Search Engine Optimization,SEO,Search Engine Marketing

Sunday, January 24, 2010

10 tips to increase website traffic!!

Here are the ten useful tips,

1.using signature on forums,emails.

2.you can use newspaper ad to direct visitors to our site.

3.buying targeted traffic campaigns from some great traffic service providers(one of them in my signature),there is no doubt ,your website will be in front of real peoples,because i personally use that service to increase my website traffic and it worked.

4.try to make a card with your website,and give it to your friends,leave it in car or train .

5.post articles frequently on popular article sites such as ezine ,go articles etc.
6.post free inexpensive classified ads.

7.join popular seo forums like this one and make frequent contribution with your website link as signature.

8.try to find a blog that suites your website content,and make feedback to that blog also remember that feedback should be genuine,so that it cannot be recognized as a spam,include your website link there.

9.submit your link to directories.

10.write an ebook about your subject of website.

Good PR Directory list

Google

google.com
Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages. The company's focus is developing search technology.

Facebook

facebook.com
A social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos.

YouTube

youtube.com
YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!

Yahoo!

yahoo.com
Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager.

Windows Live

live.com
Search engine from Microsoft.

Wikipedia

wikipedia.org
An online collaborative encyclopedia.

Blogger.com

blogger.com
Free, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP.

Baidu.com

baidu.com
Music search engine and free MP3 & video streaming for all kind of topic.

Microsoft Network (MSN)

msn.com
Dialup access and content provider.

Yahoo!カテゴリ

yahoo.co.jp
有料審査制のディレクトリ。ウェブサービスの形でAPIを公開。

QQ.COM

qq.com
中国最大的门户网站，提供即时通讯、新闻资讯、网络游戏以及在线拍卖业务，

Google India

google.co.in
Indian version of this popular search engine. Search the whole web or only webpages from India. Interfaces offered in English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil.

Twitter

twitter.com
Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.

Myspace

myspace.com
Social Networking Site.

Google

google.cn
网页、图片、新闻搜索，支持个性化搜索及本地搜索，提供论坛、邮箱、日历服务和桌面搜索工具。

新浪新闻中心

sina.com.cn
包括即日的国内外不同类型的新闻与评论，人物专题，图库。

Google

google.de
Suche im gesamten Web, in deutschsprachigen sowie in deutschen Seiten. Zusätzlich ist eine Bildersuche, eine Newsarchiv-Suche (ehemals dejanews) sowie ein Katalog vorhanden.

Amazon.com

amazon.com
Amazon.com seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Site has numerous personalization features and services including one-click buying, extensive customer and editorial product reviews, gift registries, gift certificates, wish lists, restaurant and movie listings, travel, and photo processing.

WordPress.com

wordpress.com
Free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. Includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, automatic spam protection and other features.

Microsoft Corporation

microsoft.com
Main site for product information, support, and news.

70+ ways to generate traffic to your site

Do a solid keyword research before writing your posts.

Use your primary keyword in title

Use your secondary keywords in subtitles.

Use all your keywords throughout your content.

Build links for each of your posts with your keywords in anchor text.

Build some more links.

Write articles in other people's Ezines.

Write and submit articles in top article directories.

Build a very useful lens at Squidoo.com

Build a useful hub at hubpages.com

Submit your blog in top web directories like Dmoz and Yahoo directory.

Write useful and unique content.

Write some more.

Write list type posts.

Write about Obama.

Tag your posts.

Be first to mention an update or an interesting news.

Even better. Be first and best to write about an update or an interesting news.

Write controversial but well backed posts.

Run contests on your blog.

Request other bloggers to announce your contest.

Be active on StumbleUpon

Submit your own top posts to StumbleUpon

Exchange stumbles with other fellow stumblers

Submit your pages in Digg and Reddit

Start Twittering at Twitter.com

Twitter more.

Answer questions in Yahoo answers with a link back to your related posts.

Answer questions in Help.com with a link back to your related posts.

Answer questions in Wiki.answers.com with a link back to your related posts.

Repeat tip #28, 29 and 30 daily.

Leave some useful and unique comments on other blogs of your niche.

Make your comments attention grabbing stuff.

Make use of trackbacks.

Be a guest-poster in a bigger blog of your niche.

Do some more guest posting.

Network with other fellow bloggers.

Announce your new blogs from your existing related blog.

Exchange posts with like minded fellow bloggers.

Be active in well trafficked forums in your niche.

Leave your link in signature in forums.

Be helpful and ask questions in forum.

Write unique articles in forums.

Give a viral ebook for free with free give away rights.

Place a "tell a friend" script at the bottom of your posts.

Give away free ebooks to some one who uses "tell a friend" script.

Be active in google groups. Ask questions and answer questions.

Be active in Yahoo groups

Be active in MSN groups.

Make some useful microblogs and funnel traffic to your main blog from micro blogs.

Make friends at BlogCatalog.

Join some groups at BlogCatalog and be active there.

Make friends at Mybloglog.

Tell other bloggers about a top post or great post you have written.

Research and make free reports .

Distribute those reports for free and mail it to fellow bloggers.

Upload some interesting photographs in flickr with link back to your blog in description.

Make some interesting videos and upload them on Youtube.

Upload those videos to Google videos and Metacafe as well.

Ask your readers to bookmark your posts (No ask no gain.)

Make wordpress templates.

Make use of press releases to announce your blog or contests or anything else worth aqnnouncing.

Build lists using Aweber.

Giveaway free ebooks to those who subscribes to your newsletter.

Interview fellow top bloggers in your niche.

Create viral softwares and tool.

Take part in webinars.

Write post about what you learned in a webinar.

Make use of craiglist.

Network through Myspace.

Monday, October 26, 2009

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 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

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 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

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

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

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

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 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.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.