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2014-08-09T11:02:00.001-07:00

Google AdWords Certification Tips

2012-06-04T18:43:00.001-07:00

If you’re interested in becoming Google AdWords certified you’ve come to the right site. As SEO – SEM Manager it was mandatory that I took and passed the AdWords Certification Exam. While it was admittedly difficult in the begging to piece together all of the information I needed, I’m confident that anyone can replicate my success with the same tools and attitude. In this Blog I will explain my method and give you all the tips I used to successfully pass the certification exams.

The Fundamentals Exam

The first exam, the Google Advertising Fundamentals, is pretty straightforward and if you have put in some hours studying the materials, it is not difficult. Make sure you are familiar with Google AdWords technical words and how to structure a campaign.

The Advanced Exam

After the fundamentals exam, Google let’s you choose between three different, more advanced exams. I chose the Search Advertising Exam because it included a lot of the same material as the first one. I recommend putting in many hours of reading carefully through the online materials.

If you plan on taking the Search Advertising Advance Exam instead of one of the other three options, you will have the benefit of a lot of overlap in the study material, so one you know the fundamentals material it’s easier to focus your studying efforts on those few sections that are solely on the advanced exam.

Put close attention to the following lessons:

4.5 Location Extensions (Google Places)

5.1 Overview of Bidding

6.2 Ad and Site Quality

6.3 Invalid Clicks Issues

10.2 AdWords Editor

11.3 Conversion Tracking Basics

14.2 Managing Accounts with My Client Center (MCC)

14.3 Using AdWords API

Taking the Test

When you actually take the test, I recommend taking the two exams on consecutive days. The tests are 120 minutes each and you need to obtain 85% and 80% score respectively. Good luck and if you need information about the actual questions on the exams send me an email J

Using Elements for High-Quality Site and a Better User Experience

2012-06-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

As you already know Google Panda and Penguin algorithms were created to find more high-quality site in search and focus on the user experience. As Search Engine Marketing strategist, we need to utilize various elements in order to help search engine crawlers to better index client’s WebPages. Some of these elements are the following:

Language Annotations

rel=”alternate” href=”x” | Helps Google serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers
Sitemap: rel=”alternate” href=”x” | When targeting users in many languages and countries.

Pagination

Paginated content includes things like an article that spans several URLs/pages, or an e-commerce product category that spans multiple pages. With rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup, we can provide a strong hin to Google that we would like them to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. Watch video

Markups:

rel=”canonical” href=”X”
rel=”prev” href=”X”
rel=”next” href=”X”

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are detailed information intended to help users with specific queries. Google suggest using the microdate format and supports the following content types:

In conclusion, besides integrating organic & paid initiatives and aligned marketing and search marketing goals we should pay close attention in helping Google crawlers to better index client’s WebPages in order to improve user experience which ultimately would result in a better CTR, optimal bounce rate, and higher number of visits.

Everything You Need To Know About SEM/SEO

2011-03-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is very useful to promote a Website in the WWW and to have a better or higher search engine ranking. In another words, SEM is how people find a web site. The following is a list of reasons to implement a search engine marketing campaign:

• 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred to by search engines
• 90 % of all users do not look past the first 30 results or even past the first page (first ten results).
• Cost effective advertising
• Clear and measurable ROI | Relevant traffic + good conversion rate = Sales

Search Engines
Search engines were introduced during mid-90’s as an internet tool used to record links that were important to user of the WWW. Search engines are a large web based (data) and their main goal is to provide better results for users of the internet. The main search engine now-a-days are:

• Google
• Bing
• YouTube

How does search engine work? Spider, a program that automatically fetches web pages, crawls the web to find new web documents (web pages, PDF documents, and videos) typically by following hyperlinks from web sites already in their database. In Addition, search engines index the content on these documents by adding it to their database. Search engines periodically update these contents to later search their own database (not a real time search) when users enter a Keyword to find a related document. Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm by assigning various weights and raking factors.

SEO Algorithm

SEO Algorithm is a mathematical equation that decides which page show up at the top of the search engine page results. This equation is constantly changed, tweaked, and updated by engine search’s engineers. Algorithm varies by search engines; some give more weight to on page factors some to link popularity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a process to maximize web page visibility in Search Engine for users search queries (Keyword or Key phrase). SEO tells Search Engine what the site WebPages are about and helps with easy WebPage crawl through effective Page Title, Meta tags, Alt attribute, Anchor text, Search friendly HTML tags and code, Optimizing quality content, Keyword optimization and link building strategies. Facts:

• 86% of clicks on Google are from organic search, 14% from
paid search.
• Delivers qualified leads
– Fundamentally different than traditional marketing / advertising
– Searchers are looking for you
– More & more offline sales carry an online element

Natural vs. Paid

Meta Tags

Meta tags are placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications. Most meta-tags are included within the ‘header’ code of a website using Meta tags in the title, description and keyword tags is very important. Rules used by different search engines govern how such tags are used, how many characters they should contain, and how they should be formatted. Search engines like Google no longer look at the Keywords and other Meta tag.

