A superiorly designed and laid-out Web site, along with excellent and good-quality content, has a lot more to do with search engine rankings as any other aspects.
A factor which is more vital than the quantity of content, is the quality of the content that needs to be seriously taken cared of, because you simply can't just put out a lot of words and expect your online visitors to find it interesting, and keep coming back to it for some time.
Getting a professional SEO expert or firm to improve your Web site is often compared to making an investment in your firm's core infrastructure, than simply paying for mere advertising space. In devoting significant resource and effort by utilizing a coherent SEO program, this helps you run a long-term strategy for your online business.This holds true, because when a business stops paying its optimization expert at some point after the campaign has started, it would still continue to get results from that campaign for longer periods of time, depending on whether they hire a decent, professional SEO company or expert. Below are more of the many, wide-ranging benefits optimization brings.
Most search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A company name, a running shoe, product review, or a person.
Getting seen on the first page of a search engine results page is key, particularly if your businesses' keywords belong to a competitive search query field.
As search is demand-driven, anybody who is referred from a search engine is hoping that your Web page would match their search query. If it does, and you show them all the information they need to know, and they may well become your next customer.
A professionally designed and optimized online Web site should stay long term in the rankings, as compared to PPC where costs and outlay are either ongoing or unpredictable.
Online clients referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer periods, and this will surely increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO.
Search engine optimization aids online businesses in meeting their various online marketing objectives, among these are generating leads, sales or by simply creating increased awareness.
There is more to search engine optimization than just marketing, as firms can derive many business benefits from utilizing this method. At present, the many advantages offered by SEO services have made competition in this field increase quite drastically.
These effective methods can surely make your site to rank among the top sites in most search engines. The high competition has also led to the rise of many unique methods and processes of Web site optimization. Among the key benefits of optimization is significant return on investment (ROI), increased brand visibility, attaining targeted customers, and generating higher sales.
If you have had no luck driving traffic to your website, you may want to employ an expert in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When you start your search for an expert, there are several things you should consider:
- 1. Start by interviewing the expert. Find out if their style and philosophy will suit your purpose. Give them information about what you want to accomplish and ask them WHAT THEY WILL DO to help you achieve your goals.
Ask specifically how they will address your objectives.
- Are you interested in increasing website traffic, increasing brand recognition, or increasing online sales?
Are you planning to push one product or service over another on your website?
How will they help you accomplish these goals? - 2. Ask for examples of their previous work. Visit the websites they have already worked on and look at the sites. Perform searches with search engines to see where these sites rank on the search engine lists.
Do they come up in the top ten? Look at the keywords they are using on the sample websites and compare those to the sites that come up in the first, second and third position on the search engine.
Is the SEO expert giving the right advice to his/her clients?
In addition to sample websites, see if you can get actual references to call. Contact names and phone numbers for clients who have already worked with the SEO expert can be quite valuable.
How did the client feel about the SEO expert services? Were they timely in delivering their services? Did they deliver what the promised in additional traffic?
- 3. Find out who will be working on YOUR project. It may not be the person who sells you the service. You want to be sure that you have a good team of people assigned to perform various tasks.
One person isn't going to be expert in all aspects of search engine optimization. How many projects have these team members worked on for this employer and what success stories can they tell?
What reports will they produce?
At minimum, their documentation should include:
Your current web traffic results
A list of issues they feel you should address, and what they will do to resolve these issues
Progress reports on your project
Post-Mortem reports to demonstrate positive results for website traffic, etc.
- 4. Ask for white papers, reports and any documented processes the SEO expert has to offer. What exactly does the SEO expert do for his fee? Is his or her process logical and thorough? You may not be a search engine expert.
Nevertheless, if you look at the sequence of their processes, and the activities listed in the SEO process, you may find that your prospective SEO expert is using poor business practices to get information.
Or perhaps he or she is recommending unrealistic methods or unscrupulous methods to deliver good search engine ranking.
If this is the case, your initially good search engine ranking may rapidly change to NO search engine ranking when you find yourself booted off search engine lists for bad business practices.
Make sure you know where your prospective SEO expert firm stands on business ethics.
