Leads & Traffic Blog

The Importance of SEO in Internet Marketing

Whether you are already running an internet marketing business or just getting to launch your new enterprise, one segment of the overall campaign you need to work on is search engine optimization (SEO). You will hear many people talking about it and arguing about the best methods. Cutting through the hype to learn at least the basics will help your overall business performance whether you take this task on yourself or hire an “expert” to do it for you.

Since traffic to your site and the squeeze pages you set up for specific campaigns is of the utmost importance in getting your message seen, you will have to delve into this mysterious world. The search engines, whether giants like Google or Yahoo, or smaller engines like Ask or Dogpile use a number of complex algorithms to determine how a site will place in their search engine results pages (SERP). The reason for SEO is so that when these programs combine all the information they gather about your site you will hopefully come out on the first or second page of the SERP.

Most people rely on the information found on the first few pages of the results to find what they are looking for and seldom go beyond that number of results before they have found what they were looking for. That is why you must optimize your pages. Without traffic to your site you will have no one to advertise to. Buying untargeted ads will waste your money whereas good SERP position will guarantee people who are looking for what you offer will find you first.

What do you need to optimize your pages? Well, many argue for this thing or that, but no one knows just what they search engines are looking for at any particular moment so you must cover all the bases. This means writing specific Meta tags for your pages that detail exactly what is to be found on the page. You must populate not only the Meta keywords in your tags but also in your page content. A 1.5%PRCTG% to 3%PRCTG% keyword saturation is the best target for these subject specific words. Make sure they are in the headers near the top and bottom and put them in your picture alt tags as well. Avoid frames as it is a rare search engine that can even see into them to know what is there.

Original content is another key to getting high SERP. If you have copy that is duplicated on a number of sites, the search engines will usually choose just one to index and merely cache the rest as “supplemental pages”. These pages do not get the good traffic or rankings.

Inbound links to your site from other, similar websites will increase your SERP. It is important to build a network of links within the overall topic of your site and thus create a related neighborhood within your niche. Just having links will not work. An inbound link from an automobile related site linking to a site about animals will actually decrrease the link’s value in the search engines ranking algorithms.

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Selecting Your Keywords

Search engines, in a very real sense, are the vehicles that deliver potential customers to your website. In order for potential visitors to reach their destination, that is, the website, you must provide specific and efficient guideposts that will direct them to the information they are requesting. The way to do this is to create carefully chosen keywords.

It may help to think of your site’s keywords as a magic charm that will help materialize traffic to your site. By using the right words, a user can type in his request in a search engine and by using precise keywords, is lead to your site. Generic or overused keywords will not do this as there may be thousands or millions of sites that try to catch too many people with general keywords and ultimately get fewer or none. And we know that fewer users translates out into fewer customers for your product, service or advertisements.

Keywords are the foundation of a marketing strategy. No matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, or however much you advertise, customers may never find you if your keywords are not chosen wisely. It is vital that you plot your marketing strategy by evaluating many keywords and phrases to find those that most precisely describe what your site is about.

When you begin creating your potential keyword list for evaluation you need to be objective and try to think like the potential customer. No matter how well you think you know what to describe your business as, it is still a good idea to poll a wide variety of people to see how they may describe it instead.

Since building a reputation as a serious business person will require you being a member of at least a few forums, you can run a poll and get input from the community on what they would type into a search engine box if they were looking for your product. You will probably find that your understanding of your business and the average user’s understanding is significantly different. The consumer is a valuable resource tool for research. You will find the words and ideas you can accumulate from them are often items you might never have thought of yourself.

Once you have you potential keyword list, you are ready to begin the process of evaluation. The goal of this evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest amount of quality visitors to your website. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, you should look for the elements of popularity, specificity and customer motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine and lead a customer to your website. One drawback to going only with popular keywords is that you will need a greater search engine position for it to work. Popularity alone will not serve you well. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the chances that a customer ready to purchase your product or services will find you. The greater the specificity of your keyword, the less competition you will have to deal with.

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How To Become Popular

Search engines are the first tool that potential customers use when searching for products or services they need. This is one of the reasons why link popularity is so important. If the viewers do not find your website, you have no chance of making a sale. Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines. It determines the ranking in the search engine results pages that your page gets when people enter the subjects they are looking for into the search engine dialog box.

