Once installed in your firefox browser you will have access to tons of SEO relevant informtion about any site you visit.

You can easily turn it on and off with a click of your mouse, thus making it easy to turn it on fast whenever you want to SEO-analyze a competing web site or when you’re researching a new market.

The SEO toolbar integrates:

• SEO tools from Aaron Wall’s site http://www.seobook.com.
• Site specific information from major search engines and directories, like google, yahoo, dmoz and others.
• Site specific information using a dozen services like Alexa.com, compete.com, domaintools.com and many more.
• Roundabout 50 Newsfeeds from SEO authority sites.

Here’s just a few from the many, many things you can do with the excellent SEO toolbar:

• Analyze how many back links a page and its domain have in search engines and directories.
• See how many people are subscribed to a blog via bloglines.
• Analyze keyword density for a page.
• See google page rank and Alexa rank.
• Get domain age and whois information.
• Highlight nofollow links.
• Read the latest SEO news headlines from SEO expert sites in a drop down menu.
• Compare SEO information for up to 5 web sites.
• See site popularity on social bookmarking sites.
• Research keywords and markets.

You can download Aaron Wall’s SEO toolbar at:
http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar

Besides Roboform this is definitely the most important toolbar you can add to your firefox.

The ‘long-tail’ is a term given to a keyword phrase that is longer than the normal keyword phrase that you may have in the past been targeting to gain organic traffic from the search engines.

Let me explain.

In the past it was common place to target highly trafficable keywords that were very popular in your niche in the hope that you would be able to gain a share of this huge amount of traffic.

For example, if you had built a site about internet marketing and search engine optimization you would have done your keyword research and discovered that the term “search engine optimization” was searched for over 450,000 times per month. So naturally you would have optimized your pages for this keyword phrase to try to get a listing on the first page of the search engines (SERPs) to capitalize on this traffic.

Then you would have focused on optimizing a webpage for the next highest keyword phrase – and then the next – and then the next. And so on.

Basically most people only ever focus their efforts on the top 20 search terms and forget about the rest as there just doesn’t seem to be enough reward in optimizing a webpage on a long-tail keyword phrase that only gets a handful of visitors each day.

For instance, a long-tail keyword phrase for your internet marketing site may be “search engine optimization keywords”, but as this term only gets about 390 searches a month you decide to forget about it. It’s just not worth the effort, particularly when you can get 450,000 visitors by optimizing for a more popular keyword like “search engine optimization”.

But let’s face it.

There are only 10 spots on the first page of any search engine, so the odds of you being able to gain a top spot for competitive keywords such as “search engine optimization” is remote at best. However this doesn’t deter most people as the lure of a share of 450,000 visitors is just too compelling.

The end result is that for most people this just doesn’t happen and as a result they never achieve the traffic they hope for. So they give up trying and never reach the heights that they expected.

But here’s the real twist…

Some of the marketers who do get lucky and get a high listing for one of their main keywords still don’t see the long-term rewards they had thought they would achieve with a top search engine listing for a popular keyword. And it’s all due to not focusing on the “long-tail”.

Let me give you an example to explain what I mean.

For one moment let’s assume you have built an internet marketing website and after a lot of effort and hard work you finally achieve the #1 spot for your top keyword. In fact, your top 20 keywords are sending you 15,000 visitors a day to your website from the search engines and you’re making a good income from monetizing this traffic.

You’re getting heaps of free traffic and the money is rolling in. What more could you ask for. Life is great!

The trouble is that in your excitement to optimize your site for the top keyword phrases in your niche, you forget about the long-tail keyword phrases. But hey, who cares. Your top keywords bring in 95% of your traffic, so you don’t need to worry about the smaller stuff. It’s just not worth the effort.

Then you wake up one morning and check your web stats.

Disaster!

Your traffic has dropped from 15,000 to a mere 500 overnight. You hurriedly check the position of your keywords and discover that Google has had a dreaded update and you’re no longer on the front page for your main keywords. In fact, you’ve gone from the first page to the 7th page.

All of a sudden instead of earning $10k per month, you’re looking at maybe $500 if you’re lucky. Basically your entire business has been destroyed overnight. And if you think this is an isolated case, think again. This scenario is repeated every time the search engines update their algorithms.

