Saturday, May 23, 2009

Adapt or die

Like in life, in business in order to survive you must adapt and modify. In these times things change at such a rapid pace it seems tomorrows technology is here before we’ve had a chance to learn today’s technology. What used to be a simple chain of supply and demand has instead become an information war. Whoever can learn the most the quickest and apply it wins. On the internet there are many ways you can advertise your business. Only one is sustainable however and this is called Search Engine Optimization. This means that you make a website as relevant to your industry as possible in the hopes that when someone searches for your product or service they can find it and more specifically find you with ease.

There are several reasons why an internet business needs to optimize their website to appear highly in any major search engine. First and foremost, you need traffic to your website, without traffic nobody will buy your product. So then how does one attain traffic to a website? Well you must market your website so that you can reach your target customers. There are several ways to do this. You can pay for advertising on major websites or search engines. You can send out mass e-mails. Or you can be one of the first results a user sees on any given keyword in a search engine. If you use mass e-mails this is usually a turn off as it is seen as an unwanted solicitation a.k.a. spam. If you pay for ads this can be effective but has much larger opportunities for malicious manipulation and also is statistically less effective than traditional search results.

Search engine optimization then stands alone as the most effective and trustworthy form of internet marketing. Search engine companies have highly intelligent think tanks that create algorithms or a set of well defined instructions. These algorithms determine how web sites are categorized and which ones come up in the top of any search result.

These often are changed or modified so there is no foolproof way to ensure that your website is going to be the first website to appear in a search engine. However, as any experienced SEO expert will tell you there are many methods that can positively influence your rankings.

In the world of search engines content is king, because search engines give you the most relevant website according to your search. If you truly want to be successful with your internet business, you must invest into search engine optimization. Making your website theme oriented and not overly stuffed with keywords is important. When considering SEO for your website, there are a few myths to dispel. Most important of all is that SEO is not a magic bean that will boost your business to the top of the internet and there are NO guarantees. In addition like any investment true SEO takes time. Don’t expect to throw a few thousand dollars haphazardly into SEO and expect your site to be a runaway success. Creating quality isn’t easy. Also there are fluctuations; at first you may be ranked at #1 and then suddenly drop or you may also start off of the radar and eventually work your way up to #1. Developing a content rich website with value and relevancy is the way to achieve high rankings.

As you begin to consider all these complications and minute details take time to consider your business and your goals. If you’re willing to invest in yourself and your future, then purchasing SEO services is an absolute must. When you’re ready to pursue SEO services look for those with a proven track record and fair prices. Be wary of an extravagantly designed website with no references or SEO case studies. Also mind the pricing, if it is exceptionally low, you’re probably going to get what you pay for and that’s poor service. In the same regard if it is exceptionally high, that companies’ services are likely overpriced and results may not yield better than other companies. For example if you're searching for Utah search engine optimization you will find many companies however some on the top 10 aren't the best companies to use. With some tact, careful planning and common sense you can find the right SEO firm for you.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Some Good Reasons to Choose SEO as Your Career

1 High demand for SEO services

Once SEO was not a separate profession - Web masters performed some basic SEO for the sites they managed and that was all. But as sites began to grow and make money, it became more reasonable to hire a dedicated SEO specialist than to have the Web master do it. The demand for good SEO experts is high and is constantly on the rise.

2 A LOT of people have made a successful SEO career

There are many living proofs that SEO is a viable business. The list is too long to be quoted here but some of the names include Rob from Blackwood Productions, Jill Wahlen from High Rankings, Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz and many others.

3 Search Engine Optimizers make Good Money !

SEO is a profession that can be practiced while working for a company or as a solo practitioner. There are many jobboards like Dice and Craigslist that publish SEO job advertisements. It is worth noting that the compensation for SEO employees is equal to or even higher than that of developers, designers and marketers. Salaries over $80K per annum are not an exception for SEO jobs.
As a solo SEO practitioner you can make even more money. Almost all freelance sites have sections for SEO services and offers for $50 an hour or more are quite common. If you are still not confident that you can work on your own, you can start a SEO job, learn a bit and then start your own company.
If you already feel confident that you know a lot about SEO, you can take this quiz and see how you score. Well, don't get depressed if you didn't pass - here is a great checklist that will teach you a lot, even if you are already familiar with SEO.

4 Only Web-Designing MAY NOT be enough

Many companies offer turn-key solutions that include Web design, Web development AND SEO optimization. In fact, many clients expect that when they hire somebody to make their site, the site will be SEO friendly, so if you are good both as a designer and a SEO expert, you will be a truely valuable professional.
On the other hand, many other companies are dealing with SEO only because they feel that this way they can concentrate their efforts on their major strength – SEO, so you can consider this possibility as well.

5 Logical step ahead if you come from marketing or advertising

The Web has changed the way companies do business, so to some extent today's marketers and advertisers need to have at least some SEO knowledge if they want to be successful. SEO is also a great career for linguists.

