Hi there.
If your current competitors are using the internet successfully, it is quite understandable that they would get sales from their online presence and you do not.
Let me explain…
To have a web presence is to have a website that capturing the attention of prospects looking for your products or services online, and converting them into customers.
People search the internet for the product or products that you and your competitors selling. They search online using search engines. One of the most popular search engines is called Google and Google allows you to into their search statistics. This way we can use their statistics to find out what keywords or phrases potential customers are typing into the search engines when they are looking for your products.
Search engine optimization is the art in setting up of your website in such a way that your website will get the most ranking benefit from the search engines. This means that if you can have a keyword in your domain, your website will benefit by ranking easier for that keyword, but it does not mean you have to have a keyword or keywords in your domain name.
The On-Site & Off-Site Battle of the Search Engines:
Since you may or may not have a website that is search engine optimized, we will look into the basics of a SEO website which is categorized as on-site SEO. But what happens when two have websites that are both search engine optimized, how do the search engines determine which website should be at the number one spot? Say for instance that you own a guest house and that your guest house is in Kimberley. You can guess that people may search for “guest house in Kimberley”. But what if there is another guest house in Kimberley that also have a SEO website?
In such a case the search engines will make use of off-site page rank indicators. This means they will look at off-site factors that can give them an indication to which website is the more popular of the two. There are more to it but this basically wraps it up. The website with the best search engine optimized website structure and the website which is the most popular normally outranks the rest.
Before we get to discuss how a search engine marketing specialist can go about making your website more popular, I want us to look at how to set up a SEO website. This is important even if you already have a website, because it does not mean that your website is search engine optimized
<A) On-Site – Setting Up your SEO Website:
On-Site SEO is more important than Off-site SEO. If you get this wrong, your website will need much more off-site search engine marketing to outrank your competitor who have a SEO website.
Search engine marketing does not have to be costly. In fact if you have no online competition, you would only need a search engine optimized website. This means that the search term “guest house in Kimberley” would only be found on one web page online – yours. If not, then your website have competition and other than having a SEO website, you would also need off-site search engine marketing which will be covered a little bit later.
Your website should have an online website/presence that preferably consists of the following:
- Domain Name
A domain name looks professional and allow you to have a professional email address. When you register your domain name you have to try registering
–> a .com or .org domain name for better search engine ranking
–> short and memorable website name
–> a domain name that is easy to say over the phone
–> a domain name that is not easily misspelled.
A .com domain name is about $10 a year but you can get a domain name discount. It works out at about $7 for your domain if you choose any hosting package at the same place.
- Your Website Hosting
This is your website home that involves renting hard disk space on a computer that is kept connected online so that your website is available 24/7. Having your website hosting at the same place that you registered you domain name, have the benefit of not having to edit your domain name server settings to point to your hosting with another company.You may have heard about free hosting. Never use free hosting. Your business should be able to afford a web hosting starter plan. Anything less is a waste of time and a risk of disrepute and loss of your website content.If your business can afford better web hosting, I suggest you host your website on a faster server and choosing a hosting package with enough hosting space to install a wordpress blog. If you registered hosting with another company than the one you registered the domain name with, you need to log into the domain name registrar and change the DNS (name servers) to point to the hosting company’s servers. The faster server’s domain server names are ns1.unselfishmarketers.com and ns2.unselfishmarkerters.com.If you do your domain name registration first and plan on getting your website hosted on the faster server anyway you will be shown a page with the opportunity to add ns1.unselfishmarketers.com & ns2.unselfishmarkerters.com as the DNS. If not you can leave the DNS and host with the slower hosting server for cheaper.
- A Sales Platform
A website would need a sales platform and in most cases you can make use of PayPal or other 3rd party merchant companies. Just as any business need a credit card facility, a business online would need a way take orders online. Trust me it just work better that way. Lets get back to our guest house website. In the case of our guest house it would have to be a platform that would enable the guest house website to take accommodation bookings and payments online. I have been recommending an alternative to expensive online hotel reservation software - a free alternative.
