Every business owner must continue to evolve and promote their business using the different mediums available to them. There is no question owners market their businesses in every way possible. The only way to create more business is to reach new customers and online marketing is quickly becoming the broadest and most efficient way to show your company’s services.

Every business has competitors and let me put it like this, if your competitors have not started marketing online then you will have a huge leg up on them. If your competitors have already started marketing online, then you have major catching up to do. When you decide to start marketing online you need to make sure you do it the right away because in today’s day and age there is no time or money to waste. You need to make sure consumers find you online before they find your competitors. And that is why you need to strategize your online marketing campaign.

There a few different options you have when promoting your business online:

1. You can reinforce your online branding by using paid search. Using paid search allows you to have total control over customer relationships and how you interact with them. The most important tools in paid search are your keywords. Keywords are used by Web surfers to describe what they are hoping to find when executing a search online. The keywords you use need to be relevant to your business and they need to be words that customers would use to find information on your site. It will help to reference your offline marketing when promoting online. If you’re having a sale, a new item arriving, or you are offering a different service; make sure you put that information online! Text isn’t the only way to reach people on the web. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Putting a video online is just as effective these days as commercials on television. Be sure to use all your resources and most important, be as creative as possible!
2. The next online promoting tool is organic search marketing. Did you know that 39% of Web surfers believe the websites that show up at the top of the page after a keyword search are the best business in their respective field? For this to be most effective you’ll need to network with other businesses and find beneficial opportunities for the both of you, and link your websites together. This means you’ll have to make sure you have a professional looking website with relative content and solidifying your website will drive up your business’s ranking.
3. Some of the most popular sites on the Web are social networking sites and all sorts of businesses are taking advantage of them. Find a social network that works for your business and reach out to potential consumers. Find a website where people have questions about your field and become a voice they can trust. Offer advice and make your name is synonymous as a business expert.

Remember to continue looking forward and finding new ways to promote your business. Online marketing is going to expand and the sooner you understand online marketing, the more money you are going to make.

Labels: link_building, seo_services, social_media

Blogs are one of the most effective ways to communicate with a vast amount of people around the world. It is also a prime focus for individuals to promote and market their business.

Starting a blog isn’t very difficult, all you really need are a couple of thoughts and a computer connected to the internet. The hard part is to get strangers to read your blog and to get them to keep coming back for more. Most blogs are doomed to fail because they are not treated like any other marketing campaign. You need to plan a blog like you would a business and put yourself in a position to succeed.

Here are a few tips to make your blog successful:

Make sure you have a reason for starting a blog. There a many reasons why a blog would be beneficial to you, but successful blogs are a benefit to the people that read them. And that is what’s going to keep online surfers coming back. This will attract consumers, reduce your costs, and improve your reputation and media coverage.

The key to getting your blog recognized in search engines are the keywords and phrases you choose to emphasize. Blogs will take the text you have written and store it onto a database and send that information through templates which generates the blog we read in the search engine.

The reason many blogs fail is because of failure to upkeep. You need to structure your blogs so people can find the content they are looking for. Think of it like a filing cabinet. A reader doesn’t want to look everywhere for a specific question, make it easy and efficient for them to find their answers. Also, if you make the decision to blog, keep it up. Don’t make you posts random or sporadic, make sure you are consistent when you blog. It doesn’t matter if it’s once a week or once a month. Be consistent!

Blogs are a way to communicate and it’s very important for bloggers to socialize around the Web. Respond to comments made about your blogs and look for other websites and link them to yours. Comment on other people’s blogs and become a name around the internet and as an expert in your field. You will also be able to track the hits on your blog and the more you contribute, the more your blog will continue to grow, and your business will continue to grow.

Once you have your blog in full force and everything is going well; don’t be afraid to promote your success. Getting people to take time out of their day to read your work is not an easy thing to do. Do not be afraid to flaunt your positive reputation as a blogger, especially to other businesses. This can be key to expanding your services to different sectors and opening new doors.

It is important that your blog serves a purpose, not just to promote your business. Use your years of experience to help people and it will all come back around to help your business. Not only is this a chance to market yourself, but the networking, learning and opportunity will pay many dividends in the end.

Labels: blogging, on_site_seo, seo_guide

Website owners who keep up to date with SEO competition are finding out that if you are not learning and evolving you’re falling behind. It’s becoming more and more difficult for websites to maintain high rankings on search engines and that’s even if your site is already a few years old. If you are starting a new website it’s even more difficult to make your mark on a SEO. Expectations for new sites should be set up with the goal for long term results.

The most important factor in determining your website’s success is to know what you are looking for from your site. Most owners believe that rankings dictate a website’s success and while rankings are important they do not determine the overall success of the site. Owners should pay attention to the traffic they receive because that is going to factor into your business success and put money in your pocket. That’s why you have the site, correct? To make more money! Most website owners want to be in the top five of Google and Yahoo searches, when at the end of the day those rankings to not affect their bottom line.

This will not change the fact that rankings will continue to be a highly sought after commodity. Website owners need to think outside the box if they want to move up on SEO rankings. Owners have been expanding their keywords in hopes of attracting more surfers to their site. What they should be doing is figuring out what keywords people are using and incorporate those words and phrases onto their site.

At the end of the day websites are all about content, but what constitutes good content? In one word: Creativity. Your website is an extension of you, just like your business is. Use your voice and be unique with the content you decide to put on your website. This includes videos and pictures as well. Look at the resources you have and incorporate all the good things around you into your website. Do not steal or copy from other websites, it is superficial and that comes across to the visitors on your site. Make your content genuine. Do what you do best and speak from the heart. Make sure you write content for your site and not based on search engines. It’s a disservice and will not help your business or rankings.

The best advice one can give a website owner is: Do not compete with other websites! Continue to expand and evolve your own website and don’t saturate your brain with other people’s ideas. There is no right or wrong, what works for one does not work for another. Start with what you need to have on your site and work up from there.

You can pay all the money in the world to a SEO company and be number one on all the search engines, but did you really start a website to spend money or to make money?

Labels: link_building, seo_services, seo_tips, website_development

There are common mistakes and traps that most do it yourself SEO’s have a tendency to make. See if you fall into one of these categories, they are easily fixed and when corrected will vastly improve your website and increase the traffic.

