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Knowing the Buyer’s Intent - Free Keyword Help From Microsoft

How would you like to know if the visitor coming to your site is a buyer or just a looker? How would you like to have more buyers than lookers visit your website? Microsoft has developed a free resource to help do exactly that.

The tool has a fancy name - Detecting Online Commercial Intention - and some complex calculations behind it. Fortunately Microsoft has made it easy to use.

You probably already know that Keywords are the Critical Success Factor in getting the right visitors to your website and into your business. You want traffic that is looking for your products and services. People find those by using specific words and phrases - Keywords - on search engines - Google, Yahoo, etc. Therefore in order for people to find you the website and its content must be created around the specific keywords that people are using to find your specific market and niche.

This leaves a gapping hole for our needs however as website and business owners. People use the web to either just find information and because they are looking to buy something. We want those buyers looking to buy something - preferable in our office or store. This is where Microsoft’s “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” tool comes in.

Using the website Detecting Online Commercial Intention you can learn which keywords attract buyers and which are simply keywords used to find information. Microsoft says it this way:

“Web page searches display two levels of commercial intent: informational and transactional. This tool can detect customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs. For example, if a customer searches for “canon digital camera”, it is likely that they want to purchase a canon digital camera; therefore, the online commercial intent is strong, with a confidence level larger than 0.5.”

“This tool can be used to find keywords that are commercial but have low ad coverage. From a SEM point of view, it is useful to find these keywords as they have low bid density (low price), but high commercial value. Similarly, for an advertizing engine, this can help increase ad relevancy by displaying fewer ads if a keyword has low online commercial intent.”

Although the technology behind how the site determines the keyword’s effectiveness for knowing buying intent (Detecting Online Commercial Intention) is complex -see below - the site is easy to use. Simply type in the keyword or phrase and Microsoft will produce a percentage number on its value - or the likelihood that a person using this term is to buy what they find. The result is in a .00 form, so .20 would be 20% and so forth. Anything over a .50 (50%) is considered good.

Keywords are the critical success factor for getting both paid and organic traffic to your website. Knowing if they produce business is the most important question. Until now the only way to do this is to measure the conversion rate - sales - of different keywords based on the articles, advertising, and experience. Unfortunitly this information is historical data - hindsight - meaning you’ve had to use them and pay for them without knowing first their effectiveness.

Microsoft has provided the missing link of keyword research. Now you can get a better idea if the keywords used will produce visitors who are buyers or just lookers. This is very important, especially if your’e paying for advertising, such as Adwords, which are based on keywords and costs money every time someone clicks on them.

Another Free - Quick - Easy tool for you to use.

Website Naming - Harder Than Ever

Naming your website is one of the most important decisions that you will have to make - and one of the earliest. It should reflect what you do or your niche and be as close to your offline business as possible.

The problem is that with so many existing websites finding a good name that isn’t taken can difficult. Most webhosts provide a service to check on names for you however they are time consuming and hit and miss. Here is a website that will look up a name and offer suggestions based on keywords: DomainsBot. It is free, easy to use and quick - all the things I like. Happy site naming…

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Keyword Brainstorming

Keywords are the work horses of the Internet. Keywords are the critical success factor of any business that wants to get business from the Web - offline or online businesses. Local Businesses especially must have the right keywords in their content and on their site to attract new customers.

Sometimes however we get stumped trying to brainstorm the effective keywords for our niche and our business. Kwmap in a free resource that will help brainstorm and link different keywords in an attractive and intuitive display.

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As you can see from the website picture Kwmap will not only graph the keyword you search on but provide an entire list of associated keywords and relevent sites. You can drill down on the differnt keywords by clicking on them. Kwmap also allows you to link your site and url directy - in other words free publicity and networking for your business’ website.

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Another Free - Quick - and Easy resource for those wanting to take the Business Web Step.

Remarkable find: SocialMarker does the work for you

Every now and then you find a gem on the internet, a tool or website that makes your life so much easier that you don’t know how you lived without it. Recently I found such a treasure in SocialMarker. What makes this site so remarkable is that it is not only FREE but easy to use and a huge huge time saver.

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Growth requires new business. New business requires people seeing our offer - prospects - traffic in the online world. Everysite wants more traffic, including the websites of a local business.

To build traffic you need to network in at least 3 ways:

• Article Directories
• Website Directories
• Social Newtworks

Social Networks are increasing becoming the most important element for driving traffic (organic, that is unpaid traffic) on the web. Propeller, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Technorati, Del.icio.us, to mention only a few are becoming critical success factors for websites.

What is it?

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That’s where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

How Do You Use It?

