The importance of creating a Sitemap as part of your search engine marketing strategy and its effectiveness for you search engine optimisation efforts. One of the tools that allow you to upload and submit your sitemap is Google Webmaster. However, the importance and the benefits of using Google Webmaster Tool as part of your online marketing strategy are not limited to this.

Google Webmaster Tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimise visibility of their websites. Also, it is a great tool for reporting statistics and diagnosing your website’s performance in Google.

The Benefits of Using Google Webmaster for Search engine marketing:

As search engine optimisation consultants we have compiled a list of task which can be performed using Google webmaster panel on regular basis. These tasks would help in doing heath check of your site as well as for creating you search engine marketing strategies.

1. Google webmaster login gives you relevant information on indexing of your site. It gives you access to all information from the last time Googlebot accessed your homepage to error reports regarding your URLs.

2. It allows XML Search Engine Submission of Sitemap. Google Webmaster allows submission of an XML sitemap to help Google index your deeper site pages and pages that are more difficult to find or may not yet be indexed. Once submitted, you have the option of seeing when it was last downloaded by Google and how many URLs you have submitted via your sitemap.

3. It provides you with diagnostic data about your site. After you log in to Webmaster, you have the option to click on the “Diagnostics” Tab and have a look over the information provided there and take actions accordingly.

4. It gives you statistics about your site. Google Webmaster gives you access to see your top search queries, top clicked search queries and information about the Page Rank distribution of your site page. You can create search engine marketing strategies based on the information you get from here.

5. It provides you with valuable insights into the anchor text of links coming to your site. From the “Statistics” tab you can click on “What Googlebot sees”. This is a very useful section for examining the anchor text of what people are using to link to your site pages. This is another important sections which helps you in building important search engine marketing strategies.

6. It gives detailed information regarding your external link inventory. If you click on the tab “Pages with external links” you will gain access to the site pages which have a low number of external links and need improvement. This is very important in checking how effective is your link building campaign and how many keyword rich links are pointing to your relevant pages. As a part of search engine marketing strategy, seo consultant would always look for this section on regular basis.

7. It allows generating / analysing robots.txt. Google Webmaster gives you the option to create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled. Also, you can analyse them and see if it respects the modifications you made.

8. It allows you to set a preferred domain. Therefore, you can set a preferred domain that will be associated with this site. For example, you can choose to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.

9. It gives you the option of setting geographical targets. Webmaster Tools allows you to associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area. In todays time when there are millions of website competing with each other, local search engine marketing is very important. In this section we can point Google bots to rank us high in the areas we are looking to promote for our website.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/create-your-search-engine-marketing-strategies-by-using-google-webmaster-tool-1971536.html

About the Author

SysComm International provides focused Internet marketing services including fully managed and highly successful Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Google Webmaster, Online Marketing Strategy.

One of the easiest methods to employ in your plan to drive traffic to your local small business is pay per click advertising. This particular advertising model has been around since the late 1990’s and has been a means of generating hits for many different businesses with an online presence.

Pay per click advertising is an excellent way to get the word about your local small business to a wide audience. The process involves spotting an ad on various web sites that will forward an interested party back to your web site.

Part of the attraction of pay per click advertising is that the ad owner only pays when someone clicks on the ad and actually follows through to the web site.

When it comes to PPC advertising, never forget the importance of keywords. Essentially, keywords are words and phrases that are considered to be common modes of searching the Internet to find desired content.

As an advertiser, your job is to come up with keywords that you believe are likely to take you to web sites that are relevant to the type of business site you currently operate. The rationale is that persons who visit those sites would most likely be interested in the content of your site.

If you manage to find the right web sites for your ads, then the chances of generating clicks to your site are much greater.

While the keyword mode of pay per click advertising is very common, there is also a second method. Known as content match PPC, the principle is still the same.

The main difference is that rather than basing the search on keywords, the results are based on the content of the site. As an example, if you run a site that is dedicated to gardening supplies, then it would be a natural for you to want to place ads on sites dedicated to gardening.

Content matching can be used right along with keywords to create a well rounded pay per click component in your overall publicity campaign.

Finding online resources to help you with the process of placing pay per click ads is relatively easy. One of the most popular approaches is to make use of the Google Adwords program. You can get started by identifying a list of relevant keywords. You can also get help in designing the appearance of your ad, using online tools.

Adwords also includes a number of online tools, so you can keep track of how many hits get to your web site through those hits. This allows you to stay on top of how much pay per click is advertising is costing you each month. By comparing the sales that result from the hits with the cost of your pay per click campaign, you can determine if the program is making money for you.

