Ten SEO Tips for any Website

Ten SEO Tips for any Website

Achieving a high ranking in the search results at Google and other search sites is, for many websites, the primary means of attracting new visitors and increasing traffic. That's why it's important to optimize your site for search, using various search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. The better optimized your site, the higher it will appear in the search rankings—and the more traffic you'll attract.

With that in mind, here are 10 SEO tips that you can use with any website, no matter what the site's content. Follow the advice here and you'll likely improve your ranking!

TIP #1: Improve Your Content
Ultimately, people visit a given website because it has valuable content. If the content isn't any good, all the SEO in the world won't create new visitors.

That's why of all the SEO tips in the world, the one that has the biggest impact is improving your website's content. It's simple: The better your site is, content-wise, the higher it will rank.

You see, when it comes to search rank, content is king. Ultimately, the better search engines find some way to figure out what your site is all about; the higher quality and more relevant your site's content is to a particular search, the more likely it is that a search engine will rank your site higher in its results.

So forget all about fancy keywords and technical META tags for the time being, and focus on what it is your site does and says.

If your site is about NASCAR racing, work to make it the most content-rich site about NASCAR you can; if it's about aquariums, make it the highest-quality aquarium site possible. Don't skimp on the content—the more and more relevant content you have, the better.

Here's what you need to remember: SEO isn't about technological tricks. It's about making your site more useful to visitors—and that means providing the best possible content you can. Everything else follows from this.

TIP #2: Create a Clear Organization and Hierarchy
Here's an important fact: Web crawlers for the major search sites can find more content on a web page and more web pages on a website if that content and those pages are in a clear hierarchical organization.

Let's look at page organization first. You want to think of each web page as a mini-outline. The most important information should be in major headings, with lesser information in subheadings beneath the major headings.

One way to do this is via standard HTML heading tags, with the most important information in H1 tags, the next most-important in H2 tags, and less-important information in H3 tags.

This approach is also appropriate for your entire site layout. Your home page should contain the most important information, with subsidiary pages branching out from that containing less important information—and even more subpages branching out from those. The most important info should be visible when a site is first accessed via the home page; additional info should be no more than a click or two away.

TIP #3: Fine-Tune Your Keywords
Just as important as a page's layout is the page's content in terms of keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase that the user searches for.

In determining search ranking, the major search engines look to determine how important a keyword or phrase is on your page. They do this by seeing where on the page the keyword is used and how many times it's used. A site with a keyword buried near the bottom of a page will rank lower than one with the keyword placed near the top or used repeatedly in the page's text. It's not a foolproof way of determining importance and appropriateness, but it's a good first stab at it.

When various search engines examine your page, they look for the most important words—those words used in the site's title or headings, those words that appear in the opening paragraph, and those words that are repeated throughout the page. The more and more prominently you include a word on your page, the more important a search engine will think it is to your site.

For this reason, you want to make sure that each and every page on your site contains the keywords that users might use to search for your pages. If your site is all about drums, make sure your pages include words like "drums," "percussion," "sticks," "heads," "cymbals," "snare," and the like. If your site is about dogs, include words like "dog," "puppy," "canine," "beagle," "collie," "dachshund," and such.

Try to think through how you would search for this information, and work those keywords into your content.

TIP #4: Tweak Your META Tags
A search engine looks not just to the text that visitors see when trying to determine the content of your site. Also important is the presence of keywords in your site's HTML code—specifically within the META tag.

The META tag includes metadata about your site, such as your site's name and keyword "content." This tag appears in the head of your HTML document, before the BODY tag and its contents.

It's easy enough for a search engine to locate the META tag and read the data contained within. If a site's metadata is properly indicated, this gives the search engine a good first idea about what content is included on this page.

Fortunately, you can insert multiple META tags into the head of your document, and each tag can contain a number of different attributes. For example, you can assign attributes for your page's name, a description, and keywords to the META tag.

You use separate META tags to define different attributes using the following format:

META NAME="attribute" CONTENT="items"NOTE

In the previous line of code, replace attribute with the name of the particular attribute, and items with the keywords or description of that attribute.

For example, to include a description of your web page, enter this line of code:

META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="All about stamp collecting"
To include a list of keywords, use the following code:

META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"

TIP #5: Solicit Inbound Links
Google got to be Google by recognizing that web rankings could be somewhat of a popularity contest; that is, if a site got a lot of traffic, there was probably a good reason why. A useless site wouldn't attract a lot of visitors (at least not long term), nor would it inspire other sites to link to it.

So if a site has a lot of other sites linking back to it, it's probably because that site offers useful information relevant to the site doing the linking. The more links to a given site, the more useful it probably is.

Google took this to heart and developed its own algorithm, dubbed PageRank, which is based first and foremost on the number and quality of sites that link to a particular page.

If your site has a hundred sites linking to it, for example, it should rank higher in Google's search results than a similar site with only ten sites linking to it. Yes, it's a popularity contest, but one that has proven uncannily accurate in providing relevant results to Google's users.

And it's not just the quantity of links; it's also the quality. That is, a site that includes content that is relative to your page is more important than just some random site that links to your page. For example, if you have a site about NASCAR racing, you'll get more oomph with a link from another NASCAR-related site than you would with a link from a site about Barbie dolls. Relevance matters.

So when it comes to increasing your rankings at Google (which is, far and away, the largest and most important search engine), you can get a big impact by getting more higher-quality sites to link back to your site.

There are a number of ways to do this: from just waiting for the links to roll in to actively soliciting links from other sites. You can even pay other sites to link back to your site; when it comes to increasing your site's search ranking, little is out of bounds. But however you do, increasing the number and quality of inbound links is essential.

TIP #6: Submit Your Site
While you could wait for the each search engine's crawler to find your site on the Web, a more proactive approach is to manually submit your site for inclusion in each engine's web index. It's an easy process—and one that every webmaster should master.

Fortunately, submitting your site to a search engine is an easy process. In fact, it's probably the easiest part of the SEO process. All you have to do is go the submission page for each search engine, as noted here:

•Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
•Yahoo!: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit/
•Windows Live Search: search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
As easy as this site submittal process is, some webmasters prefer to offload the task to a site submittal service. These services let you enter your URL once and then submit it to multiple search engines and directories; they handle all the details required by each search engine. Given that many of these services are free, it's not a bad way to go.

TIP #7: Create a Sitemap
Here's something else that you can submit to increase your site's ranking: a sitemap. A sitemap is a map of all the URLs in your entire website, listed in hierarchical order. Search engines can use this sitemap to determine what's where on your site, find otherwise-hidden URLs on deeply buried pages, and speed up their indexing process. In addition, whenever you update the pages on your website, submitting an updated sitemap helps keep the search engines up-to-date.

The big three search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search), along with Ask.com, all support a single sitemap standard. This means you can create just one sitemap that all the search engines can use; you don't have to worry about different formats for different engines.

Your sitemap is created in a separate XML file. This file contains the distinct URLs of all the pages on your website. When a searchbot reads the sitemap file, it learns about all the pages on your website—and can then crawl all those pages for submittal to the search engine's index.

By the way, the new unified sitemap format allows for autodiscovery of your site's sitemap file. Previously, you had to notify each search engine separately about the location of each file on your site. Now you can do this universally by specifying the file's location in your site's robots.txt file.

While you could create a sitemap file by hand, it's far easier to generate that sitemap automatically. To that end, many third-party sitemap-generator tools exist for just that purpose. For most of these tools, generating a sitemap is as simple as entering your home page URL and then pressing a button.

The tool now crawls your website and automatically generates a sitemap file; once the sitemap file is generated, you can then upload it to the root directory of your website, reference it in your robots.txt file, and, if you like, submit it directly to each of the major search engines.

TIP #8: Use Text Instead of Images
It's important to know that today's generation of search engines parse only text content; they can't figure out what a picture or video or Flash animation is about, unless you describe it in the text. So if you use graphic buttons or banners (instead of plain text) to convey important information, the search engines simply won't see it. You need to put every piece of important information somewhere in the text of the page—even if it's duplicated in a banner or graphic.