Now imagine that rather than just focusing entirely on the popular keywords, you decided to focus on the long-tail keyword phrases to drive traffic to your site. But rather than focus on just a few long-tail keywords, you focus on 200 such keywords. Combined these keywords can drive more traffic to your site than what your most competitive keywords can.

Yes it’s a lot more work – but remember, you want to build a long-term sustainable internet business, so it’s not going to be easy. The rewards will be worth it.

And here’s the real exciting part – you are getting traffic from a wider range of keywords. So if one of your top rankings keywords bites the dust, it won’t have a huge affect on your business as you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.

People who search using long-tail keywords are highly targeted potential customers. They have already done their preliminary searches and are now totally focused on exactly what they want and therefore they are more likely to convert to customers than someone who does a broader keyword search.

So while you may not get as many visitors to your site if you focus your efforts on long-tail keyword phrases, your visitors are more likely to convert into customers at a much higher rate – plus you have created a LONG-TERM business in that you are not at the mercy of the search engines and it is unlikely that you would be wiped out overnight.

So the next time you built a niche site, don’t forget to go long for the long term keyword phrase!

1. Massive Viral Traffic
Viral marketing is one of the many good sources of immense, recurring traffic. The very purpose of viral marketing is to reach out to as many website visitors as possible. Examples:

• The simple tell-a-friend script you use on your website is a form of viral marketing. A visitor sends a recommendation to a few friends. Then some of these friends pass it to their group of peers. Ideally that cycle goes on and on.
• When you submit articles to article directories for publishing, you are also taking advantage of the principles of viral marketing. It’s not only about having that article show up in the article directory – that wouldn’t be viral. It’s about others picking up your article and publishing it on their web sites and sending it to their lists.

These are just 2 examples. Both will spread your message around and send fresh traffic to your site for years to come.

2. Higher Sales and Profits
If you have enormous traffic, your chance of striking a sale is high. The more people browsing your products, the more sales you will have. Plus, a lot of people these days buy only from websites that are directly referred to them by families and friends. So if your website happens to be mentioned in a tightly knit community, all of the people who belong there are much more likely to buy from you than from your competition.

3. Increased Popularity and Authority
Viral marketing can virtually make you or your website popular overnight. Just imagine ten people talking about your website, product, or service to ten of their friends. Now those ten people would talk to another ten of their friends. Your client base would be increasing by the exponents of 10 and you can’t help it.

4. Cost Effective, Almost Free
With viral marketing, you really don’t have to worry about advertising costs. Your advertisers are the best in the world – and they are working for you for free at that. A person who directly suggests your product to a friend is the best form of advertising you can have. That beats the biggest banner on the most popular website in the world. A person is more likely to trust his friend rather than the ad he saw flickering on his computer screen.

The viral marketing definition

Wouldn’t you like that?

By definition, with viral marketing you ‘infect’ a few people with something that’s worthwhile sharing. Then they spread it around (for you) when they meet their pears.

The important phrase here is ‘worthwhile sharing’.People must have a reason to spread your message.

When you define your viral campaign you must pay the utmost attention to creating something people are excited about. That is: something of high value or something that’s highly entertaining.

If they like it they start sending it around. Or maybe you created it so that they have a benefit from passing it to their friends.

It’s best when they are so excited that they pass it around even if they have no benefit at all. But here are a few example benefits of sharing your viral content. It’s called ‘Bribery’

• they get money,
• or reward points,
• or free products,
• or whatever.

Their friends then virally forward it to more and more of their friends.

You can imagine it like circles around circles that get larger and larger.

1. You are in the center. You start sending your viral message to the smallest inner circle of people that you have direct contact to.
2. Then they pass it to people in an outer circle, the second circle, you don’t even know.
3. Then it’s passed to the third circle of people and so on.

At amazing speed the number of people who see your viral marketing message gets larger and larger.

Of course there are much more technical viral marketing definitions, but the important thing is not the technical Mumbo Jumbo. The important thing is: once you send it out, it distributes fast and wide without you lifting a finger. In the shortest time you reach tons and tons of people.

