Business SEO By Tuner

Managing An SEO Project

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:12:28 PDT

By Joseph Phillips

All projects start with one common theme: a vision of where the project will end. Whether you're building a skyscraper, designing a piece of software, or creating a new web site you've got to identify the scope that the project will fulfill. The second thing that all projects have in common is their desire to accomplish one of two business fundamentals: increase revenue or reduce costs. Let's talk about increasing revenue through one of the most prevalent channels to your organization: your website.

Which project comes first: Updating your old, stale website with a new look, fresh content and a stronger call to action? Or...planning search engine optimization with a focus on keywords research, earning inbound links and attracting Google's attention?

The answer depends on several factors:

* How old is the website's domain (URL)?

* When is the last time the site was updated with fresh content?

* Have you implemented any search engine optimization (SEO) techniques?

* Is your website ranked high in Google and other search engines?

* What is your overall goal - a better looking website or more traffic from being found in search engines?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving traffic to your website thru better search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. This would include keyword selection and use throughout the website; writing strong page titles and other meta tag codes; development of and implementing a link building program...just to name a few.

What you are doing is creating an initial project scope statement. The project scope is all of the work - and only the required work - to meet the vision you have for your project. Essentially you're framing the project to consider what's of most value and what should be dismissed for this current project. Most projects fail because their project scope is so loosely defined it's difficult to identify what's really needed versus what are some dreamy extras that don't contribute. Defining the project scope isn't easy; if it were, so many projects wouldn't fail.

As you enter the website/SEO project's planning phase you'll want to consider these false assumptions that can interfere with your scope planning:

* A new website will not get Google's attention. In fact, if you purchase a new domain name and start over, some search engines aren't going to be eager to crawl your website. Maintain your current domain.

* While a new website design and updated content might impress visitors to your website, pretty pictures and cool buttons may not increase sales. Make sure you have a strong call to action (sign up for a newsletter; complete a form for more information, etc.).

* Fresh content will not get you ranked higher in Google and other search engines. You need keyword-rich content focusing on your company's products and services.

* Submitting your website to 1,000 search engines will not work either. Actually, there are only 55 legitimate search engines, with Google, Yahoo and MSN dominating the search engine market.

Most projects fail at the beginning, not the end. A failure to adequately plan the project scope will only corrupt your project execution. It's paramount to first plan what the website is to accomplish before hopping into the project execution. For example, you do not want to write new content for your website before you conduct keyword research just as you wouldn't start building a new home without your blueprints.

Of all the project management activities planning is the most important. Planning is an iterative process and happens throughout the life of the project. The project scope is defined initially when you initiate the project, but more fully when you're in the first stages of planning. When you're creating a plan to boost your website's presence the focus should always be on fulfilling the project scope. Activities and deliverables that don't contribute to the scope are not value-added activities. Basically, you and your team should ask does this deliverable help my website's presence or not? If it does incorporate it into the project scope, if it doesn't log the issue, addition, or feature and address it outside of your current project. By keeping your execution activities focused on completing the project scope you'll get more done faster and better than considering and pondering every possibility for your website.

The basic "brick and mortar" plan of any search engine optimization project would include the follow elements:

* Research for the best possible keywords.

* Research your competition. What keywords are they pursuing?

* Write fresh content utilizing the targeted keywords.

* If you are designing a new website, determine if the design with drive the content, or if the content will drive the site design. Make sure you have selected your keywords before you write the content.

* Link building. Earn one-way links from directories and other websites pointing to your website and web pages.

Once you've created your project plan it's time to execute the plan. This is the real work of the project that'll create the deliverables and benefits outlined in the project scope and the project's work breakdown structure. In tandem with executing the project plan, you'll control the project to ensure the work, project team, and deliverables are consistently in alignment with the project's vision. At some point you'll get to the happiest day: closing the project.

True search engine optimization is not "one and done." You'll need to plan for the long-haul: keywords may change as products and services change; content and blogs will need to be written and updated and link building never ends. Build your SEO plan in stages and keep moving forward.

Joseph Phillips is the author of five books on project management and is a PMI Project Management Professional, a CompTIA certified Project Professional, and a Certified Technical Trainer. For more information about Project Management Training, please visit Project Seminars.

SEO - Effective Tips To Help Your Web Site Survive in The Search Engine Jungle

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:15:41 PDT

By Vanessa A. Doctor

The widening reach of the Internet in our daily lives, has opened many doors of opportunities for many individuals today. The Worldwide web has created new terms, references, and a wider blend of career opportunities, and methods to earn more profits, as well as devising new marketing and sales strategies.

The art of search engine optimization is a direct result of such new developments. For those who see themselves as Internet-savvy individuals and possess a much deeper insight of how the Internet moves and thinks, then they can earn themselves a great career through this novel method.

Search engine optimization refers to the kind of service which helps to increase the exposure of a Business or organization's Web site or Web pages. Attaining adequate exposure could mean a lot of good things for different organizations, firms, groups or industries who long for a wider reach with online readers and consumers.

Create An Opening Paragraph That Effectively Describes Your Page Content

It's a fact that most established search engines love content, however they are especially fond of the first 25 words on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that perfectly or appropriately describes the content of the rest of the page , or the site itself, you would be able to include your vital keyword phrases in this important area.

When users first arrive in a Web page, the first thing that they will need to know is whether that exact offers the information they're looking for. A logical step in finding out, is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it appropriately and comprehensively describes the page content, should be very helpful.

Remember To Utilize Meaningful Page Titles

A meaningful page title helps your Web site's visitors to get a full understanding of where they are,both within the site, and on the Internet as a whole. As you probably know already, the page title is the first thing that loads up, generally quite a few seconds before the actual content, therefore a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can truly help in effective user orientation to your site.

If you don't know that much about SEO yet, you'll find out that most search engines put a premium on the page title than on any other of the page's attributes. If the title comprehensively describes the content of that page, the legitimate search engines should be able to accurately discern what that page is actually about.

Make It A Habit To Provide High-Quality Content

Although this may sound like an off-beat characteristic of a search-optimized Web site, it's actually a very important one. Most standard search engines, in addition to page content, verify at the number of links that are pointing into the Web pages.

Generally, the more inbound links a Web site has, the higher will the site's search rankings appear. In writing and providing unique, interesting, fresh and regularly updated content on your Web site, this will make other Web masters want to link to your site. By doing that, it would also be able to provide extra value to their site, and to their visitors as well.

Comprehensively optimizing your online firm's Web site for both search engines and online visitors, shouldn't be seen as a mere trade-off., because while there is a significant overlap between the tasks required to achieve these two vital objectives, this overlap can be used to your advantage. It shouldn't be too challenging to create a Web site that users can easily locate via the search engines, and completely use once they reach it.

http://7seo.com - 7 SEO

Vanessa A. Doctor from Jump2Top - SEO Company

Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Tips

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:11:33 PDT

By Joshua Spaulding

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be an SEO "guru" to rank well in the Search Engines. There are only a handful of things you need to do in order to rank well. Those who concentrate on what's important will quickly pass those who spend their time worrying about all of the little things that may or may not increase their rankings!

