• Rankings

This is what everyone immediately thinks of when figuring out the success of a campaign. Technically, if you are ranking in the top ten of the search engines for your keyword, your campaign is “successful”.

However, that is not all there is to it. While ranking in Google is a great accomplishment, the only real determinant of your campaign success is if you are making money. If you aren’t, then nothing else matters. The last two metrics will determine that.

• Traffic

Ranking alone doesn’t guarantee you a large spike in visitors. If you are targeting a low search volume keyword, or you have a boring title, you probably won’t get much traffic. If you aren’t getting a lot more visitors from being ranked, then you haven’t achieved your objective.

• Conversion

This is where the rubber meets the road. While conversions are technically not related to “SEO”, this is what determines how much money you will make from your new visitors. Getting one thousand visitors a day means nothing if they aren’t buying your product.

That’s why keyword research is so critical. Choose the wrong keywords, and you won’t make money. In general, you want to go after “buying keywords”. A “buying keyword” is one that has the potential to bring a sale. For instance, “Tailor-made golf clubs” would be a buying keyword, because somebody is looking for a golf club to buy. However, “golf pictures” is not, because the searcher isn’t looking to purchase anything.

How do you tell if it’s a buying keyword? Generally, one of the best strategies is to look at the bid price for that keyword. The higher the number, the better. This means there are advertisers willing to pay money to show up for that term. They wouldn't be doing this if they weren't profitable.

That’s all there is to it. These are really the only three questions you need to ask when determining your success. Some will tell you that “bounce rate” and "average visit time" are important.

However, neither variable is as critical as visitor value. It really doesn’t matter how much time the visitor is spending on your site, as long as they are buying your product. So to avoid confusion, just worry about visitor value. Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.

The bottom line is, your SEO success is not just determined by ranking. The key to online profits is traffic + conversion. Getting ranked is just the first step to the latter two. Those are the real metrics that will ultimately determine your success or failure.

There’s no need to struggle when it comes to optimizing your site and there’s no need to pay thousands of dollars to hire a professional. You can do it! Get your copy of SEO 101 – The Startup Servicepreneur's SEO Solution, you’ll be amazed with your results.

This is not true. The vast majority of VA companies fail. This is because of a few critical mistakes made during the beginning stages. Here are the five mistakes to avoid:

Mistake #1) Not having a plan

It’s essential to have a business plan in order to make money. Anything sustainable doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be intentional.

The truth is, starting this business is not cheap. Knowing ahead of time what you can afford to spend can save you from disaster. Therefore, a good plan will include a budget and marketing strategy.

Mistake #2) Trying to be a jack-of-all-trades

Attempting to do too much is a common mistake. Many owners try to handle every task in order to get more business.

However, if you do this, you won’t be able to focus your marketing on one specific group of people. As is often said, “if everyone is your customer than no one is your customer.”

Becoming the best at one particular skill is usually more profitable than being average at twenty. This will help you stand out from the crowd. You might want to consider investing in training if you really want to master a skill.

Mistake #3) Putting up with distractions

If you are going to work from home, make sure you are in a place that is free of distractions. In other words, don’t have your office in a high-trafficked part of the home.

This is one of the biggest killers to productivity. Instead, set up a dedicated workspace where you can have uninterrupted work time. If possible set a schedule and stick to it.

Mistake #4) Not focusing on the marketing

It is difficult to make money without being a good marketer, even if you are the best VA in the world. If you can’t attract business, your skills will not do you much good.

Mistake #5) Not having a scalable business

That’s not to say you shouldn’t do any VA assignments yourself. After all, you might really enjoy them. However, recognize that there are limits to the amount of tasks you can do yourself in a 24-hour day. That’s why hiring people will enable you to accept more work, and therefore make your business scalable.

For instance, if you have a web design VA business, you might only be able to finish one site a week yourself. However, if you have twenty people working for you, your productivity will be multiplied times twenty.

The bottom line is, having a VA business can be extremely profitable. When you avoid the five common mistakes listed above, you can start making money very fast.

Here are 10 reasons search engines might not index your webpage.