Search engines will give a higher status and ranking to websites that have links to their pages from related sites. It is a simple formula and is quite important. While Google created this ranking system, just about all major search engines use this model or one very similar to rank website pages in their indexes.

The more common your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity. However, if you do not manage to achieve this step, it is almost certain your site will never manage a decent ranking in any search engine. There are ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are several very important things to be aware of when beginning to build links for popularity. Firstly you do not want to link up to just any website. Not only will you fail to rank in popularity, it could very well decrease your ranking if you do not have the right kind of links. Links from totally unrelated sites will count against you. Linking to a site which is nothing but links will cost you even more. These “link farms” are considered not only poor taste by the major search engines but blatant attempts to mislead their algorithms that determine rank and popularity.

Also research the sites you try to get links from. Links from higher ranking sites will be of more value to you than links from unranked or poorly ranked websites. You should maake sure that any site that has a link to yours is one that you would have no problems with your users going to and viewing. If it would be an embarrassment for your viewers to think you condone a linked site, then you need to request it be removed.

Next you will seek to obtain backlinks fro other closely related sites. While a direct competitor may not wish to share a link with you, there are usually related support fields that would be happy to trade links in order to expand the potential traffic and customers.

Not everyone wants to link to other sites. Some research is necessary when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is a good starting place for your search. Make sure to enter keywords that you think customers will also enter when looking for the information you are able to provide. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and assess them. Look for the quality of their products, the overall look of the site and the ease with which you can navigate through it. Check out any other sites they are linked to and determine if your own site would be similar enoug hto fit into this link neighborhood.

Pnce you have chosen a site that you would like a backlink from, you will have to convince them that it would be to their advantage to do so. The backlink is a favor you are requesting so being polite is essential. Maybe put a link to their site on yours before contacting them. Be sure that you have sufficient rank that it would not be a detriment to them. Then you would contact the site owner and request a recipricol link. Be polite and offer reasons why you think the links would be of mutual benefit. If they do not desire to link with you, thank them and move on.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, keeping in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have contacted relevant sites, make sure to check them frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it a few weeks to see if a link appears. Do not expect your rank to climb quickly. Google, for instance, only does a ranking update quarterly. However if you have spent the time well in optimizing your pages and developing good links to your site, you will be rewarded with the higher rank and greater weight and value will be given to your site in their results.

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Search Engine Mistakes

In the never ending struggle to reach the front page of search engine results pages there are a few techniques that need to be avoided at all costs. Whether done accidentally or intentionally, these methods will get you penalized by the search engines and you will see your ranking and position fall to the end of the line.

The first big mistake many people make is in not fully understanding the importance of specific, relevant keywords. When you have optimized your page for the wrong; usually too generic, keywords, you will find that the search engines will overlook your site most of the time. Even if you rank at the top of a seldom used keyword you will not get much if any traffic as no one is typing that word into the search boxes. Good keyword research will prevent this mistake from happening to you.

While the keywords in your Meta tags are important, avoid overfilling the keyword tag. If you list everything on the page as a keyword and end up with a long string of words in this tag, the search engines will automatically consider it “spamming” and will penalize your page for it. Sticking with a few extremely relevant words will gain you better results with no penalties.

Overusing your keywords in the body copy of your site will also be considered “spamming”. The best saturation of your keywords in your text and headers is usually between one and a half to three percent of total words. Anything over that will begin to make the page seem unfriendly or convoluted to your actual human viewers.

Some people will try to create different pages to appeal to the different guidelines of the various major search engines. Not only will this create a lot of unnecessary and very similar pages on your website, but will likely be considered duplicate copy by all the engines anyway. It would not even be worth considering the nightmare this would create in trying to keep updating these extraneous pages.

Hidden text is probably the worst way to try and increase keyword saturation without writing good optimized copy. This practice is where a website will inject copy onto the page in the same color as the background. It is hoped that while people don’t see it and be bothered with strained copy, the search engines which just look at the code will think the page is optimized. This is a bad move as over the years this trick has been caught and now it will usually get your site permanently banned when it is discovered.

