Recent Updates about Search Engine Optimization,PPC,Pay Per Click ,Link Exchange

Are You Ready to Outsource to a Search Engine Optimization Company?

2008-07-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

So, you are the marketing manager of your firm, and you've finally decided to pull the trigger and hire the search engine optimization company that you've been talking to for months. The budget has been cleared, the SEO firm is ready to start, and it should be just a matter of time before you start seeing a huge uptick in business. Right?

Not so fast.

An experienced search engine optimization company will tell you that an ill-planned campaign can be a non-starter from day one. This usually happens when there is no clear understanding of what will be required of the client to make the project run smoothly.

What follows is a list of just a few of the things that your search engine optimization company will need from you in order for the company to get its job done as effectively and quickly as possible. It's a good idea to consider these things before you sign the contract - because a stalled campaign will cost you money, even if it is just lost opportunity cost.

Access to and Control of Your Website

You may be ready to do whatever it takes to take the steps necessary for a successful SEO campaign. Your IT team, on the other hand, may have ultimate control of the website. This only makes sense - an internal IT team that controls the website knows the ins and outs and doesn't want anyone jeopardizing the functionality of the site. However, an SEO campaign will usually require extensive changes to the site - and you don't want to hit a brick wall when you bring recommended changes to the IT staff or ask them to give your search engine optimization company access to the testbed. Make sure that you have an understanding with them before you sign on with a firm, lest you suffer delays and internal strife.

Additionally, it is important that you can get access to either the log files of your website or to the current reporting platform. Before a search engine optimization company begins work on your site, you want to be sure that you have a baseline of current search referred traffic. Without this, you'll have nothing to brag about later - and no way to hold your firm accountable if results do not turn out as planned.

For more on achieving buy-in from different departments within your organization before embarking on an SEO campaign, please see this article.

Control of Your Website Copy

If internal politics are such that you have to consult with every department in your organization in order to get website copy changed, it's imperative that you make sure you have this process streamlined before you bring in your search engine optimization company.

There are many reasons why several departments may be involved in the content of your website. For example, mortgage brokers, medical offices, and investment firms (to name but a few) will almost certainly need to run copy changes through the legal department before they go live on your website. If your company sells complicated software, for example, the copy may need to be run by the developers to be verified for accuracy.

No matter how your internal politics work, make sure you are on the same page with all the people who will be involved in the copy approval process before you start the project.

Awareness of Current Code Limitations

Your prospective search engine optimization company should be able to look at how your website is constructed and let you know if there are limitations that may impede your ability to implement recommendations that can help your search engine optimization efforts.

For example, there are many CMS (Content Management Systems) that will not allow changes to be made that are beneficial to search engines. While many of the new systems are "SEO friendly," many of the older ones are not. Updating your CMS to one that allows changes to be made for maximum SEO benefit may incur additional costs. If your search engine optimization company has been around for a while, they should be able to steer you in the right direction and, indeed, help you and your IT team to switch to a more SEO friendly platform.

Change like this can sometimes be difficult - another reason why you must be committed to SEO and achieve the buy-in from your IT team before you embark on a campaign.

Time

The largest commodity that most marketing managers do not have is time. Frequently, there are innumerable campaigns running at once, and outsourcing SEO to a search engine optimization company may make you feel that it is done and off your plate. Alas, this is rarely the case. A good search engine optimization company will take the requisite time to learn as much about your business as it possibly can, but the fact remains that nobody knows your business as well as you do.

This means that you will have to be involved in the SEO process. If you can't dedicate an hour a week to offering feedback, approving changes, and making sure that the work being done is consistent with your overall message, there will be large delays in the project.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/67934

Top 10 SEO tips for small businesses

2008-06-08T04:07:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimisation is a science that takes many years to learn and master, additionally the technology involved is continually developing and changing. Therefore, it isn’t something that everyone can do however, there are certainly a few things you can do to help get your website ranked higher in Search Engines.

With online presence becoming increasingly competitive it is vitally important to get your website highly ranked. The top ten tips below from Adam Price, MD of SEO Sitebuilder.com outline the key factors you should examine closely to ensure an effective online presence.

1. Content is King!
It is in the search engines best interests to highly rank websites that people will actually like and gain benefit from. Therefore you need to ensure that your website provides valid information for the visitors. Generally a 5 page website would not be classed as an information resource and the search engines will be looking for more, so make sure you provide enough content to make it worth while for people to visit.

2. Keep on topic!
If you are selling garden furniture on your website keep on this theme – the easiest way to remember it is – ‘1 website – 1 theme, 1 page – 1 topic’ Don’t try to promote all your different businesses on one website. This will dilute the power of your keyphrases and content.

3. Don’t try to fool them!
The search engines are becoming extremely intelligent and are fully aware of all the rogue techniques that can be used to try and fool them. You need to avoid using hidden text as if the search engines spot any trickery you will be marked down and sometimes even blacklisted.

4. Choose an SEO partner wisely!
I’m afraid to say but there are many ‘cowboys’ in this industry that will try to convince you that they know what they are doing when really they don’t have a clue. The best way check SEO companies is to ask to see results… what have they done for other companies? Can they prove what they say they can do? Here’s a tip, make sure they tell you what domain you should find BEFORE they show you any results!

5. Search Engine friendly design
Stay away from using ‘Flash’ navigation, in fact avoid creating your entire site in flash. This is because flash makes its impossible for the spiders that the search engines send out to find out what your site is about. Many web development companies are still using tables to layout a website. This is an old technique now and is not search engine friendly.

You should have your website developed using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Try and avoid Javascript Navigation. Although these can be used to produce attractive fly out menus with lovely rollovers and colours which look very nice on your website, the trouble is that the spiders can’t understand the content within Javascript. As this is where all your page links are, you need to avoid Javascript in order to be found.

6. Back Links
Getting other people to link to your website is fantastic but bear in mind, they have to be relevant. The Search Engines will be able to recognise if the links are irrelevant and can take a view that you maybe using some form of link farm service which is frowned upon.

7. Duplicate Content
Make sure that you do not have the same content on any of your pages within your website or even the same as another website. This is frowned upon by the search engines and can even result in your website being moved to what’s call the supplemental listings, which essentially is a secondary database.

8. Site Maps
Site Maps are a fantastic way for spiders to be able to collect as much information about your website as possible. Provide a Google site map as this will be directly related to Google’s own specification.

9. Alt Tags & Title Tags
These are a fantastic way to get more valid information about your website in to the search engines. Alt Tags are the little tool tips of text that appear when you hover your mouse pointer over an image. The Title Tag will be the little tool tips of text that appear when you hover your mouse pointer over any text links on the page.

10. Bullet Points!
Use bullet points to emphasise selected pieces of text. However don’t use them without providing supporting information otherwise this could be seen as key word stuffing.

You can use the SEO tips above to try and improve your rankings but you must bear in mind the way your website has been developed. Just imagine you are building a house, if you don’t get the foundations right at the beginning it doesn’t matter what you put in to it, it could still be unsafe and not built correctly.

Source:http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/promotion/7_6/top-ten-seo-tips.shtml

Search engine competition to get aggressive

2008-03-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

Martin Byrne has a simple Internet test for Canadian banks: The search engine guru suggests typing "savings accounts, Canada" into a search engine and see what comes up.

If you're expecting to see Canada's major financial institutions appear on the first page, you'll be disappointed.

TD Canada Trust is the only one of the majors that appears in the top 10. Aggressive cyberbank ING Direct is at the top of the search listings -- winner of that particular search-engine optimization contest. And HSBCdirect.ca occupies the top paid listing, giving it winning points for paid placement.

Winning the online search game is a growing competition, and one that is expected to result in more than $1 billion being spent on search-engine marketing (SEM) in Canada by 2010.

And it is a fast-moving competition. What tops the list one minute might be deposed by a contender the next.

It has spawned a whole new category of marketing, with British Columbia enjoying high status in the new and growing generation of SEM specialists.

Byrne, the national director of Yahoo Search Marketing Canada, was in Vancouver recently as part of a Yahoo team hosting and taking part in events focusing on this lucrative and growing segment. It's a field in which Canadian businesses are lagging behind their U.S. counterparts.

"Compared to all the other major developed economies [Yahoo is] in, Canada has been the slowest to adopt search marketing," said Byrne.

SEM promotes websites by pushing them up to the top of the search engine results, through a variety of means that can include search engine optimization (SEO) -- which is getting search engines to choose your site as the most relevant and freshest for any particular search request -- to paid placement.

There are a number of popular search engines, led of course by Google, which, according to Hitwise.com, accounted for 66.44 per cent of all U.S. searches for the four weeks ending Feb. 23. Google was followed by Yahoo! Search at 20.59 per cent, MSN Search at 6.95 per cent, and Ask.com at 4.16 per cent.

In 2007, $410 million was spent in Canada on search-engine marketing, and that number is expected to climb to more than $1 billion by 2010. U.S. companies spend a much higher proportion of their online budgets on search marketing. North American-wide advertisers spent $9.4 billion US in 2006, representing a 750-per-cent increase over 2002.

It's an important pipeline to potential buyers and customers. According to Yahoo research, 43 per cent of consumers rate the Internet as the best source for price comparisons, and 37 per cent turn to it most often in their consumer research. The Internet ties with word-of-mouth as being seen as the most reliable source of information for 24 per cent of users.

Among Canadians online:

- 78 per cent use search engines to research purchases;

- 27 per cent of those Web surfers end up making online purchases;

- 45 per cent of those searching online for product information end up buying offline;

- in 2007, Canadian consumers spent $10.5 billion in online purchases, and that number is projected to climb to nearly double for 2008.

The message for businesses, says Byrne, is that regardless of whether they cater to customers offline or on, search engines play an important role in promoting their products or services.

"We help them understand the role search engines play in their business, whether they are actively managing it or not," he said. "The reality is there are 85 million search queries a day in Canada, and we take people through the amount of influence search engines have on people's consumer decisions, on their buying decisions.

"What we are finding is that search engines have more influence in terms of offline consumer decision-making than they do in terms of online purchasing decisions."

Byrne said British Columbia's entrepreneurial spirit is pushing the province to the forefront of the sector, with businesses here developing expertise that has gained international attention.
source:http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=3fc37cab-4dae-4544-b18d-91128b1b5a88&p=2

Link Building is a continuous process

2008-03-01T20:57:00.000-08:00

In Search Engine Optimization, off page factors have become related to rankings and its importance is increasing day by day. Link popularity is now the back bone for any solid website which can now make or break websites in the search engines. On the basis of this the link building process carries special importance in web promotion tactics of NDDW.

Link popularity is determined by the number and quality of links pointing to your website. Still one of the crucial aspects of SEO has been link popularity because search engines do not want artificially created or useless links. So it is not that easy to build link popularity in genuine manner according to the present scenario. Link farms and huge link exchange programs have now the thing of the past. Those who will try such strategies will easily find themselves booted out of search engines. Infact search engines likes links from authoritative sites or links from the site that share the same theme and focus as your website. NDDW performs the link building operations in a genuine and authorized way keeping in view the search engine algorithms and guidelines.

The benefits nowadays from getting an authoritative site to link to you are getting additional visibility apart from the link popularity. Web masters are generally contacted for link building and this brings reciprocal links. But much better methods of generating one way links from high traffic websites have also come into existence. These are submission of websites into internet directories, write interesting articles and distributing all over internet, but it becomes beneficial only when they have link to your website.

At NDDW all these different methods of creating link popularity are implemented to smooth enhance the operations of link process for a website. So here the link building may be slow but it is a smooth and ongoing process.
source:http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70357&Itemid=82

Study Rates PPC Search Providers

2008-03-01T20:49:00.000-08:00

AXcess News has completed a study of pay-per-click advertising agencies which was conducted to find out just how well they perform.

The reporting period ran a span of eight weeks in which a host of PPC search providers were rated for Support; Reporting; Accuracy in deliverable clicks; and Quality of visitors.

Tech beat reporter Dave Porter said, "We found alarming differences across those per-per-click (PPC) advertising agencies."

In a tech feature story released Sunday evening, titled, "When Pay-Per-Click Goes Per-Clunk" Porter noted that "In all fairness, there were many differences between the PPC providers reporting capabilities and so we took that into consideration in rating them."

During the course of the Study, Google Analytics' Urchin software was used in combination with tracking codes to monitor each PPC search provider for accuracy of deliverable clicks.

In Dave's story, each PPC search provider was rated using a simple grading system of "A" for excellent to "F" for failure. The report itself is being made available free of charge to anyone who requests a copy. A link can be found in that news article.

The study was not funded by any third-party and no marketing scheme to promote advertising is involved. AXcess News is a broad news publisher online and one of the largest independent pure web news publishers in North America with a network stretching across 92 major market cities in the United States, 16 in Canada through affiliate Source Press and an additional 16 in the United Kingdom through European affiliate EU News Network Ltd. whose combined headlines reach in excess of three million readers per day.

source:http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=76738&Itemid=9

Relating social media to other online strategies

2008-02-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

Online success depends on something very important – it requires a multi-tactic approach. I like to consider online strategies as a solution made up of three important web marketing pillars that each work together to achieve strategic objectives, namely a corporate or brand website, ROI-driven web marketing and influence-focused social media.

Before I explain, let's identify some typical strategic objectives:

* Generate traffic and and links
* Improve search engine rankings for targeted key phrases
* Build awareness amongst your target market
* Increase your subscriber base or generate a lead
* Build trust amongst your customers
* Sell a product
* Help users move through the sales cycle
* Build influence in the market place
* Support your crisis management communications strategy
* Learn new things about customers
* Identify relevant online networks

Different strategies address different objectives

As we can tell, most of these objectives are relevant to most businesses; however, it's important to understand that different online strategies address different objectives. As an example, social media may be great to build influence or learn new things about customers but would need the support of search engine optimization (SEO) to sell a product or generate a lead. It's not to say that social media cold not address these objectives; having the two working in a combined fashion just makes it all the more successful.

So back to the three important web marketing pillars…

The foundation to any online strategy should be a corporate website. It's what some would call the starting point for customers who are interested in your company – for instance, where they get their news about your company and your product and service offerings. Pay a lot of attention to this because, if anything else, this is the most important online real estate you will own. It's what pulls everything together and what supports all your other strategies.

The second important online pillar is what I call “traditional digital media”. Examples of this includes affiliate marketing, response-driven advertising, pay per click, search engine optimisation and WebPR, to name some. When used properly, these strategies offer a very targeted, ROI-driven manner of reaching out to consumers and drawling them closer to a predetermined goal.

The third – yes, third – pillar is social media. I put this one last because well-executed social media needs the support of some of the above in order to be more effective than its isolated application. Unlike the other two pillars, the social media arm of the online strategy is about leveraging relationships and networks for the purposes of engaging in open dialogue with and amongst target markets, to create influence within the market and to discover new business-relevant information and trends.

Source:http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/16/21944.html

Running Successful PPC Campaigns: Attracting The Right Click

2008-02-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

Creating and refining successful PPC campaigns requires the ability to think and act like the average web surfer. It requires taking time to understand your ideal customer as well as the wrong visitor (the guy who just cost you a $2.00 click). It's worth the effort to figure out how to attract the former and dissuade the latter.

Outlined here are 7 tips to attract the right kind of clicks to your pay-per-click campaign, clicks that make you happy to spend those marketing dollars.

1. Study the website as if you were a visitor

* Click through each page

* Click on each link

* Look at pages in several different browsers

* View the source code for keyword ideas

2. Think through how searchers will search for your products (ID cards, photo id cards, nametags, ID badges) and separate out these intuitive keywords into their own ad groups

* ID card systems

* ID badge systems

3. Understand your policies

* Does "Same Day Ship" relate to lanyards as well as nameplates?

* How does the low price guarantee work?

4. Check Google Images for search terms that generate traffic, but that don't make sense such as "Cobra Lanyards" & "Dress Lanyards" or even the ubiquitous "Honda Lanyards"

* Understanding the search term (and whether you sell it) allows you to take appropriate action

5. Walk through all conversions to the point of the Thank You/confirmation page

* Is there "friction"? (anything that causes the user to become frustrated, fatigued or confused about the buying process)

* Are there broken pages?

* Is there too much on the landing page that might distract a potential buyer and make him/her bounce off the page?

6. Study your competition

* Understand what they sell

* Understand your image(s) of difference

* Write ad copy that echoes how the competition is advertising as well as ad copy that is uniquely yours

* Run testing to see which ad copy converts the best

7. Screen potential clickers with the use of qualifying adjectives

* "Premium"

* "Quality"

* "100 minimum"

This process assumes the presence of search marketing analytics. Utilizing good search marketing analytics in an intelligent fashion can give you control over the money spent on pay per click ads. If you don't have visibility into your campaigns then get in and strap yourself down, it could be a bumpy road!

source:http://www.straightupsearch.com/archives/2008/02/running_success.html

10 Search Engines You Don't Know About

2008-02-04T02:21:00.001-08:00

Go beyond Google and get vertical. These specialized search sites will help you find the business information you need -- fast

We've got some big news for you. Brace yourself. There are search options beyond Google -- and we're not talking about Yahoo! and MSN. Vertical search is on the rise, and whether you're looking for business products, services or information, or a new place to advertise, vertical search sites can benefit your company. Market research firm Outsell predicts that the vertical search market will reach $1 billion by 2009. While Google gets around 65 percent of search traffic today, it doesn't mean it's always the best place for your search.

"When we speak about an alternative search engine, we're speaking about something that's extremely industry-specific, very niche," says Jason Prescott, the owner of vertical search engine TopTenWholesale.com. "It's pin-pointing, accurate and only going to be for that topic you're searching for, [rather than] having to scour through the billions of search results you'll get on a mainstream, tier-one search engine."

The same logic applies when determining where to spend your search engine marketing dollars. If you sell a general consumer product, Google may be your best bet. But if you're looking for highly targeted business purchasers, it may be wise to go vertical. "[You get] a much more relevant user, a much higher conversion and a much better return on your investment," says Prescott. "User traffic might be a little less, but the visitor is highly more qualified."

Here are 10 vertical search engines we've identified as useful to any business owner. Be sure to research your own industry, however, for more specific verticals that can hone your searches or boost your advertising ROI for business customers.

* TopTenWholesale.com: One of the biggest hurdles for new retailers is finding wholesale merchandise to sell. Prescott aims to place all those product sellers in one place so that when you search for shoes, you receive wholesale results, not Zappos.com. The site also offers news, a blog, directory listings, forums and classifieds, fulfilling Prescott's goal to create not just a wholesale search site, but a wholesale portal.

