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Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization) can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer is always a qualified “yes”– you can achieve professional SEO results using existing talent. However, for every company we have known that has met with great in-house SEO success, we know of many more that have seen their in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits. If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are some critical questions that you should address before you proceed. Do I have the proper resources at my disposal to achieve professional SEO results? Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal – especially at the project’s outset when target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes are first being established. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and service areas are added. Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business. Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative is likely doomed to fail. • Do I know which departments of my company should be involved, and will they work with an insider? As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website. Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot. • Will someone be held accountable for the results?This may seem like a small consideration, but it can have a tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If you have added this responsibility to some poor soul’s job description with the direction that he or she should “do the best you can,” you’ll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: SEO Certification Considerations, Selecting An SEO – Musing On An Endeavor To Trademark SEO, 10 Reasons Why You Should Pay for Search Engine Optimization

If you are thinking of using Google AdWords to generate money for your website, you have to bid on the right keywords as they play a huge role in your success. Most people often bid on keywords that are popular, which are also expensive. You can search for keywords without having to pay anything, all it takes is some creativity. Here are some ways for you to do so and find top keywords for your website.

Discover The Keyword Search Suggestion Now?

Joining Forums

Forums related to your website’s topic are one of the best places to initially start your keyword search. You can easily find related forums by using the search engines, simply type in the word “forum” after your website’s topic. For instant, you can type “computer forum” or “fashion forum”. Once you find forums relevant to your site’s topic, join these and go around the forum. Read through the conversations and pick out common terms, words and topics. As you do this, you can build your keyword list from these common words and terms.

Using Google AdWords Free Keyword Tool

Making use of Google’s Keyword tool is also a good option to find popular keywords. This keyword tool is available on the Internet and you can simply get to there by searching “Google AdWords Keyword Tool”. When you get there, simply type in your topic word or phrase then click on “Get Keyword Ideas”. The site allows you to also search for synonyms. Make sure that you tick this option so that you get more keyword suggestions. You will get a list of keywords plus some additional keyword suggestions. These keywords result also come with statistics like search volume, which is extremely helpful. Best of all, this is all free.

Use Amazon

Book content is often overlooked as a source of great keywords. Amazon.com provides you with a peek at tons of book content, keywords and information. You start by searching for the top five books that are related to your website’s topic. Take a look at the content page for each book and start your keyword research. What’s great about Amazon is that they allow you to browse through the books’ first few pages and you can use this to find more keywords. This method does not only provide you with keywords, but also information on what your audience looks for.

Other Related Websites

There are also other popular websites where you can find keywords. But make sure that these websites are related to your topic. Go through their content thoroughly. These blogs or sites are usually optimized for certain keywords in search engines. Look at their headers, page titles, meta keywords and also descriptions. These things will give you an idea of the keywords that these sites use and what your common audience usually searches for.

Internet Keyword Tools

There are several useful keyword tools that you can use on the Internet, like WordTracker.com, KeywordSpy.com and KeyCompete.com. However, they are not free and require payment in order for you to make use them. They are perfect if you’re planning on extracting thousands of keywords because they give you thousands of keywords almost instantly. Do remember that these tools can sometimes be difficult to use.

You can use these methods to find keywords for your niche. Just remember that keywords can be found everywhere and there are numerous ways to find them. Whatever methods you choose, it’s important that your keywords are all relevant to your website and targeted to your audience. This will eventually brings sales to you.

Find Out More About Finding The Keyword Search Suggestion Now?

As the internet has become increasingly sophisticated, the various professional fields in the internet marketplace have become more and more specialized. In each area there have been massive leaps in complexity, usability, design and technology.

Even just a few years back, there were relatively few separate specialties for people who work within the arena of the internet. These days there is a vast multitude of ways in which people can specialize online. These professionals include:

Web designers,Information architects,Google Adwords campaign managers, various types of program and software developers and last but not least, SEO services.

In my experience, most web designers these days don’t even know how to include Search Engine Optimisation in the sites that they design and build. There is ample proof of this; it is visible easily every day by just taking a look at what is out there. Websites that have either no or empty Meta tags no headline tags and in some cases no title tags! The most frustrating part of this is that all of these measures are very easy to include.