If a page is almost entirely built with graphics, you have the problem of there being virtually no text on the page for the search engines to read and they will consider it a blank page. If you were to write enough copy for the alt tags to overcome this, you should just go on and put the text on the page where everyone can see it. A totally flash created page has proven to be even worse than all pictures when it comes to search engine crawling. Always make sure there is something to read on the page.

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Making Search Engines Happy

Would you like to design your website to make it a pleasant crawl for the search engine spiders? Building your pages in such a way as to fit the preferences of the search engine providers can give you a big boost in your ranking and in page results. There are a few tactics that will make this possible.

First off, you should read and study the guidelines published by the major search engines. Google takes credit for being the first of the major search engines to list how to optimize your page for their perusal. The “Webmaster Guidelines” details the most common types of optimization that they consider deceptive or manipulative of the search engine algorithms. “SEO Guidelines” is their online advice and instructions on what they feel are the correct applications to take to make your website pages easier to index with their search engine.

Since this open policy was made clear by Google, the other major search engine companies have also followed this trend towards teaching compliance and now you may compare their instructions to the guidelines published by MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista and Ask; formerly Ask Jeeves. They have available their “Terms of Service”, a guideline of search engine spam and definitions of what they consider inappropriate actions.

It is possible that a design feature of your site could get you penalized without you having intentionally seeking to deceive the search engines. It is a very good idea to compare the different guidelines and keep up with any updates or new policies they come out with. Research is a key to any good business and researching the needs and desires of the search engines will help you lead the pack as it were with your competitors.

Other good places to check are the webmaster forums. From these you can usually pick up tips on better optimization techniques or the latest method that has been banned by the search engines. One should always be on the lookout for ways to tweak their pages for better performance.

The search engine companies themselves encourage you to report suspicious SEO tactics to them. If you encounter a website that is blatantly set up to spam the search engines Google wants to know about it at search-quality@google.com and you can also report to information@ask.com about sites in their results pages. Yahoo has a specific area on their website where you can report search engine abuses. This policing action is designed to make the entire process of ranking quality sites over deceivers an ongoing process of giving the end user the best results possible to their information search.

Despite the admonitions of some SEO experts, the search engines do prefer you create your site with the human user in mind and make sure the content of your pages is relevant and understandable. Make your site user friendly and easy to navigate and they will take this into consideration when ranking your site in their result pages. After all, the purpose of their efforts is to make the world wide web a more helpful place for humans.

The thing to do is at the very least to include good text based content and simple descriptive navigation menus. Include good keyword phrases that are most likely to be used by real humans in a search. Link to properly relevant sites outside your own and make sure all the links, shopping carts or other features on your site work properly.

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Search Engines Love Sitemaps

Anyone who has worked on developing a website soon learns that it is essential to develop methods of search engine optimization on their websites in order to get traffic. The traffic to a website is the users who will hopefully engage in either buying a product or service from the internet businessman or at least click through the ads on his page so as to earn some monetary compensation. One of the most overlooked elements of optimizing your website for the search engines in including a sitemap page.

The search engines have developed a program that scans the world wide web and, by use of complex programming algorithms, will catalog the information it finds about the websites it views. These programs, called spiders, check a number of factors. There are the keywords listed in the metatags that it compares to the content of the page to see if they are relevant to each other. There is the amount of traffic a website already receives. It looks at where the inbound and outbound links to other websites lead and determine if they are relevant to each other. Once the spider has crawled the pages of your website it will usually index information about what it has discovered.

Now, here is the good thing about creating a sitemap for your website. When the spider starts to crawl your pages and finds a sitemap, it goes directly to it and then checks everything from there. It makes the scan quicker and more concise. The algorithms take the sitemap as an indication that the website is well organized and will give it a higher rating. It will also be more inclined to index and cache the pages on the search engine’s servers. This makes the job of recalling information asked for in a search much quicker.

With a well ordered list of the pages, keywords and links on your site, the spider will be better able to find what it is looking for. Having your keywords and links on display will help prevent essential data from being accidentally hidden or left undiscovered in the content on your pages. One must, of course, not try to cram their keywords too often on their sitemap or they will occasionally find themselves penalized as “keyword stuffers” or “keyword spammers”. However, writing this directory page to your site will give the search engine spider a better chance of seeing the worth of your information and usually move you up in the results page because of it.