Below you will find the 5 most important SEO factors:

1: Links - The quantity and quality of the links on the WWW which point to your site and it's subpages is the #1 off-page SEO factor! When it comes to top Search Engine rankings the most influential factor really is the incoming links! Submit articles and do selective link exchanges to give your site a push-start and let your good content (below) bring it to the top!

2: Title and META Tags - The title and META description of each individual page is the most important on-page SEO factor! Craft your title and description in a way that is both Search Engine friendly (contains your primary keyword) and user friendly (convinces them to click.) Remember, if it is full of keywords and not user friendly, your rankings will not matter, as no one will click. If it is user friendly, but doesn't contain your main keyword, you will not rank as high as you would if it had your keyword (in most cases.)

3: Internal Linking - A good internal linking structure will not only show the SE's which of your pages are more important, it can actually increase the rankings of those pages! Use the rel="nofollow" attribute on links that don't need any "link juice" like your contact pages, about pages, affiliate links and duplicated pages.

4: Quality Content - Quality content will bring in "natural" links. If you're spitting out low-quality, rehashed content, you won't impress anyone. If you do not impress anyone your job will be much harder, as you'll have to manually build all of your links.

5: Keyword Density doesn't Matter - "Keyword Density" is no longer important. With the implementation of "Latent Semantic Indexing" (LSI) most major Search Engines do not rank a page higher because it contains a keyword a set number of times. Just write natural content and good things will come!

So to recap, build solid incoming links, compose a good title and META description, create a solid internal linking structure, write quality content and don't worry about keyword density!

This is the strategy that has worked for me in order to obtain front-page ranking for many competitive terms and I'm confident it will for you as well!

To see how I've conquered some of the most competitive keywords on the Internet, visit http://www.TheEasySEOReport.com/ where I provide my extremely popular SEO Report for absolutely Free!

SEO Training - How To Get The Most Out Of It

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:12:20 PDT

By Tracy Fredrychowski

Good news! I am going to share with you a detailed search engine optimization and internet marketing plan to get the most out of your seo training and to get you started today.

Step #1 - Setting Goals

Before you can really get started you have to know what you want to achieve with your Web site. There could be a number of goals that you have in mind but your first step is get a clear picture of what you want the outcome to be. It could be:

To gain higher rankings.

To redesign your Web site to be more user friendly.

To implement SEO basics throughout your site to make it search engine friendly.

To increase your visitor response online.

To open additional windows to your site through social media marketing.

To launch an article marketing plan.

Or all of the above.

What ever your goal is it is important to write it down and post it where you can see it every day. "Goals that are not written down are just wishes."

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Any new project should always include this step. Keyword research is the basis for any successful page on your site. Let's take the goals above and see how the keyword research you learned to perform in your seo training can be used.

Higher rankings can be achieved by finding those keywords in your industry that have a high KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) and low competing pages. You should concentrate on finding five phrases that you can work on simultaneously.

By redesigning your Web site you can be including your new found phrases and work them into your sales copy. If you are creating a new site this is the ideal time to make sure you are concentrating on your visitors experience while on your site.
- Include a call to action above the fold
- Contact information above the fold in straight html including area code and zip code.
- Only use Flash in small elements and not as the whole page.
- Include something that will grab your user's attention. Something out of the normal that will make your visitor stop and take notice of your page.

ท Implementing SEO basics can be a daunting task if your site is large or it is many years old. Tactics that where used years ago are no longer useful and most times are being flagged as spam. Depending on how many elements need to be addressed you need to determine if it would be better to start with a fresh page or redo the existing page. A determining factor would be if the current page is already indexed. If this is the case then it would be best to fix the existing page. If the page has too many errors and creating a new one would be wiser be sure to name the new page the same as the old one or do a 301 redirect to the new page. Include your keyword phrase when implementing your basic search engine optimization.

ท Visitor response will increase if you are giving your visitors exactly what they are looking for. Only your keyword research will help you with this. We are in an instant gratification world and your visitor will only give you a few seconds to answer their search, so make sure it exactly what they are looking for.

ท Open additional windows into your site by using your keyword phrases in your social media avenues. A couple great places to include your keyword researched phrases would be in your blog post and creating a lens in Squidoo around your researched phrase.

ท Article marketing is not for everyone but it does allow you to open multiple windows into your site but writing articles around your phrase and submitting them to places like Scribd, ArtcileFactory.com and EzineArticles.com.

Step - # 3 - Which one to choose?

I know you want to implement each and everyone of those goals into your site and you still don't know where to start.

Stop here and go find five phrases to work with and don't even think about anything else at this point.

After you find those phrases refer back to your SEO training notes and refresh your memory on how to create a search engine friendly Web page and create content for each of the new keywords you found.

It is going to be hard not to get side tracked but stick to the project at hand. Your only concern is finding 5 phrases, creating content and designing five search engine friendly pages.

Once that is done go ahead and publish the five pages to your Web site. Include each page on your site map, link it from and to relevant pages on your site and include keyword rich link text within the body of the page.

Make a note of the day you added the new pages to your site for later use.

Now that you have the first three steps under your belt you are ready to move onto step four.

Step #4 - Addressing Existing Web Site Issues

Now that you have gotten a good start with the above steps, you can start working on bringing your current Web site up to par while you are actually waiting for indexing on your 5 optimized pages. Your next plan of attack would be working on existing pages within your site. You may not be able to change every issue with your site but remember every small change could result in increased ranking for your site. You may only be able to change your title and Meta tags and not be able to change your corporate sites navigation so tackle what you can and don't worry about the rest. Each and every issue is just one of the over 200 factors so learn to pick your battles and fix what you can.

Step #5 - Social Media and Article Marketing

Your whole goal is to open as many windows into your site as possible. You have already started this by creating 5 new pages into your site now it is time to open the windows even further. Whether you decide to use article marketing or all the endless possibility of social media marketing now is the time to concentrate on one or both of these window opening wonders.

You can use the five phrases you found in your first step or you can find 5 new ones but at this stage you are creating content to be used in articles, on blogs or bookmaking pages within the many social media avenues. Your title is the most important element when tackling this step. Make your title keyword rich, compelling and deliver what your title describes in the article or blog post.

If you are not quite ready to dive into social media start at least with adding a blog to your Web site. Your best results will come from the blog residing on your server and not one that is hosted on a free blogging site. Make a commitment to blogging regularly and always about your industry so your site and your blog are industry related.

Web analytics can show you information about all of your optimization projects. Not only will it show you your results for the 5 keyword phrases you are working on but it will open your eyes to how your visitor is moving through your site. Record your results on a weekly or daily basis. This step will help you in testing each one of your projects and help you decide which one you should concentrate more on. Usually I find 2 or 3 phrases that are really performing and those are the ones I concentrate on blogging and adding it to the social media venues.

Step #7 - Keep Up With the Changes

There is no other step as important as this one. The internet changes its landscape on a daily basis so it is imperative that what you learnin your SEO Training is always the latest information. Your Web site and or clients are depending on your expertise so don't let them down by applying out of date or useless techniques. There are many places you can turn to for guidance.

The first place would be Google, Yahoo! and MSN's Webmasters guidelines. Each is posted on their site and is updates each and every time they have made changes to them.

Another place would be to subscribe to one of many search engine optimization and marketing blogs created by industry leaders. Your instructor should be able to point you in the right direction to their most trusted resources.

Continue learning by attending your favorite SEO Training provider's courses on a yearly basis. Principles and techniques change often so always keep on top them.

Often students are overwhelmed with the amount of information they are given at class but if you learn to take them in small steps starting with setting your goals you will find that your seo training is working for you and your Web site.

Author, Tracy Fredrychowski - SEO Instructor

http://www.searchengineacademysc.com
Professional SEO Instructor with the Search Engine Academy of SC

Power Of Specific Long Tail Keyword

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:06:48 PDT

By Hery Yansen

It is vital to select the right keywords for your webpage in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in order to rank well in Search Engine rather than generic single keyword or double keyword phrases, and also to get your money's worth if you're advertising using Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. I recommended you opting for less popular keywords which are rarely noticed or exploited.

Long Tail Keyword is a specific 3 or more keyword phrases. You will attract more targeted visitors if you use this power and specific long tail keyword in your keyword meta tags, and people who are searching for this long tail keyword has a trend towards buying something.

Let me illustrate this idea, let say that your visitors are seeking information on holiday vacation package to buy. If they're using the "travel package" keyword in the search engine then they would probably just want to surf around and still searching for something that would probably catch their eyes. If you tried to use this phrase in your keyword meta tags, your webpage would definitely plunged deeply in search engine results.

But if your visitor typing "Royal Caribbean Cruise Package" keyword in the search engine, I think all of you agree that this type of visitor are looking for a specific holiday package. So build your web pages with a lot of pages with unique title, meta tag, header tag and content based on your chosen long tail keyword for each specific page. Don't focus on just two or three generic keywords, but focus on several specific long tail keywords which are easy to rank in major search engine. Please bear in mind that don't build your web pages weighting too much on this specific long tail keyword because of the small traffic coming from this long tail keyword. The rule is 30% on generic keywords and 70% on long tail keyword!

Finding the right keywords is a very important step in SEO. Take some time to find the best long tail keywords and then optimize your web pages for these specific long tail keywords to get a high ranking in any major search engine which will lead you to a profitable bottom line.

Hery Yansen is an SEO buzz on SEO tips and owner of SEO Quick and Easy website. His website http://www.seo-madeeasy.info provides an informative content in e-book for those who are new online on discovering how to get top rankings by using free traffic.

Are You Sabotaging Your SEO Success (Part 1)?

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:08:18 PDT

By Jennifer Horowitz

You probably are - and you don't even know it.

Before we get into that, let's quickly recap what has happened up until this point. It is relevant, I promise.

As the internet grows larger daily, and the number of searches online increase - we see people getting fanatical about getting their sites ranked. And why not? It's a great, constant source of traffic leading targeted visitors to your door!

If only getting the results was easier!

I'm sure some of these statements will ring true for you.

* SEO is simple but not easy.

* SEO is time consuming and requires knowledge that only a small handful of business owners truly have, (since their real focus is and should be running their business) but is needed by everyone, not just a small handful.

* SEO is maddening but EFFECTIVE and NECESSARY.

So, what do you do when you know you need SEO, but you also know it is sometimes frustrating, it's time consuming and it's not your area of expertise? The consensus seems to be that you have 2 options:

1. Hire a professional SEO Firm. This frees up your time to run your business, and leaves it to the professionals who are equipped with the proper knowledge and time.

2. Learn SEO yourself, either through a current and up-to-date manual or some consulting.

Both scenarios have pros and cons. Whether you do it yourself or you hire an SEO Firm, you need to be 100% sure that the big picture is taken into consideration, and that you aren't unintentionally sabotaging your own efforts.

Let's look at SEO through the years, not in chronological order -- just by highlighting a few key events.

Doorway pages were the biggest thing online - everyone used them, and they worked! Until Google caught on that people were just trying to trick them, and they banned the pages. Mouths dropped open in shock, as sites sitting pretty at the top of the SERPs (search engine results page) dropped from sight.

Reciprocal links were all the rage. Emails flew across the internet. You link to me, and I'll link to you. Everyone was fast becoming friends and creating an information network that was all interlinked. Fabulous!

Until Google caught on that this isn't a true representation of how popular your site is, people are just creating link farms and mass-generating "faux link popularity". More mass droppage of sites from the SERPs.

One-way links are definitely the way to go. It's exactly what Google wants, and if we simply buy a link from another website, Google will see it as a viable one-way link to my site. Who says you can't buy love. I've got Google lovin' me.

Until Google realizes there are sites with high PageRank out there, making a nice new monthly income for linking to sites that have not earned a link - and therefore the faux link popularity issue is just perpetuated.

With all of the link confusion, it is a constant source for debate: reciprocal is OK, as long as it is relevant and from a high PR site. One way is the only way to go, but only if it is relevant and from a high PR site. What is high PR anyway, is it anything above 3 or 4 or 5?

With all the questions flying, attention seemed to go back to a new and improved type of doorway page. One that includes links to other sites (resources) underneath text for your site.

This is truly great - this technique is actually legit, you are providing a real value to people by having helpful links on your site, and the search engines just happen to view those links with text as keyword rich, so they boost your rankings.

A very legitimate tactic, it made sense to the engines, and it was fairly easy to do. Great - we've finally found a way to create some great pages that Google seems to like. Everyone is sitting pretty now.

Until Google sees the internet infiltrated with sites that are nothing but mass-produced pages with no customization. Resource pages spit out by software, with no real content to support it. That ended the "resource page hay day".

Blogs are "it". Everyone can create a free blog, and then blog and ping like crazy. It drives the spiders to your blog when you ping, they follow links in your posts to your main site, and next thing you know you can control Googlebot, and Yahoo Slurp. With a few good posts, you can plan on the bots swinging by to pick up more pages in your site. Cool, things are happening now! Until Google realizes people have programs doing auto-posts and auto-pings and it's not the most relevant or original content. Google wises up, and for those still trying to get away with automated blogging and pinging, you're wasting your time.

The link debates rage on; content is still king; and people want rankings more than ever. What's next?

1. RSS Feed - for a long time no one knew what it stood for, but they all love it. You can create content and send it out to the world to read with their preferred viewer. That truly is an opportunity to get your message out there!

You can also pull feeds into your site to bulk up content. Amazing. What an opportunity.

2. Enter the Press Release and Article Syndication. Brand spanking new and dressed to impress. It was fabulous - write informative articles and submit them around the internet - the benefit is two-fold - each article will drive traffic to your site, and the links within the article will count as links for your site!

The Press Release was killer too. Write an informative, keyword rich press release and get it sent out to thousands of media outlets online. You could count on about 30 days worth of traffic enjoyment from one release. Not to mentioned, press releases get picked up in the News engines and the regular engines too.

Great - so what's the problem?

Too many people don't look at the big picture, and the actual reason behind algorithm shifts. People don't learn from them, they simply adjust their methods and move on until the next algo shift.

If you really look at the trends, and realize what Google wants and why they do what they do, I think you'll find a very common theme.

Google wants to deliver relevant results to people. They have no hidden agenda. They simply want to deliver the best and most relevant results in response to someone's search query.

