Thursday, November 15, 2007

Seo: Focus, Focus; Not Hocus, Pocus

Anyone who knows me, knows that my biggest pet peeves are loud eaters, auto-loading music on web sites and my next door neighbor. Today we can safely add to this list web sites that are so ambiguous, it could be argued they are part of some cryptic conspiratorial code.

My company offers a free service analyzing web sites from a search engine marketing perspective. At least once daily, we are sent the link to a web site with no clear and apparent focus. It's so bad that we don't know what keyword exactly to talk to the web site owner about in their analysis. I always tell these people, their biggest problem is not search engine optimization (or lack thereof), it's focus!

The most important aspect of any web site in any industry, anywhere in the world is user friendliness. There is no straying from this. Your web site can be optimized for the most competitive keyword in the world, it can rank number one across the board and you can even have your URL flashed across the posing torso of America's Next Top Model on CNN and it will do absolutely nothing whatsoever for your business if your web site is not user-friendly.

Visitors need to come to your site and know immediately what it is about. You have literally just a few seconds to capture their attention. If they don't see what they are looking for, quickly, they will leave.

Some tips to help you make sure your web site visitors stick around and understand what your web site is all about are as follows:

1. Find out the language your target audience is using to find your site, refer to your product or refer to your service. More often than not, professionals in an industry refer to things differently than the layman. If you are using too much jargon on your web site, you will lose your visitor's interest.

2. Avoid start pages, flash intros, or extra steps before getting to your sites info. In this day and age, we've all been spoiled by instant gratification and we all know how to get what we want within seconds. If your site doesn't offer answers as fast as it possibly can, you've already lost customers. Flash intros and welcome pages are pretty and sparkly and fun, but pretty, sparkly and fun doesn't make money. Visitors do.

3. Do not, under any circumstances, ever have auto-loading music or sound on your web site. A vast majority of computer users listen to mp3s while using their computers, and now their mobile phones with built-in mp3 players. If they're listening to the new Jimmy Eat World record or singing along to The Cult, the very last thing they want is to have some cheesy sales pitch interrupt the chorus. The first thing I do when I hit a site with any sort of sound or music, including the web sites of my favorite bands, I leave. I immediately leave, no questions asked. They could probably pay me to stick around for a bit, but cold hard cash is about the only thing that would keep me around and being as the purpose of your site is to make you money, paying people to visit it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective route to take.

4. Use nice, clean, professional looking graphics AND text. Most web users tend not to read. They skim and usually will only go that far if prompted by something graphic that strikes their interest. As is the case with storefronts in the real world, what draws people into a store they've only just seen or heard of for the first time, is looks and what it's selling. Think about it. If you're looking for antiques and you walked up to a store called "Joe's Emporium" and the entire thing had tinted windows so you couldn't see in, would you bother going in when the store right next door says "Betty's Antiques" and has a beautiful display of some the prettiest old stuff you ever saw? No. Joe would be out of business in no time.

Your site needs to be clean, professional and enticing. Cut the bells and whistles, stop beating around the bush and give it to them straight. No one wants their time wasted or their intelligence insulted and no one wants to be chasing white rabbits around trying to make sense of your web site. Give them the goods, give it to them fast and give it to them with class. When you've done that, then focus on search engine optimization and you will find that your numbers in traffic will reflect nice and proportionately, your numbers of inquiries.


http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/SEO--Focus--Focus--Not-Hocus--Pocus/339308

Seo Or Ppc - Choose The Right Option For Your Business Web Site Marketing

When businesses start web site marketing or promotion, two main options help to achieve the goal, SEO (also referred as “organic optimization”) and PPC (also referred as “inorganic optimization”). Selecting the best option of these two is the first mile stone of any Internet Marketing Campaign.

Pay Per Click involves online advertising on web sites, search engines and their related advertising networks, by bidding highly searched and product relevant keywords and appropriate creating ads. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads”, which generally appear to the right or on top of organic (natural) results of search engines. Advertiser needs to pay whenever user clicks on the ad in accordance with his bidding amount.PPC is the ideal option for highly funded adversting campaigns aiming to achieve visitors and targeted traffic within short duration, however involves more cost and risk involvement.

Edge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) over PPC :

• Guaranteed Clicks: Many Researches revealed that visitors in general prefer natural organic search links in comparison to PPC sponsored links.

• Long Term Traffic and ROI Benefit: Web site once ranked top in search engine’s organic results brings steady, long term traffic and in return ROI in contrast to short term traffic and ROI based ppc campaign.

