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Why SEO?

So you’d like to become number ONE in The search engines? Search engine optimization or SEO is the process in which we increase the position of a given website in the various search engines. Simple right? Regrettably not! SEO seriously isn’t for the faint hearted. It involves a superior amount of technical expertise, the usage of complex tools and then the analysis and implementation of the results those tools provide.

The concept behind search engine optimization is to bring a substantial amount of visitors to your website. It’s a well planned technique based on certain key words and key phrases depending on the needs of your respective company.

Whether your Website is completely new or ten years old, managing the way it appears to search engines is vital to its success. The typical Website gets 61 percent of their visitors from organic (nonpaid) search engine results and 41 percent of all traffic from Google alone. Ensuring that the company’s site ranks highly in search results is, for most companies, a make-or-break proposal, which explains why search engine optimisation (SEO) is now a multibillion-dollar industry.

80% of all internet users find what they are looking for through the search engines like (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc). If a person is looking for a service or product that you offer on the web, they won’t find your internet site if it does not show up on at least one of the first three pages of the search engine. The majority stop searching after page three (or Position 30) and begin a new search.

The truth is there may be countless companies online selling nearly the same services or products which you offer. Five to Seven of them currently take up the first 10 positions of your favored internet search engine. How on earth can you enter into the running, much less compete with other local businesses?

Possibly sadder is the fact if you do not do search engine optimisation your site won’t ever rank anywhere meaningful in the search engines. Look at your own search habits. What number of pages will you look at when you are trying to find a service or product? It goes without saying that a majority of surfers usually do not go past page 3 if the results are presented in groups of ten! Therefore if you are on page 70 who is going to find you? What about page 122034 out of 77300000 internet sites. Do you see my point!

Search Engine Optimizing is easy enough it simply demands diligent writing of content material rich with keywords and key phrases that relate to your company. If you have a local company working with mainly local clients make sure you include your locale in the key phrase “Web Designers in Glasgow” rather than simply “Web Designers” because this will make your website more specific to your prospective customers’ searches. You need to apply exactly the same thinking to your business and website. Do the same thing for each page and you will soon have built up an optimised site. Be sure though not to make it to keyword heavy (2-5 per 100 words) because it will soon become unreadable and just turn away the very website visitors you aspire to attract.

Marketing online for your local business has never been more great. The tools, strategies and systems are available for you. Most business owners do not have the time to keep up with the ‘online stuff’.

Search engine optimization is crucial to getting your website discovered by search engines like google. You will never merely be found because you have a website.


Using traditional forums to get good quality links.

Using forums for good links

Contrary to everything that the industry media might want you to you understand, many people have already been having discussions on the net before the development of Facebook.

Possibly one of the most common methods of discussion and one which is certainly flourishing currently is the ‘forum’. Forums are essentially discussion boards where individuals could begin a ‘thread’ and other people add to it, or perhaps just start a big debate regarding the topic at hand. Because of the massive range of subjects in the world and the enormous quantity of people today with access to the Internet, generally there is usually an almost limitless amount of forums of which you can be a member of, some being much more common compared to others.

Forums might be highly valuable to the search engine marketing since they may accomplish two roles in your mission. First of all, they may often be a perfect place to get hyperlinks from (and backlinks support our SEO ranking) and secondly, by way of communal interaction you may potentially find new prospects and also brand new potential customers.

Yet adding back links to the discussion board communications can be typically a massive ‘no’ in lots of boards, consequently a lot not unlike social networking, you have to be a little tad wise concerning it.

One part of the website that most boards have in common can be the ‘signature’. This is a section of code that gets combined with every post you’re making and in many cases it is possible to include backlinks to it. A word of warning though – a few forums scowl about including signatures ahead of time and it’s really worth getting involved in the forum initially and getting a little bit of a name for yourself ahead of including any. Actually some forums enforce a principle where you have to have posted a particular number of responses before they’ll allow you to add any kind of signature to your posts.

