The Search for SEO Services

What happens next?, the task typically gets passed off and someone with virtually no idea what the protocol is, then they haphazardly begin their journey to find the ideal firm to execute their campaign. After an arduous process which can take weeks or possibly months to spend hours on the phone to hear why each SEO companies services are superior to other SEO firms, weeks later with dozens of proposals and several rounds of eliminations later, it’s time to make a decision.

Perceived Value

Just as we must learn to see from the eyes of the searcher in order to understand their needs and objectives, similarly if you are involved in any type of service oriented business, you must always put the objectives of the customer before your own.

For example, the idea of a search engine optimization company even considering using PPC (pay per click marketing) to promote their services for SEO is not the brightest idea. Sure, it may bait a few who are unfamiliar with the premise of organic vs. paid listings, but with SEO it is all about results – organic and natural results at that.

Accountability

If you are considering SEO from a company that you cannot find for any of the main industry terms they should rank for, this should raise a red flag. Chances are their level of expertise is not going to aid your quest if they imply that their clients rankings are the most important. A true SEO company should be able to aid their clients as well as service and evolve their own organic rankings simultaneously. Essentially, they are their own first client, so the proof is in the pudding so to speak.

Is There a Tangible History of Results?

Just as there are professionals and amateurs in any industry, there are certain indicators that should be clear from the onset to avoid making a regrettable decision. Things such as, when their site was created www.domaintools.com how has it evolved over time www.archive.org are there any buried skeletons out there? (such as redirects from other domain names, etc. www.majesticseo.com).

Having rescued numerous companies from SEO horror stories and finally producing tangible results, I encourage anyone interested in SEO services to perform the proper due diligence. Check references, try finding them or their clients for competitive terms ( www.semrush.com ), but most of all make sure they are the right fit for your business model and management style.

Will you be appointed an account representative?, how is reporting done?, how frequently? And how long will it take to expect tangible results? None of these questions are out of the ordinary, just common practice if you were going to invest your hard earned money in a new process which is frequently misunderstood.

Are You Ready for SEO?

With so many variables in play when considering walking into the service side of SEO such as the age of the prospects domain, if there is any link popularity at all, if they update their websites frequently, if they are dynamically generated or static, if there are other systems in place for CRM or tracking analytics that are contrary to SEO friendly conventions. It is no wonder why SEO pricing ranges dramatically from 1000-100,000 or more for reputable search engine optimization services.

Managing Expectations and Setting Realistic Goals

Just like anything, you must start where you are at, engage the gap to determine the discrepancies between where you are and where you want to be, then build a logical and attainable model to compensate for the obstacles involved.

This is the SEO process, it is not about smoke and mirrors, it is about replacing outdated programming platforms, updating and pruning attributes that do not add value and recreating the website to be conducive to the signals that search engines identify as favorable to others.

It is in one sense a popularity contest, but more importantly quality is the benchmark utilized as a measuring stick to assess why one site should rank higher than another when considered from the perspective of organic search.

The Plausibility Option of In-House SEO and Consulting

If you have an IT staff present, then perhaps SEO consulting is a more suitable fit for your business model. However, often it is the case that the learning curve may in fact be too steep to manage multiple variables, but if you work closely with an SEO consultant, then it is plausible that with their oversight with your in-house team that the synergy can work wonderfully to create the results sought.

Excuses are Unacceptable

The takeaway for consideration is, real SEO companies rank at the top, no excuses can replace real results. So, when considering who should win your business (for prospects seeking SEO services), you decision should revolve around your goal and an attainable benchmarks backed by a contractual obligation to achieve the desired objective.

SEO is scalable, however those with the biggest budget can dedicate more resources to the common goal, but there is no reason to preclude a small business from attaining a competitive series of keywords to elevate their business.

How Search Engines See Your Site Matter

Keywords are the currency that search engines use to assess value online. The more authority your website has, the more keywords your website ranks for, so the underlying premise of SEO should not be relegated to keyword positioning alone.

The real value is in creating an authority site capable of producing and sustaining its own rankings for thousands of keywords that pertain to your niche, not looking at it like pieces of a puzzle with tunnel vision. So, hopefully this will aid those in search of search engine optimization to consider a few simple points.

What to Expect

The first point (1) your website will undergo changes (2) not all of them will be met with open arms (no need to SEO a dated site where it will only amass a high bounce rate after traffic arrives) and (3) results take time to produce.

Having said that, the logical step is to target keywords within your reach, acquire as many top 10 rankings for less competitive phrases in the onset to foster a relationship with search engines. For example targeting keywords that contain your ultimate keywords within the key phrase, but also have a few additional keyword modifiers to gain traction initially (starting with 4 word phrases, then moving to three word phrases, then two word phrases and eventually the main root phrase) over time.