• Less Risk and Cost Involvement: “Click Fraud” is the most concerned, risky and costlier affair for any PPC Campaign. SEO, in comparison involves zero or less risk and cost involvement.

• More Keyword Targeting: PPC facilitates bidding and ranking for limited set of keywords. SEO offers no such limitations on keyword targeting and ranking

• More Exposure and Wider Space Promotion: PPC Campaign is confined to pay-per-click search engines and its advertising networks. SEO promotion gives more exposure and wider space with RSS, Blogs, Social Search, News Articles, in addition to Search Engine placements.

In general ,SEO has major gains in comparison to PPC. However PPC can be considered for short duration in combination with long term and result -oriented seo promotion strategy.



http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/SEO-or-PPC---Choose-the-right-option-for-your-business-web-site-marketing/339694

Top Seo Tips To Get Higher Search Engine Rankings

Getting listed in search engines is not a difficult task but what matters how have your site been listed in a search engine. Your site can get higher ranking in all search engines if you follow ethical SEO strategies. In this article you can find some important SEO tips which can help you to get higher Search engine rankings:

1.Do Research on Keywords: Keyword being the weapon of your success in SEO as search engines work as per your keywords hence be careful while selecting right keywords. It is widely advisable to use Overture or Wordtracker tools to select right Keyword.
2.Work On Content: It is widely said that for websites ‘Content is King’. So concentrate on your web content and make sure that the content provides some unique information to your visitor and not duplicated from elsewhere. While writing content for your web pages, insert vital keywords which relate to the products and services that your company offers.

3.Proper Design: Design your site that clearly represent your business and make an easy navigation based on your keyword research. Your overall webdesign should be simple, nice and user friendly. Make web pages that are easy to load. Don’t make pages with large images, if images are necessary; make a thumbnail and must add a description of the image.

Be Search Engine Spider Friendly: Search Engines read the websites content through its spiders or crawler. These spiders go through the site and categorized them as per the need of searchers. Always make sure that you have HTML link in your main navigation on each page. Avoid javascript link and menus, flash, graphics as search engine spider’s can not read them.

5. Build incoming links to your site: Incoming links are very, very important for SEO and also possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement. One way Incoming Links always have more importance than reciprocal links. Avoid link farms and try to get links from authority websites, edu and gov sites as they have more weightage than others and also preferable by search engines. Writing articles and submitting them to various article directories is also a better way to get free one-way incoming links and it also build a good reputation at the same time.

6. Don’t try to fool the search engines: Search Engine spiders are now more clever than you think and Search Engines update their algorithm time to time so don’t try to make them fool otherwise your site will be banned from search engines. So avoid cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or other and unethical methods.

Have a little patience and follow the Ethical methods of SEO. It will surely give you your desired results.



http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Top-SEO-Tips-To-get-higher-Search-engine-Rankings/339961

Search Engine Marketing Firm: Call The Specialists

A common marketing method in use long before the internet era was that technique called article marketing. The seller publishes articles with interesting content related to their product to promote it and to get others to use the copy for more exposure to other potential clients. Now this is a very popular and effective web site marketing strategy as well.
Making use of a search engine marketing firm is perhaps the most effective way to use article marketing online. Firms like these enhance copy and make it more appealing to search engines. This is achieved by drawing search engine spiders to a site through use of key words. The search engines in turn increase the site's traffic ranking. As the copy is discovered by increasing numbers of other sites who then post it themselves, more links are created to the original site, building even more traffic, and potentially sales.
Choose a search engine marketing firm for their skill in picking terms and keywords that are the closest fit for a website's actual needs, not just what seems most popular. Every business has different requirements and these firms use the latest software to study the most effective ways to reach search engines and then explain their results to an online entrepreneur. Most offer several useful services.
Many site owners write good articles, but don't know how to rewrite those articles in the best way for searc engine optimization. A search engine marketing firm can be very helpful for such people. Others may not be very good at writing copy. Marketing firms can help those people as well by writing original content or rewriting their copy so that it is republished and attracts links. Such articles will use keywords in a way that attracts web spiders looking for those specific words. These firms can even duplicate an author's signature style.
As with all forms of marketing, website marketing relies upon informing potential customers about yourself and your products. Traffic is essential if you're going to achieve that, and traffic is created when people search for topics related to your product on a search engine. If you select the correct search engine marketing firm, you'll find that your exposure will be maximized. As a result, traffic will increase, and this is essential if you're going to make money.
If you like the idea of article marketing to sell your product or service, it doesn't matter now whether you have writing or promotion talent or not. Marketing firms who specialize in online business have the resources to provide whatever skill you need to be a success.


http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Search-Engine-Marketing-Firm--Call-The-Specialists/340479

Every Web Site Should Include

Having a Website is no problem, but possessing a quality website with respect to search engine crawlers is most important. When ever you want have website consider following tips:

About Us page
The About Us page is a important place for visitors of your site to find out who you are, what your comapny does, what you sell, why they should read your content or buy your products, how valuable your site can be. From this page they can be know about you, your company and your products.On this page it will be worth to have contact information of you or your company, or at least should have link to your contact us page.