The sitemap will also help you with your human visitors as well. It is especially important if you have a large amount of pages and data on your site to create the sitemap as a sort of “table of contents” so that someone who has found your site can go to this internal roadmap and find the pertinent information they are looking for more quickly. While they may not be consciously aware of it, the user who has trouble navigating a site will be less inclined to want to come back to it again.

And finally, the sitemap can help you get an overall look at your site and see where there are areas that may need to be improved, which will ultimately improve your site and give it an even greater value to both the user and the search engines.

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Why Internet Marketing Needs SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered a vital element of any internet marketing strategy. It is important as there is so much to be gained from SEO in terms of free targeted advertising. Failure to optimize your website for search engines can result in a major loss of website traffic which is essentially gained from a well ranked page in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Search engine optimization is a method by which a website is designed to obtain favorable search engine rankings from the search engines. This can be achieved in a number of ways and the best SEO strategies combine a variety of different elements to create a well constructed SEO campaign. There are several elements to consider when optimizing your website for the search engines. These include keyword density and prominence, Meta tags, titles and relevant inbound links. Keyword density is the most common SEO strategy and essentially involves using precise keywords frequently in the content of your website. This demonstrates the relevance of your page by including these keywords that relate to the website’s topic. Search engines will usually reward websites with optimal keyword densities with favorable SERP as a way to provide internet users with the most relevant websites for their particular search terms.

The saturation of keywords needs to be considered. This includes how close the keywords are placed at the beginning of the website. It is a mistake to believe the first occurrence of keywords should be in the first line of visible text on the webpage. Search engines crawl the html code of a website as well as the visible text on the page. This means there are many opportunities to include relevant keywords before the actual visible content occurs. It includes the code for the title as well as the Meta tags. One should, however, not overdo their keywords or it will have the opposite effect on the ranking.

Another very important area of concern is inbound links. Inbound links are essentially links which reside on other websites and direct traffic to your website. These links are considered important because many search engines place a high value on relevant inbound links. They are essentially an example of one website recommending another website. However, when obtaining inbound links, it is important to obtain them from websites which have a high page ranking. Search engines consider the rank of the original website when determining the value of the inbound link.

SEO is vitally important because most internet users value the results of search engines and are likely to only visit high ranking websites when they search for a particular keyword. Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant content first and are not as likely to visit websites which do not fall on the first or second page of search results. This means essentially that websites which rank well are receiving a great deal of traffic from search engines that place their website in a key position. Website owners who do not invest time into optimizing their websites miss out on a great number of potential customers.

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Marketing Strategies SEO or PPC

There are two very different processes that you can take in working your site up to the front of the search engine results pages. As with any options there are both good and bad points in these techniques and it is up to each website owner to determine which method will work best for them.

With “Pay Per Click” marketing strategies you can quickly bring potential customers to your website by having them click through on an ad you have running. This process has been extremely effective for companies that have a sizable budget for paying website owners a small commission of fee for having the ads on their sites.

Of the benefits to PPC marketing one is that you do not have to change your site to conform to search engine guidelines to get people to your site. You will only have to pay for this advertising if it is actually clicked by a potential customer. With PPC advertising you can direct a potential customer to a specific page or section of your website that is the most relevant to the advertised product or service. You are able to target specific regions or countries with your advertising and finally, you will be able to rank highly on whatever specific keyword you wish to use so long as you have the money to cover the bid and click fees. The biggest drawback to this type of marketing is that once you cease running the PPC ads, you may experience a severe drop in traffic since that is how users had been drawn to your site.

When you utilize “Search Engine Optimization” strategies to promote your website you will have to work at creating specific aspects within your actual html page code to make it more acceptable to the search engines. Of major advantage to this form of marketing campaign is that the traffic you receive through search engine results pages are totally free of charge. Once you have developed a good search engine friendly page and get it to rank highly with them, the ranking will stay with you for a good while without having to do any more work on the page. Having gained a good ranking with SEO tactics you will find the cost efficiency to be able to save greatly on your marketing budget. Also, people are more likely to trust a site that has developed its high ranking through creating friendly pages. It is the feeling that the trust is earned through them being somewhat “validated” by an outside source, specifically the search engine companies.