You may want search engine optimization but you certainly don't want 'keyword stuffing' without content or logical association to the topic that brings the customer to your website.
You don't want false keywords to attract clients and you don't want cloaking or doorway pages.
You don't need to know all the details of how these things work; you just need to get a statement of ethics from your SEO and have a value discussion with the SEO firm and its team members.
While it may seem that no online business practice could be THAT unethical, your business reputation and your status on search engines WILL be damaged, if your website uses artificial or misleading techniques to attract customers.
- 5. What will the SEO expert charge for your project? Is it based on a fixed price project or an hourly rate? Will you have to pay travel expenses or other associated expenses?
What is included in the price? You should get a detailed accounting in writing, so that you KNOW what you can expect.
Don't buy into the explanation that the price is higher, but there is a 'guarantee' of results.
Even the BEST SEO firms will find it hard to guarantee rankings and results when they don't know what your competitors are doing next and whether new keywords and action will be necessary next month to keep your rankings high.
A guarantee of ranking and traffic can, at best, only guarantee results for a particular day or time period immediately after the project is completed, and even THEN it is unlikely the guarantee will be exact in terms of results.
There are many other personal considerations you may have when hiring an expert in SEO.
However, if you do nothing other than ask these five questions and get the information included in this research, you should be very pleased with the Search Engine Optimization expert you hire.
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A number of articles and white papers have been written on this topic. Before the days of Google and Web 2.0 there was little attention paid to the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the early days of the Internet Era you could get a site listed on Yahoo! or Altavista by merely submitting it. As long as it wasn't too complicated for search engines to understand you could get your site listed within 2 to 3 days. But Yahoo! and Altavista couldn't keep up with the flood of URL submissions. As web evolved, more and more companies began to embrace the online medium and the potential for using it as a marketing tool.
In the late 90's something dramatic happened. Google introduced PageRank, a system of ranking Web pages based on their importance and other factors. Google searchbots (or spiders) crawl through the world wide web following links, indexing and categorizing pages based on their content and relevancy. The more links a page has, the more likely they will be picked up and indexed by searchbots. In order to allow spiders to understand the site content, web masters needed to follow certain rules like placing proper keywords, title tags and content in each web page. At this point search became more of an art than a science. Companies can no longer expect to simply add their sites to directories and wait for them to appear on the top of search engine results.
The Search Engine market is fragmented, with Google commanding the majority of the market share (over 80%). If there is one search engine that you want to focus on, that would be Google. Microsoft's announced bid for Yahoo! (subjected to regulatory approval) might increase Microsoft's share in the search market, but I still don't think they will be able to challenge Google's dominance anytime in the near future.
In 2007, a survey concluded that over 50% of traffic originated at a search engine. According to a 2007 report published by eMarketer, over 20% of U.S Internet users use a search engine at least 4-5 times in a day. According to Internet Measurement firm, Hitwise, Search Engines were the highest sources of traffic during the peak Christmas shopping season, representing 57% of upstream traffic. Google alone was responsible for 18% of the upstream traffic, followed by Yahoo with 6%.
The above figure highlights the importance of SEO as a potential marketing tool in attracting visitors to your site.
A few ideas of ways to implement SEO:
Before you start your SEO implementation, it is a good practice to analyze your current state. Evaluate your goals and priorities. Determine your plan of attack. After you implement a solution do not expect immediate results. Don't be tempted to go straight for a Price Per Click (PPC) campaign such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Small Business marketing to promote your site. As I pointed in the previous sections, what determines your site's placement involves more than one factor.
Some companies take an easier route by hiring optimization firms that use shady techniques to increase search rankings. These optimization firms typically guarantee linking in from 50 or more sites (aka link-spamming). They are linked to doorway pages or parked domains that may work short term, but it is only a matter of time before the search spiders detect and penalize the site. Google even makes a point about this on their SEO support page.
As we noted in the first section, PageRank is a value that Google gives to a page based on the number of links pointing to your site. So how do you get others to provide links to your site? You can try the following methods:
- * Register with major search directories (Yahoo!, OpenDirectory, MSN)
* Send press releases about your product or idea that generates free links
* Hire an expert to write something positive about your product and publish in an industry newsletter, magazine or a local newspaper
* Ask to be a featured or sponsored client in a major portal site
* Ask employees to mention you and your products
* Enlist in a local library's site
* Make reciprocal link requests
* Mention your site in major Blogging sites, Yahoo! Answers and Google Groups
* Respond to blogs or queries in Yahoo! Answers (just don't over-do it)
* Syndicate your content through external RSS feeds to different sites
* Use announcement sites like URLwire to announce your site
* Consider ad campaigns through Google AdWords
Most sites employ DHTML, Flash, Frames and other fancy objects to enhance the end user's experience. While these objects are great to captivate the users attention, Google and other search engines can't understand them and will have trouble interpreting them while crawling your sites. Google introduced a new concept called Site Maps. Most people overlook the power of this feature. The Site Maps feature allows Google to understand your site structure and diagnose any potential problems.
Many sites use session IDs to track a user's path to the site. If the session IDs vary on each visit, Google and most other search engines simply ignore the page, resulting in it not being indexed.
You can avoid this scenario by doing two things:
- * Store session information in a cookie on the user's computer
* If the request is made from a searchbot, you can have your web server serve pages without any session IDs, hence allowing the searchbot to navigate through your site without using any session IDs
Create a narrow targeted keywords list that you think identifies your site properly. Check Yahoo's Overture (searchmarketing.yahoo.com) or WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) for ideas on selecting keywords. You can find out the effectiveness of your keywords. In WordTracker for instance, you can input your keyword to see how often people have searched for it. It also tells you how often a term is searched and how many pages appear for that term.
Once you identify the keywords, what do you do with them? One obvious thing to do is to add them inside the Meta Keywords tag. In addition, use the keywords generously throughout your page content. Search Engines love a site with fresh descriptive content filled with keywords. This means constantly updating your site with new, fresh content is vital to your overall SEO strategy.
One great way to generate traffic is to simply pay for it. Since Google pretty much dominates the PPC market, you want to focus your ad campaign effort on using Google AdWords. Google's AdWords Network not only includes Google's site, but also About.com, The New York Times, InfoSpace, Business.com, Lycos and a few others. So paying per click (PPC) on Google AdWords allows your ad to be featured on all the sites that are part of the Google network. Keep in mind that in most PPC systems, the top bid gets the top position. Be sure to use relevant keywords when associating with search engine ads.
Combining the steps outlined above and running ad campaigns on Google's AdWords Network will provide ultimate exposure to your site.
Measuring your returns on SEO investments is crucial. Google's PageRank feature in the toolbar can help estimate your site's importance in the Google index. You can perform a search on Google for the word "link:yoursite.com" to see how many back links your site has. This is a good indicator of how many sites are linked to your site.
One way to track the traffic to your site is to use Google Analytics. This tool allows you to see the traffic variables such as a) Absolute Unique Visitors, b) Page Views, c) Bounce Rates and d) Average Time Spent. In addition, you can also set conversion goals to determine how many of those leads converted to an effective sale (or some other action you describe), which is a key way to measure ROI. Tracking in helps you evaluate the efforts of your marketing strategy whether it is a PPC campaign, banner ads or natural SEO. Tracking also allows you to gain visibility into your end user's behavior and time spent on each page, which allows you to make a decision on where to place ads.
Like any other software solution implementation, SEO implementation needs to be constantly monitored and updated. A continuous enhancement to optimization techniques, tracking, keywords, content, blog entries and ad campaigns is necessary to keep your site rank high in the search results. To stay on top, you not only have to outdo your competition but also keep content fresh. This will not only bring new visitors to your site, but also the keep the visitors returning to your site.
To learn more about Search Engine Optimization and other topics around Search Marketing, please visit http://www.seosolutions.biz. Chan Komagan is a Digital Media Strategist and he provides consulting work to both profit and non-profit organizations in Search Marketing. You can reach him at chan@seosolutions.biz
The wild and often oddly mythical world of search engine optimization (SEO) is filled with old wives' tales, facts, and a mix of the two. Separating fact from fiction is often far more complicated than you might think possible but with a few cold and hard facts as well as the do's and don'ts of SEO, you will be well on your way to having a site and content that search engines like and that will receive highly targeted web traffic.