* ThomasNet.com: ThomasRegister has been a leader in the business information field for more than 100 years, and ThomasNet.com is the place to go if you're in the market for industrial and manufacturing goods and services. This robust site allows you to search by product/service, company name, brand name, industrial websites or CAD models. You can narrow your search by U.S. state or Canadian province. Browse by category, download 2D and 3D CAD models of mechanical parts, and even download a search plug-in for your Firefox browser.

* FindLaw.com: Both FindLaw.com and Lawyers.com serve the same primary functions: They allow users to search for attorneys by location and specialty. But FindLaw has an easier-to-use interface, making its extra information quicker to find, such as the free form examples, free full-text books and legal dictionary. Both have general search functionality, message boards and blogs, but again FindLaw.com wins us over with its small business section.

* USA.gov: The government has a labyrinthine web of sites, and if you're looking for information, it's easy to get lost. This all-things-U.S.-government portal/search engine has a tab specifically for businesses and nonprofits, and you can browse by topic. By far, the most helpful area in the business tab is Get It Done Online, an area with links to business necessities that, yes, you can take care of online.

* IT.com: Rather than offering a plain vanilla directory or just one basic search bar, IT.com provides several tech-oriented search options. This includes product and service categories (enterprise networking, open source, product development) or industry solutions (government, SMB, financial markets). The interface takes non-tech folks into consideration as well; each search choice has a roll-over with an explanation of the terminology. In the main search bar, you can choose to search for news, companies, white papers or webcasts.

* Zibb.com: Reed Business is one of the leading vertical publishers with more than 200 business titles. Zibb.com is the company's new online venture, a vertical search service for business that offers not only websites and blogs in the results, but also Reed Business content. This site has a strong UK bent to its information, but it's one to keep an eye on because of its strong news element along with the typical search results and directory listings.

* VerticalSearch.com: VerticalSearch gets super meta as a vertical search engine for vertical sites. The homepage offers pre-determined categories, but you also can choose your own keywords. Results pages offer feeds of headlines and research papers, and you can choose to pull an RSS feed from any search that you choose.

* SearchFinance.com: This site bills itself as the "search engine for financial executives," making it quite the portal for corporate finance. While search is front-and-center, there are a ton of browsing options: blogs, podcasts, events, webcasts, magazines and alerts. Search results are particularly impressive. Directory matches pop up first, but you can also scroll over the results sources for more information on a particular company and choose to remove any "commercial" sources from your results.

* Yahoo! Local: This site is the most consumer-oriented of the bunch, but a recent redesign with a focus on vertical categories makes it worth a look. Yahoo! Local has broken out of the restaurants-and-nightclubs city guide mold to offer a number of business categories like health and beauty, automotive, and real estate--useful information whether you're looking for professional service vendors in your neighborhood, a new bistro to take a client to, or a local advertising solution for your business.

* Melissa Data: This is a slight fudge on our part as this site is more of a new customer enticement for data service provider Melissa Data than true vertical search, but there are so many free search options, it may become a favorite on your bookmarks. You can search for basic demographic and market data, maps and mailing information, statistics or specific data like SIC codes. There's a daily limit to your number of "lookups," so unless you subscribe, you'll have to curb your information appetite.

Source:http://www.bmighty.com/services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205918774

Search Engine Optimization Best Practice Helps Ecommerce Store to Increase Sales by 780%

2008-02-03T00:53:00.000-08:00

Using desme’s strategic online marketing expertise, Bradley’s Military Mall achieved a remarkable increase in sales of 780%. The recently launched army surplus ecommerce website accomplished this feat through their revitalized online presence and marketing campaign, both developed by desme.

Eighty-four days after implementation, the website has seen vast improvements in conversion rates and an increase in overall sales. Bill McKinney, the owner of Bradley’s, commented on these achievements, “Bradley’s web page actually experienced a whopping 780% growth rate since desme developed our new ecommerce website. This phenomenal, outlandish figure is usually only found in fairy tales, but it’s an accurate figure.”

desme was contacted by Bradley’s Military in January of 2007. After the initial exchange of information and a few helpful meetings, both companies came to an agreement for a redesign of the old website and the implementation of an intense online-marketing campaign. The first step was for desme to develop a brand new ecommerce website using the advanced ASP.NET technology on an MS SQL server.

desme’s website usability team conducted a complete target market survey to identify the user trends of Bradley’s intended audience. Based on these findings, desme’s graphics team put together a new layout for the ecommerce website. Once graphics were completed, desme’s technology team leader, Ashraf Alam (a Microsoft MVP for .NET technology), built a strong architectural backbone for the ecommerce solution. In less than ninety days the entire technology had been developed, including a fully integrated custom shopping cart.

While the website development was going on, a team of desme search engine optimization experts put together a complete keyword study. Working side by side with the developers, their work ensured the new website was fully optimized and that search engines could index the website content properly.

The website was launched in October of 2007. Within days the company started to see great results. With the old website, Bradley’s received about 3.4% online orders for all of their mail orders. In less than ninety days, the total online sales increased to over 780%. This increase currently makes up about 27% of all the mail orders. desme CEO Enam Noor says, “We feel very confident about this systematic improvement, and expect to see total online sales exceeding 50% of their total mail orders.”

desme’s view of a successful online marketing campaign includes the use of best practices, as well as a combination of increased site visibility and improved conversion rates through enhanced website usability. Using a systematic implementation of these principles, desme has achieved quantifiable results.

source:http://www.prweb.com/releases/Website_Marketing/SEO/prweb670163.htm

Freight Broker Hits Top 10 on Search Engines

2008-02-03T00:51:00.001-08:00

In addition to search engine optimization (SEO) the company's internet marketing program also includes a monthly email newsletter, frequent direct email campaigns, link exchange program, online directories as well as some pay-per-click advertising. The company has tracked over $500,000 in revenue in 2007 directly back to their internet marketing efforts. "Internet marketing has always been an important part of our marketing program. Our new site and the search engine rankings really highlight the fact that we are a technology driven freight management company," said Dennis Brown, the company's CEO.

The company expects the traffic to their site and the revenue linked to it to grow significantly in 2008. Recently, the company received an inquiry from a shipper which resulted in over $47,000 in new business since December 2007. In addition, the success of the company's freight broker agent program has been fueled by online marketing with over 100 inquiries per month being submitted through the company's website.

About Logistic Dynamics, Inc.

Logistic Dynamics, Inc. is a Buffalo, New York, based third party logistics provider that specializes in transportation management services including full truckload, less than truckload and rail. Their mission is to provide innovative, practical and top-quality logistic services that offer our customers a competitive advantage.

source:http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=64193&Itemid=9

Online Reputation Management To Keep Your Nose Clean?

2008-02-03T00:48:00.001-08:00

Techdirt is reporting that as a response to all the hoopla about people being able to Google for information on potential employees (or lovers) a new market has opened up in "online reputation management". This seems to be the ultimate realization of those dubious firms who promised to scrub your records clean from a few years back.

"From the description in the article, it sounds like this involves a combination of search engine optimization, plus legal bullying of anyone who says something you don't like. If anything, that sounds like a recipe for more trouble, but you can see how it would appeal to those who are unhappy with how they're perceived online. Obviously, it's no fun to have something bad about you exposed online, but efforts to suppress that information have a decent likelihood of backfiring and serving to highlight that information. I wonder if these online reputation managers have malpractice insurance for when that happens

source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/01/1618215

Unethical SEO techniques 'are punishable'

2008-01-29T23:26:00.000-08:00

Although search engine optimisation (SEO) is constantly changing, there are a number of techniques which are constantly viewed as against the rules, it has been claimed.
Barry Hurd, president of Social Media Systems, reports that "unscrupulous" SEO methods will result in punishment from the big search engines.
"Making sure that your company is aware of certain basic standards and not accidentally infringing on discouraged techniques is essential to making sure your online brand is a flourishing asset that is building value," he said.
Dishonest- or "black hat"- techniques include hiding a wealth of irrelevant keywords on webpages or page cloaking - showing search engines visually unappealing but maximised keyword pages that it would not intend for consumers.
Submitting identical content on different pages and providing multiple pages with a particular phrase for SEO is also frowned upon, alongside misspelling common words, brands or websites in order to appear when a web user submits a typo to a search engine.
Leading search engine Google has also publicly penalised websites which pay for reciprocal links, branding them unethical.

Source:http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/searchmarketing/18445052/Unethical-SEO-techniques-are-punishable

Get to grips" with SEO

2008-01-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

Firms who have been living on a different planet and have yet to optimise their website need to get up to speed, it has been claimed.

In an article for BizReport.com, freelance marketing consultant Helen Leggatt commented that 2008 is the year to use search engine optimisation (SEO) as a marketing tool.

Ms Leggatt said that pay-per-click adverts can be effective, but that 80 per cent of searchers use natural search results as a way of finding a product or a service.

She recommended that it should be a company's main aim to appear in the top five listed websites, or at least on the first page of search results.

"One thing remains certain - internet marketing is still the fastest, most measurable and direct means of marketing and it is here to stay," she commented.

Florida newspaper the Herald Tribune recently recommended that firms use natural search over paid as pay-per-clicks often attract spammers and competitors rather than potential customers.
source:http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/searchmarketing/18439599/

Top 11 Money-Wasting AdWords Mistakes

2008-01-26T01:25:00.000-08:00

In my daily interaction with search engine marketing clients, I come across bad habits that businesses and individuals continually repeat.

I see a very high percentage of website owners with little to no understanding of how to build a search engine-friendly site. That's typically my first encounter. The cash drain isn't as apparent then as during my second encounter: pay per click, specifically Google AdWords.

This column assumes that you're fairly new to Google AdWords. If you want to educate yourself further, the 10 to 20 hours you can spend at the Google AdWords Learning Center is well worth it. You also can take the certification exam if you meet their requirements. You need to manage at least one AdWords account and keep at least $1,000 "spend" for 90 days to be allowed to take the exam.

For more information, review the following websites:
adwords.google.com/support
adwords.blogspot.com
groups.google.com/group/adwords-help

They contain additional tips, as well as real-world comments from professionals and others in the field.
Once you've familiarized yourself with AdWords and are ready to set up a campaign, be sure to avoid these top 11 money-wasting mistakes.

1. Not turning off the content network.
When first setting up a campaign, turn off the content network. This option is "on" by default, and you're lucky if it works for you in the first run. It's a form of contextual advertising and tries to position your ads on sites like About.com, The New York Times, Food Network and others.

You typically will see high impressions in your system, but often low CTR--click-through-rates, as determined by impressions to clicks--and low-quality clicks. These aren't serious buyers; they're wasting your dollars and time.

2. Using too many keywords.
When creating new campaigns and ad groups, many people begin by entering every keyword under the sun. Don't. Targeting is key; think about your niche and the categories within it. You can use tools like the Wordtracker Free Suggestion Tool to determine which keywords to begin with. Then, when you have a list together, refer to tip No. 6 below.

3. Ignoring the competition.
Analyze your competitors. One way is to use the Google Keyword Tool. Select "site-related keywords" and enter the competitor's website to pull keyword groups from their pages. Also, check their sites for an overall impression and for content. Do some more digging at SpyFu.com to find more on rankings and competitive PPC spending. Look at the search results pages after entering their top keywords in Google, review their ads, think about text and prepare for tip No. 4.

4. Not including keywords in the ad text.
Use keywords in the title of the ad, but also in the ad copy. So many ad copywriters forget to include the keyword phrase in the actual body of the ad text. Write clearly and provide relevant content for both users and the Google AdBot. Create a matching, relevant landing page to satisfy users and obtain a higher Google Quality Score.

5. Sending visitors to your homepage.
Most PPC accounts I come across send traffic and visitors to their homepage. But there's simply too much information there, and visitors may leave your site. Read my blog entry on money-making landing page tips and test the pages for content. Realize that narrow-casting is better than broad-casting in almost every case.

6. Using too many broad keywords.
Creating ad campaigns and ad groups with tightly matched keywords is necessary, but most folks don't do it. You should place only a few keywords into each ad group and add more groups to accommodate new "themed" keywords. Google maxes out at 100 ad groups per account; I believe they'll raise this at some point.

7. Using broad match.
When you set up Google AdWords for the first time and input a keyword, the default type is broad match. While broad match can work for you, I always recommend using phrase and exact match types to start and track the performance from there.

AdWords also has a negative match type, which is overlooked most of the time. Examples of match types are:
Broad: leather jacket (any order, any word, not as targeted, more clicks)
Phrase: "leather jacket" (this order, words before and after, more targeted, OK clicks)
Exact: [leather jacket] (this order, no other words, highly targeted, least clicks)
Negative: - pink (this would not show ads for "pink leather jacket")

Yahoo! Search Marketing includes match types as well. Make sure you understand them and where they're different. Begin with the standard match type, which is not the default.

8. Using the default "optimize" option.
The default setup for AdWords is to let Google "optimize" your ads for you. It's better to select the "rotate" option, so you can test your ad performance in a much cleaner manner.

9. Not tracking ads and keywords.
If keywords and ads aren't performing, you're wasting money. You can use the free Google Analytics tool to help you track activity. Keywords should also be tested and tracked with misspellings, plurals and stemming(-ing) options.

10. Not properly testing ads.
A/B testing has been around in the advertising world for decades, and the concept is the same online. Write at least two ads within an ad group, and AdWords will rotate them automatically for you. This will reveal the winning ads based on performance. As you continue, pause the loser and write a new and better one; try to outperform the winner again. Don't change it immediately, though; let it run for a while to get some trending data.

11. Not applying the "conversion code."
Be sure to apply the "conversion code," which is a simple JavaScript set that goes into your landing page or thank you page. This information will show up in a column on your AdWords dashboard when you log in, and is a quick way to check for lead counts and important for tracking return on spend.

The Perfect Google AdWords Model
Now that you've read the tips above, here's how to set up a high-quality campaign.

Set up campaigns using keywords + geo (geographic) targets; content network turned off.

Set up campaigns using keywords + geo targets using Google's own internal selections (regions, territories); content network turned off.

Set up a separate, content network only (Google Search/Network is not checked). Only do this after you have tested the first two items for performance.

Create a new "placement targeted campaign" and use "section targeting" to avoid exposing your ads to "run of site" matching. When you research your keywords, find the top searched phrases and type them into Google. Click on each of the top resulting five to eight listings, and check to see if they have Google ads. If they do, use placement and section targeting to drive traffic with a highly targeted, cost-savings approach.

Create "exact" and "phrase" campaigns to start, and create ad groups with one to four keywords, tightly matched.

Create two ads within each group.

Show ads more evenly (campaign settings) and select "rotate" option.

Google is the most advanced, most used search engine, and the AdWords advertising platform, can generate business for you. The company also has expanded into audio, print, mobile and pay-per-action models. However, make sure to test for performance before scaling out to these additional services. If you're into advanced landing page testing, you can try the new Website Optimizer (video) options, which use advanced page and elements optimization.

These tips have helped me a lot, and although I spent a fair share of my own money to discover them, you can apply these tactics immediately and start saving money. You'll also receive more quality clicks and better tracking for yourself and clients.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/141728/top_11_moneywasting_adwords_mistakes.html

Affiliate marketing experiences dramatic growth

2008-01-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

Affiliate marketing is experiencing dramatic growth in the UK, according to figures out today from E-consultancy1. The findings are echoed by the UK’s largest independent affiliate network, buy.at, which has seen turnover increase by seventy per cent.

Kevin Cornils, CEO of buy.at explains, ‘Performance marketing has grown as marketers increase their knowledge of new marketing channels and demand greater efficiencies from their online activity. Search engine marketing has arguably reached its peak but affiliate marketing is still in a high-growth phase with 78 per cent of merchants planning to increase their spend. Merchants and their agencies are gaining expertise and becoming increasingly strategic in their use of the affiliate channel. We have seen investment increase by approximately 70 per cent on our network over the past year with brands such as John Lewis, M&S, Egg, Virgin Media and British Telecom adopting our innovative technology, such as dynamic product feeds to affiliates, combining different affiliate segments to maximise CPA and improving their tracking and analysis of the results. This represents a huge opportunity for both affiliates and marketers that understand the channel and appreciate the benefits of true pay-for-performance advertising.’

Today’s report from E-consultancy follows research sponsored by buy.at2 which discovered that 78 per cent of merchants had increased their spend on affiliate marketing between September 2005 and September 2007 and the same percentage planned to increase it further in the next two years. 75 per cent of gaming companies said they had increased spend since 2005 followed by 71 per cent of travel companies, 68 per cent of financial services companies, 64 per cent of telcoes and 62 per cent of retailers.

85 per cent of the UK agencies surveyed by E-consultancy3 confirmed that they now manage more affiliate marketing for clients than they did two years ago with the channel representing 20 per cent of turnover. 92 per cent of agencies expected to be managing more affiliate marketing in two years’ time, and 90 per cent of them see affiliate marketing is a way of growing their agency or differentiating it.

One reason for growth is because the channel is the most cost-effective channel for driving customer acquisition. The research2 found that 95% of UK advertisers (merchants) said that it is ‘very cost-effective’ or ‘quite cost-effective’ for acquiring customers. Paid search was seen as the second most cost-effective followed by email marketing with these marketing channels viewed as ‘very cost-effective’ or ‘quite cost-effective’ by 90% and 82% of merchants respectively.

Affiliate marketing was also revealed as a highly effective channel for driving volume with three quarters of respondents (73%) saying that it drove either ‘high volume’ or ‘medium volume’. The travel industry was found to be making the most successful use of affiliate marketing.

A total of 239 UK merchants completed the survey in September 2007. Half of the respondents who were aware of their company’s turnover said it was in excess of £50 million per year. 100 agencies completed the Affiliate Marketing Agency Survey.

Kevin Cornils, CEO of buy.at concludes, ‘Affiliate marketing has proved itself as a particularly cost-effective way to drive a volume of customer acquisition which has resulted in increased investment in the channel. We have had a particularly successful year at buy.at with new customer wins including Match.com, dial-a-phone, Seatwave, O2 and BT. We have also developed new partnerships with Atlas and Doubleclick, launched new technology, acquired a lead generation company, recruited industry experts such as Louise Green from OMG and expanded our network into the US. We expect this growth to continue even faster in 2008 as technology and account management become more sophisticated and affiliate marketing becomes an increasingly strategic marketing channel for UK businesses.’

sourcehttp://www.responsesource.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=36443&hilite=

Affiliate marketing in UK drives more than £3bn in sales in 2007

2008-01-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

The UK market for affiliate marketing grew by an estimated 45% in 2007, taking the total value of online sales generated by this channel in 2007 to more than £3 billion.

According to a research published in E-consultancy's Affiliate Marketing Networks Buyer's Guide, the £3.13 billion total for 2007, compared to £2.16 billion in 2006, illustrates the healthy state of this digital sector which will continue to grow strongly during 2008. The company added that sectors such as retail, travel and financial services continue to be the bedrock of affiliate marketing, with both Blue Chips and SMEs ramping up their investment.

