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The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned.

Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that’s a story for another post. So what do you do in this situation? I know for a fact that the client’s business has seen 100-200% growth year over year since we started working with them oh-so long ago. They obviously see the big picture, but they still come back looking at rankings. And Yahoo rankings at that.

Ok, so let’s put the question aside about whether the client should focus on rankings or not. We know better, but they’ll do it anyway. Instead, let’s come at this from another angle.

Across the board rankings: Possible, but not plausible

From experience, we know that it’s not that uncommon to rank semi well across the board on all the top five search engines. I’m looking at several rankings for this client that are in the top five on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. But it’s not a majority. Looking deeper I see some places where they hold a #1 spot on Yahoo and Google but nowhere to be found on MSN. Similarly they also have keywords in top spots on Google and MSN and way down to page five for Yahoo. And even in a few places we see great rankings on Yahoo and MSN and piss poor showings on Google. Is this the norm?

Well, apparently it is. According to a recent study by the folks at Dogpile, there is less than a 1% overlap of top rankings between Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. That may or may not be surprising. After all we are talking about four different algorithms here. But what really struck me were these stats:

• 88.3% of total results were unique to one search engine.
• 8.9% of total results were shared by any two search engines.

That doesn’t leave much room for holding top spots in more than one search engine. In fact, that means on any given SERPs page (results 1-10), you’ll find only one of those listings on the first page of the second search engine.

It’s interesting to note that Google has the lowest uniqueness value of each of the top four engines, with MSN being the highest:

• 69.6% of Google’s were unique to Google.
• 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
• 80.1% of Live’s were unique to Live.
• 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.

Translation: when looking at the first page of results on Google, three of those listings may be found on any of the other search engines. However when looking at the first page of results on MSN only two may be found elsewhere. Chasing your tail - or just chasing rankings?

I politely explained to my client that 1) we’ll analyze the situation and do what we can do bring the Yahoo rankings back up. And we will. But I also pointed out that 2) we don’t want to make changes to gain Yahoo ranking that may cause him to lose Google rankings. Of course if the roles were reversed, if they had good Yahoo but poor Google rankings, we would upset the apple cart. But Google rankings are far more valuable than Yahoo. Sacrificing Google rankings for Yahoo rankings is just bad business sense.

So after analyzing the situation, what do we do if we feel we can’t improve the Yahoo rankings without disrupting the Google rankings? Nothing. Because we all know it’s not about rankings, it’s about business. A lower ranking on Google will most likely bring them more business than a higher ranking on Yahoo. (Your results may vary, contact your SEO for more details and take the most appropriate action as necessary.) So in this case the proper course of action is to do nothing at all whatsoever. Except to go back to the client and try to get them, once again, to look at the big picture and not individual rankings. Anything else is just a fool’s errand.

Stoney deGeyter founded Pole Position Marketing in 1998 working from a home office and has since turned it into a leading search engine marketing business with a small team of seasoned Reno SEO marketing experts. Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy on how Pole Position marketing helps their clients expand their online presence and improve online conversion rates.

What is Quality Score? Quality Score is Google’s point system that grades how relevant your ad and website is for every keyword you are bidding on.

If you are paying too much for bids it is a quality score issue. How do you know if you are paying too much for bids? Your minimum bid should be in cents and not dollars and a lot of times a minimum bid can be from 5 cents - 12 cents. Paying more for every visitor eats into your profits and ROI so if you can decrease your minimum bids you will save cash and increase your profit and ROI.

The way to boost your quality score is to be relevant to the visitor. This means focusing not only your website on the keywords you are bidding on but focusing your ad on those keywords also. I understand that you won’t be able to have every single keyword you have in a campaign on your website especially if you are bidding on a lot of keywords but what you can do is group your keywords.

Grouping your keywords is using a one common word keyword in every keyword phrase in your ad group. If you were selling musical instrument amplifiers online, ad group 1 could look like this: ad group name “guitar amplifiers”

Keywords:

guitar amplifiers

fender guitar amplifiers

cheap guitar amplifiers

used guitar amplifiers

Ad group 2 could be named “bass amplifiers”

Keywords:

bass amplifiers

bass guitar amplifiers

mesa boogie bass amplifier

Grouping your keywords in your ad groups in such a fashion will help you keep your account orgainized, and write ads targeted to your root word and variations of the root word. Grouping your keywords will also help Google be able to serve your ads on these search phrases and if your bidding on the content network will help Google serve your ads so they are targeted to the right searchers also.

Something else that will help you boost your quality score is to get a high CTR which is short term for click-thru rate. The number of times a searcher clicks on an ad per number of times the ad is viewed. If an ad is served 100 times and receives 3 clicks the CTR will be 3%. A good minimum CTR to aim for is 1%. If you drop below that you either want to adjust your ad to suit that keyword better or drop the keyword.