In the end it’s your pleasure to turn your viral traffic into sales and cash.

Reality check: Since July 25 2008 it’s official; there are more than 1 Trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) web pages competing against each other and competing with your tiny internet presence.

What does that do to your hopes of being #1? Still alive and kicking? Great!

Here’s some good news: Unlike what most people think it actually isn’t that hard to get a good search engine position. There are 3 simple things every web site owner can do to increase his visibility on the net…
to be continued, sign up for the news feed on the right hand side.

What I learned from talks with fellow entrepreneurs is that many business people who’ve had a business web site for years still have no clue on how to make it successful.

They don’t have much visitors; and the few who come to their web site don’t turn into customers. A visitor shows up, clicks, leaves, and is never seen again.

This is not what you want, right?

Successfully promoting your web site is neither hard to do nor is it a hidden secret nor is it expensive.

In the upcoming months I will show you dozens of strategies you can use to get targeted traffic to your business web site.

• What makes the difference between a successful web site promotion and a failure?
• What if you had a simple plan, a guiding principle, to promote your web site from zero to hero?

Having A Successful Website Does Not Happen By Accident.

Instead it is something that you can plan and then achieve easily step by step.

You’re guaranteed to turn your site into an internet marketing success if you commit to the 5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion and do a few simple steps on a daily basis.

How To Build A Solid Foundation For Your Marketing Plan.

Just like building a house, building a successful web site requires a strong and solid foundation. Your success cannot be built on something ethereal, you want to build a house to last.

So before taking any promotional action you need to be clear about the overall goal or your web site.

Read again: do not take any action unless your 100% clear about your site’s goal and your targeted visitors.

Don’t take this lightly. It sounds so obvious and simple that most people rush over it and never really think about it.

But you should.

I’ve had dozens of consultations with business owners who ignored that advice. These are the people that say internet marketing doesn’t work.

And they are right.

If you put up random web sites without a goal and a plan you set yourself up for failure. But that’s true in any area in life, isn’t it? Taking action without a plan and a goal just doesn’t yield much.

Here’s your chance to get it right. Print this article out and then write down the answer to these questions:

1. Who exactly is your ideal visitor? Where do you find these people online? At first you might find it hard to be precise about that. You may be afraid to leave people out and reduce your chance. Actually your chances of success will increase if you narrow your target.
2. What do you want your visitors to do once they come to your site? What is the primary goal of your web site? Sure, you do not want to leave them for good. But what do you want? And how do you make them do what you want them to do?

The answers to that will be your guiding principle whenever you’re not sure what to do next and what to focus on.

It sounds more complicated than it is.

But you’ll never figure it out unless you write down your goals and start taking the appropriate actions.

Once you know your goals and your ideal visitor you can implement a step by step internet marketing plan.

The 5 pillars of web site promotion represent 5 topics you should use on a daily basis to make your site successful.

Taking little steps each day will be much more profitable than doing a huge and expensive marketing blast in one week and then do nothing for the next 12 months.

Continuity builds success.

That’s why you rather do 15 minutes a day. The little actions you take will build up like compounded interest in your bank account.

So What Are The ’5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion’?

At first glance it might seem a lot – but if you take it one step at a time all will come easy and natural to you. Here you go:

The first pillar of web site promotion: Getting back links to your site. That’s really important. The more back links you can get to your site, the better. Ideally try to get links from sites that match your site in topic. So if you have an internet marketing site, you don’t want too have all your links coming from sites about golf or dog grooming.

Why?

1. Visitors from a related site are more likely to click through to you.
2. Search engines like Google will give more weight to that link if the site’s topic matches yours.

What else do we have for your ‘promotional consideration’?

The second pillar of web site promotion: Email Marketing. I hate to break it to you, but let’s face an ugly truth here: Unless you capture their email address 99 from 100 visitors leave your site for good.

They did not buy, and they will never come back.

The way to turn this around is email marketing. Get your visitors email and permission to email them with marketing messages.

Here are a few benefits of capturing your visitor’s email:

• You can send out promotions for your own products and services to increase sales.
• You can send out promotions for affiliate programs and earn commissions.
• You can point your your readers back to your site and thus create repeat visits.

