Link building has arguably been the most important factor and one of the core focus areas for most companies and webmasters wanting to improve their rankings within search engines. Its no secret that every major search engine heavily weighs inbound links for their search results, including natural occurrences of those links, anchor text being used within their search results, and quantity or quality of those links.

Within this article, I’ll explain exactly what you need to do to successfully market a page or pages within your web site and achieve a good balance of quality inbound links. For simplicity, I will discuss anchor text variations, most effective text to use within links, and where links should be acquired, i.e. directories, blogs, or other niche sites.

The first concept to grasp is that there are many types of links that can be targeted, not just an anchor text link with two or three words to a particular page of your site. Let’s start with the following three types:

1) URL or Web Page Links, these links are directed to a URL of a web site. This type of link to a specific page does increase the general authority of that particular page and is beneficial to use to increase the natural occurrences of inbound links to a web site.

2) Name Links in these links include the anchor text of the particular page or perhaps even the title of the pages context. An example might be a page with the anchor text of SEO Position where the URL used points to our own company home page. Another example might be the words link building benefits, where the URL points to a particular page of our site that explains that topic. In this example the URL does not necessarily have to have link building benefits in the URL to be effective as long as page context is targeted for those keywords.

The later of the two above is one of the most used types of links from directories or resource-type sites who simply describe the landing page with more intuitive text for the user to understand the pages contents.

3) Exact Anchor Text in this type of inbound link points to and describes exactly what a page is about using specific targeted keywords. An example of this linking method would be the anchor text content writing which points to a specific page about content writing and targets specific search terms. These types of text links can be confused with name links mentioned above, although they are more targeted and commonly used by webmasters wanting to build ranking for particular terms and pages. Name links happen more randomly, making them seem more natural to search engines.

The second are of inbound links include the locations in which links are acquired. There are many types of locations for links to be effective, but I’ll keep the list to just a few of the more common areas.

1) Contextual Linking is links in this category are simply links within any body of context or paragraph/sentence where the link appears. This type of link is perhaps the most beneficial since search engines have the ability to understand context wrapping around the text link, thus weighing it more heavily as a resource or authority.

2) Directory Links is simply achieved by the title field that almost every directory asks for when submitting your URL, these types of links appear on categorized pages and often include a simple anchor text with a description after it. Directory links can be beneficial for your web site if understood and used properly. Often, search engines do not give much emphasis on directory submissions alone and some directory submissions within certain directories can be ignored almost completely by the big three ñ Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

3) Site Wide Links or Run of Site (ROS) in These links were used by many webmasters and companies a year or two ago and are still used today. The effectiveness of these links are less weighted because search engines now understand that, lets say, link to site milanesemarketing.com appears on every page on the right-hand side in the navigation area, thus saturating its effectiveness. Many of these types of links can be beneficial for direct traffic if placed well, but will often only be counted once or twice rather than dozens or hundreds of times no matter how many times they occur on a web site.

For a successful link marketing campaign, the more natural looking means better results in the search engines. Understanding the differences between the different types listed above can be a real advantage since almost every site that ranks well, and ranks well for long-term, includes a mixture of all of the above mentioned linking methods.

This means directory submissions using varying anchor text to different pages of your web site, links within the context of other related pages, like articles or blog entries, and using a variety of anchor text to give more weight for particular pages in the search engines.

We find that the most successful link building campaigns include targeting main keywords first, for example, Internet marketing first then more concise keyword related to that term like North Carolina Internet marketing.î This is more like a funnel effect, giving weight to lesser searched terms related to the main phrase targeted.

With a few simple steps, you can turn your web site into a lead generation machine. Here’s how: Hook – Get your audience interested in what you have to offer. Make it exciting with catchy copy, and compelling graphics. Project professionalism and let you potential customer know how much better off they will be with your product or service.

Direct – Tell your audience what to do. If you tell your audience what to do, and you have created the impression of authority, they are likely to follow your advice. Tell your audience to buy your product or, if it is a service you sell, fill out an information request form.

Form – Use your information request form to grab essential information about your potential client. Use an online form to find out exactly what your potential client wants. Use tracking tools to see where the lead originated form, such as what search engine and keyword, or what web site and ad.

Database – The information from the form should be inserted into a database for easy searching, scheduling and record keeping. Having a good data base system is essential for the next step.

Follow up – Follow up with your potential clients, using your database to schedule events and send marketing material. Stay in front of your clients with an email newsletter, and friendly calls scheduled through out the year. You want your potential client to remember who you are, so when it comes time to make a purchase, they think of your company.

Marketing – Use search engines, advertisements, television, radio, magazines, billboards, word of mouth, web ads, and anything else you can to bring people to your site. If there are no people coming to your site, the best lead generation tools in the world won’t help you get new clients.

Most people in sales will tell you that most sales occur after the prospect has said no a number of times. Setup your autoresponder to be that persistent salesperson.

There is a number of different types of buyers from the hyper-excited. They want to buy it even before opening the email through to the most skeptical and most difficult to convince buyers.

So even if you have a great sales letter you will only convert a certain percentage of people on the first viewing. And others will only buy after seeing the information the certain number of times that suits their style. Some people need to see that something has been around for a while before they will give it any credibility.

Now of course you can improve those odds by getting a professional direct marketer to write your sales letter, doing a joint venture with a more experienced direct marketer or by giving a special offer with a discount and/or free bonuses.

These are all great things to do but let’s get back to focusing on direct simplistic benefits of the autoresponder. The autoresponder is the perfect sales person.