So if you use images on your site, which you probably do, make sure that you use the ALT tag for each image—and assign meaningful keywords to the image via this tag. A searchbot will read the ALT tag text; it can't figure out what an image is without it.

Similarly, don't hide important information in Flash animations, JavaScript applets, video files, and the like. Remember, searchbots can only find text on your page—all those non-text elements are invisible to a search engine

TIP #9: Update Your Content Frequently
It pays to constantly update your site. Because most searchbots crawl the Web with some frequency, looking for pages that have changed or updated content, your ranking can be affected if your site hasn't changed in a while. So you'll want to make sure that you change your content on a regular basis; in particular, changing the content of your heading tags can have a big impact on how "fresh" the search engine thinks your site is.

TIP #10: Know Your Customer
This final tip is a piece of business advice I've been hawking for the past two decades. Everything you do in business—or on your website—should come in service to your customers. You don't develop a new product just because you have the capability; you do it because it's something your customers want.

To that end, knowing what your customers want is the most important part of your business. If you know your customers, you can develop a website that they will want to visit—and that search engines will want to rank highly. Know what your customers want and you'll know what kind of content to create, and how to present that content.

And because SEO starts with your optimizing site's content, the better and more relevant that content, the higher your site will rank with Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines.

Know your customer, and everything else follows.

Microsoft Search And SEO's

Microsoft Search And SEO's

Microsoft has remodeled their search engine over and over again. The Microsoft Network, or MSN whose origins started as an ISP and an online portal when Windows 95 came out grew into a search engine that was always trailing as the 3rd most used search engine behind Google and Yahoo in terms of search engine usage with the United States. From MSN.com to Live.com and finally Bing.com...

SEO Need-To-Know

is now branding itself as a "decision engine." Do they mean Bing has some unique decision algorithm in giving relevant results that it can decide on what are the best sites for you to look at? Not really. It is a decision engine that it gives you various types of results that may help you decide on what you are looking for. In my opinion this just sounds like Google Universal Search Results, just gave it a new name from Live to Bing and slapped a full marketing campaign on various advertising mediums to spread the word of the Gospel of Bing everywhere.

Should I even care about Bing?

From daily SEO interactions from SEO friends working at an SEO firm, SEO friends on forums I interact with daily, to some SEO competitors who joined Sulumits Retsambew SEO Contest, a large percent of SEO professionals do not even care about Bing because they believe Google has the majority search usage world wide. Based on some research data by comScore, last April 2009, Google websites receive about 8 times more search queries than Microsoft websites.

Is this the case forever? We cannot really say as Microsoft is really pushing their search engine all out in this marketing campaign of Bing that there are some sites showing Bing gaining in market share. As for the usage, several news site and blogs are showing an increase in Bing search traffic but this can still be due to the campaign that makes everyone curious about Bing and everyone checks it out. And in the end, it will still boil down to how please the search engine users are in being able to look for what they are searching for. So we still have yet to see in the next few months if Bing's traffic sticks or continues to increase or will drop again as being the 3rd used search engine again.

Going back to the question, should you even care about Bing? Well if Bing is only 8.2% of all search queries, that can still be a big number. The US has 220 million Internet users and about 73% of those use search engines for shopping, that is an estimated 13 million people searching Bing in the US. Still a large market to target. Ok you can say my numbers are not accurate. My B2C Local Business Search data was from Neilsen back in September 2007, even 50% of 13 million is still a significant amount of people using Bing.

I'm an SEO and what do I need to know about Bing?

Ok SEO people, what do we need to know? Since Live.com, we have been seeing Microsoft reach out to SEO people, when they came out with their own XML Sitemap submission area, with some basic top 5 backlink info, and making an MS Excel plugin for keyword research from Microsoft's AdCenter, now with Bing, they have released a Bing webmaster guideline document for the SEO people that cared about Bing to read.

Most SEO concepts are the same throughout search engines. Good SEO best practices are valid for most search engines. And in this 24 pages of information of Bing's webmaster guidelines, after reading all of it, I will try to sum it up into 3 key bullet points below that may be unique to Bing:


1.Target Category Keywords that appear on the upper left of the SERPs. You want to make sure you appear on all of them that are good converting keywords for your business. People usually narrow down search results by adding in keyword modifiers and Bing suggest these so people do not have to think or type and may find it convenient to click. It is even placed on the top left sidebar where navigational menus people normally click on.

2.Optimize the Document Preview of your pages. All SEO people know that the Title tag and Meta description tag does not only help in the ranking process but if written well, these can be more compelling to click and increases CTR. Now aside from these two, Bing now has the Document preview which based on current observations it is pulling in the initial content found on the page. Thus your first few paragraphs would be ideal to write something very idea to click on.

Having your address and phone number which is a normal practice for Local SEO is a good thing since Document Preview will try to look for this information and place it in the preview window.
If you do not want this feature enabled, you can use the nopreview tag.
meta name="robots" content="nopreview"

3.Implement SEO Flash Best Practices. Bing has expressed their sophistication in their technology specifically stating this:

When titles and/or meta descriptions dont exist on an HTML page, at runtime Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing, in the effort to improve searcher experience and avoid empty captions, can even construct captions using keyword inbound link text from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

Initially this sounds good. But sometimes any information based on other websites may give you a limited amount of control. Every business has enemies and sometimes even if the enemies are a minority, they can sometimes be the "noisiest" online and could be creating a significant amount of negative publicity about your business. You do not want Bing to show this information thus as a precautionary measure, always do Flash properly.

Everything else mentioned in their webmaster guideline whitepaper are all standard SEO best practices applicable to other search engines, such as good content, unique title tags and meta tags, avoid duplicate content, etc.

So if you know SEO already these are the 3 main differences above you might want to look at when optimizing for Bing.

Links - Basic SEO interpretation

Links - Basic SEO interpretation

A site alone cannot achieve the full return on investment without using certain SEO techniques. Link building, one of the more effective ways of promoting a website on the Web, is an often discussed, and debated subject. There are varied types of link building techniques and strategies which could help in improving your standings within the index. Let's have a look at different types of link building techniques used in search engine optimization strategies.

One way links
Here one site gets a link on another website due to the quality and relevance, and not for the business purpose. The website whose link is posted, does not need to provide a link back to the site on which it is posted. Best type of linking to work towards.

Reciprocal links
Another widely used strategy of link building is 'reciprocal linking'. Here there is link exchange between two websites on one to one basis. Care needs to be taken in choosing reciprocal link partners, as fraudulent webmasters can take undue advantage. It is advisable to review any requests for link exchanges before finalizing. This can be seen as a last alternative if a one way link isn't in the cards. A little more towards the quantity end of the spectrum.

Articles
Article submission in various directories is a sure shot method to build effective link building to your website. You can write one article per day or as much as you want and submit to directories. Submission can be done in many directories altogether, where one-way links are given to your site from the articles. Other sites that use your articles also provide one-way link to your site from other websites. Quantity linking is where this would fall into.

Press releases
Press release submission in various press release directory and leading news site is a best way to get natural back links from your press release articles. You need to write press release article about your new product launches or news releases in your industry. In the deep end of the quantity pool, great for getting out a blast of information to multiple sources, quickly.

Social bookmarking and Social networking
Social bookmarking and social networking is one of the newest ways to get back links and more visitors to your website. Experience is varied, but on the whole it will send more traffic to your site. If your content is relevant to the readers interest, it's up to them at that point to provide the link back to your site.

The most important point when it comes to links however, quality link building is far better than quantity link building.

Google Stability Returns to Online Advertising

Google Stability Returns to Online Advertising

Google have announced higher returns than expected this quarter as the online advertising market has stabilised from its little wobble last quarter in the States.

Wall Street forecasts expected further plunges in the online marketing industry as a whole, but Google has once again beaten the trend and exceeded expectations. Total revenues increased to $5.5 billion (£3.4 billion) up by 3 per cent. After removing affiliate fees, Google’s revenue generated from digital marketing this quarter came in at $4.07 billion (£2.49 billion), $10 million ahead of Bloomberg estimates.