Most websites owners mistakenly use the wrong keywords when writing content onto their sites. They tag these keywords and hope their site will come up when typed into search engines. It’s important to remember that the entire site doesn’t come up when a keyword is typed into Google, only the page where the keyword is located shows up on the search engine. You should never have the same word more than three times on a page. It makes the overall content look poor.

A description tag is sometimes used when an owner want to describe what their web page is about. Mistakes that people make are that they begin to stuff too many keywords into their description tag and they turn into a small novel and are ineffective. You should only put twenty to twenty five words into your description tag. Websites like Google and Yahoo are much more interested in the actual content on your webpage rather the how you would describe the page in a description tag.

The worst mistake a website can make is to screw up the title tag. The title tag is the most important tag because it is the first tag the search engine uses. Common mistakes owners make are that they put their web addresses on the tag or their company name at the beginning of the tag. The title tag tells the search engines what the page is about and it should never exceed sixty characters.

It’s important to maintain the overall content of your webpage. I say “page” because when a keyword is typed in the search engine, it will only show the relevant pages that are recognized. You need to make sure to follow these directions for every page on your site: Make sure you tag the description tag, title tag and keywords! This is key for search engines to recognize your web pages. If you wonder why your site is not coming up on search engines, this is why.

There aren’t any hidden secrets when starting and keeping a successful website. Doing it by yourself not only saves money, but you also learn valuable tools that allow you to keep improving your website and business. It gives you more ideas that will help you grow and expand.

Search engines are pretty basic and commonly follow the same formats. It is important to know what these formats are and how to cater your website to the search engines. The main reason a website will fail is because they will not optimize their content. And it’s not because owners don’t want to, it is because they don’t know. Often new owners will try new gimmicks and tricks to get people to their site, but that often does more harm than good. People recognize when they are getting fooled and are able to move on to a different site rather quickly.

The basic rules are rather easy to follow and if you have any problems consult with a SEO expert. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, it’s not worth sacrificing your website or your business for a second.

Labels: seo_guide

The internet and search engines continue to evolve on a daily, weekly and yearly basis. A lot of what is changing is the way we are starting to measure SEO success. Currently, owners track their sites by tracking their traffic, following conversions, and ROI. These are important in every marketing and business website. The web is going to continue to be more prevalent and consumers will shop and do business more and more online.
There are new changes coming and Google is always on the forefront of cutting edge technology.

Google has recently received a patent offering the possibility to personalize the language of serach results. This means Google will be changing their search results based on language. Google added, "Customized based on recent search activity," to the top right hand corner of search results. Not only that, but Google will base results on your location and your recent activity when you are signed in to your Google Account. This makes the results more relevant and personal.
The reason this will affect business is because as Google works to get your seraching expericne more personalized, no longer will top rankings or certain keywords will no longer be relevant.

What this means for businesses is that although there may be less traffic on their websites, consumers that visit a certain sites are potentially more qualified to be involved in their business. Because the site they are clicking on, showed because it was personalized to them because of their interest and their location.

Other things Google is trying to do to make their search engine more personal is to focus on user's intent. Different sites will come up whether they are doing research, buying products, or looking for something particular in their neighborhood. Sites will change is the user is in a new location or using a different IP address.

How this affects you, is that you should start focusing your web site on your ideal consumer. Talk to employees, have your consumers take surveys and find out what they like about your site. Find out how you can make you business web site more user friendly and above all else keep your consumers happy.

Do not continue to base your web site statistics on search engine rankings, these are going to become more and more irrelevant. Continue to focus on ROI, the conversions for your website, and keep focused on overall traffic.

As the internet continues to grow and at the same time become more defined to users personally. It is going to continue to change and the same old things will no longer work and you will be left in the dust by your competitors. You need to stay ahead of the game and continue to improve your website as you continue to improve your work. Because to keep the bottom line up, you can't have one without the other.

Labels: search_engines

So, you’ve finally built your first web site in order to sell your hand-crafted, embroidered coin purses, and now you’ve heard of something called “search engine optimization” that will help people find your site and make you lots of well-earned money. You know that search engine optimization, or SEO, is about having strategic content keywords, meta tags and links to or from other sites on your site to make Google, Yahoo, Alexa and other respected search engines sit up and take notice. You want to be at the top, not at the bottom of the rankings. However, how do you get there, and how do you stay there?

First of all, you have to understand that there are some things that you should not do, beginning with links between sites. Building links to and from your site is a necessary but very time-consuming practice, and it may be a temptation to hire a service to do this for you. If you choose this route, make sure you have investigated the linking company thoroughly and make sure that their links are relevant to your site and won’t put you in the realm of a “bad neighborhood,” which can lower your rankings significantly. A bad neighborhood is not just about spamming. Some companies try to boost their rankings by doing illegal things like keyword stuffing, hidden links or text, going to doorway pages, creating meaningless links, etc. Remember also that when you hire a service, to do your linking, you are relinquishing control of your site, but you will be responsible for any consequences.

Be vigilant about keeping your content relevant, especially in your choice of keywords and Meta tags. A random word listing that might seem to drive a search engine to your site might actually get you kicked down to the bottom. Try to keep your words or phrases simple and non-repetitious. The same goes for title stacking, which is another easily caught trick to try to add keywords to be indexed by the search engines. This is also known as a black hat practice that search engines can see right through.

Avoid using content that is not your own, unless you have express permission to use it. Content that is simply copy-and-pasted on a site can run afoul of the search engines right away. Besides which, stealing content cannot only end up getting your site removed all together, you can be sued. Think also what annoys you to encounter when you do your own searches and ask yourself, “Would this turn up in my own site?”

Put your customers first. Web sites and search engines are meant to serve the needs of the end user, not the other way around. Always use common sense with your linking and keyword practices. If something feels wrong, it probably is wrong, and you should find another alternative. You will avoid having your much sought-after rankings lowered as a result.

Labels: seo_services

There are tried-and-true ways of getting things done. Then there are the crazy ways, the unique ways, the bizarre ways, the might-get-you-arrested ways. This article is not about the tried and true. If you want those, go to school.