E-consultancy's Head of Research Linus Gregoriadis said: "Affiliate marketing continues to gain momentum because the performance-based model is so popular with advertisers. When the biggest consumer-facing brands in these industries do not have a well-defined affiliate strategy, it now tends to be an exception rather than the rule."

He added: "The whole industry is getting more professional and 2007 was definitely a big year for affiliate marketing. The channel has become much more strategic and boardrooms are starting to take notice. Media agencies are becoming increasingly involved in this sector as a consequence of its increased profile."

According to the research, commissions and fees paid out to affiliate networks (covering payments for both networks and affiliates) amounted to £186 million in 2007, up 40% from £133 million in 2006 (and compared to £83 million in 2005).

The growth of affiliate marketing reflects the buoyant nature of online retail in the UK. According to the IMRG, the UK's online retailers generated around £46.6 billion in sales last year.

Source:http://www.m-travel.com/news/2008/01/affiliate-marke.html

What is a Feed and RSS?

2008-01-17T20:59:00.000-08:00

Recently I was wondering how many of the website users are familiar with subscribing to "Feeds" and understand what "RSS" really is all about. I don't often bring you technical advice because it is not the nature of the site, but I believe that this is a useful and time-saving technology that people should understand the basics.

So I've decided to do a short and informative little post about this technology and how it can make your life a little bit simpler.

Quick Introduction to RSS

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and is a technology that allows a website to announce and share it's updates to a large audience. The "Feed" is a document containing the update information which is shared out. So when you are subscribing to a website's "feed" you are asking it to inform you of updates.

This is not quite the same as an e-mail subscription which sends you a message directly. RSS is a passive technology which you must ask the website for this update file. It sounds a bit complicated but once you get in to the swing of things it becomes a real time saver.

How do I use a Feed

There are several ways to use feeds to your advantage. You can integrate them in to your homepage, such as Yahoo or Google. You can subscribe to "Live Bookmarks" if you are using Firefox web browser, and you can also use a web-based news reader application.

Adding a Feed to my Homepage

Most websites have a little orange icon which is the internationally known image for RSS. The large image on this article is one example, and there is another example on the right side of the page which is much smaller.

By clicking on that icon you can add the feed to your homepage or news reader application.

Adding Feeds with Chicklets

Chicklets are simple graphics that help the user add the feed to their homepage or reader. They must be created and provided by the website owner.

Live Bookmarks in Firefox

Firefox is a very popular web browser that gives you a lot more functionality than Internet Explorer. One of it's many popular features is the Live bookmarks. A "Live Bookmark" a kind of website subscription that automatically downloads links to the latest articles from your favourite websites.

To add a live bookmark simply click on the "Bookmarks" menu at the top of your screen and then select "Subscribe to this Page"

Now when you open your bookmarks you will have a folder containing links to all the latest articles from that website, which is dynamically updated.

News Reader Programs

Probably one of the most common programs for reader the news is Google's News Reader. It is quite an easy application to use and it allows you to keep track of many websites all in one place. It automatically scans all the websites you add for updates and then presents only the latest articles for your review. It's my personal favourite option and the one I use daily.

There are many other options such as BlogLines, NetVibes and NewsGator available, but I find Google makes the process incredibly simple and easy to use.

Source:http://www.masonictravels.com/2008/01/what-is-feed-and-rss.html

Search Engine Optimization is a Continuous Process

2008-01-16T10:30:00.001-08:00

Many of us must have heard the saying 'Plan your work and work your plan', and that the one who actually believes and works on it succeeds in the rat race of proving his or her worth. This certainly stands true for the corporate world which is continuously upgrading itself with the latest technology and where every organization faces new competition in every aspect of the business world. Marketing is an integral part of all these aspects. No business enterprise can survive without marketing and promotion of its products and services. The main reason for this promotion is the fact that 'out of sight is out of mind'. This is why, it is essential to maintain the visibility of the business enterprise in the eyes of the potential customers.

With the Internet coming up with new conveniences and benefits, both for customers and for business enterprises, it has become a perfect marketplace in the present-day scenario. Along with many benefits such as the potential to find customers worldwide, it also has many drawbacks to it. The challenge involved in online marketing is to combat the competitors from all over the world. The internet has meant that restrictions of geographical boundaries do not hold true anymore. This is where the visibility of the website comes into question. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process that rates the website based on various factors and delineates their rankings. Business organizations therefore have to recognize these factors that affect their rankings with search engines and make the required amendments in their websites accordingly. Once a website has achieved a higher ranking, one can say that the business organization is almost halfway through on the path of success. We can say that diverting traffic to a website by way of higher SEO ranking via search engine optimization is a key to reaching the zenith of success.

The better your research, the more improved your website's ranking. The main aim of search engines is to satisfy Internet users by providing them the exact information that they were looking for. They want content that is not only relevant, but also upgraded according to the latest developments. This is the reason why search engine optimization is also known to be an ongoing process. That is to say, providing the relevant information and achieving a higher ranking once is not enough. The website has to be continuously updated to maintain that high position with the search engines.

The content of the website holds the most important position when it comes to improving search engine rankings. 'Content is king' is a phrase that each one of us, who is acquainted with the workings of SEO, must have heard. This is primarily because this is the basic requirement of the user. The content should always be relevant and easily comprehensible. Plagiarized content is not required at all. Ensure that you do not stray from the topic or repeat points. The keywords that will be used should fit in well with the flow of the text. Enlighten Internet users with your knowledge and impress them with your interesting writing style and do not bother about the consequences after that. It is necessary to make the content rich in keywords. Though one should also be cautious not to exceed the ideal keyword density, otherwise it may draw the suspicion of spam towards the site and may lead to the site being banned.

There is a need to conduct constant and extensive research to find the keywords that potential users are expected to submit in the search engines. The keywords chosen should be such that it best describes the crux of the entire website. Also, the keywords selected should draw fewer competitive website results, but it should not be so unique that a general user would not even think of that keyword while searching. Technically speaking, it is advisable to go for keywords that draw less than 5000 competitive websites, but is searched at an average of 1000 times per month. Do not forget to incorporate the selected keyword in the header tag, keyword tag, title and in the description tag, including a few times in the actual content of the website.

Apart from the content and keywords, there are some other factors that greatly influence the rankings of a website on the search engines. Interlinking is a method of promotion that mentions the link of your website to the visitors of another site that has the same theme, and vice versa. This could be a reference link for the users of that website. Uploading numerous articles related to the theme of the website is another standard component included in SEO strategies to enhance the rankings with search engines. These articles can also be submitted with famous article directories that will drive more traffic to the site as the hyperlink of the website can be mentioned in the resource box at the end of the article. At times, the site map of a website can also be of great help in achieving a higher ranking. As the site map lists all the content mentioned on the website, when the SEOs trace the required keyword on the sitemap, they simply index it with the search engines. This enhances the ranking of the website.

However, there are many SEO consultants who claim to provide top rankings with search engines within a few days and they undoubtedly, prove themselves right in claiming that. But, one should remain alert not to be carried away by such claims as there are two techniques of SEO that gives higher rankings - white hat and the black hat SEO technique. While white hat makes use of ethical techniques, black hat employs unfair strategies to achieve the top position with the search engines in a matter of a few days. The latter technique is the one that is also employed by SEO consultants who claim a quick higher SEO ranking. For long term benefit, one should always look forward to white hat techniques to avoid any inconveniences such as spamming and other related things. Hence, we can say that SEO serves a two way purpose by providing the user with the required information, and business organizations their soaring profits.

Source:http://www.promotionworld.com/se/articles/article/080116searchengineoptimization.html

Why You Should Reveal SEO Secrets To Clients

2008-01-16T10:25:00.000-08:00

When you buy search services, some agencies merely provide a general overview of their SEO methodology without revealing any details. They claim this relieves the client from being bogged down in the minutiae of implementation. In reality though, these firms are simply trying to keep their intellectual property under wraps and create a dependence for their implementation services. With a little help though, well trained in-house teams are fully capable of implementing search strategies on their own. So why should a search marketing firm, which has spent considerable time and money developing proven methods, risk losing a client by empowering them with proprietary knowledge and skills?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is mission critical in today's business environment, and many organizations conduct SEO in-house because of the immediacy and convenience of having all hands on deck from the various departments involved in SEO planning and implementation. However, seasoned SEO technicians are hard to come by and many firms (with or without experienced people) find it beneficial to leverage expert consultants that provide on-site search training for in-house personnel.

This creates a need for search agencies that are willing to engage their clients in the details of SEO. Transparent firms educate clients on proven SEO strategies, customize a tactical-level roadmap and provide detailed documentation and training on their processes. Furthermore, they encourage the client to rely on objective analytics as proof of success. In the end, knowledge transfer and accountability empower the client and make the agency a strategic business partner.

The reciprocal benefits of knowledge transfer

First, search engine marketing tactics evolve on a daily basis, so companies will always need experts to help them create and implement successful programs. By engaging in knowledge-transfer, an interactive agency specializing in search articulates the need for its clients to embrace SEO as an ongoing discipline within their marketing department. Clients who adopt a knowledge-transfer mindset will profit from the insights afforded, enjoying the benefits of a long-term search marketing partnership. What’s more, savvy agencies will continue to supplement their SEO knowledge as the knowledge-transfer process becomes reciprocal and they start learning from their clients. Active clients can provide additional eyes and ears to industry changes and trends, as well as practical insights into the effectiveness of advanced SEO tactics.

SEO success begins with documented methodology

An experienced agency develops the client partnership by explaining how to conduct and analyze an SEO Diagnostic Audit. While most firms don't document or disclose SEO tactics in a document, a forward-thinking agency does this to build the foundation for a strategic plan to improve the client's search rankings. But knowledge transfer shouldn’t stop with an Audit. The client should also learn the philosophies and processes behind keyword research, page selection, content development and optimization, link building, and social media marketing.

By acting on the Diagnostic Audit findings, the client can identify obstacles that are hindering their efforts to achieve top search rankings. With this framework, the agency can credibly exhibit to the client how its recommended solutions will lead to improved search visibility. The client, in turn, can more quickly accept the recommended changes without doubt or hesitation. Moreover, with continued training, the client can start to optimize technical and editorial elements on their own and begin to outperform their competitors in search engine result pages.

Measurement is critical

Without a benchmark or continued analysis, it is virtually impossible to determine the effectiveness of an SEO campaign. As such, it is more important than ever for your in-house team to understand and use Web analytics to get the most from your search investment. As the need to master SEO search metrics becomes critical to success, Web analytics tools are becoming more sophisticated and accurate. At the same time, they are also becoming more difficult to understand and use. Again, search training services can hone your in-house team's skills, while providing documented methodology.

Looking ahead in 2008

Clients that are search savvy tend to recognize additional opportunities to accomplish business objectives through search. Because search strategies are so broad and deep in scope, an increase in general SEO knowledge leads to a greater need for niche expertise and consulting. As such, interactive agencies that have a knowledge-transfer philosophy, as well as capabilities beyond search, have a distinct opportunity to help their clients benefit nicely from search trends in 2008. For example, agencies that take the time to educate their clients about blended search, and the strategies used to optimize for it, can extend their usefulness beyond search to include: content development (i.e. text, videos, images), content optimization (i.e. landing page testing and targeting), content promotion (i.e. Internet PR and advertising), and technical development (i.e. widgets, USG platforms, custom applications). This creates a strategic partnership in which both the client and the agency can continue to create value for each other over the long term.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door's Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. John Faris, who co-authored this article, is Senior Search Analyst at Red Door Interactive. He helps plan, implement, test, measure, and optimize traffic acquisition strategies for Red Door’s clients. Faris is also tasked with training in-house SEO teams. The In House column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

Source:http://searchengineland.com/080116-122346.php

Update on Organic SEO and PPC

2008-01-14T20:10:00.001-08:00

Organic SEO and Pay Per Click Advertising

In the search industry we’ve all heard and read each of those terms quite frequently. We’ve each ran across those who believe their way is the only way, and then there are others who don’t express their opinions as strongly, but still prefer one way over the other. And lastly, there are those who use both methods.

This video/article does not contain any breaking information about either organic or pay per click, but you should still read/watch it because it will give you a couple of up-to-date perspectives from some very respectable people in the industry.

WebProNews spoke with David Szetela about why his company, Clix Marketing, only uses pay per click advertising.

I also had an interesting conversation with Matt Bailey about his exclusive use of organic SEO for SiteLogic clients. Matt describes organic SEO as being similar to art, and goes on to explain pay per click as a science.

David and Matt also point out the large role that social networking plays in both organic and PPC.

Organically, social networks are a great way to build your online reputation and get your name known. David mentioned that Google now has site-targeted advertising and Facebook also launched their own pay-per-click advertising service within their site.

Still have questions about organic SEO and Pay Per Click? Catch the full story in the WebProNews video that includes sound clips from David Szetela and Matt Bailey as well as a host of other information.

Source:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/01/14/update-on-organic-seo-and-ppc

5 Ways to Keep Your SEO Resolution for 2008

2008-01-14T20:09:00.001-08:00

Leveraging social media in 2008 will be a transformative process in the real estate industry. It is not rocket science. It does not hurt. It begins just like your decision to quit eating fast food or your promise to visit the gym twice a week.

As you try to grow healthy, realize that pay-per-click ads and costly lead generation systems are the French fries of the fast-food real estate world. You pay a premium for them, the quality is all over the board, and a lot of times you get the fries that have been sitting under a warmer for hours.

To help your business “get fit,” you have to take control of the problem.

Here are a few simple steps:

1. Join the conversation: At least once a week, visit your online community and interact.

2. Educate yourself: Pick up a book or visit a blog at least once a month and read about the subject.

3. Be realistic: Social media is not a “get fit quick” program. It takes effort and commitment. Write down realistic business goals and consult with a professional who can help you reach them.

4. Stand out from the crowd: Look at problems from an out-of-the-box viewpoint.

5. Budget appropriately: A lot of the best stuff on the Web is free. Yet $5 will not rain success down onto your business. Budget your time and money appropriately. Committing to a serious long-term plan for the year is a way to connect all of your business goals together and prevent yourself from falling into wasting money on fast-food options. Being healthy starts today.

Source:http://rismedia.com/wp/2008-01-14/5-ways-to-keep-your-seo-resolution-for-2008/

Search Engine Optimization 2008: Silence of the Lambs

2008-01-14T20:08:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimizers, or SEOs: experts in the art and science of SEO or search engine optimization.

So are we hearing the Silence of the Lambs in response to SES London chair Mike Grehan's ClickZ Experts column "The Diminishing Value of the SEO Shop ." Claims SEO is stuck in a time warp and not keeping up with the search engines themselves. Does that make Mike the Hannibal Lecter of Search?

Whether universal search is a rocky horror picture show for SEOs remains to be seen. Do you think Mike means simply "Meta Tag" SEO?

My take: SEO isn't dead. It's growing faster than any analyst firm is reporting. I'll tell you why soon.

But is SEO as a service really losing value?

If so, what does that mean for in-house SEOs?

Source:http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080114-153536

What Is All of This SEO? Search Engine Fundamentals

2008-01-13T23:26:00.000-08:00

Do you need a basic introduction about search engine optimization (SEO)? This article is an introduction to being able to understand conversations about SEO, Spyders, Black Hat, and a variety of buzz words used by online marketers.

Why is everyone so eager to be on search engines?

In 2007, advertisers spent billions of dollars on search engine marketing. Projections for search engine marketing efforts are slated at over $12 billion dollars by 2010, with some statistics going as high as $25 billion. The online market place is constantly shifting and evolving, producing large amounts of targeted traffic for various types of businesses that know how to convert visitors into clients.

In 2006- Forrester Research released these basic statistics about search traffic:

- 93% of all Internet traffic is generated from Internet search engines
- 89% of them are first-time visitors
- 99% of Internet searchers do not search beyond the top 30 results
- 97% of them never look beyond the top three results
- Top 10 positions receive 78% more traffic than those in positions 11-30
- 65% of online revenue is generated from Web sites in the top three positions on search engine results pages (SERPs)
- 93% of global consumers use search engines to find Web sites
- 76.7% of Google users use the natural search links (organic unpaid listings)

What is search engine optimization (SEO) and why is it important?

SEO is the process of analyzing elements on a site so that the code maximizes the combinations of keywords contained on the site when a search engine looks at it. While text elements are visible to a human eye, dozens of pieces of code within a site are also important to showing up for specific keywords: this includes structure, HTML code, directories, images and content on the site. The selection of the keywords a site shows up for is radically important to a business, as the competitiveness and importance of those keywords could potentially send thousands of viewers a day to a site.

What is search engine marketing (SEM) and why is it important?

SEM is the understanding of how a target site relates to other sites on the Web. Some SEO techniques allow a site to show up for relatively low competition keywords, but as the number of sites on a given keyword becomes more competitive, SEM allows a business to coordinate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites to increase the relevancy of how a search engine views it. SEM can also include pay per click (PPC) or unpaid organic results.

What is the primary difference between SEO and SEM?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is primarily done with code work on a target site. It includes images, text, and information on the site.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is primarily done with work not on the site. It includes link-building, business partnerships, and other online marketing efforts.

What is the difference between Pay Per Click (PPC) and Organic search results?

Most search engines have some form of PPC advertising that a business may purchase. You choose the word or phrase you wish to show up for, and when someone searches for that phrase your advertising and link shows up in the results. These systems are usually on a bid based system and typically show three to ten advertisers. When someone clicks on your link, you pay a per visitor price typically ranging from ten cents to ten dollars (some keywords near the $100 price point.) In Google, PPC results are typically the top 2 results labeled as “sponsored” and also include the right hand column.

Organic results are generated by the search engine attempting to provide the most relevant information based upon the search criteria of the user. Most SEO and SEM is focused on getting top placement in the organic section, as once the result is achieved no further cost is incurred on a per visitor basis.

What is a spider or a robot, and how is my site found?

When a site is originally created, most designers will do a simple submission to the main search engines. This causes the search engine to send an automated robot (also known as a spider) to examine the Web site. Depending on the search engine, that spider is looking for various clues to help categorize and rank the relevance of your site. (history note: the term spider was adopted as a nickname when the Internet became commonly known as the “Web”) These robots are looking for relevant and fresh information. When they find it, search engine spiders are instructed to analyze how often the information is refreshed and how relevant it is (often identified by how many times it is mentioned on other sites.)

What factors determine where a search engine will rank a Web site?

