I just got some spam claiming their big news is that they are now offering “deep linking seo service”. Huh. Is that right? They have not understood before now that it is all about deep linking and always has been – or at least as long as I have been involved in the SEO field.

If you have been running around trying to get home page links, you have really missed out, and it’s time to start changing your strategy. The first thing you could do, is simply filling out the form on our contact page, and we will handle it all for you. Getting those deep links to your inner pages can be difficult, but luckily we can handle the whole thing for you – from A to Z.

The problem with inquiring deep links to inner pages is that you need to have precise control of  the page linking to your page. This includes you need to have control of the exact link word or phrase. Using traditional methods can be difficult, since you have limited control of the location you get linked to, and also the link text.

Let us show you how elegant we can handle this for you, so you get those difficult to get inner page links that you so desperately need to get the traffic to the right pages.

What is your experience? Is it enough with links to the main page, or have you seen better results with deep linking?

For several years now, we have been helping SEO companies in direct competition with us to rank for the very same phrases we are working on ranking ourselves. I’m talking about phrases like seo company, seo, internet marketing, search engine optimization.

I am not gonna mention their names – we never talk about what clients we are working with, but you might find it odd that we are directly helping someone to beat us in the search results. My philosophy has always been that there is enough for everyone in our business. There are room for many more seo companies, and I believe it’s healthy for the seo business with as many competitors as possible. It’s good with freedom of choice for our clients, and especially in a business so full of pretenders as in ours. I also believe it keeps us alert and on the top of things when there is fierce competition.

So, when we were first approached by one of the big boys in the seo business in Europe about helping them build links to their own sites, I of course accepted. . Helping other SEO companies rank for our own terms actually helped us grow our own business in the end. We have learned tremendously much about how the business works, and how the different seo companies are working towards their clients. It has also thought us a great deal about how not to deal with clients.

What is your opinion? Do you help your competition in your field? I’d like to hear some pro’s and con’s. I have never regretted helping out other seo companies, and are gladly do it again when asked. After all – the best seo company wins the top positions. No matter how they do it, or who they have helping them achieve their goals.

I can’t really remember how many times have I talked with people that have said said “no. It did not work out”. This goes for all kinds of situations.

Like: Are you running that delivery service still? Answer: No. It did not really work out.

I have always lived by the idea that there is no failure, except no longer trying.

But, it does not mean that if you just keep trying knocking your head against the wall – it will eventually fall. It means that if you can’t tear down the wall by knocking your head in to it, you will have to step back, and look around you for another solution.

I used to be very single-minded in my youth. I did not look for alternative ways of solving a problem, so the result was that I simply gave up. I stopped trying.

A big part of the reason that I gave up easily, was that I had a very good safety network around me. I grew up in Norway with the best social system in the world. Although it’s great with a good safety net, it also gives you a feeling that it’s not so important if you fail. You always have the social services that will help you.

I needed to commit to succeeding, so I did a leap of faith. I cut all safety nets, and moved to Poland. Just so I would know – that this is success or get broken. There is nothing in between.

I basically moved to Poland having one single client that we could invoice for their positions in Google.no. Of course this was not even enough to cover the basic expenses of living. So I started calling around to my connections and basically begged them to believe in me and let us show them what a top 5 position in Google would mean for their business.

I got another two or three clients. It was enough to barely survive. But we kept trying.

Today, I can look back at this time, and when I read the saying “There is no failure, except no longer trying” – I can say with confidence - YES. This it true.

Do you have any good examples to share about this saying – or other sayings that really makes sense to you?

Aparently, our phone number in Bahrain used to be held by a company by the name Point View trading in Bahrain. Just to have mentioned it – we are not assosiated in any way with the company called Point View Trading Co. W.L.L.

Please make a search on Google for Point View Trading, and you will at least find a different phone number you can try to call in an Alibaba.com listing I saw there.

We are not Point View Trading, and have not heard about this company.

“Listen, Larry,” you say, doing your best to coat your singsong with a with a husky phlegm, “it just isn’t going to work out with you and me.”
“Work out?” He seems genuinely puzzled.
“Yes, you know, isn’t going to lead anywhere.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised where it might lead.”
“I bet I would. But it isn’t I mean, as a relationship, it has zero future.”
“Future? Oh, I get it. You mean you don’t foresee a pot of gold at the end of our juicy rainbow. You mean that our intimacy isn’t likely to yield a dividend.

You disappoint me, Gwendolyn. I hoped you might have a watt or two more light in your bulb than those poor toads who look on romance as an investment, like waterfront property or municipal bonds.

Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn’t have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance ‘lead anywhere?

Passion isn’t a path through the woods. Passion is the woods.

It’s the deepest wildest part of the forest; the grove where the fairies still dance and obscene old vipers snooze in the boughs.

Everybody but the most dried up and dysfunctional is drawn to the grove and enchanted by its mysteries, but then they just can’t wait to call in the chain saws and bulldozers and replace it with a family-style restaurant or a new S and L.

That’s the payoff, I guess. Safety. Security. Certainty.

Yes, indeed.

Well, remember this, pussy latte: we’re not involved in a ‘relationship’, you and I, we’re involved in a collision. Collisions don’t much lend themselves to secure futures, but the act of colliding is hard to beat for interest.”

Tom Robbins, Half-asleep in Frogs Pajamas

When talking to potential clients I often get asked the question “how hard is it to rank for general terms for their business. So, instead of answering this in mail as I have done so far, I will try to explain this in a post here so I can copy and paste the URL to the post to all of you

First of all – you need to ask yourself “what terms do I want my business to rank for – and why these terms?”.

The reason this is so important to do before you go on and start working on ranking for these terms is the fact that it takes a lot of time and effort to rank for the general terms. It’s difficult because all your competitors are trying to do the same – and as you know – the search results pages are devided in to 10 results in general – so there are only room for 10 links on the first page (not counting the sponsored links, local results or images/news results).

The above means that you better think this through before you proceed with ranking for “blue widgets” or any other really general term for your business.

Now – let us assume you have decided that despite the harsh competition for the term “blue widgets” with about 120,000,000 results in Google currently, you really want to rank for this term.

The check-list

I will list here the important things you need to go trough before you even consider building links for the blue widgets term.
[custom_list type="check"]

• URL – does it contain the general term in the address to the page? It needs to look like www.yourcompanywebsite.com/blue-widgets/preferably. I have experimented earlier with placement of the search phrase in the URL, and the tests showed that it’s better to use – (dash) as devider of the words than _ (underscore). It’s better because the one with dash ranks higher that the one using underscore where all other factors are the same.
• Title-tag – does it contain the phrase? It needs to be there to rank well.
• Headline needs to be wrapped in the H1 tag.
• The main text – The phrase needs to be included on many texts on the page – but not exaggerated. This is a fine balancing game. You need to stuff it in there without making it look key word stuffed. The text needs to be readable for the end user – not the search engines. The reason this is so important is obvious. Who wants to read a “great” machine text that does not make sense?
• The internal linking on the site itself needs to be done right. Link from the front page to all the important pages to push as much link-juice to them as you possibly can.
• Links from external sites needs to link directly to the page – with the link text blue widgets. This is one of the harder parts – how do you convince someone to link to your page?

[/custom_list]

Do you want more people to visit your web shop?  Who doesn’t?  More traffic means you can help more people, make more sales, or increase the authority of your brand!  Here are 8 great ways to increase the traffic to your online store:

1)  Create a blog.  Some online shops have blogs, but most don’t.  Google loves websites with regularly-updated content.  Not only is this good for Google, but you get the opportunity to highlight some of the strengths of your product or service and demonstrate why it’s superior to that of the competition.  You’ll need about two 500-word posts per week at the minimum, with a couple more than that being the ideal.

2)  Be the first to write on a topic, or take a unique perspective.  News spreads fast on the internet, and much of it is basically the same thing repeated over and over again.  If you’re the first to write on a topic, everyone has to credit your site, which can lead to thousands of new visitors in just a few days.  Or, if you take a unique or controversial perspective, people may start clamoring to your site to hear what you have to say.

3)  Engage in linkbaiting.  Linkbaiting is the art of strategically placing any piece of web content so that others notice it and hopefully link to it.  Done properly, this technique can lead to hundreds or even thousands of new links in the space of just a few days.

4)  Give away free content.  Try giving your users a free e-book!  As long as it’s of good quality, they’ll appreciate the free information and thank you for it.  In your e-book, be sure to highlight reasons why your product or service is superior to the competition’s, and provide some additional tips on how to use your products or services in ways most people may not be aware of.

5)  Use the social media.  Use any of the major social media outlets to distribute your message!  Although imprecise, Tweeting, sharing bookmarks on Digg, creating a Facebook Page, or posting videos on YouTube has the potential to deliver thousands more visitors in the span of minutes or hours!