As it is, some pages are just not meant to be indexed by the spiders. This may not matter to your overall SEO strategy however it’s important to understand what spiders do and don’t index. Search engine spiders don’t index:

• Pages only accessible by using a search form
• Pages that require a log in
• Pages that require visitors to submit a form
• Pages that redirect to a different URL before showing content

While some pages are not meant to be indexed, other pages are and might be missed. Pages that spiders often ignore include:

• Pages with too many outgoing links
• Pages with complex URLs – these often give spiders an error result
• Pages which are more than three clicks from the home page, often described as “deep pages”

Other factors may prevent your web pages from being indexed by search engines. These factors include:

• Broken links from your site
• A webpage that exceeds 105K
• A slow loading time or a down server.

Finally, if your page is a flash page, search engine spiders just won’t be able to recognize it and will therefore not index it. As you’re optimizing your website and specific web pages, pay attention to these factors. The goal, of course is to be indexed and to achieve first page search engine results.

Usually we resist choosing a target market because…

• We think that if we choose one group to target we’ll be passing up opportunities we could have had.
• We think that there won’t be enough clients to go around. Especially when we are in an industry filled with competitors.
• We think that because our businesses are online we can target the entire world.
• We think that if we only target a small group of people/companies that we won’t be able to make enough money.

But, the truth is that when you narrow your focus by choosing a target market marketing your business will become easier.

• Your marketing strategies can be more focused and result oriented.
• Your marketing messages will hit its mark every time. Plus, you’ll only need one message.
• You’ll know where to find potential clients, what to say to them when you find them. You’ll even know what to sell them.
• Because you’ll know where your hangs out at and what they read and listen to you’ll know what to and how to focus your marketing time and your advertising dollars.

What will you be doing?

You are going to be assisting doctors in getting paid quicker. All you do is file the claim with the health coverage firm whenever an insured patient comes in for a visit.

Before the doctor can receive payment, the claims have to get processed by the insurance firm. The doctors don’t get paid until the claims are approved.

That’s where you come in. The doctors don’t have time to file the claims themselves. That’s why they hire people for this.

What skills do you need? You have to able to write code. This will tell the insurance firm the details about the doctor visit.

But the coding isn’t easy. It’s a rather complex topic. Should it be wrong, the claim will not go through, and the doctor’s office will not get paid.

How do you learn coding? There are courses online that teach this. This is probably your best bet. There are also offline courses you can take, such as at colleges in your area. However, it’s often much faster to learn online, and very likely cheaper.

You will need software as well. You need software for both the billing and coding. Just make sure you get a quality application, as some of the software sold is not going to do the job. There are tons of applications out there, so make sure you read a review of whichever one you are considering before buying.

Do you need to do both the coding and the billing? A few of the offices hire one person for both tasks, whereas others get one person for each skill. If you can do both, you will usually make more money than somebody who just does one or the other. Most offices don’t want to hire two people, so they look for people who can do both coding and filing.

However, you need to be a great marketer. Even if you know everything about coding and filing, you still have to find offices that will work with you. That’s where marketing savvy comes in.

You might even want to outsource the coding and filing, and focus exclusively on the marketing. This is where the real money is made.

Many tele-commuting job websites will have medical billing openings posted online. This is a great place to start.

The bottom line is, a medical billing business is a great work from home opportunity. It’s cheap to start up, and you can make a lot of money with it if you are a good marketer.

The four types of linking, for SEO purposes, are…

• One way links
• Reciprocal links
• Text links
• Internal links

1. One-way links hold the highest value and they’re created when someone links to you without you having to also link to them. You can create one-way links by…

• Writing and publishing quality content
• Participating in online directories
• Writing articles for other sites, article marketing
• Writing press releases
• Blogging
• Social networking

2. Reciprocal links are powerful too. However, they must come from relevant websites. The trick is to balance reciprocal links with one-way links. Mix up your linking tactics so it looks natural to Google.

3. Text links are links that contain only text. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them, they are taken to a different page on the same website. Generally, the text included in the link is called anchor text and it’s a great way to optimize the keywords on your page and link to an external or internal webpage.

4. Internal Links are a great way to demonstrate to Google and other search engines the importance of pages within your website. You’ll link to the important pages from other pages on your site.

As you’re creating and implementing your search engine optimization strategies, take the time to consider and include these linking tactics. While you may not be able to complete them all at the same time, instead focus on one tactic at a time adding to your SEO strategy as you grow.

There’s no need to struggle when it comes to optimizing your site and there’s no need to pay thousands of dollars to hire a professional. Check out SEO 101 – The Startup Servicepreneur's SEO Solution for tactics you can do yourself, you’ll be amazed with your results.

