This past week I have received an increase in emails and enquiries from visitors to my website and clients all asking me roughly the same question - How do I get my website found on Google?

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It amazes me the amount of functionality Google provides freely to the world. Over the years it keeps increasing and a lot of their services are simply superb. Below I have put together Five Google Tools that I find helpful and useful and maybe you will too!! This is certainly not everything Google offer, just my favourites!

Google One - Google Analytics - Analyze website traffic

When you sign up for this you will be given a small snippet of code that your web developer needs to paste into all the pages on your website. By doing this Google Analytics can then provide you with easy access to your own personal easy-to-understand reports that track visitors to your website as well as visitor origin, length of stay and many other statistics. This can help you to know what is going on to make measurable improvements to marketing campaigns and websites over time.

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Getting your website found on the Search Engines is a great way to bring targeted prospective clients directly to your website!

Google continues to have the biggest slice in the search engine market, with over 4.8 billion searches (yes that’s 4,800,000,000!) in September 2008.

In terms of market share, Google held almost 60 per cent of the market, while Yahoo! had 18.1 per cent Microsoft saw 11.8 per cent.

These are the figures from Nielson Online’s September research. Other search engines that appeared in the top ten included AOL, Ask.com, My Web, Comcast and AT&T Worldnet.

So how to get found on Google? The all important question!

Google’s intention is sound - they wish to provide searchers with the very best results for whatever it is that they are searching for. It’s as simple as that (well almost!). You need to make your website a worthy result for the keywords that your prospective visitors are searching for.

There are two ways of generating traffic (visitors to your website) from Google and these are organically and through paid advertising. Today I focus on Organic (or natural) listing result which are the main listings on the left side of results when you conduct a search on Google. It is impossible to buy or bribe your way to a position here.

So how do you get there? Well the only way is for Google to think that your website is a relevant result for the keywords that are being searched.

You will need to “optimise” your website for Search Engines to find and index it - also known as Search Engine Optimisation (or Optimization).

Increasing your chances of “Organic Listings” through Search Engine Optimisation is really not as complicated as it may appear. Here are my Top 3 Tips, kept short and simple (you may have read these before but they ARE important so I repeat them from time to time):

Tip 1) Keywords: Make sure the keywords that your prospects may search for when they are looking for your products and/or services are included on your website, on as many pages across your website and often as possible.

Tip 2) Incoming Links: These are important because Google give every website a page rank which effects your placement in results for searches. Page Rank is effectively a ranking of how important Google considers your web page to be. This is based on a number of factors, with one major contributing factor being how many websites link to your website.

In Google’s interpretation, if you have lots of incoming links, then you must be popular, and therefore important. The quality of the incoming links does also factor in, so if the links to your website are from high ranking and relevant sites (with a high Page Rank) they have more effect.

Tip 3) More Content: The more written content you have on your website the more there is for Google to find, rank and return in their results.

This is why blogs are proving to be so effective, as they generally contain lots of content that is always being updated. Search engines love blogs. (Interested in blogging… visit www.businessbloggingprogram.com)  

Writing articles is another fantastic way to build your online presence, optimise your website and create multiple incoming links to your website. I would suggest that you begin writing creative, interesting articles relating to your target market. Once you’ve written an article, you can submit it to article directories and gain valuable links back to your website for free.

by Belinda Jackson

© 2008. Web Chameleon Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Want to use this article on your website or include it in your email newsletter? No problem! But you also MUST include the following:

Belinda Jackson, Online Marketing Mentor, is founder of Web Chameleon, Chameleon Mail and The Business Blogging Program.  To learn how to attract and retain your perfect clients using Online Marketing, and increase sales & income then sign up for your free Online Marketing Report and Marketing Newsletter by visiting www.WebChameleon.com.au/.

Measure your website marketing!

I’m often surprised that the majority of business owners and managers don’t know how many visitors they are getting to their website. How about you? Do you know how many visitors are visiting your website each month?