6)  Google Analytics.  You won’t know what’s working and what’s not unless you measure what you’re doing.  Use Google Analytics, setup custom variables, and monitor the results.

7)  Article marketing.  Either distribute your articles to article directories or hire an SEO firm to do it for you.  Marketing your articles provides free one-way back links (the best kind) and a noticeable amount of traffic.

8)  Press releases.  Develop SEO-optimized press releases with targeted keywords and send them down the wire in hopes they will be picked up by the major social media outlets.  News editors will pick up the interesting stories and write about them, creating a viral effect.  This isn’t a time to be cheap though – be sure to use the paid services of the major players.  If you want, you can always submit your press release on the free sites.

Overall, there are many strategies you can use to get more people to visit your online store.  Keep in mind that persistence, research, and revising strategy are the 3 keys to figuring out what will work for your site.

Everyone who is marketing their business on the internet today knows how stiff the competition is.  Most large companies are well-entrenched into their respective internet marketing strategies, however, many established small and medium-sized businesses are just making the transition, and many new businesses are starting every day.  With the internet being so large, complex, rapidly-changing, and incredibly competitive, how can a small business even begin to compete and increase the number of orders it receives?

Fortunately, the internet allows everyone to compete, even very small businesses.  At Devenia, we have extensive experience and a plethora of research which has helped us arrive at a small set of recommendations for companies looking to increase their sales.

1)  Make sure your product or service solves a problem people actually care about.  How are you measuring this?  You can sell practically anything on the internet with little-to-no start-up costs.  Make sure you are monitoring your sales, and that you know the profiles of customers who are most likely to purchase your product.

2)  Make your sales pitch a personal one.  If your website’s sales pitch sounds canned, as though it could have been written for many different websites, you’re not marketing effectively enough.  Do your best to convey that you are interested in the well-being of others.

3)  Tell an emotionally-charged story.  Once you understand your customer demographic, contact a customer who exemplifies that demographic and ask him or her to share a story of how your product or service changed their life for the better.  Your audience will think, “That’s me!” and will be more likely to purchase from you as a result.

4)  Make sure your website has a clean and professional design. Make sure that every link on your site points to the right location, and when you inevitably find an error, correct it immediately and apologize to your customers!  Eliminate ALL spelling and grammatical errors – they make you look unprofessional, and eliminating them makes you stand out from the competition.  Make sure that everything is easy to locate.  Forcing your customers to click any more than 3 times will annoy them and cause them to go somewhere else.

5)  Be careful with advertising.  Don’t clutter your site with advertisements, including the very-annoying pop-ups.  This conveys to your readers that money is your concern, not the well-being of your customers.  People expect advertising, but if that advertising becomes annoying, irrelevant, or detracts from the quality of the website in any way, you can expect to see a decrease in your sales.

6)  Test your sales copy.  You did collect customer demographics didn’t you?  If you haven’t, you should start now!  Once you’ve identified the demographic of your customer, you’ll want to know their psychology intimately.  And after you’ve learned that, then it’s time to create a sales pitch.  Try one out, test the results, and then try another and compare.  Keep what works and drop what doesn’t.

7)  Create a strong call-to-action.  A call-to-action is when you ask your customers to do something after giving them your information or sales pitch.  Make sure its a strong one that encourages prompt action.  Visitors need to know exactly what to do and should experience absolutely no hiccups during the process.

If you take the time to carefully implement these strategies, you’ll notice an increase in your sales.  Of course, these are just some of the tactics Devenia recommends. Contact us right now and we’ll be happy to help you begin increasing your sales today!

What is online lead generation?  In one sentence, online lead generation is when a small business creates consumer inquiry in its product or services.  A lead is when someone declares interest in a business’s products or services by providing their contact information.

How are Leads Generated Online?

Like the real world, online lead generation has its own systematic method for generating leads.  Here are the steps your business can take to generate more leads online.

1)  Engage in a focused Search Engine Optimization strategy.  SEO is part of the process of helping search engines know about your website.  Once the search engines know, they then tell people about your website when they search for a relevant term.  In order to be competitive in today’s marketplace, it is important to be engaged in some level of SEO.  Purchase the maximum amount of SEO services your budget can comfortably handle.

2)  Directly e-mail your customers.  Make sure that your customers want the e-mail though!  Never, under any circumstances, collect people’s e-mail addresses without their permission.  This is one form of spam, and it will only garner you negative attention.  One great way to collect e-mail addresses is to offer a newsletter through your website.  In return for a person’s e-mail address, you send them a newsletter packed with free information, updates on your products and services, and special offers.  This strategy is inexpensive, costs just a small amount of time, and it targets people who’ve already communicated interest in your products and services.