Brainstorming is an excellent and popular method for getting the creative juices and engaging those child-like centers of your brain that can still see fresh ways of doing old things. If you want to see how the ultimate brainstorming pros do it, there is a great ABC Nightline video on how Silicon Valley darling IDEO transformed the old, standard shopping cart. Check it out. Go watch, it is cool. I will wait.

Okay, so the rules in brainstorming are:

- Quantity over quality
- No criticism (there's no such thing as a dumb idea in a brainstorming session)
- Weird ideas are good
- Combine ideas, or build off previous items on your brainstorming list

Set yourself a time limit in order to get as much brainstorming in as possible before the “editor” centers of your brain catch you in the act and start clamping down on the wild ideas. Most of them you will eventually throw out, but one or several might be the diamond in the rough that your site has been needing.

Alright, so now let us put together a brainstorming session on our favorite SEO topic: getting links. No idea is too wild or crazy. Just to get you started, I will throw out my own brainstorming list. Remember, creative is good. Weird is good. Crappy quality is fine. Do not criticize – just roll with it, break out the Text pad, and keep going!

Ways to Get Links:

- Become paparazzi so we can take celebrity photos and publish them ourselves.
- Make videos on some theme until one of them becomes viral. Potential themes: lolcatz, things kids do, emo kids, extreme sports, extreme sports gone horribly wrong
- Review an under-reviewed consumer product. Children's books? Kitchen gadgets? Ikea furniture?
- Start a contest. Caption contest? Idea contest? Fund-raising contest?
- Spend the marketing budget buying links from relevant sources
- Make cool themed or branded .gifs or buttons for people to use on their blog or site
- Publish a news letter every week about the site's topic, and give its RSS link a prominent spot
- Send out press releases about the contest/review site/paparazzi
- Create a Facebook or iPhone app that does something cool – IQ test? Love quiz? Weight loss tracker? Which Lost Character Are You?
- Create or buy shareable online games that link back to the site

Upon review, we will find that most of the ideas I generated here are utterly worthless. (Quantity over quality, remember?) However, maybe one of them is worth a closer look. And then perhaps it is worth a bit of brainstorming around as its own topic, to build on and do some polish and tweaking. Then one of these ideas might become the basis of a new segment of your website, drawing new and more readers – and impressing the socks off the search engines.

Labels: link_building, seo_services

Once upon a time, search engines may have used keywords and a few basic bits of code in order to calculate their rankings. This evolved to include other key elements, such as the number of links other people made to your page, and then evolved still further to blacklist certain links in order to avoid specious link farms or exchanges.

Now, search engine algorithms are beginning to take both user behavior and dynamic aspects of the site into account. This was largely predicted by the SEO community as a natural progression of the discipline, and its day seems to have arrived.

First and foremost, bounce rate should be kept under fifty percent. If a user returns directly from your site main page to the search results, chances are they are not finding what they are looking for. This degrades the search engine's performance for its users, so it will respond by reducing your site's rankings for those search keys. Degrading to a 70 percent or 80 percent bounce back rate will likely decrease your rankings, whereas getting up to a 20 or 30 percent bounce rate can help ensure that you consistently make top rankings.

Site performance is another key element in the new paradigm of search engine algorithms. High performance rates, very low down time, speedy searches, working links, and anything else you can do to improve site speed and reliability will prove that your site can handle the traffic the search engine drives to you.

Linking is an old standard way to increase rankings, but diversity and quality are becoming increasingly critical. It is far better to have a handful of high quality links from respected sources than to have mountains of suspicious or useless links. Making an effort to promote your site only with well-respected sites and web masters, and avoiding link exchanges like the plague, should give results that are well worth the effort.

An excellent way to promote good quality linking and interactivity with the rest of the web is to utilize the most popular social networking and bookmaking sites. Twitter, and especially its blog-broadcasting counterpart Loud Twitter, can be a great way to get exponential linking. Social linking and news sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon can also help you capitalize on Web 2.0 viral growth rates. Sites like Facebook, Myspace, Livejournal, and other massive blog and social networking sites are becoming crawlable; you want to already have a significant foothold in those arenas when other web masters are scrambling to catch up with the newest search algorithm tweaks. And do not overlook the power of RSS. The number of subscribers to your RSS feed is already becoming a key measure of your site relevance and thus your site ranking.

Search engines exist not to count links, but to give users what they want, and content is still what users are looking for. You do still need to do the “real work” of web sites: getting respected authorities to review your products, providing excellent multimedia offerings, and writing articles and posts.

Labels: search_engines, seo_services

Once you put together your product and have decided on the content for your business website, you need to come up with a design. Depending on your budget, you can hire a professional to design your website or you can do it yourself. You want to have a web site that will look good to your consumers and be pleasing to search engines. If you want to create a great looking, eye popping site there are a few things you need to know.

You need to create a catching logo and header for your site. It’s generally the first thing people see when they log on to your site. The header is your calling card and is going to leave an impression with your visitors. Also use analytics on your site for important words or phrases.

Calling out the important words allows you to emphasize your business and show them what you stand for. Names, phone numbers, buying and shipping information should be prominent and not only should you use analytics, but they should be made larger and more prominent. The words need to be creative and easily readable. Also, use hyperlink keywords so that users will be taken to other pages on your site and read more about your work. Allow room for at least 250 words of text on your web site pages. You need to include graphics as well. Pictures are worth a thousand words and placing the right graphics on your site will lure costumers in and images will help tell a story about your services and products.

Web sites come with a number of pages and whether you hire an expert or do it yourself, you’ll want to be able to add pages as your business expands and redo your old ones. Use header tags on your pages. You’ll want your individual pages to stand out from one another and use keywords at the top to describe your pages. You want to avoid having excess code on your pages and using Cascading Style Sheets will keep your site clean for search engines.

Do not use long paragraphs; they require too much concentration for readers. Instead, use short paragraphs and use images along with your text to keep the users interested. Make sure to create simple navigation so your products and services are easily found. Do not use JavaScript, use text navigation. It is better for search engines and helps get your site recognized.

Do not be afraid to ask for personal information or to have users sign up for emails and information. You will need to have a privacy policy to protect both them and yourself, but make it simple and ask for their name, phone number, email, and allow them to make comments about your site and services. The most trusted opinions are those of your consumers and you need to give them a forum to help you.

Obviously this isn’t everything, but it is a start and the important thing to remember is to stay creative. Continue to come up with new ideas and steal from other websites. If you see an idea on a website that you think is genius, put it on your site and help yourself create the best site for your business.

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_guide, seo_services, seo_tips, website_development

When you hear the term “web crawler,” you could be forgiven for thinking it is something nightmarish out of the latest Stephen King novel. However, for those people whose livelihoods are based on search engine optimization results for a web site, the web crawler is a very important, albeit tiny friend to have on your side. Also known as a spider, ant, worm, web bot or automatic indexer, a crawler is a sophisticated little program that crawls through or scans an Internet page looking for data to create an index for. Information is constantly changing with vast amounts of web pages continually added every day. Web crawlers help keep up with the expansion and allow search engines and other users to make sure their databases keep current.

Web crawlers are mostly associated with search engines and search engine optimization. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Alexa use the crawlers to collect data on public web pages so that when an Internet surfer types a search term on their site, for instance “rare books,” the engine can quickly provide a list of relevant web sites. The importance to a web site master or marketer is that the information “crawled” will also determine how high or low the web site will rank in the pages and its popularity with the search engines.

A search engine assigns the web crawler a list of URLs which it will then visit to systematically index and analyze the content, including the html title, visible text, hyperlinks and keyword or key phrase rich meta tags, and then store it in a central database. The search engine uses this information collected by the web crawler to ascertain what the site is about and its relevance to the search query. That is why it is important to have well designed web pages with information that’s constantly kept up to date. The crawlers have limits to how much they can index on each site and must prioritize. A very large web site with lots of pages probably will not be entirely indexed – and therefore, lose out on valuable searches.

Web crawlers are not only used by search engines. Market researchers can also use crawlers to find out trends in any given market. A linguist might use a web crawler to search the Internet to obtain a list of today’s most commonly used words. But web crawlers can also be used by the bad guys to collect private information available on the Internet.

There can be problems associated with web crawlers that often have to do with being overwhelmed by the vast amounts data they must index. There are policies surrounding the behavior of a web crawler, such as identifying itself to the web site administrator to announce which pages have been selected for download and when it will return to check for changes. Sometimes a web crawler can accidentally fall into a “crawler trap” or overload a web server with requests. This polite identification helps the web site’s owner stop the crawler.

Labels: search_engines, seo_guide

I know this may sound obvious, but the key to any successful search engine optimization is in fact, the keywords. You, of course need a professional looking website and original content, but the keywords are essential to bringing in the kind of traffic that will propel your business to the next level.

There are different ways to decipher the process in which you will chose your keyword, and at the end of the day, the number one thing to remember is: which key words will help your business and website grow. Because that’s the whole reason you are putting your business online, right?

If you have no experience and are trying to begin your efforts into finding what keywords to target; there are a number of ways you can begin your quest. I have a couple of ideas on how you can begin. These ideas aren’t new concepts by any means, but these are simple and easy ways to get the ball rolling.

One thought, is to bring people together that you are close with; people you work with and brainstorm. I know this isn’t a novel idea, but when you are trying to come up with keywords that people would immediately think of; brainstorming would be an excellent source to gather important information. You need to be careful, of over complicating the process and getting too creative. You are looking for words that customers will indentify with, in searching for your business. You need to be wary of “fluff” words, remember you need keywords so people can find your website. Another idea is to reach out to the public and conduct simple surveys. Go to a local park or a common area and ask prospective clients common keywords, in reference to your business. Heck, even give out a little promotional gift and market yourself as well.

Now that you have a starting place and some keywords to kick around, you need to determine how popular the keywords are. A couple of ways to do this are to do a paid research campaign. Use one of the keywords and run your own similar match campaign for 24 hours. Make sure you are at the top of the page and determine how many impressions and searches came from the campaign and see what the conversion rate is. You can also use Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery as tools to match the popularity of your keywords.

Now that you have your keywords, there are a few things you might want to do before you put everything into place. You’ll want to check out Google searches and see what other websites are utilizing your keywords and use SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool. This tool will show you the competiveness of keywords and SEO For FireFox Plug-In is a quick way to search your competitors.

Hopefully, now you have an insight on how to begin constructing your website and now you have the keys to bring a high traffic volume to your site and increase your business. Who knew it all started with one keyword? Good luck!

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_guide, website_development

Maintaining a large web site that may have a few hundred to a few thousand pages can be a daunting task, even for a seasoned pro. Among the secrets is to keep your information current so that the business runs smoothly.

First of all, try to visit every page of the web site at least once a week and look for links that aren’t working pictures or content that doesn’t load properly and information that might be out of date. Out of date information can lower your SEO rankings, which you want to avoid. You can also look for errors by checking the error log, which makes a record of every time the web server comes across an error or cannot find a page. The error log can normally be found in the logs directory. You can also look at the statistics program for your web site to find errors. Two error codes to really pay attention to that may appear are 400 (Bad Request) and 404 (File Not Found).

Watch out for are bad email addresses or broken contact forms on the different pages of your web site. Since the goal of your web site is probably so that visiting customers can contact you in order to buy your product or services, you need to check weekly or monthly to make sure these work. Often there can be a problem with the hosting provider, such as the web site being down and no one is able to access it. Other hosting problems can be the web server displaying the web pages much too slowly or programs not working on pages. In addition, are the banner ads or links to other web sites working?

The overall structure of any web site is known as its architecture and how files relate to each other. It is essential to a large web site that every web page should have a link to the parent page, all the way back to the home page. The pages should be adequately linked together and partitioned into organized subdirectories. Home page content is vitally important to a large web site and should accurately represent what your company is all about to attract your customers and convince them to make a purchase. Is your contact information correct? Is your copyright date or other schedules still in force? Look at the design of the web site. Is the content font easy to read and skim through? Are the graphics well placed or do they obscure the company message in any way?

Unfortunately, there do not seem to be maintenance plans for web sites that are entirely comprehensive. Most plans found on the Internet provide only a solution to a problem or fix it rather than watch your web site and monitor it for any possible future problems. You will still need to be on top of the game to watch for them yourself, but with the right organizational system in place, this should not be too hard.

