Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a linked site. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts dont include referrer logs but may be subscribedd for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these

FTP Explorer http//www.ftpx.com/ LogMeIn http//secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp SmartFTP http//www.smartftp.com/ FTP Voyager http//www.ftpvoyager.com/

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http//www.abacre.com/ala/ Referrer Soft http//www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/ Log Analyzer http//www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you dont have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that dont send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the users last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Dont submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like http//www.google.com hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one

HYPERLINK http//www.webposition.com/order/trial.aspWT.mc_idgoogle3A7Bifsearch3Asearch7D7Bifcontent3Acontent7D3A7Bcreative7D3Atrial3A7Bkeyword7DWT.srch1 http//www.webposition.com/order/trial.aspWT.mc_idgoogle3A7Bifsearch3Asearch7D7Bifcontent3Acontent7D3A7Bcreative7D3Atrial3A7Bkeyword7DWT.srch1

Or if you want professional help try the following sites

HYPERLINK http//www.addpro.com/professional_submission http//www.addpro.com/professional_submission

HYPERLINK http//www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html http//www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Dont use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies

Search Engines Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista Google, HotBot Excite/Webcrawler

Directories AOL Search Inktomi Lycos Open Directory MSN, Yahoo LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories

http//websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http//websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.

Overtures HYPERLINK http//inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ http//inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesnt tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type Computer, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word Computer was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly computer game was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include, Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position. Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once. Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page. More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

Guidebeam HYPERLINK http//www.guidebeam.com/ http//www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeams estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.

Just dont focus on the home page, keywords and titles. The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings cant keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you dont really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products Do you discount prices or offer coupons Are your prices consistently lower than others Is your shipping price cheaper Do you respond faster to client questions Are your product descriptions better Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitors To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

A Search Engine Optimization Company can be an invaluable asset in your Internet marketing campaign. They specialize in knowing how to raise your search engine positions, monitoring those positions on the regular basis, and adjusting their strategies to account for undesirable results in any given month. Since this takes a lot of time, effort, and specialized knowledge, it can be in your best interest to go to an outside source rather than try to maintain high search engine positions on your own.

However, like every business, there are good companies and there are lemons. Knowing the right questions to ask and the criteria to look for will help you in choosing an affordable, effective search engine optimization company.

When looking at different companies, begin by considering the approach they employ to raise your search engine positions. Steer clear of companies that use cloaked, doorway, or bridge pages to raise your positions. These techniques violate most search engine policy, and in the worst case scenario, will only get your website severely penalized, if not removed entirely from a search engine’s index.

A cloaked page is a page that is created which is invisible to the regular visitor to your website. The cloaked page is coded to detect a search engine spider and divert them to this special page, which is set-up to artificially boost your search engine position. Doorway or bridge pages utilize the same concept, but often reside on an entirely different server. Google, one of the largest and most important search engine on the Internet, will remove your website from their index if they detect you have cloaked pages. Never, never employ any company that uses this technique!

Another important element is to get a guarantee that the company you hire will not work with your competitors while they are working for you. Obviously, this would seriously compromise the effectiveness of the search engine optimization campaign. Be aware that some companies will use the success they achieve for your website to sell their services to your competitors. So get your guarantee in writing, and make sure it is legally binding.

Of course, one of the most important factors you want to check out is the company’s track record of results. However, don’t take the company’s word for it. They will undoubtedly be slanting their results in order to sell their services to you. To go beyond their simple statement of success, ask them a few pertinent questions, and verify their answers.

Ask them which engines they have achieved the best results on. The ones that are important are the most popular engines, and these are the ones you want to see good results on. Since the popularity of search engines can change with the landscape of the overall Internet, check out the Nielsen Netratings page at Search Engine Watch. You can access this at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/article.php/2156451.

Next, find out what keywords and phrases they are claiming great results with. It’s easy to get high rankings with unpopular words. For instance, the keyword “cat leashes” will get high popularity ranking because no one else would think of using it. What you are looking for is good results using popular keywords. Check out the software Wordtracker, available at www.wordtracker.com. You can order a free trial, or a subscription ranging from 1 day to 1 year. This software rates the popularity of keywords and phrases based on actual search engine use.

Next, look for good results over an entire site that the company claims to have successfully worked for. You want to see a wide range of positions over a number of different search engines using different keywords or phrases for the entire site. Request a report for any client the company claims to have done well for. This report should show good positions on a number of the most popular search engines for a variety of different, popular keywords and phrases.

