SEO in The Desert

UPDATE: Performance Marketing Expo has canceled all Monday sessions, including mine, so I will not be attending. I’ll leave the discount code up, however, and will try to post what would have been my presentation here soon.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but I’ve been slammed with work and preparing for my presentation at the upcoming Performance Marketing Expo, an affiliate marketing conference and exhibition at Miami Beach which runs September 27-29, 2010.

I will be doing my bit as SEO Manager of FramesDirect.com on Monday, September 27, at 1:30 p.m. in a Search Engine Optimization session. It will be based on my popular SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love post, but, of course, shortened to best practice basics for non-technical types.

Mercifully, I go on before Shari Thurow, who I often credit with my decision to move into SEO full-time and out of web design and part-time SEO a number of years ago after reading her book Search Engine Visibility. I absolutely devoured the book, thinking “Wow, I LOVE this stuff!” and knew SEO was what I was supposed to do.

Anyway, glad she’s following ME and not the other way around! Her presentations are always great!

And, no, I don’t run the affiliate program at FramesDirect.com, but I do work with our affiliate manager and frequently get questions from this blog from affiliates struggling with SEO.

Check out the agenda.

If you need a 20% off discount coupon for the conference, feel free to grab it here.

And keep you fingers crossed for me!

Later,

Richard V. Burckhardt, The Web Optimist

By Lena Morrish and Dima Nikolayenko

Are you looking to boost the flow of positive traffic to your business website? Using Google AdWords can not only help you to boost the flow of traffic to your website but can help you to target your advertising to the key web searchers who are more likely to find your offered lineup of products and services useful. AdWords is also an excellent passive income opportunity that can help you to boost your revenue; the following list of tips will help you on your way towards finding success with Google AdWords.

1. Be Persistent And Remain Patient

It is important to be patient with your campaigns and also to be prepared to see slow-results until you have figured out to how best adjust and customize your Google AdWords to target your key audience.

2. Track Your Traffic

A key tip to successfully using Google AdWords is to ensure that you are carefully tracking your click through traffic so that you can gain an understanding as to your return on investment (ROI). This is fairly simple to accomplish by simply viewing the number of click throughs from your pay per click advertising and comparing them with the number of fresh new sales or sales leads that you have received since starting up your Google AdWords campaign. read more »

By Michael Jenkins

Most everyone starting a new e-business struggles with their website. Either they pick an awkward web design, are unfamiliar with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), know little about rankings, or fall victim to other mistakes that will make their grand entry into the exciting world of e-commerce difficult.

It is true! Some websites are horrible and their performance underwhelming. This makes you wonder what they are doing wrong as their competitors, who launched their websites at the same time are accelerating just fine.

The web would be boring if all websites were alike and fortunately for us, many offer variety and differentiate themselves well in their industry. Unfortunately for those who don’t seem to get the hang of it, many bad websites have been observed over the years and still exist today. Some have been designed by small businesses, while others belong to large corporations – this shows you that generous funds, as well as the expertise of designers and developers, does not always guarantee an incredible conversion rate. Take, for instance, online computer sales giant Gateway and electronics favourite Radioshack. Gateway averages a 0.25% conversion rate, while Radioshack is not doing much better with 0.75%. That means that this major electronics retailer receives only about 7 orders per 1000 website visitors. Ouch!

Low conversion rates can be worrying but are certainly not the end of the world, as they can be turned around with the right action. It will require some of your spare time, but with dedication, the tips offered here, and a bit of extra work, you too can create a well performing website. read more »

By Wayne Barker

We all know that your inbound linking strategy is crucial to SEO and Internet Marketing – as well as being the most frustrating part of online marketing – and creating quality link bait should be high on your agenda.

Essentially link bait is just a form of content that will gently nudge website owners, bloggers and social media acolytes to link to your site. Matt Cutts himself said link bait is “interesting enough to catch people’s attention” – whilst this is true link bait should be something that is interesting enough for people to want to link to it.

How do you go about creating link bait?

The first step is to put yourself in the position of your potential fish (or audience) and ask yourself what it is they want. Usually the best link bait (or at least the link bait that is successful) can fall into a few simple categories:
read more »