Article Marketing - Excelling and Multiplying your Article Marketing

By Gen Wright

You can benefit from article marketing in so many ways. Aside from the fact that it can offer increased online visibility in as little time as possible, it also allows you to promote yourself as an expert on your chosen niche to easily earn the trust of online users. The key to excel in article marketing is to display your in-depth knowledge through your copies. If you do not know the ins and out of your chosen niche or if there are a lot of gaps in your knowledge base, it is unlikely that you'll be able to impress your readers and enjoy maximum benefits from your articles.

Expanding your knowledge base is relatively easy although it will require enormous time and effort. However, you can be assured that it will worth it as you'll easily be able to earn the trust of your readers.

Here are the best ways to expand your knowledge and excel while multiplying your article marketing in the process:

1. Hire a coach or a consultant. Find a helpful and knowledgeable person who have been there and done that. You can make use of his experience and expertise to gain more information about your chosen niche and about article marketing in general. These coaches or consultants usually offer in-depth information and guidance over the phone or through email. To get the most out of this, make sure that you ask the right questions to easily squeeze out the answers that you are looking for.

2. Visit your local library. I know that most people are doing their research online. You can set yourself apart from the rest if you check out traditional books and printed materials that may contain information that are not yet available in the world wide web. Read and learn as much as you can.

3. Invade relevant forums. There is at least one forum for any subject that you can imagine. These sites allow you to obtain new information from individuals who are engaged in the topics that are being discussed.

4. See if you can insert links on your article body. Although most article submission sites do not allow links on the article body, there are now numerous publishers that allow this. Know the terms of service of the sites where you post your articles just to know their rules about links. If possible, insert two to three links using anchor texts.

5. Use effective resource box. The problem with other article marketers is that they ignore their resource box. They think that as long as they put their site's URL in it, they are good to go. Keep in mind that your resource box is where you can sell yourself as an expert as your article body will focus on educating your readers. So, put your name on your resource box and communicate the problems that you solve. Overtime, online users will associate your name with your chosen niche. This can promote easy recall that can lead to increased sales.

6. Length of the articles. As you are writing for people who don't have the patience to stay in front of their computers for hours, it would be best if you keep your articles short (250-600 words). However, make sure that you explain your topic thoroughly and that your readers will not need to check out other resources just to fully understand your chosen topic.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com
(my own article directory)

I recommend getting to know Sean Mize at one of these sites: Internet Marketing Success Coaching Program. Are you a coach, consultant, entrepreneur, or speaker, who is tired of getting paid less than you are worth for your coaching and consulting?

Website Design - 5 Tips to Choose the Right Web Design Agency

By Cheow Yu Yuan

Due to recession, many people are looking to start their own businesses. Most of the start-up companies will spend some time and money to develop websites to increase their web presence. If one is not trained in web design and internet marketing, he or she will not know how to choose the right web design agency to develop their website. In this article, let me share with you 5 tips to choose the right web design agency.

1. Find out how much the agency is charging you. There is no fixed cost when it comes to web design. It all depends on the complexity of the website. So the first thing you should do is to ask how much the web design agency is charging you. You will want to have an agency work for a fixed cost rather than on hourly rate. Working on a fixed cost will definitely save you more if you are developing a website from scratch.

2. Shortlist a few agencies to speak further. By doing a search on Google, you will find many web design agencies offering development services. You should visit their websites and shortlist a few companies to speak further so that you will not waste your time and theirs.

3. Ask to look at their portfolio. Every established web design agency will have a portfolio to show you. So take a good look at the websites that they have done. If the websites are live, ask for the URLs and play with the websites. Shortlist those that produce designs that you love.

4. Conduct a research. After you speak to a few agencies, conduct a thorough research on these agencies using Google to see if there are good or bad comments about them. Another way to conduct research is to contact the owners of the websites that the agencies have produced and ask them about the work.

5. Choose an agency that is located in your city or country. I am not against offshore companies. I just prefer to have a face to face meeting with the team that is handling the project. It is a lot easier to discuss ideas and bring your points across to them. And if anything goes wrong, you are still able to visit their office and rectify the problem.

Your website is your marketing brochure and you cannot afford to have a below-par website if you want to create a good presence online. Therefore, make sure you choose a reliable and capable web design agency to work with.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com
(my own article directory)

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing web design service. Check out more web design portfolio here.

6 Very Common SEO Blunders

By Steve Weber

Generally I get contacted by site owners after their site is finished and already published to the web. The owner seeks out my advice after the site has been live for a while and still has no sales and/or traffic. I have put together a list of the most common problems I see when evaluating sites.

1. One of the most common mistakes I see is duplicate title tags. (The title tag is what appears at the top of the browser when the page is displayed and is what the search engines display for the first line of the site link in their results.) In other words most, if not all, of the site's pages have the same title tag. Usually it is the name of the business. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on title tags. When multiple pages have the same title tag, the search engines discount those pages' importance.

It is extremely important to title the page with the keyword phrase the page is optimized for. It is best if the keyword only is listed in the title. If that is not possible, at least the keyword should be first. For example: "Small Dog Collars" or "Small Dog Collars - YourSite.com"

2. Although meta tags are given little importance nowadays by the larger search engines, it is possible to misuse them and actually hurt the site. The biggest mistake I see with meta tags is for the meta description to be the same for every page. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions will suffer greatly in the rankings. The same goes for the meta keywords tag. The keyword tag must contain ONLY those keywords found on that page. Also, it is important not to put the same word in the meta tag descriptions more than 3 times. Don't make a list of meta keywords like this: large collars, red collars, small collars, leather collars, nylon collars. Search engines could see this as stuffing keywords. Search engines consider this spamming. It is much better to omit meta tags altogether than to misuse them.

3. Internal linking is often a real problem. Too many links can cause the search engine spider to quit indexing the site before it is actually finished. Google states that a site should have no more than 100 links on a page. I suggest no more than 50. And that is still a LOT of links!

For SEO purposes, the links should always be made with text. Many designers create images for their linking. This is very counter productive for optimization purposes. And along these lines, the navigation system should never be in any form of java script, Flash, or image map. A link with anchor text "leather dog collars" which points to a page optimized for "leather dog collars" is the best method of linking for SEO purposes.

However, do not end up stuffing keywords by having too many links on the same page with the same word or words. For example, don't have half of a page's links like this: large collars, leather collars, small collars, etc. Instead, have "collars" for the heading of the group and then have the links "large", "leather", "small", etc. below. This is not perfectly optimized, but it is better to be cautious than to risk being seen as stuffing keywords by the search engines.

And lastly, it is important that every page on your site has multiple links to it. Pages which have only one incoming link will not be ranked well. They may even be placed into Google's supplemental index. It can be difficult to work a page out of the supplemental index once it is in there.

4. Links to other sites are often a problem too. The days of linking to your friend's hobby site are over. Spamming has become such a problem that the search engines have really changed their algorithms with respect to linking. A dog site simply cannot have links to a totally unrelated site such as a pottery site. I am not saying one single link to a non-related page will get your site banned, but just be aware this can be a problem.

To make it a little easier to tell your friend you can't link to his site, inform your friend that a link from your dog site to their pottery site will do their pottery sight no good whatsoever. Although incoming links are extremely important to a site, the incoming links MUST come from sites with a similar theme. It is great for your dog page to get a link from dog training, dog breeding, dog nutrition, and dog house sites. A link on a computer website to your dog site won't benefit your site at all.

Many new site owners may also fall prey to scams which promise "thousands" of incoming links for $29.99. There is a good chance these scammers will use what are called link farms. The search engines consider link farms to be spam. Always remember, there is no free lunch!

5. Another scam which new site owners often waste money on is paying money for submissions to "hundreds" of search engines. There is simply no purpose in submitting to even dozens of search engines. When I create a new site, I simply submit the site to the group of directories I have listed on my site. Within weeks, sometimes days, my new site will be indexed by the top search engines. I never even bother submitting directly to any search engines... not even Google or Yahoo. It doesn't hurt to submit to them, but it works just as well to get links with the directories and by posting some articles with your site's link to article directories.

Additionally, offers of "Guaranteed Inclusion" in search engines are complete scams. Anyone can get a site included in all the top search engines. But getting listed on their first or second pages is going to cost you more than $29.99. It is going to require work!

There are two ways to get great listings in the search engines. One way is to learn basic SEO skills, do the work yourself, keep learning about SEO, and keep tweaking your site as it works its way higher and higher in the search engines. The other way is to spend enough money to hire a professional Search Engine Marketer. For a small site, be prepared to spend $500 or more.

There really is no in between. Do the work yourself or pay a professional. Any money spend in between will generally be wasted.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com
(my own article directory)

Steve Weber helps new Internet marketers build successful businesses. For more tutorials, including videos, visit Steve at his website and learn how to build a home Internet business.