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With so many millions of web sites on the Internet, getting your site seen is becoming more and more difficult. If your website is your store-front, then the last thing you need is for it to be stuck out in the back-woods where nobody even catches a glimpse of it.
Of course, the obvious way to get your site seen is to get it to appear high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you dominate the top of the list for your chosen search terms, you have more chance than anyone of getting visitors to your site.
The problem is that getting there is not easy. With hundreds or thousands of websites jostling for that prime position in the SERPs, you need to do something that will make the search engines take notice of your site and place it in that prized spot.
This has spawned a whole new industry called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. There are SEO consultants springing up everywhere. Enter Search Engine Optimization into a Google and you will get over 1 billion results!

The biggest problem today is that you can not tell the good SEO consultants from the bad, and believe me, there are some bad ones out there.

So what do you do when you want to carry out some SEO on your own site? Why not do it yourself? That’s where SEO for Small Business, an ebook by Ric Raftis, comes in.

Over the years, I have read a lot of ebooks that fall under the category of “online marketing”. Some have been good, and some have been bad. SEO for Small Business is one of the good ones; very good in fact. Ric writes at a level that is not too technical, yet doesn’t treat you like a total idiot. And if something does get a bit technical, he explains it to you.

Whether you want to carry out the optimization of your website yourself, or have a background knowledge of SEO before you employ a consultant to do it for you, it’s worth reading this book.

The book starts off by explaining what SEO is and why you need to do it. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of modifying your web pages, Ric covers one of the most important aspects of SEO which many people fail to do, and that is keyword research. Search engine results pages correspond to the entered search terms, so you need to choose your keywords carefully. It’s all very well getting to the top of the Google SERPs for a given keyword, but what if nobody actually enters that keyword into Google?
Ric takes you step-by-step through the keyword research process, showing you how to use tools that are freely available online. It’s a process that you must go through to make your efforts worthwhile.

Having chosen your target keywords, the book then shows how to implement those changes on your own web pages, by adding to or modifying the HTML code and textual content that forms the pages. Again, there’s no need to worry about not knowing HTML. The book tells you exactly what to look for and how to modify it.

Once you have your pages sorted out, the process continues, to cover sitemaps, which help the search engines to find all of the pages of your site, which means they will be indexed much more quickly.

Finally, a popular topic in SEO terms is covered, and that is backlinks. A number of different types of backlink and ways of setting them up are covered in the book.

Following the steps in the book doesn’t have to be done all at once; you can do it bit-by-bit without any adverse effects on your SERPs rank. In fact, after each step, you are likely to see some improvement. So if you’re a beginner when it comes to websites, just work methodically through the book and you’ll achieve the end result. And if the book isn’t enough, Ric has prepared some videos showing you how to carry out various steps in the book.

Follow this link to find out more about SEO for Small Business.

Related Reading:

Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips To Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook in as Little as 7 Days

Plain and Simple SEO

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Search Engine Optimization

SEO Made Simple: Strategies For Dominating The World's Largest Search Engine (Volume 1)

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As a partner in a popular Article Site, I see Article Marketing used, misused and abused. In this post I hope to demonstrate where people are going wrong, and give some hints and tips that will make your Article marketing more effective.
Many of the mistakes made are based on what people have heard or read regarding the search engines and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). That’s all very well, but the search engines continually evolve and SEO rules must evolve with them. Sadly, people get hooked on a concept and don’t adapt what they do to the latest behaviour of the search engines.

Mistake #1 – Article Marketing is only for Creating Backlinks
This is a common misconception promoted by so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialists. Somebody discovered that the search engines give higher priorities to sites containing more incoming links (or backlinks) than those with fewer links. As article sites promote the re-publishing of articles on other sites, the number of links from each submitted article can grow considerably.
This led to people frantically churning out hundreds of articles to submit to article sites, just so that they could get a lot of links back to their website. Many people are still stuck in this rut, churning out numerous articles. In fact they are stuck so far into this rut that they make…

Mistake #2 – The Content Isn’t Important; Just Get the Backlinks
People stuck in the “Get as many backlinks as possible” rut tend to write short, repetitive, uninformative articles. They don’t really care that nobody will ever read the article – they just want the backlinks, and they submit their articles to 50 or more article sites. Of course, after people started doing that, the search engines started finding duplicate content, and discounting the backlinks. So the marketers needed some way of doing the same thing without being hit for duplicate content. This led to the invention of Article Spinners or Article Rewriters – software that rewrites your articles automatically, creating hundreds of new articles. In fact, they are all the same article – just written using different words and phrases that mean the same thing. Unfortunately, this led to…

