5 Tips to Make the Most of Your SEO Investment | Online Marketing Blog

Posted on 12 January 2009 by Jeremy Hermanns

5 Tips to Make the Most of Your SEO Investment | Online Marketing Blog
Whether you’re a marketer at a large Fortune 500 company or a small business, search engine optimization (SEO) can be one of the most cost-effective tools for reaching a broader audience and increasing online sales. A solid and persistent search engine optimization program can increase search visibility for many types of content affecting the bottom line: sales, customer service, recruiting, public and investor relations.

These are challenging economic times calling for prudent marketing decisions. Search industry, business and analyst publications agree: search marketing is recission proof, or at least recession resistant. To make sure your SEO program investment yields effective and efficient marketing results, keep the following tips in mind:

* Planning: A solid plan of action is a necessary component to any successful SEO program. Before beginning an effort to optimize content for better search visibility, be sure you have clarified specific goals and expectations. This will help you to decide which SEO tactics will be most effective, what internal resources will be necessary and what metrics will be used to measure success.
* Resources: Assess your resources to ensure you can actually implement your SEO program. The most common reason for an unsuccessful SEO effort is failure of implementation. Take stock of available budget (yours or another department that will be affected) talent pool and any existing media assets that can be leveraged. You will need to determine if you have the resources to complete your ideal SEO plan on your own, or if you will need to enlist the services of a SEO agency (like TopRank. :)
* Measurement: Organize a process to measure the results of your program. You will want to be able to tie your measurements of success directly back to your SEO tactics. If increasing leads was the initial goal for your program, this may mean using an analytics package to determine the origin of your online leads. If you choose to work with an agency, be sure to select one with a strong record of measurable SEO success.
* Promotion: A well-optimized website will increase your search engine rankings and help your target audience find your services over that of competitors. However, a solid SEO program does not end there. Make the most of search engine optimization by promoting useful content. Place your URL on your business card, in your email signature, and promote it online beyond the search engines in social networks, blogs, forums and anywhere that it can be useful. It will be passed along and linked to, sending traffic and further increasing search visibility.
* Innovation: Don’t rely on what has always worked, or assume that your initial optimization will last forever. The online world is constantly changing, and this extends to optimization best practices. A solid SEO program is an ongoing investment that requires you to adapt and innovate to ensure your website stays at the top of the rankings and top of mind with your consumers.

With a solid search engine optimization plan, the right resources, measurements of success, promotion, and innovation, companies large and small can not only weather the current economic challenges, but achieve new growth and revenue goals.

Article Written by: Ashley @ Top Rank Blog

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Posted on 19 November 2007 by Neha

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is becoming more important and sought after by web sites today. In the first generation of the internet, most businesses were working to transfer and adapt their business to online operability. As web sites and domains have become established, doing business for years under the same address, the need is not only for regular upgrades, but also for SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Since 90% of users search for information through the main 5 or 6 search engines, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a method of design and promotion that ensures the site will be ranked highly on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If your site is in the top 10 when a user searches for keywords that reference your site’s products and services, then your SEO campaign has been a success. Most people will be happy if their site places in the top 20 or 30 results for popular and competitive keywords.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is important to drive traffic to your web site. If a user can reach your site through a link, review, or banner advertisement on another site, it is excellent. But most users will find your web site through a search at one of the major sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, or Lycos. Users will generally sort through the links presented on the results pages until they have found the products or information they are looking for. If your site has a good SEO structure and web promotion campaign behind it, then the pages of the site should rank highly in the results pages. If users are going to other sites before yours for similar products and services, then an SEO campaign may be able to help increase sales and traffic.

Another important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is the way the titles and descriptions for your pages display on the results pages of the search engines. You may need to make sure these are clear for the user, and contain succinct summaries of all information included on the page. You may also need to redesign your site so that keywords themselves are present in the titles and categories of the pages on your site. This will make them rank higher on search engine results pages when users query a term. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is becoming more of a standard form of maintenance and operating a web presence or domain online.

Website Promotion through PPC

Posted on 18 November 2007 by Neha

Pay Per Click advertising is used for web promotion designed to bring visitors to a specific page of a web site. Sometimes this may be the home page of a domain itself, while other times it may be a special offer page or direct link to a product. The PPC ads will appear on search engine display pages within a few hours of starting a campaign. You may be able to serve upwards of twenty to fifty thousand impressions a day with multiple keywords and ads. This calculates to twenty to fifty thousand potential customers you otherwise would not have had the chance to reach. The other interesting fact about PPC is you only pay for the ad if someone clicks on it and enters your page. For many, the click is much more valuable as it opens the door directly to a web site from any direction.

Website promotion through PPC or Pay Per Click advertising should be developed together with appropriate keyword research. PPC advertising will automatically appear in the search results pages that a user browses for information, not as links but as text ads. When you create a campaign for PPC ads on a search engine, keyword analysis is needed to save money per click through. Keywords for less popular combinations and specialized searches will place Pay Per Click ads on results pages with equal number but lower rates per click through. PPC Advertisers can combine terms to build a campaign that is most cost effective based on results and post-analysis.