Having Enough Patience to Facilitate the Process

All SEO results are not instantaneous, some terms rise to the top quickly, while others need time to acquire more trust from within your site and have the necessary infrastructure to support the relevance model and bypass your competitor’s relevance score.

However, top 10 rankings do just magically appear, you have to fight for the ones worth attaining, so the longer you sit here reading this and not taking action, the more time your competition has to cement their competitive advantage. Ultimately in an online society, those who fail to adapt will be left behind holding on to dated idiosyncrasies from the marketing methods of yesteryear.

The Competitive Landscape

The web is colossal growing exponentially every day, in order to thrive; you must plant your seeds (organic keywords) today to reap the reward of relevant traffic tomorrow and focus on market share vs. just the marginal keyword rankings that you can track and quantify.

For every deliberate keyword you acquire, 10 more unintentional keywords rise to the surface along with it through keyword stemming.

The Conclusion

So, often it is not the targeting of specific phrases that yield the highest returns for organic positioning, it is what happens in between the gaps of the targeted phrases that produce the highest return on investment which is true website authority.

Search Engine Optimization search-engine-optimization-services SEO Analysis SEO Services seo-company SEO-Pricing

ShareThis

Relevance and Retrieval

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about relevance. Typically,the process involves an understanding of how keyword relate to other relevant pages hat exist within the site. Content is scalable, as a result, so are rankings.

While it is second nature to skim the surface of keyword research, semantic optimization of the baseline an entire array of phrases if often much easier than the time it would take you to capture one single competitive ranking. Understanding the threshold (your SEO ceiling) is also important to note that you deliberately target keywords within your reach instead of diffusing your websites theme.

Continuity between the keywords elected for SEO and positioning must coincide by creating topical pools of information that exist as destinations or hubs to more useful information and resources.

Search engines reward unique, well written content, news, or mashups that link out to various resources (if the text to link ratio is balanced) as well as pages with trust and authority.

Anything you do in the name of SEO should be aimed at acquiring relative keyword targets that allow you to track and measure the landscape to determine its impact on conversion. It is no secret that search engines constantly cache and compress data, so, seeing hordes of traffic one week for specific phrases and seeing them trickle down to a fragment of the volume the following week is not uncommon.

Hedging your website through investing in ranking multiple pages to promote buoyancy for multiple keywords is one way to ensure that your relevance score is evolving faster than your competition.

Just as we must learn to master the known influences that denote if I mix elements A and B, that C is impacted in the following fashion. We must also test the gap to see what emerges that was unintentional or not deliberately produced as a by-product.

The following document is an excellent resource I located which goes into great detail about Semantic Concept-Based Query Expansion and Re-ranking for Multimedia Retrieval to provide a broader spectrum of detail in how search engines interpret our content.

By understanding these cues (the way search engines process results), it prepares us to delve further into practical SEO solutions and see beyond traditional baseline retrieval based on semantics when sculpting our content for optimal information retrieval.

It’s official, universal search is here, so in case your wondering how search engines are bridging the gap (to determine who gets bumped) then the paper above is an absolute must-read document.

Creating Topical Relevance for Text Query Expansion How Search Engines Interpret Context Relevance and Concept Based Query Expansion

ShareThis

SEO and Positioning

After writing the post, I began experimenting with a few free tools and developed a simple method to take a snapshot of the competitive landscape and identify keywords that may have more potential than previously considered.

This next simple SEO tracking tip incorporates a few metrics to create a Google report using rank checker that showcases keyword activity based on analytics data. Just a reminder, SEO Tools are only as adept as the ones using them, so even though this may not have been the original reason for these tools, they both work wonderfully to track and set key performance indicators for SEO and positioning when combined in this fashion.

How to Find your money keywords using Google Analytics

I do not claim to be a Google Analytics Expert like Avinash Kaushik, however, I can show you a few ways to embrace the data gleaned for practical SEO and positioning with one handy little Google SEO tip.

1. Log into Google Analytics

2. Go to >>> Content >>> then >>> Entrance Keywords

3. From there, uder the graph, look for the drop down menu under the text where it states;

This page was viewed x amount of times via y-amount of keywords. From there, simply select the page you wish to evaluate.

4. After Selecting the page you want to evaluate then export using CSV

5. Export keywords from page analysis into excel.

6. Open the CSV file, then highlight the keywords using shift+the first keyword and the last keyword you wish to use for the snapshot/export.

Then >>> copy and paste the keywords (from keyword column) from Excel into the Rank Checker (Add Multiple Keywords) section.

7. Run the report and then export to excel when completed with the current date as the file name to use as benchmark from cross-analysis and keyword positioning and performance at a later date.