Mistake #3 – Article Spinners Will Reliably Make 300 Different Versions of my Article
Article Spinners/Rewriters WILL take your article and make 300 different versions of it. But the majority of those versions will be complete rubbish. These programs work by replacing words and phrases with others of the same or similar meaning, using a Thesaurus and/or Dictionary. Some work better than others, but most just aren’t up to the mark. The users of these programs don’t bother to read through the generated articles, so they don’t realise what rubbish they contain. They blindly submit the generated articles to different article sites, filling those sites with incomprehensible rubbish.

Mistake #4 – It Doesn’t matter if Nobody Reads the Articles
We get a lot of visitors to our article site. The majority of them are not submitting articles; they are reading them. They have searched for information on a particular subject and found articles relating to it. If your trashy, “spun” article comes up in their search, they’ll read the first few sentences, realise that it’s worthless and move on to the next article.
But imagine if that next article was useful, informative and written in good English (or whatever language is in use on that site). The visitor will read through the article right to the bottom. If they found the article useful and want to know more, they might just click on that link in the Resource Box, and the author of that good article may have got themselves a customer.

Take a tour of the better quality article sites. You will find that the articles are moderated. If you submit trash, it will be rejected and never published on the site. You will have wasted your own time. The better quality article sites will also carry more weight to their backlinks. A single link from one quality site could be worth 20 links from sites containing unmoderated rubbish.

Mistake #5 – The Backlinks Generate Traffic Via the Search Engines
It’s true. The search engines will index the backlinks, and if the quality of those links is high enough, you might get a top spot on the search engine results pages, but it’s not guaranteed.
But go back and read Mistake #4. You can get traffic directly from the article site, via your Resource Box link. And at that point, you have an advantage. When somebody starts searching for information about something, they might not be ready to buy it yet. They want to do their research. If they find a link directly to your site in the search engines, they don’t want to be sold something – they are looking for information. If that person finds the link to your site at the end of an informative, well-written article, a psychological change has happened. That person now…
1) has more information on the subject
2) found the article useful, and has built some trust in the author
3) might be more inclined to buy something
4) might want more information so follows the link to find out more
When that person lands on your website, they are now more targeted than they were before reading the article.

Mistake #6 – Quantity is Not Important
Many ebooks about SEO and Article Marketing suggest that you need write only 200 or so words in your articles. That might work for the “backlink rut” people, but if you’re going to use Article marketing effectively, you need to give more than 200 words.
A well-written article of a decent length is going to hook the reader more than a 200 word article. On our article site, the minimum is 250 words, but we suggest between 500 and 1000 words (or more if you wish).

Mistake #7 – It Doesn’t Matter if my English Isn’t Very Good
The quality article sites which carry out moderation of articles will not rate your article if it is full of spelling and grammatical errors, bad English, and too much slang. Don’t forget that your article is being published worldwide. A slang phrase or colloquialism that you use in your article might not be understood by many of your readers. Even worse, it might have a completely different meaning – maybe even offensive.

Mistake #8 – Everyone on the Internet Lives in the USA
On our site, we often receive articles that are very specific to a country – more often than not, specific to the USA. Don’t forget that what you are writing about may not apply outside your own country. Simply state at the beginning of the article that it applies to your location and may not apply elsewhere. In June/July 2009, our site received visitors from 139 different countries or territories.

Mistake #9 – Make your Resource Box link a hyperlink
We have seen numerous articles submitted containing web addresses in the Resource Box, but they have not been entered as hyperlinks, making them less easy to follow.
An even worse mistake is not even entering a web address in the Resource Box! If you don’t enter a website address, you’re not going to get any traffic, and you won’t get any backlinks.

Summary
Effective Article Marketing:
- Generates backlinks
- Generates traffic
- Builds trust between the visitor and the author.

Steps To Effective Article Marketing:
- Read the Submission Guidelines of the article sites – they are all different
- Write informative, well-structured articles that encourage visitors to read them to the end and then follow your link to your site
- Enter a hyperlink to your website in the Resource Box.

Related Reading:

The Spinner's Companion (Companion)

The New Rules of Direct Email Marketing: How to Use Direct Email Advertising and Article Marketing Techniques to Reach Your Target Audience

Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message

Cashing In On Article Writing: Internet Marketing To Go!

The Marketer's Guide To Successful Package Design

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