Labels: on_site_seo, website_development

A lot of people are confused by the term "social media marketing" and believe that it is only advertising on a social networking site, where networks monitor what users are doing and place ads next to them, hoping they will get a click. However, social media marketing is actually about different kinds of collaborations between people and finding ways that individual fans of a particular brand product or even a company can endorse it themselves on various social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others.

Social media marketing differs from industrial media marketing in that industrial media generally uses very expensive tools requiring a great deal of financial capital to publish its information, where as social media marketing uses fairly inexpensive tools that enables anyone anywhere to publish or access information. Both social media and industrial media have the capability to reach a small audience of one or two, or large audiences of millions. However, the time lag is generally much longer between a communications from industrial media as compared to social media when responses can be instantaneous. In addition, there are currently few, if any, limitations on social media such as on pages or hours. The audiences are encouraged to be active participants, to add comments, or blog or even edit articles or stories, as they deem necessary.

Social media optimization, or SMO, uses methods that generate publicity through social media and online community websites. There are many different types of technologies and applications for social media like blogs, vlogs, wikis, emails, podcasts, instant messaging and many more. Two of the most popular reference services are Google and Wikipedia. You can share photos at Flickr, videos at YouTube, personal music at Last.fm, microblog on Jaiku and Twitter. Besides the now universally known Facebook and MySpace, you can also go social networking on Avatars United, Youmeo and Second Life (social network via virtual reality).

Experts insist that social media is here to stay. Companies are now recognizing the need to be more involved in social media marketing, because it is through these channels that they can hear most quickly and honestly what consumers need and want. Businesses are learning that they now no longer wield absolute control over the behavior and buying decisions of their consumers. By paying attention, for instance, to a pro- or anti- product blog from a consumer, marketers have access to open customer discussions they never had before and then, in turn, open their own dialogue to be able to drive the needed change quickly.

Social media marketing opens up a world of fast-flowing creative experimentation where an idea can be tested online in the morning and by afternoon there is a response. Social media techniques should be combined into the marketing mix to optimize the places where the impact can be maximized. The key element in successful social media marketing is to be swift but make sure to drive change in proactive way rather than being reactive.

Labels: link_building

These days, most people with small businesses understand the need for a web site. In this era of global information, customers want their facts fast, clear and at their fingertips without any fuss. A carefully thought out, well-organized web site can place you high in the search engine rankings and put you steps ahead of your competition.

When planning your small business web site, first think about it from the point of view of your customer. Who is that exactly, and what will he or she achieve by visiting your site? What will they be looking for in order to find your site? For instance, your business is a local bakery that creates specialty cakes and cookies for any occasion. Your customer likely has an event coming up and probably lives in the near vicinity of your shop. You will want the written content of your website to both accurately and attractively describe your bakery’s menu and services, include contact information and perhaps even a map with directions on how to find the shop. All this information should turn up when your customer uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Live or Alexa to do an online search for local specialty bakeries.

See what your competition is doing. Create a list of your known competitors and see how highly they rank when you perform your own searches. What keywords and Meta tags are they using in their content to achieve their ranking? How effective or ineffective is their web site in conveying their message and winning over customers? Whom have they included inbound and outbound links to? This last detail is very important, because this is how a search engine determines the “popularity” of a site and where it will appear in the rankings.

Now it is time to sit down and do some brainstorming for the right keywords and Meta tags on your site. If you are not sure how to do this, Google Adwords has a free keyword tool and ad text generator to help you get started. Once you have your keywords and Meta tags, run them through a search engine and see where they place in relation to your competition. Make sure your primary goal is achieved on your web site’s home page and that a keyword is in the title and header for all subsequent pages. Create a new email address for the site and be sure that the site can load and be seen properly on the different web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Once your site is up and running, you must continue to maintain it with updates and the addition of new links. Web sites with outdated or in accurate information receive lower rankings in the search engine results pages. To increase your business’s rankings are add it to the local listings for the search engines, like Google Local or CitySearch, and also add your web site to an industry specific directory.

Labels: seo_guide, website_development

Back in 1998 or so, dinosaurs ruled the earth. It was okay to wear platform shoes and midriff shirts, your mom hadn't discovered email forwarding yet, and stuffing a few thousand random links and keywords into your web site was a good way to get to the top of search engine rankings.

A number of tricks emerged during those good old days, which search engines are now savvy to but some web masters still use. These days, stuffing links and keywords is a good way to get yourself knocked out of the top spots. Particularly if you attempt to load invisible keywords for the search engine crawlers only, today's more sophisticated algorithms will catch the trick and potentially downgrade your ranking. Search engine crawlers still look at keywords, but this is generally to ensure that the content on the site matches the keywords submitted to the search engine.

Before adding new features or content to your site, consider going back through your legacy code to remove any of the following that might be holding you back:

- Irrelevant keywords in META tags, visible tags, or titles
- Invisible keywords targeted at search crawlers
- Links from or to exchanges or link farms
- Links from or to spammy sites
- Ridiculous density of keywords in your site content
- Anything that was intended to increase page rankings at the expense of user experience
- Attributes that smack of spam
- Gateway pages whose only purpose is to re-direct to the actual content

Keeping your keywords short and relevant is good a practice. A good technique for determining the relevance of your keywords is to look into what users are searching for, such as on Google Trends. If your site targets a unique niche, you may want to add in a few – just a few! - related keywords that are more commonly searched for. Check the source information on your competitors' websites, particularly those who have achieved high rankings in the search engines you're interested in.

Likewise, your links should be relevant and of high quality. This may mean that you need to check the content and hidden content of the sites you've linked to, in order to ensure that you're not associated with spam-like or poorly optimized sites, or with link farms or exchanges. Solicit links from other professionals in your field or those sites who deal with related information. In all cases the purpose of the linking should be to provide value to your users first, and to increase your rankings second.

Search engines reward quality, usability, and relevance to the user community. You should always keep this mantra in mind when adding information targeted at web crawlers, or when streamlining and updating your site. Search engine sites are web sites themselves, and they must provide unique and valuable services to their users. That means finding the most relevant and useful content, not simply the highest density of related technical data such as links and keywords, and they tweak their algorithms accordingly.