The Conclusion

Although this SEO technique is not rocket science is is a useful tip to employ for establishing key performance indicators for keyword positioning. If you emulate this same practice across multiple pages in your site, it allows you to (a) track keyword performance and (b) look for keywords that you may have ignored.

Note the number of keywords driving traffic to a page. You cannot always determine how people found you (since search results are personalized), so, this can at least provide a snapshot of the landscape each page appear for. The idea is to identify and hone in on keywords that convert and this is one metric where you can identify the most common ground for how search engines view your content.

Also, being able to recreate the SERP landscape in the mind of the searcher can provide insight for how deep some consumers are willing to click a result. By reviewing the data, you can increase the funnel and ensure that you maintain SEO defense on the keywords with the most traction as well as create more continuity for those on the horizon.

Although the chances of the same exact rankings being present as when they executed the search are still plausible. It really is more about looking at how many unknown keywords are rising to the top as a result of keyword continuity (how search engines view your website).

In some instances, you may find that the search result clicked was obvious and essentially low hanging fruit or you may find they actually ventured to the 2nd or 3rd page to find the result.

In which case, if the keyword has a low bounce rate, decent engagement time and has a clear conversion objective on the landing page, now you know which keywords to build more relevance or link for in the future. In addition, you can use this with any keyword suggestion tool for gap analysis or simply to see how your pages stack up for your preferred keywords.

Thank you for visiting the SEO Design Solutions blog, where you will find useful SEO tips, tactics and strategies (as well as exceptional SEO Services) and solutions.

Keyword Position and SEO Keyword Ranking Tools Keyword SEO Analysis and Tracking Positioning and SEO SEO and Positioning

ShareThis

To answer that question, yes… just as value is relative to application, does the tree have more purpose as a bridge across the stream than standing upright before it fell? It all depends on who is on the path and what their needs are at the time.

Similarly, some keywords act as bridges to tie vast segments of synonyms and more competitive keywords together. Their latent value (building authority) vs. their immediate value (as keywords that appear in search engines) are often misunderstood when it comes to increasing relevance within a site.

For many obsessively checking your websites keyword positioning and rankings around the clock is common. Although the behavior may border on the tendency of being myopic about SEO, the true focus should be capturing market share. With both market share and authority, you can launch as many keywords as you like and sculpt which ones rise and stay at the top.

Will all of your keywords convert? Probably not, but the value they create for organic SEO are all pivotal points that anchor and impact the overall reputation of your website (keyword included). There is no magic bullet with keyword positioning, the real secret is to focus on market share and funnel as many overlapping keywords to the most appropriate pages capable of converting into a sale.

The tendency to overlook the vast amount of authority latent within a website is common. Often a few fresh links from the right places is all it takes to take a page off the shelf and put it back into circulation in search engines.

Links Provide Authority, Navigation and Exploration

Links are like the lifeblood of a website, without them there would be no navigation from page to page or website to website, hence their importance is paramount for the user experience. Similarly, links are also the passages that search engines utilize to assess the quality and context of web pages.

So, to search engines, if your website does not have any new links, this equates to “it must not be that important”. Otherwise, if it were, more people would reference the page or visit it (or you would reinforce it with links of your own internally). In either case, since everything leaves a trail or digital footprint online, metrics used to gauge user engagement for content is collected from a variety of methods. The bottom line is, does that page have authority or not?

If it doesn’t, then you can step in to make adjustments by going back to latent pages within your website and editing the content to work in tandem with other key components of your websites conversion objectives.

Considering it pruning off-topic or lackluster copy while adding a few internal links to ball roll multiple pages into a coherent mass of topical relevance (in other words, the Wikipedia effect on a smaller scale).

The Ebb and Flow of Publishing Cycles

The power of the publisher and who has dominate syndication and indexing in search engines is where ranking battles are daily won and lost. With authority under your belt, every page in your domain has the potential to reach the masses with your message. The colossal stance of media and search and closely tied, which means newsworthy content rises to the top.

Although it may eventually subside in a few weeks, content ages and typically within 3 months it has enough page rank and reputation to hold its own in search engines. The key is to constantly monitor the cycles of what content you publish, which keywords are prominent and what internal and external links are peaking within the cycles of link weight rising and falling as variables have a tendency to normalize over time.

The Power of Syndication

Based on the usefulness of the content it is then shuffled to a latent state (similar to hibernation or a being archived in a secondary index). Then when enough keywords are combined or enough links rouse it from its sleep, the page makes its presence known again when invoked from a query.

The way to keep your pages from going into hibernation is supply a steady flow of links (either from internal links or external links) to ensure that spiders keep the page in mind as a relevant resource.
The real value is to have sleepers for relevant terms as well as constantly adding more pages for future tense rankings.