3)  Buy leads from lead brokers.  Some companies exist with the sole purpose of collecting leads and reselling them to prospective buyers like you.  Termed “lead brokers,” they also have information for customers who are interested in products like yours.  This costs more than direct e-mail, but it can be pretty cost-effective in the long run if done right.

4)  Buy leads from Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  Google controls about 90% of all search traffic, so you’ll want to focus your efforts there.  Termed “Pay-Per-Click” (PPC), you create a budget, set the price you will pay per lead, and then pay when customers click on your link to go to your site.  You’ll want the help of an SEO firm to help you pick the best keywords, though.  PPC can be effective, although oftentimes Google’s leads aren’t always the most relevant.

5)  Create additional leads by offering rewards for referrals.  Referrals are effective because consumers who already love your product or service will tell someone else exactly how great it is!  As an added benefit, you can encourage current customers to sell by giving them a small commission on the sale or a discount if they purchase more.  Referrals are low-cost and you leave the grunt work to someone else!

If you choose the right lead systems for your business, you’ll find your traffic and sales skyrocketing in no time!  Before you do, be sure to seek Devenia’s services, as our intimate knowledge of lead generation will help you avoid many bumps and bruises along the path to success.

Traffic acquisition and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are a major consideration when evaluating an eCommerce website. The truth of SEO is that it’s best addressed before implementation.  However, even sites that are already deployed can attract more customers and recognize revenue benefits by implementing a well-structured SEO plan.  Following are a few tips for growing your website’s traffic:

1)  Research.  The best time to begin growing your traffic is before you even create your website.  First, you will want to hire an SEO firm to help you research the right keywords.  By targeting keywords where you can actually begin competing with other businesses in a relatively short period of time (usually a few months), you are giving your business’s website the best chance for success.  Target the wrong keywords, and you’ll find yourself being dominated by competitors or simply not being found by the right audience.

2)  Make sure your URL contains some of your targeted keywords.  Google places much weight on the URL of a website when determining its search engine rankings.  If you sell marketing services and your business’s name is the Smith Group, make your URL is something like “smithmarketingservices.com,” but not “smithgroup.com.”  It’s not the end of the world to not have your keywords in your URL, but it certainly helps a ton.

3)  Engage in SEO strategies.  Hiring the services of a successful SEO firm such as Devenia will help you stay ahead of the competition.  Make sure your meta keywords and description tags are completed, use a keyword density of 3.5% or less, use an H1 header and place your keywords in it, update robots.txt, update your sitemap, and make sure you have regularly updated content on your website.  Of course there’s much more to SEO than this, but these are some of the basic things to look out for.

4)  Make sure your site has a clean and professional design.  Nobody wants to go to a website that’s ugly or makes things hard to find.  If there’s broken links or grammatical errors, fix them right away and be sure to apologize to your audience if they were large mistakes!  “Professional” just means your site is organized, has a neutral color scheme, and otherwise makes a good impression on your visitors.  Remember, repeat business accounts for 80% of your business, so be sure to make a good first impression!

5)  Create a forum.  Forums can consume a significant amount of time, however, once established they can create a significant amount of repeat traffic, and loyal visitors will spread the word to others who might be interested.  In a forum, you can answer people’s questions, make special offers for loyal customers, or offer paid memberships with special benefits to select users.

6)  Use other people’s forums.  When posting on other people’s forums, you can typically place a link in your signature.  If you appear to be particularly knowledgeable and are able to answer people’s questions in a way that is meaningful to them, people will be interested in going to your site to see what products, services, or other helpful knowledge you can offer.

7)  Directories.  Many directories exist for every niche website imaginable.  These directories allow you to post your link for free, giving you a free back-link, and raising your site’s visibility in the eyes of Google.  They’ll also provide a small amount of traffic.

8)  Article marketing.  Writing articles and distributing them in the various free article directories is another way of getting free back-links and traffic.  People get a chance to see your knowledge and if you write authoritatively, they’ll be even more convinced to see the rest of what you have to offer at your website.

9)  Social media.  Using the social media is a boom-or-bust strategy, although with the services of Devenia, the effectiveness of social media can be increased.  Although rare, it is possible to dramatically increase your website’s traffic in the matter of just a few minutes or hours.

No matter what traffic strategies you may pursue, be sure to have the help of an experienced firm like Devenia, so that your business can achieve maximum success!