This platform is so versatile that it can manage hotel reservations better than most hotel booking software. I have no problem recommending this free alternative because it is easy to operate and has more than 9000 accommodation establishments listed already.This system shows in real time which rooms are still available. The facility manager of the hotel or guest house can also via mobile phone update the system should he/she get a booking while out of office.
If you want to ask – why not redirect my domain name and save on my hosting:
Some people think they can save by not paying for hosting by setting up a free redirect that point towards their hotel reservation system. That can be done but is not part of my search engine marketing plan. My marketing efforts if you hire me without hosting to my disposal, will most likely end up in giving your domain name temporary ranking. Until the opposition sees this and target that same keyword with off-site like I did, but adding hosting for the full SEO benefit that you can only get from an search engine optimized web page.Reminder tip: More and more online booking reservation services provide hosting and an easy way to upload pictures of the website. Some may wonder why they should pay for hosting especially if this free alternative online hotel reservation service provide all your website visitor should need. Why not save the money you would have to pay towards hosting fees every month. Do not get distracted. The long term goal is get ranked and to stay ranked. Always get your own domain name and hosting even if your booking service provide free hosting features. You do not have control over anything beyond your domain name and hosting. For long term security you need to do your link building towards your domain name preferably deep linking to your keyword optimized pages.
Unless of course you have a domain name that targets only one keyword. If you would want to redirect such a domain, and save on your hosting fees, you can do that. In such a case you may find it very difficult to keep ranking if the search engines decide to penalize redirected domains which in themselves has no content within the redirect. Currently they do not penalize domain redirection but do you want to take that chance. For the long term I always suggest a link building campaign targeting as much related keyword content you can add to your website. With a mere domain redirect you are at the mercy of the search engines and risk losing your page ranking because of the lack diverse optimized web site content.
Websites that are content rich and fully search engine optimized for a specific keyword outperform high page rank websites that rank merely because of the authority of their main page rank. If the authority site would set up a search engine optimized page for the same keyword you are targeting they will easily outrank you and take all the traffic – unless you have established a massive amount of incoming links from your off-site link building campaigns.
Enough said – Do not try to save on your hosting – see it as an investment.
I have no problem with you if you do not agree with that. With the current way search engines operate you will prove me wrong very easy – in the short run. - A Customer Service/Follow Up PlanWe have now covered a website’s need for a payment gateway. In the case of a accommodation type of business we also learned a little about such a payment gateway that doubles as a free alternative to expensive accommodation booking software. But – what if the customer clicks away from my website?
The second best function of any website is to capture the contact details of the visitor. This way you can follow up with more information and learn why he/she did not complete the booking process. In many cases a website visitor may have been distracted only to have have lost or forgotten about your website. With a means of follow up you can expose that person to your product or service all over again, and again – as many times as possible.
Contacting customers by phone would be the best way to follow up. Sending a personalised post card is also getting great reaction from leads. But a costly follow up system is not what we are going to set up. We’re going to cover the process of mailing list management software – or rather a mailing list service as it is operated via an online website.
Statistics has shown that it takes on average 7 or 8 times for a person to buy from reading follow up emails. The thing is you can only market online if you do it according to the international spam laws. For that you need an autoresponder account.
An autoresponder service is crucial in capturing the details of your website visitors.
To give you an example for how I set up the websites for my accommodation type websites. If their customers land on any page of their blogs, they can get to the online booking system in one click.
Furthermore, once they landed on the booking system, they are shown a freebie offer they could cancel on or could sign up on. This is managed by the autoresponder. Once the person’s details are captured, the owner of the accommodation establishment usually follow up with a first email response that provide a freebie. This is usually something like a coupon which the person can print out and bring with along when he/she arrives at the guest house, hotel or camping site.
The coupon can be for anything. This is normally just a welcome basket with a combination of fruit, biltong, nuts and raisons. Do not see the basket of fruit for the amout you have to pay for it. See it as an investment in your business.
