Category: Search Engine Optimzation

The use of QR codes has really taken off since the introduction of the Smartphone, making it easier for people to access business information without having to spend time manually entering it.

For those not familiar with QR codes, the QR code is a type of scanning code that can be read on mobile devices with a camera installed, and a QR code reader.

There are a number of great QR code readers available totally free on the iTunes store for the iPhone.

The way the QR code works is very simple:

You simply go to a website such as http://qrcode.kaywa.com
or search Google for ‘QR Code Generator”, and you will find sites that allow you to generate and download a QR code for free for your needs.

QR Codes can be set up to share your contact details, web address, physical business location or even links to your Twitter or Facebook pages.

But what many people are slowly learning is that QR codes can play a very important role in the marketing and promotion of your business, and there are ways many people may not have yet thought of.

Here are my top 7 ways QR Codes can be used:

Business Cards

Probably the most obvious way a QR code can be used is adding it to your business card, allowing people to simply scan your card to either add your contact detail to their contacts on their phone or just to access your website.

Real Estate
Real Estates are the perfect market to use QR codes, yet not many have caught on to this yet.

Most real estates have their properties listed online on their own website, or even a larger real estate directory such as RealEstate.com.au but unless you are visiting the website you don’t really know which properties are available, and the larger directories you might need to scroll for pages until you find the right property.

QR codes can make this much easier. For instance, if the Agent created a QR code for each of his properties and added them to his press ads o or flyers people can simply scan it and their phone can show them where the property is on the website or even on a Google Map.
Or better still, the Agent could add the QR code to his property signage and as people drive past to view the property they can scan the QR code, providing them with information of the property, even the inspection times and the Agent’s contact details, or just set it up to instantly phone the Agent!

Restaurants, Cafes & Hotels

Restaurants and Cafe’s can print a QR code on their menus, Napkins or drink coasters, which can provide the customer with access to their menu online, or just their contact details.
You could also set it up to link directly to their Facebook page, making it easy to share and like the establishment.

Markets

Even the small local markets can benefit from QR codes! Say for instance you are selling a necklace at the markets and the person loves it but may not have the money on them. Rather than lose a sale, you could have a QR code set up for the product so the buyer can scan it, taking them to your online store or even just to send you an email of interest on that particular product, allowing them to purchase it at a later time.

Social Media

Just about everyone now has a Facebook or Twitter account, but the only problem with social media sites such as Twitter or Youtube is that they have a static background that cannot be clicked. If you are receiving heavy traffic then this background area is prime marketing space. Adding a QR code can turn your static page into an active
link to your website, latest specials, etc.

An example of how this can work can be viewed here:
http://www.twitter.com/innercityhotels

Add your QR code to your Facebook profile page can do the same for you.

Press Advertising

Traditional press advertising is dead in terms of tracing its effectiveness. You really don’t know how many people even look at your ad or make a call to action if they did read it.

But if you were to add a QR code to your advertisement, especially a special offer, you could send the viewer to a specific page on your website which you can easily track through your website statistics, and monitor the success of your campaign easily.
This is also a handy way to grow your mailing list of subscribers, as you could easily direct them to an online form from their mobile device, capturing their details for future marketing.

Affiliate Marketing
If you sell other people’s products online you can ramp up your sales using QR codes, by adding them to anything…whether it is any of the things mentioned above, or to brochures, thirst, websites etc.

for instance, if you were an affiliate of iTunes or the App store, you can create the link to go directly to your affiliate link and then direct them automatically to the link in the iTunes store. You make a sale directly from the link! How easy is that!
This is just a few handy ways to use the QR code, but I am sure you can think of a bunch more once you start embracing them!

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The Importance of Keyword Density

April 7, 2019

Admin

When it comes to ensuring success on the search engines there are many important ingredients that need to go into the development of your website.

Most people are familiar with ensuring your website is well keyworded, but many do not realize the importance of ‘keyword density‘.

Adding too many keywords can see your website blacklisted for spamming, while not having enough specific keywords may not be strong enough to get you to mention at all.

Often you will notice that the highest ranking websites under most general search terms are the larger directory-based websites, while the smaller individual business websites are often following.

