Search Engine Optimization Blog
Everything you wanted to know about SEO
Online Advertising For Reaching Your Specific Target Market
Sep 3rd
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Online advertising offers a myriad of options of placement, functionality and costs, including pay per click, affiliate programs and targeting specific markets based on their search habits or expressed areas of interest. Most websites are free to visit and just like print publications, the content is supported through the sale of display ads, called web banners. These banners can remain the same for days on end, or can easily be changed to include the current score of a baseball game or reflect a breaking news event. A website can easily change banners every 30 seconds or charge a premium for exclusive use.
Affiliate marketing is a form of online advertising that uses one website to drive traffic to another. Amazon.com was one of the first websites to establish affiliate programs and today holds the patent on the concept and its components. A baker of specialty dog biscuits would carry a link to Amazon’s books on dogs on her site. Every time one her customers clicked on the link and made a person, the baker earned a commission. Banking customers can earn deposits into their health savings account by purchasing products from one of several retailers through the bank’s website and clicking on the retailer’s link.
Online advertising fees can be structured in many different ways, including cost per impression, and cost per click (or pay per click). An impression is simply an appearance on a web page. Every time the page containing the ad loads it’s counted as one impression. Most search engine and social media ads employ a pay per click rate structure. The advertiser pays every time a user clicks on the ad. Because these ads are easy to target to a very specific audience who has already expressed an interest in your product area, pay per click ads generally have a high return on investment.
Search engine ads, such as Google AdWords, allow the online advertising coordinator to select specific key words to trigger the appearance of their ad, including geographic location. A caterer in Rocky River, Ohio created a campaign based on the words catering, weddings and gourmet and limited the area to within 30 miles, and paid per click, and limited it to $25 a month. Because it was so targeted and specific, only people seeking a gourmet caterer within normal driving distance could see and click on her ad. Ads on Facebook and Twitter allow for the same type of targeted advertising.
Websites Should Be Easy to Read
Sep 3rd
How often have you gone to a website looking for a certain item or product and had to go through a lot of pages to be able to find it? When you are creating a website, you need to make sure that you are going to be creating a website that is easy to read and follow by anyone who comes to the website searching for a product. It is fine to have a lot of content and articles–and you should include plenty of them that have the SEO keywords that you are using–but keep it simple and, if you need to create more pages or organize the pages better, take the time to do that before you publish the website. If you find that you are having issues creating the website the way it should look and read, consider finding some SEO services that can help with the design. If you are going to do it yourself, here are some tips to follow that can make it easier:
1. Consider what your readers want – when you are online and looking for a certain kind of product, you know what you are looking for and you know what you like to find. If you go to a website that is suppose to have the product on the page that you are on but you are not able to find it anywhere, you probably leave the website and search again. You need to consider that your readers are probably doing the same thing. So, if you are not placing the products on pages that are easy to find, customers are probably not going to be able to find them.
2. Use the SEO tools that are going to help you – if you are not tracking and monitoring the progress of the keywords and ads that you have online, you are not able to know which ones are working the best for you and which ones are not. There are free SEO tools that are available to use online and you can easily find the keywords that are getting hits and those that are not. Focus on the ones that are not and change them to help improve the amount of people that can see your website.
3. Create more pages if you need them – when you have a lot of information and content to put on the website, be sure to create enough pages to have it so that it is easy to find and read by users. If you are trying to put too much on the pages, you are not making it very easy for anyone to find what they want. If you need more space, instead of placing articles on the page, create a link for them that takes readers to another page. Keep the content that you are using related to the products that you have on the page and try to keep all of the same kind of products together. If you do have too much content for a product, simply add a link or add a page to create the room that you need.
4. Make it easy for search engines to list the website – if search engines are able to easily find the information that they are looking for, they are able to list the website. When submitting links to search engines to get listed, you should use the SEO that is on the pages on the website. When a search engine gets to the website, it needs to easily find those keywords. So be sure that when you are creating content on the pages, you are using the same SEO and that you are using it correctly within the content and articles.
If you find that you are following the tips of using SEO and trying to design a good website but are still not sure that you are using it correctly, you may want to consider finding search engine optimization companies that specialize in design that can give you more ideas on what you can do. They can also work with you to help you make the most of the tools that are out there. Many free SEO tools are online to use and, if you have not found any yet, go online and search for the tools that can make it easier to design and create a better website online.
