Increase Your Leads with Search Engine and Lead Optimization Strategies

The most optimal way for an online Real Estate agent to succeed is through rapid lead generation and follow up. And in order to escalate your leads, you must start off with an acceptance of your current traffic and lead conversion ratio.
Ask yourself "How many visitors does it take to get to a lead?"
In fact, when we initially interview a potential client often times the conversion is close to a dismal 200:1. Depending on design features, you should really get at the most 50:1. And probably 30:1 is more like it.
Conversion comes from on page conversion optimization & Keyword representation.
On Page Factors
Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimization. Few talk about on page conversion optimization.
First of all, this whole concept pre-supposes that you are starting off with a most wanted action (MWA). Sometimes your MWA is Branding, sometimes it is Leads. And many times it is both lead capture and branding that you are asking your website to do.
If Leads are your goal then your call to action is critical. Other features on your page can distract the viewer from your objectives.
On Page factors that may increase or decrease conversion are:
Asking them to sign up (making your call to action clear)
A Johnson Box (these are those tabled boxes that break up your body copy)
Color can attract or distract
Too many buttons
Animation
Offer Placement. Where are you placing your call to action?
Variety of Call to Action
Frequency of your call to action
These are just a few of the attributes that may help your lead count to go way up.
HappyVille Real Estate
There is a reason that studies have found that Pay per Click search engine results often render poor conversion rates. Specificity.
The reason is that you can only use high volume keywords with pay per click (PPC). These high volume keywords are by their nature generalized. They are also the most profitable for the engine. But what may profit the engine does not always profit you. (Thats not to say that PPC doesn't have its place in a search marketing campaign)
9 times out 10, I am asked to "make my site #1 for "My City real estate". While this is a worthy objective, it is at best very short sighted. Words like "City real estate", "city homes", city condos", are all high volume in just about any city you research.
However, a successful marketing campaign must employ search engine click thrus that are made up of general & specific "streams of traffic". This is because traffic is a comprehensive endeavor. You wouldn't just rent out 1 or 2 of your penthouse units and leave the rest of your 150 unit apartment complex empty? You couldn't expect profitability would you?
However, this is exactly what most agents do when they go after a few high volume words.
Traffic is made up of the combined visits that come from various inquiries into a search engine.
Each inquiry represents a finite amount of possible traffic determined by the placement in the engine, for a particular keyword phrase.
So long story short, a few keywords aren't going to make your business. You need a Universe of words in order to get monster traffic and lead conversion.
Additionally, not all keywords or traffic are created equal. Step out of real estate monetarily and imagine yourself as Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. What would delite you more?
500 visitors that typed in "Books"? Or 500 visitors that typed in "Harry Potter"? Or better yet, "Harry Potter, Sorcerors Stone"? The more specific you get, conversion goes up and the closer you can get to that elusive 1:1 conversion.
The challenge however, is that the more specific you get with our keywords, the less traffic you get. So you need to represent a large amount of these specific keywords that produce low traffic by themselves. But combined, create a large stream of very convertable traffic.
By optimizing your on page factors and your keywords that drive people to your site, you will take your visitor to conversion ratio down to a respectable number.

The Steps Before Website Traffic

By now, you probably already have the theme of your website established, your keywords picked and your website ready to go live. You're thinking that you'll submit your site to the search engines, sit back and see how much traffic the search engines will send you, right?

STOP! There are many different avenues you can take to drive traffic to your site but they should only be taken after you make the search engines your first priority. The search engines should be your foundation. They'll always send you a certain amount of traffic if you have a high page rank.

IMPORTANT!

Your website must be 'set up' for a high page rank in the search engines and it's important to do it 'before' you submit your site for the first time. Here's the reason why:

Usually, after you submit your website to the search engines for the first time, your website will be 'spidered' fairly quickly and hopefully your site will be listed on one of the top pages.

Your website may not get 'spidered' again for months so if you make changes to optimize your site, you may not see your changes take effect for quite a while. You could be stuck on a back page, if any page at all, for a very long time.

Without getting into the mechanics of designing your website, here are the basics of setting up your website to be search engine friendly.

