Website Hosting and Marketing

Moving From Programmer to Marketer -Time for a Change

As a website developer, I do not have as much time to spend on marketing as I would like. There are so many marketing techniques, websites to visit for software and services, that it can be overwhelming.

Take SQUIDOO for instance. I saw it in its infancy and checked on it periodically to see if it would hang around. Unlike many fads, this service is being recommended by well-known marketers.

So here I am, familiarizing myself with the whole system so I can teach it to others. That is what I like to do - learn and teach Internet marketing. The programming and website designs can be done by others that I contract with. The time has come for me to change direction.

I find that marketing takes me to many more places on the Internet than programming does and is much more interesting. I like programming, but it can be seriously limiting. After staring at code for a week, I change gears on Saturday morning and get into marketing mode. I check my notes made sometime during the week to see what I will talk about on the weekly training call.

I like that call because people come to it to learn how to drive traffic to their websites for free or low cost. They feverishly write notes, ask questions and follow along with the instructions. By the end of the calls, the participants are so wound up that instead of spending the rest of the day with family, they are excited about putting their new-found knowledge to use.

That is what ends my week on a perfect note and entices me more each week to make the change from coding to Internet marketing.

Over-Optimizing Web Pages

How Much Search Engine Optimization is Too Much?

Everyone wants to get that coveted top spot in the search engine results pages. Being at the top means you will get TONS more traffic than you would being on the second, third or further pages.

However, we all know that there are limited places on the first page of results. Those that got there worked for their positions and used various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to reach the first page of results.

Even if you are not #1, as long as you get on the first page you will do alright with traffic because people will not always click the first link. They will scroll down to see what else is there to more closely match what they are searching for.

A large part of SEO is making your web pages relevant to the search results. You want to repeat the primary key phrases throughout your page content. The big question though is how much is enough or too much?

I played with various numbers of repeated key phrases, even though others have done the same tests. What I found was that when I exceeded the recommended 10% keyword saturation point, my web page dropped out of the results pages so far that it could only be found when I entered that page name in directly.

Ten percent does not sound like much for matching key phrases, but any more than that and the search engines consider it to be keyword spamming.

Now that you know the upper limit, you are probably wondering how to figure it out. What I do it copy my web page content into a text editor called NoteTab. It contains a Text Statistics option that counts the number of words in your page and shows you how many time each word was repeated.

It also tells you how may words total that your page contains. Knowing those two numbers, divide the keyword into the total to get your percentage. If you are over the limit, go through your page and reword it using synonyms of the keywords you are targeting.

If you are under the 10% limit, go back and see how to work your keyword phrases into the content while keeping the content flowing naturally. You do not want it to look like you are writing for the search engines. That is a turn-off for your visitors.

If you are looking for an editor that will calculate your word content, grab the Lite version here: NoteTab.com I like that editor and build all my web pages with it.

An online Word Counter is at WordCounter. Simply copy and paste your content into the box to get your results.