The power of keyword stemming can be immense as 80% of the queries in search engines are new and unique.

You never know the types of phrases people will use, so, by blanketing a plethora of keywords and key phrases, you hedge your odds of appearing at the helm of a long-tail search. In essence, your website can devour a market, literally one keyword at a time.

Keyword Positioning or Market Share Market Saturation through Keyword Stemming SEO Marketing The Fallacy of Keyword Positioning

ShareThis

Once domain authority is produced, it is possible to see multiple pages ranking from one domain or a domain and sub-domain for multiple keywords (often with a double listing). The premise of SEO is to create the necessary balance of deep links in tandem with relevant content to cue search engines to rank specific pages higher as a result of the by-product of continuity.

Navigation is the primary means that lead to the discovery and indexing of your pages in search engines. Just like you must learn to crawl before you walk and walk before you run, taking your website through the necessary steps is crucial to develop true authority. This often involves building relevance for each page over time and then electing a champion for search engines.

Deep Link to Avoid Starving Your Pages

Aside from preliminary links from navigation or sitemaps, the way in which you link from page to page within your site (known as internal linking) creates pools or relevance for the keywords you use to link these pages. This is where deep links come into play in regard to optimizing each page for search engines.

Deep links can imply either internal links or external links being distributed throughout your site to pages other than your home page. The reason why this is important is, unless you are employing flat site architecture (just using the root folder for pages) then each sub folder you add significantly gets less link juice from the root folder.

To compensate for this, you can map out the internal links in a website to fortify pages with less link weight and distribution. Ideally, your main keywords should be targeted with your primary pages (homepage, or specific products or services page).

In the past footer links were sufficient to add enough context and weight to each page to aid search engine optimization. However, as search engine algorithms evolve to offset unnecessary relevance, the link location in addition to page focus and anchor text choices have varying degrees of impact.

Create Topical Pools of Relevance

For example a page that is about landing pages linking to another page about landing pages within your site has more relevance than say a page about pricing. The idea is to semantically weed out anything off topic and reinforce pages and folders within your site that have topical relevance.

Once a sufficient threshold has been reached (for each page from internal and external links) then that page or folder can rank competitively in search engines. In addition to that, any additional pages linked from those pages or within those folders also receive a significant boost of authority through link osmosis (ranking by affinity).

All it takes to appear competitively for a specific keyword or phrase is (a) a proportionately higher percentage of links to one page in a site from other pages or (b) enough internal and external links concentrating on a specific landing page. Here is an SEO tool we developed that identifies indexed pages in Google with continuity and keywords.

Don’t Cannibalize Keywords, Pick the Most Relevant Landing Pages

Although it is possible to cannibalize keywords (from diffusing the focus of a keyword by having too many pages competing for the topic in search engines) the idea is to elect a champion page or two, then support them with the subsequent pages.

For example, if I have 100 pages within my site, then that provides 99 opportunities to choose a variant on a keyword for 1 specific page. Even though I would not suggest all of those pages just to rank one keyword, typically 15-25 pages is enough. In this scenario, electing 25 pages for one keyword or a tight series of keywords and modifiers would be suitable. In addition to those 25 internal links, I would also consider building 25-50 links (from other relevant websites) to give that page the needed link weight to climb the search results.

So, if I had 100 pages to work with, that means I can rank 4 competitive terms (25 internal links per keyword to avoid keyword or content cannibalization) and roughly 10 secondary keywords for less competitive terms by editing those pages adding links with the right keywords in the appropriate locations.

Going back to the statement about the proximity and position of the link locations for internal links, the higher up on the page the links occur, the more credibility and link weight they provide for the target pages.

What occurs next is the precursor to developing true website authority. In addition to the pages with links all sharing collective buoyancy for the keywords involved, the added strength of using the collective composite of your web pages to reinforce topical relevance can create massive surges of rankings for secondary and tertiary keywords.

Search Engines Can Read, So Don’t Overdo It

Anytime search engines determine a high co-occurrence of keywords or semantic phrases from multiple pages in your website, it naturally assumes your site is targeting those phrases. All it takes to rank for a keyword is for the keyword to appear somewhere in the title, description of the meta data or within the body text of the page enough time that the relationship signals search engines that your page has relevance.

The more concentrated the internal or external links from other sites are to that page (from deep links) the easier it is for that page to gain traction. In addition to this, this is where the competition and their threshold of relevance and domain authority come into play.

Domain Age and Authority Equate to Rankings

Chronology (who started first) is weighted heavily in search engines, so, a website that started optimizing a series of phrases years in advance is going to be able to stave off competitors easier for those phrases than it will be for a newer website with less authority to acquire a high ranking for the same phrases.

