Happy Holidays!!

I’m sure that you, just like myself, are busy attending to our families needs during this holiday season.

Oh, the stress!

But oh, the joy when you see the little ones faces light up Christmas morning!

I had something come across my desk not to long ago and it may be something that you’d be interested in.

If you’ve ever, EVER, thought of starting your own online business – especially beginning in 2007, and you aren’t exactly sure where to start or what to do….

…even if you have been working and getting nowhere, this is for you too!…

…A very rare special is taking place right now…

For those of you who are familiar with Site Build It!, you’ll be happy to know that they are currently running a 2-for-1 special which does not come around often!

For those of you unfamiliar with SBI! and what it can do for your small business…simply visit our site at:

http://www.be-a-wahm.com/articles/start-your-business/build-a-website.html 

This special ONLY RUNS UNTIL DECEMBER 25, 2006 AT MIDNIGHT!!

Happy Holidays to everyone and we’ll see you next week!

Se Habla Español?

The United States is a huge market. You could probably solely sell your goods or services or even center your website’s topic strictly around something in the US.

Most of us though know, that there is an entire market of people out there that we are not even touching and thus could be losing some very viable search traffic from, in non-English speaking markets.

This is great you say because you have been wanting to put your product in France or Mexico or wherever but simply don’t know how to go about researching the market to do so.

Yahoo’s Overture search tool is now in French, Spanish, German and Japanese.

You now have the ability to market in any of these languages. But what if you don’t know the language?
The very first thing I would do is head on over to Elance or Rent-a-Coder and find someone who speaks the language you are wanting to target natively.

Let them know the keywords you are looking to target for your particular market and let them do the research. Not only can they help you research your keywords, but being as they are from the country you are marketing to, they will have a better command of the language and which words to use effectively.

All the best,
Kristine

Cost-Effective Website Marketing Tip #2

Write a Press Release for Your Business

As with any business, online or off, it’s important that you submit a press release to announce your business, a new product or just a launch of a brand new website.

Not only does it give you traffic right away, but you’ll attract the attention of other website owners who may link back to you.

A press release has to capture the attention of readers relatively quickly so write it as if you were writing for a newspaper.

If you aren’t sure exactly how to go about doing this, simply look at your local paper and see how they write their headlines and articles.

One thing you should do however is to add your keywords into your press release so that readers know what your website is about.

Keep it descriptive but to the point.

There are various websites that aid in getting your press release out to thousands of people such as:

PRWeb;
URLwire;
Market Wire

There is also a useful tool called Press Equalizer that has you fill in some blanks for and then it goes out and submits your press releases to the most relevant sites.

Another important thing to keep in mind is to be sure that you have lots of relevant content on your website before submitting your press release. You don’t want to send people to a site that is not finished.

Kristine

Quit Writing for the Search Engines

So many people make the mistake of listening to the “guru of the day” when it comes to keyword optimization and your website.

How many times have you visited a website, let’s say, about “Moms” only to see the following:

If you are a Mom then you know how hard it is to be a Mom. Moms have a lot of work to do especially if you are a say at home Mom. A Mom’s work is never done. From hearing your kids say “Mom!” to hearing your husband jokingly say “Hey Mom how about…”. Mom’s, especially stay at home Mom’s are the hardest working people out there. If you’re a Mom you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

C’mon people! Does this really read like people talk? If you visited a website would you find this interesting?

It’s annoying at best. Yet so many people find their particular keyword for their particular page and do just that. They try and find ways to incorporate their keyword into the text as much as possible and it ends up sounding just horrible. They are not writing for their audience, they are writing for the search engines.

This is not the way to gain popularity.

The key to getting high search engine rankings is to simply write for your audience as naturally as possible. However, there are a few other tricks you can use within your writing to be sure that the search engines know exactly what your page is about while still sticking with your overall keyword for the page.

Let’s take the term “Mom” again for simplicity’s sake.

If we head on over to Wordtracker (if you don’t have a subscription, get one! Your competition is using it I guarantee it! And if you don’t have the money now, then at least sign up for the free trial.)

If I enter the word “Mom” into Wordtracker it gives me the following results: (I’m only listing the top 10 here).

• mom
• family
• children
• pregnancy
• parenting
• kids
• mother
• parent
• Mom
• school

As you can see, there are a LOT of other, related keywords relating to “Mom”. Taking this information, we would then rewrite the above absurdity into something that makes a lot more sense and makes your visitors (and hence, the search engines) happy:

If you are a Mom then you know how hard it is running a family. As a mother you have a lot of work to do especially if you are a say at home parent. You never get tired of hearing your children holler for you as they run in the door after school and being there for your kids is what parenting is all about. During pregnancy you never knew how rewarding being a mother could be.

Now we have shortened it up a bit and it still sounds just a little choppy but doesn’t that read so much better than all the “Mom’s” references in the first example?

To be successful in your business you have to keep your visitors in mind. Knowing what terms they are searching for and using them within your content is the absolute best way to get high-quality visitors and equally high search engine rankings.

All the best,
Kristine

You haven’t gone over to Wordtracker yet? What are you waiting for? Your competition to get there first? Jeez!

Websites vs. Webpages

A lot of people are confused about the difference between Websites and Webpages when it comes to search engines.

Your website is your overall theme and encompasses all of your webpages. It is your webpages that show up in the search engines not just your website.

For example, if you have a website about Ice Cream and you have 40 or so pages on your website each named “vanilla”, “chocolate”, “mint”, “chocolate chip cookie dough”, “peppermint”, and so on, each of these individual pages will be visited by the search engines and indexed or put into their database.

People have a misconception that it is their website and their website only that gets found in the search engines. What you need to understand is that since each individual page on your site is indexed, each of these pages needs to be keyword optimized.

It is these individual pages that your site visitors will find and thus your website.

I hope this has helped to clear up some confusion as to the difference – albeit slight – between the two.

All the best,
Kristine