Friday, September 26, 2008

Importance of Local Optimazation

Restrict your search to a particular geographic area. In early 2005, Google Local became publicly available by placing the local tab on their home page. For many search engine queries, up to three local listings appear above the #1 natural search results.

The concept of this is to show relevant local businesses (with or without websites) to people who look online for them. These listings appear either by entering business information to the Google Local Business Center, advertising with companies like CitySearch, SuperPages, DigitalCity, other local portals or to simply have a Yellow Pages listing. At the starting time, their results were average at best. They had minimal information other than where these businesses were actually located. Now their results and information have greatly improved since then. Businesses that have a local Yellow Pages listing might already be in Google's index whether they have a website or not. Although you don't need a website to be listed in Google Local, a properly optimized site can be a big plus.

Location: Location plays a big part in many different Google Local searches and it makes sense that they will continue to consider this valuable. For Ex. How about a search for Minneapolis pizza? The majority of local results are located in the Minneapolis city limits.

How to list your business on local Google
Entering your own business information:
None of these listings include information supplied directly from the business itself. This can be done for free by signing up at the Google Local Business Center. This is a way to get listed both prominently and properly. They can custom write their own descriptions, list their business hours, payments accepted, and show contact information including an email and link to their website.

Suppose you have business with multiple locations, it can certainly take a lot of time to manually enter information for each locality. Companies with ten or more locations can now send Google a Froogle business listing feed. This is something that can be remedied by submitting a business feed.

Elements of getting top rank on local Google:

1. Use of Google’s Local Business Center (LBC): Local search requires structured data to be effective. Google needs to be able to match the business to a location.

2. Availability/Trust of other business data: If the business is not participating directly with Google’s LBC, does it have listings in the other major business databases like Acxiom, Amacai/Localeze, and infoUSA directories.

3. A Business Web Site: Having a web site is not a requirement to being found in Google Maps. However, having a web site, and having pages that are properly optimized for local search keyword would most surely be a factor in the local search algorithm.

4. Listings in 2nd-tier Local Directories and Vertical Directories: Listing your business on 2nd tier directory like yellowpages, City search, Yelp, InsiderPages besides this Google Maps pulls data from verticals such as TripAdvisor, ChefMoz, Gayot.com, Fodors, Travelocity, Wcities.com, Frommers, and HotelGuide.net.

5. Proximity to location: Not too long ago, this was a prime factor in many local search algorithms. A local search SERP used to show listings based on proximity by default. That’s not the case anymore, but for any location-based search, it still has to play some part in the algorithm.

6. Location Prominence: The location prominence noted in the title to the document refers to factors that are intended to convey the best documents for the geographical area rather than documents based solely on their distance from a particular location within the geographical area.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Affiliate Marketing Helps in SEM

Nowadays The Internet offers many ways to make money online. Affiliate marketing is one of them. An example of affiliate marketing is the Amazon product links that some people place on their website. If a third party clicks on an Amazon Associates link on your website and purchases a product, Amazon will pay you a percentage of the sale as a commission. Of course, depending on your site traffic, the product links and your conversion rate, your commission check can either be latte money or whole lotta money.

Affiliate marketing widens the scope of your internet presence by encouraging other websites to become advocates for your services, increasing your online exposure and improving the efficiency of your advertising spends. Affiliate marketing, also called referral or paid lead generation advertising, is a method used on the Internet that allows for income sharing between websites. It is a process where sites are created specifically to generate highly relevant leads and traffic to specific landing pages of our clients.

Main goals of Affiliate Marketing Service
1. The creation of a steady flow of sales leads for your business.
2. Brand building of your business on the Web.
3. The provision of leads for future target marketing by your company through efforts that include e-newsletters, SMS, MMS, and referral advertising.
4. Getting into the top ten search result listings for keywords relevant to your company or products.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing is a solid and very effective web marketing tool. The strength of this type of marketing lies in the indirect nature of the websites through which partnerships are formed. The affiliate builds traffic by carefully addressing the individual interests of each user and tailoring their content to potential customers' needs and expectations, before delivering a call to action through to your site.

The most basic affiliate marketing programs fall under two categories: pay-per-click (PPC), and pay-per-performance (PPP).

Pay Per Click (PPC):
PPC is the most popular type of affiliate marketing for affiliates with small websites, and probably the easiest way for them to earn money. In this affiliate marketing type, the merchant pays his affiliate whenever a visitor is referred to his site that is whenever someone clicks through the merchant's banner or text ads. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount even if the visitor he referred does not purchase anything from the merchant's site. However, typical fees for PPC affiliate programs are small, usually not exceeding a dollar for every click.

Pay Per Performance (PPP):
PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular among merchant and is also the most lucrative type for the affiliates. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action—that is whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant's site or when the visitor becomes a lead. This means a lot of savings for the merchant. On the other hand, it becomes the most lucrative type for the dedicated affiliate, for commissions in PPP affiliate marketing usually comes in the range of 15% to 20% of the actual product sales.

These types of affiliate marketing are based on various levels or tiers in the affiliate network by which payments are made.

Single Tier -
In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant. Most of the time, unless specified, all the affiliate marketing types mentioned earlier (i.e. PPS, PPL, and PPC) fall under the single-tier classification.

Two Tier -
In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliates are not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he brings to the merchant's site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by other affiliates who joined as sub-affiliate of the above affiliate marketer.

Multi Tier -
Multi-tier affiliate marketing works the same way, although the affiliate gets additional commission for more number of levels of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.

The perception of people about affiliate marketing has undergone a sea change with the rising popularity of affiliate marketing. Today, no one considers affiliate marketing as an alternative method of advertisement of products by a merchant or as a source of additional income for an affiliate. As of now, affiliate marketing has become the main source of profits and revenues for the merchants as well as for the affiliates.