It’s a fact that the search engines are the way in which 90% of people locate the internet resources they need and Google has a recorded 75% market share in the UK, Europe and the USA. Add to this that 84% of recorded searchers never make it past the bottom of page two of Google, and 65% of people never click on sponsored (“Pay per Click”) results. Then being at the top of the non paid (or “natural”) search results should be a priority for the modern business in a world ever more dominated by the internet.

Around 15% of all sales in the British economy are now reportedly completed online, and price comparison service uSwitch predicts that internet sales will make up 40% of all purchases by the year 2020. The numbers are similar in all the developed countries of the word, including the United States.

So why is it that we at Direct Submit still, frequently, come across business owners who are happy to spend thousands on a website then reject the need to properly address the Internet Marketing and SEO requirements of their website?

To achieve optimal results from this approach it has been suggested that the following information needs to be thought about ‘before’ the project begins.

1. List the goals and objectives for your business and for your website. Do they align with each other? They should.
2. Who is your target market?
3. List your competitive advantages. Does your current web site highlight these advantages? If not, it should.
4. What kind of feedback are you getting on your current website (if you have one)? What is currently working and what may need reworking?
5. Examine your competitor’s websites. What are they doing well or maybe not so well? What could you learn from their website?
6. What information would make your company stand out from competitors? Promote this information on the website.

A website can help drive new or repeat business.  It can help improve your companies profile and give you a competitive advantage, so it is worth taking your time and getting the design and content just right.

It is also crucial to make sure your web design company understands effective Internet Marketing and how the search engines work. They should know how to set up your website so that it has the potential to list well in the likes of Google and Yahoo for key phrases important to your business. Get this ‘Internet Marketing’ issue wrong and your website won’t be an asset to the business.

An additional benefit, as you continue writing and publishing articles you may become recognised as an expert in your field. This adds to your credibility and makes your site trustworthy, helping attract yet more visitors and online reputation.

Article submission can be a cost effective way to get traffic, help improve the page rank, and attract permanent incoming links to your website, Direct Submit offer a high quality article submission service. We manually submit your article to all of the major online article websites. We create unique user account for you & verify the account before the articles are submitted. A full report is provided at the end of the process.

We provide excellent support to our customers, which can include writing articles for you which are unique and presented for customer approval before submission.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Phishing for your Password
You can be persuaded to reveal your password – it’s called ‘phishing’ and it’s very common. It can be stolen by ‘malware’ – a malicious program on your computer that watches keystrokes as you type – or if you use the ‘remember password’ feature on a web page. In any of these cases it doesn’t matter how complicated your password was. Websites with login pages store passwords in a file, and these files often get stolen. If the file isn’t encrypted, nothing you can do will protect your password. If it is encrypted, obvious passwords could get revealed quite quickly. More complex passwords would be slower to break, but the attacker usually has all the time they need. An attacker might systematically try user names and passwords at the login page of some popular online service. This is called ‘brute force’ and it’s preventable – the page should lock out further attempts after a small number of failures. But many don’t, so this is a real threat. Here, using a strong password can help protect you.

A Strong Password
Two of the most commonly used passwords are ’123456′ and ‘password’ – very bad choices as they would be among the first to be tried by an intelligent attacker. The ideal password is a fairly random sequence of characters, and extra length is usually more important than a wider range of symbols. But creating your password in this way is not always the most ‘human-friendly’ approach as you may find it tricky to remember. Instead, one of the best techniques is to choose a memorable phrase containing the same number of words as the desired password length in letters (usually this is at least eight characters) and use the first letter of each word to create an acronym to use as your password. The chosen phrase should not be well known, and using capitals and lower case can add quite a lot of strength, but substituting numbers for letters or adding special symbols doesn’t make much difference. For example, the phrase ‘the boy stood on the burning deck until it got too hot’ could yield a password of ‘tBsotbDuigth’, which is quite strong. The phrase is memorable even if the password is not, and the rule – capitalise every noun – is simple to remember, but results in unpredictable patterns in the password that make an attacker’s job more difficult.

Finally, it’s important to use different passwords for different activities – not necessarily for each site you use, but at least to segregate sensitive from non-sensitive services. You might use the same password with different user names for commenting on multiple news sites or blogs, but you should have a different password for each bank and shopping account.

Source of article taken from BBC webwise.