Most search engines use a process of automated mathematical analysis to determine what site has the most relevant content. There are a number of accepted best practices for reaching higher value on specific terms, ranging from keyword research, selection and relevance of link partners, meta-tags, element and heading tags, submission techniques, freshness of data, and overall online competitiveness of the keywords and industries. Social search engines vary in this regard- in that community members or staff act as the filter of relevant data, either voting or submitting data manually to the search and browsing areas of different social search networks.

How long does search engine optimization and marketing take?

Basic optimization work can be done immediately for most sites, which is a labor intensive chore of making sure the site is coded and labeled using best practice techniques. SEO work will not rank a site for competitive terms, but will provide a platform for long-term results over time depending on the material of the site.

Organic SEM usually takes 15 to 30 days to implement, and results are typically 30 to 90 days behind those efforts based on the competitiveness of the terms. That timeframe can be reduced by spending more effort, but as the time frame of the project is shortened, the pricing typically sky-rockets.

With a strategic team and specific goals, some terms can gain results within weeks by leveraging industry partnerships or using PPC campaigns for immediate impact. For most businesses, realistic search benefits should be seen at 90, 180, and 365 days.

How do you target traffic using search engine marketing?

Search engine traffic can be extremely targeted using specific keyword combinations. The more detailed the term, the more targeted the traffic. Many companies make the mistake of trying to reach extremely broad and competitive keyword results when they should be focusing on lower traffic but more highly defined keywords. Understanding the marketing 101 behind your product and services may also allow you to target like-minded terms that are not directly competitive with your business, but that attract the same demographic and target audience you are looking at reaching.

What is ethical search engine marketing? (a.k.a. what is black and white hat?)

There are many “best practice” strategies and techniques that search engines both appreciate and endorse, and ones that they actively discourage and ban. In the search engine world, White Hat describes only positive and encouraged efforts, while Black Hat describes manipulative and questionable techniques. Ethical search engine marketing utilizes only practices that are beneficial to the target site (white hat) and do not risk negative reactions (black hat) from the search engines. As a general rule, search engines appreciate using good code and relevant information to index, while they dislike techniques designed to manipulate, SPAM, or corrupt the search results.

Here are some known items that are either black hat, or discouraged by the search engines:

• Page cloaking
• Spamming of the submission process
• Automatically generated doorway pages
• False redirects to another page
• Keyword stuffing (too many keywords on a page)
• Irrelevant keywords
• Duplicate content on different pages or sites
• Misspelling of common words, or well-known brands/sites
• Unrelated link farms
• Data blogs with no unique content (also known as splogs)
• Malicious code design to trick the search engine

Can I do SEO for myself or can my Web developer do this for me?

Yes and no. There are many basic steps of SEO that a business owner can do for themselves. Many of these involve making sure the site is correctly coded under current standards and that it is submitted to the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Lycos, etc.) Beyond the basic steps of making sure the site has good foundation, experienced Web designers and developers can commonly take on the task of basic to intermediate search engine optimization. Expert level and competitive search marketing falls into a more general umbrella of online marketing that may involve SEO, SEM, online partnerships, business development, public relations, and online advertising expertise. Depending on the time frame, importance, and budget, choosing to learn certain SEO items or utilize an expert is a case by case basis. As with all projects, using a specialist may or may not make sense.

Source:http://rismedia.com/wp/2008-01-08/what-is-all-of-this-seo-search-engine-fundamentals/

How To Remove URLs From Google?

2008-01-11T18:43:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts has a unique way to educate the "masses" through the videos. Last last year in December we got introduced to Amy Cutts, Matts' Cat through a video, see:

Matt Cutts, Video: How To Use ALT Attributes For Images. For all you videophiles out there, Matt has come up with another one.

If you've been confused about the best uses of robots.txt, nofollow, URL removal tool or want to know how to keep some of your pages off the web? Then this one from Matt, talks about the best ways to stop Google from crawling your content, and how to remove content from the Google index once it has been crawled.

Source:http://www.searchnewz.com/blog/talk/sn-6-20080111HowtoRemoveURLsfromGoogle.html

What Is All of This SEO? Search Engine Fundamentals

2008-01-09T04:09:00.000-08:00

Do you need a basic introduction about search engine optimization (SEO)? This article is an introduction to being able to understand conversations about SEO, Spyders, Black Hat, and a variety of buzz words used by online marketers.
Why is everyone so eager to be on search engines?

In 2007, advertisers spent billions of dollars on search engine marketing. Projections for search engine marketing efforts are slated at over $12 billion dollars by 2010, with some statistics going as high as $25 billion. The online market place is constantly shifting and evolving, producing large amounts of targeted traffic for various types of businesses that know how to convert visitors into clients.

In 2006- Forrester Research released these basic statistics about search traffic:

- 93% of all Internet traffic is generated from Internet search engines
- 89% of them are first-time visitors
- 99% of Internet searchers do not search beyond the top 30 results
- 97% of them never look beyond the top three results
- Top 10 positions receive 78% more traffic than those in positions 11-30
- 65% of online revenue is generated from Web sites in the top three positions on search engine results pages (SERPs)
- 93% of global consumers use search engines to find Web sites
- 76.7% of Google users use the natural search links (organic unpaid listings)

What is search engine optimization (SEO) and why is it important?

SEO is the process of analyzing elements on a site so that the code maximizes the combinations of keywords contained on the site when a search engine looks at it. While text elements are visible to a human eye, dozens of pieces of code within a site are also important to showing up for specific keywords: this includes structure, HTML code, directories, images and content on the site. The selection of the keywords a site shows up for is radically important to a business, as the competitiveness and importance of those keywords could potentially send thousands of viewers a day to a site.

What is search engine marketing (SEM) and why is it important?

SEM is the understanding of how a target site relates to other sites on the Web. Some SEO techniques allow a site to show up for relatively low competition keywords, but as the number of sites on a given keyword becomes more competitive, SEM allows a business to coordinate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites to increase the relevancy of how a search engine views it. SEM can also include pay per click (PPC) or unpaid organic results.

What is the primary difference between SEO and SEM?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is primarily done with code work on a target site. It includes images, text, and information on the site.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is primarily done with work not on the site. It includes link-building, business partnerships, and other online marketing efforts.

What is the difference between Pay Per Click (PPC) and Organic search results?

Most search engines have some form of PPC advertising that a business may purchase. You choose the word or phrase you wish to show up for, and when someone searches for that phrase your advertising and link shows up in the results. These systems are usually on a bid based system and typically show three to ten advertisers. When someone clicks on your link, you pay a per visitor price typically ranging from ten cents to ten dollars (some keywords near the $100 price point.) In Google, PPC results are typically the top 2 results labeled as “sponsored” and also include the right hand column.

Organic results are generated by the search engine attempting to provide the most relevant information based upon the search criteria of the user. Most SEO and SEM is focused on getting top placement in the organic section, as once the result is achieved no further cost is incurred on a per visitor basis.

What is a spider or a robot, and how is my site found?

When a site is originally created, most designers will do a simple submission to the main search engines. This causes the search engine to send an automated robot (also known as a spider) to examine the Web site. Depending on the search engine, that spider is looking for various clues to help categorize and rank the relevance of your site. (history note: the term spider was adopted as a nickname when the Internet became commonly known as the “Web”) These robots are looking for relevant and fresh information. When they find it, search engine spiders are instructed to analyze how often the information is refreshed and how relevant it is (often identified by how many times it is mentioned on other sites.)

What factors determine where a search engine will rank a Web site?

Most search engines use a process of automated mathematical analysis to determine what site has the most relevant content. There are a number of accepted best practices for reaching higher value on specific terms, ranging from keyword research, selection and relevance of link partners, meta-tags, element and heading tags, submission techniques, freshness of data, and overall online competitiveness of the keywords and industries. Social search engines vary in this regard- in that community members or staff act as the filter of relevant data, either voting or submitting data manually to the search and browsing areas of different social search networks.

How long does search engine optimization and marketing take?

Basic optimization work can be done immediately for most sites, which is a labor intensive chore of making sure the site is coded and labeled using best practice techniques. SEO work will not rank a site for competitive terms, but will provide a platform for long-term results over time depending on the material of the site.

Organic SEM usually takes 15 to 30 days to implement, and results are typically 30 to 90 days behind those efforts based on the competitiveness of the terms. That timeframe can be reduced by spending more effort, but as the time frame of the project is shortened, the pricing typically sky-rockets.

With a strategic team and specific goals, some terms can gain results within weeks by leveraging industry partnerships or using PPC campaigns for immediate impact. For most businesses, realistic search benefits should be seen at 90, 180, and 365 days.

How do you target traffic using search engine marketing?

Search engine traffic can be extremely targeted using specific keyword combinations. The more detailed the term, the more targeted the traffic. Many companies make the mistake of trying to reach extremely broad and competitive keyword results when they should be focusing on lower traffic but more highly defined keywords. Understanding the marketing 101 behind your product and services may also allow you to target like-minded terms that are not directly competitive with your business, but that attract the same demographic and target audience you are looking at reaching.

What is ethical search engine marketing?

There are many “best practice” strategies and techniques that search engines both appreciate and endorse, and ones that they actively discourage and ban. In the search engine world, White Hat describes only positive and encouraged efforts, while Black Hat describes manipulative and questionable techniques. Ethical search engine marketing utilizes only practices that are beneficial to the target site (white hat) and do not risk negative reactions (black hat) from the search engines. As a general rule, search engines appreciate using good code and relevant information to index, while they dislike techniques designed to manipulate, SPAM, or corrupt the search results.

Here are some known items that are either black hat, or discouraged by the search engines:

• Page cloaking
• Spamming of the submission process
• Automatically generated doorway pages
• False redirects to another page
• Keyword stuffing (too many keywords on a page)
• Irrelevant keywords
• Duplicate content on different pages or sites
• Misspelling of common words, or well-known brands/sites
• Unrelated link farms
• Data blogs with no unique content (also known as splogs)
• Malicious code design to trick the search engine

Can I do SEO for myself or can my Web developer do this for me?

Yes and no. There are many basic steps of SEO that a business owner can do for themselves. Many of these involve making sure the site is correctly coded under current standards and that it is submitted to the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Lycos, etc.) Beyond the basic steps of making sure the site has good foundation, experienced Web designers and developers can commonly take on the task of basic to intermediate search engine optimization. Expert level and competitive search marketing falls into a more general umbrella of online marketing that may involve SEO, SEM, online partnerships, business development, public relations, and online advertising expertise. Depending on the time frame, importance, and budget, choosing to learn certain SEO items or utilize an expert is a case by case basis. As with all projects, using a specialist may or may not make sense.

To learn more about search engines and online marketing, see 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog.

About the author:
Barry Hurd is president of Social Media Systems, an online marketing and advertising consultant group working with search engine marketing and leveraging social media communities. He has over 15 years of entrepreneurial Internet and online marketing experience. As an author and prolific blogger, he has reached online audiences around the world. Since the mid-1990s, Barry has been involved in numerous efforts to bring forth technical innovation through online business models. Past projects have included NIKE, REI, TMP Worldwide, Monster.com, Verizon Superpages, Intuit, and RISMedia.

source:http://rismedia.com/wp/2008-01-08/what-is-all-of-this-seo-search-engine-fundamentals/

Search Engine Marketing Firm launches “Small Business Accelerator Packages" as affordable advertising options for small business owners

2008-01-09T04:04:00.000-08:00

Keniston Company, a Search Engine Marketing firm specializing in helping local businesses achieve exposure on the internet,is launching three Small Small Business Accelerator Packages , tailored to small and medium sized businesses that want to gain search engine exposure. “Any small business, from the local plumber to the insurance agent, or beauty salon stands to benefit from Local search engine marketing, but cost can be a barrier to entry,” says Keniston & Company CEO Denise Keniston, “that’s why we tailored these packages to the needs of small business people and subsequently priced them affordably.”

People are searching for every kind of business, right in your hometown, using the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Savvy local business owners know the importance of being on first page of a search engine query and they’re looking for ways to improve their Local search engine marketing.

The Keniston & Company Small Business Accelerator Packages combine three primary Search Engine Marketing Tactics, search engine friendly web design, search engine optimization, and pay per click advertising. “We’ve bundled these three services because one facet won’t be effective without the other,” says Keniston.

Stephen LaRoche, VP of the Biosolve Group/Westford Chemical Corporation sees a huge increase in website traffic and online conversions after signing up for the Accelerator Package. ”Keniston & Company is redesigned our website making it more search engine friendly, they already optimized it for our industry keywords, and created and manage a Pay Per Click Campaign that is second to none. I would recommend this program to any small business who wants to gain visibility on the internet.”

Denise Keniston, CEO Keniston & Company, if one of only a handful of individually nationally awarded the Google AdWords Certified Professional status by Google. She has successfully completed several courses from University 2020 including back linking course by expert Jerry West. Keniston is a member of Biltmore Who’s Who and currently works with dozens of clients across the globe.

source:http://www.prleap.com/pr/111188/

Recent SEO Tips and Services to Optimize your website

2008-01-06T00:16:00.000-08:00

These days the basic requirements to promote and optimize your website starts with the keyword basics. Keywords are still considered as the base. Finding good keywords that match with the domain name still matters. A search engine in the recent trend has started giving preference to the title tag. So it has become necessary to use your target keyword in
the title. Content must also consider the keywords and it should be relevant.

The basic requirement for ranking in search engine starts with all the pages having keyword rich good content and proper Meta tags like title. Keywords and description tags. This has created a great possibility for good ranking of the web page in search engine like Google, yahoo and msn.

While using images it has become necessary to write out the names and possibly a keyword description with the title. Developing the right keyword strategy related with the url of the images and pictures used has also been the point of consideration.

At NDDW we follow the certain SEO tips to promote your websites in the search engines. This begins from the booking of a relevant domain name for your website. In the next step we define a suitable navigation structure. Keyword analyses is done to search the best keywords that matches with the theme of your website. Then we optimize the site on right keywords. In the next step we define a content strategy for your website. We develop the content by writing articles as it is rightly said that content is the king. In the next phase we submit the website into search engines and get directory submissions done. In linking strategy we give emphasis to one way linking and three ways linking campaigns.
source:http://www.pr-inside.com/recent-seo-tips-and-services-to-r367512.htm

Five Tips for Building Better Segments

2008-01-06T00:10:00.000-08:00

One key lesson we've learned about e-mail marketing over years is this: One size does not fit all. The more relevant your messages are to your subscribers' needs, wants, and expectations, the better the response and deliverability.

In order to create relevant messages you must be able to create good segments from your house list. Further, good segments require good information collected from subscribers when they sign up.

If you don't collect much information from subscribers beyond e-mail address, how can you create highly targeted segments?

You probably have a little more information than you realize. You should be able to sort your list by opt-in date, e-mail address domain, or partner vs. direct opt-in, for example. These may not create the most personable segments, but they can still be useful to observe how each one is different in respect to engagement.

You'll still need to gather additional data points from subscribers. The following list of ways to collect more information can be used to create segments and relevant messages.

1. Invite readers to fill out or update their profiles.

This is one of the best ways I know of to get your readers to share valuable information with you, but you have to proceed carefully. After all, online consumers are growing wary of sharing too much personal information until they get to know you better.

You can't request too much information at sign-up, and the link at the bottom of your message probably gets very little activity. You must, therefore, be able to answer the unspoken question: "Why should I tell you anything about me?"

The answer, of course, is you need to know more so you can send only the most useful kinds of messages. Frame the invitation that way and send it in a welcome message or an additional communication within a week or so after opt-in. Add a small incentive, such as a discount coupon or extra download, to sweeten the deal.

Alternately, ask readers to fill out a survey. Keep it very short and simple. No more than 3-5 questions. Offer a checklist rather than require essays. Even a simple request such as "help us improve this newsletter" can yield a motherlode of fresh data from your most active or engaged readers.

2. Use the search engine optimization terms that drive the most traffic to your site.

I picked up this tip at the recent Email Insiders Summit. What search words do people use to find your site? Web analytics can reveal what visitors are most interested in. Which pages get the most visits, or the longest page views? Where do people come from, and where do they go when they leave? Incorporate the terms they used to find you in the first place into message content, subject lines, calls-to-action and other communications, such as the preference page invitation.

Then, review the data manually. Tally key words and phrases used to find your brand. You'll quickly see a pattern you can use.

3. Target messages based on subscribers' past behavior.

Use behavior data to segment out inactive users (those who haven't opened or clicked in a set time period) to capture those who clicked on product links in earlier e-mails but didn't buy, or who bought from you once but never again.

I'm receiving this type of e-mail from an online florist whose subject line "Come Back and Save an Extra 10%!" reminds me I've purchased before. Because I had a previous good experience, I read their messages.

4. Interview the people who talk directly with your customers.

These include your customer-service or call-center people who should be familiar enough with your Web site to offer feedback or pass along comments about the site's usability or what customers are looking for when they call. Again, you can turn this information around to create useful segments that speak to customers' needs or interests.

5. See where people click in your e-mail messages.

If I'm promoting men's shoes but a large portion of my audience clicks the links for women's shoes, I can use that data to promote woman's shoes in the next offer.

Don't forget to include a link to a mobile-friendly version. If you see a lot of action on that link, that's the clue you have a large mobile readership. At the bottom of the text-only versions, offer a link and invite mobile readers to update their profiles and switch to that e-mail format.

source:http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3627972

Everything Search Engine Marketing

2008-01-04T17:29:00.000-08:00

Lets start with the most obvious one firsteverything related to the search engine marketing industry is going to continue to grow, if not thrive, in 2008. Everything in this case includes search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), online reputation management (ORM), SEM PR and my favorite, social media optimization (SMO) which merits its own category (see below). ORM will rise to the top of the media buzz-o-meter with big brands and celebrities hiring firms like Anvil to make negative search results disappear. Online ad spending will continue to increase significantly (up $6 billion over 2007) as traditional ad spending levels off due to the fear of an economic downturn. If youre not in the SEM industry now, you may not be able to ignore the pending recession.

Online Advertising Options Evolve

Display advertising may see a re-emergence as brand budgets move online in search of better measurability. While rich media ads will continue to have a seat at the table, in-text advertising will be the big winner in 2008. Key players like Kontera and Vibrant Media will cash checks when consumers test and accept the relatively new contextual advertising model. Googles $700 stock price is proof that contextual advertising can work.

Google Cross-Platform Bid Management Tool

Google will launch (we hope) a cross-platform bid management tool (API based; to work across engine platforms including Yahoo Search Marketing & MSN AdCenter). This prediction is based on the move Google made this year to allow AdWords advertisers to opt-in to the new Conversion Optimizer and the technology/interface they have continued to develop with AdWords Editor. Watch out third party vendors like Atlas, SendTec, and SearchForce! Google could end up disrupting the bid management industry like it did with Web analytics when it purchased Urchin and gave away the platform as Google Analytics. It looks like Omniture could get stung twice as badly, offering products and services in both markets.