Meta Title

Meta Title or page title should be used for on every webpage. Generally the formula should be: website name – keyword | keyword | keyword. Avoid using articles and conjunctions like a, the, and. Use the pipe (|) or dash (-) to separate Keywords this is the primary way to optimize title. This is the primary way to optimize title of your website.

Meta Description

The Meta description tag belongs inside the section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important. The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

Meta Name="Description" content="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here."

The purpose of the Meta description tag is to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as well as to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Image Alt Tags

Image Alt Tags are used to write the text for the images since images is not readable by search engines. While using Image Alt tags make sure you use your targeted keyword since this will help improve Search engine ranking. Many suggest that the Image Alt Tag Text on your images should contain your keywords. Be careful. Some search engines see that as spamming. If you like to do it, don’t overdo it. Better if you use the words, images or picture along the combination of your keywords. The whole process is also called image optimization.

If you use image navigation links it is advisable to place descriptive text links at the bottom of the page to help search engines figure out the relevancy of your pages.
Alt tags are good coding for several reasons:

1. Alt tags let visitors know an image is being formatted before it is displayed. Like the text visitors read as they wait, they can anticipate the image before it appears.

2. Picture alt tags aid visitors who can’t see the image whether they are Lynx users–a text based browser on Unix or Linux systems that has no image capability, or users who have images turned off in their browser preferences, or visitors who are visually impaired. Aids for the blind include readers that can tell them the image’s text description and allow them to understand accompanying information about your images. One warning: if our example above had the alt text, “pic1a.gif”, it would be meaningless for our visually impaired visitors. No description of the image provides no benefit about the image itself!

Anchor Text

Search engine have come to understand that the anchor text or hyper text link often more indicative of a page’s content than the Meta data of the page itself. So much so, in fact, that some pages are ranked in the top ten for highly competitive keywords simply because many other pages link to that page using the keyword as the anchor text of the link. Google is especially susceptible to anchor text (hyper text Link). In fact, it is well known that you can pretty much any given page ranked for a keyword simply by using that keyword as the anchor text (hyper text link) of your links to that page. It is called “Google bombing” and a well known instance of it involved a couple dozen bloggers linking to the official George W. Bush page using the anchor text “miserable failure”. After a couple weeks, low and behold, the page was ranked #1 for the search “miserable failure”, even though those words did not appear anywhere on the page itself. Once you understand the weight accorded to Html text link, you may choose to take a second look at how you hyper link text to your own pages. For instance, instead of linking to a page using the anchor text “Specs”, why not link using your keywords in the anchor text: “Widget Specs”.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword Optimization is always recommended that before going to build the contents of your website, and before going to optimize the each webpage, you must have a complete list of keywords and key phrases (The word or words that relate to a particular topic. Keywords or phrases are used to construct a search statement to find information).

Divide keywords into two following categories:
• Primary Keywords
Keyword for which your mail website should be indexed and rank well in all major search engines.

• Secondary keywords
All the keywords which are used on your different pages along with some matching words which may use differently with respect to geographically or in different terminology.

How to find GOOD Keywords?
• Conduct a survey with your friends and net surfers if you are not sure about how people will search for products you are going to offer from your website.
• Make a list of keywords optimization from the keyword Meta tags of your competitors.
• Make a list of your product and services you will offer from your website
• Prepare general name and specific terms if these things have some botanical, chemical or technical naming in professional use. (If applicable)

Use the following tools:
• Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
• Google Keyword Sandbox
• Word Tracker
• The Best Free Keyword Research Tool
• Good Keywords

Where to place your Keywords
• Place keywords in the paragraphs.
• Place keywords in the heading tags.
• Place keywords in image alt tags.
• When the word is part of a small statement making a specific point, you may bold it or italicize it.
• You may also want to include your keywords a few times in bulleted lists.
• When possible place the optimized keywords in links, and don’t forget navigation.

The key focus of the page should be on readability. If it does not make sense to human eyes then it is no good for a search engine and it will not convert. You want to use keywords and key phrases often, but not to the point where it sounds like you are writing for the search engine and not the user. If you are in question to yourself then you probably are overly optimized.

How to Utilize Keywords and Keyword Density
Any web developer or web article writer needs to have a firm grasp of exactly what keywords are and what keyword density is, in order to get good search engine and directory placement. Many people understand that quality content is important, but what good is quality content if no one can find it? That’s what keywords do for you; help your readers find your content.

Keywords help your readers or site viewers find your site or content. What you need to do, in order to get page hits for whatever you want your viewers to read, is figure out exactly what phrases or words your readers might use in order to search for the type of information you have. But more importantly, you don’t want to use popular words that everyone would be using in their articles, because then you are competing with all the other articles and sites out there writing about the same thing.

Let me explain. If you are writing an article about cooking, using the keyword ‘cooking’ would not really get you high rankings in search engines, because 1) it’s a common word, and 2) every other article about cooking and every other site about cooking will be using that keyword too.
So let’s look at what your content is really about. Perhaps you are writing an article about cooking with jalapeno peppers – well, there’s one of your potential search phrases right there. Chances are, that would be your title, or at least part of your title, of the article or the webpage you are building pertaining to ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers.’