A) Links from a website or directory that relates closely to your content or market sector. B) Links located within the body of the content of the source website, using ‘anchor text’ based on your keywords or key phrase in them. c) Direct links not just your homepage but, where appropriate, to the relevant content pages.

We all know that links are a core part of Google’s ranking algorithm, but often achieving these good quality links is more difficult than it looks. In some case you could consider paying for inks from quality directories or upgrading a free link to one that includes a key phrase rich text link to a page within your site. Make sure you have the type of quality content that makes people want to link to you. That old SEO statement still rings true, ‘Content is King’.  Not only will this approach help generate link popularity, but it will also help you in other ways, too. Search engines love good quality relevant content, all of which will help you succeed with your ongoing SEO campaign.

How do you find out who’s already linking to you? Go to Yahoo search, type in linkdomain:www. yourcompany.com and it will return a list of sites that are linking to you. Google offers the same thing (type link:www.yoursite.com). Note that in our experience, Yahoo returns more comprehensive results with Google often limiting the results it delivers from these requests.

Our advice would always be to focus on quality and relevance when developing you Internet linking Strategy. Low quality links from spam sites or link farms could hurt your rankings and the golden rule should always be ‘quality, not quantity’.

Make the Internet Work for your Business in 2012
More and more businesses are recognising the need to actually do something with their website. How many businesses have spent hundreds, or in many cases thousands of pounds on websites that they then do absolutely nothing with. Quite often, the web design company will do little or no Internet Marketing or will try to sell this an additional service to the client – in our experience of talking to clients, sometime after the website went live.

It is not unusual for a prospective client to contact us, as a last resort, and offer us the ultimatum, if the website continues to do nothing for our business we may as well bin it.

In these difficult times, when a business is looking to the Internet for new business, then the process of Search Engine Optimisation and subsequent Internet Marketing should be placed higher on the ‘to do’ list when planning or operating a website.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

In a perfect world, SEO would be developed while a website is still in infancy. While this ideal situation rarely occurs, the following steps summarise the process as it should occur every time.

Key Phrase Strategy and Website Development  
Before building your website, you must have a keyword strategy. Select key phrases that are relevant to your business and receive an acceptable level of traffic. It is often appropriate, particularly for smaller / new businesses, to avoid the most competitive phrases where the level of competition you would be up against would be significant. You can always develop to these phrases as your business grows.

Once you have selected your keywords you can begin to develop the website using basic SEO site structure principles. These include the Meta titles, Meta descriptions, linking strategy, clear site navigation, optimised coding and great content.

Web Analytics
Try to include some web analytics platform that will allow you to monitor users are coming from and what search terms they are using. One free example is Google Analytics which provides a reasonable level of feedback on the traffic levels and sources to your website. This information will enable you to monitor and update your website to try and achieve the best results possible within your market sector.

Driving Traffic to the Website
Obvious really, but look to get your web pages listed in the main search engines as quickly as you can.  You can submit the website, but also look to get your URL linked to from websites already in the search engines. Subscribe to directories and develop a strategy for effective link building. Remember, with links, it’s about quality, not quantity; a handful of links on top-notch sites is worth hundreds of links on irrelevant, insignificant sites.

Incorporate off site and traditional marketing methods. For example, include your web address on your stationary and have it displayed on the side of company vehicles.

Consider employing the services of an Internet Marketing specialist to help with the Search Engine process. At Direct Submit we regularly see clients who have spent thousands on a website assuming, the traffic will just come, only to find their lovely looking website is not SEO friendly and they have no identifiable SEO strategy in place.

Monitor, Evaluate & Refine
After you campaign has run for a time, review and look to assess how the project has been working. Are your keywords receiving the most traffic and bringing in the best ROI, is your website listed in the major search engines and do you need to update /refine the website content.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

In the United States, IE currently holds a 50.66 percent market share, a slight increase from one year earlier. By contrast, Firefox usage among U.S Web users is 20.1 percent — down from 26.75 percent in the same month last year, StatCounter said.

Google’s popular browser — which held a 17.3 percent share of the U.S market at the end of November — is clearly benefiting from Firefox’s slide. At the beginning of 2011, only 10.9 percent of all U.S.-based Web users were using Chrome.

“We can look forward to a fascinating battle between Microsoft and Google as the pace of growth of Chrome suggests that it will become a real rival to Internet Explorer globally,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen Thursday.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit