Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Happy Diwali - Dillip Kumar Barik - SEO Expert India

Wish u all Happy and Prosperous Dipabali.......The festival of Light over Darkness.....

Happy Diwali from Dillip Kumar Barik - SEO Expert India

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Top Ten Ways to Drive More Visitors to Business WebSites

For more visitors to your business website specifically, those who at some point want to purchase. Like any other online business, the success of your own business is tied in directly with the amount of targeted traffic your site can attract.

Fortunately, there are many techniques you can use right away to start attracting increasing amounts of quality traffic to your site. And they work long-term too.

1. Recommendations

Recommendations from other online businesses are very powerful, and drive valuable traffic for months if not years. So it’s worth investing time and effort in attaining some of these links.
After all, potential customers are far more likely to believe a third-party review of your business than your own marketing materials.

To help encourage these recommendations:
  • Ensure whatever you provide through your business is the best it can be and delivers real value to your customers.
  • Prioritize customer support, deal with inquiries on a personal level and build up a personal rapport with some of your best customers.
  • Create an affiliate program, providing incentives for other businesses to start recommending you.
  • Ask for referrals – you’ll be surprised how often your customers will be happy and willing to refer others to your business.
2. Article Marketing

Yes, article marketing has received some negative coverage of late, but much of it comes from business owners who use SEO as a central pillar in their marketing strategy.

Instead, it’s important to develop links from all over the web that drive traffic to your business independent of search engines, and reduce any such reliance on SEO. Article marketing remains one of the most effective ways in which to achieve that.

The fact is article directories are among some of the most highly-visited sites online … why wouldn’t you want your link on them, siphoning traffic back to your site?

And if you need any proof that article marketing can increase the online visibility of your business – you’re reading this, aren’t you?

In fact, my own articles tend to get hundreds if not thousands of views within just a few days of publication. Some go on to achieve tens of thousands of views. And that’s just one article directory …

Multiply that when you syndicate to several high-traffic article directories, as well as other potential online publishers, and you start to appreciate how effective article marketing can be in raising your profile.

It’s also not always about linking back to your main website either. You can for example also link back to your pages on social media, or perhaps a squeeze page domain to help build your email list.

3. Paid Traffic

Can’t that be costly? Yes, but only if you do it wrong. Get it right, and it’s a continual, long-term profit stream.

Personally, I’ve been paying for traffic for years, as well as using other traffic-building methods.
Take time to master it; be willing to invest some cash up front while you get it working effectively, and it becomes an important asset for your business.

4. Retargeting

Of course, retargeting also involves buying traffic, but it works slightly differently.
When you get a visitor to your site, you then drop a cookie on them, and they continue to see ads for your site on other websites around the web long after they have visited.

This not only brings a percentage back to your site, but can also raise your profile with them and keep your business front of mind, increasing the likelihood of purchase.

5. Email Marketing

Capture the email address of your prospect, and you can then follow-up with them by email for weeks, months, and years to come. Some people on my own list have been receiving emails from me for several years now, and still end up back on one of my sites after clicking links provided in the emails I send out.

Communicate with your list regularly, and invite them to return to your website, whether for a promotion, to read your latest content, or to interract in some way with you.

It’s a powerful way to build a relationship with your prospects, build traffic for the long-term, and of course increase their likelihood of purchase.

6. Blogging

I’ve now been blogging for years, and it’s one of the central planks to my long-term traffic strategy:
  • It gives you a lot of content in the search engines, with each post that you write (or have written) working to attract visitors over the long-term.
  • It helps build relationships with the people who read your blog, who return repeatedly to read your latest content.
  • It builds your credibility and authority, increasing the chance of both purchase and referral to others
  • It gives you content to feed your social media activities.
  • You can leverage the content for other purposes (for example, this article originates from a blog post).
7. Forum and Blog Commenting

Engage with forums relevant to your niche, and you can drive a lot of targeted traffic back to your site.

For example, link to a blog post where it helps someone’s question. Link back to your site from your signature, and via your profile.

You can also build up some powerful relationships which can result in long-term traffic from referrals and so on.

It works in a similar fashion with blogs. Avoid spam commenting completely, but instead add a useful, informative comment of real value. You can either link back by adding your website details into the field provided, or where appropriate try linking back to say one of your own blog posts where it adds further to the discussion.