Another target for your pay per click campaign is online comparison shopping engines. These types of engines often are willing to provide feeds through the placement of ads on their searches.

Just as with the ads on informational web sites, persons can click through to your web site and see what you have to offer. Some of these sites provide you with the ability to see the number of hits, while others do not. Payment for placing the ad on the shopping comparison site may be in the form of a fixed monthly amount or based on a fixed rate per click.

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as exclusionary pay per click arrangement. This means you can sign up with as many keyword and shopping ad services as you like. In fact, you may do very well to try out several different services, to see which ones seem to provide you with the best matches and coverage.

If funds for advertising are limited, go with a well known service, and then add more services as your revenue stream builds to the point you can afford to do so. Remember that your goal is to build a solid foundation for your web site, so it may take some time before you begin to see results.

Disregard stories about overnight success. Chances are you will go about six months to a year before you see significant traffic that results in sales.

Pay per click advertising is often an affordable way to launch your advertising campaign. The cost per click is often a fraction of a cent, so it certainly will not cost a great deal, unless you happen to get a huge number of visitors clicking through to your site.

The law of averages would dictate that of that huge number, enough sales would result to make your investment in the pay per click program well worth your time and the expense.

To learn more ways to drive traffic to your company using local business marketing go to: http://www.streetsmartsalesandmarketing.com/LocalBusinessMarketing.htm

Internet Marketing Strategies Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
By Festus Taferi

Internet marketing means the use of the internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes banner and text advertising, email marketing, interactive advertising, affiliate marketing and search engine marketing (including search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising). The aim of using search engine optimization in internet marketing is to increase targeted traffic to one’s website via search engine rankings, paid listings and advertisements.

So, what is SEO?

It is the art and science of making your Web pages as relevant as possible. Here, relevance is a measure of how close your Web page is aligned to what the user is looking for. Simply, the more relevant your page is, the higher your rankings are by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista etc.

This means that if your web page is ranked high by the likes of Yahoo or Google, and a user searches for information that contains specific keywords/terms associated with your web page; your web page is most likely to be among the top 10 search results that will be presented to the user.

The act/art of adding keywords to ones web page for maximum relevance is what is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

Humans and search engines treat Web pages in different ways. Where people look at design and read text, search engines will scan and detect relevant keywords that it would use to rate your web page as having the relevant information that a user needs.

Such “key words” are strategically placed within the web page for search engines to “see” them. Also noteworthy is the relevance of your link popularity and theme. That is, who is linking to your page? Are they related to your site’s theme?

So how do search engines evaluate your Web pages?

They determine relevance of your page by breaking it into areas. Each area consists of elements, namely HTML tags. this engines emphasize some of these tags and scan them for your keyword. If found, your page is considered more relevant.

To optimize your pages, you need to learn these three main terms: Frequency, Prominence, and Weight.

A. Frequency:

Frequency is how often your keyword appears on the page or in its elements (Title, META Description and Keywords, visible text, H1, ALT, etc.).

B. Prominence:

Prominence is how close to the start of the tag your keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the beginning of a page element (Title, META Description and Keywords, visible text, ALT, etc.) will make your Web page more relevant.

C. Weight / Density:

Keyword weight shows the number of times a keyword appears in an area as a percentage to all words in the page:

Keyword weight is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword). Mathematically, it is:

Weight = (Words in keyword/All words) x 100%

Logically then, the higher the weight of a particular keyword in a page, the higher the ranking of the page for that keyword. However, repeating a keyword too often to increase its weight can cause the page to be penalized by the search engines.

Keyword weight is sometimes referred to as ‘Density’ which stands for the same notion – overall percentage of some definite word relative to all words in the text.

It is very important to balance your site’s optimization so that it is neither under-optimized nor over-optimized.

Under-optimization may get your site lost among hundreds of thousands of other sites. While over-optimization would get your site penalized or worse – banned from the search engines

Festus Taferi is an IT professional with over 9 years experience in online business development and marketing. Get more mind blowing SEO techniques at: http://linksman-seoplace.blogspot.com/.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Festus_Taferi

Your website should be the hub of all your lead generation efforts.  But before you start or continue to spend your time, money and resources sending traffic there, you must be sure that your website is set up to convert those visitors into leads or better yet, paying customers.  Watch this video to learn what you need to be doing to help you drive more traffic, generate more leads, convert more visitors and increase sales.