To be able to track trends and to assess the success of your website it’s essential to have access to some statistical information about visitors to your website. If you don’t already have this information or know how to access this information then I suggest asking your web designer or hosting company as they should be able to give you instructions to access this information.

If you have your website hosted with a company that offers CPANEL (as all of my clients do), then you can see instructions here.

So once you get this information what do you need to look at? Below is an outline of the more important metrics you can access through most website host statistics packages and what they mean;

Visitor Information

The number of unique visitors will help you to determine how many visitors you receive each month and you can track the trend over time to see whether numbers are increasing, decreasing or staying the same.

An important distinction is the difference between “visitors” versus “hits”. Each person who visits your site is considered a “visitor”. Each time a visitor looks at a page, that page and its contents are accessed, including the graphics on the page and these are counted as ‘hits’.

An example is 1 unique visitor comes to your home page, and on your home page you have text and 3 graphics, totaling 4 elements on your page, and thus being counted as 4 ‘hits’ on your website. When a visitor visits that page once, your statistics will show ONE visitor and FOUR hits. So for most of us, the unique ‘visitors’ is the more accurate statistic to take note of.

Visitor Location

The location tells you what country visitors are coming from. This is important if you’re concerned about your global reach to other countries.

Time of Day Activity

This area of your statistics helps you to determine which days of the week have the most activity, and which time of day is the most active.

Referrals

This section of your statistics will tell you who is sending people to your web site. It lists which search engines people use, as well as which keywords or key phrases people use to find your site. This section will list what other sites are linking from their site to your site.

This is a great information to track any online marketing you are doing. For example if you paying to list on a website then you would want to ensure that you are actually getting visitors from this website to know that your spend is worthwhile.

Pages

This section of your statistics will help you to determine which pages are visited most often, how long people stay on a page (hopefully reading it), and which page people exit your site from.

As mentioned above it really is important to keep an eye on this information if you are serious about marketing your business through your website. What I do and what I would suggest you do, is keep a record of these statistics (perhaps in excel) so that you can easily see the trends over time.

by Belinda Jackson

© 2008. Web Chameleon Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Want to use this article on your website or include it in your email newsletter? No problem! But you also MUST include the following:

Belinda Jackson, Online Marketing Mentor, is founder of Web Chameleon, Chameleon Mail and The Business Blogging Program.  To learn how to attract and retain your perfect clients using Online Marketing, and increase sales & income then sign up for your free Online Marketing Report and Marketing Newsletter by visiting www.WebChameleon.com.au/.

These Online Publicity methods are all non traditional forms of generating publicity and interest in both you and your business. All are free and highly effective, so why not give them a try….

1. ARTICLE MARKETING
Article marketing refers to writing articles on your area of expertise or industry and then publishing those articles wherever possible as a way of promoting you and your business. Online this means submitting your articles at sites such as www.ezinearticles.com and relevant websites that accept articles for publication.

Don’t forget this can also be used offline, in fact the same articles can often be used with perhaps some minor editing to submit to magazines, papers and other offline media. For example I recently slightly tweaked one of my popular Email Marketing articles for a Real Estate publication.

2. BLOGGING
Blogging is a way to gain ongoing exposure online for you and your business. Ideally this is in the form of you publishing articles (which can also be used in Publicity option 1 above), news, events, press releases and industry updates on your blog which allows your readers (both prospects and clients) to learn more about you, as well as provide another way for media to find you. It is becoming more and more common for media channels such as TV, magazines and radios to source information and opinions from Bloggers and to contact Blog authors for interviews and further comments on their area of expertise.

3. SOCIAL NETWORKING
You may have read my article recently about Facebook (if not you can read it here), where I mentioned how popular this online social networking community has become. Facebook is a great way to get free publicity, although how far your message reaches may depend on how many friends you have! Simply by updating your status on Facebook you can let your network know about new projects that you are working on and generate interest.

