It doesn’t have to cost money to advertise your online website or e-commerce store

There are many online services that companies use for PR and marketing exposure, and many of these are free. For example, Twitter and Facebook are prime examples where companies are harnessing the power of social media to gain PR exposure, and to advertise and announce new products and to get customers aware and start talking about their new products. Every major company I know are on Twitter and/or Facebook – however, Twitter is becoming increasingly used by companies. It’s short and concise. Each message can be up to 140 characters long. This can be both annoying and useful. It means “tweets” are short and concise, and makes it much different to Facebook. Twitter is more public and a public communication tool than Facebook and in this way I don’t think Facebook is competitive to Twitter or vice versa, which is why I think companies need to be on both. Not everyone is going to be on Twitter as well as Facebook, since they aren’t the same nor do they work the same way when using these social media sites.

Using Twitter and Facebook to keep customers informed and loyal.

Using Twitter and Facebook are important tools especially if your business is solely an online business, such as an online e-commerce store. You can use Twitter and Facebook to gauge customers on new competitions, new products and to even provide customer support via these mediums. It’s much easier to contact a company about an issue via Twitter than contacting them official channels, because first, it’s short, it’s concise and it’s quick. And the fact that every tweet is essentially public, most companies will be eager to sort out the customer issue because there is no way to really hide another person’s bad tweet about some company. But, the bottom line is, it’s a good communication and connection tool for you, your company and your customers. While it has made Twitter even more commercialised, many people will appreciate companies they use for various services, shopping or products that your company is on Twitter to keep updated on the latest products, services and competitions ran by your company.

Search engine optimisation (SEO).

Why pay for advertising space via AdWords and other online sites? You can use search engine optimisation to have your site listed naturally higher than other competing sites via popular search engines such as Google or Bing, as these search engines start to algorithmically understand your site is quite relevant and more important.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation is using techniques in order to have your site, blog or online e-commerce store to be ranked higher for relevant search terms via search engines such as Google, Bing and Ask Jeeves – Google being the main one here. There are many techniques you can use, including:

• Getting back-links to your site: Use quality directories to submit your site or e-commerce store to in order to get link backs to your site; use online forums and where allowed, add a back-link to your site via your signature (as if you are advertising your site). There’s lots of legitimate ways of getting back links!
• Focus on quality content: Quality and original content is required. Google does not just focus on your website URL and title, Google also focuses on the content of your site too. In fact, content is king, which is why it is important to focus on ensuring your content is updated regularly, is of high quality and is always original. If you copy any content from another website Google has indexed (and Google indexes billions of pages), expect Google to remove that page or section of your website off Google listings or not index it at all, or even worse, penalise your entire website whereby your site isn’t listed on Google at all).
• Name your HTML/server-side files appropriately: If you have a page on computer accessories, naming your file appropriately helps towards SEO, so as an example a file name of: computer-mouse-accessories.php, if your page is selling computer mice accessories (or computer-mice-accessories.php, perhaps) – this is for PHP server-side files, but applies just as equally for static HTML pages

We have a blog post on search engine optimisation (opens in a new window) explaining about various search engine optimisation techniques you can use for your online blog, but generally apply universally for online sites and even e-commerce stores, too.

Make word of mouth front-and-centre.

Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. Period. There’s no question about it. I run an online Minecraft server, and I’ve never advertised it any further since I launched it and many new online players that play on the game server were referred from existing players on my server. Even at eUKhost, many of our customers have referred new customers of ours because they are happy with the service we provide. Word of mouth is important, which is why every company should focus on providing good customer service, support and experience to ensure customers are happy. You never know, if there is an unhappy customer, they may end up telling others which may lose you sales in the future.

Perhaps add affiliate programs on your e-commerce store? Even customers could use this. Provide attractive offers to get your customers to either advertise your e-commerce store via their website or even via social networking sites such as Facebook!