Here’s why…
The person always stay on your list and is automatically sent updates of your blog. This way you build a ralationship with the person even if he/she did not book their accommodation with you. If ever they find themselves looking for “accommodation in Kimberley” don’t you think they would immediately contact you and bring that coupon with?
Another way to capture your visitors is to popup the freebie sign up offer as soon as they want to leave your site or close the web browser.
There are tons of ways you can use an autoresponder to build repeat sales for your business. In the case of our guest house website, we can use our autoresponder account to collect the details of our contacts that do group reservations. If a guest house do not have this type of contact they are leaving money on the table. Persons in charge of group reservations should never be bribed, but there is nothing wrong with building a favourable relationship with these people. If that person gets to know you, you become more than just a business contact to them.
If you update your blog with seasonal and social posts you can inform these valuable people of the length you are willing to go to accommodate your guests. If there is going to be a convention in town, or a social event that may draw people to your town, you can set up a related display in the living room or outside in the garden – which ever is more appropriate. Blogging about it will then inform your regular customers as well as these VIP’s. If they were contacted to do reservations, who do you think will be the first thing popping into their minds? The picture of your display of course.
I am not even going to tell you in detail about the free search engine traffic you may get from the picture itself. The search engines love to include related pictures (and videos) within their first search engine result page.
Once you have a domain name, your website hosting, the payment gateway or platform and the mailing list management service in place, adding related content to your website is easy using a wordpress blog.
How To Publish On-Site Keyword Related Content:
Before getting on with our discussion about off-site search engine marketing, let us look a little into how you are going about to add keyword related content to your website.
First of all you are going to install a wordpress blog using your hosting CPanel or hosting panel. Then learn how to use wordpress if you do not already know how to.
Since Google allows us to access their search engine data, lets use the Google keyword tool to find out what keywords people are searching for. We want only the keywords related to our guest house business so we will search the Google search engine data for anything related to “guest house kimberley” (without the quotes off course).
You will now get a list of related keywords that the website for your guest house in Kimberley should target. You target those keywords by adding content that focus around those terms. Search engines love content.
You can add content easily using a wordpress blog.
1 – Create a post titled with the keyword or with a title that contains the keyword.
2 – Write an article about the topic (If you need to learn how to write an article).
3 – Optionally you can add video and pictures to your article.
4 – Always add a call to action at the bottom of your article – in the case of the guest house website a link to Book Your Accommodation Now would be appropriate – linking to your free online booking platform.As you know by now your website content should be ranking in the search engines not long after you published it – unless there is some competition you have to take care of. To get anything you published on your website to climb through the ranks of the competing search engines listings for the same keyword, you need to get into the off-site marketing side of search engine marketing.
B) Off-Site – The Website Popularity Contest:
For a guest house to get customers from the internet, it has to have a website and it must be seen by people looking for guest house accommodation. There are 2 search engine sources you can use to get people to book into your guest house.
- The paid listing in the SERPs
- The free listing within the search engine result pages (SERPs)
The website that has the highest search engine ranking for any given keyword, will get the most web site visitors (web traffic). Your website’s listing within the SERPs depends on your search engine marketing.
Lets look at this 2 basic types of search enginge traffic or search engine marketing:
1. Paid Ranking/Listing aka PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)
Your ranking with the paid ranking, depends on how much you are willing to bid for a click. Every time someone click your ad, you get that person to visit your website. It is then up to your website to convert that visitor into a customer or the automated customer capture and follow up service (autoresponder) to follow up with the non-buyer or buyer to entice them to keep buying. More about the autoresponder later.
Since you have to pay with PPC Advertising an amount up front for each customer whether they purchased from you or not, it means that each website visitor is costing you money this way. If your website converts 10 out of a hundred vistors it means your website have a 10 % conversion. If your PPC bid was $0.05 per click, then a 100 web site visitors would comes to a cost of $5. If your website converted at 10% and your profit on one booking is lets say $35, it means your website made 10 sales (10 accommodation bookings) that relate to $350.
And that is why people make use of PPC Advertising.