Mobile " No, Seriously This Time

Apples iPhone stole the show at CES in early 2007and Steve Jobs and his phone werent even there. Since then, the buzz has set new standards and consumer expectations. Phone manufacturers and carriers are now forced to step up with more advanced technology that will get the US out of the Stone Age (in comparison to the rest of the world). That means SMS text messaging will gain in popularity and usage (especially by smart restaurants, hotels and retailers). Additionally, mobile advertising will reach $5 billion in 2008 (up from $3 billion in 2007), fueled in part by search-based ads.

Social Media

US ad spending on Web 2.0 social networks will climb to nearly $1.6 billion in 2008which is a significant increase over 2007. That said, the long-term success of social media sites will rely on the ability to manage one profile (yours) across a multitude of sites. Lacking that key ingredient, only a handful of existing social media sites will survive. Assuming portable profiles dont come to fruition in 2008, we predict MySpace, Hi5 and other spam-friendly sites will die on the vine (at least increase user growth at a decreasing rate), while other startups social media sites like Spoke, Doostang, Spock and Biznik will fail to find enough traffic or revenue to survive the year (certainly not beyond 2009). Facebook will struggle to find a viable business model (certainly the initial foray into advertising is generating a negative response from users), but the open API will continue to fuel growth. LinkedIn will gain ground and become the de-facto Web 2.0 social network site for business professionals (followed in a distant second by Plaxo). In a massive consolidation move, Google, MSN and Yahoo will continue to buy up social media properties, if for no other reason than to kill them off. Lastly, social media optimization (SMO) will experience significant adoption by B2B marketers, which is important because the Webs significant growth has been fueled by businesses and not consumers.

Google/YouTube Television

With fanfare that will put MTVs launch to shame, Googles YouTube will launch their first foray into broadcast television. While initial efforts may be through a broadcast partner (RE: ABC or Bravo) but will eventually move to a dedicated cable station, where they will show the best and worst videos YouTubers have to offer. Even if the station doesnt take off for a few years, it will likely fare better than Revvers Fame TV in the UK.

Consumers Controlling Conversation

As companies look for additional ways to attract and retain site visitors, a new technology will emerge: Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML). APML will change the way advertisers target end users. As more companies adopt AMPL, users will be given the opportunity to control their own attention and share it with service they wish - giving advertisers the ability to target based on what the user wishes to see. Social media sites like BizRate and ePinions have demonstrated consumers own and influence brands with which they interact and identify, so the next logical step is for consumers to control the entire conversation. Only the biggest brands and most aggressive B2B companies will pursue this technology initially, but it will generate meaningful buzz in 2008 (although dont expect much in the way of meaningful adoption or revenues until 2009 and beyond).

Googling Oneself Even More Popular

In 2007 we saw even more Americans flocking to Google themselves, friends, partners, and even co-workers. Pew Internet released a study earlier this month that said 47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine. This is more than twice the 22 percent of users who did so in 2002. But with all this searching, 60 percent said they arent worried about the extent of information about themselves online. We think this statistic will change in 2008 when searchers realize that as Google and other engines get better at indexing and ranking all types of content in one screen (think Universal Search), then they had better clean up their act and make some information private. If its too late for some, please contact us at Anvil Media and we can do an Online Reputation Audit and develop a strategy to combat the negative results.

source:http://www.searchnewz.com/blog/talk/sn-6-20080102SEMPredictionsfor2008.html

SEO for President

2008-01-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 75 million voting-age Americans have already used the Internet this year to find information about political candidates. Earlier this year, a Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed that 80 percent of likely caucus-goers between 18 and 34 years old have or are likely to search online for information candidates' stands on the issues.

With the Iowa caucuses scant days away, it's become clear that search is poised to play a major role in the 2008 Presidential campaigns.

Yet a stroll through the sites of major candidates and minor players on both sides of the aisle is not a showcase of shrewd SEO tactics that are built to attract these searchers in droves, to say the least. Neither are these sites that are just one or two advanced tactics away from pushing their traffic into overdrive.

Not in the slightest. Holes this big would sink normal sites and create e-commerce job openings by the dozens. Right and left (literally), these are sites that are not taking advantage of simple on-site SEO practices. They are not search-friendly and in some cases are barely indexable, but are saved only by large numbers of inbound links.

The Range Online Media SEO team completed an audit of the political candidates' sites, and I've done my best to detail the improvements needed for each major campaign throughout the article. I feel compelled to say that any omission is not an endorsement of a candidate's campaign or tactics. For the record, I'm an undecided voter and if I've missed someone, you can safely assume their SEO is desperately in need of help, too. Now, my disclaimer aside, each of the candidates' sites is struggling to overcome issues like these:

1.Duplicate, non-descriptive and overly long title tags. The title tag is widely regarded as the most important aspect of a page to ranking, but it seems most campaigns view it as a throwaway job. Rudy Giuliani, despite keeping issue sections to simple and search-friendly terms, made every single Issues page's header the generic "Rudy Giuliani : Issues."

Likewise, "Hillary Clinton.com : Issues : Strengthening Our Democracy" gives readers and engines alike no idea what content will actually be discovered on the page and is therefore a fairly worthless title tag.

2. Lack of, or poor use of, header tags. This is the most egregious and widespread issue. Frequently, H1 and H2 tags aren't used and, when they are, it's often on the same terms on every page. John Edwards' campaign takes this a step further by placing an H1 tag around its logo, a practice that is helpful (according to some circles) to the visually impaired by making the alt text more prominent in site readers as the page's main topic. However, the fact that this H1 tag is the same on every page renders even this extra step meaningless in practice.

3. Splash pages, JavaScript navigation and other search stoppers. All campaigns have gone with java script navigation, often with no straight HTML links to the pages underneath. Fred Thompson's campaign has gone as far as to place his issues content completely behind JavaScript expanders. Splash pages asking for donations when one first arrives can destroy a site by diffusing its front page's influence, especially when the site vacillates between using them and not using them.

4. And, of course, nary a sitemap to be found. While this could be mitigated with XML sitemaps, what's the likelihood that these sites blew off so many other aspects of site ownership and management – except for this particularly tedious exercise?

...and the list goes on. Even if these sites' weaknesses in coding were corrected, they would still have a major and ironic flaw: the lack of keyword research and understanding of searchers' behavior.

In this age of framing an issue with the right words (pro-choice vs. pro-life), campaigns have forgotten to do their keyword research. 'Keeping Americans Safe' (Mitt Romney) and 'Strengthening America Overseas' (Barack Obama) may make for majestic lines in a campaign speech, but when Americans are literally searching for candidates' views on 'defense' and 'terrorism', they make for pretty useless page titles and header tags. What does it matter that you have a PageRank like a Gold-medal gymnastics score if the word 'immigration' isn't to be found on your immigration issues page?

For followers of the campaign thus far, it should come as no surprise which campaign is closest to the mark. Dr. Ron Paul, an otherwise obscure Republican, is supported by a swath of passionate, Internet-savvy followers who, fittingly, can often be found with signs urging readers to "Google Ron Paul". Despite polling somewhere in the low single-digits in MSM polls, he has had the two most successful days of fundraising in GOP history which were centered around – you guessed it – donations through the Internet.

His supporters have clearly had an effect on his site's SEO work as his site is the closest to being ready for prime time. It uses unique title tags throughout the site, search-friendly URLs that utilize keywords (unlike Mike Huckabee) and are based on directories rather than pages (John McCain cannot claim this). It uses header tags that cascade smoothly through the topics of each page in ways no other campaign has taken the time to do. The site uses straight-talk names for page topics and strikes a good balance between plain text and internal links.

Of course, the site also falls into the same traps as the rest of the lot in many cases, including placing H tags around every menu item on every page (killing a chunk of the other H tag efforts) and fails to link even once to its own campaign blog. Tsk, tsk.

So, why should campaigns care? Not only are the candidates not taking advantage of an opportunity to own an issue, they're leaving themselves dangerously vulnerable to other candidates and opposing groups. With the right content, good SEO practices and a healthy dose of inbound links, a candidate's opponents could tell searchers their own version of what the candidate believes and fill results pages that should normally be friendly with unflattering spin.

Think that sounds far fetched? Hillary Clinton's campaign is reported to be working on two sites that target Barack Obama on a specific issue. Whether it will work remains to be seen, but whoever survives the primary season would be wise to watch, emulate and improve upon this approach, as well as guard against it with well-formulated SEO practices.

Search is capable of delivering the right message to the right audience in the way they want to find it: It is the ultimate direct marketing tool for campaigns. When they will choose to take advantage of it, however, is yet to be seen.

source:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628000

Free, but not easy

2007-12-31T09:09:00.000-08:00

How e-retailers are building web links that charm search engine spiders

An online retailer of baby gear is offering great deals on strollers, making “strollers” a spot-on-relevant keyword for the retailer to target in optimizing pages for natural search. They’re a popular item among new-mom consumers, and they’re priced right and attractively presented on the site.

Sales are robust—for other online retailers. Because under the term “stroller,” this retailer’s listing shows up at number 29. So what gives?

The problem could be links: not enough outside links pointing to the page, or perhaps not enough of the right kind of links. As a result, listings from competitors that may be as well optimized on-page but that have more and better links from outside are moving to the top of search results.

How those links from other sites can improve a retail web site’s rankings in search listings is one of the least understood aspects of natural search optimization.

“Link-building has always been a part of search engine optimization, but retailers have been more focused on the on-page aspects of SEO because it’s easier for them to get their heads around,” says Stephan Spencer, president of Netconcepts LLC, which helps retailers optimize search engine rankings. “But the link-building factor is just as powerful, if not more so. One link or a handful of links can make the difference between meeting your budget or not.”

While it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how outside links affect a retailer’s rankings in natural search results vs. the effect of other optimization elements such as page architecture or keyword-rich text, one way to diagnose link problems is by ruling out other reasons a retailer’s listings aren’t ranking higher.

“When you’ve had your site design fixed for a few months, you can attribute some of the fluctuations in ranking to what you’re doing with link building,” says Josh Greene, director of online marketing for Discovery Communications Inc.

Sniff test

A link, or hyperlink, is a connection by click to a specific area of content on another web page, either within the same web site or to another site. It’s the latter path that figures into how high a retailer’s listing ranks in natural search results under a given keyword. As search engines strive to deliver relevant results, their algorithms take links to a web page from outside the site—from consumers, directories, blogs and other entities—as evidence that the page is relevant to the searched term.

In fact, outside links are such a valuable commodity in boosting a site’s listings in search engine results that online retailers, their advisers and other parties simply looking to profit have come up with a wide variety of tactics for making those links happen.

But here’s a warning to e-retailers out to build links: Search engines resist being gamed. Because their own reputations suffer when they return results searchers don’t find relevant, search engines are ever more adept at protecting themselves by sniffing out when links are contrived without relevancy solely to boost a listing.

Most recently, market leader Google has been working to identify and actually discount links added to a site exclusively for this purpose. “Since the initiation of search there always have been ways to trick the engines, but the engines always wind up winning in the end,” says Khrysti Nazzaro, director of optimized services at search engine marketing company MoreVisibility.com.

This means retailers should look to emerging best practices in link building and sidestep tactics that could backfire under search engines’ increasing scrutiny of link quality. Here’s an example of such a tactic: The PageRank system, part of the Google algorithm, measures the popularity of a web site to determine how high in natural search results a site will appear. It’s possible for a heavily-visited site to elevate the PageRank of a less-visited site just by linking to it, a practice called “passing PageRank.”

Any number of popular media sites sell links for this purpose, according to Spencer. These links are different from paid search ads that link to products. But when Google finds them, it discounts links that a retailer buys merely to “pass PageRank.” “Google doesn’t want you to buy links and pass PageRank if the links are advertisements,” Spencer says.

Masquerade

Spencer adds that search engine algorithms can easily find various forms of link-buying masquerading as link-building. For instance, search engines frown on asking an author to post a link in an old web article or blog post, even if the content is relevant to a retailer’s keywords. Engine algorithms will likely flunk such links as “natural” listings by determining from cached pages that links are suddenly appearing from a web page that has had no updates for years.

Another link-building practice that engines can spot as unnatural is three-way linking, in which a web site asks to link to another site, and in exchange, asks that site to link to a third site that also links back to the original site. “If those sites don’t have any relevance to each other, the engines are able to see those kinds of multiple link relationships,” Nazzaro says.

With search engines increasingly calling the shots on what outside links will or will not help with list rankings, what opportunities are available to online retailers looking to build links while steering clear of algorithmic biases? Plenty, say search engine optimization experts.

For starters, general directories such as the open-source Demoz.org or niche directories such as BabyBusiness.com can provide online retailers with a source of outside links. So does the Yahoo Directory, the still-existing, human-edited, searchable data base of submitted listings that preceded Yahoo’s web-crawling search engine.

The directories span both free and paid options, such as the Yahoo Directory. Though search optimization experts say the best outside links are naturally-occurring—for instance, a web site or blog about parenting might link to a recommended item at an online toy store—paid links aren’t all bad in terms of their ability to help boost a listing in natural search results, says Eric Papczun, director of natural search optimization at DoubleClick Performics Inc.

Not necessarily bad

“If someone has a site that sells cooking utensils, we shouldn’t discount the value of that retailer choosing to purchase a link from a blog or web site that is relevant to their content,” he says. “Determine what constitutes a good link—is it relevant to the page and is it credible—and if you pay for it, that doesn’t necessarily make it bad.”

Sponsorships of events in the offline world also can add links. For instance, a retailer could sponsor a local baseball team or a charity event and bring in links from those organizations’ own web sites. A thank you or a testimonial on an outside site in relation to a service provided or a community event can bring links from that site to a retailer’s site.

Blogs are another fertile field for retailers’ link-building. At the online store of Discovery Communications Inc., which also operates the Discovery TV Channel, toys are a major category. So the site has reached out to parent bloggers, bringing new toys to their attention, sometimes offering toys for their review and comment and seeing if links from those blogs result. To identify influential bloggers, it depends on input from Netconcepts as well as its own research.

“It’s a beneficial cycle,” Greene says. “As you have links coming into a particular area of your site, you get more traffic, and then other links may show up that you may not have actively pursued.” For Discovery, links from parents who have blogs help build exposure that leads to links to tech toy pages from technology bloggers and sites, even green-focused blogs and sites in the case of Discovery’s fuel cell-powered toy car.

And while compelling content and products work to bring in outside links, this works even better when supported by offline PR. A Discovery.com microscope mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article got a link from the article online; placement on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” later netted Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth DVD set a spot in the show’s annual holiday “Favorite Things” segment, with a corresponding link to the site from Oprah.com.

National Underwear Day

PR efforts and media coverage also combine with content to bring in outside links at underwear site Freshpair.com, a MoreVisibilty client. The site originated National Underwear Day, which features a live show with models strutting in their skivvies on a runway in Times Square. The site devotes real estate to the annual event year-round, with streamed videos, previews, reports of media and more, all of which helps to attract traffic and build links, says president Michael Kleinmann.

Online community and social sites represent another potential source of outside links for online retailers. Online marketing company Orange Soda leverages relationships it’s established with the most active users on social media sites in link-building program for retailer clients such as AbleKitchen.com.

After reviewing social media sites to see what people are talking about that might relate to a client’s business—for a kitchen site this might be buzz about a favorite dessert recipe at a popular restaurant—Orange Soda might develop an article about how people can prepare similar restaurant-quality desserts at home. It’s offered free as useful content to sites and bloggers in the cooking space. Where posted, Orange Soda then sends those postings to social media sites including Digg.com.

Digg depends on a user ranking system to figure out which submitted postings and articles are the most popular—or “dugg”—and that determines in what order they are posted, starting with the top spot on the home page. Sometimes words in those posted articles are linked back to e-commerce sites and the opportunity to buy a referenced product.

But according to Dan Garfield, SEO manager at Orange Soda, it’s not sales and conversions that are the real payoff for getting an online marketer’s content up high on Digg; it’s links.

“If you get on the front page of Digg, you are going to get thousands of hits in five minutes. Those people are not going to click on your ads, but they are great at spreading the word. A lot of people like to blog about stories on the front page of Digg. So if you get a story there, you might generate a thousand links,” he says.

While putting compelling content up on a retail site attracts traffic and links, e-retailers need to get real about the quality of the content they expect to do the job, experts say. “You have to ask yourself, why would someone want to point a link to you? It has to be something people really want, either because it’s truly useful or because it’s cool,” says John Tawadros, chief operating officer of search marketing company iProspect.

Drag and drop

He offers a hypothetical example of content that would be both: a home furnishings retailer creates a tool for its site that presents 10 layouts of a living room. Visitors pick the one that most closely resembles their own home and travel through the online store, dragging and dropping into the layout the furniture that interests them, so they can see how it would all look together.

“That’s something people might want to use and point to,” Tawadros says. “It’s about building something that will entice people, something they will want to pass around. If it’s actually useful, that creates longevity.”

Best practices in organic link-building revolve around the concepts of compelling content, relevancy and relationships—with a knowledge of new online media, cross-channel media and public relations, and a watchful eye on ever-changing search algorithms blended in.

Successful link-building also takes something online retailers haven’t needed so much in the pay-per-click online marketing environment, and that’s patience. Unlike pay-per-click programs that show instant results, it takes time for link-building strategies and tactics to find their audience and produce an effect.

“A good expectation would be to see some results 30 to 90 days after the initiative is launched,” says Tawadros of iProspect. “If I suddenly have a million links pointing to my site overnight, that is a red flag. No way can you organically get that many links.”

However retailers choose to pursue them, links are key to any search engine optimization program, experts say. “You need good content with sound architecture that is spider friendly,” Spencer says. “But just as important, if not more so, you need great links pointing to your site.”
source:http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=24882

Promote your business effectively with search engine optimization

2007-12-29T07:47:00.000-08:00

No matter what business you are into, a web presence has become the need of the hour. Almost every business is striving to make their presence felt on the internet because it one of the most effective modes of communication. However, just having a website will not serve your purpose as it will be unable to attract the amount oftraffic, which you desire to spread the word about your business. The practical way to go about promoting your online business would be by getting a professional search engine optimization firm to promote your website on the World Wide Web. Comet search engine marketing firm is one such expert who can give your online business the boost and visibility that it deserves, making it a popular website on the internet.

Search engine optimization strategies by CometSEM are tailor made to suit the needs of your business. The methods for search engine optimization include keyword heavy content, blogs, link building with other sites, article syndication, participation in forums and discussions and many such methods. A specialized search engine optimization firm like CometSEM researches into the positive and negative aspects of a client's website and then works towards enhancing the strengths while minimizing the weaknesses of the site.