That alone tells us all we need to know. In order to get good rankings, we need a popular site with great, informative content that is current.

Any current hot technique is only a fad. We make sure of that. What do I mean by that? Stay tuned for Part 2 of "Are You Sabotaging Your SEO Success?"

Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of http://www.EcomBuffet.com Since 1998, her expertise in online marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications.

Submit Article or Press Release as Part of Your SEO and Web Marketing Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:10:10 PDT

By Andrew Karasev

Writing articles, PR and internet blogging is essential success factor for web exposed businesses: all kind of ecommerce web sites, online exchanges and services. If you are on the top part of the first page, returned by Google, Yahoo, MSN on your keywords combination, you got the deal, otherwise if you are on the second page - you should be happy to get very small slice of the cake, where internet surfers catch you by entering deeply structured queries, meaning that they have more keywords there, and occasionally you are exposed. How do you inch up in the search engines? Well, the answer is simple - you have to contribute to your product or service consumers community. One of the ways of contributing is being writer, publisher or journalist. Let's consider practical highlights

1. Writing Articles. This genre in our opinion is the best and at the same time the most unknown to internet marketers (where they rather work hard to get their press releases and blogs published). What exactly article is? It is neutral source of new information - without advertisement (which is allowed in PR) and emotions (which is allowed in blogs). Articles are typically syndicated by multiple internet media portals, meaning that if you publish your article on one respected portal, you will get maybe twenty or even hundred links back to your website - of course the number of links depends on the quality of your article and how media portals editors will review and like or dislike it

2. Internet Blogging. This genre is in essence popularization of the fiction, or what normal writers do - write (hopefully masterpieces) with their personal opinion and attitude, meaning blogs are subjective and emotional, and as such they do not contain new knowledge (or could not be considered as independent or objective). Blogs do not allow advertisement, the only place where you can drop couple of advertising lines is your about author section, similar trick you can use in article as well

3. Press Release. This genre is more flexible in putting more ads, however it is often considered very structured by most of the PR publication sites. You should consider getting college class in marketing and journalism to understand the structure of press release. Press Release lives shorter live in internet community, similar to the ad in newspaper - nobody typically remember what was advertised in Chicago Tribune last month, however current advertisement can help you to boost your current sales and promotions

4. Video and Photo in your news. This is good supporting idea, however you should be aware that not all modern media portals allow you to quickly upload movie rollicks and pictures to your news submissions. We generally believe that Video and Photo news will get better SEO and web exposure

Andrew Karasev, Alba Spectrum Group, serving Microsoft Dynamics GP customers in Chicago and Houston locally plus in USA and Canada nationwide via web sessions and remote support. We also invite you to contribute to our Great Plains support knowledge base at Pegas planet, where Taisia Karaseva is happy to review and publish your Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics articles: http://www.pegasplanet.com - If you have questions, please call us: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918. We also have customers in Latin America, Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. Submit your news here: http://www.pegasplanet.com/SubmitNews/SubmitNews.aspx

The Truth About Meta Tags Revealed and How They Can be Used Affectedly

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:06:59 PDT

By Michael Hanna

An important factor in SEO is the existence of Meta tags in the source code of web pages.There is many factors that affect a website's performance in the search engine. One key factor in the Search Engine Optimisation of a website is Meta tags.

Meta tags are additional pieces of code that you can add into your web pages. These used to have a lot more impact than they do today but they are still part of the overall picture. There are 3 main types to consider - the Meta Title, the Meta Description and the Meta Keyword

The Meta Title is the bit that appears in the blue bar on. This is currently the most important Meta tag in Google. This tag should reflect what the page is about, and also utilize keyphrases where appropriate.

The Meta Description - This is the bit that appears on some of the search engine result pages and should be well written. When you do a search is it always the one in first place you click on, or the one that catches your eye? You can also incorporate some keyphrases here as well.

Meta Keywords - Is where you tell the engine the keywords or keyphrases the page is about and should be the ones you want to get results for. The most common mistake is by people who know a little about SEO who tend to stuff these Metas with as much as they can. If you overdo it you can be classified as spam.

It makes sense though that if you properly target your pages to have 1 or 2 keyphrases then you have a better chance of getting results than if you try to target 50 per page.

Usually, web designers will include the meta tags and this will be the extent of their SEO process; however the inclusion of good meta tags is just a part of the overall process and that's why they fail to compete against expert SEO'rs

For great website design Edinburgh this would be a good choice and also offer online storefront software solutions.

It is important though to think about other factors as well in the keyphrases. One thing to steer away from is: a lot of businesses think it's a good idea to use their competitor's names in their tags and get traffic meant for them. You wouldn't get very far trying to open a business with their name and the same laws more or less apply online.

Author
Michael Hanna
Michael's Website: Poker Sign Up Bonus Codes

Why Linking Is an Essential Part of Building Your Online Presence

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:11:46 PDT

By Michael Hanna

SEO is very important for websites nowadays, and links are very important for SEO. Most businesses nowadays have realised that an online presence is a must, and with shopping online getting bigger and bigger than ever most businesses realise the importance of having a good search engine presence. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a major concept nowadays. SEO has the purpose of helping a business' website to get on to the first page of a search engines results for a certain keyphrase.

For a business nowadays being on the first page of the search engines for their relevant keyphrases is very important, and an important part of getting a site onto the first page is external links. This is the most important part of optimisation in the eyes of Google.

Google began in 1996 as a project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry and Sergey were both studying at Stanford University California. In their research project they came up with a plan to make a search engine that ranked websites according to the number of other websites that linked to that site (and ultimately came up with the Google we have today).

The term PageRank was patented in September 2001 - this term is actually named after co-founder Larry Page and not, as some think, named because it is the rank of a page (webpage).

The Google algorithm that records this is very complicated but essentially it again echoes a real life quality guiding factor. The more people that refer your business (or link to your website) then the more trustworthy it is considered.

If site A has 3 inbound links compared to Site B who has 300 then clearly site B will be considered more important.

If you're looking to increase website traffic this is an excellent company I use who are achieving some amazing results in the search engine optimisation field and have a superb technical team that can help with ecommerce development and website design.

However, if the link is from someone in a related industry then it will be a much more valued link, i.e. if our Manchester florists gets a link from a Glasgow florists and a link from a shirt company then the first one will be the more beneficial.

Further to the mix, is the actual importance of the site providing the link itself. If Google rate one site higher than another then that will also have an effect.

In summary the more links the better but quality usually wins over quantity where applicable.

Author
Michael Hanna
Michael's website: Poker Sign Up Bonus Codes

Do You Know What SEO is and How Search Engines Work?

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:11:33 PDT

By Michael Hanna

SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising a website to perform better in the search engines. Wikipedia defines it as "the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.

There are more than several factors that all have repercussions on a websites search engine results. Google for example has over 100 individual criteria that they use to evaluate websites and determine their positions in the search results. Some of these are how many relevant links you have to your website from related industries; how your website is designed does it include the keyphrases the searcher is looking for in the body of your pages. It even takes into account the age of your domain.

