A sitemap well serve as your all-in-one webpage for search engine spiders to index the rest of your Web pages. Search engine spiders will easily be able to move through your website and measure each page in terms of its importance for keywords. Often times, a crawler will arrive at your main page and look for a sitemap to see how well your website is set up. You should link to your sitemap from your home page.

An intuitive internal link building strategy is important if you want your website to rank highly in the search engines. Crawlers are getting smarter and keyword rich links that flow smoothly (without any broken links!) will lead to you getting a higher ranking in the search engines. Well designed websites are seen as more important by search engines than badly designed websites.

You should not only put in a site map for SEO and Search Engine crawlers. There are some website users out there that prefer sitemaps to help them navigate their way around websites. You may be inadvertently losing customers if you leave a sitemap out. If a web user cannot find what they are looking for, they will often go to the sitemap to try and save time.

If you do not have a sitemap on your website, then you are doing yourself a disservice. You should put in a sitemap in order to help you with your Search Engine Optimization and to help those customers who are struggling to find the right information on your website. A sitemap would be useful for them.

What are pay per click search engines?

An example of a pay per click search engine is Google. Google is the world’s largest search engine and controls approximately 60% of the search engine marketplace. If you have a product to sell online and want to drive highly targeted traffic to your website quickly and easily, then using a pay per click search engine like Google is a great strategy.

How does pay per click marketing work?

Pay per click works exactly how it sounds. That is, an advertiser creates an ad that relates to a specific keyword search which Google (or other search engines) will then display when the keyword that advertiser has bidded on is entered into the search box. If a user then clicks on that advertisement, then Google charges the advertiser the amount that they were willing to bid for that keyword.

What is the best way to run a pay per click campaign?

If you are an advertiser on a pay per click search engine, simply putting up an ad and bidding on a group of keywords is not going to ensure that you will be profitable. In order to make sure that your campaigns are not running a loss, you will need to track your costs and your conversions to make sure that you are not overpaying for clicks. The good news is that there are many types of pay per click software on the market today which can help you greatly cut down the time you spend optimizing your campaign.

The key things that your pay per click software will need to be able to do are pay per click tracking (the ability to track cost down to the keyword level) and then secondly, pay per click optimization (the ability to raise the bids on keywords that perform well and at lower the bids or pause altogether on poorly performing keywords).

In summary, if you have something to sell online then using pay per click search engines may be a great strategy for you and your business. Just remember to use well-designed pay per click software, which can help you with tracking and optimizing your pay per click campaigns.

Affiliate marketing has always been a good way of getting started with an online business but just lately things are getting alot tougher for the newbie marketer. Those affiliates that are just learning how to build a good landing page and promoting real value products are starting to feel the effects of the bad apples in the barrel and may never learn how powerful Pay Per Click advertising can be.

It looks like Google and the FTC are stepping up their anti-affiliate game, and coming down hard on the affiliate marketer. Accounts on Adwords are being banned or closed down for good and in some cases affiliates are being taken to court by the FTC. It is true that Google don’t really like affiliates and only want to deal with ‘real’ companies but it’s the small affiliate marketer that many large companies rely on to generate their leads. So what’s the problem with the small affiliate marketer?

Well it seems complaints are on the up at Google about new affiliates creating fake blogs and review websites, a fake blog “let’s say about weight loss “will usually show a picture of a woman or man with made up names like Susan’s or Mikes Weight Loss story Blog. The problem is that Susan or Mike doesn’t even exist! It’s just some person making up a fake story, review or testimonials about how they lost a ton of weight using the product their blog is promoting.

These sites are targeted at certain keywords and products, when some unsuspecting surfer clicks on an ad they are taken to a flog (fake Blog) or website. The sites have little or no original content with just a link to the affiliate offer. Usually the offer is a free trial where you only have to pay for shipping with your credit card, but it seems a lot of the companies are charging people the full price before the end of the trial period or giving people no way to contact them to cancel the re-bill if they do not want to continue with the offer.
So who should be worried about this? Well the hobbyists affiliates just move on to the next money making system leaving the serious marketers to sort out the mess and in the process lose money due to Google slapping them.

So what’s going to be the best way forward for a new pay per click marketer?
Well to start with you are going to have to build a real site with good quality content about the niche your are promoting and when I say a real website I mean a site with at least fifteen pages of unique quality content to start with.
Don’t use fake testimonials on your landing page or else you will be in even bigger trouble. Google or the FTC will ask you to produce proof that backs up the claims made in the testimonials.
Research the offer you are going to promote find out as much about the company as you can, make sure they have a way to contact them and a clear policy on refunds.