What you need to take into account will be that when you find yourself taking part in almost any discussion board, you might be effectively a visitor on their system and of course , if you do anything at all which goes against their guidelines as well as ethics, they’re quite within their own rights to get rid of you from the forum. There is certainly also another thing to watch out for – the ‘no-follow’ tag.

The Online world of boards is certainly separated just about equally between those who love site visitors and their hyperlinks, along with those who don’t. It’s a chicken and egg factor because those who would likely positively encourage you to post back links upon their sites will end up acquiring lots of guests and thus plenty of hyperlinks themselves – increasing recognition, however some people would also get an awful lot of spam.

However people who can’t stand you leaving hyperlinks, or just make it really hard to do so may lose out on a lot of visitors. At the end of the day, it really depends on the subject of the site and whether it’s monetised in any way. Some of those that don’t like you leaving links will sometimes give each link an attribute that was introduced only a few years ago, the ‘nofollow’.

By adding the nofollow attribute to a link, it informs the spiders that it shouldn’t be followed and shouldn’t get ‘link juice’.

Now, many SEO experts disagree as to whether this actually means a link using ‘nofollow’ is completely pointless and some will show evidence that shows that it does actually make a difference and shouldn’t be discounted completely, however most will agree that if you’re going to look for links, make more of an effort on those that don’t use this attribute.

Don’t get too anal about finding these sites. The better ones will be more difficult to post to and you should become active members of these rather than simply posting fo links.

So that’s it really. Investigate and analyse your link building techniques and you’ll find ways to increase your website’s SERPs without breaking the bank.

SEO Training


Overview of Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has revolutionised Internet advertising and allowed advertisers to get more bang for their buck. PPC via search portals, such as Google, has allowed search marketing consultants to create highly targeted adverts that are displayed to users actively looking for solutions to their problems.

The PPC model differs from the concept of paying per impression (i.e. appearance on the page) which was initially favoured by the big publishing houses as they felt forced to move more of their business online. Much the same as Cable TV, the Internet fragmented the audience and took the power away from traditional publishers.

PPC ads can be split into two types:

  1. Search
  2. Content

Search ads appear on the right hand side of the search results on the main search engines Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Increasingly there is some encroachment on the left hand side of the search results for some adverts. Content adverts appear in modules which a webmaster will place on their site. Webmasters receive revenue for placing these ads on their site so placement can be very eye catching to maximise review or unobtrusive – depending on the whims of the webmaster. They are distinguished as PPC ads by the phrase “Sponsored Listings”.

So how does it work?

As Google Adwords is the most popular form of PPC advertising to date, the following explanation will be based on their services.

PPC on Google works on the following levels:

  • Keywords
  • Ads
  • Landing pages

A PPC campaign is a careful construction of good interaction between these three elements. Keywords must be grouped into relevant groups so as to display targeted adverts relating to those keywords that then flow through to landing pages relating to the keyword.

If we take the example of a sports store, the keyword “tennis shoes” would correspond to an advert saying “Best quality tennis shoes” (or whatever their selling point was). This advert would then link to a page about the tennis shoes they had available. The keyword “tennis rackets” would correspond to an advert saying “Quality tennis rackets” and link through to a page displaying the tennis rackets the company sells.

It’s all about relevance and providing a good user experience so the user looking for “tennis shoes” doesn’t end up on a page all about tennis rackets.

This article was contributed by Geoff Andrews, a search marketing consultant, known online as SEM Freak. Follow SEM Freak on Twitter or find him on Google.


Link Building with Blog Comments

As every SEO starts out you begin to believe that even the smallest link can have an effect on how well you rank in Google.  You first start off with the basics, optimising your site for the terms that you want to rank for, utilising title tags and H1’s as your first point of call.  So after you have made the content and the menus all nice and shiny (no flash content however), and easily crawled by Google then you move forward onto link building.

As an SEO you like to tell yourself you are going White Hat (a form of SEO where no dubious means of Link Building are done including buying links and comment spamming).  You begin by submitting to free directories and approaching others in your niche to see if they will list you (hopefully without a reciprocal link).  Your gain yourself a whole bunch of splendid looking links, situated on PR3 or possibly 4 sites and you feel quite chuffed with yourself.  As you progress rankings stabilise but not where you want them.  You reach the second page or bottom of the first page and can’t improve on your position.  As an SEO you need to investigate other avenues of Link building and take the initiative to try something new.