THE FIRST STEP is to establish the main keyword for your site. This is the word or phrase that you want people to type into the search engines to find your website. It's important to have your site focused around your main keyword.

Let's say you have a site dedicated to 'building your own home' so we'll use 'home building' as our main keyword example.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a title for your website and to place it in the 'title tag' of your site. The 'title tag' should be the first tag in the 'head' of your site and it's important because many search engines use the contents of the 'title tag' as the title of the listing. They also look for keywords in the title and your main keyword should be the first words in the title.

Generally, your title should be no more than 40 characters and, again, it should begin with your main keyword. Try to avoid using 'stop words' in your title. Stop words are transition words such as - and, but, or, for, with, etc.

Here's a possible title using our example main keyword 'home building' - Home Building - Home Construction Plans

Notice our main keyword is first, the title is less than 40 characters (39), there are no stop words and we managed to sneak in 3 secondary keywords - home construction, construction plans and home construction plans. Clever huh?

THE NEXT STEP is to create a 'keywords meta tag'. This is where you list all the keywords you want to use for your website starting with your 'main keyword'. A good rule of thumb is to use about 20 keywords and your main keyword should be contained in about half of them.

Using our example keyword 'home building' our keywords could be - home building, home construction, home building plans, home building cost, construction plans, etc.

Notice I didn't use our main keyword 'home building' twice in a row. For example - home building, home building plans, etc. Search engines might see this as spam and it could hurt your ranking.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a 'description meta tag'. This is where you describe your website and, again, you should start with your main keyword.

Keep your description to about 150 characters, use as few 'stop words' as you can and sprinkle in as many secondary keywords as possible.
Make your description interesting because search engines often use the contents in your 'description meta tag' as the description of your website in the listing.

THE NEXT STEP is to use your keywords often in the body of your website. Make sure your 'main keyword' is somewhere in the beginning and at the end of the body of your page.

It's a good idea to use your main keyword in an 'h1' tag and a few of your secondary keywords in an 'h2' tag. This tells the search engines that you put importance on your keywords.

It's also a good idea to underline your main keyword no more than once and to use bold text for your main keyword no more than once.

Although there are other factors that determine your position in the search engines, having the basics of what search engines look for will give you a much better chance of making that illusive first page and driving consistent website traffic to your site.

How Search Engines Work

A search engine operates, in the following order: 1) Crawling; 2) Deep Crawling Depth-first search (DFS); 3) Fresh Crawling Breadth-first search (BFS); 4) Indexing; 5) Searching.

Web search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler (also known as a spider) - an automated web browser which follows every link it sees, exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds, such as AltaVista. This cached page always holds the actual search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations that the search terms will be on the returned web page. This satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data that may no longer be available elsewhere.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. An advanced feature is proximity search, which allows you to define the distance between keywords.

The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back. While there may be millions of Web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.

Most web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and, as a result, some employ the controversial practice of allowing advertisers to pay money to have their listings ranked higher in search results.

The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search. However, Open source search engine technology does exist, such as Dig, Nutch, Senas, Egothor, OpenFTS, DataparkSearch and many others.

The Evolution and Revolution of Search Engines

Search engines, where would we be without them? Within the past 10-15 years the internet has become a huge part of every day American life. Many people nowadays cannot remember the time prior to having this wonderful information highway we call the internet. The internet has really revolutionized the way people live their lives; for example, you can bank online, buy just about anything you want online, meet new people online, and even find local movie times. However, one of the biggest benefits of the internet is the use of search engines. At any moment in time you may have a question, or an urge to get more information about a certain topic and that information can be easily attained through a search engine. In this article I am going to give you a brief history on the evolution of the search engine, and show you how they truly have revolutionized our lifestyles.

The history of search engines is the story of university students' projects evolving into commercial enterprises and revolutionizing the field as they went. The first attempt at creating a search engine was called Archie, and it was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University. This very primitive search engine did not use any robot technology. All Archie really did was just become a database of archived filenames, which it would try to match with users' queries.