Contact Us page
Visitors of your site and target traffic need an easy way to get in touch with you or your company. Have a clearly marked link for contact information and include every avenue you receive communication through, like Telephone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, etc. all should appear on this page.

A Site Map

This page has very high importance as far as SEO is concerned, because this page contains all of your site page links and their mapping. So when any search engine crawls your site URL can crawl every page if it sees the well formulated site map.

A News, Press Release, Blog, and/or Articles Page
These are information pages, which helps providing useful information to your customers about the current events, products, endorsements, and other company happenings all in one place. Make sure to maintain these pages with fresh content that is reader friendly so your target traffic is more likely to come back, bookmark your page, and they may even provide word-of-mouth advertising. Free advertising! Believe me, search engines love these types of pages. New, fresh, relevant content is the stuff of search engines. Each time, a search engine’s spider crawl your site and find new content it ups your chances of ranking higher in the organic search listings. More free organic visitors to your site!

A Relevant Page Title
Many people have no idea that your page title holds a lot of weight. Search engines displays the title of your page on their searches, therefore, the catchier and more accurate your title the better the chance you will hit target traffic. Page titles should be different for every page in your site. They should clearly and accurately describe your page, it is very good idea to use keywords in the page title. The page name are also important and might be selected same as the page title, but, these should be smaller in length and readable for your users and search engines.

A Balanced text contents

For example, Good Grammar, Correct Spelling, Sentence Structure and readable text, Not only should your site have relevant content, the more the better, people should be able to read your content. Choppy or run-on sentences that seem to go nowhere cannot provide the type of readership concise, correct sentences can.You do not want to distract your readers, Misspellings, wrong word usage, bad grammar are all distractions. You want to captivate them. If your site is a business site avoid slang and offensive language all together, just don’t confuse readers more than necessary. If you are not good on writing, don’t do yourself ask some one who can do it for you.

Professional Design, Colors, and Images
Design should be implemented with usability in mind. Create easy navigation and links to all your pages. A search bar for your site is also a good idea. Colors should be inviting, not blinding. Use colors to emphasize your brand, product or content. Don’t overpower the visitor with colors. Use colors to make text pop without being distracting or hard to read. Images should be friendly and relevant to your site. Make sure your images can load within a reasonable amount of time, you don’t want to lose visitors because a single image caused an incredible amount of load time, or worse froze the visitors browser.

Make Sure ALL Links Are Working Links
The site with broken links, is against credibility of your website. You avoid this mistake and check, recheck, and check your links again, to avoid bad impression about your company



http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Every-Web-Site-Should-Include/340706

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Everyone knows that the best way to increase your income online is to increase your Search Engine Rankings. When researching how to increase your rankings you come across lots of hearsay and rumor but very few real facts. Separating the facts from the rumors can be a difficult task.

Every now and again a product is released that is worth it's weight in gold. One such product is Xtreme Rankings by Ryan Moran. Xtreme rankings contains no fluff and lot of information that will allow you to capture top search engine rankings. These in turn lead to more visitors and more income.
It is quite possible that you haven't heard of Xtreme Rankings. This is probably because the Ryan didn't want the entire usual marketing guru's promoting it. He preferred to let word get around naturally about just how good the product is.

Xtreme Rankings is a video and e-book package that will take you by the hand and show you step by step how to get your sites ranking highly in Google, Yahoo and MSN. It's not rocket science and everyone will be able to achieve good results by using the methods shown.

Unlike many similar products Ryan keeps Xtreme Rankings up to date. This is really useful as the SEO methods change all the time. Recently Netscape changed their name to propeller and Ryan has already incorporated this into the program.

I've been using Xtreme rankings for several months now and the change to my business has been immense. I have drastically reduced my PPC costs as I no longer need to advertise as much as my sites now get organic traffic from the the search engines. The savings in advertising costs alone would have paid for Xtreme rankings many times over.

When I now launch a site I am secure in the knowledge that within 4 weeks by using the methods in Xtreme rankings I'll be generating a good level of free search engine traffic. In the past 2 days a site created at the end of last month has made 2 sales. This is only going to grow over the coming few months.

How long does it take you to get 100 visitors per day to visit a new site? If I told you that by using the methods Ryan teaches in Xtreme rankings that I have received an average of 120 a day for the past 2 days to a site that is just slightly more than a month old would you be impressed? The traffic to this site has been building daily. I could only hope to do this in 6 months before I started using Xtreme Rankings.

If you want to make money online then the best way is to increase your search engine rankings in Google , MSN and Yahoo. The best way to rank well is to read the e-book and view the video that comes with Xtreme Rankings. You owe it to yourself to look at what Xtreme Rankings can do for you.


http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Improve-Your-Search-Engine-Rankings/340794

Is Google Preparing To Counter Yahoo's Search Assist?

On the evening of October 30th 2007, I was doing my typical SEO rank checks, when something caught my attention at Google.com. As I was typing some text into the search box, out came a gray box with search suggestions that got ever more precise as I typed in my text.
The dropdown box on Google certainly appeared to be very similar to Yahoo’s Search Assist. The exception is that the box also contained the number of search results for each given term, much like what is found on Google Labs. This was a two column format, with the suggested search term on the left and the search result number on the right. I saw no option to disable the search suggestions as Yahoo provides.

Thinking that this was the launch of yet another search engine feature, I quickly logged on to my Digital Point forum account and began a thread about this new feature. The responses took me off guard. Nobody else could see it. Knowing that my vision is good, I returned to Google to try it again. This time I would post a screenshot. Well, I never was able to take the screenshot as the search suggestions were off. What I had seen was a rare occurrence and quite possibly the testing of a new search feature on Google.
Despite being the dominant player in the search engine market, Google is smart enough to know that Yahoo is its closest competitor. And even Google, the behemoth it is, plays catch up to the competition every now and then.

The search engine market is an ever changing landscape. Behind the scenes it appears that Google is testing a comparable feature to counter Yahoo’s Search Assist. Only time will tell if this feature ever makes it to market, but I feel privileged that Google shared something with me and apparently few others.



http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Is-Google-Preparing-to-Counter-Yahoo-s-Search-Assist-/341337

Search Engine Marketing Company- Take Your Business To New Heights

Search engine marketing isn’t a new technique but with the changing trend it has gained a lot of popularity and importance. If we talk about the potential market, the UK is one country which carries true potential of search engine marketing.

You can find the best and competitive search engine marketing company in UK, which not just guarantees high ranking but also more business. If you perform a search using keywords like search engine marketing company UK and internet marketing company UK, you will be bombarded with staggering results.
The core process of search engine marketing or website marketing is to attract new prospective clients and buy new customers. Initially you might have low sales but once you are constantly on, no one can ever beat you. You will be amazed to know that across the Internet, every month millions of people perform search on various keywords and key-phrases. This means if you are offering that service and you are ranking high, more business will be coming your way. Search engine marketing company in UK’s main aim is not just to rank your website higher but to push your sales too.

Generally there are two approaches when it comes to search engine marketing strategy. If you wish to enjoy higher ranking and that too just in a few months, you have to get black hat SEO techniques. These black hat SEO techniques fetch you high ranking along with increased traffic but in long run you will be at loss. This is because contemporary search engines have become very clever to judge whether that person is applying legal techniques or not. You will be getting whooping results but in the long run either there will be a sharp dip in your business or you will get your website blacklisted. And this is certainly not your aim.

Whereas, the other technique is white hat SEO technique. This process and approach might be a little slow but in the long run you will be at a benefiting end. You will get not just high ranking but your website will never ever see a dip, hence, why to go for something which proves to be dangerous for your business in the long run. Moreover, search engine marketing company in UK even guides you in taking steps that prove to be beneficial for you. During your search engine marketing strategy, try to find each keyword that you identify for search engine marketing initiatives. It’s true that there are numerous keywords which mean the same but only a few are able to deliver the desired result. Search engine marketing company provides a wide range of effective as well as targeted services that drive highly targeted visitors and traffic to your website.

It has been now proved that if you wish to stay on the top in this rank world, you have to hire services of the best search engine marketing company in UK. So what are you waiting for, perform a simple search in search engines and locate the bankable search engine marketing company in UK.



http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Search-engine-marketing-company--Take-your-business-to-new-heights/341441