Keep good keyword and link hygiene. Search engines and users will reward your diligence.

Labels: link_building, seo_guide

In the decade or so since the search engine was first invented, the field of Search Engine Optimization has evolved. Some obsolete information and old wives' tales still persist, and these can damage your standings.

The myths and obsolete techniques fall into a few broad categories:

- Keyword density: There are many number of magic formulas touted on the internet, claiming that if you reach the perfect number of keyword instances per page, your rankings will go up. While you do need to have the keyword somewhere in your text in order to have your stated keywords considered relevant, artificially inflating the number of instances is a bad plan. First, it simply decreases the quality of your content. Second, the search engines may begin classifying your site as too spammy, and actually downgrade your rating.
- Tags and META: Loading keywords into your page headers and the meta data of your site is also an old trick that's now likely to get you classified as spammy. Only keywords that are relevant to your content and specific to what your users are searching for should be included.
- Links: Some fraudulent SEO services, and some outdated pieces of advice, will associate your website with link exchange systems and link farms. Since the search engines keep track of these farms and exchanges, and using them is considered trickery, being part of them can actually significantly downgrade your rating.
- Submission to search engines: Once upon a time, submitting your site to search engines was a long and arduous process, which was nonetheless necessary to get a good place in the rankings. These days, search engine submission is generally not needed at all, since the engines automatically search for new sites. If they don't find yours quickly, manual submission is quite easy and there are a few top search engines that have most of the market share.

Conversely, there are a few relevant and current strategies for climbing the ranks of search results. (It should come as no surprise that these are broader and more difficult or time-consuming to implement than the myths would suggest.)

- Unique content: Consistently offering high quality content that is valuable to your users, unique on the web, and from original sources is by far the best way to attract users – and search engines – to your site. If your site consists of copy, providing a unique value in information filtering, commentary and analysis, or other user-friendly services.
- Voice of authority: Along with unique content, offering an authoritative voice is a good way to increase your links and therefore your page ranking. Either become an authority yourself or offer interviews, quotes, or guest content by noted authorities in your field. If well-respected people and organizations recommend or reference your site, your popularity will rise.
- Professional networking for link sharing: As a web master, blogger, marketer, or business owner, professional contacts matter for a wide range of activities. Additionally, you may ask these people to link their sites with yours, or to provide expert and authoritative content for your site.
- Crawler files: Having a robots.txt file that is updated, accurate, and properly configured can make your site easier to catalogue correctly. Building the site's architecture in a crawler-friendly manner can give your site a slight edge that may be worth pursuing. Do remember that search engine developers are concerned with their users and serving them appropriate content. They're smart enough to outwit most technical tricks.

Labels: seo_guide, seo_tips

Every modern professional knows that with the whole world being one big marketplace, having a web site can make or break your business. To be a success, your business has to be seen before it can sell and turn a profit, and that requires an efficient, up to date web site that can tap potential customers across the globe. There are advertising strategies that factor in not only the high end corporate prospects but the other side of the coin for the needs of individual shoppers on the virtual market of the internet. Just about everything can now be bought online, from food, to clothes, to antiques -- even to pets.

But if you’re a newbie in the world of internet commerce and you have a product to sell on a web site, you may not know how or where to start your marketing. One of your answers is search engine optimization, or SEO; and the secret to SEO is keywords. Search engine optimization is defined as web content that’s been developed to adopt specific, often descriptive keywords or key phrases that guide traffic to a web site. While there are many other forms of attracting traffic to a site, SEO remains one of easiest and most effective to use.

To implement search engine optimization you will need to use a search engine. The well known and most widely used search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com are your best bets since they are set up to handle heavy traffic. Most of your prospects for customers -- or hits -- will come by way of search engine. They will use key words to look for the providers of the services they need then make comparisons between the names or listings that turn up. But most users will use a search phrase rather than a single word. So, it’s important to develop web site content that is more key phrase rich than keyword rich. Rather than use a common keyword like “book,” something more descriptive like “art book” or “cook book” would yield better results.

Another key factor is the appropriate keyword density, or the number of times that the keyword appears in the content on the web site. Search engines decide whether a page is relevant to a search query by the keyword density and ranks the web page based on this factor. But just as important as keyword density is your keyword placement on the site. If the keywords are distributed carefully through the content, as opposed to being crowded together, the search engine will recognize your content as quality and improve your ranking in the search results.

Maintaining your website and constantly updating your content and keywords is among the most important factors to success in using search engine optimization. Time doesn’t stand still for anyone, especially on the internet. An outdated web site loses ranking in an SEO search and thus will fail to attract those much sought after hits.

Labels: seo_guide, seo_tips

Be useful.

Okay, lesson learned, you can all go home now.

Well, it's not quite that easy is it? Actually, it is and it isn't. There are some legitimate web building skills you can use in order to make it easy for search engines to crawl your site, or for promoting links from other high-quality sites. However, at the end of the day, what matters to your site isn't really the search engine. What matters is users. In addition, what many web masters forget is that users are what matters to the search engine developers too.

When a user types a keyword in to a search engine, they're relying on the search engine to provide them not with popular links, but with useful content. If what they find in your site is unique or thoughtful, high quality, and actually relevant to their needs, they'll stay awhile. If they're web masters themselves, they'll link to your content. If they're bloggers, or “mavens” as Malcolm Gladwell calls them in The Tipping Point, they might promote your site's name in their articles or talk about it to their friends and colleagues. The more promotion you get, the more you become accepted as an authority in your field, and the more web masters will link to your site. Getting these high-quality links is one of the key technical methods of increasing your search engine page ranking.

So how do you get useful, relevant content onto your site? Clearly, this depends on your site's purpose, your users' needs, and your own constraints. The following are a few tools to have in your content building toolbox.

Expert Opinions

Interviewing experts is a time-tested journalism technique, updated for the blogging era by the use of email. If you're a blogger and a relevant expert or academic has published their email address, send them a polite request to answer a few questions for publication on your site. This provides one of the most surprisingly easy methods of generating new and unique content.

Structured Copy

If you must write copy that summarizes other sites, do so in a structure that is immediately clear and useful, and can become a familiar pattern to your site's users. If users know that they can always go to you and find a quick summary, followed by a thoughtful analysis or question, followed by a link bibliography, they will begin to trust and use you as an information filter. Web masters who are looking for content to link to will be more likely to use your site repeatedly.