The next evolutionary step of the search engine was the introduction of "robots." The first use of robot technology was in the search engine World Wide Web Wanderer. Simply what robots would do is scan the internet for URL's, starting at one site and using the links in the previous site to find more sites. The problems with these first robots were that if they were not written properly they would cause too many hits on a server decaying the systems performance.

To combat these initial problems Martjin Koster came out with the first web directory called "Aliweb" in October 1993. Web directories are different than search engines because the sites listed in them are not from automated robots, but rather from human editors reviewing sites and placing them in the directory.

However, shortly after, in December 1993, a new robot was born. This was called the "spider." Spiders added a much further degree of accuracy by indexing the entire text of a webpage. The older robots only indexed the URL and titles of a page, which meant that some pertinent keywords might not be indexed. This greatly improved the relevancy rankings of their results, and thus was the first major step in forming the major search engines that we have all become so used to using today.

Not long after the spider, we saw the emergence of some of the big guns. In 1994, out of Stanford University came the extremely famous Yahoo. The two guys who started Yahoo were students, David Filo and JerryYang. Basically, at first Yahoo was just a list of these guys' favorite websites. But soon, due to its easy user-friendly interface, became the most popular web directory. Due to the fact that its websites were all human reviewed, Yahoo was only able to index about 1% of the web. At this time, Altavista became the fastest growing search engines using the spider technology and was indexing up to 10 million pages a day.

By this time there are two different types of search engines, "author controlled" such as Altavista and Excite, in which results were ranked by keyword relevancy, and "editor controlled" such as Yahoo, in which humans manually placed websites into their index.
Then in late 1997 out of Stanford University was born the most popular and well-known search engine to date: GOOGLE Google has a different way of ranking its websites. It used a Pagerank system. Simply what they did was list websites higher in their results based on how many links were pointing to a particular site. Of course, the content on the page had to be relevant to the keyword typed into the search box. But basically, Google invented what you could call a system of voting. So a site with numerous backlinks or votes would rank higher. A backlink is just when someone else puts a link on their site that points to another outside site. Jump forward to today and Google has more than 80% of the websites on the internet in their index, which is pretty impressive.

Search engines have had a huge impact on the American lifestyle. They basically will grant you just about any information you want, all you have to do is type into the search box the topic you want to find more information about. Human beings are natural born information junkies, we always want to know more and find out more and search engines have made this urge of ours extremely easy to cure. Just think about it, maybe you need to fix a simple problem you have with your car. By using a search engine to do some research you may very easily figure the problem out, saving you a very costly trip to the car repair shop. They are just great educational tools, before search engines emerged if you really wanted to learn something you would go to your library and check out a book. Now before making that trip you may find out what you wanted by just sitting at your desktop and surfing through Google. The list goes on about the many benefits of this great new technology we call the search engine. I'm sure you can recall a time when you found some very good information by using one. If you're anything like me and find yourself addicted to this easily accessible information highway then your making uses of them daily.

Search engines by nature were made very easy to use. However, with a little extra knowledge about how they work you can really take advantage of them and find great information very quickly. With the right knowledge of search engines and the use of specialized tools you can literally find anything you want. And when I mean anything, I mean ANYTHING. For me personally I am excited to see what search engines will evolve into in the future. The sky is the limit. Who knows what type of search spiders the future will spawn, but one thing is for sure there will be newer and newer search technology it's just our human nature to keep trying to top ourselves.

Impending Changes in the SEO world

The sky isn't falling chicken little, but your traffic may be in the near future.

There is no question that Google has been a dominating force. There is also no question that Microsoft has both the financial and the manpower resources to give them some serious competition and probably eventually get the upper hand again. As Google has grown to a size comparable to that of Microsoft, it has lost much of the "little guy trying harder" appeal that once helped to create a great deal of it's public support.