Google’s return to form should be echoed throughout the advertising industry online as the market settles from the blip that occurred earlier this year. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: “We’re not at the moment looking at the downward spiral we thought we might be six months ago,” according to Financial Times.

The uptake of advertising on Google’s video streaming site YouTube has helped revenues across the Atlantic, although at the monstrous rate of growth, YouTube is still much more of a financial burden to Google than a blessing. The company announced in May that they were receiving over 20 hours of uploaded content every minute to the website which is taking its toll on bandwidth and storage capacity.

Google have been smart to take precautions though, axing the unprofitable newspaper and radio-advertising arms of its business and focusing on the online model. “What they’ve done is gone and eliminated the obvious initiatives that were not performing very well,” analyst Youssef Squali told Bloomberg.com.

The market is returning to normality, with Google keeping a firm grip at the top of the online advertising tree.

Inbound Internet Marketing

Inbound Internet Marketing

In response to the evolving change in online marketing strategies, Fresh Traffic announces a complete Inbound Internet Marketing package that encompasses everything a business needs in order to become a web marketing powerhouse. Fresh traffic is an Internet Marketing Services company that expertly provides small businesses with the much needed edge in the big world of search engine marketing to increase their customer base without depleting the company’s financial resources.

“Businesses are seeking returns on their marketing dollars and they're shifting money out of expensive phonebook ads, direct mail, telemarketing, and into website optimization, expert content and social media that help them get found in organic search results.”Marketing your business in today's online world, forces small businesses to throw out the old handbook and try new strategies. Traditional outbound marketing using direct mail, print advertising, and phonebook ads are becoming more expensive and less effective. Today, consumers use search engines, blogs, and social media to learn about products and services.

"Businesses are seeking returns on their marketing dollars and they're shifting money out of expensive phonebook ads, direct mail, telemarketing, and into website optimization, expert content and social media that help them get found in organic search results.""These changes are laying the foundation for a new marketing strategy on the web.

To succeed online today, businesses need to adopt an Inbound Internet Marketing Strategy. Instead of pushing a sales message out, inbound marketing is the process of drawing prospective customers into their business by allowing the consumer to choose to learn more about a company’s product or service. Fresh traffic's Inbound Marketing Services will help small businesses be found on search engines, blogs, the media, and help convert those new visitors into leads.

Online Marketing Eats Into Traditional Media

Online Marketing Eats Into Traditional Media

Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21 percent of all marketing dollars spent in 2014 as advertisers shift money away from traditional media to search marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, social media and mobile promotions, according to a recent study.

The trend is already underway, as more marketers this year are taking money from traditional marketing budgets and using it in interactive advertising, as opposed to supporting interactive efforts with new funding, as was the case in years past, according to the Forrester Research report "US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014," by Shar VanBoskirk.

"This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening and a new identity for Yahoo," writes VanBoskirk.

She goes on to say that while ad budgets will decrease, marketing investments won't, as any money saved by using cheaper interactive media will be put toward funding IT technology and staff, customer service and so on.

Given this, traditional ad agencies must include interactive marketing for mere survival. "We've hinted before that agencies that can't transition from pushing out messages to nurturing customer connections aren't long for this world. Agency readers, heed our warning. Services firms that lack data management, analytics, listening, social media execution, and strategy expertise will dry up," warns the report.

Social media campaigns are growing into an established part of the interactive ad mix as more companies embrace it -- 64 percent of marketers already build social media applications and 22 percent more will by the end of 2009.

Search marketing continues to do well, in both adoption, today 80 percent of marketers use it, and money spent. "Search marketing accounts for 59 percent of the overall interactive pie. We project spend on paid listings, which includes paid inclusion, and search engine optimization (SEO) to grow at a CAGR of 15 percent, to $31 billion by 2014," according to the report.

The report says advertisers favor pay-per-click over impression-based display campaigns, with 58 percent going to PPC - and the trend is expected to continue. Rich media is also gaining traction, currently about one-third of display spend, rich media will grow to 45 percent by 2014 as marketers use more and pay a premium for rich media.

E-mail marketing continues to grow, with an 11 percent CAGR over the next five years, due to the "green" market campaigns being in vogue and to increased integration with social media sites.

Online Advertising Shift to be spent on SEO

Online Advertising Shift to be spent on SEO

Digital media analysts Outsell Inc. have projected in their annual advertising study for 2009 that some $65 billion (£39 billion) is due to be skimmed off the top of traditional advertising budgets and reallocated online.

Major brands are going through some hefty corporate liposuction, sucking the fat media budgets out of TV and newspaper and plumping up online spending. The trend towards digital has been talked about for quite some time, but according to Outsell, the money will not be transferred directly to an online advertising equivalent of the traditional ads.

Instead of investing in internet advertising, companies are increasingly looking to spend money improving their own websites, with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web analytics and good quality relevant content.

Chief executive at Outsell, Anthea Stratigos spoke in an interview with Forbes: “The marketing dollars companies now spend on their own sites is equivalent to all TV ad revenue for the year. Eight years ago we said that the Global 2000 would be the dot-coms of tomorrow. That’s what is playing out.”

Investors calling Time on AOL

Investors calling Time on AOL

Struggling internet company AOL is pleading for patience from investors, insisting that online advertising revenues will pick up in the next two years.

Time Warner laboured over the decision to untangle themselves from the lead weight of AOL, but finally decided to jettison the company in February. Nine years ago, the two companies made the “deal of the century” with a merger that saw AOL takeover Time Warner for $160 billion.

It didn’t take long for the deal to go sour. The “transformed landscape” of digital media quickly turned into a quagmire, with AOL failing to move with the changing trends, crucially missing out on the broadband explosion and early movers who made the most out of the emerging internet advertising movement.

As subscribers dropped by two thirds, AOL shrivelled into virtual insignificance. The company changed its business model to focus on digital marketing but by then they had lost the edge of being on the frontier, and were playing catch up with the likes of Google and Yahoo. In the last three quarters, AOL’s revenue took a 20 per cent nose dive, hastening Time Warner’s decision to ditch its partner.

AOL’s chief executive Tim Armstrong told investors that AOL will make a comeback in the advertising market as the industry bounces back from the recession. “Advertisers are going to be driving to Internet Road and AOL is a major property on Internet Road,” Mr Armstrong told Reuters. The new look AOL will be pure display advertising, but with the frontier moving again to SEO, AOL could once again be caught one step behind its competitors.

The end of SEO?

The end of SEO?

The end of the world (of SEO) is coming! Or at least, that's what some recent articles might tell you. Just a couple of erroneous statements I've read over the last few days:

"Social media (Twitter/Facebook etc) will soon be *the only* viable marketing medium"
There's been loads of social mediums before Facebook and Twitter, and they've had their time and moved on. The net is an ever evolving, morphing, living thing, and just like everything living, it needs it's heart and circulation. If you start following pages and links, all roads lead back to (you guessed it) Google (and other associated SE's).

And one of the more confusing comments I've read to date;

"Google will stop using backlinks in the very near future"
Google's (and other SE's) index is built, in part, by the the way the web is interconnected; ie: backlinks. For them to stop using that method to crawl the web, and determine some level of relevance, they would have to "re-invent the wheel". Seeing as that hasn't happened yet, I won't be holding my breath for this to happen either.

Search engine optimization and marketing strategies are an ever changing, and growing field. Full of pitfalls, short cuts, good ideas and bad. But it's not going away, it will merely begin to fly instead of run; adapt and survive.

Imminent death of SEO

Imminent death of SEO

The imminent death of SEO has been a hot topic amongst SEO professionals for quite some time now. Some SEO professionals worry that their careers are in jeopardy since search engines are continually making improvements to their technologies. Search engines are in the process of completely revamping their ranking strategies to fight spammers and improve user experience. For example, Google is currently improving intent and behavior-based search in order to provide more relevant search results. So what does this all mean for the future of SEO? Is the death of SEO an inevitable outcome of the advancement of search engines?

People have been predicting the end of SEO since the very beginning. While it’s certain that things on the SEO front are always changing and that search engines are getting smarter, SEOs will continually adapt to these changes just as they have in the past. As long as search engines list websites without requiring the websites to pay a fee, SEO will exist.