When you are checking out search engine optimization companies, make sure they have actually done the work they are claiming to have done. Some companies will use other company’s results in order to get you to sign on with them. If you are in doubt, call the company they are showing you results for, and ask for the name of their search engine optimization company.

It’s important to keep in mind that a successful search engine optimization campaign will result in maximum exposure across a wide range of popular search engines using a variety of keywords and phrases. This is the formula for a successful campaign, and you should keep it always in the forefront of your marketing strategy.

Ask the search engine optimization company you are considering for a report that shows you rankings across a number of popular search engines for a period of at least six months. Remember: search engine marketing is a process that is continual, and you need a company that not only understands this, but keeps constant tabs on your search engine positions. That company must also be able to adjust its strategy in the event that search engine rankings drop.

Since search engine marketing is an on-going process, your positions must be constantly monitored. If you want your search engine optimization company to do this for you, request a sample of a monthly report. It is essential that this report should show rankings for the most popular search engines. Don’t be impressed by a report that only shows great results for a limited number of small search engines. These are fairly easy results to acquire. Also confirm that the popular search engine results they are showing you are indeed the popular search engines currently.

Be sure the sample report the company shows you is in a format that you can easily understand. For example, it could be in the form of a chart that covers a period of at least six months and presents data such as the top 50 positions broken down on a monthly basis or the top 5 pages each month. Then, ascertain that the company you are considering actually monitors these positions or pages every month, and that the sample report they show you includes findings and recommendations for the specific site. This insures that the company will actively monitor and make adjustments to their strategy on a continual basis rather than simply gather statistics on your positions. You need a company that is actively participant in your search engine marketing campaign, not just an information gatherer.

Obviously, your finances have to figure into your choice of company, but bear in mind that a search engine optimization company is crucial the success of your marketing campaign. It is not just a casual accessory. If you cannot afford a company that will do a thorough and reliable job for your website, you might consider waiting until you do have the finances in place.

If you have to find a company and can’t wait for your finances to catch up, you may be able to find an affordable company that will also be able to supply quality, reliable work, such as a fairly new company. Just remember that there are risks involved with using a company without a proven track record – and that risk is your money! Don’t take that leap unless the company can supply you with a least a few references.

References are the most reliable indicator of a good company. Don’t use a company that won’t show your references because of any reason, confidentiality included. Remember – even doctors will provide references! The firm you choose should provide you with a minimum of two references, one that is from the past, and one that is current.

When you contact these references, be prepared to ask precise, specific questions so that neither of your time is wasted. Ask them what their experience was like with the company, such as their availability to answer questions and deal with problems and their ability to meet deadlines. Ask the reference to rate the overall performance of the company.

Find out if the company requested that the reference make significant changes to their web pages that affected the visitors coming to their site. You are looking for a search engine optimization company that can balance the needs of both search engines and site visitors without compromising either.

The most essential question to ask is whether the work of the search engine optimization company resulted in higher profits for the reference. Without profits, it doesn’t matter whether your positions are at the top of the list or not.

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this by creating carefully chosen keywords.

Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do – and things you should be sure NOT to do – which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye – but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text – splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page – ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering – unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier – and more effective – the process will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position – which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.

The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.

Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others are, but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one called Overture provides an online tool that will give you the data on how often particular keywords are entered into their search engine. They also offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a description of your site.

In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture and Adwords Select, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.

There are many ways to promote your website and one of the most efficient ways is to use search engines. Search engines are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services, and products online. Because of this, it is essential that your website appears quickly in search results.

The Internet contains numerous search engines, some of which offer what is known as “paid inclusion.” This means that you pay the specific search engine an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

Of course, every search engine already has an automated program commonly called a “spider” that indexes all the web pages it locates online, and it does this for free. So whether you pay or not, your web page will eventually be indexed by all Internet search engines, as long as the spider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is, then, how quickly your page is indexed.

A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an extra spider that is programmed to index the particular pages that have been paid for. The difference between the spider that indexes pages for free and the spider that indexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid for inclusion, the additional search engine spider will index your page immediately.

The debate over paid URL inclusion centers around the annual fee. Since the regular spider of these search engines would eventually get around to indexing your web page anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary? The fee is necessary to keep your pages in the search engine’s index. If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be aware that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines, your page will be removed from their index for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to get confused about whether you would benefit from paid inclusion since the spider of any search engine will eventually index your page without the additional cost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paid URL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros and cons that you will be able to decide whether to spring for the extra cash or not.