Own a blog? Make exclusive articles on EZineArticles.com* and add a link back to your blog

This is a great search engine optimisation exposure but also exposure to interested visitors. EZineArticles.com is highly ranked on Google because of how popular the site is and the fact that all articles go through a submission review process to ensure all articles are of high quality, are original and unique. If your blog is new or isn’t well established from a search engine optimisation perspective (or even it if is), EZineArticles.com is a great marketing method for your online blog. I’d definitely recommend you use ezinearticles.com to submit some unique articles to their site with valuable link backs to your blog in exchange (which they let you do at the end of articles). However, make sure articles on EZineArticles.com are unique and aren’t articles that are already on the Web, such as your own blog.

This is a good search engine optimisation method and to get clicks back to your blog from readers that had read your article on EZineArticles.com.

*Link above opens a new window

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Search engine optimisation is important for a blog. Because that is, if your blog is small, the primary way to get visitors to your blog. It is evident features in blog systems such as tags and categories help towards search engine optimisation, and others as detailed below. But as many will stress, the most important thing of course is content. Content is king. It is important to have original and unique content and that your blog is updated regularly with original and unique content. If you don’t do this, Google is simply going to give another blog better search rankings that what your blog is potentially capable of being given.

Content is king

Content is king. So what sort of content are you going to write? The thing that works for my small blogs personally is writing about something unique and that hasn’t specifically be written by blogs that are more highly-ranked than my blog is. It all helps towards search engine optimisation and of course, getting valuable visitors, which is (mostly) the reason we have blogs in the first place – if, unless of course, your blog is for your own reference only.

So, talk about something original that may not be talked about by other blogs. If your blog is on sports, why not talk about something in sports that no one else is specifically talking about right now? Perhaps your opinions on something that isn’t being talked about by another blog that is more highly-ranked. Even though there is great competition between websites in terms of search engine optimisation because of how many websites are online and the amount of people using the Internet, if you think of the logical things you can do to help make your blog more noticeable by Google from an SEO perspective, then over time your blog will be ranked more importantly by Google bots.

Backlinks and deep links

Backlinks and deep links are important in order for Google to recognise your site as important. The obvious may well be submitting your site to relevant directories, but you can also do this by adding a link to your blog via your signature, especially on sites which you are active on. If you often post in threads that are related to your blog’s articles or main purpose, that is definitely a practical way of getting backlinks. And where you can, try and get deep links, too. Deep links are links of inner pages within your blog, and they are just as important as backlinks of the main page of your blog. Getting deep links is probably a little more difficult. I am sure if you post meaningful tutorials, articles or how-tos on your blog, perhaps others will link to that article if they find it interesting enough to provide a link back to it, perhaps on their own website or article on their own blog, or on a forum. For example, if blog post is on how to fix a particular issue, someone may find your blog post via a search engine and provide a link to your blog post on a forum topic to assist a particular forum member.

There are other ways of getting deep links, too; such as link directories that accept deep links or link submissions to articles within a blog or website. This can definitely help from a search engine optimisation perspective, so definitely consider this option too.

Of course, remember that Google’s algorithms are very smart and can easily and readily detect cheating and will penalise websites that cheat in the form of search rankings or out-right removal of a website from searches altogether.

There are many easy ways of finding relevant directories to submit your blog to, including this forum of the DigitalPoint forums that allows users to advertise their own directories.

Search engine friendly URLs

Most blog systems including WordPress allow you to have search engine friendly URLs. Instead of an article ID that is part of a blog URL to refer to the article itself, it is best to have search engine friendly URLs that perhaps display the title of the article as part of the URL, for example example.com/blog/2012/20/01/blog-post-title-here.

Use tags with your blog posts

Using blog post tags do help. Add relevant tags (not too many, though) that describe what the blog post or article is about. So if I was making an article on CentOS, I’d obviously use the CentOS tag but other tags more direct to what the article is about, such as Install CentOS, etc

I’m sure this is fairly obvious but also use categories for your blog posts. It does help from a search engine perspective.

Allow users to share your blog posts via various mediums

There are plugins for WordPress that allow you to add icons beneath each blog post allowing your readers the convenience of sharing useful blog posts with others; on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may think, “Facebook? What?” but Google are now indexing Facebook comments!

