when they could be building a wildly successful website.
Successful Websites Do Not Have To Rank Well
Investors constantly preach the benefit of diversifying a portfolio to reduce the risk of investment fluctuations. The same strategy needs to be taken with developing your website’s marketing strategy. Diversify the sources of your traffic. Becoming over-reliant on any single type of traffic sets your website up for failure if that type of traffic happens to fail for some reason.
Unfortunately, many website owners simply do not know how to generate traffic to their websites. These website owners would do well to think about their website in more traditional business terms. Traditional businesses do not have search engines to bring people to their doorstep. Rather, the brick and mortar businesses rely on word of mouth, good solid promotion, good customer service, a good location, and quality products.
Websites can incorporate these same techniques in developing traffic. Article writing, press releases, participation in forums, development of a mailing list, and developing a strong public relations campaign are all solid promotion techniques. Entering into partnerships with industry websites, doing joint promotions such as co-registrations can help position you in a location where your visitors can find you. Offering your visitors the ability to recommend your site to a friend, adding community interactivity to your website are all ways to help promote your site effectively.
Stop Optimizing Your Website (That Means No Trading Links)
One of the worst things to happen to websites is the development of search engine optimization. Although it is perfectly acceptable (and expected) to do a cursory amount of SEO, many website owners do too much to the detriment of their sites. The purpose of your website is to offer information and possibly a service to clients and visitors. Your SEO activities should never define how you develop, structure, and word your website.
The most popular technique in search engine optimization currently is link trading. Knowing that Google judges a page’s value by the number of inbound links, website owners learned that they could set up entire links pages and exchange links with hundreds of other website owners. You will know the websites that do this. They will have a page named “links” or “resources” that contains a myriad of links to other websites. If you visit those other websites, they typically will have a similar page.
The problem with exchanging links is two-fold. The first, and more important one, is the fact that link exchanging does not have as strong an effect as it once had. Google knows that webmasters exchange links, and many webmasters are concerned primarily about the quantity of links they have. Google also knows that these links are primarily exchanged in an attempt to increase page rank, something Google probably will try to not recognize. Page rank was initially developed to incorporate the number of natural inbound links a website had. So, to prevent website owners from falsely increasing their page rank, Google actively works on developing systems that determine links that are a part of a link exchange and links that occur naturally. The problem with link exchanges is this: website owners are spending way too much time on an activity that has relatively little impact when they could be spending their time writing articles or other more reliable traffic generation techniques.
The second problem with exchanging links is the cosmetic effect it has on your website. Visitors that come to your website do not want to see a loosely collected arrangement of links to sites that may or may not be similar to your topic. They came to your website to see what you have to offer. If you want to recommend a resource to your visitors, you can do so, but you certainly would not do so in the form of a links page. The cosmetic effect that links pages have on a website is to make it look less professional.
SEO should never dictate how your site is arranged, worded, or how you spend the majority of your time.
When You Get That Visitor
Promoting your website is only half the battle in developing a wildly successful website. The other half is to have a website that will bring visitors back time and time again. Not only do you want a website that visitors find worthy of revisiting, you want a website that people talk about and refer to others.
There is a popular saying among internet marketers: “Content is King”. Well, this is sort-of true. But, it takes more than simply having content on your site to bring visitors back to your site time after time. It takes quality content.
People visit websites on a repeat basis for a few reasons. First, they may believe that a particular website is the only place they can get the content they are looking for. Secondly, they may recognize that more than one website offers the same content or information, but they prefer the format, look, and design of one website over another.
When developing your website, make it your goal to not just match the quality of your competition, but rather to far exceed the quality of your competition. Be confident that your layout and design is of a higher caliber than any competing websites. And, most importantly, offer more unique, valuable, and helpful information than any other website that could compete with you.
That’s the Rub? Yep, that’s the Rub.
Here is the amazing part… when you stop focusing on developing your website for the search engines and start focusing on a website that is the best of its kind, the search engines will find you. By focusing all of your attention on developing a high quality website that leaves an impression on visitors, and by focusing on developing alternative sources of traffic, search engines will take notice and give you the ranking you deserve.
Google and the other search engines have a very simple goal with their search results: to provide the most relevant results to those who perform a search. Some of the brightest minds are working on developing formulas and algorithms that do just this. Your job as a website owner is not to focus on trying to demystify the secrets of members of Mensa-level search engine developers. No, your job is to develop your website, to promote it through the many channels available, and to maintain the high level of quality content your site offers.
If you successfully build your website on a diversified set of traffic sources, your website will be protected from the loss of any single traffic source. Furthermore, if you build your online business to capitalize on every visitor that you receive, the traffic will always be there. If you happen to be picked up by Google, or Yahoo!, or MSN Search, the results will simply be a pleasant addition to your already abundant sources of traffic.
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Mark Daoust is the owner of http://www.site-reference.com. This article originally appeared at http://www.site- reference.com/Marketing/5258/index.html
Discuss this article, and other topics, at http://forums.site- reference.com
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Remember some time ago I mentioned that I would try out Traffic Equalizer(TE). I did and generated 400 pages. Because of these pages, I’ve got additional hits and a couple of Adsense click through. The price of TE is US$147. The latest version was released on 2 August 2004. However, I am using the older version.
After using TE and trusted the quality of product, I invested in a copy of RSS Equalizer too. This is an amazing software. Now I can scrap lastest news update content and post it on my futures trading website. RSS Equalizer converts the RSS feeds in search engine friendly plain html and not the usual Javascript. The Googlebot and Slurp are visiting my website several times a day now (see table above). I guess this will probably boost my ranking. However, the more important thing is the website provides more value to my visitors and they have a good reason to bookmark it and come back frequently to view the latest news update by Reuters!
Also, I have the latest news update on “singapore” and “nikkei” provided by Yahoo News on these pages:
1. http://www.tradersvic.com/simsci.html
2. http://www.tradersvic.com/nikkei225.html
The main drawback is that the page takes a few more seconds to load. I will need to optimise this and may have to forego the Ads by Google.
The price of RSS Equalizer is US$97. If you intend to use it on several websites, I would think it is easy to justify the cost.