Google’s Improvements and What They Mean for the Future of SEO

In the quest to fight spam and improve user experience, Google is in the process of implementing a series of changes in behavior and intent-based search. Every person who conducts a search for a particular term will have different results based on their location and search history. As a result of these changes, search engine optimization have to switch from only targeting keywords to focus more on increasing traffic and conversions. A possibility is that link building will become far less important in the future of SEO because Google will determine the value of a website based on how visitors engage with it. The ultimate goal of websites will be to provide compelling content that entices visitors to read, share, bookmark, and so on.

Social input through voting is another feature that search engines are tinkering with in order to provide user-controlled rankings. Search engine users might have the chance to vote for sites they like and sites will get ranked based on such votes. The model will be similar what’s seen on social voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Of course, search engines will have to find a way to ensure that votes are made naturally in order to prevent black hat SEOs from fooling the search engine bots.

Google and other search engines are raising the bar in SEO. Initially, this will make it harder for SEO professionals to do their job but the end result is positive. Spammers and black hat SEOs will have more difficulty succeeding in their unscrupulous efforts and search engine users will be provided with content that is more relevant.

Humans, Not Machines

As always, the aim of webmasters and SEO professionals should be to appeal to humans. People spend so much time trying to trick the search engines that they forget who they are ultimately serving: people! Your site should be optimized but your priority should always be to fulfill needs and provide solutions. Considering the direction that SEO is going, human actions and behavior will ultimately determine rankings. Your SEO success depends on your ability to engage people through great content and social media marketing

TV and Online Advertising Combination Most Effective

TV and Online Advertising Combination Most Effective

A new report from CNN International has found that consumers respond best to multi-platform advertising which combine the best of traditional and online advertising.

Cross-platform advertising offers marketers the best of both worlds, combing the conventional clout of television with the effervescent buzz of digital media online. The most effective advertising campaigns according to CNN are those that can yoke the strength from both platforms to encourage people to buy into the brand.

CNN’s Cross-platform Advertising Study on Effectiveness and Engagement (CASE) involved a dual monitoring of market penetration through a comprehensive online survey and biometric assessments. Candidates were asked to wear a “smart vest” to monitor their heart rate, respiratory rate and body movement during a television screening.

The report showed a high cross over between the two media platforms. Adverts with a call to action have enjoyed success by promoting a teaser on television with a follow up advertisement online.

The results from the scientific investigation found that advertising breaks increased engagement in viewers by up to 10 per cent. Contrary to popular belief, consumers do not switch off during when their programmes are interrupted by advertisements. The study also introduced eye-tracking technology which found that viewers responded well to video content on websites, taking between 66 to 80 per cent of their attention.

According to CNN International’s senior vice president of research, Didier Mormesse, with a combined TV and online advertising approach: “an advertiser can markedly increase campaign recall, leading to positive shift in brand attitudes,” reported bizcommunity.com.

Television adverts in isolation had a 20 per cent chance of being recalled by viewers, but with the addition of internet advertising or mobile marketing, this figure rose to 33 per cent.

Does Bing have enough bling?

Does Bing have enough bling?

For years, Microsoft has been struggling to chip away at Google’s dominance in the search engine market. And for years, they have been largely unsuccessful, mainly because their own search engine, Microsoft Live Search, produced unwanted and often irrelevant results.

But a few weeks ago, Microsoft released Bing, an updated version of Live Search, in their newest attempt to knock Google off its pedestal.

Although Bing is partially a rebranding of Live Search, it does include new features like instant previews of Web sites and videos.

Microsoft is so committed to Bing’s success that it will launch an astronomical $80 million to $100 million advertising campaign. That’s more than four times Google’s entire advertising budget last year.

It’s been hard to determine how Microsoft’s newcomer is stacking up against its two greatest competitors, Google and Yahoo!. According to StatCounter, one of the world’s largest Web analytics companies, Bing temporarily overtook Yahoo! in terms of market share. Currently, however, Google has 81.5 percent of the search engine market, with Yahoo! at 9.39 percent and Bing at 4.82 percent.

But one Microsoft employee, Michael Kordahi, thinks that some users might be prejudiced against Bing because of Google’s perceived brand name superiority.

He created a blind search engine that shows the search results of Google, Yahoo! and Bing in three nondescript columns. The Web site then invites users to vote for the most relevant results.

Unfortunately, the results were too erratic to name any consistent winner, prompting Kordahi to conclude that “some douche is gaming the system.”

I must confess that, as someone who has had bad experiences with Live Search, I prefer Google. Before I could adequately review the usefulness of Bing, I thought I should first experiment with the blind search engine myself.

So, in completely unscientific fashion, I typed in ten random searches – five single words and five phrases – and picked the results I thought were most valuable and applicable.

And the results were somewhat surprising: While Google crushed the competition with six votes, Bing received a surprising three votes, and Yahoo! just one vote.

It seems I find Microsoft’s search engine a fairly legitimate contender in the battle for supremacy, although Google is still the undisputed champion.

But how do Bing’s other search capabilities like News and Maps compare against Google’s?

Well, I certainly found that the Bing homepage looks pretty. The search bar is superimposed on a beautiful panoramic stock photo that changes every day. Each picture is embedded with invisible squares about the picture that users can click on for more information.

But while this design is certainly unique, Bing’s hide-and-go-seek feature is basically self-promotion masquerading as helpful innovation.

Each square merely redirects users to a search through Bing. For example, clicking on “Learn more about Flag Day” directs the user to a Bing search of “Flag Day.”

But Bing does have some helpful, interesting features.

Unlike Google, Bing’s image search displays the results in one giant scrollable window, thereby eliminating the annoying need to click on multiple pages. And Bing Cashback offers buyers to receive a small percentage back of payments they have made on participating Web sites.

These are Bing’s best features, however, and ultimately Bing still plays second fiddle.

Bing News lacks all the customizability, readability and wealth of information that exists in Google News. Bing only features 14 translatable languages to Google’s 41.

And while Bing Maps is speckled with aesthetically pleasing mountains and forests, it cannot easily display directions and locations like Google Maps.

We must remember, though, while developers have made significant blunders along the way, Bing is still being improved.

They failed to realize, for example, that Bing can mean “sickness” in Chinese (the nationality of Bing’s biggest audience), prompted a name change to “Biying,” meaning “must respond,” which Microsoft is coyly marketing as a “decision engine.”

And they received criticism when Bing’s filtering mechanism could not adequately block porn in its parental settings, which was quickly rectified when the company consulted 25 security vendors for assistance.

Microsoft is certainly improving its image as a legitimate search engine competitor. But the company needs much more innovative firepower before successfully waging war against the Google Empire.

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing

I was browsing one of the internet marketing forums the other day, and stumbled on a thread titled “What happened to the 4 pillars of Internet Marketing?”.
For those of you who don’t know what the 4 original pillars of internet marketing are, here’s a quick recap:


1. Product. Product is very important, I mean, that is what you are selling, right?
2. Price. 95% of all the selling propositions are being turned down because of the price. Probably this is the reason 1$ trials work so well.
3. Promotion. Traffic, Copywriting, PPC and basically anything related to generating traffic and driving leads.
4. Place. You can’t go to a synagogue and try to sell pork chops. I mean, you can, but…Trust me, you don’t want to. *Hint: big rocks and your head.
Those are the 4 pillars of internet marketing, according to the old school Gurus. However, world is rapidly changing, and we must keep up with it.

Those pillars no longer apply when it comes down to 21st century’s internet marketing industry. They probably still do when selling tea or rice, but when it comes to sophisticated customers who shop online, nahah! Different approach is required!

After taking a cold hard look at the internet marketing industry today as we know it, I have created a new internet marketing pillar blueprint. I am not saying this is going to go global right away, but I do believe it what is needed to be done, if you want to build a profitable internet marketing business.