Many users don't really care which search engine they use as long as they are getting the results that they're looking for. In this area, Google is falling seriously behind. In an attempt to filter out more of the web sites using artificial means to improve their ranking, they have knocked a large number of legitimate web sites out of the SERPs and often prevented newer web sites from appearing to begin with. While I applaud their effort to combat the web sites using spam techniques to climb above legitimate web sites, I can say with out a doubt that unless they find a better way to do this they will begin loosing market share in a big way. There are several reasons, some of which are not so obvious:

• People want relevant and timely results. If Google continues to delay newer web sites and web pages from ranking for applicable terms, users will go elsewhere to find more up to date results.
• Many web site owners using Google AdSense will begin switching over to competing services from Yahoo and MSN - which they are likely getting traffic from. Since the ads are a source of revenue for these web site owners, they are going to deal with the search engines that are helping them make more money.
• Many web site owners will remove the Google site-search from their web sites since they aren't getting traffic from Google.
• Web savvy people are often asked for advice from those who are not as proficient with computers. It won't take too many bitter web site owners telling these people to use a competing search engine before Google starts to see the effects in their bottom line.
• Microsoft has been developing Windows Vista (www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx), in fact, the beta version has already been released. Microsoft will put a serious dent in Google's business with this because they have built a handy little search box right into the operating system.

For those of us that are forward thinking enough to prepare for this shift, the next six to eighteen months should be very rewarding. For everyone else (especially those relying entirely on traffic from Google) it will be somewhat like riding off the edge of a cliff in a Mini Cooper. So, what can be done to prepare?

• Diversify your internet marketing strategy. Search engine optimization (www.wildfiremarketinggroup.com/search-engine-optimization.php) should only be a fragment of your internet marketing. For starters, you could consider advertising on other relevant web sites, utilizing a pay-per-click campaign and publishing articles on other web sites.
• Plan for the adoption of new technology. Blogs are here to stay and RSS is taking hold. Stay on top of new and innovative ways to use technology to multiply the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaign. You can get a general idea of what technologies to look at by staying up to date with the advances in operating systems, browsers and related software and hardware.
• Avoid using spam techniques to improve your ranking, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, or link spamming. Most of these questionable techniques don't work and those that do don't work well - and you risk having your web site banned.
• Update your web site on a regular basis. A web site that is constantly growing is viewed by the search engines as more important, a side benefit is that by generating useful content other web site owners will have a reason to link to your web site.

AdWords Tips: All About Keywords

As you probably know, Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing system, which is a great way to get traffic to your site. But if you don't know the ins and outs, it can end up costing you a lot of money and not making you any.

So, what's the key to success with AdWords? Well, I wish I could tell you there were one or two simple tricks, but the fact is, the best way to ensure success with AdWords is to be familiar with every aspect of the system. This will likely take weeks or months of research, plus a few bucks spent testing out a real AdWords account. However, you can greatly increase your chances by following this bit of advice: don't skimp on the keyword research!

Maybe you had it in your head that you could go through your site, grab 20 or 30 words or phrases, load them into an ad group, and you'd be watching the traffic and sales pour in. This is simply not the case. Keyword research should be the most time-consuming part of setting up any campaign; not only that, but you should be doing it all the time. That's right - never stop building your keyword list. Okay, now let me explain a few things:

First, you need to understand how Google uses your keywords to show your ads. You place a bid that determines your maximum cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. This can be different for every single keyword, if you wish. This bid does not represent the amount you'll pay for each click (like on Overture); this is just the maximum you'll ever pay for any single click. For example, if you have a max CPC of $0.50 set for a keyword, you'll only have to pay the full amount if someone else bids $0.49. If that person decides to lower his bid to $0.30, you'll only pay $0.31. This is because Google's bid discounter only charges you one cent more than the next highest bidder, no matter what your max CPC is. Theoretically, then, you could bid $10 or even $100 and still only pay $0.31 for a click.