8. Videos

YouTube can be hugely effective in driving traffic to your site, simply because it gets so much traffic itself as the world’s second largest search engine. By posting videos that will match up with some of those searches you’ll reach new audiences and attract new visitors to your site.
What’s more, you can create new videos relatively easily by simply basing them on earlier blog posts.

9. Social Media

Social media signals are becoming increasingly important for SEO purposes, and it also allows your content to spread far beyond your own shores and get seen by audiences you otherwise wouldn’t reach.

Every time you create or add new content somewhere, you can also post it to your social media profiles. This drives up engagement, attracts new followers, and raises the visibility of your business in general.

10. Do They Want What You’ve Got?

You might not think it’s a ‘traffic strategy’ as such … but in fact, it’s the most important one.
If people don’t want what you’ve got, you’ll find traffic generation a whole lot harder.

On the other hand, when you sell what people want, particularly when combined with a powerful USP (unique selling proposition) it all becomes a lot easier. People will spread the word naturally, your traffic will grow based on their willing referrals, and your marketing costs will reduce substantially.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Tips for Launching an Ecommerce Business Online

It is finally time come to become your own boss. You have a product idea that you know people will love to invest in that can make you more money than what you make at your regular job. It's time to start an online business. Yet before you begin marketing yourself to friends and neighbors through social media, you'll want to get your online business off to a great start from the very beginning. Use this checklist of the 10 elements to have in place before opening your online business.

1: Have a Business Plan

Business plans are basic outlines and details about your business as it shows what you will do to make your business a success. It helps define who you plan to market your products to, what products you will be offering, how your product fits into the industry market, how you plan to promote your business, and how you plan to finance it.

2: Secure Your Vendors

You will want to secure all the vendors who will be supplying the materials and merchandise for your online store. Evaluate vendors to ensure that they can deliver your items to you in the fastest amount of time and that the products are of a quality that you want to associate your name with when selling them to customers.

3: Get Financing

Unless you have a nice nest egg you can use to finance your business for the first year or so until you start to make enough profits, you will have to get the working capital to see your business become a reality. You can obtain a business loan from a financial institution or a government-backed loan. If you have poor or no credit to get a loan, consider asking friends and family members to finance your business.

4: Obtain any Business Licenses, Permits and Insurance

Even though you will be offering products or services online instead of through a regular brick-and-mortar store, you still need to abide by all state and federal laws based on the type of business you operate. Obtain the suitable licenses or permits to open your business. You should also look into getting insurance to legally protect yourself and your business.

5: Create Promotional Materials

Even though you may be selling your products exclusively through your online store, you will still need to create physical promotional materials to hand to people so they will visit your website. Create promotional flyers to hang on store bulletin boards or pass out to pedestrians. Also make business cards to hand out to people you meet.

6: Develop a Functional Website

The website is the hub of your business. While it should be appealing to all web traffic, it also needs to be functional with easy-to-use navigation features and ordering instructions. Strive to make the website look professional with photographs and content that appeal to your customer niche. There are tons of website templates to allow you to create the website yourself, or you can go through a web design company who can help you get your business seen online.

7: Set Up Your Website for Payment Processing

There are so many e-commerce software and hosting solutions available that you truly can pick the right one that works best for your business. Whether you want to set up a simple shopping cart on your website, or you want something more robust through an e-commerce hosting company, will be based on your business preferences. Research and compare your options so you can process credit cards or accept payment services such as Paypal without any problems.

8: Define Your Customer Support Services

For some reason customer support always get pushed to the side as eager small business owners are more focused with promoting and marketing their sites. Yet you need to set up a reliable customer support service to handle returns, upsell products and deal with customer complaints. Options you have for customer support include email contact pages and a dedicated telephone line for your business. Always set aside a portion of your time to deal with customer service issues or hire someone to strictly handle this role.

9: Market Your Business Online

Customers won't know that your online business exists if you don't have an online marketing plan. While you promoted your business out on the street, you also need to promote yourself through all online avenues. Create a social media presence, set up a blog, offer opt-in newsletters and engage in ad campaigns to spread your business brand far and wide.