The constant battle in search engines is not can you achieve a top ranking for a competitive keyword; it is more about how to acquire more authority for the market or niche than the competitor above you.

Even with a website that has authority (for other keywords and key phrases), it will still have to develop the right signals for search engines to acquire enough relevance and trust to shift the balance in favor of the new keyword targets, this can be done through deep linking and segueing internal links to produce additional trust and subsequent rankings.

Developing Domain Authority for Search Engine Domination Search Engine Optimization SEO SEO and Deep Links Web search engine

ShareThis

Will You be a Casualty of Short Term Gain or Benefit from Long-Term Growth?

It may take days, weeks or months for each intricate layer of a campaign to fall in place to produce the desired effect. At times, it is easy to put the cart before the horse and build castles made of sand without taking change into consideration. You cannot pull the roots up to see if a plant is growing, you just have to be patient until it sprouts based on the nourishment you provide, SEO and producing quality rankings can be viewed much in the same light.

Paradigms Can Change at Any Moment

Much like the economic crisis and downturn as of late, we now know that change can occur quickly and challenge you to adapt. Recently the web experienced a topsy-turvy ripple effect from the Google index having a touch of indigestion.

As a result, it purged millions of websites and pages that failed meet the new standard (even though nobody except the engineers knew what that was). As a result, untold fortunes were lost in the weeks that search results for lack of better terms lost their bearings.

Those pages which were removed or temporarily quarantined until they (a) play by the rules or (b) attract enough authority links to vouch for their credibility are all casualties of relevance. During the interim, there is a vacuum of virtual space for worthy content to fill in the gaps.

Instead of having to compete with the noise of scrapers sites, copycats or parrots skimming RSS feeds and spinning content as if it were there own. Search algorithms stepped in to clear the slate (and rebuild the index). As a result, many good sites linked to from questionable sites also took a hit.

User agents are capable of assessing multiple variants simultaneously to determine genuine quality content from lackluster copy. Quality is the gatekeeper and without it, your support system could falter. One creates top ranking positions from combining multiple facets of on page and off page factors. Quality is the measuring stick that determines which factors truly pass value.

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Much like a scientist a seasoned SEO can sculpt the way link weight moves throughout a site, make adjustments to the peaks and cycles of inbound links, modify keywords and anchor text as well as dampen or redirect outdated pages to capture new rankings. However, some things you just cannot control are when a penalty or new algorithm is introduced and what extent it will have on your previous SEO efforts.

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

Due to the inter dependency of the web, one shift down the line can send ripples through the SERPs (search engine result pages) and even dethrone the most stable site from its perch. The effect of mass deindexing (which is what just occurred over the last few weeks) still has webmasters reeling in disarray.

It’s like having the rug pulled out from underneath you. It’s so easy to get caught up under the guise of stability only to have an algorithmic shuffle shake things up to see which websites are built on feeble stilts or which sites have invested in a slow and methodical growth (which emphasize authority over an impulsive and rapid ascent).

Even our website took a dip from the first page of “SEO” in Google and we had to kick things in high gear to jump past a few sites that were shooting up the rankings to claim our previous spot.

The Search Engine Shakedown

Here is my take on what happened over the past few weeks. An example of this theory is that search engines took a snapshot of the web from 6 months ago and cross-referencing the index to present index. By analyzing the gap, they could fill in the blanks and assess based on a time line what was considered natural or unnatural.

For example, with the right pool of data and a few savvy engineers, one could create an algorithm to gauge who has been naughty and who has been nice as far as:

1. Assessing link velocity (the rate in which you gain or lose links).
2. Gauge the quality and quantity of aged / authority links attracted.
3. Measure the amount and quality of the content the site developed.
4. Asses the average links per page that content had attracted.
5. Parse toolbar data and RSS subscription rates and feed data (to see if the engagement time lived up to the hype) to assess genuine popularity.
6. Evaluate the amount of comments each post in a website attracted (if a blog was involved).
8. How many times that site appeared in organic searches and with what keywords.
9. Determine the time on the page to see if the signals matched up with data from the previous formulations. For example a site with 2000 links and the same amount of visitors is not natural.
10. Has the site attracted any new links, set perpetual momentum in place through deep linking or internal links or is it just leaving pages out to dry and starve as far as the distribution of link weight int he site.

These as well as many other aggregate factors to validate the authenticity of authority. If a site passed these preliminary checks, then it was reindexed and allowed to act as a beacon to anchor itself and the other sites linked within its neighborhood. Remember, authority sites typically only link to other authority sites, if one was promoted and got a gold star in their niche, then everyone else linked from that site got a bump as well.

On the contrary, if search engines discovered link clusters that were from low PR sites with thousands of outbound links and a low number of inbound links in to support those pages or found pages and pages of scraped content or saw anything out of the ordinary, chances are they are gray barred right now.

