For years, web marketers spent a lot of time driving traffic and visitors to websites in hopes that some of that this traffic would lead to conversions (or leads, sales, etc). So much emphasis has been put on traffic that many new webmasters thought that the more visitors they could get to their websites the more successful they would be. But a run-in with reality (and the change of economic times) changes that perception really quickly.

While visitor levels to a website is important – highly targeted visitor levels is and should be more important – the real sign of success with your search engine marketing and online marketing efforts is the ROI or return on investment. I’d much rather have a low-trafficked website making a profit than a high-trafficked website floundering in the red.

So how do you get there? To a positive ROI? Does it involve building visitors and testing?

Well, search engine marketing is the key to success for any website. But not all search engine marketing is equal. Instead of focusing on attracting raw traffic numbers, you should focus on getting targeted traffic to your website and determine what one visitor is worth to you. Furthermore, put a dollar amount on one visitor that converts – a sale or a lead that you close into a sale. When you can determine what a conversion is worth to you then you can determine how much you are willing to pay to get that conversion. After that, it’s all strategy. Focus on the ROI, not the traffic. Also another important take away here is test, test and re-test. Once you are achieving a good return at a small visitor level, then slowly build the results to increase your sales and lead volume, while keeping your ROI in line.

Believe me, this is easier said, then done, but with the right approach, patience and an open mind you can achieve excellent ROI from your search marketing efforts over time…hopefully this post has helped you just a little bit!

Keyword research is a very important step in website development and search engine optimization. I’ve talked to some Internet marketers, newbies of course, who purchase a domain name before they do their keyword research, if they do it at all. Why? It is pretty well established that your keyword in your URL is a very important aspect of search engine optimization and attaining the rankings you want for your website.

There are some simple basics to keep in mind for keyword research, however. It’s a simple process, but if you go about it wrong you could end up in the wrong business, so to speak.

No. 1, there are two sides of the keyword equation. Supply and demand.

The supply is how many websites that are targeting a specific keyword. Just go to each of the search engines and type in a keyword and see how many websites come up for that keyword. That’s your supply number.

Demand is the reference to how many people are searching for your keyword each month. Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and a few other tools are available to help you figure that out. But what you want to do is get your hands on the number of people who are conducting searches for each of your potential keywords.

Next, you need to figure out the profitability potential of each keyword. Some people call it a keyword effectiveness indicator (KEI), or index.

To figure your KEI you’ll divide your demand number by your supply number. In other words, if Google shows 1,000 websites for the keyword phrase “redheaded midget wrestling” but you find that 400 people per month are searching for that phrase then your KEI will be .4. That’s a 40% ratio.

Of course, this number by itself means nothing. It can only have meaning relative to other keywords. So put all your keywords into a spreadsheet and sort them by KEI. The higher the number the more valuable that keyword is. Even still, a highly valuable keyword may not be any good for your site concept so be sure that you toss out any keywords that doesn’t match your concept.

That’s a quick way to determine a value for your keywords and decide which ones are the most valuable for your website.

If you have decided to start marketing a business or website online one of the most important steps or aspects of conducting your entire search engine marketing campaign is your keyword research. Keywords are your audience and get this step wrong and you will get your audience wrong. The last thing you want to do is market yourself online through search engine optimization and pay per click advertising for many months only to find out your keywords have been pulling in the wrong audience.

There are many different philosophies on keyword research. Some like to focus on many keywords and some like to just focus on one or two highly trafficked words. Personally putting all your eggs into one basket is never a good idea, period. Focus on targeting many keywords tastefully and within search engine guidelines to really get it done right.

Here are some helpful tips below to get the best possible results you can with your keyword research:

• Competitor: Make a realistic list of competitors and take a look at their website to see what types of keywords they are targeting. That doesn’t mean copy their approach but it is good to see how someone is doing it who has been successful prior. It might just give you some direction on where you should head with your keyword research.

• Find a Niche: Would you rather compete with a lot of websites or a little? In today’s market place it is tough to find a profitable niche but when it comes to keywords those who find themselves in niche with a smaller group of competitors usually find themselves ranking quickly and generating visitors faster. Long tail keywords along with niche keywords are great for websites just launching.

• Top Keywords: You have to first understand everything in your industry. Find the top keywords for your industry before you start marketing. You have to understand your surroundings and what you are up against before you can really start focusing on marketing your business online.

• Budget: This is very important. You need to be realistic. If you are not doing all the work but plan on outsourcing a great deal of it than you need to figure out how much you have in order to get the job done right. This will be most important if you plan on doing pay per click advertising for your business. Those clicks are not cheap and some industries have very high click costs that for some could only allow ads to be visible for a very short period of time.

