Plan for Search Trends In Advance

For many websites the Christmas/New Year period is a quiet time of year and most people managing them look back at how well they did in the last year.

Take advantage of this by looking forward. Try to predict upcoming trends for the new year and use these trends to build related content to attract visitors to your website.

For example the Simpsons movie was a big release in 2007.



As you can see above there were several important events for search trends about the Simpsons movie (source: Google Trends):

• A: First newspaper previews of the movie


• E: Movie released to theatres worldwide


• F: DVD released for sale

If you had a website with lots of movie related content the way to attract lots of visitors to your site would have been to be the first to publish a really indepth article about the Simpsons Movie, ideally several months before event A (newspaper previews).

Even if your article is mostly rumour and innuendo if it has:

• Plenty of often updated text content


• Using targeted keywords


• Images of Simpsons characters with proper alt attributes etc

Than being first to publish will mean your page will already be ranking well and be "reputable" to search engines by the time event A occurs and will still rank well compared to the big movie review sites when the movie and subsequent DVD's are released.

Have you had success using Google Trends for content ideas?

Want Free Cricket Tickets

Free Cricket Tickets!

We just launched a new competition for 3 Mobile Cricket where you can win a free cricket ticket for each of the one day international tests! Its Free to enter.

Other prizes to be won:

• A bbq with Gilchrist and Brett Lee and 4 signed cricket bats for you and 3 mates.
• 100 Signed 3 mobile hats
• If you refer a friend you could win a Australian cricket team signed cricket bat
  

Google's Matt Cutts explains ALT attributes for images

Google's Matt Cutts recently posted a video about how to use ALT attributes for images

The ALT attribute provides alternative or substitute text, for use when the image cannot be seen by a visually impaired person or by a search engine.

In both cases they can't see the image so you have to describe it in a way that tells them what the image shows. For example if it's a photo of a Siamese cat than you might use:

<img src="cat.jpg" alt="siamese cat">

This is great for the visually impaired person and also for SEO purposes because the search engine engine has a label to attach to that photo for use in their Image search.

For more information, I'll handover to Matt's video (3min 10sec):

Online Christmas Game in Flash

If you have a minute checkout this latest christmas flash game we recently developed for one of our clients PMI mortgage Insurance.



P.S. If you want to learn more about my formula for website traffic and how to get it as cheap as possible, you might be interested in my new online marketing seminar.

God Created the Internet to Market your Business Online

God created the internet to market your business online – get that firmly entrenched in your mind … and when he created it what he wanted you to have is thousands of visitors to your site.

To achieve this you'll need a strategy to get quality traffic to your website and drive sales.

An effective online marketing strategy is more than SEO, email marketing, or even optimising your website. It involves a number of activities that, when combined, result in a dramatic increase in sales.

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You will get hands on experience that will improve you online marketing abilities and enable you to start marketing like a professional online marketing agency.

You can get a sneak preview of Fred Schebesta's 11 Online Marketing Secrets Seminar below, watch Fred as he explains the fastest way to grow your email database:




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12 Quick Christmas Online Marketing Review Tips to Increase Sales Online

Check Your Website with 12 Quick Christmas Online Marketing Tips

Interestingly the 12 days of Christmas song is not actually a countdown to Christmas day but instead a count from Christmas day to the 6th of January, “The Epiphany Day”. This Christmas whilst you are pondering around and have some time on the internet give yourself a break in 2008 and do a little review of your online marketing with these 12 tips.

