By : Admin

While most online marketers would agree that SEO and PPC are essential in search engine marketing, many people are on only one side of the fence. Either they advocate PPC or SEO. Both (SEO and PPC) has their pros and cons. Some might praise PPC or some may SEO. However, this debate do not decreases the value of any of them; rather SEO and PPC can work better in co-ordination. I believe that they should go hand in hand together and compliment each other. There are several reasons that could give you a platform to trust that they could be better friends than foe.

Keyword Tools Are Not Accurate: Even Wordtracker says its database is skewed. With PPC you can get the raw data. Assuming there is minimum skew from invalid clicks. If you run a broad match campaign over a set period, you can mine the real most popular keywords from your server logs.

Not All Keywords Convert: Having ten thousand unique visitors a day come to your site using a search term is all well and good. With a PPC campaign you can find out what keywords convert. You can also pour your time into an organic SEO campaign for this purpose. Although a general conversion idea can be gained from PPC and applied to your SEO efforts.

Meta Descriptions Are Essential: Meta descriptions are the little snippets essential to getting users to click through to your site in organic listings. With PPC and SEO, you can optimize your call to action and description to maximize your CTR on organic listings. It may even be possible to get a higher click through rate in the second or third organic position if you have the perfect Meta description.

Relevance is rewarded: Search engines wants to provide relevant results in the organic search results. Knowing and improving your quality score for certain keywords can reveal how relevant they think your site is for any given keyword. With PPC you can find what keywords work and what keywords don’t and optimize your organic listings according to that data.

Long Tail Gold and Mining Only the Valuable Terms: Long Tail Search Running a broad match PPC campaign and mining long tail keywords that converted can give you an absolute goldmine of information. You can obtain a number one organic position for many, many long tail keywords by simply getting a single back link with that anchor text or writing an article on that exact topic.

Landing Pages Can Be Optimized Quickly: You can get the visitor to your site through SEO. With PPC you can split test different landing pages and use multi variant testing to make the ultimate landing page. So when you reach that coveted number one position, you are ready to convert that visitor.

The Power of Branding: This subject has been beaten to death but it is well know and documented that the more real estate your brand occupies on any given SERP the more trust and recognition you will receive. If you have a well optimized PPC campaign and landing page you should be able to convert the visitor who clicks on your paid listing anyway. Every visitor to your site has a value.

To conclude, most people rely either on at least an organic SEO campaign or a paid search (PPC) campaign. But to maximize your ROI it will be best that SEO and PPC should go hand in hand to compliment each other on exposing your company or brand to not only as many people as possible, but as many of the right kind of people.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Are you sick and tired of receiving “I just visited your website. I linked to it on this page. I would love it if you would link back to mine” emails? When you go to the page to locate your URL, if you manage to find it at all, your site is in the company of hundreds of others. Does this help your website? Will anyone ever go to that page with the hundreds of websites and miraculously click on just yours?

These pages with countless links to other websites were created during the fervor of link popularity when it was thought that the more links that linked to your website, the higher your website ranked in search engines such as Google. It was also thought that a reciprocal link between sites, any site, counted in your favor. Link farms sprung up, and website owners have been bombarded with reciprocal link requests ever since. Software and entire websites were launched to make creating link farms easier. But, many SEO professionals refused to use them, finding them to be a waste of time and website real estate, and an obvious desperate measure.

My advice to my clients was from a usability perspective. Pages listing hundreds of websites leading OFF your website was illogical, especially if your website was trying to generate sales leads or sell products or services. The appearance of link farm pages made some websites appear unprofessional.

It didn’t take long for search engine databases to become clogged up with pages upon pages that did nothing more than link to websites. This was their only purpose. Since search engines and directories want to provide relevant search results with quality pages for their users, link farm pages became quite a nuisance. Search engines began to penalize websites containing link farm pages. The workaround for that was to disconnect the link farm pages from the main site, but keep the game going in an effort to convince people to link back to your website.

Link Farm Request Checklist:

• Their site has no possible connection to your subject matter whatsoever. The page they put your link on isn’t linked to FROM any page, meaning it’s floating out there in never-never land and is a ploy to get you to link to their site.

• The page where they put your link is on a URL a mile long and several directories deep so engines will never find it.

• The page looks like a farmer’s field with nicely arranged rows of links to hundreds of sites which aren’t necessarily organized in any logical manner, but that doesn’t matter because someone told them the link is all that counts.

• It’s a link and a link only. No description. No proof the person ever actually reviewed the site.

• They don’t seem to know that links leak PageRank in Google, not the other way around or that the link that does you the most good is the one that shares space on a page with about 2 other outbound links, not 3596 other ones.