2. Natural Search Ranking/Listing
With PPC advertising you can bid more to get a better placement but then your website needs to convert better in order to keep on making a profit. Because with PPC advertising you will always need to pay for traffic and your website has to have a high conversion rate and a low cost per click in order to be profitable, let’s look at another method of search engine marketing – Ranking high in the search engines‘ natural search results.
The search engines uses a highly secretive formula to determine which website should be ranked or listed in the number 1 spot, and which website should be ranked number 2. Because there is so much money to be made from having your website listed on the first page one of the SERPs, people would take the search engines for a ride if they knew just what to do to have their websites ranked number 1.
Since the search engines want the show the best website for a given keyword at the number 1 spot, the precise formula they use to find the ranking winner website, is maybe the best kept secret in the world. Companies are investing huge sums into search engine marketing in order to get ranked on the first page of the SERPs. My advice to you is not to try and find out what the formula is, or fall for any person trying to convince you to pay them for a first page placement, as you can do it yourself in most cases.
For a natural search engine ranking your website should have as much quality related content on your website and as many real websites linking to you. Adding quality content is easy if you have a website and a wordpress blog installed already.
Quality Content:
If you find that people are searching for your product/website while using the keyword “guest house accommodation in Kimberley”, then you should have a web page that targets that keyword. All that means is that you would open your website blog, and write an article on the topic. Use the phrase a few times without making the article seem spammy or unnaturally bombarded with the keyword phrase.
If your competitors have a higher ranking in the search engines for the same keyword phrase, there are some reasons for that. Do not be discouraged. You are going to work with a plan.
Dofollow Backlinks:
One of the ingredients for a successful ranking in the SERPs, is called dofollow backlinks. Backlinks are what linking from other websites to your site is called. The more sites linking to your website, the higher your ranking in the SERPs. The natural occurrence of backlinks is when people find great content online, such as your website, and then they will link to it in a natural way. Mostly this is when they update their online social platforms such as twitter, facebook or their personal blogs.
Getting backlinks in a natural way is not easy. It involves having great content and getting people to link to your website. If a guest house publish the photos of their guests, their guests may just link to those photos from their own blogs, resulting in your website getting a higher ranking in the SERPs. A commonly used method to get other websites to link to your website, is to leave comments on website that give you a place to place a link.
Commenting on onther people’s blogs have a 2 basic draw backs.
Drawback #1:
Not all blogs are the same. Some blog owners change their comment linking structure so that your links will still look correct but they will instruct the search engines to ignore the link and your search engine ranking will not benefit from having placed a link on their blogs. So if you want to get backlinks by making comments, make sure that the blogs you comment on are dofollow blogs.
Drawback #2:
Searching for blogs that allow for dofollow backlinks and commenting in exchange for a backlink, requires time – a lot of time. Especially if you have to read the person’s blog post (article) to write a quality comment.
Automated Backlink Building – Article Marketing:
The best backlink building method is the viral effect of writing articles that will be published by blog owners on their blogs. This means that if you write an article about “guest house accommodation” and you publish it at EzineArticles.com, it will most likely end up on some other accommodation type blog or two.
Even though this is great and loved by the search engines, I suggest that when you write articles for backlinking purposes, that you will write about anything. Even though writing an article about “3 Reasons You Should Book Your Accommodation A Week In Advance” would be great, I don’t think articles about accommodation are going to be as viral as articles about cats cats and dogs. As I said, write about anything.
You can also use a paid article submission service that will take your article and for as little as $2 submit the article to blogs, articles submission sites and article directories.
There is an article submission site that gives you 2 authoritative backlinks, and the ability to add a picture to your article as well. The down side with this site is that no one is allowed to re-publish content once published with them, but they have a huge adsense sharing benefit. This means that they give away most of their advertising generated income, making it possible for people without work to start making money online. This is a free article publication business that is based on a 2% viral income adsense sharing system.
Guest Blogging:
Just as you can place comments on another person’s blog, so can you place an article on another person’s blog. It’s called guest blogging. Yet again, 2 drawbacks exist with guest blogging:
Drawback #1:
Finding a blog owner to write articles for and writing the articles takes time, a lot of time.