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Niche and Keyword Research Tools

Google is arguably the best tools one can use to do the initial keyword research. It will also help you find a much deeper niche for you, probably very lucrative and which is possibly already making lots of profits for the competitors, and it will also show you the most relevant keywords associated with the niche.

So before using the keyword tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Market Samurai, for example, we shall use Google and yet another very good niche finder tool to find a good niche for you.

The good niche finder tool I am writing about here is the one I use the most – Ezinearticles.com. It is definitely one of the most popular article submission directories on the internet. It is arguably the best in its category one can find and use for his or her marketing research. It has plenty of resources which you can use to build up your niche website too. Thus, I feel it is the best starting point for our new niche website.

For our example niche website, let us see how we can find a good niche market using Ezinearticles.com.

Type Ezinearticles.com in your browser’s address bar and you will see this screen as the home page of that wonderful website. The various popular global markets are right there on its home page – the Articles Categories on its home page!

These categories are the fundamental markets from where we can find sub-markets, and from the sub markets, we shall find our niche markets and various very high quality and focused articles which will help us build our own niche market website quickly. So here it is: the article categories, which we shall use to find our new niche market first:

When you place your cursor on any of those categories, the inner sub markets will be displayed:

So, when you place your mouse cursor over the “Finance” category, for example, a pop-up window will display the various niche topics associated with Finance. In the above example, these various niches are: Auto Loans, Bankruptcy, Personal Bankruptcy, Credit Counseling, Income Taxes, Taxes Tools, and so on.

Let us see another such category, “Home and Family”, which will display various good sub topics like: Adolescent Care, Adoption Foster Care, Baby Boomer, Board games, Crafts and Hobbies, Crafts Supplies, Fatherhood, Elder Care, Grand parenting, Gardening, Pregnancy, Motherhood, Step parenting, and so on. Each of those sub topics are very hot niche topics and are well-known as money makers for a lot of internet marketers.

Then there is yet another great market which will stay profitable for many years to come – “Health and Fitness”, which has plenty of sub niches, and sub-sub niches and a lot more! You can go as deep into a niche market and still find some great topics which you can use as your new niche market.

For example, the niche market inside “Health and Fitness” category can be “Skin Care”, and if you want to go still deeper into the “Skin Care” niche market, you can find a very lucrative hot-selling product category – the wrinkle creams.

So this is how you can come down to a great niche market with plenty of opportunities to make money – because this particular niche market cannot be saturated until the human ageing process exists!

So let us see how good this “wrinkle creams” niche market really is by first using the greatest research/search tool world has ever seen – Google Search, its main URL being: www.Google.com. Remember, Google offers you plenty of options so that you can target a particular geographic region for marketing your product and services. For example, if you wish to target the huge Indian market, you can use www.google.co.in, or if you wish to target the UK market, you may use www.google.co.uk to do your localized research.

So let us try to find a good niche market which is a very hot market right now, and which is going to stay around as hot global market for many years to come – wrinkle creams.

Next, open Google search site in your web browser and type the word “wrinkle cream” once without the surrounding quote marks and once with the surrounding quote marks intact.

You will find a similar result like the following image:

The Google result page shows some very interesting facts about the “wrinkle cream” niche – On the right hand side, the Ads section shows plenty of advertisements. It denotes that this particular niche market can be potentially a money-making niche market, which indeed it is!

The section below the search bar also shows the various brands and stores for this particular keyword – it denotes that this is indeed a big-to-huge money-spinning market as there are various brands and stores prominently shown by Google.

The new Google search page also enables you to see the other good keywords and key-phrases suggested by Google itself. It is a huge benefit for us as we readily get some good keywords for our research.

So write down such keywords suggested by Google. By making some adjustments and fine tunings to our initial keyword “wrinkle cream”, Google will help us with more appropriate keyword and key-phrase suggestions.

By simply typing a space in front of the keyword “wrinkle cream” in the Google search bar, you will be shown other great keywords in the Google’s suggestion box that appears below the search bar.

Write down about 25 to 50 such suggestions which we shall use in our special keyword research tools like Google Adwords keywords research tool and Market Samurai.