The good news is, its never too late to instill quality in a website. Although many are scarred from aggressively pursuing the fallacy of keyword conversion, authority is the true measure of a websites worth to the online community.

The takeaway is clear, invest in stable growth through building quality content, be selective with link partners and always look for more opportunities to fortify your own pages with previous content within your website. There is no penalty for linking to yourself and each page is treated as a site within itself. If you understand this, then it is only a matter of time before your pages cross the tipping point and website authority is developed as a by-product of your investment (exceptional content).

Build Relevance not just Short Term Gain Building Authority Websites With Long Term Value Develop Long Term Objectives SEO Value Evaluation and the Casualties of Relevance

ShareThis

SEO is Official

To say that search engines and SEO have arrived in full-force in 2008 as one of the must-have marketing tactics for businesses globally is an understatement. What once appeared as a pseudo science (internet marketing and SEO) now occupies the forefront for commerce around the world as one of the most potent discoveries ever implemented for increasing profit margins in the history of business. If your first Quarter 2009 marketing budget does not have a place for SEO, it’s not to late to make adjustments.

From Past to Present

Just as companies have always embraced each marketing medium (print, radio, television and now online marketing) those who fail to see the importance of online positioning for their business are poised to lose untold fortunes to competition from failing to grasp search engine optimization as a viable marketing alternative.

The transaction is simple, search engines send pre-qualified traffic already interested in your product or service to your website. Today’s savvy online consumers are not the same consumer from 10 years ago who you had to educate through branding.

The new breed of consumers are intelligent, nimble and armed with information (as a result of the accessibility of research, reviews or resources) who already know which make, model# and how much it should cost. You must (a) reach them when they are intent on purchasing and (b) provide the most value in order to win their business. In essence they are simply looking for the best deal from a website/company who is clearly positioned as a brand leader online.

Why Brand When You Can Engage?

Why waste money branding when you can engage visitors, test variables and refine your offer instead? Instead of spending thousands of dollars to find your ideal consumer (from traditional broadcasting), that same money can be spent honing your website for relevant traffic through acquiring visibility across multiple keywords with a proven track record for performance in search engines.

Similarly, aside from organic / natural search results with so many other types of optimization like user optimization (streamlining your message) can be used to reach your target audience through pod casts, forums, social media optimization, video optimization and the like. Companies really need to think outside the box when engaging a cross-platform viral online marketing campaign, the extent of its success all depends on how you embrace the market holistically.

The Message is Simple, Give People What they Want!

Search engines give people what they are looking for and businesses who follow this trend (giving consumers what they want without fluff, just features and benefits) will be some of the most successful stories in 2009. Some things never change despite the medium (television, print, radio, etc.) if make the consumer happy, they will spread and promote your brand as enthusiast/evangelists.

Instead of just bombarding the masses with a one-size-fits-all, blanket approach, businesses should plant seeds through using trickle down / drip marketing tactic to virally influence early adopters. By influencing brand leaders (through reviews, giveaways, promotions, or traditional PR with a twist) a company can position and influence a market - from the top down.

The more early adopters who embrace “and purchase your products or services” are essentially agents of change that inspire others to purchase and follow suit. Finding those ideal dream consumers online can be accomplished at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing and traditional marketing budgets.

Search Engine Positioning is Branding

The power of appearing for highly trafficked keywords is the equivalent of big brands spending millions of dollars in alternative marketing mediums to achieve the same result. The biases are stripped down with internet marketing as transparency is tested by reputation and everything is essentially in the hands of the consumer.

Businesses are more accessible than ever as a result of being online. Claims about products or services are instantly investigated from scouring blogs, feeds, forums or search engines for accurate information. This is the age of the soft launch, in this new economy, reputation matters and credibility is currency for reaching a larger target audience.

One thing is certain, your either in or your out as far as online marketing goes. Every day that you sit back from the sidelines and look at your competitors strengthen their foothold in an industry. The more difficult it will be to bypass them on your way to the helm of search engines.

Don’t Get Left Behind

Learn from the mistakes of others, remember the yellow pages?, what about VCR tapes or pagers? the market passed them by. Change and evolution are inevitable, however, you must embrace the medium while you can in order to develop authority and rankings in your niche as a result.

The market only has room for 10 companies at the top for any given search and with over 8 billion searches conducted each month now is the time to get started snatching up as much low hanging fruit as possible until you have enough authority to conquer competitive keywords.

Plan for the Future

The message here is to (a) plan ahead 3-6 months in advance to allow the SEO to settle in (b) measure results and gain feedback from your target audience and (c) provide more value than your competition. If you can accomplish all three things harmoniously, then you will have successfully migrated the focus from offline to online marketing.