Every single SEO project is different because no 2 businesses are exactly the same and need their own goals identified and strategy implemented. The Google search engine is the most widely used search engine, however you really need to include all the major search engines when developing your internet marketing strategy. Google gets around 54% of the users, so that leaves 46% of the marketplace using other engines, a big chunk of your potential marketplace that should not be ignored.

One thing to think about... MSN for example, comes pre installed on most PC's, so is the default search engine for a lot of users, and if you use BT or AOL to connect to the internet then the AOL search engine will be set as the default on your computer. A lot of people then get used to using these search engines and don't see the need to change it.

The different search engines are all competing to win your business and all use different algorithms as well as different approaches, for example Yahoo has a strong gaming community which retains a lot of users.

You can hire the services of a Search Engine Optimisation UK company to Increase Web Traffic. I listed one here that I have used and found them to be very professional and achieved some great results for my targeted keyphrases.

To summarise: Google is the most important search engine in terms of numbers of users, however Google aren't the only search engine, so you also need to look at how your website ranks in some of the lesser search engines.

Author
Michael Hanna
Michael's Website: Poker Sign Up Bonus Codes

What's the Difference Between a Web Designer and a SEO'R

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:10:50 PDT

By Michael Hanna

Probably the biggest confusion for business owners is that most think web designers and search engine optimisers are the same thing. This is quite rare to find.

Web design is usually concerned with creating a good website, both in terms of how it looks and functions. SEO is basically online marketing and involves different skills than good web design and functionality. It's about understanding how the search engines and the online marketplace work, and what factors contribute to winning business.

Often, when business owners go to a web company to get a website built, they then return to the same company to get it optimised and whilst the designer may have some idea about how to help it does not mean they are an expert. When marketing your bricks and mortar business, do you call the guys that built your shop or call a marketing specialist?

Design and Additional Factors

Navigation is the most important factor in the design of a website: A website should be designed with a clear hierarchy and text based links. Every page should be reachable by at least 1 link. Every site should include a site map for your users but also so the engines can index your site easily.

If you're looking for Search Engine Optimisation Edinburgh I found this company to be very helpful they also have great CMS Solutions for your business.

The actual aesthetic design itself won't have any effect IF all the other factors that we have discussed already are considered. Robot txt files - This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Sitemap xml - Gives Google information about when the information on your site last changed. Saving you bandwidth and reducing overheads as well as helping Google index you better.

As stated in Google's quality guidelines:

� Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

� Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

� Don't send automated queries to Google.

� Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.

� Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

� Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

� Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

� If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Author
Michael Hanna
Michael's Website: Poker Sign Up Bonus Codes

Why Content is Important When Designing For SEO

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:09:54 PDT

By Michael Hanna

In 1996 Bill Gates said "content is king". That is still true to some extent today (more so on MSN than the others). This is the part of seo concerned with the actual text within your pages. If we are trying to achieve results for Manchester Florists for example then we need to ensure it is actually in the content as well as the meta tags etc.

The engines all have their own guidelines about how to rate this. For example Google currently use a keyphrase density ratio between 7-13% approx. This means we can repeat Manchester florists with the text 7 to 13 times per 100 words. If we go above this then it may be considered spam, if we are below it we may not be able to keep up with our competitors. All the engines have different rules so it's important to work out a complete strategy for issues like this.

Other factors start to come into play such as Header Tags. These are bits of code that are used to identify headers which the engines give more importance to. Also words or phrases that are underlined or bold can get more attention but again you must be careful not to overdo it.

Don't forget though that you must ensure your site remains well written for users as well. It's pointless to achieve results for keyphrases if your site loses its effectiveness for users.

The search engine programs that run across the web are often called "spiders" and it's important to remember that websites are ranked by programs not real people and therefore cannot be very subjective. This means that if we have a site built just using images or too many of them then no matter how good they are the engines will not be able to accredit you with good scores. You can use alt tags, which means alternative text to tell the spiders this is a picture of Manchester Florists Shop but the balance needs to be right and the temptation to keyword stuff must be avoided.

For a great search engine optimization SEO service I found this company to be very good at helping me with my website rankings and taught me a lot about this subject.

When writing content for your site make sure it is information rich, original content and includes the words users would actually type into the engines to find your site. If you provide quality content then other websites will start to link to your site naturally.

Author
Michael Hanna
Michael's Website: Poker Sign Up Bonus Codes

How SEO Services Are Beneficial To Your Website

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:08:29 PDT

By M. Wali

SEO services are generally divided into sub categories, but Search Engine Optimization is the most essential part of SEO services. Search engine optimization itself is categorized into paid and unpaid listing technique that are extremely effective in building traffic to a website and pulling up its rank in the search engine result pages.

SEO services can be extremely beneficial in ranking the website, increasing visitors and also the conversion ratio for your website. But in order to make sure that your services are being used in the right path, there are a few factors that you need to keep in mind and ensure that the ground work for your Services is strong enough to support the development which is about to take place.

There are several SEO experts floating in the market who claim to be top performers in the field. Do not hand over your SEO project to any one who comes to you with a quotation. Go through his profile, check his credibility, review his performance result through the websites he has worked for and most importantly ask for his SEO certification before you hand over your project to him. Always remember it is only an expert who can take you to where you wish to be seen that too without unethical methods.

In order to ensure that your SEO services come out with excellent results make sure that your website is not lacking in good content, search engine friendly design and proper codes and tags. Yes, these factors carry a lot of weightage when the search engine spiders crawl your website. Good content and proper navigation are the first few essential criteria for website ranking in the search engines.

SEO services are gradually diversifying into several lanes adopting newer ways of ranking the websites, make use of all of them and see your website benefit from them in no time at all.

About the Author- Meenakshi Wali is an expert in Internet marketing solutions, presently working with Rupiz Media LTD., one of the leading internet marketing company, offering online marketing services, SEO services, email marketing and search engine marketing over the globe.

The SEO Website Overhaul - 5 Small Changes for Better Rankings

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:13:49 PDT

By Brandon Cornett

Some people think that search engine optimization (SEO) is a highly technical field that only a few people truly grasp. Please allow me to debunk that notion...

SEO is time-consuming, to be sure, and it does require a lot of patience and persistence. But it is by no means hard to understand. For example, most of the work I do for clients on a daily basis revolves around two things -- developing content and acquiring links to the client's website. Nothing technically advanced there.

5 Simple Changes to Your Website

In this article, however, I won't be focusing on the long-term side of an SEO campaign. Instead, I'll focus on the short-term website overhaul. More specifically, I'm going to show you five simple tasks you can perform on your website over the next few days to improve your search engine visibility and traffic levels.

1. Validate Your Key Phrases

Let's start by eliminating the guesswork of SEO. Let's find out exactly what phrases people are searching to find the kinds of products or services you provide. We will refer to this list of phrases throughout the other steps in this article.

There are several keyword-research tools you can use for this purpose, but for starters you can use the free version of WordTracker (just Google that phrase to find it). It will give you the 100 most commonly searched phrases for every starting word or phrase you enter. For example, if I were to enter "small business finance" into this particular tool, it would show me the 100 most popular searches (variations) of that type of phrase.