Drawback #2:
When you do guest blogging, you mostly have to spend your time posting articles on only one or two people’s blogs. That means that you probably would not get a huge boost in search engine ranking since the search engine’s can “see” that your backlinks originates from only one or two blogs.
What about Duplicate Content?
Even if you would post the same content to different blogs, there is a drawback. This drawback is called duplicate content. So what if your articles at EzineArticles get re-published on other people’s blogs – does that not also constitute the publishing of duplicate content? Yes, it is duplicate content too – yet it still works. Just in case you are worried about having a backlinks building campaign that uses duplicate content, I have good news for you – Article Spinning.
Article Spinning?
Article Spinning is where you write different versions of the same article content in such a way that the new article will also be “seen” as original content. If you just replace the some words of the article by their synonyms, it will not do the trick. The correct way of spinning is to rewrite your article using the basic framework of the article you already have but to change the sentences so much that it will be a new article. If you think this is hard work – it is – unless you use article spinning software.
Article Spinning Software:
Article spinning software does allow you an easy and a fast way to change synonyms but most importantly the best article spinning software allows for fast rewriting of whole sentences and even paragraphs. This is very handy if you do article marketing and just want to spin your articles you published at EzineArticles in order to submit spinned versions at other article submission directories.
Automated Blog Posting:
Backlink building can be taken one step further. You can write one article and submit it to many blogs, using a blog network platform. This is extremely powerful as within a blog network you will automatically get:
- 3 Do follow backlinks
- Extremely Fast Re-publication.
That means that you do not have to search for blogs that allow guest blogging. You just write your articles and publish them. The members of the blog network (people with blogs) will then allow the blog network to automatically publish your content when it relates to their website topic. This means that if you write one good article about accommodation, about 90% + of all accommodation types of blogs will accept your article, giving you 3 dofollow backlinks. Since there are only so many blogs about accommodation, I would suggest, once again, to write articles on different topics.
There are several blog networks available and they are all run through an online service. Most of them allow for spinning within the software through a spinning module. If you use one that does not have a spinning module you can always use the article spinning software we’ve learned about. Some blog networks have spinning modules that allow deeper spinning and other have better word phrase replacement systems that can automate most of the spinning by hand based on your personal preference.
Register with a paid blog network for instant backlinks:
Cannot Afford Paid Blog Networks?
- Free Traffic System:
Take note that participation with most blog networks are paid advertising systems and since they republish your spinned articles out to the network of blogs and new blogs as they are added to the network, they charge a monthly subscription. If you cannot afford the membership to an automated blog posting network, there is an automatic article submission system that can be used for free. There is an upgrade option with more links as well as a viral referral benefit included which means you get some further backlinking by sharing their system with other people.
- Outsourced Guest Blogging:
If you can not afford the free traffic system, it is not a question of money but rather that you do not have the time to write articles, spin them and submit them to a network of blogs. For this the solution is to outsource. You can learn to understand the process of saving time and money by outsourcing business services, or you can take my word for it. By hiring a search engine marketing specialist you can get an article written on any topic, spinned and submitted to a paid blog network for as little as $50. Payment for this kind of service is usually made through PayPal.
The most amazing benefit you get when you outsource, is the fact that you do not have to keep paying for a blog membership as the search engine specialist that makes use of such an automated blogging system, already keeps his/her membership alive.
Copyright And Plagiarism:
The ability of rewriting articles does not authorize anyone to plagiarize the copyrighted work of others. If you outsource your article writing it is also a good idea to make use of trusted article writer. One way of making sure that your article is not copyrighted is to make use of Copyscape. Another way is to place the onus on the article writer by having him/her publish the article he/she wrote under their own names.
LET’S WRAP IT UP
You have now covered some of the most important basics of search engine marketing.
You can use a free rank checker to see where your website is listed for each keyword you are trying to rank for or you can use the rank checker tool from Market Samurai of which you can get a free 1 month trial.