A great evening in Manhattan, a fantastic atmosphere in Madison Square Garden. Web business people is waiting this match for a long time. One side there is Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing on the other, both seems fit and there is desire to win on face. Last years both sides challenged to other but they never came to face to face. Before the match starts, lets take a short look to their career, strength and weaknesses.
Called SEO is short term of Search Engine Optimization. A milestone in web business since the search engines are the main source for web users before they buy services or products online. Finest and most trustable data source with their high indexing capacity and different logical algos working on the back round may depend on your rankings while results are listed. As most web users do not look much after the 3rd pages of results, web business owners are directly influenced. A web surfer can be your client if your web site is ranked at the top of search results but how you get listed at the top of a major engine? Even there are different algos powering the search engines the main theory is mostly same, simple algo stands on location and frequency. A crawl base search engines use spiders a web site and classifies with different principles to define the ranking. A fact about algo can be changed or improved for search quality. I’am sure all professionals will remember Florida Update on Google. Indeed it was an earchquake more than an update, many results were changed or disappeared on Google, some high rankings even lost from the index. Actually general Google algo is formulated as Relevance Score , PageRank , Local Score with other tweaking , tuning or filtering aspects. Main development point of a search algo is how much off page factors are important and their degrees take part in your algo. The theory on here is not giving much control to webmasters with on page factors .Other search engines do not use Page Rank since Page Rank is a trademark which belongs to Google. Avoiding any spamming , manipulation trials, over optimization or even cloaked content, engines are modifying or changing the degrees ,adding new variables on their algo time to time but all work done is to provide higher search relevancy and quality for users. (Relevance score is SEO efforts, Page Rank is Link building efforts for Google and Local Score is links from expert documents) As seen from the formula, SEO efforts only work on relevance score and vary your ranking 10% if you hired a SEO professional but this can increase 18% if your SEO is master level. I would like to talk about Yahoo and Live search engines’ secrets either but as mentioned they are my professional secrets for now, if you don't know these, its impossible to get top results on Yahoo or Live.
Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click) is paid inclusions as seen Sponsored Results on engines based on pay per click. This marketing tool has been increased enormously in these years, even with expensive per click rates. In some keywords or phrases a click may cost 10€ ( online dating industry) whether visit converts to a lead or not. Ads buyers are ready to pay these high per click bills because SEM efforts bring more revenue than they spent. How this technology works while displaying the ads? Lets say few words about Google Adwords. Google has 2 different networks such as search network and content network. Search network means Google powered search results that you may see on any website with a search bar using Google’s search technology. Content network is different spidering technology and matching the search query and web site content. If you have a web site with high quality and useful content, you may apply and get involved Google’s Adsense network to make money. Google will classify your content and display related ads when a search query is matched as you have probably seen Ads by Google on web.
If SEO and SEM are powerful marketing tools which is the best and effective on sales conversion rates? This is the fatal question, both have advantages changing to the case, then lets compare:
A)In SEM, your web site does not need a change in most cases. If you want high conversion rates, a SEM professional should prepare high quality landing page is necessary only, not your entire design. On the other hand SEO may require some major design changes to get good spidering by engines.
B)PPC Ads charged when clicked only, displaying your ads will not cost you anything but poor Click Through Rates will increase your minimum per click costs. SEO visits are free of charge as visitors comes by clicking the natural search results from a search engine. Most visitors likely to trust a site they find on a search engine, they feel like natural results have been approved by the search engine.
C) SEM brings very quick results to analyze your campaign while SEO effects can take long time on ranking. On Adwords, just 15 minutes is enough to display your campaign on screen but SEO results may take up to 3 months on engine’s ranking.
D) ROI and Conversion rates are higher in SEM because you may design different landing pages according to your major products or services with price charts, feature comparison tables .However in SEO, you can not make these much because your most powerful PR page is your homepage so your sub pages which includes your product specification will not get listed higher than your main page.