Create a spreadsheet of the search phrases that are most important to your business. These phrases / topics should have three things in common: They should be related to your products or services. People should be searching them on a regular basis. And you should be capable of writing content to support them.

2. Include Keywords in Your Title Elements

Armed with your spreadsheet full of key phrases, you are now ready to venture into the actual website to make some SEO enhancements. Let's start with the title element.

The title element (sometimes referred to as the "title tag") is found within the HTML code that makes up each of your web pages. To view the title element, just right-click on any web page and select "View Source." This will show you the HTML code that makes up the web page. The title element will be near the top, between two tags labeled with "title."

You can also see the title element in the blue bar (with Internet Explorer) or the gray bar (with Firefox) at the top of your web browser, up above the navigation buttons and the address bar. When your website shows up on a search engine results page, the title will also be prominent above the listing.

Here's the secret to writing effective title elements for your web pages. Be sure to include your key phrase at the beginning of your title. If you put it at the end of the title, it will greatly reduce your search engine visibility for that phrase.

So for this step in the SEO overhaul, go page by page through your website and make sure that (A) each page has a unique title that is relevant to the information on that page; (B) the titles include keywords from your spreadsheet; and (C) the keywords are at the beginning of the title element, wherever possible.

3. Add Five Pages of Website Content

I'm willing to bet that, after doing your key phrase research, you'll find some topics / phrases that are important to your business but are not currently covered on your website. So for this step of the overhaul, you will simply broaden your content by adding (at least) five pages of new website content, targeting those neglected phrases.

Glossaries and articles are both great ways to expand the content of your website in a logical way, and you can continue to expand them over time. For example, there is no limit to how many pages an article center might provide ... or how many key phrases it might encompass ... or how much search traffic it may bring!

4. Freshen Up Your Existing Pages

With your key phrase spreadsheet close by, review your existing web pages and make sure they include those phrases. If they don't, you can correct this fairly easily. For starters, add an introductory paragraph to the top of each page, as well as a concluding paragraph at the bottom. Integrate your key phrase(s) within each of these paragraphs.

Next, go through the main body content on each page and spread your key phrase naturally throughout. Often, you can do this simply by converting generic pronouns into descriptive phrases. For example, a sentence that says "They can help your business" can be made more descriptive and keyword-rich by rewriting it as "Our accounting software solutions can help your business."

5. Improve the Findability of Your Web Pages

A search engine cannot begin to evaluate and rank your web pages if it cannot find your web pages. So in this step of the SEO overhaul, you are going to make sure your web pages are easy to find -- for people and search engines alike.

Start by creating a sitemap. Actually, you should create two types of sitemaps. The first one is an XML sitemap that will help search engines find all of the pages of your site. Do a Google search for " xml sitemap creator" and you'll find some helpful tools to help you complete this step.

The other type of sitemap is the one for people. This would be a neat and organized listing of all the key areas of your website. The goal here is to help people find things on your website. But it will also help the search engines crawl through your site because you'll have plenty of text hyperlinks to the key pages.

Do you have a fancy menu at the top of your website? Maybe one built with lots of JavaScript? If so, you can help search engines navigate the site by also including a basic text menu in the footer section of your website. Heavily Javascripted menus can impede search engine crawlers and prevent them from reaching your entire website. An XML sitemap and a clean (text-only) footer menu can alleviate these problems.

Brandon Cornett is the owner of an SEO firm that also performs website maintenance to improve search engine visibility. Check out the author's informative website at http://www.austinseoguy.com.

Quality Content Writing For Search Engine Optimization Services

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:11:37 PDT

By M. Wali

Be it print, television or internet, some form of content has always been a part of promotion and marketing. Content writing for search engine optimization services indicates writing text on the web in such a manner that they attract people's attention and encourages them to click on the link provided in order to learn more about the subject.

Content writing is an essential tool of search engine optimization services, as the websites are generally ranked in the search engines only after they are evaluated to have content that is genuine and original. A lot of weightage is given to good quality content for the websites. Well written search engine content can help your website, rank high on the search engines, it also helps in bringing quality traffic to your website thereby generating profitable leads.

Writing content for Search engine optimization services is quite different from writing for print or any other media that requires a creative bend from the scratch. Writing copy for search engines, is presumably re-writing thoughts and ideas that have already been drafted creatively. These write ups are vividly different from the others in the simple logic that they are written not only for the human surfers but for the internet as well.

Content written for search engine optimization services make write-ups even more interesting for the users. It does not only make the copy targeted on a specific theme, but at the same time utilizes important keywords that are necessary in order to make the page rank in the search engines. This helps in making the content more search engine friendly and it is easier to evaluate results out of these write ups.

Factors that are important to maintain while writing a good copy for search engine optimization services include, a careful selection of good and relevant keywords that are incorporated in the write up depending on their relevancy. The language in these write ups should be verbalized meaning, catering to the general people So that even a layman user can understand and apprehend the thoughts and ideas put across in these articles.

About the Author- Meenakshi Wali is an expert in Internet marketing solutions, presently working with Rupiz Media LTD., one of the leading internet marketing company, offering online marketing services, SEO services, pay per click and search engine marketing over the globe.

Search Engine Terms And Definitions

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:11:50 PDT

By Dean Quek

There are numerous terms on the Internet that most people have probably seen, but are definitely not familiar. If you have a website or blog online, the foremost concern on your mind would be traffic to your website. Traffic to your website would be a good indication of how popular your site is, and if it is connected to your online business, how much money you can expect to make.

In this article, I shall make a short compilation of the most popular Internet terms associated with website traffic and popularity.

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the process or technique of increasing the number of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. It is common practice for Netizens to only view roughly the first three pages of any search. Hence, where a website appears, or ranks, in a search result is extremely important for getting traffic. SEO considers how search engine algorithms work and will usually involve tweaking a site's programming code, presentation and structure.

SERP, which stands for Search Engine Results Page, is the webpage or site that a search engine returns from a search. Major search engines usually return these listings on their SERPs; listings that have been indexed by the search engine's spider, a human, and paid listings.

Spiders (or alternatively known as webcrawlers) are programs that are written to explore the World Wide Web and retrieve some or all of the information that are referenced in a document. As most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start its work almost anywhere. As soon as a spider sees a link to another page, it will go off to that page to get data.

Backlinks is the term used for links located on other websites that link to your website. Backlinks are extremely important to SEO as most search engines determine the search engine ranking of a website by the quality and quantity of backlinks to that website. To find your website's backlinks, type in link:www.yoursiteurl.com in any search engine. Alternatively, you can make use of Ablewise.com's free domain statistics tool; this tool will show you the number of backlinks you have from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live.

PageRank is Google's patented algorithm to determine the overall importance of a webpage. This algorithm will consider factors such as content, inbound links and quality of the webpage. However, many factors influence PageRank; thus, it is not a very accurate indicator of how well a page ranks for particular keywords. Contrary to common belief, "page" in PageRank is not related to "page" in webpage. It is from the name of Larry Page, one of PageRank's inventors.

Do stay tuned for more terms and definitions to come.

The author writes occasional articles of interest in finance, advertising and IT related topics.