10: Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

While marketing your products to online customers, you don't want to leave out mobile customers. More people are shopping and making purchases through their smart phones or tablet devices. You will need to have a mobile-optimized site, landing page and ad marketing campaign suited to mobile customers.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

SEO Reviews of 2013 for Business Websites

HAPPY NEW YEAR - 2014
Ask anyone in the SEO space and they will be happy to confirm - often at length - that 2013 was a tumultuous year. Throughout the year, Google's SEO moves all had a singular aim: To force content providers to deliver clear and substantial value to searchers if they wanted to be rewarded with a high rank in search results. Nothing new there, at least in theory. What changed dramatically, however, was the search engine giant's ability rank sites using signals that forced providers to comply with the company's goals regarding value without being easy to manipulate. In other words, in 2013, Google made it much harder to game the system. Here's how:

Continued Panda and Penguin Roll-Outs

Google rolled-out its Panda update in 2011 in an effort to penalize "thin sites" that offered little value to searchers but lots of onscreen real estate to advertisers. The effect was dramatic if occasionally overreaching in scope. Penguin followed in 2012, targeting questionable linkbuilding tactics that artificially inflated a site's apparent influence. In the time since their initial releases, Google has continued to refine these algorithm tweaks, including at least three known Panda changes and two Penguin updates in 2013. Significantly, some of these changes were intended to help "legitimate" sites that unintentionally fell victim to Panda recover some of their lost status. Google continues to scrutinize linkbuilding tactics, including penalizing practices in 2013 that originally fell outside of Penguin.

"Not Revealed" Keywords

Traditionally, SEOs could analyze Google Keyword information to see how searchers were arriving at their pages and spot optimization opportunities. In 2013, Google took most of that data away in the name of protecting searchers' privacy, replacing what had been some of the most useful information provided in its suite of analytics tools with the dreaded phrase "Not provided."

While some information is still available through Google's Webmaster Tools, SEOs are still largely in the dark relative to the keyword information they had at hand in 2013. The two choices available to SEOs seemed to be make use of keyword information available elsewhere (for example, through Bing) or choose to focus on providing robust content that would hopefully incorporate many organic keywords.

Google Author Rank

It's no surprise that an author's name and reputation can contribute an air of expertise to the content she writes. Unfortunately (for searchers), until 2013, there was no solid way to calculate the impact of this incredibly important social signal in a search algorithm. As with so many other challenges, Google found a way around that and Author Rank was born.

By verifying code snippets on a content page against information in the creator's Google+ page, Google is now able to reasonably assure searchers that a piece content was written by a known and respected "name." Additionally, Google can now assign a value, known as Author Rank, to the apparent influence connected to that name. The upshot is simple: SEOs whose properties can offer content written by well-regarded creators stand to win big in this arena.

Hummingbird Update

In September 2013, Google announced that it had essentially replaced its old algorithm. The updated formula for parsing search requests and sorting results was named Hummingbird, and it promised to allow more natural search queries as well as provide more precise results, serving the exact page a user is likely to need within a relevant website. For example, searchers could now literally as Google a question instead of typing a string of keywords. The algorithm supposedly also understands queries more contextually - for example, providing answers relevant to Kansas City instead of New York if you happen to be searching from within Kansas City. While this is a new algorithm, it still incorporates changes related to quality that arrived under previous updates. Hummingbird makes optimizing content for locality and at the page level extremely important. It does not change any expectations about content quality.

What to Expect in 2014

Clearly, optimizing content for mobile and local search will be important in 2014, but the real story remains content quality. Since Google is forcing content providers to think strategically instead of tactically regarding their content, it makes sense for SEOs to take a moment to think strategically about Google as a search provider. While its executives in Mountain View earn their salaries in large part by delivering value to advertisers, they can only do that by maintaining their position as a trusted brand for end-users. The best way maintain that trust is simply to deliver high quality results to searchers. It will always be important for SEOs to keep feelers out for tactical approaches to optimization that can be exploited for quick gains, but the best long-term strategic approach to succeeding with Google in 2014 - and beyond - will be to deliver well structured, easily parsed, and valuable content to their target audiences. If that content is good enough to encourage social sharing, thus circumventing the need for discovery on a search engine to begin with, well, so much the better.