Now, that is a keyword phrase, and each one of those words, with the exception of the word ‘with,’ will also be individual keywords. Let’s look at the Google Search Engine results page for ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers.’ Right CLICK HERE and open this link in a new page, in order to open the search results page so you can follow along.

The first thing you should note is that the word ‘with’ will not be searched for unless it is found in the exact phrase ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers.’ In the search results, you will see the keywords from your search either highlighted or bolded, so you can see the relevancy of the listing. The reason for this is because, outside of the keyword phrase, ‘with’ is not an index-able word.

Other words that are typically not index-able are: a, at, in, on, of, for, and (with exceptions), or (with exceptions), the (with exceptions), is (with exceptions), but, not (with exceptions), and a few others not listed here, including sometimes obscure acronyms and oftentimes, numbers when written numerically and not longhand. Now, the exceptions above are sometimes included in searches, but not usually as keywords. For example, when performing a Boolean Search, and-or-but-not all have a meaning.

Okay, so back to our example: cooking with jalapeno peppers.

As you can see from the search page I provided, and I can’t point them out to you by item listing, because search indexes can indeed change daily, but what you should be able to see is that the highlighted or bolded words from your search string ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers’ are most likely going to be the individual index-able words: cooking, jalapeno, peppers.

But, besides having the keyword phrase: cooking with jalapeno peppers – and the individual keywords, you also have another common search string phrase: jalapeno peppers.
So your Google Search for the example phrase will result in several ‘hits’ for websites with a high concentration of any of the following:

• “Cooking with jalapeno peppers”
• Cooking, jalapeno, peppers
• Cooking, “jalapeno peppers”, jalapeno, peppers

And you might also get returns for the word ‘pepper’ and not just ‘peppers’.

So what does all this mean to you when writing your article?

Okay, to make your article receive good placement for its topic, you want to not only use index-able and searchable keywords and phrases in your article title (and your page’s title if you are building a webpage), but you also want to use these words frequently within the body of your text, to get proper search engine optimization (SEO).

There is some debate about how many keywords should be used in an article or on web content in order to get good SEO. Some will argue that the more the better, but here recently, Google and other indexers, search engines, and directories consider it ‘keyword stuffing’ if your keyword percentage is too high. How high is too high is a gamble, because no one seems to know for sure.

Robots scan your site, not human beings, and these robots really can’t tell if your content is quality or just a page of random words. Therefore, an algorithm is used to determine the ‘quality’ of your content versus your keywords. What these robots do is scan your text (they can’t scan images and most other things), and they count how many index-able words appear on your page. After these robots have the number of index-able words on your page, they count the words or phrases that are used most often on the page.

Once they have these figures, they determine a percentage of keyword saturation. That is, what is the percentage of times that keyword or keyword phrase is used in comparison to the total number of index-able words.

For example, out of 1000 index-able words, if your keyword phrase appears 50 times, then you have a keyword SEO percentage for that keyword density of 5%. Most search engines seem to like keyword density between 2-8%, many web publishers hire freelance writers for keyword density of 10-15%, and most experts agree that if you go over that, you will probably be decreased in ranking due to keyword stuffing.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that this works on any repeated word or phrase, even if you did not intend to use it as a keyword or keyword phrase. I’ll give you an example. For this article, the word: ‘keyword’ and the phrase ‘keyword phrase’ are probably the two keywords I would have picked for this article. After completing the article and running it through a keyword density analyzer, I discovered that my keyword density for these two phrases is:

• Keyword = 3.12%
• Keyword phrase = 1.02% (a little low)
• Keyword density = 1.55%

Which is right on target, but what I also discovered is that there are other keywords that were picked up in this article that I wouldn’t have picked. For example, in the beginning, I wrote a lot about cooking and jalapeno peppers. Now, imagine that someone was searching for cooking and jalapeno peppers and came to this article and found it was about keyword density.

I did this on purpose to prove a point. What I should have done with this article was used an example that had similar content and information as to what my article was about: keywords and keyword phrases. Instead, I wrote an article using the example of “cooking with jalapeno peppers” and in return, here’s the keyword density analyzer tool for the following:

• Jalapeno peppers = 2.18%
• Cooking with jalapeno peppers = 2.32%
• Cooking = 1.09%

As you can see, my example phrases did almost as well on the keyword density as the phrases I was hoping would index for this article. Of course, there’s another issue called ‘prominence’ where my keyword phrases and keywords I have chosen have a higher prominence than the phrases of my example, but that’s for another article.

Now the reason I did it this way was to make a point. When writing content articles, like the ones you will find on Associated Content, you need to be sure that you are writing to your target audience and that the keywords you choose relate to the content you are writing, but more than that, make sure you are not accidentally indexing keywords in your article that have nothing to do with the topic of your article – like cooking with jalapeno peppers has nothing to do with keyword density.

When you do this, readers come to your site, read your article, and are disappointed that it does not contain the information they thought they would find. In the future, if the reader sees our articles consistently don’t index properly for their topics, they may stop reading you altogether.