The professionals working at CometSEM have the necessary expertise in the field of search engine optimization. As this a comparatively new field, it is crucial that the employees working for your site should be competent and knowledgeable about the internet processes. Professionals at a search engine optimization firm work to ensure that your website content is relevant to the user and the navigation is also user friendly. Keeping all these aspects in mind, one can ensure the popularity and visibility of any website in the internet. If the content is correctly created and placed, the search engine spiders will find it easier to crawl the site, thereby giving your website the top ranking, which you desire.

Source:http://www.pr-inside.com/promote-your-business-effectively-with-search-engine-optimization-r365305.htm

Search Engine Optimization: A closer look at search engine optimization including methods employed, company insights and vendor ratings

2007-12-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

As the advertising benefits of merely having a web site to promote a company's image and products or services have slowly waned over the last few years, many companies have turned to different forms of Internet advertising to have their web site stand out among the crowd. One such method is the use of search engine optimization ("SEO").

In this report, Amplitude Research examines the general policies and ranking procedures of the major search engines, different methods promoted for increasing web traffic including search engine optimization, and the characteristics that consumers should look for in a trustworthy SEO firm. Also included is a survey of technology professionals and executives on their use of Internet advertising, optimization software and SEO firms, with vendor ratings.

This report is a valuable tool for consumers evaluating the use of search engine optimization firms or other methods of increasing web traffic, and for SEO firms trying to better understand their consumers.

Source:http://www.it-analysis.com/research.php?code=AM-2504

Importance of Meta Tags

2007-12-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

Meta Tags are HTML tags which provide information to the search engines, describing the content of the webpages a user is likely to view. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. The three types of Meta tags are:

• Title- The text that appears on the title bar of the web browser
• Description- The quick summary of what the page is all about
• Keywords- The important words on the page

Meta tags add information to the HTTP header of the page as well as contain hidden information of the coding that the Search engines are likely to pick upon.
Meta tags are of great significance as they boost the overall performance of the webpage. Meta tags are useful in enhancing the placement of your webpage in various Search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN thereby increasing the traffic to your site. Webmasters need to stiff a number of keywords in their Meta tags in order to improve the search engine rankings of their webpages for a particular context.

Webmasters need to lay great emphasis on stuffing appropriate keywords in the header. If the keywords are absent from the header of your html code, the search engines will be unable to find your website/webpage.

Choosing the right keywords for the Meta tags needs expert advice. One needs to be extremely careful while selecting the keywords for the Meta tags as they act as major factors in determining how a visitor will locate your website in the search engines.

Title and Meta tag structure formation is the most important aspect and is known as the beginning of website promotion. It is very important to keep track of the number of keywords as most search engine spiders only use the information available in the title tags to locate the webpage. Using high quality Meta tags rich in keywords ensures increased traffic to your webpage.

The core purpose of Meta tags is to guide the search engine spiders enabling them to reach a specific webpage. Thus, it is very important to use Meta tags and not drop them as they ensure effective Search Engine Optimization.

Source:http://www.bestsyndication.com/?q=122807_meta_tags_optimization.htm

Search Engine Optimization Firm Combats Hunger and Homelessness

2007-12-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

Austin, Texas (PRWEB) December 13, 2007 -- What do our homeless, hungry fellow citizens living in the streets have in common with burgeoning technological companies? Not a lot - that is unless you consider the generous efforts of one world renowned search engine optimization company to bring about a positive impact in its local community.

ArteWorks SEO has committed to sponsoring 1000 meals per month to feed homeless fellow citizens of its Austin Texas community by promising valuable funding for Church Under the Bridge, a multi-church effort to combat hunger in Austin's homeless population. Additionally, ArteWorks SEO has provided 100 sleeping bags to the homeless to keep them warm on cold winter nights.

The Church Under the Bridge initiative is spearheaded by Mission: Possible, an organization aimed at connecting believers with people in need and establishing a connection with the Body of Christ through serving and empowering those individuals in need.

In accordance with the organization's mission, volunteers for Mission: Possible congregate weekly to share in the love of God by providing blankets, clothes and 1,600 hot meals per month to disadvantaged citizens. "Corporate sponsorships are vital to our ministry as they allow our volunteers to get involved in relationships that have a lasting impact on participants serving and being served," said Tim Pinson, Sr., Executive Director of Mission:Possible.

In its 15th year of operation, Mission: Possible is a faith based nonprofit organization which since inception has been focused on connecting to at-risk youth as well as empowering homeless individuals who are pursuing positive changes in their lives by providing a venue through which they can worship and express their faith.

The generous donations of ArteWorks SEO will supply sustenance to 1000 hungry citizens per month, with contributions anticipated to increase with business growth. "We have worked diligently to maintain a position of leadership in our industry, and through our activism we aim to also be leaders in serving the needs of our less fortunate brethren, both as fellow Christians and as a community conscious company," comments Foster.

source:http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/12/emw575907.htm

Search Engine Optimization Firm in Raleigh NC Now Offers Complete Website Analysis

2007-12-26T10:05:00.000-08:00

Unlimited Web Solutions, a search engine optimization firm in Raleigh NC, will now offer a complete website analysis by four of the industry's leading SEO experts.

Until now, Unlimited Web Solutions website analysis services were only available to ongoing SEO clients in the premium price range. Now do-it-yourself website optimizers can have access to the same high-end SEO consultation and analysis for a fraction of the price.

The complete website analysis package offered by Unlimited Web Solutions will include:

* Site analysis of source code by Fred Wood

* Copy review by Christine O'Kelly

* General SEO overview by David Williams

* Pay Per Click strategy review by Noah Boswell, a Google Certified Adwords Specialist

Clients will receive a complete written analysis and of their current website as well as a specific short and long term plan of action that they themselves can execute to achieve greater search engine visibility.

In addition to a written analysis, clients will receive a CD of up to 1 hour of live screen cast video and audio detailing:

* Analysis of a website's competition

* Keyword analysis and recommendations

* Analysis and recommendations for on-site optimization

* Analysis of backlinks and recommendations of generate additional quality backlinks

* Analysis of layout and recommendations for enhancing layout

Website owners can use the CD to discover exactly how the complete website analysis is preformed and pass the CD along to the appropriate people in the company responsible for handling related tasks.

"The most important part of an SEO plan is having an advanced SEO strategy in place from which to work with. Once a thorough analysis has been conducted and a plan has been created, most of the details can often be carried out by the website owner to for significant improvements in search engine ranking," says David Williams, vice president of David Williams Online/Unlimited Web Solutions.

Williams says that the decision to offer a website analysis service was driven by the company's desire to help more start-up internet entrepreneurs achieve their goals for success in 2008.

"While many new businesses cannot afford the full-service rates of a high-end SEO company, we wanted to find a way for companies on a budget to receive a high-end, personalized SEO plan that they could execute themselves to gain front page search engine visibility and grow their businesses in the New Year."

About Unlimited Web Solutions/David Williams Online: Unlimited Web Solutions is a leading Raleigh NC search engine optimization firm. The SEO experts at DWO/UWS have worked with numerous of clients to create more visible and more profitable websites.
source:http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52378&Itemid=9

How to Market SEO to Humans

2007-12-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

With every holiday season comes the inevitable parties and get-togethers. As with any social gathering, you might find yourself among unfamiliar company being asked about your job.

If you work in SEO (define), what do you say? How do you explain SEO to the layman?

Fortunately, SEO is not unlike other marketing tools. Technical aspects aside, SEO is a marketing discipline at heart, relying on the same principles as traditional marketing practices. While the medium may be unfamiliar, the process can be broken down easily for the unacquainted.

SEO Research and Human Trafficking

Call them traffic, conversions, or whatever you like. Your online audience is made of real people. While SEOs typically define audiences by their search inputs, think of these keywords (define) as your audience's everyday vocabulary.

Do they want hoagies or grinders? Free checking or "no fee" checking?

We compile a list of effective phrases for Web copy from audience vernacular. The keyword list enables your site to speak harmoniously with the audience.

To create this list, SEOs examine what works for competitors, as well as what's hot in search engines. This research helps pinpoint the target audience.

The process is equivalent to how Nielsen ratings are interpreted for demographic targeting, and audience research can be refined further through focus groups. Online, we have user experience and advanced optimization teams for similar refinements.

The New SEO Media Mix

Traditional marketers may view their media mix as print, TV, radio, and outdoor. Based on budget and scope, they create the best mix to deliver their message. The SEO mix behaves comparably.

Within online marketing, SEO has its own media mix. This consists of organic channels ranging from on-site to social media to inbound links. Don't let the jargon confuse you. They're just different pathways for audiences to find your message online.

As in traditional, each channel must be weighed carefully, factoring in relevancy, timing, and budget constraints. The full mix must execute on a unified message, reaching the audience from all angles -- just like a traditional marketing mix.

Budging a Little on SEO Budget

When considering SEO, new clients often wonder, "What percentage of new sales can I expect from increased search results?" ROI (define) is a major consideration and often a major hurdle for SEO agencies.

Predicting new optimization revenue is not an exact science, and therein lies the problem. Search engines expand the playing field so that even sites like Wikipedia can be competitors.

Instead of a handful of competitors in your industry, you now have hundreds of thousands in your search results. This is a key difference between search and traditional.

When budgeting SEO, approach the medium with a goal in mind. If you need instant conversions, try paid search. If you want to improved long-term conversions, then budget for an SEO redesign.

Unlike traditional media, the effects of SEO continue to generate ROI long after the initial engagement ends.

Blended Search: Beyond Traditional Channels

When setting up a television campaign, you need to decide which channels to target. Is a Super Bowl spot the right way to go? Or should you rely on cable niches?

The same thinking goes into SEO. Do we focus on local, image, or vertical search? Is YouTube right for buzz building?

Channel options must be considered carefully to maximize effective coverage of any marketing campaign.

Going Live, Virtually Speaking

Now it's time to take the campaign public. Here's where traditional marketing and SEO align.

To launch a print ad, client and agency work closely to flesh out details -- everything from choosing models to planning magazine placement. In SEO, the agency develops on-site and off-site tactics for the client to implement. Same idea, different tactics.

The client must remain hands-on throughout the process to ensure the campaign flows smoothly. In many cases, the client implements, as they alone may control backend access.

Even SEOs Can Speak English

While casual SEO chat seems tricky, you might charm a few technophobes by speaking their language. Search is still a marketing medium, just like radio or print. Our terminology reflects the same information whether you say inbound links or references, keyword, or psychographics.

Knowing how to pitch SEO in plain English is also important for agencies looking to capture new clientele. Showing how SEO aligns with traditional practices may be more effective than walking a client through meta tags (define) and 301 redirects.

Speaking in human may save your holiday party too, as people tend to listen when you're not talking in HTML. The only thing that should be glazed over this holiday is a nice honey baked ham.

source:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627956

Is it Really Your Space with Social Media?

2007-12-26T09:56:00.001-08:00

A power shift is being waged on the Internet and the “non-sophisticated” Internet user stands to gain. Getting to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) is typically a costly hit or miss event put in the hands of marketing experts. Social media is changing this with its unyielding ability to attract Internet users and quickly build online communities and ranking around popular topics. Until recently, online communities were looked at as merely places to socialize, network or advertise. Now, the business minded seeks to establish marketing control and eventually ownership of these online communities but they will have to seek alternatives to MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, LinkedIn and others.

A first of its kind technology called www.Moguling.com integrates search engine optimization with a social media platform for businesses and individuals looking to market themselves on the Internet. It is now possible, and quite easy, to build “and own” an online community around ones personal and professional interests. The ability to establish ownership of online communities is making every business reconsider their approach to social media and the marketing technology of choice.

To make the picture clearer, let’s look at how the whole process of building online communities works and where the value is: as new members sign up online, a community grows around popular topics along with a mass of content rich web pages. Each individual (or business) becomes a valuable publisher in the community and ownership of the content (web pages) it not you. This content that you help create on MySpace, Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn is a major part of why these companies have become worth so much and why they want to keep this a secret. Online communities are built naturally through the addition of friends, or if you are a business through employees, customers, vendors and partners into your network. Additionally, valuable online real estate (content) is generated. As these communities grow in numbers, there is now more real estate for MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Bebo, and others to sell advertising on. Unfortunately, these big online communities restrict your ability to establish any ownership in the community, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. Which leads you to ask, is it really your space?

Unlike other social networking sites/communities, www.Moguling.com allows you to easily develop your own online community while continuing to use other social, professional and video networking communities. Moguling enables participants to have marketing control over the content your network creates. Additionally, your content gets listed and ranked in search engines naturally to further build traffic and the overall value of your online community. The end result is a powerful network that you manage and most importantly own.

Moguling is positioned to become what industry experts say has yet to be established, the basis for the first “standard” for search engine marketing using the power of social media. Moguling makes it possible for virtually anyone to build search engine friendly online communities that businesses and individuals own and have marketing control of. Moguling.com is taking an aggressive approach to becoming the market leader for building valuable online communities that businesses and individuals own.
source:http://www.prleap.com/pr/109779/

Is it Really Your Space with Social Media?

2007-12-26T09:56:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Marketing Issues: Changing URLs

2007-12-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

I would highly recommend *not* changing your URLs at all. It is a common misconception that keywords in URLs are somehow helpful to search engine rankings, when in reality, they have very little (if any) effect on
rankings.

The reasons why people believe they help rankings are many, but generally center on a mixing up of cause and effect, as many people learning about SEO are apt to do.

For instance, when you do a keyword phrase search at Google, you will see your keywords bolded on the search engine results page, including keywords that appear in the URLs. People see this and assume that it means Google factors the bolded words into their relevancy algorithms. Yet, the software that does the bolding is just that -- software that is programmed to bold the queried words that show up in the listings. It's a huge leap to think that the bold type has anything to do with Google's actual algorithm.

Another reason why people wrongly assume that keyword phrases in URLs are a factor in getting a page to show up in the search results is because the top results do indeed often use keyworded URLs! But (and this is a big but) websites that use keyword-rich URLs are using them because someone, somewhere is attempting to optimize the pages to show up in the search results -- which means they are doing a lot more than simply putting keywords in URLs as part of their website optimization. Very rarely will you see a page show up in the search results if the only place the keyword phrase appears is the URL. Most likely the phrase is also being used in the Title tag and other visible places on the page. So again, there's a mixing up of cause and effect.

What has happened over the years is that the mixer-uppers have spread the word that keywords in URLs will help with rankings, so others believe it and make changes to their own URLs, making more and more keyword-rich URLs appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Which, of course, feeds the myth-monster even more!

All that said, this is somewhat of a tricky one to prove one way or another
,and it certainly doesn't hurt to use keyword-rich URLs when building a new website. It often makes it easier to remember the URL, which is why on our
new High Rankings site most of our URLs will have keywords. It's not for SEO purposes, but for usability purposes. If we didn't have to change our URLs due to switching backend platforms, we definitely wouldn't go changing to
keyword-rich file names. But since we had to change them anyhow, I figured we could use our site as a test bed to see what happens when you change URLs. (And yes, I realize we could have done some complicated things behind
the scenes to continue to keep our URLs the same as they were, but in this case, we felt changing them and redirecting was our best solution.

Especially as I can probably get a few good articles out of it later!)

I can't stress enough that you should never change URLs simply for SEO purposes. But if you do have to change them, and you do want to eke out any possible search engine benefit that you might get, then you should not use
underscores between the words, but hyphens instead. Even though Google recently announced that they were going to start reading underscores as a word separator, traditionally they haven't. They do read hyphens as a separator, however. So if Google decides to use URLs to rank pages, then you'd want to at least create them in a way they can read. You would also not want to put two words together like "twowords.html " as they don't separate words that are mashed together that way either.

Where you may benefit from a keyword-rich URL that has its words separated by a hyphen is when another site links to your page by using just the URL because it becomes somewhat of a keyword-rich anchor text link. For example,
if someone links to your page with this URL www.example.com/keyword1-keyword2 (instead of using traditional anchor text) you'd still have keyword1-keyword2 as part of the anchor text, which does tell the search engines that the page they're about to go to is at least somewhat relevant to those keyword phrases.

So in answer to the original question, instead of changing the existing URLs, make sure you've optimized the page elements that do matter --especially the Title tag, the anchor text pointing to that page, and the words on the actual page itself -- and don't worry about the URLs. Changing them can lose any "age equity" that you may have built up with your old URLs, with minimal (if any) effect on rankings.

If after all this you still feel the need to change them, be sure to put 301-redirects in place from the old URLs to the new, and use hyphens rather than underscores.

Source:http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1759/1/Search-Engine-Marketing-Issues-Changing-URLs/Page1.html

SEO - Search Engine Optimization Methodology

2007-12-23T11:00:00.000-08:00

If you want to rank your web site in the top positions within search engine results pages (SERPs), your first tasks are to address how your site is built, how the page content is developed and thematically organized throughout the site, and how the internal navigation is structured. All of these factors impact how your site appears to a search engine.

The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers", a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design.

Essentially search engine marketing (abbreviated SEM) is an umbrella term for web site promotion through a search engine, whether that is through search engine optimization, pay per click advertisements or through paid inclusion. The theory behind SEM is a good one; when people use search engines, they are in a state of mind where they are looking for information. When a web surfer gets to your site via a search engine, he does not feel put upon or annoyed, which he might if he had received a piece of spam e-mail from you. By giving the searcher exactly what they want when they search, SEM can get you customers who are already sold on the type of services your provide, but just need to find you.

The best and most direct way to ensure that your website is near the top when a search string related to your site is entered into Google Yahoo or MSN, is through search engine optimization and through link building. The search engine rates your site on how closely it seems to match what the search string says, and also by how many other sites have linked to you. There are many ways to make sure your site is attractive to search engines, ranging from article writing to placing your link on directories that list similar services.

Pay per click advertising is also a main part of SEM; you can set up an arrangement where a small link to your site appears when a certain search string is used in the search engines. The best example of this sort of advertising and how it relates to SEM can be seen with Google Ads. You choose which words you'd like to bring up your ad and then, whenever anyone clicks on your link, you will pay Google a certain amount. You can set a budget to and limit how much you pay every day, and you can also experiment with the words you use to see which combinations bring the most relevant traffic to your site.

There is fairly constant debate that goes on over whether natural search results (search results that show up on their own) or paid search results are better. A blended strategy is normally best which utilizes both search engine optimization and pay per click as it encompasses both parts of the marketing mix.

Search Engine Optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunites offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals. As far as search engine promotion is concerned, your web site's text content is your key to success (or failure!). When doing SEO copywriting, it is important to understand that the search engines exist for one primary purpose, and that is to provide the internet searcher with relevant results for their searches.