But that's not all! As you start getting impressions (i.e., your ad shows up in the search results) and clicks, you'll have a click-through rate (CTR). This represents the number of clicks you receive per 100 impressions. Here's the really beautiful thing about AdWords: the higher your CTR, the lower your click cost. Because Google values relevance, you'll receive a bonus for having a relevant ad, and CTR is the primary indicator of how relevant your ad is. So, let's say you're competing with someone for ad position No. 3 on the search results page for a particular keyword. Your max bid is $0.50 and his is $1. He should be way above you, right? Not necessarily. Suppose you have a CTR of 5%, and his is only 1%. Google factors in CTR when calculating ad positions, so you end up with this: max CPC × CTR = (what we'll call) ranking factor. In this case, your ranking factor is 0.025, while your competitor's is only 0.01. Which means your ad shows above his for $0.50, even though he's willing to pay up to $1!

Okay, so now you know the basics of how keywords work in AdWords and how Google charges you for clicks. What's next? Keyword research. The best way to go about this is to use WordTracker. I won't get really specific about how WordTracker works, because they've got a ton of information right there on the site - just go do some reading there when you finish this article. Basically, though, WordTracker will help you find the best keywords to use in your AdWords campaign. You type in any word, and you'll get up to 300 related terms, which you can then click on to find a few hundred variations of that term. The terms you'll get are all terms from WordTracker's search query database, which uses metacrawlers to compile information (again, they explain it on their site if you're really interested). So you know that all the words you find there are real terms that people are actually searching for. Even better, you get a prediction of how many searches to expect per day for any keyword, how many times it shows up in their database, and a KEI value to determine your best words (KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, which you can also read about on the site). You can get a free trial, or you can sign up for a single day to test it out with all the features included (a day's membership is just a few bucks).

There are some free keyword research tools you can use, but I recommend these only for absolute newcomers who have no budget to start out with. Overture's Keyword Inventory is a good, free resource, but there's a catch: it shows results only for searches done through www.yahoo.com. If you're marketing with Google AdWords, you should know that Google accounts for at least twice as many searches as Yahoo!, in some cases three or four times as many. (Though reports vary, Google usually receives credit for about 50-60% of all searches, while Yahoo! gets about 20-30% - but this is based on all searches, and results for individual searches may vary widely.) You may find other "free" tools or downloadable programs that claim to help you with keyword research, but I say don't bother with them. You get what you pay for. Most of them just pull their results directly from other free online tools, and they don't offer anything in the way of features unless you buy the "full version." If you're out to get one for free, just use Overture. (Google's own traffic estimator is decent, but it doesn't give you an exact count for searches within a given period; you just get status bars, which are hard to interpret. Google's bid and position estimates are also usually way off.)

But third-party tools, even if they're very good, won't do your keyword research for you. You'll have to pick through your web site (or your affiliate's sales letter) for words and phrases that you can use. Then, using those words, see if you can think of similar words or concepts that people might be searching for. There's no real trick to this; you've just got to do a lot of brainstorming. Once you've got a good core list, take that over to WordTracker to beef it up. (Hint: If you see any words that don't directly relate to your product, service, or niche, add them as negative matches.)

Now you should have a lean but healthy keyword list. This is your first step to beating out your competition on Google AdWords.

Best SEO Firm: Your Guide To Online Success

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion or the other in the SEO field. Well, it will not serve any of your purpose if you keep on listening to everybody and implementing everything that you come across. If you are very serious about your online business venture, your best bet would be to hire the services of the best SEO firm in your city to do the work for you. No one needs to be told that SEO means search engine optimization, but what they need to be told is what are the proper methods of doing SEO.

Basically, SEO is nothing but publicity methods of a site on the web. Publicity rules and you must make sure that you have the best advertising methods in place for announcing your presence on the web. Competition is immense and you have to risen yourself in this competition to be successful in online business. Search engine marketing is one of the fastest growing industries. To be successful on the web, it is important to do search engine optimization.

For doing successful online business, it is important that your site must be available and accessible to all online visitors at all times of the day. If visitors come to visit your site and sees that your site is not functioning properly, then he will not come back again to the site. The net is a very good source for you to learn about the basics of SEO. However if you want to make use of SEO methods for popularizing your site, hiring SEO services from the best SEO firm is the perfect as well as the safest bet for you.