One of the main reasons larger websites outrank sites this way is due to the Keyword Density.

Keyword Density is quite simple to master when you know how it works…
Basically, Keyword Density is the density of the priority keywords throughout the entire website. So for instance, if you only have a three-page website, then to get a high density you would need to use the main priority keywords that you would like to be found in the search engines very heavily throughout those three pages. The problem with this is that if you use the keyword too much you could be blacklisted!

But using the same keywords throughout a website with more pages provides a higher keyword density without overly using those keywords on each page, and the beauty of a larger website is that you can also use additional priority keywords throughout the website as well, so you have a multitude of popular search phrases throughout the website.

Where I live here on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, the main business trade is holiday accommodation. Being a very competitive market it is obviously important to ensure the accommodation websites that make it to the top have the best keyword density.

Having built a large number of Sunshine Coast accommodation websites over the past years, it was always a challenge to ensure they outrank their competitors, but with a good basic knowledge of how to correctly use keywords and keyword density, it becomes quite easy once you know the correct technique.

However, there are many Sunshine Coast accommodation websites lately that are integrating the booking systems of other websites into their website’s navigation, which in theory makes it easier for them to accept bookings online. However, the negative reaction by the search engines from this is that they are immediately diluting the keyword density of their own website and substituting it with the linked keywords that are found on the other website that is now integrated into their navigation. This means that if the linked website contains unrelated keywords, such as other accommodation locations (for instance, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, etc) then their density for Sunshine Coast accommodation immediately drops greatly, sending them sliding backward down the search engine rankings ladder. Even worse, if there are replacing their own navigation with links to pages from another website then the results can be catastrophic, as the most important content of most websites, from a search engine’s perspective, is found in the top area of your web pages.

To check your own keyword density of your website I recommend a software package called Web CEO. Web CEO software allows you to review your keyword density yourself (as well as your competitors!) and allows you to change your density live yourself very easily. It will also show you if any websites directly linked to your navigation are damaging your keyword density or search engine listings.
Check out the software online at http://www.webceo.com

Using some basic techniques and knowledge of Keyword Density can get your website to the top spots in the search engines!

For a free Keyword Density report of your own website (or your competitors!) visit http://www.devision.com.au

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Building a Search Engine Friendly website

April 4, 2019

Admin

Search Engine Optimzation SEO No Comments

When it comes to building a website for your business there are many key factors you need to plan for first before developing your structure of the web site, including functionality, overall design, and branding of the website, ease of use, loading time of the website, and much more. But the one thing many novices and even professional website designers fail on is the most critical aspect – search engine optimization. For those not familiar with search engine optimization (or ‘SEO’ for short), this is the part of your website that helps your site show up on the search engines when people type in either your business name, your products, services, etc, and in my views probably the most important aspect of any website, especially if you rely on your online presence to promote your business.

My own business, Division, attracts around 85% of new business through the website. Forget Yellow Pages, forget PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing. Search Engine Optimization is king!

So if you’re planning on developing a new website either yourself or with a web design company, here are a few things you need to look at to create a search engine friendly website that will help your website to the top of the search engines:

Starting with a Good Domain name:
Having the right domain name can play a big part in the success of your listing on the search engines. For instance, if you were selling Gifts for women and targeting Australian women, then the domain name ‘womensgifts.com.au’ would most likely get you to the top spot on the search engines with a little additional keywording added to the website. The name is a good length, easy to remember and it has two of the most popular searched key phrases – ‘women’ and ‘gifts’. Simple!

But what if your business name is long, such as ‘Stephens & Jones Lawyers’. Obviously ‘Stephensandjoneslawyers.com.au’ or even ‘stephensandjones.com.au’ is a mouthful and way too long for any relevance. Now some would go down the path of ‘sjl.com.au’ which is ok, but then there are no keywords in the name, making it difficult for the search engines. So probably the best choice would be ‘sjlawers.com.au’ or even ‘australianlawyers.com.au’ if you are attracting the entire Australian market place. That way if someone searches for ‘australian lawyers’ you should get top listing!

To search for available domain names visit http://devision.domainnameshop.com.au and you can search just about every combination available.