Source:http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=44529

Search optimization helps blog drive traffic

2007-12-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

Challenge:Objective Management Group is a service company that provides sales organization assessments and sales candidate evaluations, including personality testing. The company sells its service two ways: directly and through 110 resellers.

OMG wanted to add resellers and track leads better. “We had no way of determining where these people came from, whether the leads were any good, and we weren’t getting enough [leads] to make everybody happy,” said CEO Dave Kurlan.

Kurlan maintained a blog about sales assessment, hosted at Blogger, but traffic was not extraordinary, averaging about 800 visits per month. He wanted more visibility to attract more business.

In his blog, Kurlan inserted links back to the company’s Web site. “I’d post an article and nobody would see it and nobody would come,” he said.

Solution: Enter HubSpot, a company that combines search engine optimization with blog strategy to help its clients generate and convert leads.

HubSpot’s first order of business was to optimize both OMG’s blog and Web site, and set up a mechanism to track visitors.

“They did some search engine optimization, they tweaked the corporate Web site and they added tracking tools and analytics so that I could continue to play with it and change my writing to increase the traffic,” Kurlan said.

The tracking gave Kurlan the insight he needed to determine which topics were of interest to potential customers and which were falling on deaf ears.

“I go in and look at the data relative to my blog, because it tells me whether I am writing things of interest [to our prospects],” he said. “We get a lot of real world information about their behavior. We actually get the trail they leave behind, so we have a lot of intelligence about them before we contact them.”

OMG’s customer service staff also reviews the tracking data in order to get qualified leads out to the resellers.

Moreover, Kurlan has adapted his blog writing significantly. Now instead of writing about sales assessment and the business of sales assessment, he writes about things like coaching, motivating and recruiting salespeople.

“Most people doing searches weren’t looking for information about sales assessments,” he said. “They were looking for information about selling strategy.”

Simply marrying the search terms that most people were using and writing more about those topics, OMG managed to attract a greater number of qualified prospects.

“One third of our traffic is coming from the Google search engine, and [HubSpot] optimized our site so that we show up in the first page of search results,” Kurlan said. “The search traffic we’re getting from Google has been increasing exponentially.” OMG also does some paid search with Google AdWords.

Interestingly, Kurlan said the nonpaid search is working better than paid search. “We measure it in terms of quality of the leads,’ he said.

The keywords HubSpot used to optimize OMG’s site included “evaluating a sales force,” “sales force objectives,” “competencies for sales people” and “sales competencies.”

Results: With HubSpot’s involvement, OMG’s business is booming.

Page views on the blog jumped from an average of 800 views a month to 5000 views every month. In addition, with the tracking tool, OMG has learned that its blog generates a whooping 25% of the traffic to its corporate site.

source:http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071219/FREE/962120748/1113/FREE

Search Engine Visibility and Site Crawlability, Part 1

2007-12-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

At the recent SES Chicago. Laura Thieme and Matt Bailey, both experienced presenters, showed how webmasters could tame the dynamic Web site beast and improve search engine visibility and site crawlability.

This is the first of two articles outlining the SEO problems they identified with dynamic Web sites and solutions. I'll expand on both.

At the very highest level, dealing with large dynamic Web sites requires IT and marketing to collaborate. The person responsible for the technical search engine optimization is an important member of the team. Without the cooperation of technical SEO support staff, your Web site can end up poorly optimized for search engines.

Keyword Research and Deployment

Do your keyword research up front. You need to understand the language potential customers use to find the products or services you offer. You also want to understand related topics that interest these potential customers.

You then want to match up this understanding of the marketplace with the available content you have, or are willing to develop, and design a logical and clean hierarchy around that.

Laura said embedding keywords into your page names (i.e. the URI) is a powerful SEO tactic. In fact, she recommends existing sites embed the most important keywords for each page into their URI (and then 301 redirecting the old page location to the new page location).

Don't use the same titles and headers for all the pages of your site. That's another reason to do keyword research. The long tail of keywords enable you to create a different title and header for every page of the site.

Large sites also have issues with pages being found and indexed. Make sure the most important keywords for your site appear in the title and header for the home page.

Robots.txt Files

Matt pointed out that it's surprising how many sites have problems with their robots.txt file. He provided a tutorial on how robot.txt files work. You can also find good tutorials on the Web.

I've seen many sites that have problems with Robots.txt. While it's a powerful tool for directing the way search engine crawlers see your site, it's easy to make a mistake. A single mistake can have catastrophic consequences. So use robots.txt, just use the file with great care.

To illustrate how easy it is to make a mistake, we worked with a client a while back that implemented new versions of their site on a staging server separate from the one used for the main site. This allowed them to look at the site live before launching it.

They didn't want this duplicate site indexed by the search engines, so they implemented a robots.txt as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Experienced readers are already cringing because they know where this is going. Unfortunately, one day during a site update they copied the whole site from the staging server to the live server, including the robots.txt file.

It took 3 weeks before anyone noticed, and that happened because traffic to the site was already crashing. Ouch. Again, use it, but be careful.

Site Maps

The Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site, as well as when each URL was last updated, how often it usually changes, and its importance relative to other URLs in the site. The protocol was designed to enable search engines crawl the site more intelligently. In principle, this should help the search engine find all of the pages on your site more easily than crawling it naturally.

Matt had a great point when he told the audience you're better off letting your site being found naturally by the crawler. He referred to Sitemaps as a "fast track to the supplemental index".

I couldn't agree more. We don't use Sitemaps on our clients' sites.

The two best solutions for the crawlability problem -- lots of pages not being indexed -- the following two steps are the best solution:

1. Build an efficient and clean global navigation system on your site. There is no better way to help a crawler find your site than a logical and simple navigation structure. If you do this, the crawler will find its way around.
2. Get third party sites to link to your site. No on-site search engine optimization strategy will work unless you get these links.

Summary

We've outlined three key problem areas with sites that have dynamically generated content: information architecture and keyword research; robots.txt files; and the use of Sitemaps.

When search engines don't index pages on your site, invest your time and energy in site navigation and inbound link development, rather than using Sitemaps protocols.

In Part 2, we'll look at tools for analyzing your Web site structure and traffic, as well as more solutions to SEO problems with dynamically generated sites.

source:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627930

Achieving Organic Search Engine Optimization

2007-12-23T10:48:00.000-08:00

When it comes to difficulty, organic search engine optimization is really not that difficult. There are a couple things that you should implement on your website and the link building is not all that hard to understand. You need to remember not to use unethical means to obtain links to your site so knowing the right way is vital. One way to get many links to your website is by obtaining them from other sites that are relevant to your niche by developing unique content for them to link to.

Search engine optimization is a process that is ever changing and evolving. With every day something new comes to the table, a new method of organic SEO. This changing information is what you need to stay in tune with in order to stay ahead of your competition. A good way to stay on top of this is through forums, news developments that are related to the niche, newsletters and networking within your niche.

Search engines need to see the relevance and importance of your site within your niche. Make sure that your site is easily accessible and navigable by the search engines. You want them to be able to explore the content of your website deeply. To facilitate that you need to design it in a manner that allows the search engine robots to easily get follow through the network of you site to explore the content.

A newer method of designing websites uses a cascading sheet style that is more transparent to robots which makes it easier for robots to read the content. But don’t forget that you need to have optimized content there for the robots to read. The content should have keywords that arerelevant to your niche that the spiders can feed on. The more they see your sites relevance to your niche, the higher they will place you in the search engines. Content and keywords will get you to the top of the search results. That is where any site that does business on the web wants to be.

If you don’t have a thorough understanding of how to best implement organic SEO techniques there are companies that can assist you with it. A professional will be able to assist with the generation of content that is unique to your niche and bring visitors to your website.

Hiring a professional is not absolutely necessary though. If you have a knack for writing and are well versed on your industry you can easily generate interesting articles that other interested web surfers would want to read.

Keep in mind that you should understand prior to writing the content what words and topics that you really want to emphasize. They need to be within the content of your site for the spiders to read and understand the relevance to your topic.

source:http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=46138

Search Engine Optimization Firm in Raleigh NC Now Offers Complete Website Analysis

2007-12-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Unlimited Web Solutions, a search engine optimization firm in Raleigh NC, will now offer a complete website analysis by four of the industry's leading SEO experts.

Until now, Unlimited Web Solutions website analysis services were only available to ongoing SEO clients in the premium price range. Now do-it-yourself website optimizers can have access to the same high-end SEO consultation and analysis for a fraction of the price.

The complete website analysis package offered by Unlimited Web Solutions will include:

* Site analysis of source code by Fred Wood

* Copy review by Christine O'Kelly

* General SEO overview by David Williams

* Pay Per Click strategy review by Noah Boswell, a Google Certified Adwords Specialist

Clients will receive a complete written analysis and of their current website as well as a specific short and long term plan of action that they themselves can execute to achieve greater search engine visibility.

In addition to a written analysis, clients will receive a CD of up to 1 hour of live screen cast video and audio detailing:

* Analysis of a website's competition

* Keyword analysis and recommendations

* Analysis and recommendations for on-site optimization

* Analysis of backlinks and recommendations of generate additional quality backlinks

* Analysis of layout and recommendations for enhancing layout

Website owners can use the CD to discover exactly how the complete website analysis is preformed and pass the CD along to the appropriate people in the company responsible for handling related tasks.

"The most important part of an SEO plan is having an advanced SEO strategy in place from which to work with. Once a thorough analysis has been conducted and a plan has been created, most of the details can often be carried out by the website owner to for significant improvements in search engine ranking," says David Williams, vice president of David Williams Online/Unlimited Web Solutions .

Williams says that the decision to offer a website analysis service was driven by the company's desire to help more start-up internet entrepreneurs achieve their goals for success in 2008.

"While many new businesses cannot afford the full-service rates of a high-end SEO company, we wanted to find a way for companies on a budget to receive a high-end, personalized SEO plan that they could execute themselves to gain front page search engine visibility and grow their businesses in the New Year."

About Unlimited Web Solutions/David Williams Online: Unlimited Web Solutions is a leading Raleigh NC search engine optimization firm. The SEO experts at DWO/UWS have worked with numerous of clients to create more visible and more profitable websites.

source;http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52378&Itemid=9

SEO for Mobile: Tips and Tricks

2007-12-14T09:35:00.001-08:00

A Cre8asite Forums member asks how a site is differentiated by Google as a mobile site or as a regular website that may not be included in Google's mobile web search. What are the criteria for being categorized as a "mobile" site?

The Google Webmaster Help Center has a guide of questions and answers on this very topic. Additionally, other feedback is given from a webmaster who has been designing for the mobile web for a year.

He says that you need to avoid tables in your design, have concise titles, have a small page size, and include good content.

As far as understanding whether your site is going to be accessed, he says that Google crawls your site as a Nokia 6820 which accepts XHTML.

And finally, it helps to create a mobile sitemap.
Source:http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015651.html

PPC shot down by SEO experts

2007-12-14T09:31:00.000-08:00

Experts in Search Engine Optimisation dismissed PPC as far less likely to bring about results in a debate last night (11 December).

The "B2B Marketing Debate" saw SEO exponents and Pay Per Click champions clash over effectiveness and results.

The debate, at The English Speaking Union in London, saw head of search at Bigmouth Media Andrew Girdwood argue that organic results were often perceived as more directly relevant, with a lower overall cost. He said: "“People don’t want to put more money in. For B2B campaigns SEO has a definite advantage over PPC.”"

Periscopex co-founder Simon Norris defended PPC as a marketing tool and said that its plus points were that it was easy to change, start, stop and completely transparent. He asserted that PPC was a better, more targeted way to gain leads.

Stuart Small, industry leader, business and industrial markets at Google, backed up the argument and said that with 85% of all B2B purchases starting in a search engine, paid search ads were vital to any business. He added that Google sees 80% of searchers clicking on organic results, with 20% clicking on search ads.

While the "black art" of SEO was criticised Girdwood argued that Google was excellent at filtering spam out of the index and said: “Google does an excellent job at this. ‘Gaming’ the search engine is just no longer possible the way it used to be.”

Norris also claimed that Google was trying to increase the number of ads clicked on by searchers and that personalisation changed the ads shown based on user intention. “That is not true” said Stuart Small from Google. “Google is very careful about privacy and we do not change ads based on people being logged on to Google. That is completely wrong.”

Source:http://www.mad.co.uk/Main/News/Articlex/aa351f9517854e389afd62334673b5dc/PPC-shot-down-by-SEO-experts.html

Pay-per-click is customer analytics

2007-12-08T21:48:00.000-08:00

Pay-per-click advertising is, at its basic level, paying for ad placement in search engines. The concept is simple. When a user searches for a keyword a paid ad will appear. These ads are usually listed at the top or right side of the search engine results page and are identified as Sponsored Links, Featured Listings or Sponsored Listings.

That is PPC for the basic user. Unfortunately, most PPC advertisers are basic users. PPC is much more then paid advertising. Not only is PPC the best return on investment available, but it is, or should be, at the heart of all marketing campaigns.

PPC can provide customer analytics through ad testing, geo-targeting, match types and discovering SEO targets. PPC advertising provides an instant view into the mind of the customer at an extremely low-price.

Ad testing

Google and now Yahoo, with the new Sponsored Search, allow advertisers to run multiple ads for the same keyword. With various messages reaching potential customers, advertisers are able to see which ads attract the most visitors and more importantly which ads attract higher revenue.

Ad rotation gives the advertiser great insight into the mind of the customer. For instance, do customers click more on ads that offer “Free Shipping” or “Free Item with Purchase?” Another example, do discount mentions convert better than guarantees?

To get accurate measurements on ads, it is important not to let the search engines optimize the rotation of the advertiser’s ads. By default, search engines will serve the better performing ads more often. However, the problem is search engines measure “better performing” as ads with higher clickthrough rates and quality scores. By delivering all ads evenly within a given time, advertisers should be able to define which ads generated a higher conversion. With knowledge from strong ad testing, off-line campaigns can be tailored to meet those discoveries. Thus, PPC becomes a testing ground for all marketing campaigns.

Solid geo-targeting statistics can help off-line campaigns

PPC geo-targeting lets advertisers target ads to specific countries, regions and languages. Geo-targeting especially benefits companies with smaller budgets, by allowing product promotion strictly within the majority of customers’ region.

Geo-targeting resolves any geographic uncertainty about customers. For example, more customers from Region A may click on ads. However, more customers from Region B may actually convert and purchase.

By combining geo-targeting with ad variations, advertisers discover which messages convert best regionally.

Learn the customer’s language with exact keyword matching

Often advertisers get caught up in internal jargon. Within the industry it may be an acceptable form of communication. However, it is the customer that pays the bills.

To obtain accurate results from PPC, having various match types is essential. By bidding on all variations of keywords advertisers are able to see which keywords customers are typing into a search query. Google, as an example has four different keyword matching options (broad, phrase, exact, negative), each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For example Broad Match, the default setting, includes all variations of the keyword in the query.

However, Exact Match is the most targeted option available. It only shows ads when the exact phrase is used. Exact Match will provide instant feedback into the language of the customer. It is not to say there is not a place for other match types. Ideally, all variations should be tested. In fact, Exact Matching will inevitably bring in fewer visitors than other forms of matching. However, Exact Matching is a great way to gather instant customer analytics.

Discover highly targeted keywords for organic search rankings

Search engine optimization is often compared to rocket science. Of course the advantage of rocket science is that there are always constants, SEO does not have that luxury.

With PPC reporting advertisers are able to know what the customer is typing in search engines. By reviewing periodic reporting, they are able to tell which keywords bring in the most clicks and most importantly which keywords bring in the most revenue.

Instead of creating search engine optimization initiatives to tackle hundreds of keywords, the top converted pay-per-click keywords are targets. Site content, link building, and various other search engine optimization techniques can push these elite keywords.

Advertisers do not have to waste time trying to get rankings on keywords that do not convert. The numbers are provided; it does not matter where the competition is ranked. By following the payper- click keyword statistics advertisers are able to get instant customer analytics to use for search engine optimization efforts. With PPC, there is very little guesswork in marketing.

However, the trouble arises when traditional advertisers do not understand or believe in the power of pay-per-click marketing. Many companies still see it as separate advertising model and fail to tie the relationship back to traditional off-line campaigns. By analyzing PPC reports advertisers can pull dramatic customer analytics. With that knowledge all marketing campaigns can benefit, thus eliminating traditional guesswork from traditional advertising.

Source:http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-opinion/columns/43077.html

SEO - Search Engine Optimization Methodology

2007-12-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

If you want to rank your web site in the top positions within search engine results pages (SERPs), your first tasks are to address how your site is built, how the page content is developed and thematically organized throughout the site, and how the internal navigation is structured. All of these factors impact how your site appears to a search engine.

The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers", a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design.

Essentially search engine marketing (abbreviated SEM) is an umbrella term for web site promotion through a search engine, whether that is through search engine optimization, pay per click advertisements or through paid inclusion. The theory behind SEM is a good one; when people use search engines, they are in a state of mind where they are looking for information. When a web surfer gets to your site via a search engine, he does not feel put upon or annoyed, which he might if he had received a piece of spam e-mail from you. By giving the searcher exactly what they want when they search, SEM can get you customers who are already sold on the type of services your provide, but just need to find you.
The best and most direct way to ensure that your website is near the top when a search string related to your site is entered into Google Yahoo or MSN, is through search engine optimization and through link building. The search engine rates your site on how closely it seems to match what the search string says, and also by how many other sites have linked to you. There are many ways to make sure your site is attractive to search engines, ranging from article writing to placing your link on directories that list similar services.

Pay per click advertising is also a main part of SEM; you can set up an arrangement where a small link to your site appears when a certain search string is used in the search engines. The best example of this sort of advertising and how it relates to SEM can be seen with Google Ads. You choose which words you'd like to bring up your ad and then, whenever anyone clicks on your link, you will pay Google a certain amount. You can set a budget to and limit how much you pay every day, and you can also experiment with the words you use to see which combinations bring the most relevant traffic to your site.

There is fairly constant debate that goes on over whether natural search results (search results that show up on their own) or paid search results are better. A blended strategy is normally best which utilizes both search engine optimization and pay per click as it encompasses both parts of the marketing mix.

Search Engine Optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunites offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals. As far as search engine promotion is concerned, your web site's text content is your key to success (or failure!). When doing SEO copywriting, it is important to understand that the search engines exist for one primary purpose, and that is to provide the internet searcher with relevant results for their searches.
Source:http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=44529

How To Choose an SEO Agency and Why

2007-12-07T19:02:00.000-08:00

When you're scoping out a Web site design project, you expect prices to fluctuate from provider to provider. You expect one company's talents to be greater than another's. You expect to pay for added functionality.

When pricing SEO (define) services, many companies have a hard time getting a handle on what they should pay. Why? It's not easy to understant the numerous tactics and strategies that go into an SEO project.