6 Lots of Learning

For somebody who comes from design, development or web administration, SEO might look not technical enough and you might feel that you will downgrade if you move to SEO. Don't worry so much - you can learn a LOT from SEO, so if you are a talented techie, you are not downgrading but you are actually upgrading your skills packages.

7 SEO is already recognized as a career

Finally, if you need some more proof that SEO is a great career, have a look at the available courses and exams for SEO practitioners. Well, they might not be a CISCO certification but still they help to institutionalize the SEO profession.

Top 10 SEO Mistakes

1 Targetting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2 Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3 A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

4 JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5 Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6 Concentrating too much on meta tags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

7 Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.

8 Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9 Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on The Importance of Backlinks

10 Lack of keywords in the content

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

SEO Keyword Tags

When it comes to search engine optimization, keyword tags are practically important. For one, SEO keyword tags are one of the reasons that can propel or pull your website down to the bottom list in a certain key phrase. Therefore, it is very much needed that a webmaster or any SEO specialist can learn its importance in a website.

A lot of SEO professionals nowadays would argue that SEO keyword tags are really no longer needed, with the presence of so many Flash sites. Nevertheless, it should be noted that these tags, along with other meta tags, are the very first information that the spider can notice every time it crawls your site. If title tags serves as your site's caption, then your SEO keyword tags give the overall scope of the information contained in your website.

When it comes to the relevancy of the website to a certain searched key phrase, SEO keyword tags also come in handy. Remember, these tags are actually hidden from the visitors; they are only made for the different search engine spiders to crawl. SEO keyword tags are used to measure the keyword density of the site, which then evaluates the relevancy of the site's content to the overall theme of the webpage.

For example, your site is all about sleeping disorders. If you have a keyword tag “sleep apnea,” Google’s spider will eventually check the site’s content for such phrase and measure its density. If the density is high, then you will probably find your site among the top list should anyone should search for the term “sleep apnea.”

Sometimes the logic of SEO keyword tags may be hard to comprehend, and oftentimes neglected. Yet, always keep in mind that in the world of SEO, everything related to search engine rankings counts, even these few words.

why outsourcing SEO is a good option for such business

Outsourcing has taken the business world by storm. And why not undertake this process for any business when one can only have many advantages after undertaking this process for their business. For those who are involved with online business, they know what it takes to catch the attention of search engines and this is why they are very particular about the SEO or search engine optimization strategy that they undertake for their business. However, we also know that anyone who is in the field of online marketing is not an individual who has knowledge about all the nuances related to SEO. This is one of the major reasons why outsourcing SEO is a good option for such business undertakings.

SEO is the work of a specialist and you cannot thrust such an important task of your business to just any individual. Outsourcing SEO will provide you with many options and one of them is that you will be able to hire the services of trained professionals to help you in your SEO work. If you have an online business site, undoubtedly you will want to promote this site on the web and outsourcing SEO is one of the most affordable means to do this for your site. If you have not undertaken outsourcing SEO services for your company, chances are there you will not be able to hire the services of trainer professionals as their services are quite expensive.

Outsourcing SEO can take care of many aspects related to your business and one of the most crucial things is that the process can help you in freeing up the internal resources of your business. When you undertake outsourcing SEO for your business, you will hand over the working of your company to a third party and this is the reason why you must decide carefully if you really want to undertake this process and how beneficial this will be for you. then prerogative lies in your hand as since you are the business owner you are in the best potion to decide if outsourcing SEO will be beneficial for your business or not.

Another reason why you must get highly trained professionals to do the work is that it is very important to study the existing market. And if you do not have expertise in this area, there is no way that the campaign can turn out to be successful. SEO requires different things to be done and finding out what strategies will best suit a business is also the work of an expert. Just make sure that the firm from which you are hiring the outsourcing SEO services has the experience of handling this work if you want to succeed in this venture.

Outsourcing SEO has been successfully undertaken by several businesses and there is no reason why you cannot implement this for your business. The purpose of all business is to earn profit and if a business process like outsourcing SEO can help out these businesses then there is no reason not to undertake this.