E) Targeting is easy in SEM with campaign settings option. You may target national ,regional or international geographical areas depending on your shipping options. Google has features to promote your local business with accessing your business address or just selecting distribution area on Google Map. Another useful tool is matching options are enables you to select broad ,phrase,exacxt or negative matches while displaying your ads.When you prefer SEO, you can not prepare different target pages as they will be sub pages and will not get listed higher than your main page as above.
F) SEM limits you with your budget because your ads campaign will stop displaying when your daily, keywords or monthly budget is reached while SEO results longer even months after optimization work is done.
Finally who wins this match? Well, this depends on your expectation, budget and targets from your campaigns. As long years professional , I dont have a preference . Each business needs different campaigns, you may select to attract new clients in both tools while achieving your corporate targets.
Ladies and Gentlemen, unforgettable match is about to start in Madison Square Garden, please sit back and watch this.
About the Writer: Mr. Erkan Meydanlioglu has a degree in Economics and professional Online Marketing Manager , Google Certified Professional and Team Leader for more than 9 years. He is managing corporate online campaigns as individual or as team manager in Europe. Training company level marketing teams to increase esales.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/131597.html
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Basic Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
If you've read my article "Basic On-Page Search Engine Optimization" article, you know all about the on-page factors that make a webpage rank highly, but what about the off-page factors?
The Importance Of Off-Page Factors:
The off-page factors for making a website rank well in the search engines are equally, probably even more important than the on-page factors. This is because the off-page factors are like a representative opinion of the rest of the websites on the internet. So if loads of websites recommend yours as a good site, google will think, "hmm, quite a few websites recommend this site, so it deserves a boost in rankings". This results in you getting higher in the search engines.
The Links Effect:
If a website links to yours, normally it means that they like you. It's not necessarily you that they like, but your content. However this could be quite the opposite, loads of people might hate something on your website, but still link to it to show other people the part they don't like and encourage them to also hate it.Luckily Google doesn't care either way. A link is a link and you score points for it, whether its saying "xyz.com sucks click here to see" or "This is the best site on the planet, click here to see it". Another thing that will give you points, is if the site linking to yours uses your keywords in the link text. This will lead google to believe that your site is more relevant to your keywords, as another site is basically telling google that "xyz.com is related to the search term 'blue widgets'", if the link text is "blue widgets".
Bad links:
Yes there is such a thing as a bad link. If you go around spamming websites, posting your link and spamming blog comments, your pretty much wasting your time. This is because the blogs and websites that you're spamming are likely to be completely unrelated to yours. Therefore, that link will probably not hold much value at all. You could argue that every little helps, which is true, but if you spend 2 minutes a time, spamming 1000 blogs you'll have 1000 links, which is great, but how long do you think it will take the annoyed blog and website owners to delete your links. I'll tell you, it'll be seconds after they see it. You would have wasted all that time, gotten nothing back from it and you would have tarnished your name and credibility and would have annoyed a lot of people on the way. So not exactly the best method of getting links in the world.
Submission:
Okay, so that is inbound (i.e. links going to your website), what about websites that you link to? This is where you have to be selective. Don't just link to any old websites, if you link to a "bad neighborhoods" google penalizes you. If you link to a site that has shady search engine optimization practices, like hidden text and such, google will think you have similar practices, as when you link to a site, you're saying you support it.
Submit your website to as many relevant directories as you can. This will provide you with high quality, relevant links to your website. This will not only score you points for good links, but it will also get search engines to crawl your pages more often as you're providing the search engines mroe avenues to find you. This means that the changes you make to your site will be reflected in the search engines much quicker, meaning you can tweak your content to get better rankings much more frequently. I plan to make a whole page of directories for you to submit to very soon.
If you run a blog, start an RSS feed, if you don't know how to do this I'll be writing a separate article about it soon. It's very easy to start and update an RSS feed. Don't be fooled into thinking you have to buy some software to make one. You can, but it's not necessary. My RSS feeds are made by my own hand and they work just fine. Once you've created an RSS feed you need to submit it to feed directories (I'll make a list of these in a separate article). Now you just need to update your RSS feed whenever you add a new article.