So where does that leave the buyer? It leaves them with a website that will no doubt look fantastic; however the chances are that few will ever see it. Let alone become customers of whatever service or product the site is offering. This seems to be particularly true in the case of websites that contain a lot of flash, it looks great, but it is heavy in the browser and as it is purely images, the search engines cannot read it, even if there are words as the words themselves are rendered as images not text.

Therefore, when shopping for a website designer, be aware that though most will have the words ‘SEO’ or ‘Search engine Optimization‘ somewhere within their marketing or sales material. It is a good idea to check that that they really do know what that means, many of them do not. The way to check it out is to look at sites they have already completed – particularly their own. Check to see if it has Meta tags such as the keyword and description meta tag, check to see if their title tags actually have something useful in them not just ‘welcome to company XYZ website’.

These things are simple for anybody to check out. The title tag contents are readily visible when you open any webpage in your browser, you will see it on the very top of your screen. To double check the other items you will need to view the source code, you can do this in Firefox by clicking on ‘View’ then on ‘Page Source’. This will show you all the code of the site, the meta tags should be near the top just after the the title tags.

Finally, check out the code to see if headline tags have been used. Between these tags you should see the main headline of the page, this should include the keywords that you want people to find your website with.

Article by Johnathon Black

I put a lot of my thought into developing strategies for search engine optimization (SEO) for my business’s many traditional websites and blogs.  An online business has two options for tackling the necessary, continuing task of improving SEO.  One of those is to handle your optimization efforts in-house, while the other is to hire a consulting firm to assist you in the project.  Such consulting companies cause me some concern for serveral reasons.  Many of the consultants are not well informed about legitimate research about how the search engine algorithms determine rankings.  They rely on rumors without the empirical data to confirm these often incorrect assumptions.  Some of the simply disguise themselves as experts, and then go out and purchase links from link farms.  Such links can sometimes have very short term success, but eventually the linking strategies are made useless by sophisticated search engine algorithms that can uncover such schemes and cause your site to drop back farther in the search results than it was before you hired the self-proclaimed masters.  My third concern about these companies is that they are usually very expensive for the limited value that you actually might achieve.

You should already know what my recommended solution is from reading between the lines of my first paragraph:  Take the time to educate your company team unless you want to hire the few very expensive geniuses in the field, such as Leslie Rhode, Brad Fallon or Dan Thies–if you can get them to work for you at any price.

But to take the do it yourself approach, you need some help in the form of basic search engine optimization education and good, well engineered software to help you gather and analyze the immense amount of data required to indicate potential areas of improvement and to track the results of the strategies that you implement.  I have a comparison of the most important SEO software on one of my websites.

I have long been a long term supporter of SEO Elite (see sales page).  This Callen designed program has been a leader in SEO software for years.  I generally recommend it without any reservations.  However, I know that the company plans to release a new version of SEO Elite in the near future, so I hesitate giving it my full endorsement right now, unless you can find out if those of us who own the original will be able to upgrade SEO Elite 2.0 at a reduced rate or unless you decide to by another Callen miracle solution, Keyword Elite, because you can buy both at the same time for a substantial discount.  I bought both at the same time and, together, they are still among the best investments I have ever made!

The only other comparable SEO software package is guru Leslie Rohde’s Optilink (you’ll land on the sales page).  Leslie Rohde is the patron saint of optimization, a genuine genius.  Rohde taught me much of what I know about search engine optimization.  Pardon the lack of modesty…I know an immense amount about SEO.

If your business can afford the expense, I urge you to buy both software options–and use them both (as well as the amazing Keyword Elite).  However, if you are new to the online business world and you are going to begin your optimization efforts using just one, for the time being I am going to deviate from my usual recommendation and endorse Optilink.

Both SEO Elite and Optilink are comparably priced at just under $200 each, which is a bargain.  Only if you are really pinched for cash, Rohde’s company also offers a less sophisticated aid, Optispider, that is only half as costly as the robust Optilink.  If you really must scale back to that level, you might also consider the similarly priced ($100) Traffic Travis, by Mark Ling.  If you follow the link in the first paragraph of this article, you can get to my comparison of all of these alternatives, and there are direct links there to each of the software products.

