I find that there is not a lot of opportunity to compete for prizes or to be truly honored for your skills in the workplace.  Sure, I have had promotions and raises, but beyond that, quite often there are no awards given to you by your peers in recognition of your abilities.

A good example would be for the countless webmasters online who do SEO on a daily basis.  What do they get for a reward?

Well, besides the traffic and potential income, most of us just perform our roles and never get recognized for the exceptional skills that we have when it comes to marketing.

That changes right now.

If you are an SEO expert (or think you are), now is your chance to prove how good you are and get recognized by the industry.  Participate in the Busby SEO Challenge, prove your skills, and be rewarded.  It is free to compete.  If you are interested, check out the following site for the complete Busby seo challenge details.

When I was looking for a way to promote my many websites, a friend suggested that I look into SEO consultancy services. I was not really sure what this was all about, but I thought that I would make and appointment to talk to someone and see what they could do for me and my websites.

I checked into several SEO companies and made appointments at a half a dozen of them. I was pleased with what they promised they could offer me and I decided that maybe I should give it a try for a few months, just to see what would happen. I now had the job of making the decision about what company I was going to go with.

Although they all offered guaranteed SEO results, I decided that I would use the one that cost the least. I know that if I am not happy with what they offer me or with the results that I receive, I can always go back and try a more costly company. For now though, I am ready to see things start to happen and I can only hope it happens quickly.

When I was new to the Internet and owning websites, I realized that I had a lot to learn.  I have never been one to assume that I know everything, and when I entered into this business venture, I knew that I would have a lot to learn.

Reading through many webmaster forums, I learned that I would have to master the art of search engine optimization if I was to ever get any traffic or make money from my website.  I read a few books on the subject, but quite honestly, I didn’t understand what I was reading.

It wasn’t until I talked to a SEO consulting service that things started to add up.  I explained what I was trying to do and they were happy to answer my questions and help me get up onto my marketing feet.

I was a quick learner, and it wasn’t long before I had traffic running into my website.

As our business has grown, so has the popularity of our website.  If you look at the trend over the past six months, our website has moved up in the rankings on many of the search engines on its own.  Though that is great, I would like to think that our website could be number one.

With that in mind, we’ve been making an effort to increase our web ranking by actively marketing our site.  We’ve done many things such as directory submissions, article of publishing, and social bookmarking in an attempt to gain more back links to our website.

So far, it looks like our work has been paying off as the site continues to move up in the rankings in many different keyword phrases related to our business.  Though we are not there yet, I know if we continue to actively market our site we will get there in the next six months or so.  I am very interested to see what the effect on our sales will be when we do reach the number one position.  I guess, I will just have to wait and see.

My friend and I were discussing the relevance of using online video ads to promote your website. I didn’t think that they would really generate much more traffic and he thought that they were absolutely critical. We decided to go and check out some different sites with and without and see what we thought.

I do have to admit that the sites containing the online video ads were more pleasing to the eye and definitely held my attention a lot longer than the ones that didn’t have them. Okay, so there was one point against my argument, but it still didn’t prove that it would send traffic to the site, so we decided on another experiment.

He made an online ad and posted it with a link to his site. We said we would give it a week and see if there was any difference in traffic. The week is now over and I lost this argument really bad. The ad drove about double the traffic to his site. I am all for them now and I even have them on my own site now.

Even though I have owned many websites over the years, there is one thing that I don’t stop doing: learning.  That is right, in some respects I would classify myself as a professional, but there is a never ending stream of things that I can learn - I don’t know everything.

Take for example Internet marketing.  In the “olden days” (think ten years ago), all you really had to do was submit your sites to search engines, and that was about it.  Back in those days it was pretty simple to market your site and get results.

But, things have changed.  We have moved past simpler times of just submitting your site to countless web directories, and writing articles.  Now there are new social marketing methods that have a greater return on investment compared to the old, traditional marketing methods.

I am happy for the changes as it makes my job a little more challenging and rewarding.  I can say one thing for sure: I am never bored.

My husband has been running his own computer Internet business from home for awhile now. I happily spent any money that he made doing this, but that was about the extent of which his business had anything to do with me. Until now. All of a sudden, his business has taken off by leaps and bounds and he can no longer do it on his own.

He has started teaching me small things about the business, just so I can help him out when he is swamped. One thing he has taught me to do is to write articles to promote his websites. I am told that this helps with search engine optimisation. I am not sure what that is, but I will trust he knows what he is talking about.

He says that he hopes I understand the whole inner workings of the business at some point. I think it is a bit far fetched to think that I can do this, but then I never thought I would know even as much as I do right now. I guess we will see what the coming months have in store for me.

As much as I love running websites, I just feel that I don’t have enough time in the day to do everything.  Between life, work, and my sites, it seems there is not a free moment left to do anything.  The result of this is everything suffers in those three categories, and I am unable to perform my best.

Frustrated and searching for answers I found myself online, looking for someone that had the same problems as I did, looking for a solution.  I came across a blog that suggested that a big lesson for most people starting a business was realizing that they didn’t have to do everything themselves.

What?

Reading down the article, I realized that I could just pay someone to do certain aspects of my business that I didn’t really need to be doing myself.  I thought that I would try it out first with trying to find some link building services - the website marketing had been taking too much time.

I found an SEO company that would do directory submissions for me for a reasonable price.  Not only would this save me time, but it would make my website promotion - and life easier.  I am going to see how it works out and the effect it will have on both my life and business.  So far, even the decrease in my stress level is great!

Now, a website by itself doesn’t do much - it just sits there.  Sure, you could pick a domain name that most people would just randomly type in to get traffic, but usually most of those names are taken.

So, as a webmaster, you need to develop some link building strategies to get your site noticed.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, or have piles of money to do link building, rather the discipline and drive to succeed.

Some examples of link building ideas include blog commenting, forum posting and article submissions.  At the same time you are focusing on building links, you need to make sure to find sites that are authority sites in your niche, and get links on them as well.  These high value links will help you to establish your site as an authority site as well.

Be sure to take the time to market your site after you have it up.  Without anyone knowing it is there, your website will fail.  But, if you build up some links to it, you will be pulling in the traffic and sales too.

I have a few websites and I am just now learning how to promote them. I looked into some article sites, as I know having some blog articles link to my site would help me with site popularity. I paid someone to write some articles for me, as I am no writer myself, and was quite pleased with the results.

There is one particular site that I was impressed with and I contacted the website advisor to get more information, such as pricing and the amount of time that would be required. They responded quickly and after we made a business deal it made a big difference in traffic to my site.

Another thing I have been doing to better the traffic to my site is keyword research. I figure the more targeted keywords I have liking to the site, the better traffic I am going to have and the closer to the top I will get on the search engines.

I have also invested in some help from some SEO services. I am very happy with the results so far and am pleased to say that my sites are quickly climbing up the ranks and are doing better than ever.