Review Your Competitors:
Before planning your own website it is a good plan to know your competition and see what they are doing to get to the top spot of the search engines. There are a few great software packages available that provide all the information on your competitors, including their keyword relevance, who they are linked to, who is linked to them, where they rank on all search engines globally and even the number of visitors they are attracting. If you want to bump them off their search engine perch, this is the place to start! My favorite software package is WebCEO. This easy to use package is designed for both the amateur or professional and not only does all of the above, but will also help you fine tune your own site to achieve great results. Click here for a free download of the software to get started.

Plan the Navigation:
Planning your navigation and setting it up correctly is very important. The search engines crawl through the pages of your website, picking up on keywords you may have included in your page names, and the content on those pages. So having your main navigation just right is essential. For example, If you were selling women’s gifts and had a page on skin care, then a good page name would be women’s-skin-care-gifts.html or skin-care-women.html. Fill that page with content about women’s skin care, link to a few products and you have a very search engine friendly page!

Make sure your main navigation at the top of the page always links to your own internal pages and NEVER to an outside party as this can totally crush your search engine ranking, which is the first concern. The other concern is if the external site you are linked to goes offline or shuts down, you are left with missing page links, and the search engines penalize you hard for this, often sending you spiraling to the bottom of the search engines, which can take months to regain! Now without wanting to target a particular site (and no intended offense to the owners of the website), I need to show you an example, so have a look at http://www.coolumbaywatch.com

Apart from the homepage browser description header being over saturated with ‘Coolum Baywatch Beachside Resort Coolum Beach Sunshine Coast Queensland Australia’ (which will probably lose them brownie points!) move over the main navigation and you will find that almost half the pages go directly to another website. So this means that if the other website was to ever go offline the main website hosting that navigation would half their content missing. If the site were to disappear completely they would probably need to pay someone to create the new pages which could be costly if they don’t have the master design files. On top of that, the search engines really don’t have as much to work with from the main website, greatly reducing their keyword density, and in effect, lowering their chances of a good page listing for their own site, but probably increasing the other companies website. So always keep your navigation linked to your OWN pages!

Set up your Graphics Correctly:

It is important to name and ‘Alt Tag’ your graphics correctly to increase your search engine ranking. Going back to gifts, if you were to name a product image ‘womens-hand-soap.jpg’ and place it on a page names women’s-soap-products.html will probably do very well for your website. On top of that, create an Alt Tag (the text that appears when you move over an image in your browser) with a small description such as ‘Soap gifts for women’. and this will work beautifully. Make sure your images always load fast, and try and stay away from Flash navigation..either use text or graphics navigation as it can be tagged more successfully, not to mention much easier to update!

Internal Links:

To help the search engines list your website correctly under the right categories there is a simple way to give them a little hand. On your homepage (or internal pages as well) amongst the main body of text, simply add a few links to your other pages. But don’t just add any text to any page – If you have a page called women’s-soap-products.html, then on your homepage make sure you have the words ‘womens soap products’ amongst the text in a sentence and link that to the page. That way when the search engines visit your website they can not only trawl through your website much faster but also have instance keyword relevance and can identify exactly where you should be listed on their engines. As you add new products, add some text changes and link them. The search engines love sites that are regularly refreshed or updated. But remember not to overdo it! 8 or 9 links at the most per page is ample.

Write Search-Engine-Friendly Content:

As I partly mentioned above, writing good copy for your website is very important. Make sure the first and last paragraphs contain the important keywords that you would like to be found under. But don’t write it like you are repeating your keywords constantly. You want humans as well as search engines to read the website! Just casually slip a few of your keywords found from your WebCEO search tools into your website and then run the software and it will provide you with a report on whether your keyword density is just right.

Search Engine Friendly Keywording and Tagging your website:

Once you have all the navigation, text and images in place, you then need to do the final piece to a great search engine friendly website – Adding the keyword and description tags.

Now, this sounds technical if you don’t know what they are, but basically, it is the initial script that the search engines use to add your site to their directories, and it is the text description that appears when you do a search for something, so getting this just right is very important.
To see if your website is set up correctly go to your browser menu and look for ‘View Source Code’ and it will show you the HTML breakdown that the search engines see.