If you're shopping around for SEO services, compare companies. That's just common sense. You'd be surprised, though, how few companies do it. Comparing companies ensures you're not just getting the best price, but the best value. That's what you do with most big ticket purchases.

Scope Out the SEO Project

When shopping for Web site redesign, you'll likely set up an internal discovery meeting to determine the scope of the site redesign project. This process usually involves countless hours with those responsible for the brand -- designers, the marketing team, and many other "decision makers" within the organization.

Unfortunately, most SEO projects don't receive near the time and attention afforded to Web design projects. In many cases, that's a colossal mistake.

Without the due diligence on your Web site's SEO challenges, it's almost impossible to understand the scope of work necessary to launch a successful SEO campaign. Do you have JavaScript navigation? Does your site content reside within images or frames? Do you lack for content? Will you need to write many pages of copy, add them to the site architecture, and build out pages? Does your site have others linking to yours? Is your internal link structure sufficient?

Once you answer some of these questions, ask yourself if you have the resources -- internally -- to do this work. Or will you need an SEO company to handle these tasks?

What's the Competitive Landscape?

With SEO, the competitive landscape is everything. You have to look at not only who your known competition is (those companies you compete with on a daily basis), but also who your keyword competitors are. In other words, what companies are ranking for the keywords you want your company to rank for?

You also must take into account the degree of competitiveness for the keywords you want to rank for. Are you trying to rank for "home loans" or "Dallas home loans"? Big difference.

For those trying to be found for highly competitive keywords, the timeline to rankings and/or significant traffic increases can be a daunting and time-consuming task. As with any service-oriented company, time is money. So, if the scope of the work determines the highly competitive keywords are the goal, then you can expect to pay more money.

The more competitive the keywords, the more content you may need to write. That means more pages to add to your Web site and more assistance with link generation.

What Are You Spending on PPC?

Funny thing. So many companies spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on PPC (define), because they know they only pay when someone clicks. Well, that's great, but there's no doubt that a well developed SEO campaign can do better, even if you measure it on a PPC basis.

For example, at Vizion Interactive, we have a client that spends less than $10,000 per month on SEO and also spends approximately $100,000 per month on PPC. The traffic they receive from SEO is valued at approximately $2 million per month. If they'd acquired this traffic on a PPC basis, that's what they'd be paying. For the $100,000 they spend on PPC, they get $100,000 worth of traffic.
sorce:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627562

Quick SEO Tips

2007-12-07T19:01:00.000-08:00

One of the features on my blog, The Web Optimist, is a tip box that shows a different random search engine optimization tip each time a page is loaded. As I come across little pearls of wisdom, I add it to the collection.

For the first time published anywhere, here are the first twenty of my Quick SEO Tips in no particular order and with on-site and off-site tips all together. More to come in Part Two.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don't want the link.

4. Don't be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is "blue widgets" then link to "blue widgets" instead of a "Click here" link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don't design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won't cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can't link to a single page. It's either all or nothing. Don't use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

12. Your URL file extension doesn't matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won't make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

13. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google's regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

14. If your site content doesn't change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

15. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

16. Search engines want natural language content. Don't try to stuff your text with keywords. It won't work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

17. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

18. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you're not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

Whew. OK, try to digest these first 20 tips for a while. I'll be following up with the rest in 40 Quick S E O Tips, Part 2 once you've had a chance to absorb these thoroughly.

Source:http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/12/06/quick-seo-tips

SEO Design and Organic Site Structure

2007-12-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

I will cover getting your site to do well and traffic – not the end of the game; you need to convert and be successful on all browsers. I will cover keyword research, creating a SE friendly architecture. I won’t get into details, just highlights, and content.

Keyword research – you may use your tool and build strategy around most searched for keyword. At this phase you need to talk to your target audience, don’t just go for the most popular, go for the tail end. Make sure the keywords didn’t come from the CEO, talk to the target audience.
Assign relevancy to words to get a good targeted list. At vision, we put together a spreadsheet and assign relevancy – up to 100%.

Once you’ve done research, find out who is ranking for those words and why. Know who you are; carve out your niche, try to determine factors necessary to compete with those words, then develop your content.

We look at indexed pages for competitive sites and your own, Yahoo does the best here.

Creating the IA: incorporate the keyword research, incorporate comp analysis, then lay out your site. Use keywords when you can in the names of the pages, assign tags, metas, etc.

A lot of people say SEO sites are ugly – not true. Avoid java script, image based navigation, flash navigation, flash intros to site. Allow space for content – a lot of ecommerce site get carried away with images. Use alt text. Try to write static urls in the development stage. Design should follow the IA – design should be the 3rd phase of the process, try to have a reason why the site is being designed that way.

Trip Advisor is good for usability. Usability is important. What’s below the fold on their home page is a lot of links using great anchor text.

Read Searchenginewatch.com this Tuesday for article on spam.

Building content:

Once you have your keywords, your site is only as good as the copy you put on the pages write engaging content. Don’t stuff. Make it engaging for visitors and search engines. Once you have content, go back through it and try to link between one page to another, this is great for spiders. Use good anchor texts. People get so caught up with external links but forget about linking within site.

Make sure you avoid marketing fluff. Blogs are great for getting out quick content. Pages will rank quickly.

Summary: do research before design, use research smartly to develop IA. Deign for usability and SEO, in that order. Make sure you have good content.
Speaker 2: Alan K’necht, K’nechtology, Inc:

Linear approach: spiders read from top to bottom, left to right, and go straight through. Search engines care about words, words and words! Not pictures. Also care about positions of words. Then why show graphic first? Good for usability, not search engines. Use 2-tier design architecture. Separate content from presentation. Doesn’t necessarily mean design will be ugly. Organize content logically, i.e. don’t use privacy policy first – use H1 tag first! Use CSS to position.

Newspaper philosophy – they get readers engaged. Why? Linear info – easy to read! Headlines first! Main story first! Important stuff up front! That’s what search engines are trying to do, be easy for the human. Newspaper puts links to inner pages at the end (i.e. continued on page 22). So linear approach is that the important elements must come first! H1 first, H2 second, target words in H1 – first and foremost, this is what page is about! Stick graphic at the bottom!

One of the ways to see if coders did a good job is to turn off CSS using the Firefox Webmaster Toolbar. You can see what the site looks like. You can remove lots of the fluff. If the logo is relevant or well known keep it in towards the top. Get content up front though. Usability for search engines.

Speaker 3: Lyndsay Walker – WestJet – Canadian Airline

Design for your visitors! You want to have a clear navigation not only for visitors but also for search engines.
Avoid flash, there is no advantage whatever. There is so much you can do with CSS and Java that can simulate what Flash can do.
Fresh content is the best.
Use DIVs – more reliable than a table structure.
Use your stats – what browsers are people using? Where are they going on your site?
Test everything in Firefox – it’s a compliant browser. If you design for Internet Explorer, you will test in Firefox and it will be broken. Design for Firefox and tweak for IE. You will save yourself a lot of headaches. Especially since Firefox has great tools and plug-ins. If you watch your stats over time, you will notice an increase in Firefox users as well as mobile device users to surf the net.

Must-haves recap:
Title tag – unique to every page.
Meta description tag – the yes or no if someone will click on our site. Very important.
Header tags – place prominently at the top, H1, H2 etc.
Strong code-to-content ratio – CSS is so important, you really don’t need a lot of code these days.
DIVs instead of tables.
Don’t forget your keywords.
Links – so important – internal linking structure just as important as external.

Side note - Inadvertent SEO – If you are testing out new pages, the search engines will find it whether you are ready or not. If you are not ready for it to be live, use a testing environment or watch your linking structure.

Speaker 4: Paul Bruemmer – Red Door Interactive

Organic Site Structure:

- Server configuration: robot.txt, redirect codes, 404 error codes, internal broken links, canonical duplicate content, dedicated IP address, alias URLs, transfer of keyword page rankings, etc.
- Site architecture gone bad: messed up situation. To prevent, 6 essential components to implement:
Inclusion ratio – it pays to know and track the number of pages indexed to gauge how you are doing in the index.
Directory structure and naming conventions.
Internal linking structure – very often neglected and annoying to correct.
Dynamic and persistent URLs.
Site Map.
Privacy statement.

Content Generation:
Look at competitive landscape and be equal to or greater than.
Textual content types: articles, industry news, etc.
Think about content promotion, RSS feeds, blogs etc.

Content Optimization comes down to 6 on-page factors, Lyndsay summed them up. If you work them into your design you will do really well.

Natural Link Profile: think ahead about creating a neighborhood of links around you which will have a huge impact on your site. Give some thought to your link profile.

Deep Link Profile – ratios of links to subpages in comparison to links to homepages.

Additional considerations are feeds, paid search, local search (map locations, XHTML for mobile), development and administrative staff etc.

Source:http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015577.html

AML Launches New SEM Tool – Integrating SEO Within A Web Page Generator

2007-12-01T03:55:00.000-08:00

Associated Marketers has launched a new website designed to help businesses become visible on the web. Page Author provides a simple to use tool, to build, optimize, and submit WebPages to a search engine.

The tool may be used to promote an existing website, or create new search engine friendly sites.

Ed Shea a founding partner stated that, AML will apply techniques learned from years of experience in automating Computer Aided Manufacturing processes to simplify web publishing. Tools are designed for use by those without Web Design or SEO (search engine optimization) technical skills.

The idea for LeadsLander is based on the premise that the SEO process can be applied to any content, using an automated process. I know that that would be considered blaspheme in the SEO forums. However the majority of business web pages are written with no consideration for search. They are highly specialized with narrow topics making search optimization straightforward.

Businesses have ample content available that would be suited for publication on the web, the problem lies on the lack of technical skills related to publishing material optimized for search. LeadsLander product is our attempt to offer a tool where in-house textual content can be published by “cut and paste” skill levels.

The integrated SEO scoring method provides for fine tuning by the page author.
The HTML Tags important for effective indexing by search engines are automatically generated for each page. The visible scoring system assures that the page content supports the keywords and phrases chosen.

Building Link Popularity for a site through paid links or from unrelated sites has been discounted by search engines for some time. LeadsLander pages are dependant on content related to the business topic and will only post when they score well enough.

Publishing of pages to the integrated hosting is allowed once a minimum score is achieved. The page is viewed in a pre-viewer once saved, then automatically published to the AML server. Pages are submitted to search engines through XML sitemaps generated as pages are added.

Source:http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/26869/

The biggest SEO keyword searches for November

2007-11-30T19:21:00.001-08:00

Lycos today announced its results from its excellent blog report The Lycos 50, the 50 most popular Internet search results for the week ending Nov. 24, 2007.

Biggest Search Engine movers for the week ending Nov. 24, 2007:
1. Rachael Ray - 871%
2. Nelly Furtado - 220%
3. Amy Adams - 150%
4. Anna Nicole Smith -100%
5. Stephen Colbert- 100%
6. Emma Watson- 86%
7. Johnny Depp- 73%
8. Xbox- 72%
9. Thanksgiving - 55%
10. Poker- 40%

As to be expected a distinct Christmas theme is around this week with terms like Xbox (Natural Search #45) re-enters this week’s Lycos 50, jumping 72% in online interest.

A report recently issued its list of Top Toys and Video Games of 2007, based on web search activity, and while the gaming consoles fail to make the Top 10 Toys list this year, both Nintendo (Natural Search #36) and Xbox score the biggest points with web users over the past week, generating 64% more search interest than PlayStation.

Meanwhile, the unstablity in Iran (Natural Search #28) continues its climb up the Lycos search logs, rising from number 35 last week.

While shy of making this week’s Lycos 50 list of top search terms, celebrity chef Rachael Ray sees the biggest jump in search activity, up 871% over the past week.

The star of the popular US TV show “Rachael Ray” show, Ray is also a best-selling author, and for the past year, has locked in the sweet gig of Dunkin Donuts’ spokeswoman.

Her CBS talk show won a 2007 Daytime Emmy Award, while Forbes named her the number two “Most Trusted Celebrity.” The most popular Rachael Ray-related search queries this week include Rachael Ray biography; Rachael Ray party food recipe; Rachael Ray photos; and Rachel Ray Show.

The Lycos 50 Top 10 Search Terms for the Week Ending Nov. 24, 2007:

1) Poker
2) Thanksgiving
3) Golf
4) Fashion
5) Disney
6) Christmas
7) World Series
8) YouTube
9) South Beach Diet
10) Britney Spears

Source:http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/news/999186/

Google Experimental Offers Vote Up Search Listing: End of SEO

2007-11-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I covered the news at Search Engine Land of a new Google experimental search feature that lets you move search results up and remove results from the Google search results page.

The changes you make only impact you - your login and does not influence the overall scope of the search results. But can they? Who knows. We have been seeing Google test remove results features before and then drop the feature.

Google says:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you've made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

A Cre8asite Forums thread is talking about how this may or may not impact SEOs. Well, this is nothing new. We have had whole conference panels on the topic, such as Personalized Search: Fear or Not?. Plus we have shown how much the personalized results today can differ from non-personalized results. In fact, why not try turning off Google personalized results yourself and do some tests.

Is this new Google experimental test the end of SEO? Not at all. This does not add much more than what we have today with Google Personalized results. All it does it make it more visible to all of us.
Source:http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015496.html

Google Spam Patent Explorer: "Identifying Manipulated Articles

2007-11-29T09:26:00.000-08:00

What SEO doesn't like talking about spam? Now add a newly granted Google patent that talks about spam and an SEO is in heaven!

Bill at created a Cre8asite Forums thread about a new granted patent named Methods and systems for identifying manipulated articles. Here is the abstract:

"" Systems and methods that identify manipulated articles are described. In one embodiment, a search engine implements a method comprising determining at least one cluster comprising a plurality of articles, analyzing signals to determine an overall signal for the cluster, and determining if the articles are manipulated articles based at least in part on the overall signal.""

Bill goes into more detail at the Cre8asite Forums thread and in his blog post at SEO By The Sea. I will not recap what he wrote, since he did an excellent job explaining the patent.

In short, Google has come up with an formula for analyzing articles, placing them in a cluster and determining based on the linkage pattern between those articles if they are manipulating the web with spamming tactics.

Here is how Bill explains it:

"" A patent granted to Google today explores Web spam and the manipulation of documents and links on the Web. It describes how the rankings of pages may be influenced if they are identified as “manipulative.”

The identification of manipulative documents, how they might be grouped together, and how they could be treated by the search engine is described in some detail. That treatment might include removal of pages from the search index, reductions in rankings for pages, and possibly a change in how quality scores (PageRank) are calculated for links from manipulative pages.""

The patent application was filed about 4 years ago. So Google may or may not be using all or some of these concepts within their current day algorithm. The fun part is the discussion and application of the patent to current day SEO trends.

Bill ends his thread with a teaser, "Anyone want to talk about spam? Paid links?"

Source:http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015480.html

5 Free Or Cheap SEO Tracking Tools

2007-11-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

There are a number of free or inexpensive search analytics tools available out there, and this article will outline a few of them that have gotten rave reviews.

Google Analytics

Google shook up the search analytics scene with the release of Urchin-powered Google Analytics. Google bought measurement powerhouse in 2005 and eventually integrated its tons of information into its Analytics product, the second incarnation of which was released early in 2007.

The good news, all that information is free.

The service allows webmasters to:

* See pie charts and maps that show who is sending traffic and what part of the world (on a city level) visitors are coming from.
* See several different reporting categories: Executive; Marketer; Webmaster; Marketing Optimization; Content Optimization.
* Integrate the information with AdWords that allows ROI reporting
* See visitor trending

Some reports say the breadth of information available through Google Analytics can be overwhelming, so there may be a bit of a learning curve for full benefits.

Compete Search Analytics

Metrics firm Compete grabbed some buzz this fall with the release of Compete Search Analytics, of which there are both free and pay versions. The company boasts:

* Keyword discovery for expanding your keyword bidding
* The ability to find gaps in competitors' strategies
* Discovery of keywords that drive visitor engagement
* Performance tracking and competitor comparison

Mint

Mint is a relative inexpensive tracking tool ($30 per site) that tracks browser type, country of origin, internal searches, outbound clicks, specific page tracking, and page trending.

It has been mentioned that Mint is fairly basic to the point that free tools would offer the same, but where it becomes worth its salt is via "Peppers," or free plug-ins created by enthusiastic developers.

SEO for Firefox

Developed by Aaron Wall, this Firefox browser plug-in allows you to see various stats about a website in the toolbar and beneath that site's search result. It tells you:

* PageRank
* Estimate of inbound links via Yahoo and MSN
* Number of .edu and .gov links to the site and pages within
* Number of del.icio.us bookmarks for a page
* Estimated Technorati links
* Alexa ranking
* How many pages are in Google's cache
* How many page are indexed in DMOZ
* How many Bloglines links
* Whether a site is indexed in Yahoo
* Whois lookup
* Age of a domain
* Google search volume trends
* Popular keywords
* Top keyword bid prices on Overture
* Bid estimates and click volume estimates on Google

SEODigger

Another free tool available, SEODigger shows:

* Which keywords your site ranks high enough for to be in Google top 20
* Analysis of user sites and competition sites,
* How well sites are optimized for search
* Information on entire domain as well as pages

Source:http://www.webpronews.com/

SEO: How To Top The Search Engines

2007-11-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

Just like every webmaster, you want your website to be on top when there is a query in Google. Ranking highly in organic search engine results is a key element for bringing traffic to your website. The higher you rank for search queries, the more often your website is presented to the internet community. The process to achieve these results is called search engine optimization.

The elements of good search engine optimization and ranking higher in organic search results are maintaining high web standards, accessibility and usability of your website. What improves the visibility of any site is the human usability factor, unique and quality content, easy indexing for search robots and the sites appeal to visitors.

There are many webmasters, site owners and consultants that engage in search engine optimization. It is actually considered to be a subset of search engine marketing which takes into account the optimization of website content, its keywords and meta tags. It also minimizes the use of complex scripts to increase the ability for search engine robots to crawl your website for content. If you do not have the technical expertise to optimize your own site you should search out a qualified professional to assist you.

Improving search engine optimization will involve the site’s coding for structure, presentation and correctly allowing robots to index the site. You also measure visitor traffic and the keywords that are used to find the website and the conversion of those keywords to the desired action of sign up, purchase or a certain landing page.

Another part of search engine marketing that is important for obtaining higher rankings is link building. To increase your websites visibility to the search engines and drive traffic and search engine robots to your website for indexing, you should submit your website to quality directories to increase inbound links that are relevant to your sites topic.

By taking these actions you should see an increase in traffic and inbound links to increase your search rankings.

Source:http://www.americanchronicle.com/