Now you need to use the most powerful way of getting high quality links to your site. Writing and submitting articles to article directories. You wouldn't believe how great this is for your search engine rankings. I wont go into too much detail here as there's a lot to cover, so I'll go into depth on that topic in another article. But you have to do it. If you write a high quality and informative article, without sounding salesey, and you submit it to an article directory, it's very likely that a good few websites will take that article and permanently stick it on their website. This gives you one more avenue for the search engines to find and spider your website. This means more visitors to your website and hopefully more sales/advertising revenue or newsletter subscribers. This can take a while to do i.e. writing high quality articles and then submitting them to directories, but is more than worth it.
Right that's the basics to help you hit the ground running, I'll delve deeper into each point in separate articles to make them easier to read.
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-25-2006-100440.asp
The Importance Of Off-Page Factors:
The off-page factors for making a website rank well in the search engines are equally, probably even more important than the on-page factors. This is because the off-page factors are like a representative opinion of the rest of the websites on the internet. So if loads of websites recommend yours as a good site, google will think, "hmm, quite a few websites recommend this site, so it deserves a boost in rankings". This results in you getting higher in the search engines.
The Links Effect:
If a website links to yours, normally it means that they like you. It's not necessarily you that they like, but your content. However this could be quite the opposite, loads of people might hate something on your website, but still link to it to show other people the part they don't like and encourage them to also hate it.Luckily Google doesn't care either way. A link is a link and you score points for it, whether its saying "xyz.com sucks click here to see" or "This is the best site on the planet, click here to see it". Another thing that will give you points, is if the site linking to yours uses your keywords in the link text. This will lead google to believe that your site is more relevant to your keywords, as another site is basically telling google that "xyz.com is related to the search term 'blue widgets'", if the link text is "blue widgets".
Bad links:
Yes there is such a thing as a bad link. If you go around spamming websites, posting your link and spamming blog comments, your pretty much wasting your time. This is because the blogs and websites that you're spamming are likely to be completely unrelated to yours. Therefore, that link will probably not hold much value at all. You could argue that every little helps, which is true, but if you spend 2 minutes a time, spamming 1000 blogs you'll have 1000 links, which is great, but how long do you think it will take the annoyed blog and website owners to delete your links. I'll tell you, it'll be seconds after they see it. You would have wasted all that time, gotten nothing back from it and you would have tarnished your name and credibility and would have annoyed a lot of people on the way. So not exactly the best method of getting links in the world.
Submission:
Okay, so that is inbound (i.e. links going to your website), what about websites that you link to? This is where you have to be selective. Don't just link to any old websites, if you link to a "bad neighborhoods" google penalizes you. If you link to a site that has shady search engine optimization practices, like hidden text and such, google will think you have similar practices, as when you link to a site, you're saying you support it.
Submit your website to as many relevant directories as you can. This will provide you with high quality, relevant links to your website. This will not only score you points for good links, but it will also get search engines to crawl your pages more often as you're providing the search engines mroe avenues to find you. This means that the changes you make to your site will be reflected in the search engines much quicker, meaning you can tweak your content to get better rankings much more frequently. I plan to make a whole page of directories for you to submit to very soon.
If you run a blog, start an RSS feed, if you don't know how to do this I'll be writing a separate article about it soon. It's very easy to start and update an RSS feed. Don't be fooled into thinking you have to buy some software to make one. You can, but it's not necessary. My RSS feeds are made by my own hand and they work just fine. Once you've created an RSS feed you need to submit it to feed directories (I'll make a list of these in a separate article). Now you just need to update your RSS feed whenever you add a new article.
Now you need to use the most powerful way of getting high quality links to your site. Writing and submitting articles to article directories. You wouldn't believe how great this is for your search engine rankings. I wont go into too much detail here as there's a lot to cover, so I'll go into depth on that topic in another article. But you have to do it. If you write a high quality and informative article, without sounding salesey, and you submit it to an article directory, it's very likely that a good few websites will take that article and permanently stick it on their website. This gives you one more avenue for the search engines to find and spider your website. This means more visitors to your website and hopefully more sales/advertising revenue or newsletter subscribers. This can take a while to do i.e. writing high quality articles and then submitting them to directories, but is more than worth it.