Now if you manage to drive new visitors to your site for free, you’d have a killer marketing strategy funneling your free traffic into your email promotions. Getting free web site visitor’s is what the next pillar is about.

The third pillar of web site promotion: Search Engine Optimization. 85% of all visitors arrive at your site through a search engine. So they did a search, for example with Google. Your site came up at the search engine results page (SERP) and the visitor clicked through.

The more often your site is at the top of search engine results pages, the more free traffic you get.

That’s why you should optimize your site for the search engines. The process is called ‘search engine optimization’. In short it means that you optimize your site in a way that makes it relevant for specific search terms people might use. Let’s say your site is about ‘the 5 pillars of web site promotion’. When someone enters that term in a search, then you would want to see your site at the top of the search engine results.

About the 5pillars … ah, well, it’s not something people are likely to search for … I know that.

You can learn more about search engine optimization in this blog’s category ‘search marketing’. Now let’s see how to make humans and search engine robots fall in love with your site, it’s pillar #4:

The fourth pillar of web site promotion: The amount and attractiveness of content on your web site. Search engines as well as visitors love regularly updated and content rich web sites.

After all: why would someone come to your site twice if there’s noting new to discover. On the internet we’ve become information junkies.

• People browsing the net are looking for information.
• They are looking for sites that provide value.
• They are craving new content all the time.

That’s why it’s easy to put your competition to dust.

Most of them treat their web site like a business brochure that is rarely updated. Take advantage and post fresh and useful content. Your visitors and the search engines will love it, come back often and refer your site.

The fifth pillar of web site promotion: Promoting your web site with paid advertising. This is the fastest way to get targeted visitors to your site: placing ads on other web sites and offline in print magazines and news papers.

The crucial point of course is that it costs money to place an ad. Unless you already have a marketing budget you should start to set one up. Or- if you’re dead broke – your paid marketing will have to wait till you made some money. It is however an area not to be neglected.

There’s no other means of online marketing where you have that much control about who gets exposed to your promotion.

But since it’s costly: better make sure your web site converts visitors to buyers before running a campaign. When running an ad campaign keep track of cost and be sure to stop it if it generates a loss.

So those are the 5 pillars.

Remember our building analogy?

There’s a final piece missing to build your house – the roof of your successful web site promo.

Let’s Top Your Success – With A Roof

The final piece of your marketing plan is ‘Measure Your Success’!

You do not want to waste your time and effort and money on any activity that doesn’t pay off. So measure what works and what doesn’t. Then expand what works and discontinue what doesn’t.

How do you do it?

Well, first of all get yourself a software to track what visitors are doing on your site. The easiest way to go is Google analytics.

Technically it’s a tiny piece of text that will be incorporated in all your pages. Then the analytics software will track what happens on your site.

A site analytics tool will show you useful information like:

• how many visitors come to your site
• what pages do they look at
• how long do they stay
• where do they leave
• etc. etc.

So there you have it, the foundation, the 5 pillars and the roof.

That Finishes Our Picture…

Here You Have It, The Step By Step Plan For Successful Web Site Promotion.

1. Before you start promoting decide who should come to your site and what action you want your visitor to take.

2. Work on improving all 5 pillars for your site. You could for example invest 15 to 30 minutes each day on 1 of the pillars. If you follow through from Monday to Friday you’ll be amazed. You’ll see your traffic grow and people coming back to your site again and again. Example:

1. Monday: 30 minutes link building.
2. Tuesday: 30 minutes to improve your email marketing.
3. Wednesday: 30 minutes to SEO one page on one of your sites.
4. Thursday: 30 minutes to add fresh content to one of your sites.
5. Friday: 30 minutes to place an ad through PPC, E-zines, or print advertising.

3. While building your traffic and working on the 5 pillars, monitor what’s happening on your site. Put more time, energy and money in promotions that produce results. Stop promotions that do not produce results.

Remember: Continuity Builds Success! Follow through with such an easy plan on a day by day basis and you simply can’t fail.

You’re guaranteed to see your traffic jump through the roof.