Sure you will let the best SEO firm handle the job for you, but it pays in the long run if you have a proper knowledge about this. The first and foremost thing that you should do is find out and determine who the target audience of your product is. It would be rather stupid on your part if you are targeting the wrong audience for advertising your product. All your money, time and other resources will simply go waste without yielding any visible results. Your business will just go to a downwards spiral. So take a hold of your online business before it is too late to amend the damage.

Work towards getting targeted traffic to your site. On any given day, your site can have thousands of visitors, but what purpose will this serve if their visit is not monitorized. Making commanding landing pages on your site is a great way of going about attracting the right kind of visitors to your site. Visitors on clicking the link of your site must be immediately transferred to the page that they want to see. This will ensure that visitors do not face any difficulty in finding out what they are looking for.

Hiring the services of the best SEO firm in your city is an excellent source for you to do successful online business. SEO firms are experienced and know what they need to do to make your site successful on the web. There are many aspects that need to be dealt with and taken care of popularizing for your site on the web. Just make sure that you find out the best SEO firm to do the work for your site.

Link building for effective search engine optimization

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of aquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.

Robocops

The Robots.txt protocol, also called the "robots exclusion standard" is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a "Keep Out" sign on your door.

This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.

How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn't be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it's difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won't be read.

In effect, robot.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren't locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is-if it's that sensitive, it shouldn't be on your website to begin with.

Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn't block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the crawlers rely on the robots to count the keywords, review metatags, titles and crossheads, and even register the hyperlinks.

One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

To avoid these problems, consider submitting your site to a search engine spider simulator, also called search engine robot simulator. These simulators-which can be bought or downloaded from the internet- use the same processes and strategies of different search engines and give you a "dry run" of how they will read your site. They will tell you which pages are skipped, which links are ignored, and which errors are encountered. Since the simulators will also reenact how the bots will follow your hyperlinks, you'll see if your robot.txt protocol is interfering with the search engine's ability to read through all the necessary pages.

It's also important to review your robot.txt files, which will enable you to spot any problems and correct them before you submit them to real search engines.

A Guide to successful pay per click marketing

Pay per click, as the term itself suggests, is a form of advertising that makes use of keywords for popularizing your business on the web. To make a success of your pay per click marketing you need to find the keywords that will best describe about your business. Pay per click marketing is used these days on a large scale, as this is the best way to reach out to online visitors. A study found out that more than seventy five percent of online visitors could be reached through pay per click marketing.

Yes, pay per click marketing is the best source to attract the attention of online visitors, but you must also realize that you need to know all you can before you actually start the process for your business. Nothing can be more frustrating then being caught in a situation where you are not aware of what you are doing and what is happening to your business. So make sure that you know in detail all the nitty gritty about pay per click marketing before using pay per click marketing for your business.

Finding out and identifying the proper keywords is the first task for undertaking pay per click marketing. What you need to do is find out what words will be used by online visitors for searching information or the products that are being sold through your business. There are various tools that can be used for finding out the correct and appropriate keywords for any particular business. Overture, word tracker and digital point are some of the tools that are capable of finding out appropriate keyword for any site in the web.

Sit and plan out carefully what amount of money you are willing to spend on your pay per click marketing campaign. For pay per click marketing, you will have to bid a certain sum of money on keywords that describe your business. Those particular keywords will be used for advertising your goods in major search engines. Whenever a visitor clicks on your site a pre determined amount will be reduced from your bid amount. It is inevitable that you will get many visitors who will click on your site just because your site happens to be listed at the top of sponsored finds in search engines. This cannot be avoided.

There is very little time to grab the attention of visitors. What you can do to grab visitor attention is to making very compelling landing pages. It is very possible that people will not buy goods from you for the first time they visit, but design the page in such a way that at least the visitor leaves behind his email address so that you can contact them in future and tell them about your products. Your landing page must appeal emotionally to the visitor. If you manage to gather the email address you can create a strong database and send out emails through auto responder.

Competition is something that is inevitable and you cannot avoid this in any field. So any marketing strategy including your pay per click marketing strategy must be made and implemented in such a way that you always stay miles ahead of them. Being successful in business is all about beating the competition and no matter how tough the competition, you will have to beat this at all cost.