Writing a relevant ad will also help you boost your quality score because a relevant ad will get a good CTR which is a criteria for how Google calculates your Quality Score. Here is an example of a relevant ad for a searcher that typed the search phrase “bass amplifiers”:

Save on Bass Amplifiers

Bass Amplifiers up to 40% Off

Free Shipping on Orders Over $100!

SomebodiesOnlineMusicStore.com

To recap what we have learned here - to Boost your Quality Score “group” the keywords in your ad group using one common keyword. Write a relevant ad because a relevant ad will get you a better CTR and focus the content of your landing page on those keywords. Your CTR will rise as will your Quality Score and your profit and ROI will soar.

Robert Walter has been successfully marketing online for over 6 years. Learn the guerrilla marketing tactics for Adwords with these Hot Adwords Training Guides

Whether you own a Mom & Pop outlet or you own a big company, reputation and brand building is always important. Brand building can be done via various ways but one of the most popular is gifting innovative promotional items such as umbrellas. Gifting promotional umbrellas create strong goodwill, positive reputation, and a lasting relationship with your business counterparts. Many large corporate houses can afford to have large marketing and advertising budgets, but small businesses often rely on the smart use of cost effective marketing strategies to promote their company name. This is when they use promotional umbrellas.

Initially businesses were reluctant to shift their focus from cliché promotional items such as pens, caps, hats, key rings, shirts, and many more. But with the growing competition, they started contemplating on more innovative ideas, promotional umbrellas being one. And within no time, these promotional umbrellas got the much required publicity.

Promotional umbrellas are perfect to raise brand awareness. Promotional umbrellas are available in a wide range of colours, styles, designs, forms, and printing options. With their usage, promotional umbrellas certainly make an ideal choice for businesses in all sectors. The major advantage of using promotional umbrellas is that they are available in wide variety of budget options and you can get even get top quality branded umbrellas at an affordable price. If you buy branded umbrellas such as Slazenger in bulk, you get amazing deals. However, if you order them in smaller quantity, you get the choice to customise them innovatively by adding company name, message, or logo.

You can select promotional umbrellas from different canvas colours, or you can also go for different handles and umbrella ties. And if you think that’s enough, then wait, as you can also be complimented with your brand colours. This helps to identify your company with the umbrella. Isn’t it great from marketing point of view? Promotional umbrellas can certainly raise your brand awareness if you sell or distribute them for charity fundraising. You can even distribute them in-house to employees as tokens of appreciation, or gift them as business gifts to clients, accountants, solicitors, suppliers, and consumers. If you have enough stock, you can also keep promotional umbrellas at your reception for giving away to select visitors and guests.

Online you will find various promotional umbrellas available in a variety of styles and colours. You can customise them by using the latest printing techniques so that you get the desired result to effectively advertise and market your business. Buying promotional umbrellas, printed umbrellas, promotional gifts, and promotional items from online is likely to be the best option for you both in terms of service from the supplier but also in choice and value.

Gareth Parkin is the co-founder of Ideasbynet.com, the UK’s leading online promotional umbrellas and printed umbrellas supplier based in the north of England. Ideasbynet was established in 2001 and has taken the UK promotional gift market by storm.

When picking keywords to implement in your keyword tags for your website, please remember this rule: Do not use single term unless the term itself is specific.

For example, if you pick “MLM” term as the keyword tags in your webpage, I think most likely you don’t really know what the target you are aiming. Why? “MLM” is a general term. Although this keyword has high searches, most people when they search for this “MLM” term probably still searching for something. Instead of aiming for the “MLM” term, it could have been wise for you to pick terms like “Amway”, “Avon”, “eCosway”, “Nu Skin”, “WBG”, “Mary Kay”, “Shaklee”, etc.

Wouldn’t you agree with me that people searching for the specific terms (Amway, Avon, eCosway, etc.) like the above surely they’re interested in a specific multi level marketing? They are interested on it and if they don’t, they won’t key in the MLM company names. Agree?

What is the drawback when you use a general single term keyword?

1. Untargeted traffic

Think now … if A key in “MLM” in Google and B key in “Amway”, who do you think are more likely targeted? B will be a targeted prospect rather than A.

2. Low Conversion Rate

If untargeted traffic clicking on your sales webpage, what you will get? You will get prospects which are just playing around your webpage and then click quit. Correct? If from the example above, A is your prospect then you probably won’t get any sales because A is what we call a prospect which is still “searching keywords.” Unlike B, B is a targeted prospect, so the chance of getting sales from prospect B is bigger than A.