Passion and Style

It's easy to get excited when other people are excited. Show a clear passion for your topic, and write it in a style that's appropriate to the user community you target. It is much easier to get a reputation as an authority, and to make valuable contacts in your field, if people can tell that you enjoy your work.

Labels: on_site_seo

The number of links to your web site is important in determining its position in the search engine results pages (or SERPs). A link to a site is a sort of vote for its relevance or popularity based on specific keywords or key phrases, and this is a major factor in how high or low the site ranks in a search. It’s rare for users to go beyond the first or second page of search results, and your likelihood of getting customers to visit you web site are greatly reduced unless you can command a high position on the SERPs.

Many people’s livelihoods come from web sites that get most of their business from search engine-generated traffic, and a lot of time and effort has gone into building reciprocal back link relationships with other web sites to make sure they stay afloat. But how are those back links and relationships built? First of all, it helps to have a web site with a specific purpose, that fills a need, that has information or content that people want to link to. Reevaluate your web site and try to determine its usefulness in helping a visitor or potential customer achieve a goal. Providing a referral list of relevant resources on your site can be invaluable, such as other web sites, stores to buy the right materials, helpful reading lists or publications, calendar of events for upcoming conventions, et cetera.

Do some research and come up with a list of industry or field-related news sites where you can announce your web site’s presence and submit it to them for review as a relevant, quality resource to share with readers. Write a well thought out press release about your web site and what makes it stand out, and email it to PRWeb as well as bloggers, online journalists and experts specific to your web site’s theme or subject matter. Networking with peers hosting other web sites is a great way to build back links, as long, of course, as the content is relevant between both sites. Share news and articles or ask for feedback about the usefulness of your site’s content.

Another good way to generate back links to your site is to create a blog or news section, if you don’t already have one, and post or write your own favorable article about a relevant company in the headlines and then send that company the link to the story to which they can then – and probably will -- link back.

There are many other ways to make your web site an inviting resource to link to as long as you show patience and good judgment in your choice of link relationships. With good links, the traffic will follow. You are limited only by your imagination.

Labels: link_building

So, you want to start a new web site. However, what, exactly, do you want this web site to do? All web sites should have a purpose, reach out to a specific audience and, hopefully, attract visitors. Do you plan to sell something from your web site? Or will you be sharing information and other kinds of content around a particular topic, such as you might find on a news site or even a personal page? Or is it a little bit of both? Until you figure out what the purpose and goals of your web site are, you probably won’t know how to structure it effectively, and it may become frustrating or confusing to visitors who likely will not return. That’s bad news if you had plans to actually make money from your web site.

There are countless reasons why a web site might fail, but one of the easiest traps to fall into is creating the site based on how you personally would like it to be rather than what your visitors and customers might need and want. Of course, you need to point your visitor in a certain direction to reach an objective, but that’s only possible to a point. Visitors might not want to feel manipulated. They’ve come to your site with their own agendas and goals. Your job is to set up your web site to make it easier for your customers to accomplish those goals.

When you know what your site is all about, next try to be clear about who is most likely to be interested in the wares or services you have to offer. What will appeal to them to make your web site attractive and make them want to visit for a while? Better yet, become a customer who will visit often? In determining the demographics for your target audience, you’ll need to be as specific as possible. Is gender important? How old are they? What do they do for a living, and how much do they make? How much education do they have? Are they likely to live in the city, suburbs or country? All of these are factors for the design and the implementation of the content you will need to put on your web site to make it a success.

For instance, if you’re targeting to sports buffs, you’ll probably want a more masculine, action-oriented look to your web site as opposed to something soft-colored and more feminine. As much as you might like it, an article on art galleries wouldn’t be as relevant on the site as an article about sports injuries -- unless the galleries focus on exhibitions of sports in art. As well, there’s no reason to include a link to your favorite online store unless that store supplies sports apparel, equipment or other paraphernalia that would be of use to your target visitors.

And as important as keeping your content relevant is keeping it current. Nothing scares away customers like a neglected web site.

Labels: website_development

There are many factors and processes that go into creating, developing and marketing a successful web site. The first begins with what you actually want to achieve with your web site and understanding the target audience whom you intend to serve. Then you need to find a way to get your message out to that audience via search engine optimization using strategic content keywords and links to and from other web sites. It’s a lot of work and takes more than a little patience, and you may feel that your job is never done. But with the right planning, the results can be not only immensely satisfying, but very lucrative.

Not enough can be said about knowing your audience, what they want and why they would come to your site. Try to avoid the trap of making the site what you want it to be over your customers’ needs. Then, once your web site is up and the design and content elements are in place, it’s time to turn your attention to how to market all your hard work. One of the most powerful mechanisms of guiding internet traffic to your site is search engine optimization, or SEO. Most of your web site visitors will come by way of search engines like Yahoo or Google. Hopefully you have made your web content descriptively keyword or key phrase dense so that your site will turn up in the search results.

At the same time, keywords aren’t enough to ensure higher rankings in a search query. You need to have inbound links and outbound links from your website to other sites. Search engine algorithms count these links to determine your site’s relevance or popularity with the search users. Your linking relationships are very important, and you should be judicious in building them. The key again here is relevance. Linking to just any site will not help you and may, in fact, even lower your rankings in the search results.

Among your best bets for getting good back links are to establish relationships with other web sites or blogs in the same field or industry as your own, especially field related news sites to which you can make your site’s presence known as a new resource. Make links to sites that aren’t in the category of heavy traffic. When you take the time to establish these networking linking relationships with peer blogs and web sites, they will regard you as community contributor who helps increase their own value and site ranking with your link. Just remember that this process is going to take some time, so patience will be necessary.

Finally, one of the most important factors to consider is that a successful web site must be maintained and constantly updated, especially if you want to increase your SEO rankings, attract customers and, best of all possible worlds, and watch your profits rise.

Labels: website_development

Search Engine Optimization requires specific skills, as well as the time and focus necessary to edit and test a web site against SEO best practices requirements. Most web masters are incredibly busy already with simply keeping their web sites functional, online, and growing. Yet hiring an SEO service can be an expensive investment. It's critical to make a strong business case for spending money on what might be a nebulous return – or to do the work yourself at the expense of other projects.