Create separate campaigns (list of peoples email addresses) with different messages for different types of products. It is much easier to sell to a list of people that have a common interest than just to a common list. Set up each campaign with a series of messages, pre-programmed to go out at a certain interval of days. Encourage them to take action and use your words to help them see the benefits of doing that.

After you set it up once, this can all happen automatically as soon as the prospect subscribes to your list. You can just tweak the messages and improve on them over time until you have the perfect salesperson staying in contact with your customer and ensuring that you have every chance to make a sale. Meanwhile you are sleeping, surfing or working on other money making ideas.

For people to buy from you they need to trust you. Regular contact with the person and giving them useful information is a great way to achieve this.

Now before we get too carried away with this idea, are you in this business to send out information or to run a business and make money? Now you want to be clear on that as professionally run businesses generally make the most money.

Sure you want these people to improve their lives. As a quality internet marketer, you always send people valuable information. Remember this, Peoples lives only change when the person changes, and the catalyst for them changing is to make a choice about something. Buying your product can be one of those choices that are moving them towards something that they want.

So set up a persuasive series of messages in your autoresponder to encourage people to take action and get your product. Get them excited about the possibilities. Continue the series of messages after purchase to encourage them to take action and use the product to get what they want. If you help them with this they will be much more likely to buy other products that you introduce to them.

So make sure you capture peoples email addresses and use the magic of the perfect persistent salesperson to create credibility and plenty of sales.

Autoresponders are one of your best friends, use them well.

A great Autoresponder is Aweber!

For a long time now there has been a lot of buzz in the online world about article marketing, but I am still frequently asked what it is and how it works. Here is a brief explanation. Like any large medium, the internet is hungry for content.

However, unlike other media outlets such as TV, radio and newspapers, which generally only use content from professional writers, on the internet, anyone can publish. Article marketing is a way of taking advantage of that freedom and using the medium as a way to bring visitors to your website or blog. So, how does it work?

You write an article. A typical article for web consumption will be between 250 and 750 words long. It will be carefully focused round a specific area of expertise; the writer’s niche. It will use keywords relevant to the writer’s intended audience and often it will contain a numbered or bulleted list for clarity and ease of reading.
You publish that article on the web. There are now hundreds of article directories, where any writer can publish almost any article. Most are free to use, but some more specialized ones charge a small fee. One of the biggest free directories is EzineArticles.com which carries the work of nearly 70,000 writers.
The directories are organized into multiple categories and the article writer must decide which category to publish under. You are also encouraged to attach a group of relevant keywords to your article and to include your personal or business details and a link to your site, in your ‘resource box’, which is a brief paragraph about you or your work which will appear at the bottom of every article. The directories employ a team of staff to approve each article before it becomes available on the web.

So how does this drive traffic? Firstly, the directories, being very content rich, have high rankings in the search engines and often your article may be spotted there and an interested reader might click on your link and come through to your website.

However, the real purpose of the directories is to provide a place for e-zine publishers to find free and relevant content. Every day, editors of a huge range of subject specific e-zines, visit the article directories and download new articles that are relevant to their audience. This saves them writing it themselves. The only stipulation made is that they must publish the article in full, without editing and always include the author’s resource box and retain the links intact.

So over a period, a single article can easily, be found in many different places on the web, each time with a valuable back link to your website, which not only leads highly targeted visitors to you but also helps to improve your search rankings.

Many frustrated Internet Marketers have abandoned their conquest into Google Ad Words after being robbed left, right and center due to their inability to run a successful campaign. If you have the knowledge to run a successful campaign, you can turn it into priceless wisdom that will grant you endless profit, guaranteed!

#1: Relevance: Got a bad CTR (click-through rate)? This is undeniably the biggest problem with all people who advertise with Google. If your ad isn’t relevant to what the user is searching for, then your CTR will plummet! If your ad is relevant to your keywords, you will no doubt see a boost in your CTR, resulting in cheaper bids. Relevance is so crucial. It makes or breaks any campaign. Think long and hard about the relevancy of your advertisements.

#2: Competition: People don’t analyze their competition very well, and end up trying to use the WOW factor in their advertisements to attract visitors. Three simple words: Observe your competition. Look at the structure of their advertisements. In fact, look at the top performing advertisements of your niche. Draw the commonalities between them all, and structure your ad based on theirs. You must always do what successful people do.hen W in Rome, do as the Romans do.

#3: Budget: People spend $100 with their budget on their first day. It hurts me to see people telling complaining that they just lost a lot of money with Ad Words. Start small, and if you are maximizing your CTR potential, raise the budget so you can get more clicks. It’s all about maximization. You don’t want to go broke in a matter of days, like many do!

#4: Inactive Keywords: Bad results with your campaign haunt you and stay with your account so long as it exists. Inactive keywords are due to your inability to have a successful CTR, and results in you having to place higher bids.. This literally drives people broke, and Google isn’t willing to be sympathetic about it. To avoid this, again, you need to think about targeting and relevancy. Relevancy is everything with Ad Words. Repeat this to yourself!

#5: Ad-Writing: There are many styles of ad-writing on Ad Words. One of the most famous is known as anti-marketing, which has been so saturated that many newcomers to Ad Words are under the impression that it will WOW their target niche market. To some extent, it can. In fact, this is likely if a successful Ad Words user is involved. Some niches have been so saturated with certain styles of ad-writing that it just doesn’t work anymore. In order to really achieve success with headlines and body text of an advertisement, refer to steps #1 and #2. This is all about relevancy and your competition. Target your competition in your niche, grab ideas, and make it relevant to your user.

Take some time to review these tips, and see where you can make improvements. You will be glad you did.