In the top area of your page (the head tag) you should see something like the following script:

If you don’t see a script like this one above then chances is your web site does not yet search engine optimized. If you are familiar with website design already you can add the script in your own web editing software, or alternatively, WebCEO has the tools to do it for you.

Submit your Website:

And finally, you now submit your site. to submit your website to multiple search engines I recommend using submission software, or you can go the slower process, but just as effective and go to the submission page of each search engines. For Google, it is: www.google.com.au/addur

Once that is all done you can now sit back for a few weeks and wait and then watch the visitors (and sales) start rolling into your website!

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POPULATING YOUR WEBSITE WITH PLR CONTENT

April 1, 2019

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Search Engine Optimzation SEO No Comments

When you’re creating a new website content really is king.

Ensuring your website not only looks great and is easy to navigate is not enough…you must have great content as well or you won’t be found on the search engines.

Not only that but to ensure people keep coming back to your website or blog you need to keep the content fresh and informative.

Now you can do this a few ways….The first is writing your own content, spending hours on end creating new content yourself, which is not only very tiring but unless you love writing content and have a good knowledge of how to search engine optimize your text as you write, you will probably get sick of this quickly and also still not get the results on the search engines, or the visitor numbers you’d like.

The reason most blogs fail within the first 8 months is due to lack of content being added, keeping the site ‘alive’.

The second way to quickly produce content for your website is with PLR articles.PLR stands for Private Label Rights, and this is where content is already written about products or services which relate to your business or website and the author charges a small fee to give you the rights to republish the content on your own website. Sometimes the Rights to the articles even include you re-authoring the content and even naming yourself as the author of the article.

This can provide you with a lot of credibility on a particular subject and brand you as an expert in your particular field very quickly without having to go to the trouble of actually writing the article yourself.

Always make sure the content you add is not simply taken from someone else’s website. Always make sure you purchase the content and have the rights to use it otherwise you can be in big trouble for copyright infringement, which is a very serious crime, even online, and you could find yourself in hot water!

Now, there is an upside and downside to using PLR content.. the upside is obviously it will save you hours of creating fresh content and save a lot of hassle if writing isn’t your strong point.
The downside though is that the content may already have been purchased by a number of people who are also using it on their own websites and blogs, which leads to the issue of duplicate content on the web.
Search engines (google in particular) are not fond of duplicate content and can penalize you for this method, dropping you from the search engines, which can be very hard to recover from.

The ideal solution is to sign up with a Private Label Rights article service which allows you to author the content with the articles you purchase and then edit them yourself so that they have been radically changed to be original content.

This still takes some time, but much quicker than writing the articles yourself, and the content will usually still be full of search engine ‘goodness’ to achieve a great ranking.

If the content is original you can also then submit to article directories such as ArticleCity.com or ArticleBase.comand add a signature link back to your website or blog which will generate a lot of traffic for you.

Article directory websites usually won’t post content if it is not original.

Some of the best PLR reference sites I recommend are Indigital Works and Mark Nathawani’s PLR & Resell Rights Warehouse.

Both offer high-quality Private Label Rights to a huge selection of ebooks, and content specific articles for almost every possible niche, from making money online, diet and health, to even miniature trains!
You will be guaranteed to fine a pile of articles suited for your website and blog to really get your site ranking and attracting the visitor numbers you want.

A full list of articles available on each site is available before you sign up.

So grab your PLR content and start populating your website to success!

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The Link Wheel formula to Website Traffic

March 30, 2019

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Search Engine Optimzation SEO No Comments

Website traffic is the most important aspect of any online business. Without the stream of visitors, you have no business!

There are a number of ways to accelerate the amount of traffic your website can achieve, such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising.

But one sure fire way to drive traffic to your website or blog is by creating a ‘Link Wheel’.

A Link Wheel is a system created to generate a network of links pointing back to your main website, which create a higher page rank for your site as the search engines see your website as a popular site because you have a group of related and well keyworded sites and popular social bookmarking sites pointing back directly to you.

This may all sound a little complex, so I have created some simple graphics to show you the 4 simple steps to creating a Link Wheel formula that will hopefully drive massive amounts of traffic to your website in no time.