Content Optimization

Content Optimization is a very important factor in search engine ranking. The technique is to write it yourself and if that is not possible get someone to write it for you. The website with the best unique content get more marks from Google. There are many factors during which should not be overlooked while building. Some of them are explained below:

Keyword Placement: Keyword placement mean where you place your keyword during. The best rule is to have your primary keywords in first two lines of your paragraph.

Keyword Density: Key word density means the number of time the keywords are repeated in your content. This density is generally not more than 5% for the main keyword you are focusing.

Keyword prominence: Keywords prominence mean have your primary keywords standout with respect to the rest of the text. This can be achieved during creation by bolding the text or using italic. What the most webmaster recommend is to bold the text.
Remember content creation during site optimization should be done with most care since in search engine world CONTENT IS THE KING. The website with the best text gets the best search engine ranking.

Internal Links

Internal links is a link in the context of web design is a hypertext function whereby clicking on the word or picture (an “object”) causes a web browser to load the new page to which the object is linked. Thus, clicking on the hypertext-affected word card should lead you to a page about a card or cards. Most commonly, a link to a page outside the same domain is considered external link, whereas one in the same domain name is considered internal link. However, these definitions become a bit tricky when the same organization operates multiple domains functioning as a single web experience, e.g. when a secure commerce website is used for purchasing things displayed on a non-secure website.
Similarly, a blogging website might have thousands of different blogs, in which context one might view a link as “internal link” only if it linked within the same blog, not to other blogs within the same domain. Search engine spiders prefer the simplicity of the hypertext link to any other form of linking structure elements. In fact, the anchor text is deemed very important in the eyes of the search engines and is assigned more weight within the search engine algorithms then ordinary body text.

Link Weight

Link building is another consideration of internal linking in conserving or distributing link weight. Most websites have the majority of inbound links or backlinks directed at their index page.

Follow this simple formula:

“The more important the page, the more occurrences of links to that page within the site. The less important the page, the less frequent the number of links.”

Site Map

A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors, and search engine robots, to find pages on the site. An example is the one on EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation’s) page.

Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

Site maps do have limitations. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, additional strategies besides the site map may be required that search engines, and visitors, can access all content on the site.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO is getting found on the search engines without paying the search engines for the placement (Pay-per-Click), and keep getting found for a long, long time. The following is a list all most relevant benefits of organic optimization:

The search results are long-lasting
Organic SEO keeps a website appearing on the search result pages for a long time because that website gives the search engines exactly what they want — relevancy. Relevancy is something you cannot achieve by “tricks” or by paying for it. You can only be relevant by being relevant, and that means, constantly generating content that people want to find and consume. As long as you ensure relevant content, other websites link to you, and the search engines love your website for that.

Organic SEO builds greater trust
If you are constantly adding organic (read natural) content to a website, it shows you really care for what you present on the site that shows you take interest in the business and that further shows you are really there to do business and have not just created a website on a whim. Organic content also manifests your deep-rooted knowledge of what you are involved in.

Simple Ways to Build Links that Have Authority and Great Anchor Text

2011-01-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

Anchor text and domain authority are crucial elements of the link building process. Often the types of links you'll be able to build will force you to sacrifice one or the other. You can create an info graphic that gets a lot of unique, authoritative domains to link at your site with suboptimal anchor text, or you might be able to use some article or press release directory submission sites to get great anchor text from low-value link sources.

Ideally you would do both at the same time, and get great links from authoritative sources with exactly the anchor text you want. The following is a list of four simple ways to build links that have authority and great anchor text.

1. Guest Posts

Guest posts are probably the most powerful example of how you can get a link on an authoritative domain (and even on an authoritative page) with precisely the anchor text you want. The process is also a very "pure" way to build links as you're giving something (a piece of content) in exchange for the link. This also often means that:

• You can get your content hosted on a powerful domain

• That the domain will have its own syndication and will attract its own links

• And that you'll be permitted to create a link with great anchor text

Not every blog will allow you to use exactly the anchor text you want, but using services and tools like My Blog Guest and the Ontolo link building tool set you'll be able to find a lot of great targets, and you can then vet which are a bit more liberal with guest posting anchor text than others.

2. Testimonials

We've talked about using testimonials to get great links before, and it's a tactic that's definitely deserving of a spot on this list. This is another example of nepotistic link opportunities that can often offer you a great link on a trusted site, and like guest posts you're trading something (your testimonial) for the link. Here are some good examples of the types of vendors who could make sense here:

• Contractors – We’ve worked with two freelance copy writers on the MadeUpCompany.com site and other marketing collateral. They have their own sites where they promote their services. We reached out to them and offered testimonials in exchange for a link.

• Consultants – Are you using a specialist who consults on some aspect of the company or other? Are they doing good work? Do they have a website? Offer them a testimonial!

• Hardware Providers – If you’ve bought a product from a company, you could take a second to shoot them an email saying you’re happy with it and would love to give them a testimonial for the site.

• Customers You Think Would Help – If there’s someone who’s very enthusiastic about our offering and you think that they wouldn’t mind linking to us from their site, this might be an opportunity.

