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Making Search Engine Traffic a Priority

CommunicateBetter — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:23:36 +0000

Most online marketing approaches are risky and unfortunately, many of them will not result in the increased website traffic you desire. Today’s internet marketing firms will try to sell you on everything from pop-up ads to mass email campaigns, both of which people tend to find very annoying. Being that an email campaign is more like spam distribution and pop-up advertisements are so aggravating they could actually cause you to lose customers, investing in such marketing solutions just might equate to throwing money out the window. Instead of wasting money on these risky strategies, perhaps you should focus on something that actually works – search engine optimization.

Boost Traffic the Natural Way

It is a proven fact that the most effective way to reel in targeted traffic and potential customers is through the search engines. A number of studies show that nearly 90% of first-time visitors find their way to a website via search engines powered by internet brands such as Google and Yahoo. You yourself are probably in this high percentile of web surfers who bypass all the pop-ups, spam messages and PPC ads by relying on the convenient search box to find the content you seek. Search engines offer a consistent stream of targeted website visitors and in most cases, leveraging this traffic is absolutely free. What you have to do is make sure your content is relevant to the search results because if it isn’t, visitors will likely be very disappointed when landing on your site. If you keep this is mind when optimizing your site, the search engines will reward you with increased traffic of excellent quality.

When Users Search, Everybody Wins

Search engine traffic results in a win-win situation for anyone trying to promote a website or business online. Improving your volume of traffic does take a lot of money or hard work for that matter. All that is required of you is good site optimization. Despite the millions of active domains throughout the world, an alarming number of web pages are not indexed by the major search engines for the simple fact that most of them are not optimized correctly, or not optimized at all. Unless you have a winning marketing strategy that simply cannot fail, this makes it very difficult for anyone to find your website. Though it can be a challenge, optimizing a website is also something that can be done by an individual with little to no marketing knowledge.

Believe it or not, the search engines want to send you as much traffic as possible. This is because the more users who find the content they want, the more they will rely on that search engine and recommended it to others. The actual search engine benefits tremendously as these recommendations lead to increased popularity and advertising revenues. Search engines can be an excellent resource that helps internet users find what they desire and provide you with the targeted traffic needed to keep your site alive.

Leveraging the Press Release as an SEO Tool

CommunicateBetter — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:56:27 +0000

A large number of webmasters and site promoters neglect to implement press releases into their SEO campaigns. This is primarily because most associate them with some sort of news related publishing piece. While that holds true from a traditional aspect, press releases are quiet effective in print media and the world of online marketing as well. If you have not considered using them to promote your website, this article will give you all the reason to leverage the old press release for SEO purposes.

Generating Traffic with Press Releases

Press releases are not limited to introducing a new product or service. However, link popularity and all the most popular keywords on the web will not aid your efforts if traffic is not coming to your site. With a good press release, you can reel in traffic from the following sources:

Direct Traffic – In the ideal environment, your published press release will be syndicated across a network of related sites. If you are able to snag readers with an intriguing headline, people will check out the piece and follow up by paying your site a visit.

Subscribers - By signing up with a reputable press release service, you can have your publication submitted to leading news wire sites like, EIN News, Google News, Topix and several more. These sites maintain an existing database of subscribers so when publishing a press release, they will be able to view your piece in their news readers. If they like what you have to say, they will visit your site to find out what else you have to offer. This is certainly an avenue you want to consider because these sites combine to offer the potential of millions of visitors every month.

Search Engines – The most valuable traffic source that can be obtained is generated directly from the search engines. This could turn out to be a long term source because your press release will remain online for as long as your site is up and running. Should the traffic from the news wire sites start to diminish, you can always rely on the search engines for that consistent stream needed to keep up your exposure.

Organic Search Engine Rankings - Since publishing a press release is merely another aspect of SEO, your search engine rankings will naturally improve, thus resulting in more organic traffic. When following this up with quality backlinks, you can boost your traffic numbers considerably very fast.

Tips for Press Release Writing

If you want to write a press release to improve your SEO efforts, keep the following tips in mind:

- Right your press release in the third person.

- Compose an intriguing headline to entice readers.

- Emphasis facts and benefits; avoid fluff.

- Make sure your press release is not too short or too long. 500 or so words should do the trick.

- Remember to insert your primary keywords into the press release. Do not go overboard with keywords as you want your piece to flow as naturally as possible.

Hot Banana: The Enterprise CMS

CommunicateBetter — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:21:35 +0000

Originally launched in 1999, the Hot Banana CMS is an award-winning content management tool designed with the small to medium sized enterprise in mind. It places a strong focus on content optimization and online marketing, but also has a broad range of basic content management capabilities, which helps it appeal to customers with varying needs. Hot Banana is integrated with Lyris’ suite of marketing products, most notably EmailLabs, its flagship email marketing solution. This CMS aims to satisfy three key demands: content management, website optimization and marketing automation. If power and ease of use is something that matters for your project, then Hot Banana certainly warrants a closer look.

Website Optimization

Optimization is a key element of Hot Banana, proven by the fact that it contributes numerous resources to tracking site and campaign performance. Its SEO tools play a key role in content creation and keyword analysis through a comprehensive editing interface and reports. Some of the other optimization tools include affiliate tracking, metadata management, automatic Google Sitemap submission and updates, automated tagging and instant SEO-friendly output. Analyzing your components for optimization is as simple as clicking and entering keywords into the appropriate field. Hot Banana is one piece of software that allows you to enjoy CMS usability the way it was meant to be.

Marketing Automation

In the Hot Banana environment, marketing automation and optimization go hand in hand. The software provides a robust web form builder that streamlines the creation of forms and management of captured data. It also integrates with SalesForce and other popular CRM platforms as well as EmailLabs, which enables form data to be automatically migrated to customer databases. In addition, Hot Banana aims to ensure marketing optimization with a press release manager, blog administration, and event and survey management tools. While EmailLabs provides an open framework for integrating with other email marketing managers, Hot Banana has a nice set of default email marketing functions in its own right.

Content Management

A clean and well organized interface makes content creation a breeze with Hot Banana. The software packs a nice selection of templates with options ranging from standard web pages and landing pages to multi-column email layouts. From there, your page can be created using the WYSIWYG editor, which offers tools for HTML view toggling and keyword analysis directly from your browser. Advanced metadata can be inserted via a separate table while all of your content items can be scheduled for publishing dates of your choosing. Though Hot Banana has a user-friendly interface to work with, it actually conceals many hidden treasures beneath all the open-space, making you dig a little deeper to perform certain actions.

Conclusion

Hot Banana is geared toward small and medium sized organizations whom for marketing, branding and ease of use are essential. The major downside to the platform is that its based on Cold Fusion, which automatically makes it a turn off for developers not familiar with the language. Disadvantages aside, this Banana offers enough out of the box functionality to greatly benefit small teams and businesses with a strong internal focus.