All you need to do is simply drag this button to your bookmarks toolbar, in order to create a submission bookmarklet. When you are on a website that you want to socially mark, simply select the text and click the SocialMarker button to pre-populate the submission form with the selected information.

Why SocialMarker?

It can help you spread a link on 47 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!

• It helps you get a lot of backlinks.
• It helps you increase your traffic.
• Your link gets indexed by Google in a matter of minutes.
• Best of all, it’s free!

Of course the problem is who has time to enter information and link to all of these sites? No-one - or at least no-one who has to work for a living. Social Marker has taken the work out of the process. Here are the steps:

1. Sign up and get an account at the socai networking

2. Find interesting information and highlight what you want posted on the networking sites

3. Hit the link or bookmark that takes you back to SocialMarker

4. The information is automatically populated and the site takes you through each social network you’ve checked off to post the links.

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One of the great features of the site is that if you’re not registered with one of the social networks it allows registering without leaving the process of posting the information or loosing your place. Once you’ve registered and told your computer to keep you logged in then the entire process is automatic. Unbelievably fast, easy, and effective. Just take a look at the popular social networks SocialMarker works with:

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If you’re reading this and you want to build traffic - which I hope is everyone - check out SocialMarker. It’s free, quick, and easy. My signature theme - free quick, and easy. Cheers…Russ

Free Blog Statistics - Find Out the Who and What About Your Visitors

We spend all this time creating and adding content to our blogs. Do ever wonder if anyone is reading them? Want to know which pages are popular and what is getting read? Well there are a lot of expensive statistics and web metrics services out there - too rich for my blood. I just found a free resource for keeping track of what is going on at a Blog: MyBlogLog. It’s part of Yahoo and as always its Free - Quick - Easy

If you already have a Yahoo account MyBlogLog you are already signed up. Just enter your Blog information and you’ll get a complete record of the visitors to your Blog and the pages they visit! Great stuff.

Below is a screenshot of the information MyBlogLog provides. This was only minutes after I added the script to my Blog (very easy - they provide the code and you just cut and past it into the Wordpress Theme).

As always its Free - Quick - Easy

Click on an Image to see it more clearly

Get your Website & RSS feeds promoted for free

Here are some sites I found that allow you to link your website to and accept your RSS feed. Linking takes time but will build your site’s traffic. The sites below required only seconds to use and get connected with - no email or long registration process (mostly). I’ve checked out and confirmed that these sites work and that you can get registered on them - if you have good content.

Name: Blogarama
URL Address: www.blogarama.com
Description: A small search engine that will give you a directory listing
Add your blog here:http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/

Name: IceRocket
URL Address: http://www.icerocket.com
Description: A quick one-step link for your RSS feed
Add your blog here:http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping

Name: RDF Ticker
URL Address: http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/findchannels.php
Description: A link for your RSS feed, news oriented
Add your blog here:http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/addchannel.php

Name: Readablog
URL Address: http://www.readablog.com/
Description: A quick one-step link for your a website blog or RSS feed
Add your blog here:http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx

Name: Technorati
URL Address: http://www.technorati.com/
Description: Have to register and confirm with an email. However one of the most important sites on the web right now
Add your blog here:http://www.technorati.com/account/signup

231) Best Directory

http://www.directorybest.info/

Best Directory Anyone can use this directory without signing up to any service. Feeds are divided in 14 main categories, which are divided in two sub-categories themselves.

If you want to submit your feed, all you need to do is to pick the appropriate category, select the sub-categories in which your feed will best fit, provide a feed link, name, description and email, and finally the submission method:

• Free: No registration needed, nothing to pay, but your feed won’t be high until it is rated.
• Exchange: You can get a higher place, for free, by placing a link to Best Directory on your page.

Submit your feed to Best Directory.


230) Blogged

http://www.blogged.com/



Blogged is an online blog directory that you can use to discover and promote interesting blogs

Currently featuring 200,000 blogs this is a very popular resource to get listed at. Blogs are reviewed, rated, and categorized by editors, but anyone with an account can review and rate a blog to help it rise in the rankings. You can browse them by topic, rating, or simply searching for any keyword.

If you want to add your blog to the directory, you will just have to sign up to the service for free, and provide the RSS feed of your site.

Sign up and submit your feed to Blogged.


224) Webloogle

http://www.webloogle.com/



Webloogle is a blog directory where anyone can submit his own RSS feed URL and keep an eye on how his blog is going.

Webloogle will offer you a dedicated page on which it’ll show information, ratings, statistics of your site, and also a link that other people can click to write a review about your site. Requires a bit more time than the other links - the site has an approval process and they’ll email you with the results. Worth the investment of time and effort

Feeds can be browsed by category, ordered by ranking, or simply searched through the search form.

Submit your feed to Webloogle.