• Signs they’ll accept anything that shows evidence of being a “live” link. A true Directory has criteria, frets about the quality of sites it links to and doesn’t have people out begging for links. Instead the reverse is true, with people begging to be let in.

• They ask you for a link on your links page, even though you don’t have one.

• Watch for scams such as sub-domain one-way traffic feeders where the page your site is linked to isn’t part of the main website. Study the URLS carefully before you decide to accept a link request.

Despite the negative approaches to link requests, there’s definitely good reasons to seek them. If you see a website that offers something of value to your target audience, by all means, link to it. I always appreciate hearing from well researched inquiries. I can tell when someone has studied my website and has shown me a great spot on theirs to link mine. They take the extra step of pointing out on my website where they think their website should be linked. Most times they’re correct.

Remember that it’s not just the number of links back to your website that contribute to your rank jackpot. What counts is where your URL is placed, the amount and quality of its neighbor links and whether or not the page is even linked to the main domain at all. And that’s just for starters. There’s a lot more to linking and influence on rank than just a few basic guidelines. If you really want your website to rank well, build a good website that people find useful and want to return to, study branding and how that can help you, and of course, like everything else in a competitive environment, promote and market it effectively and wisely.

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By : Admin

Webmasters, often employ their best plans, strategies to make their email marketing endeavor successful. However, only a few succeed. Gone are the days when ‘load and send’ was the only marketing concept rather principal available to follow for email marketers. It doesn’t work anymore! Today the competition is at its peek and only the best performer could survive. Here are few rules that need to be followed in order to be successful. Companies that fail to follow all of these principles (rules) will find their email marketing programs underperforming their competitors and not achieving maximum ROI.

1. Seek Permission, It’s Not Optional: You hurt your brand, your campaign and your sender reputation by sending unsolicited mail. Avoid using stealth methods to collect email addresses. Rather use a two-stage subscription process that requires confirmation before the address goes into your database. Also, ask older opt-ins if they still want to receive your email, and retain all the permission data on each opt-in.

2. Manage Your Sender Reputation: Either you send too many emails too often to too many bad email addresses, or generating too many spam complaints you’ll get on bad side of ISP. As a result ISP will block your emails, shunt them to oblivion in the bulk folder and won’t tell you what you did wrong. Honor unsubscribe requests immediately, stay off blacklists, monitor and resolve spam complaints, and use a double opt-in process and unique IP address if you don’t already.

3. Clean and Analyze Mailing Lists: A list consisted of too many unsolicited, incorrect, and out-of-date or duplicated addresses hurts your campaign’s performance, your company’s delivery and sender reputation. Keep your list hygiene. Clean out bad addresses and reduce undeliverable emails.

4. Deploy Authentication Technologies: These days, some ISPs are using methods that allow email from recognized senders but block spammers and malicious senders. Unauthenticated emails could be blocked, filtered or sent to bulk/junk folders through whitelisting, SenderID and DomainKeys.

5. Test for Delivery and Correct Rendering: Send a sample email to test emails accounts at major providers to spot bad links, copy that triggers spam filters, bad images or other problems. Also test to see which attributes work best in individual emails.

6. Establish and Build Trust: Ask only for the most necessary information at registration. Send only what you say you will, when and how often you promised at registration. Without trust, recipients are less likely to open or act on your emails and more likely to unsubscribe or file spam complaints.

7. Respect Recipients’ Privacy: This is just good business practice, but you’ll also avoid legal and ethical problems. Include a short, simple email privacy statement within your opt-in form and link it to the full policy statement on your Web site.

8. Provide Functions: Give recipients the tools they need to manage their subscriptions, contact you, forward information to others and get more information, right in the email.

9. Define Your Email Value Proposition: Give your recipient clear reasons to open your emails every time. Define your Email Value Proposition and use it to drive your content, creative, frequency and segmentation strategies.

10. Personalize for Greater Relevance: Personalization boosts your value. Top-quality email service providers allows to personalize right to the recipient level, with email that recognizes each one by name, buying history, content, format, etc.

11. Use Good Design & Format: Weak designs and improper format frustrates users. They can’t navigate your email easily or find the information they want. So, they opt out. Or, they delete you every time. Or, they hit the “Report Spam” button and hope that makes you go away.

    That’s why you test sample messages, to make sure they perform across many email programs and Web services. Your email has to stand out in a crowded inbox so design email for the inbox.

12. Focus on List Quality over List Size: Growing your mailing list is important, but don’t do it at the expense of quality. Analyze your house lists carefully. Clean them frequently, especially before a campaign or publication and Segment your lists regularly.

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