1. Review your competitor’s website – Type in the main keyword you are competing for in Google and browse through the top 10 results to see what they are doing that you might be able to do. Sometimes comparing yourself to the competition can bring about quick shortcuts which you were pondering before.
2. Review your web stats – If you don’t have access to your web stats, I suggest spend the time to get it. Checkout these metrics and set a reminder for this time next year to make a comparison:
1. Major keywords bringing you traffic
2. Which websites are bringing you the most traffic
3. Number of unique visitors on your website per month
3. Test your website – Just click around it and pretend you are a customer. You are looking for:
1. Quick improvements
2. Spelling mistakes
3. Errors
4. A reminder of where you are at with your site.
4. Increase trust and review your content – Remove your 2005 press release on your website and consider replacing it with some latest news. Fresh content is very persuasive as it shows that the website is alive. Actually read your homepage content and make a quick assessment.
5. Write a quick article – A good article for your website that helps visitors is invaluable. It helps in the sales process for your visitors and it is also great search engine food. If you are stuck for ideas:
1. Pickup a your trade magazine and write about what your take is on the industry and what your predictions are for 2008
2. Write a “How to Choose a ‘your profession’” e.g. How to choose an online marketing consultant.
6. Hunt for a new domain name – Check if the generic keyword for your industry (www.Shoes.com.au) has expired and if you can snap it up. This happened to me quite a few times with our clients. Domain names with keywords inside them are easier to rank in the search engines.
7. Build your email database – Collect together all of those rogue business cards and other email addresses you have and compile them together into an Excelsheet ready to be put into an online mailout database.
8. Write a quick enewsletter – Get together some content and prepare to send out your enewsletter in January next year. Be ready to press the send button next year, before it gets crazy again.
9. Tweak your adwords – Kill poor performing ads and pump up ads that are performing well. If you haven’t got a paid search marketing campaign, get one up and running in 27 minutes with my free guide.
   
10. Rewrite your about us page – Include all of the new things that happened in 2007 into your about us. Include new clients, new products and any other big news that occurred.
11. Check your contact us form – Make sure it works. Is it logical to use, does it make sense to you what it requires. Fill it out. Got back to your website and think where else you could put links to your contact us page to get more people to it?
12. Plan your 2008 online marketing – Jot down things that you want to do, wishlists and what you won’t do next year.

How to start a search engine marketing campaign

Why start a search engine marketing campaign?
Buying traffic for the sake of buying traffic will send you broke. The reason is because it isn’t targeted, so you will only get people coming to your website that just leave. Buying just any traffic is like putting up a T.V. ad, you are shooting millions of arrows out to try and hit a prospect. The answer to not wasting your money is to target specific users and prequalify your traffic.

Target specific users – Market to people who are interested in your product. Michael Kiely taught me to “Fish where the fish are”. I took out of that advertise where people are looking for your products. Search engine marketing targets the people who are interested in your products because the visitor types in what they are searching for. The user makes their intentions clear that they are searching for “a way to save my marriage”, keyword typed in = “Save Marriage Book”. Before the user goes to your website they tell you what products they want to see. If your product matches what they want to see you can easily market your product to them.

Prequalify your audience – Buying advertising on a performance basis is a great start but you still don’t want to be paying for traffic that is not sent to your website for the right reason. Getting a user to do something like typing in a query makes the traffic more qualified. Users actually have to search for your ads.

I recommend buying search engine marketing traffic as the first thing to do. The reason is that you can keep your budgets low, ($100 per month) and you can keep the campaign small and manageable to determine what results you get.

How to start your search engine marketing campaign to get instant traffic

Step 1 - Choose your search engine: I recommend starting with Google because it accounts for around 70% of the Australian search engine market traffic. Yahoo and Ninemsn each account for around 12% each and the minor other search engines account for the remainder.
Below is a snapshot from one of my clients websites that shows you the % of traffic they get from each of the search engines.




You can see from the above results that Google is the big Gorilla in the Australian search space so I always recommend you optimise first for it and buy Adwords first. After that consider Yahoo and Ninemsn.

Step 2 - Setup your campaign on Google
I have put a guide together to help you in 7 steps get your site live on google. Just go to www.StartSearchMarketing.com.au and follow the steps.
To begin you will need the following:

1. A website – You need somewhere to send the traffic you will get from the search engine.
2. A credit card – This is to pay for your ads.

www.StartSearchMarketing.com.au
Start your search marketing campaign now