Right that's the basics to help you hit the ground running, I'll delve deeper into each point in separate articles to make them easier to read.
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-25-2006-100440.asp
Top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Myths
There are many SEO myths and rumors we hear and read about everyday. While there are SEO tricks that work for a time, but inevitably come back to haunt the website using them, most of SEO is knowledge and work. Or research and time, if you prefer. We have listed some of the more popular Search Engine Optimization Myths so please read and let the truth about SEO be revealed.
SEO Myth: Your top ten search engine ranking can be guaranteed
The Truth: Some SEO firms will advertise a "guarantee" to have you listed in the top ten rankings. No one other than the search engines themselves can guarantee any ranking. Don't believe it. Trust their results for other clients and make your decision from actual client successes, not empty promises and guarantees.
SEO Myth: In-House SEO Is Cheaper
The Truth: SEO professionals can get higher rankings faster because Search Engine Optimization and Marketing is complex, technical and has a steep learning curve. We also place a team at your disposal, including a copywriters, developers and SEO specialists and unless you have a room full of marketing staff dedicated to SEO it is hard to keep up. How much is 10, 15, 20 hours a month worth to you in a dollar amount? SEO professionals make you money by saving you that time and effort, at a cost you can afford.
SEO Myth: Search Engine Leads Are Worth Less Than Other Leads
The Truth: Search Engine leads are the probably the most qualified leads, because they come from people searching for the exact products and services which the search engines have you indexed. They are looking for you, not the other way around. Keep in mind you must be targeting the right keywords, but that is the job of your SEO firm, to help you choose the right keywords.
SEO Myth: Websites are optimized while they are being developed.
The Truth: A small percentage of designers and developers actually optimize pages for the search engines while they are building. Most search engine optimization is done after the fact, if at all. As many as 60% of all sites are not properly optimized to rank high in the search engines, so anything you do to optimize your site puts it ahead of your competitors who don't.
SEO Myth: Simply inserting keywords in the keyword meta tag will help list your site for that keyword
The Truth: Most major search engines do not spider or index the keyword meta tag and those that do, if the keyword is not also in the copy of the same page, it's considered spam which could lower your rankings, not raise it. At best the keyword tag is used by directories when submitting your site.
SEO Myth: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.
The Truth: This is a little tricky since each algorithm uses different factors for ranking. A keyword density of 3 to 15% is recommended for tweaking the page for higher placement (depending on the individual search engine). Combined with other optimization efforts and tweaks, the proper keyword density will get listed higher. A keyword density that is too high will get listed lower or penalized.
SEO Myth: Hidden links or text in a page can get your page ranked higher.
The Truth: Keyword stuffing and hidden links in the page can get your site penalized or banned if detected. It is considered spamming by some engines. Most people think it's not worth the risk.
SEO Myth: The more reciprocal links to other sites you have, the higher your Google page rank goes.
The Truth: Outbound links to related and unrelated sites are factored into page rank. Unreciprocated links count higher than reciprocated links. The more quality inbound links to your site, the higher the PR, but nobody knows exactly how Google factors their PR and their algorithm is constantly adjusted. A million links to and from unrelated sites could drop your PR and if your site is found linking to obvious FFA or link farms, your site could be penalized as being 'guilty by association'.
SEO Myth: You don't need to update your site to keep your rankings.
The Truth: By routine maintenance (removing outdated material, fixing broken links, queries, etc.) and updating your pages regularly, you are signaling the bots and crawlers to come back and re-crawl your site for changes to their listings. To maintain high standings, you need to keep at it and tweak the pages for better results if necessary. If neglected, your standings could easily slip out of the top rankings as new competing sites get indexed and optimized.
SEO Myth: You can achieve higher rankings on a keyword without changing the code or content of the pages in your site.
The Truth: Not likely for long. Any elevated results will be temporary. If you want to steadily improve your ranking, you must make changes to your site that help the search engines spider it. You might temporarily raise your ranking by running regular queries and reports on search engines for your keywords but steady results are dependent on your willingness to optimize and tweak the code and content of your pages. A simple thing like fixing broken links can contribute to elevating your listings. It's one of the most overlooked search engine tweaks. Search engines will not continue to spider a site when it runs into a number of broken links.