1. Keyword density is an important component for SEO. Although not the one nail on which to hang your hat, the more desirable keywords your article contains, the better off you will be and the more visitors search engines will send your way. In other words, if you are writing about the importance of SEO and do not use this term until your final sentence, the odds are good that you have missed the boat. On the other hand, overuse the keywords so as to goad search engines to send you visitors, and you will have web traffic that jumps ship as soon as they read the beginning of your articles and the impossible linking of a bunch of buzz words and key terms. The trick to keyword density is balance.
2. SEO requires competition and niche thinking. If you are writing about the DeBeers lawsuit, you can bet that there will be a plethora of articles and websites dedicated to the same topic. While you may have some strong competition for the most commonly used keywords and phrases, make sure you also bolster your article or site with some rarer ones that the majority of your competition will not think about: the niche words. Thus, address the needs of the commercial diamond users at least in passing while offering information to the private consumer front and center.
3. Without relevant keywords, your SEO attempts are in vain. Who has not received the spam emails that contain gibberish of highly sought after terms? Sure, they might have tricked your spam filter, but they probably also ticked you off and you won't be caught dead buying from those spammers. Turning this around, do not try to trick visitors to come to your site by enlisting much sought after keywords that have nothing to do with the site's actual content.
Of course, no amount of SEO tweaking can replace the unique content to a website that attracts new visitors, and the sticky content that keeps them coming back. Do's and don'ts of SEO may cover the nuts and bolts approaches possible, but even the most relevant and organized by the book website will fail to appeal to a visitor if it does not have that wow factor which will set it apart from all the other websites that have read the same manual. It is in this little wildcard that the true genius of SEO strategies is revealed: the marriage between abiding by rules through the following of algorithms and high level creativity born of an understanding of consumer behavior.
Given the importance of search engines in driving quality traffic to your site, it's no wonder that Search Engine Optimization or SEO is such a vital element to the success of any web site.While there's loads of good SEO advice available for your use, there's plenty of bad advice too, which can actually do more harm than good.
The following are three SEO myths.
The old mantra "The more links the better" doesn't hold as much water as it used to. It may have worked earlier, when the Internet was more manageable. In keeping with an ever growing Internet and increasing misuse of link exchanges, search engines have now adopted different, varying criteria for ranking web sites.
Today, an over abundance of links from irrelevant, low-ranking sites and link farms could actually cause you more harm than good - getting your site penalized. While links continue to be vital to the success of your website, what is important for SEO purposes is that you use a wide variety of anchor text and seek out one way links only with sites that are relevant to yours.
There are numerous SEO companies that promise to get you ranked high with Google and other major search engines. They may make good on their promise and get you ranked in the top ten. But then what? Don't forget that every other web site owner is going to be trying the same strategy and the competition does not stop once you've positioned yourself on the first page.
In order to stay at the top, you will need to keep your web site continuously updated, employ innovative new methods to keep attracting visitors to your site, and try to keep getting a steady flow of one way links.
There are several ways to do this:
• Personalize your website with latest updates on lifestyle, technology or finance.
• Write articles and submit them to article directories.
• Join a blog that's relevant to your business and post valuable comments; don't forget to include a link with your signature.
• Write testimonials for other web sites in exchange for a one way link to your site.
We've all seen the Ask commercials demonstrating how much more user friendly their search is. But, a commercial is one thing and reality is another.
It's really a matter of optimizing for the big three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) and letting everything else fall where it may.
If you have a website that is well designed and content rich, it is sure to please almost all major search engines. What's more, you are likely to build a significant portfolio of search terms where different terms attract traffic from different search engines.
But, spending your time trying to please every search engine is an exercise in futility. You're better off spending your time optimizing elsewhere.
Paul Majestyck is the publisher of EZ Affiliate Profits :Great Articles Top Notch Resources Free e-Courses Product Reviews & Videos To Help You Shorten The Online Learning-Curve And Start Generating Income visit=> http://ezaffiliateprofits.blogspot.com Also be sure to visit his Digital Webstore eNetMall :The #1 Digitital program and product store on the internet => http://www.enetmall.net
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