1. Traffic. You can say it goes under promotion, but Traffic is not about promotion anymore. Today, when the customer gets destructed so easily, traffic has became more about grabbing attention. If you know how to grab person’s attention when he is surfing the web, you got traffic!
2. Conversion. Internet Marketing is all about conversions, are you kidding me? Capture pages, click through rates, bounce rates etc. Everything is needed to be tested, modified, customized and tested some more!
3. Growth. Growth applies to you, the person behind the product. The only way you can be providing more value and getting more sales is by growing. Not in height, but in mind. Growing your knowledge base and raising your personal value through the roof.
4. Content. This is actually an inevitable byproduct of growth. Providing quality content is what is going to separate you from the spammers, self promoters and uneducated newbies who have no clue how to market online.

This is my personal view on the 4 new age pillars of internet marketing. You can support me, or you can dispute me, the choice is yours and comments are welcomed, however, remember that marketing isn’t about you or your product going viral, it is always about the consumer.

jasper

Dallas Cowboys try their hand at SEO

Dallas Cowboys try their hand at SEO

The Dallas Cowboys will be using search engine optimization (SEO) to increase organic traffic to their sites One of the most popular sports franchises in the world has jumped aboard the search engine optimization (SEO) bandwagon as the Dallas Cowboys plan to increase organic traffic to sell team merchandise.

To generate traffic and get the most targeted visitors to its sites, the Dallas Cowboys' Pro Shop has partnered with a well known web development company to increase its search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).


All companies should focus on more than just traffic, "If you are running marketing campaigns and don't have solid data in regards to your true ROI, you could be wasting your budget," "Many of our clients come to us looking for traffic. We respond with: It's not all about traffic anymore. It's about solid analytics, maximizing targeted visitors and building websites that convert."

According to a report from Forbes in December, statistics from SportsScanInfo - a company that tracks jersey sales - show the 10 most popular jerseys in all of sports were from the NFL. Of that 10, three belonged to the Dallas Cowboys

Good SEO Practices

Good SEO Practices

There are always the articles and posts about "How to SEO" or "SEO Tips and Tricks", but it isn't too often there is any discussion of what not to do from an SEO perspective. So, very briefly, lets go over some of the points of what not to do from an SEO view.

SEO Mistake #1 - Improper Use of Your Title Tag

The title tag is extremely important when it comes to website optimization, and serves multiple purposes. It tells the search engines what your site is about, it gets displayed in the search results for your page and is displayed at the top of your visitors browser while they are on your site.

SEO Mistake #2 - Improper Use of Your Keywords Meta Tag

Once upon a time the keywords meta tag was was used by search engines to determine the relevance of your website. These days even well-written keyword tags are largely ignored by Google and the other major search engine players. But that doesn't mean you may ignore, or abuse the keyword meta tag. You could possibly wind up being penalized by the search engines instead of ranking well with them.

SEO Mistake #3 - Keyword Stuffing

More does not always equal better. Page content with too many keywords typically doesn't read properly, and "hiding" keywords, using white text on a white background, is highly frowned upon and dealt with.

Your best bet, is to work up well written, relevant content for what your customers may be looking for, and let the web work it's magic.

SEO Mistake #4 - Using Irrelevant Keywords to Attract Traffic

May seem like a common sense point, but to reitterate. Using irrelevant or useless content and keywords to attract traffic to your site will only lower your overall rankings with the search engines.

Aside from the few points from above, there are a great deal of mistakes you can make as a website owner that can hurt, or hinder your rankings with the search engines. Cloaked pages, doorway pages, poor coding practices, page labelling, and the list goes on and on.

Nath

The Magic of Seach Engine Optimization

The Magic of Seach Engine Optimization

Magic! Mysticism! Mystery!

Nope, guess again. Search Engine Optimization, is to a lot of people, full of magic and mystery. It has none of these qualities, yet when it's done right, it can definitely provide the illusion of it.

Proper SEO, can change a companies future, drive internet marketing and sales, give that needed visibility for your campaign race, and more! When the rules are followed, and the steps are taken, it can be magic.

That being said, there's the black magic out there of course. The not so legal tricks, cloaking, hiding text, keyword stuffing, just to name a couple. The temptations for fast results, often come with the just rewards, barring of your site, to outright banning your site from the index.

In the end, the good guys win, and the bad look for a new way to use their tricks.

Which hat will your hero wear?

The First 100 Days

The First 100 Days

If you happen to look around, even slightly, you'll learn that there is no "quick fix" when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. It's an investment in yourself and your website, wherein you hope your content is better than the next guys.

But if you own the goose that lays the golden egg in your market niche, how can you possibly wrangle your way to the top of Google to shout out to the land? The tried, and true, SEO; correctly performed and implemented, and practiced will drive you there. But just like a journey of 1000 steps starts with the first, so does the journey to the top of the Search Engines starts with day 1 and building your site with proper coding, and SEO practices in mind.

In the first 30 days you'll be noticed by the spiders, as they crawl your content and start finding where you fit into the billions of already indexed pages out there.

In the first 60 days, if you've built your site properly and have had optimization done onsite, you'll start to see yourself climbing "the ladder" in your market niche. You may already start to make brief appearances in the top 20, exciting times for a new business.

Nearing the end of your first 100 days of properly constructed, and optimized site, your site will start to hang around consistently in the top 15 or so, top 10 if the search engines love your site, and perhaps top 5 if your market niche is that particular.

All in all, the first 100 days of a newly constructed, optimized site, can be viewed as a beginning benchmark to your strength within the index. If you've followed the rules, been properly optimized, you'll enjoy the fruits of your labours and investments for a long time to come.

Successful Web Marketing

Successful Web Marketing

Everyone wants to get associated with this word. What has web marketing in store for your online business? In selling products and services inside the Internet, there is a procedure that is utilized in order to advance the brands and names for one purpose: to sell. Selling in the Web is different because a website must give concentration on ways to get the attention of users and how they can be baited. Therefore, there are devices that have been formulated to take advantage of the number that gets inside the Internet.

Considering the large population of Internet users, it would be fairly easy to catch them and point them to a certain site. However, these people cannot be manipulated that easy unless there is a common ground for all of them. What is that common ground? The search engines, a tool so widely used and an authority when talking of information gathering. Certainly, the individuals who make use of search engines are scattered all over the globe. Hence, this venue has been considered very viable to give information on your products. SEO is a process in Web marketing that allows your business to be included in the search results.

The first thing that comes to mind when SEO becomes a topic is, can I rank in the first pages? There is plenty of website now so one questions, "Will I shine among the millions of competitor sites?" The answer lies in the potential of this method.

Consider it a privilege for you to know that SEO is a non-expensive method of making a mark in the search pages especially, of Google. Once your site lands in the top ranks, it would be easy to maintain that position. So, it is an imperative that if success in business is being aimed at, Web marketing methods can help each hopeful to achieve that goal.

The companies that have relied on the guarantee of Web marketing process are now enjoying the fruits of this brilliant technique. Making money becomes a relatively easy endeavor and thus, if they have succeeded, then there is big chance that you can achieve that too!

SEO Friendly Coding

SEO Friendly Coding

There are simply too many benefits to using CSS (cascading style sheets) to ignore. Is your page code long and difficult to read? Is it increasingly harder to find that line to tweak your pages layout or appearance? Cascading Style Sheets will help improve your websites efficiency, and it will be easier to read for search engines. To a search engine, a website that is coded in CSS says several things about your company: you embrace foward technology and that your content is modern, up-to-date and relevant. Using Cascading Style Sheets is one of the best Search Engine Optimization methods to creating a web site, it is candy to Search Spiders.

A Cascading Style Sheet is a method used to give web designers more control over the style of each page — allowing them to customize each paragraph, title, header, or bulleted list. CSS gives you the ability to specify font, size, and color of anything you want without having to repeatedly insert specific lines of code.

A few key points to using CSS to help optimize your website are:

1. Using regular HTML codes to define things like font tags can be very cumbersome. It inserts extra unnecessary code into the source code of your website, making it more difficult for the spider to crawl your site. Search engine spiders won't just read the content that shows up on your site, they read every single line of code. You don't want to pollute your source code with excessive HTML.

2. In a nutshell, CSS can do everything HTML can do, only better. Instead of placing the style tags (for fonts, backrounds, colors, etc.) in the actual code, it is placed in an external file. A simple and brief statement is placed in the source code to call to that external file where all your bulky style codes are laid out leaving your page clean and simple.