I think it doesn’t make sense to use a general single term keyword for your webpage unless they keyword itself is very specific, but frankly single term keywords are not worth the effort.

Hery Yansen is an SEO buzz on SEO tips and owner of SEO Quick and Easy website. His website http://www.seo-madeeasy.info provides an informative content in e-book for those who are new online on discovering how to get top rankings by using free traffic.

If this sounds like a strange title for an article on Internet marketing tips, keep reading. Eventually, you’ll understand exactly what I am talking about. See, there is more than one way to reach your prospects. What works for you will eventually come down to your own personal preference and style. Ultimately, you will need to test these two methods to see which works best for you.

Let me go on record by saying that I neither condone nor condemn either of these methods. I am only acknowledging that they exist. I don’t want this to turn into a moral debate. There are marketers who use both these tactics. Both can be used successfully. The key is understanding them both and the consequences of their use.

Let’s take good cop first because that’s the easy one to use. Good cop is where you approach your prospects with a nice friendly email, sympathizing with their situation and offering your help. You speak to them like you’re their best friend. The approach is non confrontational. It would be very difficult to put anyone off with this type of approach.

The problem with it is that it’s also very lackluster. Prospects have turned a deaf ear to this feel good approach for the most part because the majority of marketers use it. The message received by the prospect is one that has been done to death. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to convert the prospect into a buyer unless you are very convincing or can show an awful lot of social proof.

The bad cop approach is when you pretty much tell your prospect that if they don’t get your product, they’re going to end up on the street with a monkey and a tin cup begging for spare change. The Rich Jerk, as you might recall, used this approach. He had quite a mouth on him. It worked for him. But it won’t work for everybody. For one thing, you need to know your target market. The Rich Jerk knew his. He tailored his message to this market and it translated into millions of dollars in sales.

Ultimately, you have to decide which approach you want to use. They both can work. As long as you understand the pluses and minuses of each, you’ll be fine.

Of course, you can always try to find somewhere in between the two.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

Article marketing, of course, is the process of writing articles, including one or more links to your web site within the articles, and submitting the articles to the various online article directories.

One of the things for which article marketing is especially useful is that of increasing search engine rankings.

How does that work?

Letâ??s take a step back.

How do the search engines determine which websites should be ranked higher than others, and in which ranking?

One of the ways that search engines determine which web site should rank higher than another web site is by counting the number of inbound links to that web site. An inbound link is a link that is coming into your web site.

The theory is this: if you have more inbound links, you must be more popular, and if you are more popular then your web site must have more to offer, than another web site in your niche with fewer inbound links than you.

So how do you get more inbound links, and therefore increase â?˜popularityâ?? and search engine rankings?

One of my favorite ways , and one of the easiest ways, to do this is by article marketing. Each article that you submit to an article directory, with a link in it pointing back to your web site, gives you one additional inbound link to your web site.

Article marketing is a quick and easy way to get multiple inbound links to your web site. I regularly submit my articles to a list of about 150 article directories â?” and each of these directories places a link back to my web site, which increases my inbound link count and my link popularity.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, â?˜Your Article Writing and Promotion Guideâ?˜

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

There seems to be fair amount of confusion doing the rounds on the Internet with regards to what the Google PageRank is, and what all the fuss is about.

Considering the importance of the Google PageRank, allow me to clarify to the best of my abilities what this is, and why it has become so important.

Google as a search engine considers the Internet to be “democratic state”, where votes are cast by websites as to the popularity of other websites. In other words the more votes your website gets from other websites, by way of inbound links to your website, the more important (popular) your website will appear to Google.

Google interprets a link from Website 1 to Website 2 as a vote from Website 1 for Website 2, and so on. This means that the more inbound links you have, the higher your Google PageRank.

More recently Google has increased the variables on its PageRank algorithm to take into account not only the number of in bound links, but the quality of those inbound links.

Several other factors are now also considered when allocating the Google PageRank:

• Contextual relevancy of the site linking to you.
• PageRank of the site linking to you.
• Content context of the site linking to you.
• Keyword Relevancy.

Basically the quality of your incoming links matter just as much as the amount of inbound links. Links must come from a websites that are relevant. In other words, these websites should share many of your own keywords.

And that in a nutshell is what the Google PageRank is all about.

Good Luck and Happy Marketing.

Justin Harrison is a strategic Internet Marketing Consultant specialising in all areas of Internet Marketing and Internet Marketing strategy development. He is also the author of several internet marketing books, and runs his own info and software publishing business.

Part of being a B2B business professional is marketing your services to your target market. There are dozens of ways to go about this and dozens of different marketing techniques that you can use â?” advertising, telemarketing, blogging, networking â?” just to name a few.