In order to do a cost/benefit analysis on the relevant factors, you must ask yourself a few business and technical questions:

- Do you have the skills needed to do search engine optimization? This will require streamlining and selecting keywords and tags that match what users are currently searching for, as well as generating unique content, and structuring your site architecture to be friendly for crawlers. If you don't have these skills, do you have time to acquire them? Would other, more high-priority projects be compromised if you spent your time this way?
- Will your site handle the traffic a higher search ranking would generate? If you're already working at capacity, it may not make sense to do any optimization until your site can handle an increase in traffic.
- Are there potential users searching for the keywords you're associated with? If you serve content to a unique niche, there may not be enough available traffic to make it worth your while to optimize. For example, if you average 100 unique visitors per day, and only 110 people per day search for your primary keywords, it may not be worth the investment. At this point, you should evaluate both the relevance of your keywords to your content, and the potential market for your website, before looking into SEO.
- Are your competitors ranked significantly higher than you are? They may have already spent time and money on SEO and be reaping the benefits. Look at their site architecture and content to glean clues about what they're doing right. If your sites are of similar quality on the surface, but drastically different in rankings, then it may be worth the investment.
- Can you afford an SEO service? Call a few reputable companies to get quotes on introductory services, as well as long-term contracts, in order to get an estimate of the expense. (Do stay away from companies that promise guaranteed rankings, or that will use a pay-per-click scheme rather than actually modifying your site correctly.) Then calculate the extra revenue you would generate if you were able to match your competitors' traffic volumes. Compare the difference between that and your current revenue, versus the cost of the SEO service quotes.

Ultimately, pursuing SEO is a business decision. Apply sound business logic along with your technical expertise, and use your professional contacts to get advice from people you trust. In many circumstances, it can be overkill and an unnecessary investment. However, for the web sites that would benefit from the service, the rewards can be enormous and well worth the investment in time and money.

Labels: seo_services

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a particular discipline within web design, intended to increase the site's rankings on a search engine. Since many users who search for a topic will select a site from the first page of results, or may stop after only a few pages, most web masters want their content to be displayed at the top of the page rankings.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to promote your web site within the search engine page rankings, and a number of pitfalls to avoid. Since the field has grown and evolved over the years, there is a body of knowledge and professional debate about it, as well as some long-standing myths and hold-overs from previous techniques that no longer work.

Pitfalls include:
- “Magic formulas” for keyword density
- Dictionary-like lists of keywords in page headers
- Filling tags and headers with irrelevant content
- Using invisible tags or keywords to “trick” the web crawler
- Using link exchanges or farms

Time-tested techniques include:
- Offering high-quality, unique content
- Becoming or utilizing recognized authorities
- Carefully soliciting links from high quality, professional contacts
- Structuring your site to be easy to crawl

Getting into SEO means sifting through all of the information available on how to optimize, determining which information is relevant and current, and then applying the best of it to your own project. Doing so cost effectively is critical.

You can choose to do your own SEO on your web site, or contract the work out to professional SEO services. Whether you do the work yourself or hire it out should be a careful business decision, based on the current size and completion level of your site, the amount of user traffic it can handle, the amount of time and skill you can dedicate to the SEO project, and of course your budget.

If you choose to contract the service, do your research on firms that are professional and well respected. As with any other web-based service, caveat emptor. There are good firms and scam artists, clear terms and fine print. Be sure to check the SEO provider's references, and ensure that you're paying for site architecture and content changes, rather than simply for pay-per-click contracts. Avoid any that guarantee you a particular page ranking or sound too good to be true.

By far the best technique for increasing your search engine page ranking (SEPR) is simply offering high quality content that users find valuable. The more people value and respect your site, the more respected bloggers and sites will link to you, thus increasing your rankings.

Remember that the point of SEO is to drive users to your site. You should never find yourself sacrificing a user-friendly experience or the quality of your content for the sake of the search engine bots. Search engines are themselves web sites that must offer a high quality experience to their users, so they will heavily penalize sites that use technical “tricks” that degrade their own user experience. More importantly, a high page ranking is irrelevant without a good web site that keeps users coming back.

Labels: seo_guide

If you’re new to the world of web site development and traffic, one of the best ways to get your web site a high ranking with search engines is to build links – but be very careful about the links you choose. There are categories of links that will be more valuable to your site rankings and others that will even bring them down.

There are a few different types of links to consider and some general terms you need to know. The outbound links on your web site lead to other sites. Let’s say you’re writing an article on your webs site about applying for copyright protection. The outbound link is where you’ve linked from your site to the U.S. Copyright Office site where readers can get forms and other information. When someone links to your site from another web site that is an inbound link. For instance, you’ve written a favorable review of a theatrical event. The inbound link would be the theater company linking to your site in order to publicize the review. The link to your web site’s home page or index page is a general link. A specific link goes to a particular posting or section on your site.

High-ranking sites are usually very well known sites and get high traffic flow, plus high search engine ranking. Microsoft, EBay and YouTube are good examples of highly ranked sites. Search engines like Yahoo, Google and Ask.com determine how sites are ranked based on algorithms. One of the main types of algorithms counts your inbound links (links to your site from another web site) and uses this to gauge your web site’s relevance or popularity with readers based on the search parameters.

Now it’s time to make a list of sites to build links to and hopefully get inbound links back. In order to increase your ranking, make links to sites that don’t fall under the category of heavy traffic. Facebook gets so much traffic that it probably won’t care that you’ve linked to its site, but the florist with the irises you mentioned in your article will probably appreciate it and reciprocate. You may want to post comments (and link) to various blogs in order to make your web site’s presence known, and you will also want to link to other web sites that publish content relevant to your own. In this instance, make sure you let the author or administrator know that he or she is receiving inbound links from you.

The value of taking time to establish these links to other sites and blogs is that you will be viewed as a contributor to the community who increases their web site ranking and value with your link. Your productivity can be doubled by combining your tactics of finding sites to link to and sites you would like links from. But be patient, and don’t rush it. This process is going to take some time.

Labels: link_building