I am a frequent user of both SEO Elite and Optilink, and I believe that they compliment each other marvelously.  They allow me to save hours upon hours of gather the data, and they make valuable contributions in assisting me in making sense of all the data they collect for me.

Here is one example of the financial results that a company achieved by optimizing a single keyword that moved from the bottom of the second page of Google to a number 4 position, above the fold on the first page.

A client’s website had a ranking of 18 for their primary target keywords on the second page of Google’s natural search engine results. Considering how many marketers are competing for the top positions for this keyword, appearing on the second page of search results seemed a like an accomplishment, but we thought that it could be better.

SEO Works

A marketing strategy focused optimization efforts on improving the natural keyword ranking for this one target keyword. After some time and effort, the ranking for the keyword first moved to the number 9 position, and then to the number 4 position of the first page search engine results. The improved search engine ranking for this single keyword generated an increase in sales leads far more than expected, which subsequently converted to an increase in sales revenue amounting to over $1,000,000.

Tracking the Moves

The list below shows the search engine ranking relative to the number of sales leads that were generated from the company’s primary target keyword:

• Nov 08 – position 18 = 6 leads
• Dec 08 – position 9 = 31 leads
• Jan 09 – position 9 = 126 leads
• Feb 09 – position 4 = 102 leads
• Mar 09 – position 4 = 207 leads
• Apr 09 – position 4= 221 leads

Summary of Results

The increase in the number of monthly sales leads can be seen as the target keyword ranking moved up over the six month time period. The full benefit of the keyword moving from the 18^th to the 9^th position is reflected in the January total because the change occurred later in the month of December. The same applies to the move from position 9 to position 4 because the change occurred later in February.

For marketing managers and business owners who are wondering about the difference between having a major keyword listing on the first page of search results compared to the second page of results, this case study should provide some insight based on our experience.

It also shows an example of the potential benefit from having keyword search results listed above the fold of a web page as opposed to below the fold where viewers must scroll down to see more search listings.

There was clear evidence that a higher organic search engine ranking can dramatically affect sales lead generation and company revenue, in this case over $1,000,000.

Wriiten by Rick Smith at 10th Degree Online Marketing and Jazel Automotive SEO.

Search Engine Marketing Video

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start discussing what you should and shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their website, if they happen to have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, what you like and dislike, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

When considering finding out more about search engine marketing; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may decide your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines very much prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorize correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

WordPress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power or flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do too.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

There are a number of steps I always follow when optimizing a site for SEO (note these are just the high points, there are others that I don’t mention here, but these WILL take you a long way):

1) For a new site, I will include the keywords in a non hyphenated domain name (if you can get a .edu or .gov TLD do so, otherwise a cheap .info will do just fine)

2) I like to rename the URL to each money page to include the main keyword for that page.

3) Implement Google Analytics for the site and ensure the tracking script is added to every page.

4) Go through the “money” pages and make sure that the title, meta descriptions and meta keywords tags are different and optimized for the keywords on the page. In a competitive niche (over 1 million result pages in Google), I would limit the keywords to one main phrase, a couple of local modifiers and one or two more closely related terms per page.

5) Go through the non-money pages (i.e. pages you don’t care about from an SEO perspective) and ensure the title and meta description tags are not duplicates of any of the money page tags. Google Webmaster tools will identify this for you once your site has been crawled.

6) I nofollow any links to overhead pages from all of the pages on the site other than the home page. I leave the home page links as follow links, since I want the SEs to index all pages on the site and having privacy, contact, disclaimer, etc overhead pages add to Google’s view of the “trust” for the site. On all other pages I want only the link to the home page to be a follow link, so I can build up the page rank of the home page. I handle this in Dreamweaver by using two different site templates. If your main keyword page is something other than the home page, modify your approach accordingly.

7) I then optimize each pages content for it’s main keywords, modifiers and related terms. It’s critical that each word or phrase used in the keyword META is found on the page to avoid keyword spam penalties.