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/11-11-2005-81157.asp
SEO Myth: Your top ten search engine ranking can be guaranteed
The Truth: Some SEO firms will advertise a "guarantee" to have you listed in the top ten rankings. No one other than the search engines themselves can guarantee any ranking. Don't believe it. Trust their results for other clients and make your decision from actual client successes, not empty promises and guarantees.
SEO Myth: In-House SEO Is Cheaper
The Truth: SEO professionals can get higher rankings faster because Search Engine Optimization and Marketing is complex, technical and has a steep learning curve. We also place a team at your disposal, including a copywriters, developers and SEO specialists and unless you have a room full of marketing staff dedicated to SEO it is hard to keep up. How much is 10, 15, 20 hours a month worth to you in a dollar amount? SEO professionals make you money by saving you that time and effort, at a cost you can afford.
SEO Myth: Search Engine Leads Are Worth Less Than Other Leads
The Truth: Search Engine leads are the probably the most qualified leads, because they come from people searching for the exact products and services which the search engines have you indexed. They are looking for you, not the other way around. Keep in mind you must be targeting the right keywords, but that is the job of your SEO firm, to help you choose the right keywords.
SEO Myth: Websites are optimized while they are being developed.
The Truth: A small percentage of designers and developers actually optimize pages for the search engines while they are building. Most search engine optimization is done after the fact, if at all. As many as 60% of all sites are not properly optimized to rank high in the search engines, so anything you do to optimize your site puts it ahead of your competitors who don't.
SEO Myth: Simply inserting keywords in the keyword meta tag will help list your site for that keyword
The Truth: Most major search engines do not spider or index the keyword meta tag and those that do, if the keyword is not also in the copy of the same page, it's considered spam which could lower your rankings, not raise it. At best the keyword tag is used by directories when submitting your site.
SEO Myth: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.
The Truth: This is a little tricky since each algorithm uses different factors for ranking. A keyword density of 3 to 15% is recommended for tweaking the page for higher placement (depending on the individual search engine). Combined with other optimization efforts and tweaks, the proper keyword density will get listed higher. A keyword density that is too high will get listed lower or penalized.
SEO Myth: Hidden links or text in a page can get your page ranked higher.
The Truth: Keyword stuffing and hidden links in the page can get your site penalized or banned if detected. It is considered spamming by some engines. Most people think it's not worth the risk.
SEO Myth: The more reciprocal links to other sites you have, the higher your Google page rank goes.
The Truth: Outbound links to related and unrelated sites are factored into page rank. Unreciprocated links count higher than reciprocated links. The more quality inbound links to your site, the higher the PR, but nobody knows exactly how Google factors their PR and their algorithm is constantly adjusted. A million links to and from unrelated sites could drop your PR and if your site is found linking to obvious FFA or link farms, your site could be penalized as being 'guilty by association'.
SEO Myth: You don't need to update your site to keep your rankings.
The Truth: By routine maintenance (removing outdated material, fixing broken links, queries, etc.) and updating your pages regularly, you are signaling the bots and crawlers to come back and re-crawl your site for changes to their listings. To maintain high standings, you need to keep at it and tweak the pages for better results if necessary. If neglected, your standings could easily slip out of the top rankings as new competing sites get indexed and optimized.
SEO Myth: You can achieve higher rankings on a keyword without changing the code or content of the pages in your site.
The Truth: Not likely for long. Any elevated results will be temporary. If you want to steadily improve your ranking, you must make changes to your site that help the search engines spider it. You might temporarily raise your ranking by running regular queries and reports on search engines for your keywords but steady results are dependent on your willingness to optimize and tweak the code and content of your pages. A simple thing like fixing broken links can contribute to elevating your listings. It's one of the most overlooked search engine tweaks. Search engines will not continue to spider a site when it runs into a number of broken links.
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/11-11-2005-81157.asp
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