There are many white hat ways to build relevant inbound links, but there is one method of link building that is almost guaranteed to build you links if you do it the right way. I am talking about building an affiliate program. But you do have to do it the right way. Remember, I always recommend building your offsite search engine optimization efforts (link building) from many different relevant sources over time. Launching an affiliate program can be another excellent way to build your inbound links to your website. So what is the right way?

Let’s first talk about the wrong way. Don’t go to one of the third-party affiliate program sites like Commission Junction. It doesn’t matter how good they are at managing affiliate programs. Any links that point to your affiliate program pages will be redirected through your affiliate manager’s website so they can track clicks. That will give them the link juice, not you. So I recommend that you build your own affiliate program. Let’s not forget that building a proper affiliate program can produce an additional excellent source of leads and sales for your business.

What you do is build an affiliate sign up page where you capture the pertinent data from your affiliates. Then you’ll need to assign an affiliate ID number. There are methods for doing this and you can Google it, but once you do that then you’ll want to include the affiliate ID number of each of your affiliates as a parameter in your landing page. Also, be sure to have an excellent commission structure (cost per lead, percentage of sales or cost per sale) affiliate program. If you don’t offer affiliates an excellent commission structure then they will not link to your website.

When you build an affiliate program this way you’ll get inbound links to your website. Use a third-party service and someone else will get the benefit those inbound relevant links.

Is there a difference between optimizing a site for earning money with AdSense (or an affiliate micro website), or another contextual advertising, site and optimizing a business site for selling a service? You might think the answer would be “no”, but in actuality there is a difference.

For AdSense, all you are really concerned about is finding valuable keywords to target. You really want to focus your efforts on making your content optimized enough to attract search engine traffic – in other words, you want high search rankings – but you don’t really want it so good that people hang on every word your write. After all, if they’re reading your content then they are not clicking on ads.

That’s not to say that you just want people showing up and clicking ads and not reading what you have to say. You may want the traffic on your site, but you earn money when they click so if the content is too good then you won’t get any contextual ad clicks.

With a service business, you don’t want ads on your site at all. They will certainly distract from your message and give people an exit from your site. You want your content to be so great that your visitors will not want to leave. After all, you are trying to sell your services.

You are not so much concerned with the most valuable keywords when optimizing your site for a service business. You are concerned with the right keywords for your business. They could be completely different keywords than anyone else is targeting, making your business unique. Or they could be the same keywords every one is targeting so that you can establish your uniqueness in a crowded marketplace. Whatever it is, you have to target the right keywords for your business.

At the end of the day, optimization is optimization, but there is a big difference – a different strategy – in optimizing for a service business and optimizing for contextual advertising.

If your website has a high visitor bounce rate, you might be wondering why visitors visit your site then leave before looking at any more pages. That’s what is called a bounce rate and unless you are running an AdSense site, it’s not good. You won’t make nearly as many sales with a high bounce rate.

Why visitors leave? There are a number of reasons why, among them:

1. Poor site design – Let’s face it. Your website design is a visual treat. If visitors like it they are more likely to stick around. If it’s unattractive, gaudy, or obtrusive to their eyes, they will leave.
2. How good is your content? – If your content is sub-par you can’t expect people to stick around. No one will hang around for bad content. If you can’t create great content on your site then hire a ghostwriter. Otherwise, live with the high bounce rate.
3. Poor calls to action – You want your product descriptions to be very good and your calls to action to be strong. If they aren’t, you’ll lose traffic.

These are the top three reasons visitors leave your site before buying anything or visiting other pages. If you want to kill a high bounce rate, fix these problems before they kill your site.

One of the hottest all time search engine optimization debates online centers around the importance of Google PageRank. At one time, it was the holy grail of Internet marketing. Then link sellers started exploiting it for personal gain. A lot of marketers noticed and began to discount PageRank as a gamed system that no longer has any relevance. Google fought back by targeting link buyers and sellers, penalizing sites that engaged in this behavior. Personally, I think it was the right thing to do. Google has a right to protect the reputation of its ranking system and I respect them for doing that.

Google PageRank has established some relevance again, but is it still worth it a metric? Titus Hoskins says yes.

I actually like what he has to say in this paragraph:

Now while you can have a lower PR number and still rank above other higher PR pages for your chosen keywords, I have even had many times when my PR drops but my actual SERPs rankings in Google goes up, mainly due to building related relevant backlinks. So PageRank counts little towards your keyword rankings, but it can’t be totally dismissed.

I agree with this. Google PageRank can’t be completely dismissed. But it’s not as important as visitors your website receives from the search engines, search engine rankings and developing long term search engine trust. You can have a No. 1 position for an important keywords and still not have as high a PageRank as your competition.

But some people do still look at Google PageRank as an important judge of your reputation and trust. To completely dismiss that is to miss the boat. However, to put undue focus on it is to miss the boat in another way. Google PageRank still have some relevance even if it isn’t the holy grail. Consider it, but don’t rely on it completely.