It’s staring you in the face now, other people do it, and you have seen your competitors do it, so why shouldn’t you?  There is a PR8 website that you have found that allows comments on its blog which is a PR7 and even some PR7 posts.  So you think why not and get a comment link situated at the bottom of the page, yours is the only one.  What’s the best about it is that it was easy, so you go out and find yourself some more blogs that accept “Do Follow” links and place down some more links.  You watch your rankings over the next two weeks and see a rise.  Positions increase by about 3 or 4 on the first page of Google and you can’t believe it.  You relax your link building and then it happens!

About 2 weeks after the rise, things go wrong, you return to your previous position and even possibly lower if you stopped other link building activities.  You want to find out what has happened and check those dainty Comment links you did last month.  Every single one of the posts now has a hundred comments on it with spam links.  Some have been No Followed and others just deleted from existence.  You give up on Comment links and return to a true way of Link Building!

Comment Links generally provide an initial boost but are hardly stable links, they are easy to identify and very easy for users to manipulate.  Although you could get a lift from them, how long will it last, and is it worth your time, especially if you do not have much time to do it.  Many SEO’s me included believe Comment links not to be worth of our time, and are considered a “Grey Hat” approach to link Building!

Bio:

Marcus is an SEO that works for Travel companies around the world.


Site Speed Analytics Tools

Site Speed Analytics Tools

 

Optimizing your website for speed is one of the most important factors affecting its success. The patience span of most internet users today is short when it comes to loading times. Having a fast site with short loading times has been shown to improve retention and user activity, decrease costs and increase overall revenue. Additionally, most industry experts predict that Google and other major search engines will soon make speed a factor in determining search engine rankings. Speed analytics tools can help you monitor your website’s speed and find ways of optimizing it further for better performance and results. Here are just a few of the best site speed analytics tools available on the web.

Google’s Site Performance

Google’s Site Performance tool is still in the experimental stage, but it works pretty well thus far. This webmaster tool displays speed information about your web site as well as suggestions on how to make your site faster. You’ll be able to see exactly how long it takes for pages to load, how their speed performance appears over time and how your site’s speed compares to the speed of competitor sites. You’ll also get “Page Speed” suggestions on specific ways to help reduce user-perceived slowness.

 Website Optimization Speed Test Tool

This free web tool allows you to find out the speed of any webpage by simply entering the site’s URL into the application. The tool calculates the page’s size, composition and its download time, as well as the size of the individual elements making up the web page. It then uses these results to offer some useful advice on how to improve page load time. It does so using the best practices from the Website Optimization Secrets website, which provides things like page size guidelines and optimization techniques.

Pingdom Page Load Test Tool

The Pingdom Page Load Test Tool loads a full HTML web page along with all objects, including images, CSS, RSS, Flash components and JavaScripts, mimicking the way the page would load on a browser. The load times of all the objects as well as the overall page load time are displayed on a bar graph, so you can see a visual representation of the stats. You can view the objects list by hierarchy or by load order. Other general page statistics that are displayed by this load test tool include things like total number of objects and object sizes.

 Uptrends Page Load Test Tool

Uptrends’s page load test tool is another great resource that will help you determine your web pages load speed from various physical locations around the world. See how people experience your page in terms of speed from Singapore, Shanghai, New York City, Berlin, and more. The tool tests the speed of a complete HTML page along with all objects, in a similar fashion as Pingdom. Load times are all displayed next to their corresponding objects, which include all content from third parties, content such as advertisements and links.

 Link Vendor

This tool divides your web page’s elements into categories, such as images, scripts and style sheets. In addition to all of the standard load time statistics, Link Vendor’s load tool also shows you how fast your pages load on different internet connections.

 This is a guest post from Ben Rozema of Best Rank, a San Diego SEO Company.  Go and check out their blog.