3. Target Keywords in Your Meatier Content

The Free Keyword Tool drives a significant amount of traffic not only because it's a great utility, but also because the tool's name includes a high-volume keyword and the tool itself ranks highly for that term. By naming your cornerstone content strategically, you can attract quality links interested in pointing to your great content or free tools and get the ideal anchor text to those sources. Sometimes this means sacrificing somewhat on the link-baity title front, but it can pay dividends if the links you do attract contain exactly the anchor text you're after.

4. Internal Links

Internal linking is one of the most overlooked means of getting targeted links from trusted pages (your own domain!). It's not as sexy as "link baits" but it can be just as powerful in helping you to actually rank, drive traffic, and increase leads and sales.

Finally, the bottom line is that tactics that allow you to develop quality links with targeted anchor text is an outstanding opportunity to accomplish two things with one tactic and build links that will last regardless of which way the Google algorithms blow.

Search Engine Marketing | A different Approach

2011-01-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

Dollar for dollar, a properly managed search engine marketing campaign, whether natural or pay-per-click on, usually yields a greater return on investment (ROI) for the business. Therefore, It is crucial to understand the proper integration of the three main components of a search engine marketing campaign: search engine optimization, social media marketing and web analytics measuring.

Search engine optimization is a pre-requisite to effective SEM campaign. It’s the first half in the SEM course of defining and refining keyword phrases to maximise what web optimization professionals seek advice from as “keyword density” and reduce the consequences of “keyword dilution”. Search engine optimisation entails editing links, content, title tags, meta tags, meta description, and typically construction of a website to get the location prepared for marketing. The SEM promotion of the site may be handled a variety of ways, utilizing a number of different methods (each natural and paid-for advertising) to perform the identical end: getting the positioning discovered when someone searches for a specific keyword or key phrase phrase. Website positioning is often known to have a direct affect on natural marketing efforts with SEM, unbeknown to many business owners and even some Internet developers, the quality of a web site’s search engine marketing will usually have an effect on the value of pay-per-click advertising as well. For example, keywords used in pay-per-click campaigns by means of Google AdWords are assigned a “quality score”, and websites which can be optimized properly will sometimes yield increased high quality scores than poorly- or un-optimized sites. The upper the standard rating, usually the lower the price-per-click on for an optimized keyword.

The second component of a well managed search engine marketing campaign is social media marketing. Social media channels can be used to gain new or returning business by participating in discussion forums and blogs or by creating a two way dialogue with consumers through Facebook and Twitter campaigns. Also, businesses can become a source of information by sharing knowledge and answering questions; demonstrating value for clients and potential clients. Blogging and posting updates about a business's product or service becomes a unique and innovative tool that can be used to spread the word. It is a social media medium that keeps customers aware and interested. As long as businesses are providing useful content for their audience, they’ll appreciate their effort and most likely visit again. Social media is supposed to be conversational and casual, treat it as such and allow the audience to participate in order to create a viral effect.

Web analytics is the third component of a search engine marketing campaign. In general terms, web analytics is the process of collecting data about the activities of people (visitors)accessing your website. Web data is often analyzed to push and pull the three general levers available to businesses on the internet: marketing, merchandising, and site design. integrated marketing strategist will often use this data to determine how well (or poorly) their hard-earned marketing dollars are spent. By identifying every inbound marketing campaign, marketers are able to make apples-to-apples comparisons regarding how well each type of acquisition vehicle performs, usually by examining some type of conversion rate. Perhaps the most common use of web analytics data is fall-out reporting--looking at specific valuable paths on the site in an attempt to understand why visitors abandon the process prior to completion.

Finally, search engines like google generally have a look at three standards to determine a web site’s placement in the rankings: textual content options, hyperlink options, and traffic features. All three comprise the search engine advantage of a website. Web site builders generally solely exert management over textual content criteria, that means the content material on the web site itself. Taking it further, SEM experts “wordsmith” the text content material on the location and work externally to the web site to influence hyperlink criteria by creating and adjusting hyperlinks from relevant content on the Net that point to the positioning, reminiscent of articles, blogs, and different websites. In other phrases,SEM deals with the textual content and link parts of a website. The site visitors element of the location’s search engine advantage is essentially driven by the textual content and link adjustments. Ultimately, if a website is optimized and marketed properly and successfully, the recognition of a website will continue to deliver placement results over time and allow the business proprietor to reduce their natural advertising budget, or maybe realign those advertising dollars to give attention to a special set of keyword phrases.

Search engine marketing is very useful to promote any enterprise or any site on-line, with the a proper managed search engine marketing campaign your company may appear on internet to grab online enterprise very simply.

Website Positioning And SEM Defined In Plain English For The Non-Tech Business Proprietor

2010-11-30T20:10:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization (seo) is akin to producing a TV commercial. That is, it is PREPARATORY work designed to get the website able to be marketed, very similar to how producing the TV commercial involves editing, formatting, and advantageous tuning. Once the site is optimized, it’s able to be put out in front of the public’s face (and the search engines). Marketing the positioning is the process of calling consideration to it, and persevering with to enhance the presence in front of the viewing viewers, similar to broadcasting the TV commercial.