Friday, May 8, 2009

SEO The Old School Way

There's been a lot of changes in search engine optimization at least over the past 9 years that I've been doing it. Back in 1999 keyword stuffing was considered, if not white hat, then a reasonably grayish-white way to get a web page to the top of the rankings. Back then, you would come across many websites where the tops of the pages (above the fold as they say) were for the visitors of the site and keywords stuffed at the bottom of the page were for the search engines.
But, over time a consensus among webmasters, SEOs and the search engines emerged that this method was not preferable. What developed as preferable over time was writing complete sentences for the visitors of the website without any regard to the search engines. But, for a while the search engines lagged in rewarding this behavior ahead of the keyword stuffing behavior.
It was only after this reward system took hold, and the ranking algorithms became savvy to this trick and delivered a consistent reward-punishment system to shall we say, good pages versus bad pages, that webmasters and SEOs had a playbook in which to follow. Of course, many years ago, much of this was unspoken.
There was no Matt Cutts from Google or Google Guy giving SEOs hints here and there of what behaviors were considered white hat, black hat, gray hat or snow cone hat. Before the days of Matt Cutts, SEOs had to guess and talk to each other on message boards to compare, confabulate and surmise what was going on with the latest algorithm change or anomaly (of course this still goes on today).
But, just as the search engine algorithms evolved so have the black hat SEOs who have kept one step ahead of the search engines (or tried to) and have become even more sophisticated at gaming the system. Cloaking, sophisticated redirects for siphoning Page Rank (PR) or cheating link partners have abounded.
An entire industry has evolved around buying and selling text links for the purposes of passing PR from one site to the next. The buyers want to buy enough PR to get their websites up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and those doing the selling are happy to make a profit doing just that.
But, even throughout all the efforts to game the search engines, old school SEO hasn't changed that much over time. The basics of keyword research, on-page optimization, link-building and tracking results, which is the core of SEO has stayed the core.
Sure, there are new wrinkles as to exactly how to do this core of white hat search engine optimization. Within the past couple of years, blogs and social media have both come on strong and evolved. Old school SEOs have had to be flexible and adapt to new market conditions and even embrace the new online media.
But, when one gets lost in the new and shiny techniques (which is easy to do) it is important to pull back a while, gain some perspective and realize that old school SEO will still get a website where it needs to be. And, as trust is important in any business relationship, clients can rest assured that their white hat won't get their website dumped at the drop of a hat for using black hat techniques that the search engines have caught wind of and penalized.
Old school SEO still rocks and there is no reason to believe that this will change anytime soon

Friday, May 1, 2009

Number One Strategy to Boost Your SEO

Your Web Page Title, often referred to as your page Title Tag, is a very important factor to consider when optimizing your website to achieve high Google rankings. Get your Page Title Tags right and it is really going to help you get that 1st Page Google ranking.
What website designers usually do is just put your company name in the Web page title tags.
That is fine if you are just optimizing your website for your company name, but lets face it, most people do not know what your company name is, so by having just your company name in your webpage title it is not really doing you much good.
What you really want to do is to include your keywords in your pages titles, because that is what most people will be searching for.
The Title Text usually appears in the Blue Bar at the top of every web page.
Putting your Keywords in your Page Title is of utmost importance.
Imagine you are in a Library searching for a book on Internet Marketing, you will be faced with hundreds of books on Internet Marketing, what do you do next?
You would probably look at the titles printed on the spines of the books until you see the one that looks relevant to what you are searching for, you then look inside the book to see if it matches exactly what you need.
This is very similar to how Google works. First of all someone searches a keyword on Google e.g. Golf Balls. Google looks at all the web pages in its database that have the words 'Golf Balls' in the Page Titles (or as in our analogy - spines). If the web pages do not have the words Golf Balls in the Page Titles then it would be a major problem. You need to make it as easy as possible for Google to find your pages.
There are other factors Google uses, but you want to make your site as obvious as possible to Google when someone is searching for what you offer.
So, by putting your keywords in the Page Title the site stands a very good chance of getting listed when that term is searched.

SEO Expert That's Right For You

Having been in the business of Internet marketing and SEO or search engine optimization in Mumbai for the past few years, I have often been asked if SEO or search engine optimization is applicable and realistic for small businesses, home businesses and budding entrepreneurs.
Whether it's applicable for a garage enterprise, a local business or a large corporate is not the real question to be answered. The real question here is - Can the prospect of targeting billions of Internet users world-wide searching daily for news, entertainment, businesses, products and services be avoided by any smart businessmen?
Answering this part was easy, but what gets tricky is how to go about choosing a SEO or search engine optimization expert and building an Internet marketing strategy that's right for your business.
The issue is that even businesses that are aware of the benefits of SEO or search engine optimization and Internet marketing are not sure which way is the right way to go. And I don't blame them. After all there are so many misleading guarantees flying around, SEO or search engine optimization gurus and experts who claim they have found the secret key to driving traffic and business, and the stories of websites who claim to be generating thousands of hits without raising a finger does not lessen the pressure to get it right.
So in this confusing marketplace, how is one to go about choosing a SEO professional right for your business?
There are no shortcuts in life. It's the same way if you want to hire a SEO or search engine optimization professional and come up with a winning SEO or search engine optimization strategy that works for you, then its best that you understand whatsoever you can about the ground realities of search engine optimization.
No I am not asking you to all to become SEO or search engine optimization experts and spend your days and (probably) nights identifying the right keywords, optimizing the pages, creating compelling content, building quality links, checking and tweaking for rankings, analyzing analytics reports, analyzing competitors strategies, keeping up with search engine algorithms, and promoting your website across social networking and social bookmarking sites, blogs, RSS feeds and article submission sites. After all then I would be out of business.
There are many things the SEO or search engine optimization expert, or a SEO or search engine optimization company will not tell you. It's not that they are liars; they just don't feel you will be able to understand if told the naked truth. After all no one wants to be a wet blanket and destroy your dreams of achieving top rankings, and making your millions.
I hope to shed light on some of the blocks in your mind, before you go ahead and identify a SEO or search engine optimization expert that's right for you.


SEO or search engine optimization is for technology buffs