The Article is written by seoconsult.co.uk providing Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimisation Services. Visit http://www.seoconsult.co.uk for more information on seoconsult.co.uk Products & Services
Internet Marketing and SEO
Sep 3rd
INTERNET MARKETING AND SEO
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet (or online or web) marketing broadly refers to the marketing of companies, brands, products or services using the Internet. The rapid and dynamic growth of the Internet has created tremendous global marketing opportunities for businesses to reach new customers and communicate with them in ways they couldn’t before. Regardless of the industry, many companies have realized its potential and importance, and are now looking at web marketing as a vital part of their overall marketing mix.
Internet marketing can scale many areas, and can include such things like Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Online Reputation Management (ORM), and E-mail Marketing. This article will focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Link Building.
Search Engine Optimization and Link Building
Search engine optimization is one of the most crucial components of Internet marketing, especially for growing small businesses. What good is having a beautiful website if your customers and stakeholders cannot find you in search engines? The goal of SEO is to increase the volume of targeted traffic to a website through search engines. A good SEO strategy involves two basic elements: optimizing the website content and link building. They are both equally important, however in this article we will discuss link building.
Link building often begins once a website is completed, and once its web content has been optimized. In a nutshell, optimizing web content involves having a website with a search engine friendly architecture and structure (a good web developer would know how to do this), with content that is strategically written with SEO in mind (a good copywriter would know how to do this). Your next step is the off page activity referred to as ‘link building’. You can think of link building as a popularity contest. The goal is to find as many quality, relevant websites to point to your website. The more you get, the more link popular your site becomes. And generally, the more popular your site becomes, the more search engines begin to notice it. In fact, Google has their own 10-point ranking system (also known as PageRank) of websites based on links. All websites start from 0 on the scale, and a site with many people linking to it, such as Facebook, would be a 10. Here is a link to a free tool which allows you to lookup any website’s Google PageRank: http://www.page-rank-lookup.com
There are many different ways to build links. There are countless numbers of directory and search engines sites for businesses, web, press releases, articles, blogs, and videos. And there are also social sites which include social networking (Twitter.com) and bookmarking sites (Digg.com), and blogs. The more content you have to share on such sites, the better it is for your SEO campaign.
Submissions to directories can often take some time (depending on the directory). In general with most directories, there are three ways to get links: free submission, paid submission, or reciprocal links or link exchanges (ie. I’ll link to you if you link to me). Link building through social channels can occur much faster because you can actually manage the content and submit it yourself.
Link Building Best Practices
Link building has several obvious advantages. As mentioned above, it is a way to increase the volume and also the quality of traffic coming to a website. Moreover, it helps by increasing the visibility of a website by putting it in front of more sets of eyes, with more people being able to find a website through more web channels.
There are some general best practice rules to link building though. One of them is avoiding building links to irrelevant websites. For instance, if you are in the furniture business, do not submit your link to a health website directory. Another good rule is to be aware of the PageRank of the site you are submitting your website to. Websites with higher PageRanks can give you more link popularity than websites with lower PageRanks. In the end, you can think of it all as being a popularity contest, in which the traditional rules of a popularity contest still apply.
About Motive8 Media
Motive8 Media is a full-service Internet Marketing and Web Design agency based in Vancouver, B.C. They mainly work with small to medium sized businesses looking to increase their online exposure and visibility. They offer integrated and customized marketing solutions to fit any business need or budget. For more information and examples of their work, please visit them on the web at http://www.motive8media.ca
The Owner and President of Motive8 Media Vancouver Internet Marketing and Web Design.
How to Write Good Content for Your Website and get Picked Up by Google
Sep 3rd
Here is the dilemma that every one has now a days; how to insert keywords in your website? What keywords should I use? How many keywords should I have? The answer is very simple; forget the keywords and just write the content of your website for your clients, not for Google.
Google is a very interesting search engine, but most of all Google is highly sophisticated software that knows about you more than you know and probably you will ever get to know about him. To be more specific; Google can tell if you are writing content for your visitors or to try to score with Google and how do you score with Google? You score by trying to add as many keywords as possible.
So to get to the point; when you start writing the content for your website you do not need to be so concerned about your keywords and your key phrases. The logic is very simple; if you are writing about a topic let say for instance that you are writing about web design services obviously you will need to mention the word web pages, websites, web design and many other words that are relevant to your story. There are your keywords and your key phrases, as you can see there is no need to emphasize or to accumulate chunks of keywords words because they will fluently come in together for you as you write your content for your website. On the other hand when you try to score with Google by adding extra key words then the result is that Google will reject your page and in addition your visitors will also run away because the content of your website is poor.