The Key To Creating Valuable Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:19:34 PDT

By Jason Pearson

There are a few things your have to have in order to really pull people into your website. The number one thing you need to do is come up with a list of relevant keywords that will bring you and potential customers together. A couple of questions you need to get answers to are: What is the subject matter of your business? What are the sub-categories?

The best way to decide these answers is to simply set down and start making a list. Don't worry about thinking up the perfect words yet, just include everything you can think of that has to do with your subject. Let's say my website is a coin collectors site. The subject matter for the site would be 'collectors.' Without stressing out about it, I would take a pen and paper and begin writing down anything I could think of that would work with it, for instance, coin, antique, hobby, and so on. The point is to make the list as long as you can.

You may be looking at your list now thinking 'Great, I have my keywords,' Sorry, but not yet. You have created a list of keywords, but they are not the ones you will use on your site. It is at this crucial step that most sites blow it. What you have before you is a list of subjects, not keywords. To really take it to the next step and reach your target audience, you need to identify the keyword phrases your potential customers are searching for within these subjects. Don't get frustrated, lucky for you it is a fairly easy process.

Word Tracker is a program that will take you from frustrated and guessing to relaxed and the perfect keyword list. It is a program that allows you to analyze a subject matter to find out every phrase a potential client may be using in searches for that particular subject. So how does word tracker make your life easier? Simply put, it does the work for you, and it does it well. For $8 you can get access to the program for two days. Once you have tried it out you may want to invest in a year's subscription. Whatever you may choose, you will find that the phrases and words that Word tracker comes up with will be a perfect for your subject matter.

Jason Pearson is an online marketing expert who wants to share his secrets with the world. To find out more...

Click Here To Discover More About Jason Pearson

Colorado Search Engine Optimization Companies - What To Look For

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:15:13 PDT

By Jill Sullivan

So, you finally got a website out into cyberspace and you're ready to start getting some traffic and closing some deals. It's a well known fact that just because you have a website, doesn't mean you're going to get visitors, no matter how pretty your site is. You NEED search engine optimization services unless you want to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month on services like AdWords, Google's sponsored listings. Getting your website noticed and recognized in the search engines is vital if you want to be successful online.

But, where do you start? What do you look for in a Colorado SEO company? Most search engine optimization companies offer basically the same services, the differences only become apparent when you start talking about pricing. There are plenty of search engine optimization companies out there who charge upwards of 7 to 8 THOUSAND dollars for their services. The thing is, when it comes to the search engines, there are never any guarantees. Noone can guarantee they are going to get your site to be #1 in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. So, is it really worth spending that much money to have your site optimized? Maybe.... but probably not.

Always ask for an itemized invoice for work that has, or will be performed. Get a couple of different quotes and compare them. Don't assume that just because a company costs more that they are better.. that is NOT always the case. There are a lot of smaller SEO companies and independent contractors that will do the work for a lot less money than some of the bigger companies, and they'll do the same work.

Be sure to ask questions. The more you understand about what services are going to be performed, the easier it will be for you to evaluate your options.

It's a fact that you should have your site optimized if you want to compete in todays online market. Do your research and find the company that best suits your needs for the money you're going to be paying.

Best of luck!

http://www.affordable-optimization.com

Using Differentiators in Keyphrases - What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:09:57 PDT

By Scott Buresh

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors - a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website - in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example "email marketing"), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let's take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type "email marketing" into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like "cheap email marketing" or "free email marketing" are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking "email marketing" are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting "email marketing", a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider's particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider's differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as "business to business email marketing" and "web-based email marketing". Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company's differentiators, including words such as "free", "affordable", "high-end", "full service", "proven", "turnkey", etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

(C) Medium Blue 2008

Scott Buresh is the founder of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SiteProNews, WebProNews, DarwinMag, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue has local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, Cirronet, and DS Waters, and was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

3 Reasons to Purchase SEO Software

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:17:31 PDT

By Michael Cantrell

One of the most popular methods of marketing these days is to use Internet marketing to promote a product. The great thing about Internet marketing is that you don't have to have a website, a whole lot of money, or even your own product. There are a ton of people making a lot of good money online by promoting other people's products. The key to becoming successful as an Internet marketer is found in three words, search engine optimization.

There are a variety of ways you can go about having your product page or article content optimized to achieve high rankings in the search engines. One method that is used by Internet marketers is to hire an SEO company or firm to produce high quality keyword saturated content that will help them get listed high in the search engines. This can be quite expensive and if you have a small budget is not highly recommended. The other method used by Internet marketers is to purchase SEO software to help them optimize their websites or product pages.

There are three reasons why it is more beneficial for individuals to purchase SEO software rather than hiring a SEO company to produce content for you.

The first reason it is beneficial to purchase SEO software is that it is only a one-time fee. If you are on a limited budget for advertising your product, you may not be able to afford the services of an SEO firm. If you have no prior experience and know very little about the ins and outs of how SEO works, this could be severely detrimental to your business. The price to purchase SEO software is much less expensive in the long haul, and is something that you can use over and over and over again without paying for it ever again.

The second reason it is beneficial to purchase SEO software is the fact that the software comes jam-packed with a variety of extremely useful and helpful tools and features. Many of the features you will have at your fingertips are the same tricks and tools that the professional SEO firms use. The tools you get when you purchase SEO software can help you to build high quality content that is targeted specifically for your niche without the hassles of dealing with the middleman.

The third reason you should purchase SEO software is that it places the power of success back in your own hands. SEO software allows you be in charge of all the resources involved in optimizing your site or page. It allows you to test and try all the different methods and tips and to find what best works for you and your business. With this software you can have as much or as little success as you want. It literally puts you in control of your business and gives you cutting edge tools necessary to land on the front page of all the major search engines.

Michael Cantrell is a freelance writer who has extensive training in SEO content writing and Internet marketing techniques, including keyword research and building landing pages. If you're looking for a writer that can offer you the highest quality content on the Internet with the fastest turn around times possible, then look no further than Michael Cantrell.

If you would like to contact Michael about doing a project for you or your company feel free to contact him visiting his website Michael Cantrell

How Important Are Back Links In Search Engine Optimization?

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:11:58 PDT

By WA Davies

Articles about SEO marketing often say you need to get links back (i.e. back links) to your website before you'll be listed on page one of Google.

The claimed importance of back links leads many website owners to chase down link exchange programs like theirs no tomorrow. Some even go so far as to find sites with a high page rank<, and email the site's owner begging for a link swap!

The problem with a link swap is, essentially they cancel each other out. One way back links are far more effective. So the real question is, how important are back links? Do you actually need a back link to get onto page one of Google?

The answer may surprise you. You don't need a high page rank, or a lot of back links, to get onto page one of Google. I've proven this over and over again.

In fact, the whole concept of high search engine ranking is misunderstood. You're almost certainly on the first page of all major search engines for a particular set of key words. The real challenge is to get there with the search terms of your choice.

But the important point to note is, you can get your site onto page one of Google with no back links at all. And with a page rank of zero.

It's very difficult to get effective back links from enough sites to make a difference. Most web site owners don't have the time or patience. There are better ways to get your site onto page one in Google. For example...