3. The use of Cascading Style Sheets will also allow preloading of your website into your browser. The basic elements are carried forward through any page you visit. This is optimal for search engine spiders, they want to read through your website as fast as they possibly can. With CSS, you can have all the effects you want without slowing down the search engine spiders you are striving to impress.

4. Give your website a diet plan! Converting your old HTML layouts to CSS can typically cut anywhere from 25 to 50 percent off of page size. They give you the added benefit of simplified, adaptable structure and the separation of code in a presentation.

5. One of the most instantly rewarding benefits of Cascading Style Sheets is that they are a huge time saver. Code it properly once, and never again. Let's say for example, your site is coded with HTML; the header on each one of your sites pages is written in blue text. One day you decide you want to change the look and feel of your site and you want to change the headers from blue font to a bold black. With an HTML website, you have to go through each page and physically change each header. Depending on the size of your site, that could be very time consuming. with a website written with CSS, you simply open that external file, change the header tag color from blue to black and your job is done That one change will automatically update every header without you having to manually change each one.

Multiple Online Marketing Efforts Can Succeed

Multiple Online Marketing Efforts Can Succeed

If business owners want to gain a competitive edge online in 2009, a comprehensive strategy is the way to go.

Businesses of any size will succeed with online marketing – and blow past the competition – by focusing on multiple fronts at one time to deliver the most favorable ROI.

The Internet offers a dizzyingly array of services, everything from search engine optimization and link building to paid search, banner advertising and video marketing. Each has merit and can improve profits.

How could it make any sense to let them operate as silos?

We tie these and other services together in what we call the Battle Plan. To get the best results, you need to hit your target market with everything you have available.

Regardless of what you call it, a Battle Plan approach requires a good deal of coordination that can become a way of life with practice.

Here are 8 tips to help you get started:

1. Cultivate Teams.

A plan on paper won’t work in reality if the people involved can’t cooperate. Long before our Battle Plan took shape, we made sure to involve the entire staff in team building exercises, contests and social outings. We also have regular staff meetings and hold internal mini workshops so each service line can let everyone else get a sense of what they do.

2. Nail Down Processes.

Yes, it can be tedious, but only good things can happen when everyone follows the same system.

3. Achieve Excellence.

It’s not always easy to define quality, but you need to continually provide exceptional service in each area. Our Battle Plan would suffer enormously if one service dropped the ball. In the military, for example, ground troops would fail more often without air support.

4. Think ROI.

At the end of the day, it’s about leads and sales. Time and time again, we’ve managed through SEO to achieve high rankings and traffic. Unfortunately, the website we inherit sometimes lacks clear Calls to Action. Adding a well placed, unique phone number or a special offer can work wonders.

5. Track and Adapt Conversion Opportunities.

Calls to Action can appear just about anywhere. With the basic website design, you may have any number of response forms or buy/call signals. Similar or different ones may be developed for paid search or video marketing campaigns. In our case, we learn from what each area is doing and adapt or repeat their Calls to Action. In other words, lead forms that work for video may perform as well or better in paid search.

6. A Central Project Manager Is Essential.

Obviously, plenty of work must happen behind the scenes. Yet, it’s also critical to have a project manager in place for each program to keep the lines of communication open. The project manager is in a good position to make sure everyone – from internal staff to clients – is on the same page and up to speed.

7. Share Data.

I’ve hinted at it already, but shared information is paramount to a comprehensive approach that crosses multiple disciplines. For example, when a SEO specialist gets a top ranking on Google, that information must get in the hands of a paid search expert who can help decide if an ad should be paused or continued depending on whether branding or conversion objectives are being met. You can exchange data from many areas – paid search ads, landing pages, banner ads, meta descriptions, inbound link anchor text, video marketing campaigns and much more.

8. Reinforce Efforts.

You have to find ways to stay in touch with prospects. For us, one of the easiest is an opt-in e-mail marketing system. I’m dumbfounded by the number of companies that I hear about that don’t consistently use structured emails to follow up with different types of leads. Sometimes businesses do send emails, but it’s not always well planned. Why not craft automated messages for designated dates, such as 7 days, 30 days and 60 days out from the first point of contact?

In today’s economy, at the moment in time someone is searching for what you offer, how fiercely are you competing to be found?

Emerging Online Marketing Trends

Emerging Online Marketing Trends

It's always been known that America is primarily a consumerist market. But, even now Americans are dedicated consumers. And, the Web makes it easier and faster to track, and then bag, the goods.

Even with living with a devastating economy, we’ll still find ways to happily buy stuff. We won’t stop.

So, flagging emerging consumer trends is the lifeblood of any business. Consumers can pile into a fad quickly, and leave just as fast.

Two must-watch trends rippling through the consumerism this year bear watching: chic frugality and the greening of older goods.

Booming online shopping and research tools speed the frugality process, especially as small, mobile devices make the Web easier to navigate. The result is a giant communication tool for sharing consumer information and low-cost goods.

According to one survey, 80% of consumers say they’re shopping online to save money.

80%!!

What with the 24/7 market of the web, it's best to be your targets first, and only stop.

Using Your News To Drive SEO

Using Your News To Drive SEO

With more than 70 million people getting their news online every day, your news is about more than just reaching the media.

Your news can be a powerful tool to directly reach the millions of people searching for information online, drive traffic to your website and maximize your online visibility.

News search engines like Yahoo! News and Google News offer a great way to direct targeted traffic to your website and help you generate awareness about a topic or your company.

Traditional Media, Time to move your Butts

Traditional Media, Time to move your Butts

In a pure business sense think about the old American railroads. They were huge in their day, but, with the advent of cars and highways, they have lost their broad-base relevance. We're in the same place with newspapers and magazines right now. In one sense the Net is the automobile that is taking over from the railroads.

People are switching over to online for their entertainment and news". People aren't just switching, they're consuming more - both online and traditional print, TV, radio. The traditional media sources are 'floundering' somewhat, however there are always signs of bouncing back.

Our ability as humans to move reasonably freely about the Earth opens up a world away from a computer. We can play sports, go to the beach, shop, drive cars and even fly to far off destinations. At each point of the journey the marketer would like to reach us, and whether travelling, shopping, driving or just living, there is an opportunity for them to engage with us in a meaningful way via many varying communication platforms

All aspects of advertising including television, radio, magazines, print websites, blogs, email, direct mail, telemarketing, in-store advertising and promotions, event sponsorship, conferencing, concerts, product samples and even whisper marketing have their time and place

Recession Proof Advertising?

Recession Proof Advertising?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM); - SEM, paid search, Pay Per Click (PPC) - why would this particular form of online advertising appear to be just about recession-proof? Google's continued growth in such a down market is just one example of how SEM continues to grow at a faster pace than nearly any other form of marketing.

It is expected that SEM/PPC will grow at a rate of 13% a year up to 2013, even where print, broadcast and other offline mediums are stagnating or declining.

What is it exactly that seems to make SEM recession-proof? SEM does what marketers need a marketing medium to do in a down economy: it generates better returns on the smaller budgets organisations have to work with.

The true power of Search Engine Marketing lies in the fact that a search user is telling the advertiser exactly what he or she is looking for, and search engines provide the relevant results to the user. Other forms of advertising by contrast push a message to the consumers who may or may not be interested in them.

The fact that advertisers place their messages in an environment that is relevant to the user mean that SEM is a powerful tool for branding as well as achieving customer acquisitions and conversions.

SEM is cost-effective and efficient. Because you are getting the right message to the right people, at the right time, there is far less wastage than there is in most other forms of advertising.

The flexibility which SEM provides is another key strength. One could easily set up a branding campaign that will see a longer tail of keywords and the possible use of the content network. The focus is on achieving critical mass or to reach it in a cost-effective manner. Sales-driven campaigns by contrast, will be more targeted with a strong ROI focus.

Around the world, industry is buying into search. Research conducted by Forrester in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe shows that 85% of marketers are using, piloting or planning to pilot search marketing programmes this year.