To successfully create a Link Wheel as shown below does take some time and patience. It’s not a fast process, but as they say, there is no quick way to ultimate success, but hopefully, this will help you understand and speed up the process of creating your Link Wheel.

Step 1
Once you have your website up and running, search engine optimized and submitted to the search engines, you need to create a series of 8 microsites.
These microsites work best if they have their own domain names that relate to the content of the master website.
For example, if your main website sells car parts for classic cars and your domain name is your business name, then purchase 8 domain names relating to this, such as classiccarparts.com, uniqueautoparts.com, classicpartsforcars.com…you get the idea!
You can buy the domain names fairly cheaply at Godaddy.com for around $11 a domain name.
You also need to now create the 8 microsites. The easiest way to do this is using WordPress, but if you are not a web guru and have no idea how to install WordPress there is a couple of solutions.

Solution 1. Since you need to host 8 websites, the easiest way to set up your blogs is to purchase a hosting account with Hostgator. Hostgator’s cpanel allows you to simply click a button and the WordPress blog is created for you. No mucking around setting up databases, etc. It is done for you in less than a few minutes!
And as you need to set up 8 sites you obviously need them hosted. Rather than paying a hosting account for each site which could cost a thousand dollars or so, Hostgator allows you to purchase the one account for around $8 per month, which you can then split into 8 (or more) sites for no extra cost!

Solution 2. If you already have a hosted account you can go to Fiverr.com and have someone set up your WordPress account for $5 per site. You can sit back and relax and someone will do it all for you!

Make sure each microsite links back to the main website. This starts building your link structure, making it easy for the search engines to list you.

NOTE: Don’t add links FROM your main site to the microsites, only from the microsites TO the main site. This prevents the search engines from busting you for possibly spamming their search engines and earning you a blacklisting.

So once you have your main site and 8 microsites set up, each with their own domain, it should look something like this:

Step 2.
Now you need to add content to the sites in order for them to be also picked up on the search engines.
Create about 4 pages for each of the 8 sites, and make sure the content on each page is keyword specific relating to your main product, and the pages are named well.

For example, titles for the pages such as car-parts-for-classic-cars.html, If you are using WordPress make sure you turn on the Permalink setting. this turns the page numbers into search engine friendly titles. See the setting example below and set your custom permalink on each wordpress site the same as this for best results:

Your Link Wheel should now look something like this below:

Each page doesn’t have to be a huge page of text and images. In fact, just a couple of decent paragraphs of well written product-related content per page is all you need.

If you are not great at writing, don’t steal or copy content from other sites. The search engines could catch you for duplicate content and drop you from their searches. Again, go to Fiverr.com and you will find there are people willing to write the articles you require for $5 per article, or search content writers online and you will find cheap packages available.

Now add in a few internal links from related keywords in a few of the pages, pointing them back to each of the other microsites. try not to get two microsites pointing to each other or again Google may pick you up for spamming and your cover is blown! Follow my graphic below, which shows you the correct way of linking each of your sites for best results.

Step 3.

You’re almost there!
Now comes the real dynamic part to the process. You want to get all your sites and pages listed on as many search engines and social bookmarking sites as you can.

The graphic below shows just a few of the most popular ones to link to. By linking to these will boost not only your page rank but it will attract other members to follow you and link through to your website.
Because many of these sites have so many people already listed on them they have a good page rank already. When you get all your microsites listed on them as well, this boosts up the page rank and popularity of each site, and in turn, boosts your main website immediately.

Remember, the microsites aren’t designed to be selling anything, they are purely to generate traffic back to your main website through optimization and link building. Of course, you can always add a banner on each microsite to promote and drive traffic to your main site.

Sites such as StumbleUpon and Hubpages work as their own microsites and social bookmarking sites, so you need to create accounts on each one for your pages. This can take a lot of time.
But an easier way is to go to OnlyWire or LinksAlpha and create one account which will post your pages to all these sites and more. You still have to create the initial accounts for each site, but it is all done through LinksAlpha and Onlywire, saving a lot of time.

You have now created your Link Wheel!
Now sit back and watch the traffic start rolling in to your website!

Author: Chris Bourke of WebSEOCoach and Devision Design Australia.
Chris is a graphic/web designer, affiliate marketer and SEO Coach from Australia

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