At this point the on page optimization is complete enough to start with link building. As you may already know, building links is not a piece of cake. I use articles, blog posts, submit forms on relevant sites, reciprocal links, etc. There are ways to make this process easier, without going black or even grey hat. Contact me at Mississauga Search Engine Marketing if interested.

For many blog owners, they fail to capitalize on search engine traffic because they rely solely on Social Media traffic. Failing to bring in targeted traffic is one reason many bloggers stop trying to make money with affiliate programs and find the next scheme to jump into.

If they only understood how easy it was, they might have a chance. It can be done in 3 easy steps. By following these easy steps, you can increase traffic and make the difference between a blog that makes the owner little if any income or a blog that is an instrument for additional income.

Follow the advice below to SEO optimize every blog article you upload and take advantage of free traffic from search engines.

For starters, you should make sure your article addresses are optimized for the search engines. With a blog platform like Google’s Blogger blogs, this is done automatically and cannot be changed. WordPress blogs need a little work. If you use the WordPress blogging platform, then you’ll want to change your url structure so that WordPress will produce optimized url’s when you make a post.

The way you do this in WordPress is go to the Permalinks tab, and check the button along side the Custom field. Then you’ll put a percentage sign followed by the words Postname. {Immediately after the words postname, Now} add another percent symbol. You’ve now ensured that all your post will have optimized urls.

The best tip to optimizing your blog is to put your main keyword in the Title. For example, if you’re blogging about ways to earn extra cash, then make these keywords the Title of your blog. Don’t put something like Johns Blog. If your name is John and you have a blog named Johns Dog Blog, then you’ll rank higher than if you name the blog something that does not tell the search engine what your blogs about.

Your next move is to put the keywords in the Post’s title. If you’re trying to get blog readers to click on your post about using Ebay to to make extra money, then your keywords need to be in your post title. Not something like How I Make Money With Auctions. The search engines won’t know what your post is about and the search engine traffic you need won’t appear. If you’re using Adsense to monetize your blog, this is a very important tip to get targeted traffic for high paying keywords.

These 3 tips will be letting the Search Engines know what your post is about. When you make it easy for them to know what your post and blog are about, they’ll rank your post higher in the Search Engine ranking pages.

Building links to each of your optimized post is the last step in dominating the search engine rankings with your blog post. Ahh, but link building is a whole nother article that has to be saved for later. Get used to optimizing your blog and blog post before tackling the chore of building links to your site.

Search Engine Optimization Video

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start talking about what you should or shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and fingers crossed linking to your blog from their site, if they happen to have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

When considering finding out more about search engine optimization; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may decide your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines definitely prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorise correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

WordPress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do as well.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

How does all affects the search engine optimization? Not many, I can honestly say. There is only ice market. Both Google and Bing will coexist peacefully. There is no strategy for change is now needed is the real life of soldiers.

Facebook is now the most visited social networking website in the world. Facebook tremendous number of users who log on to the left, so it is invisible to a great part of the network, that is, search engine. You can see that these users of Facebook, the site will work with the feed and search site. Facebook has also introduced vanity URLs that is expected to increase search engine optimization of people and companies using it. The vanity Web site will allow users to choose a user name and have started a separate website http://www. So, someone may have something like http://www.twitter.COM / softxml. So if someone searches in Google softxml results will be displayed in this web site. This will increase the search engine optimization. For a company this can safely translated into targeted web traffic, and subsequently conversion. It is easy to create a brand username and get displayed. This has created tremendous opportunities for Western business use of Facebook applications.

Facebook also added new internal links to it`s brand Pages in users` public search listings. Therefore, if some people like things, which will appear in his or her search for a list of public. That way, companies will have a great chance of exposing themselves to Facebook users and increase their seo services.

Twitter has now emerged as an important tool to find live information. There are many tweets this concern what is happening around the world. Searching tweets can keep people updated on many real life news items. Twitter is also effective to send visit other pages, this is a great advantage of search engine optimization.

To increase SEO, business can follow some steps that will be effective. Choosing good username is very important. The username should reflect the brand being endorsed. Added to this effective username should be optimal utilization of bio.