The biggest drawback to SEO marketing is that it will take some time to build up the ranking your site has. It is a slower process but has the equal advantage of staying on top longer once you have achieved high ranking status. As with most things in business, your decisions will come down to the conflict between time and money. Determining which of these two commodities you are more able to afford will help you decide which direction you will take with your marketing campaign.

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A Forgotten Secret For Search Engine Success

Everyone who is seriously working to improve their business and placement on the search engines to gain needed traffic from potential customers is looking for new ways to rank better. Many people with huge advertising budgets are actually buying their way into the front pages of search engine results. However, that option is usually out of reach of the ordinary company.

There is one secret place that is of vital importance to place on your site that will draw the attention of the search engine spiders and give your site more relevance with them. It is the “title” of your web page. In basic usage this is the meta tag that places the text in the top title bar of the web browser. It will tell the user what the page is called. But it does more than make your user comfortable that they have found what they were looking for. It is one of the first places a search engine spider looks when it crawls your webpage.

It is checking to see that the title is relevant to the keywords and content on the rest of the page. If you just use a company name, it may not actually say much about what the page is about and will lose you ranking. It is for this fact that you must make sure that each and every page of your site has its own unique and descriptive title. If you were to just name every page in your website with your company name, then the algorithms that the search engines use to determine relevance will probably interpret this as a number of copies of the same page and dump the entire site into “supplemental” status which will never show up on a search engine results page.

You need to incorporate your keywords, or at least one of them, in your page title. This assures the spiders that your page is not misleading about its content. Once coupled with the headers and a proper balance and saturation of this keyword or phrase your page will get a better ranking and be moved much closer to the front page of the results when a topic is searched for. It is usually best to use your strongest keyword. This is the one that research has proven to be the most searched for word that pertains to your topic and niche. Remember, the search engines can only know what you tell them, whether it is the right thing or not.

Additionally, you can tweak the title in relation to the scope of your business as well. If by chance your business is of a local or regional nature, you can include the city or area name in the title page and make it more specific to your target area. This will also place you at the top when a user searches for a specific area to seek a product or service from. Of course, this will not work for a global market, but it is one more idea for making precise changes to your webpage that will increase your ranking, results and traffic.

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Be an SEO Spy

There are a few undercover methods to researching just what makes a high ranking webpage that you can use in order to improve the setup of your own pages. Besides just looking at the website of a successful competitor, you can also take a peak at what lies underneath that high ranked page by investigating the source code on their pages.

In the dropdown menu of your web browser there is a tab labeled “view”. You will want to check the box “view source”. This will show you the actual html code of the page in question. There are several places to check for how they placed their information for best results. Look at how they set up their meta tags and meta keywords. Make a list of the ones they used and compare them to how they would relate to your site.

Then look at where these keywords are used in the headers on the page. You should find the primary keywords near the top and the bottom of the page. Different search engines will read a page in varying ways and this will help prove that your entire page is relevant to the topic. If no keyword is found in a large part of the page, the computing algorithms will consider that the point was lost somewhere in the text.

The alt tags of the pictures placed on the page are another good place to drop an appropriate keyword or two. Many people forget that the alt tag is very important to search engine spiders. They cannot see the picture so they rely on a description to know if it is relevant to the page topics. With no alt tag, they will consider the picture a null spot in the page. Then check to see the overall placement, or weight, of the keywords throughout the text on the page. Optimally this should be between one and a half to three percent of the overall text. Do not overuse your keywords. BY the tim you reach a five percent saturation, the search engines will begin to consider that you are “spamming” the keyword and will actually devalue your page for it. It is a fine but very important distinction to maintain.

With the increased use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for design, you will not be as likely to see just how they achieved the look of the page, but that is not necessary. You do not want to look like a clone anyway. But by evaluating the source code of a number of successful high ranking pages you will get a better idea of what it takes to gain the search engine’s approval. You will also have gathered a list of effective keywords in your niche that can be used as a starting point for your own keyword evaluation.

You can use this data to construct your own pages with the happy knowledge that you will be able to move more swiftly up the ranks toward that coveted first page placement in the search engine results pages and ultimate business success.

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