Pedro E. Montero
Get your new website indexed in Google fast easy and free
Sep 3rd
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Establishing your MyWorldPlus business or other online business will also take a while. In fact, growing an online business can take months just to establish an online presence. Getting your website indexed in Google or Yahoo can take months. In fact, there is no guarantee they will ever index your site. One thing is for sure, if you don’t get your site indexed, you are at the mercy of someone typing in your website address right after they read it off of your business card.
The best way I have found to get your website indexed is to open a Blogger account and get to blogging. It is free, easy and painless. This is Google’s own blog and you should see your website get indexed by Google before any of the others. If you are not a big fan of creating your own content, borrow some related content from an article directory. Just make sure that you post the proper credit to the author and follow the article site’s guidelines. Before your borrowed content begins on your post, write a paragraph or two of related content and include the hyper link to your website. Visit my blog for an example of what I am talking about.
Next, go to Technorati dot com and find the ping the page. Enter the url to your new blog and ping your site. Technorati is a content monster and webmasters from all around go there to find content. If you will make a blog post every day, include your hyper link and ping your site, it will not be long at all before you find your website in the Google search results. I have seen brand new sites show up in the search results in as little as two days with this method. It may take a week or maybe a little more but it has always worked for me. If you would like to know more marketing tips and ideas, visit my homepage at http://www.myworldrocks.biz
Steven Phillips is a myworldplus member/associate and an avid saver and his money saving, residual income program can be found HERE.
Effective PPC Advertising and Social Media Advertising
Sep 3rd
Both PPC and social media marketing have been steadily integrated into many business strategies, but if you have not incorporated these 2 powerful marketing tools, you may find you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Inasmuch as the ROI, conversion-rate obsessed world of paid searches can seem light years away from the viral and community-based marketing seen in social media, their differences are exactly what makes them complementary.
On the one hand, ppc is all about lead generation, revenue and conversion. Other than the small number of words describing your site, paid searches offer little in the way of branding. In contrast, Social media is all about branding when used for your business. You create an active dialogue with consumers and that dialogue builds trust in your brand and expands the concept of your company’s brand to form an identity. By creating content in your social media marketing that engages your audience, you can develop paid search campaigns that are targeted toward that audience.
A recent study (October 2009) by GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore found that when an audience is exposed to a targeted social media campaign, they are almost three times as likely to search on the terms used in that campaign. In addition, an target audience exposed to a good social media marketing campaign is almost twice as likely to search with the intention of buying. The study also found that brands had a 50 percent increased click-through rate when their target target audience was exposed to both social media and paid search. The study illustrated that social media builds a deeper brand awareness and, thus, is able to drive ppc. This results in more impressions, more clicks and a higher quality score, which in turn means that your advertisements will be placed increased on the page.
Here are several successful strategies for bringing paid search and social media together effectively:
- Optimize your social media.
When your social media marketing is tagged and indexed, complete with metatags, potential customers will be able to find you when they search for your brand content or product/service offering.
- Use keyword advertising on social media sites.
When you run an advertisement on certain social media sites, such as Facebook, you have a unique targeting option that traditional ads do not offer – you can make your advertisements appear only to those people who have certain interests, as listed in their profiles.
- Let social media marketing influence your paid search campaigns.
For example, pay attention to what is trending on Twitter or what the key topics and discussions are and create paid search campaigns that include those search terms.
In the beginning, integrating your ppc and social media campaigns can be trial-and-error. Expect that and use it. Spend some time running tests, such as turning your social media off to see if it makes a difference or finding out which keywords tend to help the most people find you. The key to being effective in advertising of any type is knowing where your traffic comes from and why.
Pittsburgh SEO Services provides “results-driven” internet marketing for small businesses. Visit mediawhizmarketing.com/free-report to get your free SEO report now.
Articles are a great way to enhance your websites
Sep 3rd
Creating the content that your website needs can be a lot of work. If you have never written any content for a website before, it can also seem like there is a lot to learn and it may seem like too much to try to do. It is possible to learn more about writing good content for a website and how to use search engine optimization. The more that you learn about it, the easier it can be to work with and to start to use in your website. If you need help trying to learn more about SEO or about writing effective content you can find a variety of SEO services online that can help you get started. You can also find a lot of great websites that will help you learn how to write the content that you need.
