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The call to action is an important element in any marketing, but it is very important that this call is strong on the sales page of your web site. In this article I will explore reasons why the call to action is so very important.

1. The call to action shows that you have the solution to the problem at hand and are standing by to answer the call. Whether it is picking up the phone or answering an email you are ready to help the party with your expertise.

2. It conveys that your firm can provide the right solution quickly. Most people on the web want answers quickly, they don’t want to wait for a solution.

3. Sales training professionals will tell you that asking for the sale is of utmost importance. Your call to action is another way of asking for the sale.

4. The call to action inspires the person to make the jump from merely searching for information, to acting on solving their problem

Effective copywriting will help you make your call to action more effective, as will placement, and text color, weight and font choices. The call to action can be a part of your web page, an email or even the copy of a pay per click campaign. Make sure that you have a way to track the click through rate of the text if it is a link on your page. The call to action in a pay per click campaign should be tracked very closely for click through rate, and your web pages should be monitored closely for the conversion rate. All it may take is a simple change in wording, placement or font to help increase the conversion rate.

Local search marketing is all about niche marketing. Niche marketing is selling specific products or services to a limited audience who wants or need the product the most; thanks to internet marketing. Local search marketing creates a rich presence on the web in front of customers who are ready to act! By driving targeted traffic to your business.

It is one of those hard cruel facts of business that the big boys have all the money they need to advertise and sell their products and we little guys are on advertising budgets that are so small they probably don’t add up to what the big boys spend on paper clips in a month. Competing with the big boys isn’t feasible…or possible, for that matter. So what are we little guys supposed to do? Local search marketing is the answer.

There are millions of searches being conducted everyday nationwide from people who are interested in finding someone who offers what you sell. Some of these people live and work within minutes of your business. The key is being in front of them when that search takes place! And this can be achieved by controlling all of your business information online in one place and distributing that information consistently across the internet. Local search marketing helps you stay one step ahead of competition without burning a hole in your pocket.

In recent years there has been a shift in consumer behavior from more traditional sources, such as Direct Mail, Yellow Pages, and Publishers to Local Internet Search. Local search marketing provides an effective platform to effectively engage and target an audience which is in immediate purview of the business. In other words you know them; it is just a matter how effectively you can reach them. The trick is to do all this while not burning a hole in your pocket. Some of the most popular mediums of targeting your local audience are Yahoo Local, Google local, Windows Live Search, Yellow Pages, InsiderPages, PriceGrabber and many more. A Local Search Listing gives your business instant locally targeted exposure online. It serves as a source of untapped traffic as a matter of fact of all the searches made online, local search now accounts for over 40% and this number is increasing by the day.

Local search marketing promotes your business as an online storefront and drives traffic to your business. The more traffic your business receives the more chances of converting these visitors to customers and this can be achieved at the expense of a cup of coffee a day. Local search marketing drives local dollars to local businesses with an affordable internet marketing campaign that places your business where customers are searching; online. Local search marketing ensures that you stay one step ahead of your competition with an affordable and effective online advertising solution. With Billions of searches conducted every month, why not take advantage of this colossal number of searches and the percentage of those searches that represent local search engine traffic?

Organic search works for the little guy and the big guy. If you’re a freelance writer or blogger, the niche I cover, it behooves you to learn about it now - to get a jump on the competition.

Why All Online Marketers Need to Know about Organic Search

Loosely translating the Wikipedia definition, Organic search is a process by which internet surfers find web sites that have not employed paid search techniques like pay per click (PPC) advertisement.

The definition goes on to explain, “The field of search engine optimization, (SEO), is concerned with maximizing the visibility of a web site by making its listings appear more frequently and more prominently in organic search results. Some businesses base their SEO strategies on the successful insertion of their web site listing(s) into organic search results for various popular keywords.”

Why Knowing SEO is Critical to Online Marketing Success

I don’t care if you’re trying to sell an ebook or a toilet seat, if you’re not employing SEO techniques, you will soon be search result number one billion, 999 million, blah, blah, blah - that is, if you already aren’t.

Consider this: According to the InternetRetailer.com article, Burgeoning search advertising market grows new approaches, 68% of U.S. online retailers ranked search engine optimization as the fifth most popular online marketing vehicle.” This article also points out that more online retailers are employing SEO techniques to heighten their natural/organic search results, because pay-per-click advertising is getting ever more expensive.

So, where does that leave the little guy? Ostensibly out in the cold. But, organic search is the online marketing Goliath budget equalizer. To have a decent shot at showing up in the first few pages of results in your niche doesn’t take rocket science if you know some basic SEO.

How Much Do You Know: Test Your SEO & Organic Search Knowledge

For example, do you know what key words are? Do you know how to find out the “hot ones” for your niche? Do you know what meta tags are? Do you use them on every single page of your website? Do you use article marketing?