You can also do this with Twitter which is a service that allows you to keep others up to date on what you are doing at any time. To learn more about using Twitter for marketing and exposure I suggest reading this great article at http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/11/twitter-guide/

by Belinda Jackson

© 2008. Web Chameleon Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Want to use this article on your website or include it in your email newsletter? No problem! But you also MUST include the following:

Belinda Jackson, Online Marketing Mentor, is founder of Web Chameleon, Chameleon Mail and The Business Blogging Program.  To learn how to attract and retain your perfect clients using Online Marketing, and increase sales & income then sign up for your free Online Marketing Report and Marketing Newsletter by visiting www.WebChameleon.com.au/.

If you are a small business owner and you are struggling to attract and retain clients then you must read on. If you are spending a small fortune on advertising in newspapers, magazines, radio or even TV, then it’s time to consider some new ways of marketing your business.I believe that the internet offers huge opportunity to small business, service professionals and large corporates alike.

The online world in many ways is no different to the offline marketing world. On and offline, it’s all about people. In fact, if you think about it, every dollar that is spent online must come from an individual choosing to spend their money with a particular website.

Creating an effective website that brings you new customers and makes you money will be more likely to happen if you successfully build relationships. This means building a geniune relationship with visitors to your website so that they come to like and trust you enough to give you their money!

This is relationship marketing. Next step is leveraging yourself as an expert so that clients come chasing you. Online Marketing provides the opportunity to simplify both of these strategies.

Selling as was used in the past is gone. Every day we are overwhelmed with marketing and sales messages and it’s impossible to take it all in - even if we wanted to - and I’m sure you, like me, don’t particularly want to be sold to.

What you want is to have clients choose to want to buy your products and/or services, because they have come to see you as an expert AND they have formed a relationship with you built on trust, knowledge and authenticity!

Having an Effective Website and/or Blog and using your web presence to attract and build a database allows you to form the beginnings of a relationship with prospects. Allowing your prospects to get to know, like and trust you through an Email Newsletter over time gives you the opportunity to leverage yourself as an expert and convert prospects into clients.

No hard selling allowed or required.

These are simple Online Marketing strategies you can implement almost immediately to begin leveraging yourself as an expert in your industry and begin fostering an ongoing relationship with prospects.

Google AdWords are one of the fastest way I know to get traffic to your web site. They are also one of the fastest ways to lose money if you don’t do it right.

What are Google AdWords?

If you go into Google and do a search on a topic, just say something dear to my heart, CHOCOLATE, you will see a list of all the web sites that are relevant to that topic. On the left hand side are “organic” search results. These are websites that Google thinks are the best sites on that topic (the Holy Grail of search engine marketing).

On the right are “sponsored links”. These are listings that people pay Google to display when people search on that keyword. This is what we’ll be talking about today. You can set up your own ads in Google by setting up a Google account (you may already have one through gmail or you can just search for Google AdWords in Google to find where to start).

Factors that determine if your ads show at the top of the page or the bottom (and how much you pay to get there)

There are really 4 factors that determine where your ad will show. Surprisingly, it’s not a matter of who pays the most!

1. How much you are willing to pay

Price is determined by auction. You say how much you are willing to pay and hope that it is more than your competitors. Google isn’t too greedy. If you bid a really high price and the next person bids low, you only pay slightly more than the next highest bid.

2. Relevance

Google will reward you (ie, lower price and higher up the page) if you use the same keywords in:
• your list of keywords you say you want to advertise for
• your ad
• your website

3. Click through rate (CTR)

The click through rate is the percentage of people who see your add who choose to click on it. If more people click on it Google assumes it must be relevant and will reward you.

4. Web site quality

Google looks at how long people stay on your site after they click on your ad. If your web site is not what they are looking for they’ll go back to Google and click on a competing web site.

The really powerful thing about Google AdWords is you can test and measure everything. There are some very simple strategies you can use that can easily double your income by testing and tweaking.

This article is by Janet Beckers, a friend of mine, who is also the host and founder of Wonderful Web Women, an award winning on-line community recognized for generous and honest marketing advice for women on the internet.

To learn from the most successful women on the internet through live webinars, masterminds and forums absolutely free - visit the website today.

Web Chameleon is also a distributor for Janet’s Google Adwords Home Study Course - go here for the info..