All of these marketing methods work, some better than others, but being a business professional you should incorporate a variety of techniques to get your marketing message out. One easy way to get started is to add your services to online B2B directories. A B2B directory is a business directory categorized for easy navigation by people searching for your products and services.

Why are B2B directories a good place to start? It is easy and takes little time to do so. Doing a Google search for “B2B directory” provides over 14,000,000 results, everything from general directories to niche directories. You obviously canâ??t submit your services to all of them but a good bet would be to submit your services to one or two dozen of the most appropriate directories.

If you have a website, most directories allow you to add a link to your site. Otherwise, you can include other ways for prospects to contact you, including a telephone number or email.

All business professionals must perform B2B marketing services to get their name out there and generate new business. Submitting to business directories is just a start, but it is a good start.

Tino Buntic created TradePals, a B2B directory of business professionals and entrepreneurs across The United States and Canada, providing free advertising and sales leads to its members.

Tino enjoys reading Jeff Kershner’s Dealer Refresh blog, providing observations and opinions of a automotive internet sales manager.

The first step with any subject matter is to get down a foundation. With that in mind, let’s get into the basics of search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is known, is simple the methodology of manipulating a site for one purpose and one purpose only - to get top rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. SEO can get complex and challenging. If you ever lose your way or get frustrated, just think back to this simple summary. Is what you are doing going to get you ranked or not?

Rankings. Just what are we talking about when we discuss “top rankings?” Let’s assume you have a site devoted to bird watching. You would want your site to come up when someone does a search for relevant bird watching terms. If your listing is on the first page of results, a certain percentage of people are going to click your link and visit your site. This obviously leads to sales, which is a good thing!

So, just how do you go about getting these mysterious top rankings? Well, there are a number of factors that go into the process. They include things such as the number of links pointing from other sites to yours, the keyword phrases you use on the pages of your site, how you place those words and, well, a bunch of other things. This is an article on the basics, not a thesis!

Why is search engine optimization such a great thing? The primary reason is it produces tons of quality traffic 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. As long as you stay in those top listings, you should reap the benefits on a consistent basis and rake in cash accordingly.

If you are having problems picturing the value of search engine optimization, consider a simple example. Assume you had a site selling electronics. How much business do you think you would do during the holidays if you were ranked number one for “Christmas gifts for Men?” Let’s just say retirement planning would not be a problem.

Aazdak Alisimo writes about search engine optimization for SEOServicecompanies.com.

Having a website is not enough; it solves its purpose only if visitors find it available whenever they search for it. Making a website available to masses is poles apart from promoting a product. A website needs different strategies and methods to get popularity among people and the medium that is used for promotion of a website is optimizing it on search engines. If your website is not getting proper traffic then SEO New York is the best option for you.

In present corporate world everyone faces tough competition and businesses that are not having adequate reach among masses can never flourish. This necessity of firm hold over consumers, fortifies the need of web presence or website. To be readily available for consumers 24*7 nothing is as effective as a website but only if it gets proper traffic. SEO New York helps you out in getting prolific traffic on your website as it optimizes the website on all major search engines so that you may not miss even a single moment of serving your consumers. Once you get large traffic on your website, your business automatically gets a boom. As all businesses are distinct from each other, SEO New York understands the needs of every business type and works accordingly.

When a visitor starts searching for particular information or service he goes through only those links that are rated high on search engine listing. That is what SEO service providers offer; they optimize your website so that it may become one of highest rated websites. SEO New York is the most effective option to make your online presence effective and bring more traffic to your site. It gives you a reliable support to flourish and expand your business and strengthens it for winning the tough competition of corporate world. As far as the cost and charges are concerned, SEO New York is very cost effective and affordable. Its charges for optimizing your website are very low as compared to other services providers. It is a fact that website optimization is a cheaper medium for promotion but still it is twice effective in increasing revenues than other mediums. SEO New York makes search engine optimization effective as well as affordable.

It doesnâ??t matter that whether you are residing in New York or in any other place of world; you can get the advantage of a SEO New York firmâ??s search engine optimization services everywhere. You will just have to search for SEO New York services and it will be readily available to look after your search engine listing position. There is another effective way that can save a large amount of hard earned money and that is pay per click which is a service for those businesses that want to pay only if the traffic increases. In this you will have to pay only when a visitor will click on your site. Isnâ??t it more reliable to pay after getting a result only? So make a sensible decision and optimize your website with SEO New York as it is well-versed to fulfill the requirement of present corporate world and is capable of giving your website recognition among internet users.

Steve Waganer has specialization in Web Marketing. He is expert in Search engine optimization, Search engine marketing, Seo New York. To get the Search engine marketing tips for your website to get high rank and top position in major search engines visit http://www.cometsearchenginemarketing.com