If you’re not familiar with all of these and not employing them on a regular basis, you are not only opening the door for your competition, you are propping it open and inviting him in to take over.

Freelance writers and bloggers already have half the puzzle in place for online marketing success - they know how to generate content. Figuring out the other half - SEO - will practically guarantee online marketing success.

So you are serious about getting your site listed on the 1st page of Google?

If you have read the previous articles in this set of articles, you now have more knowledge about Search Engine Optimisation than your competitors do. Read on to find out how to help Google to recognise all of the pages on your website.

This simple strategy not only helps google but it can be a useful tool for your visitors to get access to your pages quickly.

Get yourself a Site Map - To help Google reach all of the pages on your site you need a site map, which is basically a page with links to all of your other pages. If you put a link on your home page to your site map this will make it easy for Google’s software to find all of the pages on your site.

If you are unsure about how to create a site map simply create a new page called Site Map and put a link on your home page linking to your new Site Map page. Then, go to your Site Map page and put links on that page linking to all of the other pages on your site. Now, when Google’s software comes to your site it will click all of the links on your home page including the link to your site map page. Google’s software will then click all of the links on the site map page, so after 2 clicks it will know about all of your pages on your site.

If you have implemented the strategies in the previous articles in this set and you now combine that with a Site Map page, your site is well on its way to the 1st page of Google.

I often hear people say you need at least 10 pages on a website for Google to even think about listing it. This in nonsense, I have a one-page website on the 1st page of Google for my chosen keyword.

Do you want to discover powerful marketing strategies that will help you to grow your business without spending any money?
Download this: Marketing Guide for Small Business

Getting your site listed on the 1st page of Google and the other major search engines is going to give you a never ending stream of website traffic. You do not need the help of Search Engine Optimisation companies to get your site on Google. You just need to spend a little time in the right area.

Here is one simple strategy to help get your site listed.

Promote your keywords on the pages of your website. Keywords are the words you use when you search on Google.

Make sure your keywords are at the top of page, in the middle and at the bottom of the page. For example, you would start your page with something like “Welcome to Joe Bloggs Builders, we are a building company based in Chelmsford and we have been supplying quality building works in the Chelmsford area for many years. All of our Builders are fully trained and qualified”. As you can see your keywords are repeated a couple of times in the opening paragraph, this is very easy to do and should be done a few times across the whole of the page. The reason why Google is the most successful search engine is because they have built their search engine on relevancy. If your webpage is relevant to what is being searched then you are far more likely to end up on the 1st page of Google.

If you combine this simple strategy with the other strategies in the article set your website will start to move its way up the Google listings. Look out for the rest of the articles in this set.

Do you want to discover powerful marketing strategies that will help you to grow your business without spending any money?
Download this: Marketing Guide for Small Business

Have you been busting your butt trying to get on page 1 of Google for a popular keyword phrase? What I am talking about is a keyword that is worth being on page 1 of Google for.

For example, if you are in the niche of helping people make money you would probably give just about anything to be above the fold on page 1 for the keyword phrase “work at home.” The bad news is for a new website starting out it could take years before you he ever naturally achieve that position.

I do not want to burst your bubble, but let me tell you from personal experience that even once you achieve a page 1 ranking for a valuable keyword, maintaining that position becomes even more difficult.

The primary reason that people lose their page 1 ranking is they cannot acquire natural back links with relevancy for their targeted words. Google places particular emphasis on the back links, and targeted keyword back links.

You reach a point where you really can never write enough articles with your hyperlinked phrase in your resource box, create enough blog post targeting your primary keyword phrase, comment in other peoples blogs enough, and so on.

If you do not figure out a way to get natural back links to your site you may as well plan on losing the rankings for your best keywords.

If you don’t believe me find a few of the most searched keywords, related to your niche, and watch how the websites in the organic search section of page 1 on Google change over time.

Search engines currently receive more than 500,000,000 queries per day. Of these, Google handles a majority of all of the queries. If your website shows up on the first page of a search engine result, you will get tons of traffic through what is called “organic” or “natural” search results.

Types of Search Engines

There are three main different types of engines, and knowing the differences will help you tremendously.

* Crawler or spider search engines
* Directories
* META crawlers or META search engines

Crawler or spider search engines actually have a type of code that is called a spider, crawler, or robot. These search engines send their crawlers out to scan the web and bring back websites to add to the index. The internet works on a system of hyper links and spiders use these hyper links to crawl the web. Google is a perfect example of a crawler search engine.

Directories are usually human edited search engines that have a list of categories that you can browse down through. Directories usually require someone to submit a website in order for that website to be included into the index. Directories are trusted heavily by other search engines and most of the time crawlers start at directories before indexing anything else. Yahoo has a directory, but a good example of a directory is DMOZ.