Choosing the Best Keywords Choose the Right Keywords – create a list of keywords that you want to use, starting with the products that you are selling. Once you have created this list, use some of the tools that are available to see if they are popular keywords. Use them throughout the content that you write for your website. You can also use them to post links to the website and when you are going to be creating ads to post on other websites. Be sure to choose the keywords that are being well searched for in the search engines and use those keywords throughout the content and in the ads and links that you are creating.
Using Articles Write effective articles – articles are a great way to enhance your website but they need to be written effectively. This means that you need to use SEO, and you need to keep them short and informative. Readers should be able to go to your website and find what they are looking for easily and find the articles easy to read.
If you need to find help writing the articles and you are not able to get them written yourself, you can find a professional service online that can provide you with the articles that you need. They can make sure that the keywords are used and that the articles are the right length and on the right topics. You want to try and have all of the content that you are using related to what your website has to offer.
Using Tools and Blogs Use blogs and forums – blogs and forums are other ways that you can use SEO in the content on your website. They are also great ways to interact with the customers that you have and get feedback and comments from others who are on your website and reading the blogs.
Creating More Links Create more links with the content – once you have created the content that you are going to use on the website, you can then create links for it online. You can submit these links to a variety of websites and promote the products that you have on the website.
Updating Your Content Keep the content fresh – readers want to find informative and fresh content when they are on your website. Keep the content that you write informative but also make sure that it is related to the products or topics that you have about your business.
Update the content often so that you are always providing the best information for your customers. Your work is not done once you have created the content. You need to keep creating more content, articles and updating the blogs or other tools that you have on the website. You also need to be tracking the SEO and keywords that you are using and see which ones are working the best for you.
Submit articles online to help market the website using the content that you have written. You can find places online to submit your articles to. This is a very easy way to create more links and get more people to see your website and, when you use SEO, it is also affordable. You can use the articles that you have written as links and find places to submit them to online. You want to make sure that you are using enough articles on the website and that you keep them full of good information for people to read and learn about on the website.
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The Article is written by seoconsult.co.uk/ providing Website Optimization and Search Engine Optimisation Services. Visit http://www.seoconsult.co.uk/ for more information on seoconsult.co.uk/Products & Services___________________________Copyright information This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety, including live links & this copyright statement must be included. Visit seoconsult.co.uk/ for more services!
SEO for Dummies
Sep 3rd
I was recently invited to speak at an event orchestrated to give small business owners an overview of the e-marketing landscape. I thought I’d go in, give an overview of SEO, and provide some practical SEO tips for those delegates who possibly didn’t have the budget for a full-blown campaign.
I was met with a few blank stares, which made me realise that a lot of SEO still goes over the heads of most people. That’s not to say that they don’t know what it is, and most people these days certainly grasp its benefits. What they don’t understand is “the how.”
Keyword research and careful keyword allocation remain the cornerstone of a solid SEO strategy. But that aside, what are the technical considerations that you should look at, on page, to ensure that your content performs as well as it should on the search engines?
Make sure it’s accessible
If search engine spiders can’t reach your content, they can’t index it. One of the most common problems I see is that sites restrict spiders’ access through their robots.txt file, restrictive navigation or the use of elements like iframes and Flash.
Get your meta-data right
We know that Google doesn’t consider the meta-keyword tag any longer, as it had been so widely abused in the past.
However, the title tag is still one of the most important elements on a page. It can also play an important role in click-through rates, as it is the blue link text which is displayed on the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s important to include your main key-phrases here and to customise this tag for each page.
An equally important element, the meta-description, is often used as the snippet on the SERPs. This should include relevant key-phrases, describe the page and entice users to click-through.
Use proper headings
Headings give your page structure and, if these are marked up correctly, they give search engines a good indication of your page’s hierarchy.
Use descriptive URLs
URLs should contain keywords. If your site is data-base driven, you could utilise something like a mod_rewrite to convert your URLs into user and search engine-friendly addresses.
It’s also worth employing a directory structure that orders your content in a hierarchical and logical way.
Link properly
Linking appropriately to your landing pages with the correct keyword-rich anchor text (link text between the tags) not only provides a useful point of entry for your human users but also shows search engines which pages on your site are the most important and what they’re about.