Here are ten tips for effective SEO on a small budget.

1. When researching your keywords, use any number of the free keyword research tools available.

2. Use trends and read blogs and industry publication to find relevant and interesting topics to write about.

3. Content, content, content. Write your own blog posts, articles and reports. Content is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy and if you write your content yourself you’ll save thousands. Even if you write some of the content yourself, you can save lots of money. And the more valuable and compelling your content, the more folks will link to it which helps your SEO ranking significantly.

4. Participate on social networking sites and market your website and your content. Include a link to your website in your profiles and link to new content in your posts. Links generate traffic and boost SEO.

5. Use article directories/syndication. Article directories are free and they’re a wonderful way to generate links to your website. They also help you create an online presence and establish credibility as an authority in your industry.

6. AdSense ads can be a frugal way to boost SEO; however, it’s imperative you keep tight control on your budget and test and track your ads for performance.

7. Write press releases and submit them to online press release websites. They create incoming links and media attention.

8. Get listed on online business directories like dir.yahoo.com. Business directories create quality and relevant links to your website.

9. Finally, partner with other business owners in your industry to link to each other, guest blog or article swap, or to swap advertisements. Partnering with others is a great way to get exposure and increase your SEO for next to nothing.

When it comes to boosting your SEO or creating a budget-friendly search engine optimization strategy you have many options.SEO101 – The Startup Servicepreneur's SEO Solution gives you complete system that you can easily implement.

For the rest of us, we don’t have the time to experiment with our search engine optimization. We just want to know what to optimize and how.

Here are the eight things you can, and should, optimize on your website for search engine results.

• Your Blog Posts
• Articles You plan to submit to Directories
• Your Content
• Your HTML
• Everything in between the <head></head> Tag (including the Title Tag and meta tags)
• Your images
• Your multimedia including audio and video content
• Social Media campaigns (they can create valuable buzz and back links)

Of course, how you optimize each item listed above varies.

For example, video content is generally optimized by placing keywords in the file name, title tag and then making sure to write a clear description about the video either in your code or directly in the text on your page. Content is optimized by placing your keywords in the headline, subheadings and the first and last paragraph. However, search engine spiders also look for words that relate to your keywords, a process called Latent Semantic Indexing, and they look to see how often your keyword is used, keyword density.

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into search engine optimization. If you don’t have the time or patience to experiment, there’s help.

SEO 101 – The Startup Servicepreneur's SEO Solution

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SEO Content Tools – Content is one of the most common and most effective tactics for increasing website ranking. The more relevant and informative content you have on your website the higher your page ranking. The following tools will make it easier to optimize your content:

Keyword tools. While the primary focus of content is to provide valuable information it is also helpful to optimize the content for a keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword tools can help you determine which keywords to use in your content.

• Free Keyword Suggestion tool
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Duplicate content checkers. Search engines often penalize a site if their content is being used more than once. It’s called duplicate content. In order to avoid this, and get the most use of the content you have written you can compare articles to make sure you’re not going to be penalized.

• Copyscape
• Article Checker

SEO Blog Tools – WordPress plug-in developers have created a number of tools to help blog owners optimize their sites.

Tagging. Tags are labels that people use to make it easier to find blog posts, photos and videos that are related.

• Simple tags plugin
• All in One SEO Pack
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/another-wordpress-meta-plugin

Website SEO Tools – Metadata has fallen by the wayside when it comes to optimization but all that’s required is a little attention to your web code and the tags. These include not only the keywords in the meta tags themselves but also the title and header tags.

• Advanced Meta-Tags Generator
• Meta Tag Analyzer

Linking Tools – Linking is a great way to increase your page ranking. However just any old link won’t do. The link has to come from a trusted and reliable source. This means you’ll need to create a linking strategy. To create this strategy, consider exploring what your competition is doing.

Search engines enable you to enter a URL and see how many incoming links it has. This is not only a great way to check your own website but also see what your competition is up to. To find out who is linking to you or your competition visit:

• Yahoo and enter link:http://www.swebsiteurl.com with the website address in the space where it says websiteurl.
• Google and/or MSN and enter link: http://www.swebsiteurl.com with the website address in the space where it says websiteurl.

SEO tools are abundant. Spend your time analyzing and investigating each tool before you use it. They can be tremendously helpful to enhance your SEO strategy and your bottom line.