Search marketing should be a cornerstone of any marketing strategy. Any company which isn't visible when users are looking for their services or products online is throwing away opportunities to capture new sales and customers.

3 Keys to a Successful Web Presence

3 Keys to a Successful Web Presence

Whenever I ask a prospect what their goals are, all too often their answer is, "We want to rank in the top three results for keywords A, B, and C."

Is that really a goal?

Now, I understand that high rankings (or, rather, organic search traffic) are important. I sincerely believe that a sound organic search strategy should be the core of every business's marketing efforts.

This goes back to the old adage of running a business (location, location, location). You must be where people are actively searching for your product or service offerings.

However, imagine that you had the perfect retail location and yet your storefront was filthy. Perhaps there isn't as much as a sign with your company's name on the front of the building. Perhaps, once you get into the location, not a single item has a price tag and the salespeople are nowhere to be found.

That traffic coming through your parking lot isn't going to help much, is it?

There are three basic rules that you need to follow to have a successful Web presence:

1. Brand matters.
2. Usability matters.
3. Search engine optimization matters.


Brand Matters

The look and feel of your Web site is a key component to success on the Web. For example, last summer, a retailer that was enjoying great rankings in the search engines approached my company about a possible redesign of their Web site.

When I pulled the site up, it was very evident that these folks needed a facelift (the site was very '90s, with no brand -- not even a logo -- and it was poorly organized). This e-commerce Web site was typical of many: it was graphics-heavy (not even formatted consistently) and had little to offer in terms of (keyword-rich) product descriptions.

Bottom line: there was no way that I would drop my credit card info on this Web site. I didn't trust it. If I were a common searcher, I'd probably spend about five seconds on the page that I landed on, then hit the back button and check out the next result.

Build a Web site that exudes credibility and trust with your target audience. Because online, a competitor is always next door to your perfect location. And, next door to them is another competitor. You get the picture?

Usability Matters

OK, let's assume your Web site looks great now. So, if you manage to get the traffic to your site, you probably want people to fill out a lead form, call you, or buy a product.

Too often, prospects tell me that a phone call is a major point of emphasis for them, yet you can't easily find their phone number on their page. Check some of the most successful e-commerce or lead-gen Web sites and you'll notice that most of them display their phone number on the top right of every page. Little things like this can have a dramatic impact on your success.

Every click/visitor to your Web site is valuable. Yet many don't put the effort to get the most out of every click.

Once you get people to your site, what do you want them to do? Download a white paper? Sign up for a newsletter? Complete a lead form?

Now, be honest with yourself. Are you making this action obvious to your visitors? People on the Web have very short attention spans.

Search Engine Optimization Matters

Now, just because I put SEO last on this list doesn't mean that this is the last thing you should do. Oh no. The creation of your information architecture absolutely should be done in conjunction with your SEO efforts.

Your SEO team should research (or at least approve) the content management system and coordinate the design and site development. SEO is the foundation of your efforts.

Funny thing about how SEO and usability go hand-in-hand. Visitors to your Web site like content. They may be researching and need to read those detailed product descriptions.

And, coincidentally, search engines like that content, too. So, the more search engine friendly you make your Web site, the more usable the site will become. If your content is good enough, people might want to link to your Web site.

You know what else users like? Blog content. They love finding "unbiased" helpful/resourceful information. They love reviews. They love forums.

Guess what. Search engines love this stuff, too! Ever seen Wikipedia show up in your searches on Google?

So, next time you're trying to determine your SEO goals, stop for a moment and think about the bigger picture. SEO is just one part of Web success.

Dallas Cowboys try their hand at SEO

Dallas Cowboys try their hand at SEO

The Dallas Cowboys will be using search engine optimization (SEO) to increase organic traffic to their sites One of the most popular sports franchises in the world has jumped aboard the search engine optimization (SEO) bandwagon as the Dallas Cowboys plan to increase organic traffic to sell team merchandise.

To generate traffic and get the most targeted visitors to its sites, the Dallas Cowboys' Pro Shop has partnered with a well known web development company to increase its search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).


All companies should focus on more than just traffic, "If you are running marketing campaigns and don't have solid data in regards to your true ROI, you could be wasting your budget," "Many of our clients come to us looking for traffic. We respond with: It's not all about traffic anymore. It's about solid analytics, maximizing targeted visitors and building websites that convert."

According to a report from Forbes in December, statistics from SportsScanInfo - a company that tracks jersey sales - show the 10 most popular jerseys in all of sports were from the NFL. Of that 10, three belonged to the Dallas Cowboys

SEO Basics - The Beginning

SEO Basics - The Beginning

Optimizing your site takes time, effort, and knowledge. If you're willing to take the time and learn, apply the effort to your site, then allow this little bit of knowledge to help you with those first few baby steps into the internet jungle.

We're going to go way down to the beginning..

Keep your site friendly for the engines, there's a ton of scripts, code, and fancy tricks that look great, but the search engines will pass over. Be careful with these common search engine obstacles

* Flash sites/elements – Some web designers love it, site visitors have a love it or hate it feel, and most importantly, search engines cannot read it. If you are determined to incorporate flash into your site, be sure to also include keyword text for the flash page/elements. Home pages and entire sites done entirely in flash are completely invisible to search engines. What is the value of a site that is invisible to the spiders?

* Dynamic URLs – Typically these urls are associated with a database driven website (www.yoursite.com/143?=5aswe for example) Although the engines can read them, they won’t dig too deeply. Simple URLs are Google/Bing/Yahoo friendly URLs.

* JavaScript menu navigation – A dated style to build off of, but your web developer will know about this type of menu. The engines don’t follow JavaScript links, so avoid them as often as possible for navigation links (Home, About, Products, etc.).

* Write for People, not bots/spiders
Is your website an effective marketing or sales tool? Or has it been crammed full of keywords and doesn't read like a person has written it? Once you're able to get visitors to your site, compelling, relevant content will keep them on your site. Possibilities include making a purchase, sign-up for news or promotional email letters, add the site to their bookmarks (to make it a regular reading stop), add your site to their Twitter or Facebook accounts, etc.

Short, simple, and extremely basic. The above points are merely a drop in the sea of SEO, but seeing as every website out there is just another fish, why not do your best to be the hunter amongst the prey?

More to come..

Google vs Bing vs Yahoo

Google vs Bing vs Yahoo

In a competition to find search engine bugs, Google came out on top of Bing, while also earning higher general praise than Microsoft's new search engine. People in over 50 countries participated in the competition, held by uTest, a Southborough, Massachusetts based Q&A company.

While top spot went to Google earning the highest marks, almost a third of the testers were pleasantly surprised by Bing, and 10 percent said they'd make it their primary search engine, after having tested Google and Yahoo as well. Still, 90 percent said they'd be sticking with Google, valuing its search accuracy above all.

Testers actually found the fewest bugs in Yahoo, with just 70 problems, though less participants focused on this departing search engine compared to the other two major search engines. Testers found 130 bugs in Google, with 8 percent classified as "showstoppers", while 321 bugs were discovered in Bing, 14 percent of them showstoppers.

It's not clear how bugs are determined, but they pertain to technical, functional, and user interface issues. Because known bugs don't qualify, Google probably gets a pass here, as there could be well-reported problems that don't show up in the results. By comparison, with Bing being less than four months old, there's plenty of room for new problems to arise.

More interesting is the survey that uTest solicited from its testers after the contest. Google dominated these surveys, as the top choice for accuracy, real-time relevance, and page load speeds. In all categories, Bing ranked second and Yahoo came in third. A small percentage of testers also tried Google Caffeine, and were generally impressed. One tester said results came back twice as fast as Google's existing engine.

If the survey results are at all representative of all users, it's a blow to Microsoft, which has tried to market Bing as turning up better search results. However, Microsoft may recognize it's losing this battle, instead of turning to new, flashy features such as visual search.

Hail to the king baby..

SEO Basics - Content

SEO Basics - Content

Continuing our ever growing list of SEO Tips, we'll step into another batch of really basic optimization techniques which can help you improve your sites appearance, and hopefully, appeal on the search engines.