SEO made easy
The good news is that if you use a platform like WordPress for your site or blog, it already takes care of most of SEO’s technical considerations for you. There are several plug-ins or widgets that you can use to rewrite URLs, to insert custom meta-data and to format headings.
Generally the CSS and the mark-up of WordPress templates is standards- compliant and very accessible, so you don’t need to worry about whether your content is crawlable or not.
Of course, the content is still up to you. You will need to evaluate the keywords you choose to use, monitor your progress in analytics and use this data to make informed decisions about changes to your site.
AlterSage, a full service online marketing agency, offers tailored online marketing solutions that achieve targeted exposure for your website. Goal focussed and driven by return on investment, services include search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, web design and development, persuasive web copywriting, brand building, conversion analysis and many more.
Microsoft v. Google – Kai-Fu Lee’s Non-Compete Agreement
Sep 2nd
Unless you’ve been on vacation all summer, the brawl between
Google and Microsoft should be old news. New developments,
however, have occurred with publication of the non-compete
agreement signed by Kai-Fu Lee.
Google v. Microsoft
Earlier this year, Kai-Fu Lee quit Microsoft to go work for
Google. In doing so, Lee allegedly violated a non-compete
agreement he had signed with Microsoft. Predictably, Microsoft
sued Lee to prevent the move and the brawl began. Microsoft
landed the first punch by getting a temporary restraining order
preventing Lee from working for Google until the case is
resolved.
Non-Compete Language
As matters have moved forward, the language in the non-compete
agreement has become public knowledge. Generally, Lee agreed not
to work for a major competitor of Microsoft if he left the
company for a period of one year. The specifics of the language,
however, are grossly entertaining
In signing the non-compete agreement, Lee agreed:
1. “…not to accept employment or engage in activities
competitive with products, services or projects…of Microsoft…I
worked on or …learned confidential or proprietary information or
trade secrets while employed.”
2. All litigation arising from the non-compete agreement would
occur in the State of Washington.
Mr. Lee and Google have a serious problem. California courts
rarely enforce non-compete agreements, while Washington courts
do. Since Microsoft sued first and Lee specifically agreed to
Washington jurisdiction, this case should remain in Washington.
Google is trying to move jurisdiction to California, but
Microsoft beat it to the punch. Google’s attorneys simply blew
it.
Prediction
Predictions in legal disputes are iffy at best, but Mr. Lee and
Google have really fallen on their face in this one. Why they
didn’t sue Microsoft in California court before Microsoft could
react is mind boggling. The deck is now stacked heavily in favor
of Microsoft and you can expect an outright victory for
Microsoft or a settlement on terms set by the company.
Richard A. Chapo is with SanDiegoBus
inessLawFirm.com – This article is for information
purposes only. Nothing in this article is intended to address
the reader’s specific situation nor does it create an
attorney-client relationship.
Driving your website through Google Sandbox
Sep 2nd
What is Google Sandbox?
Google Sandbox is applied on new websites, it determines the
timing of site inclusion as well as ranking in Google search
engine results (SERPS). This process could take up to 6-8
months, which could be against your plans causing frustration to
webmasters.
The question is what is to be done during the time in which
websites are in Google Sandbox?
Do not waste time on checking your website listings in results
page instead emphasize on SEO methods to accelerate your
listings & improve status of ranking results. Also make efforts
to appear on other major search engines such as MSN & Yahoo
since they do not have sandbox like Google, this will help drive
traffic to your website while waiting for Googlebot to index
your pages.
Link building strategy is another important issue not only will
it improve ranking but also it will help Googlebot spider to
find your pages easier while it’s in the sandbox instead of
repeatedly submitting your website every time.
Content is king
Main part for ongoing development of your website is to add new
content on continuous basis since the most thing search engines
are after is good quality websites with relevant content.
Conclusion at the end is that waiting for Google Sandbox is
nothing but a waste of your precious time; instead do some
useful efforts on developing your website with relevant content
& adding inbound links as a part of your linking strategy to
make Google happy with what it sees as well as your target
visitor.
Monia Hassan is specialized in providing SEO services. Working
for Moon Search Engine Optimization Company
(http://www.moonsearchengineoptimization.com)specialized in SEO
services. Writing SEO articles is part of her task, to help
increase people knowledge of what trends are used by search
engines on an updated basis.