Think of it this way: When you produced a TV business and only aired it one time, you could receive some business from it, but over time, peoples’ reminiscences fade and nobody remembers the commercial. In much the same manner, submitting the location to search engines like google (a part of advertising) and creating links from unbiased sources (natural advertising) ought to get some initial results. But if the efforts cease there, then a few months later, the impact is gone. Just as you’d suppose it silly that a enterprise proprietor complains 6 months later that no one is responding to their TV business (that only aired once six months in the past), it’s equally unrealistic that an website positioning mission that is marketed one time is expected to ship results in perpetuity. It merely does not work that way.

Like the TV commercial, the preparatory work to get the website up and operating is often a one-time BIG expense (with periodic changes as the market modifications) because of the time involvement to do the job… and the time it takes to do the job right depends on several variables: the market (competitors and saturation), the targets (native, regional, national publicity), the scope of the site (variety of pages, amount of content material), etc.

Also like a TV commercial, the marketing and promotion of the location takes comparatively much less time to implement, but should be a steady, ongoing process to be effective. It is a shame when a enterprise proprietor spends the money to optimize their site, after which fails to follow by means of with “the rest of the job” by way of advertising it. The preliminary prices of search engine optimization go wasted in such instances.

Just like with any kind of advertisement, the enterprise owner needs to ascertain a funds for Search Engine Advertising (SEM). Perhaps they shave bits off of their other advertising methods (brochures, radio spots, phone book, newspapers, etc.) to ascertain their place on the search engines. Dollar for dollar, a properly managed SEM marketing campaign, whether natural or pay-per-click on, usually yields a greater return on investment (ROI) for the business.

Search engine optimization is a pre-requisite to effective SEM. It’s the first half in the SEM course of, and includes performing market research, defining and refining keyword phrases to maximise what web optimization professionals seek advice from as “keyword density” and reduce the consequences of “keyword dilution.” search engine optimisation entails editing links, content, and typically construction of a website to get the location prepared for marketing. The SEM promotion of the site may be handled a variety of ways, utilizing a number of different methods (each natural and paid-for advertising) to perform the identical end: getting the positioning discovered when someone searches for a specific keyword or key phrase phrase. website positioning is often known to have a direct affect on natural marketing efforts with SEM, but unbeknownst to many business owners (and even some Internet developers, the quality of a web site’s search engine marketing will usually have an effect on the value of pay-per-click advertising as well. For example, keywords used in pay-per-click campaigns by means of Google AdWords are assigned a “quality score”, and websites which can be optimized properly will sometimes yield increased high quality scores than poorly- or un-optimized sites. The upper the standard rating, usually the lower the price-per-click on for an optimized keyword.

A key point to recollect about the various search engines is that an organization’s “competition” just isn’t essentially its “sworn enterprise rival” down the road or throughout city that draws from its customers. When it comes to engines like google, the “competition” is any web site, link, document, advertisement, etc. that’s ranked above the enterprise’s website, or exhibiting up within a web page or two of the enterprise’s search engine itemizing for a given keyword phrase. That is why proper keyword and market analysis is so necessary for efficient website positioning, slightly than merely counting on the words and phrases that intuitively come to thoughts when a enterprise owner thinks of his or her personal merchandise and services. Using the “hardwood floors” instance, it is potential that articles and corporations about carpentry, arboretums, laminate flooring, and flooring wax may all be “competitors” on the search engines.

The issue with any sort of advertising is that a enterprise can at all times spend more cash on it. For instance, if a billboard firm is approached to promote a company and asked the query, “How much does it price to promote my business on billboards?” the reply is likely to be, “It depends upon what number of billboards you want to promote on, an where they’re located.” A similar response would be offered in reply to somebody asking the question, “How much does it price to promote within the Yellow Pages?” The answer: “It depends in what metropolis and on how big of an ad you want on the page.” The cost questions pre-suppose that there’s some mounted price to advertisement, which is much from reality. Not all markets are the same, and a business may conceivably spend an infinite amount of cash on advertisement. SEM is not any different.

Sooner or later in advertising, whether it’s through traditional strategies or by way of the Internet, there comes a degree where the marginal value enhance in advertising yields a diminishing return on investment. As an excessive example to make this point, let’s assume that an organization achieves the Number-One place in the organic rankings on Google for a selected keyword, “hardwood flooring”. No matter how a lot cash is spent on selling the keyword phrase “hardwood flooring”, there can be no improvement within the place of that firm as a result of they cannot be better than quantity one. If the position for “hardwood flooring” have been numbers three and 5 in Yahoo! And MSN respectively, then spending more cash on organic advertising and marketing could convey them up to Quantity-One across the board (there are not any guarantees), but these advertising dollars would be much better utilized to marketing different key phrase phrases that aren’t quite as prominent yet. In this way, the ROI is a part of a “greatest bang for the buck” consideration when it comes to efficient SEM.