Make sure your landing page follows the TOS on the Google website and you have a link to your privacy policy and Terms and condition statements.

The one page landing review sites are on the way out, you need quality content about the product you are promoting on your landing page and lots of it, also links to other high quality content sites in the same niche and the link to your sites home page should be easy to find.
These are just a few of the things a new affiliate marketer will have to deal with. But if you are “in it to win it” and don’t mind putting the time in to get your business off to the best possible start then you’re going to see the benefits that a content rich website will bring you. The days of the fly by night affiliate marketer are coming to an end!

Here are some of the things to avoid.

1.Duplicate content – One thing that Search Engines do not like is duplicate content. It is important not to just copy and paste content from other website. This could see your ranking penalized or your website could be banned from the search engines altogether.

2. Keyword stuffing – People using search engines do not search for websites, they search for keywords. Overdoing keywords will not rank you highly in the search engines. You are likely to be penalized As a general rule of thumb, if your keywords take up more than 5% of your article, then this would likely be considered keyword stuffing.

3.Redirection – don’t think about using meta refresh tags to redirect your readers to another page after some fixed period of time because this is considered by search engines as spam. Your page can be banned from being crawled forever if matters get out of hand.

4.Doorway pages – these pages are created by website owners for the purpose of search engine ranking. They do not contain useful content. Doorway pages are a way to redirect towards other web pages and are considered a spam by search engines.

If you want people to visit your website, then search engine optimization is important. Equally as important is ensuring that you do not break the rules put in place by Search Engines. Otherwise you could see your website banned from the Search Engines and your livelihood destroyed.

What is a keyword or keyword phrase- A keyword or keywords is a single word or phrase very closely related to the topic you are discussing in your article or Web page. You want to repeat the keyword or keywords several times and strategically place in your article or Web page body. These keywords are like an anticipation of what your readers would type on search engine search bar if they’d like to search for something that you can offer in product, service, or simply opinion. There are plenty of resources out there that can tell you what internet users are searching for so you can decide on which keywords to target.

Where should you place your keywords in your article- Once you have decided on what keywords to target, you need to decide where to place the keywords in your article. As a general rule, you should try and put your keyword in the title, in your first paragraph and in the conclusion. If it flows well, you should consider using it a few more times throughout the article.

How often should you use your keyword or phrase- There is no set rule on how many times to use your keyword phrase in the article. No matter what happens though, you need to avoid keyword stuffing. Most people say that you should not go higher than 5%.

Keyword density is a double edged sword. You need to ensure that you target keywords that people are looking for, but keyword stuffing will lead you to Search Engine oblivion.

In essence, all other search engine optimization techniques are useless if you do not have a good content to match. You can spend as much time as you want building backlinks, but if your content is crap the search engines still will not like your site. You need to make sure that you write your content for your reader, not to try and scam the search engines. Otherwise, even if you can get a short term spike in traffic you will not see any benefits long term.

It is the biggest mistake that internet newbies make. Internet newbies think that traffic is the be all and end all. Whilst you will not get traffic to your website without visitors, you want targeted readers. If you manipulate things to get site visitors but there is no useful information there or it is hard to find the information, then you have wasted your time. Those people that get to your site will not stay, and the Search Engines will quite quickly ban you or lower your site ranking.

Search engine optimization is not all about tags, banners, links, titles, or what have you. Whilst it will be beneficial for you to utilise all of these SEO techniques, there is no point if you have not developed a website that is full of useful content that is going to be interesting to your readers.

Choose laser targeted long tail keywords

Website searchers do not generally search for one word phrases so you should be targeting longer phrases. There are plenty of resources out there that can help you decide which keywords to target. Some of these resources are paid resources but there are plenty of free resources available to you if you are starting out.

Try and target keywords with lower competition-

Some keywords and phrases are more popular than others. The challenge is to find keywords that are worthwhile enough for you to target but do not have too much competition. If you target high competition keywords, you may put in a lot of effort but still see no results.

Know that keyword optimization is important in the back end also-

As I mentioned in the introduction, link building to your website is important. To fully optimize these back links, you should ensure that these links reflect the keywords that you are targeting on your main site. This can help you skyrocket your website to the top of the search engines.

There is no point in developing a website if you are not going to optimize it. If it is not optimized, you will not get any visitors. If you do not get traffic, you will not make any money. Follow the tips I have mentioned above, choose the right keywords, and you will be well on your way to success.