Online Marketing and Search Plan for the Future SEO SEO and Early Adopters SEO is Official in 2009 User Optimization

ShareThis

A potential visitor does not care if there is 100 or 100,000,000 search results returned when they type in a query, with SEO/SEM, they only care if your website is in the top 5 results. Competitive thresholds exist for the sake of SEO when mapping out the route to the top 10, with SEM, it is only a number (the price per click).

For example, if a keyword has less than 50,000 competing pages and has a fair amount of traffic (100 searches per day), then optimizing dozens of keywords such as this can increase your baseline traffic exponentially vs. targeting one competitive keyword target (over 1,000,000 results).

Cracking the barrier to entry to create relevance and rankings take time. Particularly if the keywords are new to your website’s topical theme.

With search engine marketing (SEM), If you wanted to appear alongside keywords with proven search volume, then you simply pay your fee and when your clicks are depleted based on your budget, your ad disappears.

On the contrary, although search engine optimization (SEO) takes times more time and effort, the continuity created by relevance for the topic makes it easier to optimize entire series of keywords simultaneously.

This alone can hedge your websites performance and dependency to just a few keywords and in most instances when the key phrases are longer in nature (containing more keywords and modifiers), obtaining them organically are essentially like plucking low hanging fruit.

As an SEO company, here are a few tips we use for setting the stage for organic search engine optimization that you can employ to wrestle your website back from the clutches of pay per click marketing.

• How to manage and develop web content for higher rankings.
• How to unleash your website through strong internal linking to reinforce relevance.
• How to identify a keywords tipping point / keyword threshold for buoyancy.
• How to create appealing landing pages to entice your audience.
• A few techniques for choosing the best keywords from using gap analysis for SEO.

In closing, the trend for businesses to use SEO instead of pay per click is steadily on the rise. When you find a medium that has pure upside like organic search. The only quandary is the time, energy and effort required to create content, link popularity and website authority.

After the keywords have been identified with the strongest continuity for conversion, the choice is clear for businesses who are tired of paying too much to procure sales and conversion with a dated pay per click sliding scale incentive marketing model.

Pay Per Click Marketing versus SEO Search Engine Optimization search-engine-marketing SEO SEM

ShareThis

Are Search Engines Raising the Bar?

Google is constantly raising the bar and their guidelines are clear, if you play in gray areas, then you could get penalized. However, so many tread on shaky ground in an attempt to find the limits.

As a result of search engineers adopting new methods to ensure quality, similarly those involved with SEO are forced to come up with even more detailed techniques to remain relevant and buoyant in the rankings amidst those changes.

One audit within the search algorithm could very well be responsible for de-indexing millions of pages. Consider it like a daisy chain, when one link is missing, the flow of link weight is kinked. If you have 10 pages in your site that provide 90% of the link weight for your pages, and for some reason if they fall out of favor with the algorithms new filter and get dampened or removed, all the rankings those pages supported are on hiatus.

Even now multiple data centers are showing vast fluctuations in the number of pages indexed for our domain, which is what led my to this conclusion initially (1180 pages in some centers, 1300 in others) and every page matters.

What this means to you is, entire ranges of keywords now are on page 3 instead of the top 10, search behavior remains the same (essentially those at the top get the high click through rate) and your profits tied to those keywords experience a loss.

Although there are no sure fire methods to insulate your website entirely from this phenomenon, there are things you can do to facilitate systematic redundancy to supplement times when the search engine index experiences a relapse and decides to start from scratch and re-index the web.

Without going too far off into theory, one shift in crawler behavior with one new rule that excludes pages that do not have the appropriate combination of indicators could be responsible for a major upheaval of the search engine result pages and how they are re-ordered.

Think of it as some results being grandfathered, others simply not making the grade. In either case, through using cyclical sweeps to take snapshots of the web to cross reference pages that are linked to from hubs or authority sites (which typically provide SERP shuffle/Google Dance immunity), search engines can provide layers of data to support who stays and who goes.

For examples a preliminary spider is sent for initial indexing and retrieval, a secondary sweep for another layer of evaluation and then a third sweep to compare the differences of the first two results. I am oversimplifying here for the sake of the concept, but you can see how shades of the supplemental index are making a comeback when thousands of references momentarily disappear for your website.

Although it is not the coined terms, I call it a cache relapse which is capable of erasing several months of hard work in just a few minutes after the new (lean) index goes live. Then, seeing search engine result pages waning until the index is rebuilt is only a natural side effect of this process.

Sure, hundreds of thousands of documents do not survive “The Google Shakedown”, or whichever search engine is conducting the audit. However, this is just one way to make room for new and improved metrics for information retrieval, relevance and the ideal user experience.

