1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.

2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.

3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimise each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

Writing is the best way of getting your website ranked in the search engines. Search engines, and indeed web visitors like content and lots of it. By incorporating a blog and lots of articles in your website you are well on the way to helping your site rankings.

Another way that you can use writing and articles you have created to help your search engine rankings is to submit them to an article directory. One of the best ones to use is article dashboard and this contains thousands of articles on just about any subject you can imagine. The idea is that you submit your article and include a link back to your website in the footer of the article. Website owners can then pick up these articles for inclusion on their websites which results in giving your site multiple back links.

For example I might write an article about marketing in Ireland and post it to my blog, and then modify it and submit it to an article site. This kills two birds with one stone, it gives you new blog content which helps your ‘on site criteria’ i.e. inclusion of relevant content on your website and plenty of off site linking content both of which will help your sites search engine rankings, particularly if you include search terms and keywords in the title and body of your articles.

Increasingly business owners in Ireland are waking up to the possibilities of spending some of their advertising and marketing revenue on Search Engine pay per click campaigns. The most popular of these is the google adwords system.

The advantage of a ppc campaign is that your promotional message is displayed when your target customer base is actively looking for a solution to a specific probelm by searching for it in a search engine.

Another benefit of ppc is that it is possible to make all of your marketing accountable, you can very quickly see what is working and do more of it and stop what isn’t working. This simply isn’t the case with traditional advertising which is much more expensive and harder to track.

So Irish businesses are jumping in head first and hoping to get some more business from this new medium. However based on some of the campaigns I have witnessed a lot of them won’t be getting a good return on their investment.

The good news is that there are a number of ways you can make your Pay Per Click Campaign more effective:

1. Continually test two adverts at once, drop the weaker performing one and keep the best one, then create a new advert and test this against your best one.
2. Make sure your landing page is relevant. So often I see advertisers sending traffic to the homepage of their website rather than deeper into a part of their web which is closely relevant to the original search term.
3. Capture contact information. Always try to capture the contact details of your prospects, at the very least an email address and name, even better if you can get the postal address and phone number. Getting this information will allow you to follow up by sending additional information. Remember on average it takes seven contacts before a prospect decides to do business with you. One of the best ways to capture prospect information is to offer something of value in return, perhaps a free book or other information.

I hope this has given you an idea of how you can improve your pay per click campaigns. If you need any help then please give us a call and we can help you.

One of the blogs that I regularly read and find very useful for information about web marketing is this blog for tailored consulting a web design firm in Australias Gold coast. They are currently doing a live case study to look at tips and techniques for getting this belfast web design company an increased search engine ranking. Have a look at the case study for some tips on how to improve the search engine position of your website

I had a question the other day from friend of mine, asking me how to get his website listed in Google. In terms of getting it to appear in Google there are two ways that it can be done.

The first is Google adwords, this is when you search for a term in google and matching adverts appear in a list of boxes on the right hand side.

The way this works is that you have to pay google every time someone clicks on your advert. The amount you pay depends on a number of factors, mainly how relevant your advert is to the search terms i.e. how often it is clicked and how much competition you have.

You bid how much you are willing to pay for a click, from a few cent per click upwards and can set a daily limit. For example on my hire a hot tub site I have picked keywords like hottub and jacuzzi Ireland etc. Typically I spend less than €50 per month, but really the sky is the limit depending
on your budget. The other way to get into google is under the main search results (this is known as an Organic listing).

This is much more complicated as it is based on a number of things like how popular your site is (number of other websites which link to it), how much content you have relevant to the search etc. Generally this happens over time so it can take months or years for this to work.

For a new website I would advise you to pay for the ongoing google adwords to get you up and running and then hopefully over time the site would grow in popularity as you add content etc, and then you will get a better organic listing in Google.