Search engines like google generally have a look at three standards to determine a web site’s placement in the rankings: textual content options, hyperlink options, and traffic (or reputation) features. All three comprise the search engine advantage of a website. Web site builders generally solely exert management over textual content criteria, that means the content material on the web site itself. Taking it further, SEO/SEM experts “wordsmith” the text content material on the location and work externally to the web site to influence hyperlink criteria by creating and adjusting hyperlinks from relevant content on the Net that point to the positioning, reminiscent of articles, blogs, and different websites. In other phrases, SEO and SEM deal with the textual content and link parts of a website. The site visitors element of the location’s search engine advantage is essentially driven by the textual content and link adjustments. Ultimately, if a website is optimized and marketed properly and successfully, the recognition (site visitors element) of a website will continue to deliver placement results over time and allow the business proprietor to reduce their natural advertising budget, or maybe realign those advertising dollars to give attention to a special set of keyword phrases.

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3 Ways Businesses are using Social Media to Save Money

2010-09-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

Small businesses all have the same problem these days. How can they save more money? Social media is one important way that businesses are saving money while still delivering value.

Whether being used for community building, customer service, product marketing, or staying organized and communicating as a team, one common theme can be found of the use of social media: cost savings.

Social media has given small businesses the ability to market themselves in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before. It takes a small time commitment, but the overall costs are minimal. This allows more companies to allocate resources to other parts of their business.

Here are three ways businesses are using social media for results.

1. Customer Service

One of the most useful ways that companies are employing social media is for customer service. These days, people expect to be able to post issues directly to Twitter and obtain a real-time response. This instantaneous access to customers is invaluable to companies.

One of the tools being used to manage their customer-focused social media efforts is Hootsuite, which has decreased the amount of time necessary to look after their Twitter and Facebook accounts by allowing both networks to be used at the same time. HootSuite is effective and can cut down time for an administrator

“Twitter has become the launching point for many of our internal processes” says Todd Barr, Vice President of Marketing at Pnonebooth. “We have multiple examples of responding to an issue on Twitter within a couple of minutes and then being on the phone with them within ten minutes. A tweet actually starts an internal process where we pull in the appropriate parties, get our information together, and reach out to the customer.”

“All of our other social media uses are extremely important, but Twitter is actually helping to create a culture change. We’re able to quickly assemble the correct folks to improve life for the customer. Internally, this begins to shed light on the power of social media and the team of folks who want to be involved is gradually expanding” states Todd Barr.

2. Building Community

Companies try to utilize social media for building a community of customer evangelists. Relying on social media efforts to build a community involves providing support, invites, encouragement and general engagement through Twitter. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts should be used to actively engage people. It allows a business to organically build relationships and influence key people within a particular industry.

One of the most often overlooked aspects of social media is building relationships offline. It is important for startups to take online networking to the next level and go out and talk to customers in person.

3. Product Marketing

Using social media for marketing is another cost-saving no-brainer for companies. Social media levels the playing field like never before. It has never been easier to be more in touch with your customers or market. Traditional marketing promotes messages to unwitting audiences. Social media marketing seeks interested people who want to hear from a company with compelling content, products and conversations.
Companies using social media for marketing need to be in it for the long haul. The use of social media to market yourself is a commitment. You have to put value in being authentic, respectful and responsive.

“Concentrate on the value you’re providing for others through these tools,” said Dmitry Dragilev, Marketing Lead at ZURB. “The tools are just another communication medium. What value are you providing for them through Social Media? Try to imagine yourself in their shoes –- would you be interested? Imagine you’re standing with strangers in an airport -– what would you say to them to get their attention and get them excited about what you’re doing?”

Social media sites come and go, but the idea of social media will remain and is in fact growing. With the help of social media marketing service your company will benefit from brand awareness to a better ranking on the search engine page results, visit Blind Acre Media for more information

Creating an effective Social Media Strategy

2010-09-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Every business needs to take a strategic approach to incorporating social media into their PR and marketing plans; however it can be very easy to get lost in the social media world. Jumping on the social networking bandwagon is very tempting, but don’t get in a rush to do so! Starting to tweet, post and blog without a well-defined strategy, or add comments on different blog or article can leave you questioning your efforts. Before you start your journey into the social media world, take time to create a social media strategy to ensure your efforts are not going to waste.
Follow these tips to help you stay on track:

1. A company has to collaborate internally to successfully integrate social media tools into their marketing mix. Make sure everyone is on board with the same plan, because execution is going to be much easier to reach your predetermined goals.

2. Get the ‘OK’ from upper management to begin the integration of social media into the company’s marketing and culture. Be sure to check if there are social media policies that you need to be aware of.

3. Before a company starts with its social efforts, there needs to be a mutual understanding across the company in regards to:

- Who will be maintaining the social networking sites?
- How much time will be allocated towards creating and editing content being posted on the sites?
- What are the corporate policies (if any) in regards to publishing company-related content?

4. Construct and create measurable goals; determine what you want to accomplish with your social media efforts before you start your campaign. What message do you want to get across to your community? From those efforts, create your next plan of attack and a new set of goals.

5. Be prepared to listen to customers, provide timely feedback, opinions and suggestions. Social media is not a one-way street, it is a community. You are not using social networking just to talk to customers; you are there to interact with them.