*Continually update your site-Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant material on your site, which also improves your rankings. Consistently adhering to this principle, you can over time, become "the authority" in your niche.

*Unique content-Adding all the content you find on the internet won't help improve your appearnce, if none of it is original. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.

*Try to use your keywords in your headlines-Headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are a great place to use your keyword phrase and secondary keywords. Search engines recognize that headlines are more important than the surrounding text, and so assign greater value to keywords found there.

*Try to get your keywords inside incoming links-Inbound links are a great way to improve your page rank, and your standings in the search results. But it's difficult to control how people link to your pages. Most incoming links don't use a phrase that has anything even remotely close to any of your keywords. Remember that they are doing you a favor by linking to you.

One way to get your keywords into inbound links is to provide your customers with the link text ready-made. For example:

Please link to this page: a href="http://www.freshtraffic.ca/online_internet_marketing_sales.htm" Search Engine Marketing

Just a few more tips to add to the beginning stretch of beginning SEO. As always, there's always more to come.

Google, the Department of Justice, and you

Google, the Department of Justice, and you

In it's bid to digitize the world, Google has moved forward again in it's application to digitize the worlds libraries. Lately however, things have taken a decidedly more serious turn with the Department of Justice weighing in with it's concerns. The DoJ became the latest party to file its concerns about Google’s book settlement and it appears the search giant will have to either make tweaks to the deal, or allow the feds—and maybe even Congress—to poke around. You should be betting on the tweaks.

While there were some good points made by the DoJ :

The United States strongly supports a vibrant marketplace for the electronic distribution of copyrighted works, including in-print, out-of-print, and so-called “orphan” works. The Proposed Settlement has the potential to breathe life into millions of works that are now effectively off limits to the public. By allowing users to search the text of millions of books at no cost, the Proposed Settlement would open the door to new research opportunities. Users with print disabilities would also benefit from the accessibility elements of the Proposed Settlement, and, if the Proposed Settlement were approved, full text access to tens of millions of books would be provided through institutional subscriptions.

They also made it very clear, that there are valid concerns about the settlement as it exists now.

..the breadth of the Proposed Settlement – especially the forward-looking business arrangements it seeks to create – raises significant legal concerns. As a threshold matter, the central difficulty that the Proposed Settlement seeks to overcome – the inaccessibility of many works due to the lack of clarity about copyright ownership and copyright status – is a matter of public, not merely private, concern. A global disposition of the rights to millions of copyrighted works is typically the kind of policy change implemented through legislation, not through a private judicial settlement.

In the end, Google is most likely going to make a few tweaks to it's compensation agreement and try to placate everyone as best as possible.

Why Winnipeg

Why Winnipeg

The title why Winnipeg is a question I must get asked a hundred times a week.

What made you choose Winnipeg, why not Toronto or Vancouver, surely this would be better for you.

Okay, giving myself a little bit of toffee here, I'm pretty well known on a global scale especially for what I do on the Internet, the immigration officer at Toronto airport knew who I was when i flew in and so did the guy in the American Embassy in Vancouver.

Yes and they asked the question too, Why Winnipeg.

Well Winnipeg has a simplicity about it, you get a sense of familiarity with the city and the people, it's relatively easy to commute around, it's safe and you feel a strong sense of community.

When you have lived and worked in big cities around the world you come to appreciate these little things more.

As for my work it has it's pluses and minuses, great opportunities and a growing marketplace, we maybe have a few years to go to catch the Toronto's of this world, but that's not to say that the potential isn't here.

When Winnipeggers realise that we are just as good as everyone else in Canada and lose the inferiority complex and small mind thinking we will come much further.

Only in the last 12 months we have seen a massive increase in companies providing SEO and Internet marketing services, my sector, 6 to about 70, so either half of Europe or the US company's have moved here or Winnipeg web businesses are just good opportunist. You decide. It's your turn Winnipeg

Social Networks - Free SEO

Social Networks - Free SEO

Back to the basics again. We've talked about building, some basic tagging, and basic linking strategies. Another very basic step in the realm of SEO for the layperson, would be to make use of the current social media craze.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger/Wordpress, and to a lesser degree, Myspace, are all very viable, and encouraged spaces to use to market yourself and your new website.

Facebook offers a great audience, and is one of the most widely used social networks out there. Using their free services to help boost your sites visitors is as simple as having friends and family add you to their account, and just spreading the word. Use the page to update your news frequently, and watch the visitors begin to use your site and services.

Twitter, when used in conjuction with Facebook, adds an additional dimension to your company's profile. Being able to update your news, interact with any customers or clients in an almost instant medium, is a great draw for potential clientelle. Being that Twitter can be done anywhere, you could be on the road, at the office, or at home and be able to handle any questions or concerns which can impact your image.

LinkedIn, is a professionals version of Facebook. It can be used to begin building your professional image with established companies locally, and globally. Lenders, suppliers, potential partners and alliances can all begin as simply having an account with LinkedIn.

Writing blogs is like icing on the cake. It's the little bit of everyday, active information about your company, your niche, or even just the industry around you. Taking a short time each day to send out a blog, gets your blog site indexed within the day, and over time, and with dedication, you'll begin to see the visitors grow and traffic will go through your site.

More to follow...

The future of Google is.. cloudy?

The future of Google is.. cloudy?

With it's seat firmly set on being the king of search, Google is constantly growing, and evolving. It's a living, breating, life sustaining organ of the web, and as such, any moment of service problems is almost immediately noticeable.

Gmail, Google news, Blogger, Youtube etc. the list of companies under Googles umbrella, and in their repetoire is quite large, and seeing as acquisitions are once again on the table, soon to be growing. With such a huge toolkit of technologies available to them, it should be understandable that the odd disruption of service were to happen; even though it is rare.

And now, with Google encouraging users to change their productivity apps from the desktop, to the "cloud", loss of service is beginning to become an issue. Not because it happens every day, or even if it happens once a month. The simple idea behind cloud computing being having "your computer" available to you anywhere is an incredible incentive. But, if when you go to use the cloud, you can't access it because of a glitch, programming error, someone trips on a plug etc, it is a problem.

It's like showing up to your current workplace, and your computer just not booting up. And the tech manager, is in the next city over, trying to communicate to you what's wrong over the phone, but because he's using sign language you can't tell what's going on, or when it's going to be fixed. All you can do, is wait until then.

Cloud computing, may very well end up being the greatest boon to business productivity the world has seen to date. But as of right now, it's still a brand new technology, and as such, will encounter hiccups, glitches, crashes, and downtime. Should Google be knocked, stripped, and beaten down for it? Not in my opinion, but everyone has their own.

For everything that Google does impressively, how easy is it to forget, when they're trying to make a step into a previously, unknown sector.

What to do when you disappear from Google

What to do when you disappear from Google

Step 1: Don't worry. This occurs regularly, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that it’s come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isn’t just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to ‘dance’ between the old index and new index – that’s the Google dance.

So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from thousands of servers, and they can’t all be updated at once. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will rank you where you belong. Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown around for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index.

One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Google’s index doesn’t work this way – it’s a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly. This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally won’t suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last round of indexing.

The servers that Google uses are distributed between datacenters all over the world. Google doesn’t keep all of those eggs in one basket – they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. This way, if part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as was said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down. The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.

You see, the ‘time-to-live’ for Google is only five minutes – that means that Google can change it's IP address every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that thn servers they do have is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.

The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless you’re looking for your website’s ranking, you’d never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.

Catch the Wave

Catch the Wave

Google Wave was unleashed for public testing recently, with 100,000 invites being sent out; and with those a batch of invites, tied to the invites (think Gmail at it's inception).

Catch the Wave, it's setting itself to be the most interactive, social media collaberation idea out there. Email, instant messaging, documents, which can be edited by a list of people selected by you, it's a step to making the internet just a little more accessible. Google has a love affair with making information freely available, from their book digitizing (currently on hold), to the actual search engine and indexing of the majority of the internet, to handing out free services like Gmail, and now the Wave service.

Wave itself is still a good few months off yet, admittedly still buggy in their own blog writings, but when the Wave gets rolling, it would be best to be on it and ready for the ride.