META search engines are a hybrid race of search engines that combine the results of several different search engines into one results page. META search engines usually take the information they gather and compare that information with all of the other search engines and then orders and ranks the list of results. It it in this way that META crawlers such as Dogpile allow us to pull such clean, relevant search results. If you are looking for the perfect search engine, Dogpile may be it because they currently pull information from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and ASK. META crawlers scrape other search engines for results and this helps the purity of the information. Researchers tend to use META search engines very often.

The Index

Once your site is in a search engine’s index, it will rank for keywords that are used on your website. When someone makes a search query for one or a few of the words on your website, your website will then be included in the search engine results. If you have links pointing to your site from directories like DMOZ, your overall ability to rank for your target keywords increases tremendously. The reason directories affect your ranking so much is because search engines trust directories because they are human edited with a final objective of relevance for searches.

Google started updating its algorithm since 2003. Several pages, which were topping suddenly, disappeared. The first recent algorithm is Florida. Here, Google placed filter using its teams of SEO professionals and SEO specialists to locate sites that did more SEO work than normal levels.

Another theory is that Google bought this Florida algorithm to make the ranking page more healthy and foolproof. Some say that, Google employs a certain system, which considers few web sites that have quality links and uses those links. If such links are efficient and work best, then Google places such web sites at the top page.

The next Google algorithm update was Austin. It bought lot of speculations and expectations because people thought it might repair the damage caused by Florida. Austin update was a combination of PR algorithm and Hilltop. SEO writers and professional SEO consultants stated that this new update is more reliable and helps to get rid of web sites which send spam mails and indulge in other immoral practices. Thus, web sites having superior content topped the list.

Jagger is another recently updated algorithm. Its focus is to improve all the current algorithms. Jagger gave more importance to inbound links and reciprocal links. It fiercely came down on blog spam, immoral sites and sites that auto linked to other irrelevant sites.

Big Daddy Changing the Calculations

The most recent Google algorithm update is Big Daddy, which evaluated web content in a much better way as compared to Jagger. It changed the indexing of web sites enrolled only the trustworthy sites that linked to relevant sites and did not entertain off topic web links.

This change gave a more defined, comprehensive and relevant search. It also managed to tackle the problems of redirecting web sites Google gave instructions to SEO specialists and professional SEO consultants to use 301-redirect, through which it informs users if any web site has been moved. The use of 301 and 302 redirects helped Google to attain the consistency level and keep its commitment for better search results.

Big Daddy also solved the problem of canonicalization that occurred when search engine recognized a single web site having two separate domains as two different web sites Therefore, the issue of duplicate web sites no longer exists.

With all these Google algorithm updates, one thing that never changed is Google’s core agenda. Creating a better search environment is the foremost task of this search engine.

If you have ever designed and built your own website you know what keywords are and the importance of them. Everything on the internet revolves around keywords. People that create their first website may not be aware when they first begin designing a website, but eventually learn the importance of them if they ever want anyone to visit their website.

Keywords are what your website is built around or what your website is about. Keywords tell the search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo about your website and helps them index your website in the proper categories. Figuring out what your keyword is may not be difficult, however deciding on what variation your keyword should be can be difficult.

If you are considering building a website that focuses on golf, then golf would likely be your keyword. Golf is an excellent keyword. There is a great deal of interest in golf and people spend massive amounts of money on golf which means you could make a lot of money promoting golf products on your website. Great! But there is one problem with using golf as your keyword. Thousands of others are using this very same keyword which means there is a great deal of competition for the keyword golf. To rank high in the search engines for the word golf would take many, many months and maybe years to attain the number one position in Google or the other search engines.

Websites that have been around for years already dominate the first positions and the possibility of your new website ranking anywhere near these older and more established websites is non-existent. Google, Yahoo and MSN place a great deal of importance on websites that have aged and weathered the up and downs of the market and persevered, standing the test of time and rightly so. These websites are legitimate and provide searchers with what they are looking for in the first place. This does not mean a person should not shoot for these number one positions if you have a good product and are willing to make it a long term goal. It can be done but only after hard work and dedication.

Golf is such a huge market that here are ways to have a website dedicated to golf and be profitable without relying on the keyword golf. Many business and websites are profitable using keywords that are a derivative of golf such as:

Golf shoes
Golf bags
Golf balls
Logo golf balls
Golf equipment
Golf travel cases
Discount golf

These are called long tailed keywords with this list being just a few of the possibilities of long tailed keywords that a golf related website can be centered around. Using long tailed keywords to build your website around offers the possibility of being able to rank your website quicker in less competitive niches. It also allows you to begin on the path to go after main keywords like golf later after your site has aged and established a reputation in the search engines as a legitimate website. Going after highly competitive keywords such as gold when you are just starting out will only lead to frustration and disappointment. Concentrate on the long tailed keywords and you will be rewarded quicker as well as build your confidence to pursue more competitive keywords as your website ages and grows in legitimacy.