6. Be patient. Creating an active online social community is a lot of work and a very timely process. This is something that is not going to happen overnight. Once your community starts to have a voice, listen, listen, and listen! They are involved in YOUR community because they believe in your product/service. What changes and improvements can you make from listening to them? This is a perfect example on how to build customer trust and loyalty. You are supporting your followers, and in return, they will support you.

7. Measure your success. Determine your key metrics BEFORE you get started. Focus on metrics that you can measure. Some examples include financial outcomes, non-financial outcomes, return on engagement, return on participation, return on trust, etc. (the lesson here is to focus first on metrics that truly matter for your business).

These beginning tips will help you organize a social media strategy and get you on the right path to creating your interactive online community!

Can a blog Be Useful for Social Media Campaign?

2010-09-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

Using social media for Advertising is cost-saving for companies and it makes easy to be in touch with customers or industries. Traditional advertising promotes messages to unwitting audiences. On the other hand, social media advertising seeks interested people who want to hear from a company with compelling content, products and conversations.

Companies using social media for Advertising need to be in it for the long haul. The use of social media to advertise a company is a commitment and you have to put value in being authentic, respectful and responsive. Successful social media ad campaigns are by no means traditional, which means standard display or contextual ads should be avoided unless they're devised to be entertaining. Try, for example, online video ads
With social media, the advertiser must also accept less conversion-driven results, instead tracking interaction measurement standards, such as content contribution (the volume of comments/reviews/posts), content use/Web mentions (google alerts), social bookmarking/sharing (delicious, Digg, google|Bookmarks) subscriptions (RSS feeds, e-mail), and engagement metrics (unique visitors, page views, time spent on site, depth and frequency of visits, etc.)

A high number of business owners are looking into the possibility of blogging as a form of marketing for their business. However, since most businesses take place offline there is a concern as to if the time put into blogging will have a positive impact for the business. The thing to remember about a blog is that it is, in essence, a platform for communication and community building.

Now, the Question is: Can a blog Be Useful for Social Media Campaign?

The importance of communication in marketing is not anything new. Offline businesses have done direct mailings for years, so the idea of providing routine, free information and using it as a promotional vehicle is likely not news to anybody. However, the idea of building a community around your business is a newer concept. It is a concept that really has not come about until social media began taking off and people started realizing the power of conversation to build “buzz”. You can use a blog to build a mailing list and to invite comments from your readers. And, by using the blog to form a two-way communication platform with your followers, you are developing a relationship which turns them into a potential customer for your business.

Blogs offer your offline business a worldwide audience. You can publish information and disperse it to a lot of people for free. So, can a blog be useful for online Marketing? Absolutely. In this day and age, any business website which is completely static could be considered by many a waste. Therefore, it is important to set up a blog on your business’s website.

Traditional business owners probably don’t realize just how much they would out-do their competition if they would invest to increase their internet presence and build relationships using social media. You could increase the brand awareness and revenue tremendously because most businesses have no idea of the power of the internet for their business or how to go about increasing their online presence.

The Importance of Social Media for SEO

2010-08-25T18:38:00.000-07:00

What is Social Media? It is only Facebook and Twitter or it’s more than that. Social Media is all channels available in the web that allow us to come together, communicate, and build upon each other’s opinions and ideas. Also, Social Media can be utilized as a SEO (search engine optimization) tool in order to improve a website’s ranking in goggle, yahoo, or bing.

No doubt social media has a large influence on SEO. For example, if you Google a brand, such as “Coca Cola”, you will find that more than half of the links are influenced by social media; from LinkedIn, to Google reviews, Twitter streams and even blog postings. Social media plays a large part in the content displayed in the search engine results page.

Most social media sites link back to a particular web site, and even though a lot of sites have adapted no follow links (meaning you will not benefit from inbound links), they are increasing your visibility in the search engine results page.
So what does this mean?

Social media can and does influence search engine optimization. However, the goals for a brand may determine what strategy works best for them.

If your brand is already well established, you may want to leverage social media to help you optimize for other keywords and phrases. For example, if Coca-Cola decides they wante to enter the dessert game and offer a new drink, simply putting this new drink on their website may not be enough. As part of their marketing campaign they may leverage a blog to discuss the finer points of the new drink or even YouTube videos about how to make and enjoy the beverage. These social media tools in conjunction with a larger marketing campaign will help Coca-Cola rank for dessert ideas and new coke drinks.

On the other hand, a less well-known and established brand may take a different approach to utilizing social media for SEO. This may include a startup company looking to push their brand awareness. The startup company may focus all of their social media and communities on branded items that may assist to push their name to the top of the search engine results page and help fill out all of the results when someone searches for them.

Focusing strong efforts in some channels is definitely better than spreading your channels. I believe everyone should get a blog because that is the social media channel that anyone can most easily utilize to help influence search engine ranking.
Beyond a blog, if Facebook does not make sense for companies just wait until they use it. However, if Yelp or Twitter does make sense for them, make sure to not only leverage that but to build those communities into strong locations for the brand.

Finally, it is important to understand Social Media, the different channels available in the web, and how this practice affects SEO. It is not enough just to have a website if you do not attract visitors to it.