Generating More Business
Innovative ideas for generating more business via the Internet.
Most of our newsletters relate to Alpha Five and are of a technical nature. In this newsletter we wanted to move onto a theme relating to how you can cost effectively attract more business to your company or more visitors to your site.
As most of you know, the web can be an incredibly powerful and highly targeted way to attract new customers - but how do you tap into this power without breaking the bank?
There are a few key methods to become visible on the search engines, and this article will touch on each of them.
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Blogging
- Traditional PPC (pay per click)
- New and Improved Method for Web Keyword Advertishing
Of these four, you may be familiar with the first 3 methods, with the 4th method being new and especially exciting right now... please read on!
S.E.O. (search engine optimization.)
When you search for something on Google (or other search engines) and you get back a page of search results, what determines which websites will be listed first?
Clearly being at the top of the list - or at least being on the first page of results will help you gain more traffic than being at the end of the list. But how do you get there?
Quite a few factors influence your search engine ranking, including how many other sites link to your site. How many pages your site contains, how often a keyword is listed on your site. S.E.O has become both an art and a science and there are companies that can help you get better placement. The service of making changes to your website to get better search engine rankings is called "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO. Here is the Wikipedia link to SEO.
(Note. Over the last seven years, as we have been practicing SEO, we have learnt a huge amount about SEO and we will soon be offering a service to assist customers in this area, if you would like to speak to us about this before then, please email marketing@alphasoftware.com )
Blogging
Having a well written interesting blog that customers and prospects want to read, will increase your presence on search engines and has many other side benefits, too. (We will be writing more about this in the future – but in the meantime – we wanted to tell you about a book called Naked Conversations that inspired us to take blogging seriously at Alpha.)
If you have not seen the Alpha blog click here please.
Traditional PPC – Pay Per Click
This is the standard process whereby Search Engines like Google and Yahoo make their money. Essentially, you choose the keywords that you want to bid on. You place your bid, and if you bid is higher than the competition your ad gets displayed in the sponsored/pay per click sections of Google/Yahoo pages.
This can be an effective way to attract customers, but it has two very real problems.
- Your competitors can "drown you out" by outbidding you.
- Even if you have a high enough bid to be displayed on the search page, Google/Yahoo etc can decide to run your ad infrequently because your advertisement is not getting enough clicks (remember that they make money only when someone clicks on your advertisement.)
New and Improved Method for Keyword Web Adverstising.
At Alpha Software, we have recently started using a new service that eliminates these two problems and we are delighted with the surge in traffics and leads coming to Alpha Five.
With this new service:
- We are guaranteed to be in the top 3 slots in the sponsored positions at the top of the page on Google and Yahoo.
- Our ads run 24x7 so we never miss an opportunity to be found.
- Our competitors can’t outbid us.
- We know ahead of time what the costs are going to be and that price is guaranteed to us for 1 hear.
To see how this works lets use Alpha Software as an example. When someone searches Google or Yahoo for the word "AJAX software" (which is one of the many kewords we have targeted at Alpha Software,) we want to show up prominently on the search results page. This new service does precisely that and does it consistently. To see for yourself try typing “AJAX software” in to the Google or Yahoo search box and see who comes up #1 at the top of the page or simply click here.
I think you can tell we are pretty excited about this service that we feel gives us a competitive advantage.
The company that we are using to provide this service is not a well known outside of a small ciricle and we are not able to publicly say who they are.
However, we want our customers to benefit from the service (as we have) – because it works!
If you are interested in getting in touch with this company, please email me personally at richard@alphasoftware.com and I will put you directly in touch with them.
Sincerely,
Richard Rabins
Co Chairman
www.alphasoftware.com
http://blog.alphasoftware.com
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