You may use any other keyword research tool as you may like as there are plenty of good keyword research tools in the market, of which some are free while others are paid tools. For our study, we shall see how the above two keyword research tools work.

Once you have collected some good keywords suggested by Google related to our target niche market “wrinkle cream”, we shall begin our research using the specific research tools – one each among the free and the paid research tools.

You may alternatively also collect the set of keywords from other sources and only one such great method of collecting keywords for further research is mentioned above.

Next: Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

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From what we’ve learned from running blogs for many years, when you have a new blog, it’s important to talk about a certain niche of topics that can immediately get recognition in search results. If you’re posting an article or blog post on a hot subject, you’ll probably find you’ll be so far back in the listing you won’t get any return for the blog post. This is because other blogs that are deemed more relevant and more important by Google have been posting about that subject or product and so they are ranked first before your blog which has a lower search engine ranking.

You don’t need to be an SEO expert to understand the basic fundamentals of getting good search listings in Google – you just have to keep an eye on your search listings for your articles and start to understand which articles are working better for you. This doesn’t necessarily mean one particular subject is listed higher than the other, unless it is not as well talked about in regards to higher-ranked blogs. In general, when your blog is new, it’s best to talk about niche subjects at first if you want good search listings almost immediately or simply things that aren’t discussed by higher-ranking blogs. For example, instead of talking about the latest version of some hot product, you may want to, at first, keep your blog posts to fixes you’ve found for particular bugs in PHP for example or perhaps with a product you own, etc. And remember, make sure you bring fresh new content often, because eventually other blogs that talk about something you’re talking about will eventually replace your position in a search result and so it is important to continue blogging regularly with fresh new content. Eventually, Google will rank your blog higher and so it gives you greater flexibility on what you can talk about and even how highly-ranked you are for blog posts on things that aren’t well discussed by higher-ranking blogs or blog posts which have good a good search listing position.

However, that said, it is important to get back-links from other blogs and websites as well. The easiest way to do this is through submitting your site to directories. If your blog is being linked to from a highly-ranked directory or  blog, Google may start positioning your blog as more important since you’re getting back-links from well-recognised websites. Finding directories are relatively quite easy searching for them online. You’ll also find directories to submit to via the DigitalPoint.com Internet Marketing Forum. Many people advertise their directories over at that forum so it may be a convenient way of finding directories to submit to. Linking to your blog via signatures via forums you go on (where allowed) definitely helps too. This will also help you get actual traffic too, from forum members that click your signature link.

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There are number of instances when people can be seen bothering about their website not getting indexed in search engines. No matter how much they try, despite every effort taken, the websites and its pages simply fail to get indexed. It may be due to the lack of knowledge or due to insufficient tools, webmasters are not able to identify the actual problem at the first go, hence building to frustration and a few incorrect moves.

First of all, once you have created your web site and hosted at a web hosting UK server, it is important that you get it verified in the Google Webmaster Tools wherein you are also required to build an XML sitemap and submit it to Google. Upon verification, you would be informed with the exact reason about is stopping your website to be indexed in Google. There may be numerous reasons to it, but one of the very common one’s is because Google bots and spiders are blocked in robots.txt which is actually responsible for grabbing the sitemap of a particular website.

Further, as a matter of fact, no webmaster would intentionally block the search engines from crawling the website in robots.txt.

So, in the first place you might not even know that your website is blocking search engines through robots.txt. You must take a closer look at this file, if you find anything similar to what is shown below, it confirms that there is a problem with the permissions of robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Or

<meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ />

This concludes your hunt for the problem.

How to make a website Visible to search engines ?

Well the solution too simple than what you can least expect.

You are required to login to your WordPress Website as an admin. Then go to the Privacy Settings option. There you need to select the option that says “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”. To avoid such instances, it important that you do not uncheck the option that says “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.”

Once you have made the necessary changes to the settings in WordPress, you must resubmit it in Google Webmaster Tools for re-verification. Don’t be surprised to see that your website and its various are now indexed. If not, you would need to check in webmaster tools for the reason and dig deeper to resolve the issue.

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