In closing, most pages that had authority prior to a sweep should rise back to their lofty positions prior to the audit. If they do not, then focus on raising relevance score through (a) creating quality topical content, which can age and support the rest of your site in 90-120 days (b) linking out to other authority sites in your niche to establish hub status (c) optimizing your internal links to reinforce theme prominence (what your site is about) for increased relevance. However, if you need an SEO company to aid the process, I am sure we can think of someone.

Are Search Engines Raising the Bar Deindexing and Search Algorithms Indexing and Deindexing Pages Determine Rankings Indexing and Relevance SEO SEO and the Index

ShareThis

Those prospects are already eager to skim, engage or purchase those products or services as soon as they type a related a query into a search engines search box to initiate the process. What happens when they hit the enter button is where the balance of information retrieval, relevance, multiple algorithms and SEO begin.

The objective is simple, position as many relevant keywords as possible to attract the most appropriate consumer to your website. Those who rank at the top, enjoy a proportionately higher percentage of exposure, and exposure translates to monetary gain when conversion is mastered.

Over the years on our SEO blog, we have talked about how to create a self-sufficient SEO site, how to build website authority, how to build links for multiple keywords, how to create optimized site architecture and SEO friendly tags and titles, how to structure on page SEO factors for maximum SEO benefit, how to theme and silo your information, how to build deep links and dozens of other SEO techniques and tactics that work day in and day out.

Information without application is an exercise in futility. SEO is all about experimentation and analysis, everything in between are the effects we can measure and apply to the next layer of the process.

There are facets of content development, topical relevance and internal linking that denote that just having content is not enough. It must work cohesively as a unit and be supported by a solid site architecture to (a) get indexed (b) have enough relevant information, i.e. keyword usage, titles, tags and external references form other sites to be recognized as a notable source of worthy, top 10 ranking / useful information.

It is safe to assume that outside of the on page SEO factors, that reputation (popularity) and trust also have equally as must say over who stays or goes when it comes to long-term search results. Yet even aside from that there are fundamental SEO measurements that can indicate where in the gap each page of your site is, for each respective keyword.

This is known as allintitle, allintext and allinurl relevance. When all of these factors are combined (great content, great references from backlinks from other sites, great site architecture, and don’t forget an rss feed to get the word out) then buoyancy for any possible keywords contained on any page of your site exist.

You have to remember that the long tail of search (the longer phrases people use to find a website) are extracted from the relevance in the query to the keyword co-occurrence on your pages. Did you intend to rank for multiple long-tail phrases (probably not) but if you have an idea of the process of how keywords stem over time and how relevance is ascertained, then you can facilitate the process as a side-benefit.

Search engine optimization is not something designed to save the day, after the fact. For optimal results, its best to start with a ranking objective in mind, then fortify it using as many means necessary from within your website and through building quality links from other sites to create the appropriate synergy.

As stated above, its not always the technical aspects of steps A-Z that produce the effect. You have to plan your SEO accordingly (which means that favorable factors remain in place long enough) to gain search engine trust and website authority for your site to propel past the next highest ranking.

Similarly, if you lose trust, invoke a penalty (from building or losing links, changing a key area of your site, or modifying something search engines like) you can also fall from grace for your respected keywords.

Managing the rate of ascension to the top 10 across multiple keywords, balancing a site so that the keywords have continuity and do not cannibalize each others positions and constantly maintaining an upward trajectory of relevance in your content are all crucial component to long term SEO.

SEO is all about managing the stages of continuity, but regardless of how many visitors you are able to attract, ultimately its all about marketing and promoting your offer through its value proposition. So, paying attention to graphics, the flow of information, the emotional appeal or the information and whats in it for the user all matter.

No need to go through the steps with an ugly website that will only serve to give more business to your competitors. SEO is marketing for the next millennium, but without identifying the right audience, it is all in vain.

My advice to anyone who employs SEO, understand where your at, assess the gap, build relevant content for now, but also look for the future for when the dust settles by building long term authority for your niche.

It starts with great content, but there is so much more than meets the eye to constantly acquire the most coveted positions for multiple keywords. Fortunately, there is a vast array of informative resources to keep everyone from the curious neophyte to the most advanced engineers busy as this exciting industry ( search and search engine optimization) transform itself daily.

Through the creation, modification and synergy of search engine algorithms, search engine spiders crawl and administer the assimilation of billions of pages into their index from around the web. Where you end up has a lot to do with the steps you take, but just as the mastery of those components occurs, additional changes and tweaks always keep those in this field on their toes to stay ahead of the bell curve and anchor quality, consistency and value into every page in their website.

Content Links Trust and Authority Multiple Facets of SEO Search Engine Optimization SEO Understanding the SEO Process

ShareThis