The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid re-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will be indexed quickly and added to search results in a very short time after you have paid the fee. The time difference between when the regular spider will index your pages and when the paid spider will is a matter of months. The spider for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the regular spider will never locate them at all.

Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your pages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is that you can update your pages constantly to improve the ranking in which they appear in search engines, and the paid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matter of days.

First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten page website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have to pay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the cost factor is will depend on your company.

Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, Google, Yahoo, and AOL, do not offer paid URL inclusion. That means that the search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of the traffic to your site on a daily basis.

Google usually updates its index every month, and there is no way you can speed up this process. You will have to wait for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their index daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updates their index that your pages will show up in Google, Yahoo, or AOL results.

One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good deal for your company is to consider some common factors. First, find out if search engines have already indexed your pages. To do this, you may have to enter a number of different keywords, but the quickest way to find out is to enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear when you enter the URL address but do not appear when you enter keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the regular spider. If this is the case, your money would be better spent by updating your pages to improve your ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this, you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the regular spider to revisit your pages.

The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid URL inclusion is to decide if it’s a good investment. To figure this out, you have to look at the overall picture: what kind of product or service are you selling and how much traffic are you dependent on to see a profit?

If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best investment for you; the biggest search engines do not offer it, and they are the engines that will bring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if you have a business that offers an expensive service or product and requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, a paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.

Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently. If the content changes on a daily or weekly basis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages are indexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed by the paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywords are entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion in this case will guarantee that your pages are being indexed in a timely manner.

You should also base your decision on whether or not your pages are dynamically generated. These types of pages are often difficult for regular spiders to locate and index. Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamically generated website will insure that the paid spider will index them.

Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the possibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pages are indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, the search engine will be on the lookout to locate them immediately.

As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when it comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable investment depending on your situation. Evaluate your business needs and your website to determine if paid URL inclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.

There are many horror stories about affiliate programs and networks. People have heard them over and over again, that some are even wary of joining one. The stories they may have heard are those related to illegal programs or pyramid schemes. Basically, this kind of market does not have real, worthy product.

You do not want to be associated with these schemes. It is obvious you want to be with a program that offers high quality product that you will readily endorse. The growing number of those who have joined already and are succeeding immensely is proof enough that there are reliable and quality affiliate programs out there.

Why participate in an affiliate program?

It allows you to work part-time. It gives you the opportunity to build a generous residual income. And it makes you an owner of a small business. Affiliate programs have already created lots of millionaires. They are the living testimony of how hard work; continuous prospecting, motivating and training others pay off.

If ever you are deciding to join one, you must take note that you are getting into something that is patterned to what you are capable of. This will be an assurance that you are capable of doing anything to come out successful.

How do you choose a good affiliate program to promote? Here are some tips you may want to look over before choosing one:

1. A program that you like and have interest in. One of the best ways of knowing if that is the kind of program you wish to promote is if you are interested in purchasing the product yourself. If that is the case, chances are, there are many others who are also interested in the same program and products.

2. Look for a program that is of high quality. For instance, look for one that is associated with many experts in that particular industry. This way, you are assured that of the standard of the program you will be joining into.

3. Join in the ones that offer real and viable products. How do you know this? Do some initial research. If possible, track down some of the members and customers to give you testimonial on the credibility of the program.

4. The program that is catering to a growing target market. This will ensure you that there will be more and continuous demands for your referrals. Make inquiries. There are forums and discussions you can participate in to get good and reliable feedbacks.

5. A program with a compensation plan that pays out a residual income and a payout of 30% or more would be a great choice. There are some programs offering this kind of compensation. Look closely for one. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward substantially for your efforts.

6. Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales target that is too hard to achieve. Some affiliate programs imposes pre-requisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements.

7. Select one that has plenty of tools and resources that can help you grow the business in the shortest possible time. Not all affiliate programs have these capacities. Make use you decide on one with lots of helpful tools you can use.

8. Check out if the program has a proven system that can allow you to check your networks and compensation. Also check if they have it available online for you to check anytime and anywhere.

9. The program that is offering strong incentives for members to renew their membership each time. The affiliate program that provides continuous help and upgrades for its products have the tendency to retain its members. These things can assure the growth of your networks.

10. Be aware of the things that members are not happy about in a program. Like with the ones mentioned above, you can do your checking at discussion forums. If you know someone in that same program, there is ho harm asking if there are many downsides involved.

Have a thorough and intensive knowledge about the affiliate program and network you will be promoting on.

Knowing the kind of program you are getting yourself into will make you anticipate and prevent any future problems you may encounter.