Get specific. Focus your entire site on a single topic

Choose your domain name wisely

Pay careful attention to your page content

You'll find more information about search engine optimization on my site

http://asureimage.com/search-engine-optimisation

Wayne Davies is an online lead generation specialist based in London (UK). He has 16 years worth of experience in direct response advertising, and 8 years experience in online advertising. He is now on a mission to introduce proven lead generation techniques to business web sites: http://asureimage.com

SEO Marketing The Right Option For Online Promotion

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:07:53 PDT

By Rama Krishna

SEO Services and Marketing

SEO Service is the perfect marketing tool to land your products directly to your target audience which comprises of potential buyers or business partners. SEO places the website with a higher ranking which attracts more visitors and traffic, and ensures better brand visibility.

Why is SEO marketing the best option available?

Various Researches show that people are most relying on search engines for finding their choice of products, services or information

In Search Engine marketing it is the customers who search for the products and is hence more effective unlike other forms of marketing.

Majority of online traffic to web site driven by the search engines: Google, Yahoo , Msn live and Ask

According to various studies, most people prefer to click on organic search results rather than sponsored results, by a very wide margin.(this is clearly evident by recent drop in clicks of google adwords program)

Most Cost effective way of marketing your products and services online.

Makes your web site easily crawled , indexed and ranked high in search engines.

Advantages of using SEO marketing:

Better brand visibility

Directly reaching your target audience making the products easily accessible to them.

Increase in the sales of your products & services

Since the results are keyword-based, the customers are genuine making it more profitable for the company.

We can target global market and reach customers all over the world.

Studies have shown that most search engine users don't click past the first three pages of search results; many don't even click past the first page if they find what they're looking for. Positioning your website in top 10 listings can be accomplished only by effective Search engine optimization services and strategies.

For more info on Search Engine Marketing visit : SEO Services

Using Effective SEO Software Tools

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:12:54 PDT

By Michael Cantrell

There are a lot of different SEO software programs floating around out on the Internet, and each one of these programs offer a variety of tools that can be used to help you optimize your website. While all of these programs offer different tools, not all of these tools are effective in helping you get top rankings on the major search engines. It helps to know which tools are the most effective for search engine optimization so that you can make a wise purchase that will help you to achieve your traffic goals. Here are a few of the most effective SEO software tools and the basics of how using them can help you achieve maximum optimization.

One tool that will be very beneficial for you to use is called a keyword tool. This is one of the most effective SEO software tools a program can have. This tool is used to help you create effectively targeted keywords and allows you to do research on your keywords to see what the competition for that keyword is like. These keyword tools can also help you to make up more targeted keyword phrases by allowing you to combine keywords together. This tool can help you to drive traffic massive traffic to your website.

Another important tool an SEO software program must have before you should consider purchasing it is an article submitter. This is an extremely effective SEO software tools that can end up saving you a lot of time and hassle. Article marketing is fast becoming the method of choice amongst Internet marketers for promoting their products. Most of these articles are submitted to article directories, which are databases that allow individuals to submit content on a variety of different subjects. An article submitter allows you to submit articles instantly to a number of different article directories in a fraction of the time.

A great and highly beneficial feature that more SEO software programs are beginning to implement in their programs is a tool that allows you to connect with link directories. Link directories help you to connect with high quality websites that will allow you to link to them and will link to you in turn. This helps to create backlinks, which will help to drive a lot of traffic to your website or product page. This is definitely one of the most effective SEO software tools that you can use to optimize your site and content.

These are just a few effective SEO software tools that you can find in SEO software programs. If correctly implemented, these tools can help you achieve massive success in optimizing your website and achieving top rankings with all the major search engines on the Internet.

If you are interested in getting more information about SEO software and product reviews please visit http://www.squidoo.com/SeoElitetestimonies

3 Steps to Proper Keyword Research for Your Website

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:08:15 PDT

By Ashley Mcallister

When first starting out your online business, you should know that your websites will never get anywhere if you don't have the proper keyword research. It is a very important and necessary step that must be accomplished in order for your website to get placed well in the search engines.

People do searches in the search engines using certain keywords. A keyword these days is the way your website will be known. Without proper keyword research, you will never be able to make it to the search engines properly. Today, I would like to go over the steps on how to properly find keywords that pertain to your website.

Here are the steps for keyword research:

1. Google Keyword Tool

Head on over to the Google keyword tool. It is a free tool to use and if you don't know the URL for it then just type in those exact words in the Google search and it should bring it up for you. Whatever your website is about, you should first search for the keyword that is the most common way to describe your website.

If your website is about how to train your puppy, then you should use the keyword "Dog Training". When you type in that word, Google will pull up all the keywords that people are searching for in that subject.

2. Good Pickings

When it comes time to pick which keywords you want your site to rank well for, you should make sure that the keyword as low competition. To find out if it has low competition, go to Google and type in the keyword with quotation marks around it. If the number in the top right hand corner is under 100,000 searches, you have just struck gold. Try and pick the keywords that are also receiving a good amount of searches per month as well.

3. Optimization

When you choose your keywords, it is now time to add them into your website. Try and put the keywords into main titles and throughout the content of your site. The main way that the search engines will know what keywords to place your website under is when you start the promotion of your website. When you promote your website by creating back links, make sure that your links are anchor texts with the keyword you want to rank well for. This is a sure fire way to shoot up to the first page.

There are the 3 steps on how to proper keyword research. Hopefully this article has taught your something that you didn't already know and are now ready to start the keyword research process.

For more information, you can check out: Profit Lance.

If you are wondering what Profit Lance may be, it is a detailed course to learn about internet marketing and has said to be somewhat like taking a course in college.

Google PageRank Update

noreply@blogger.com (MeLoDy) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:22:36 PDT

By Nik Sulyap

Google PageRank have just updated recently. Many are surprised about this early update because PR usually updates quarterly or every 3-4 months. As usual, different effects to different websites took place. Many sites that who have gained PR are surely clapping their hands right now, while some who got the reverse effect are definitely wondering why? But there are also those sites who's PR remains unchanged, at least its a draw.

As I visit SEO Forums and read different SEO articles, many are saying that PageRank doesn't really matter anymore. They say that PR is already ignored and its value is not weighted that much. On the other end, there are people who still give importance to Google PageRank. Most of them still uses them as a reference of identifying the value of a sites pages. This contradicting ideas gives impact on how we should treat PR as far as our Internet marketing campaign is concerned.

On my own point of view, PageRank is still valuable and considerable in different ways. Imagine this, who would have want to exchange links on websites with PR0? I guess no one would engaged in this kind of link trading unless both of them have the same PR0 rating. A site with PR7 won't even think of linking with PR0 sites that's for sure. PageRank is still a good basis in measuring the page importance of websites. This link algorithm may not be perfect but it does help us determine the quality of a particular site.

No matter what people may say about PageRank, let us face the fact it is still a factor to consider. Having a high PR brings a lot of opportunity to do well in this kind of business. Even though some people ignore it, they don't notice that it does affect their site even in the slightest way. PageRank is not formulated by Google for nothing. It has many purposes and one of them is to deliver viewers with quality and satisfying web pages.

Search Engine Optimization Specialists (SEO) For a successful Internet Marketing Campaign visit our website and check out our Search Engine Optimization Service.