In most cases related to SEO, Pay Per Click advertising will be just one aspect of the overall campaign. But for affiliate marketing techniques, there may be few opportunities better suited than PPC. Affiliate marketers can earn high commissions by researching keywords and matching them to affiliate partners through PPC campaigns. In this way PPC advertisers do the work for the main site without them having to invest, but the result for the customer is the same. The affiliate PPC ad thus works to introduce a web searching customer to an affiliate sponsor with a product or service to sell. The affiliate earns a commission if the customer makes an order, though there are some affiliate programs that will pay simply for leads or account sign ups. Managing these types of affiliate accounts is a fundamental and popular practice related to PPC advertising and web promotion.

Tips to improve your websites’ SEO

Posted on 18 November 2007 by Neha

Good web design practices and basic editing skills are still the basics when it comes to improving a web site’s SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The basic SEO campaign begins with the selection of a domain name, which should include the keywords of the target audience, or else be an easily remembered name. Second in importance is meta tags on a site. These are invisible tags of code on a web page that include a site description and its keyword lists. You should enter unique descriptions and keyword strings on every page for best SEO results. The reason for this is that web sites with the same description and keywords on every page may not be indexed past the first page by a web spider or crawler unless the meta tags description and keywords are different. Nevertheless, having the same meta tags on every page is still likely to be better than having no meta tags whatsoever on a site. In relation to meta tags, you should also make sure the robots.txt file on your web site’s root directory is configured so as to lead spiders to pages you want indexed, and to hide others, such as your site’s admin or downloads pages. You can also use meta tags to tell the web spiders and other ‘bots how often to return to index new content.

Other important aspects to consider in an SEO campaign are re-writing the titles and text of your web site’s main pages to better reflect the keywords people are searching for related to the information. This should make it clear from every angle what information or products are offered on the page. When these editing changes have been implemented across a site, you can also analyze keyword density per page across various categories. An SEO campaign will then move in the direction of web promotions. This involves building links to the site through announcements in forums, bulletin boards, blogs, and press releases. SEO campaigns are usually looking for one-way links, but two-way, three-way, and multiple link-exchange networks are also beneficial for SEO. A good SEO campaign will also target high PR sites for references and links in an attempt to increase the PR of the local site through community. As this SEO work progresses and continues on a weekly basis, a site looking for more traffic may then also start up a keyword based PPC advertising campaign. The main sources for this are generally the Big Three search engines themselves, Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft.

Developing A Web Site, Do Not Forget SEO

Posted on 18 November 2007 by Neha

Many people figure that when the design work is completed on a site, it is finished, and either sits and serves information publicly or begins to function as a business, community, or resource site. Yet that is when the Search Engine Optimization work really begins. The final stages of a web site’s construction should be based on an SEO overview and refinement. Usually this is coding meta tags for every page, refining text and titles with keyword research, and submitting the site to many search engines and directories automatically or by hand. Registering the web site with many search engines by hand will ensure a permanent link in the appropriate level of the directory. This is a different section usually from the search engine results pages, but will also help your site build Page Rank.

The next step is to promote the site on the web through forum posts, blogs, comments, announcements, press releases, and articles. You may also submit your site to link exchanges, banner exchanges, or PPC advertising sites during this stage. Basically the goal is to build a wide network of relevant links that describe and lead visitors to your information. As this web develops, your traffic and page rank will increase naturally. This is an SEO campaign in a manner that can be set up as a regular part of your domains development and maintenance. SEO is becoming more necessary as sites increase their evaluation of search engine algorithms to influence their results. Most SEO strives to create sites and campaigns of promotion that are in harmony with the way the search engines algorithms are calculated and how users browse information. For this reason there are many different types of SEO companies which use different methods for the same results.

Another increasingly common practice with blogs and content management systems is the automatic submission of XML site maps to search engines whenever a site has been updated. This automatic submission keeps the site indexed as dynamic content is created and expands. A site map that includes a text link to every page on the site is important to ensure that all pages in the domain are indexed and cached by the search engines. Content management systems should also be set to clean URL settings where possible, and use automatic generation of URLs from titles to build keyword density. CMS owners should also make sure to set the meta tags and descriptions on their sites for every page distinctly, to make the site more accurate in search engine index and results pages.

SEO: Does Your Website Require It?

Posted on 15 November 2007 by Neha

You can do a search with some basic keywords important to your web site or domain, and review the results at different search engines to see where your site returns. The page rank of your site will vary page to page, keyword to keyword, and you can draw the basic conclusions as to what needs to be done for SEO marketing. The top 10 sites on the search engine return pages may or may not have been using SEO techniques, but SEO techniques will certainly assist your website to rank higher if done properly and in accordance with White Hat methods. Only the Black Hat techniques such as cloaking or hiding keywords that do not apply to the site or page will really be likely to cause any penalty to your page ranks. Thus, even a little SEO work for a site can be important to building momentum and can also be a foundation for more promotion work.

Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft as well as many other smaller search engines and directory sites have PPC advertising campaign options for users. Combining PPC advertising and SEO work is the best way to generate more traffic to a web site quickly. Web masters should also include a program that submits an XML sitemap to the main search engines whenever content is updated. A site map including text links to every page on your site is not only hopeful for navigation, but also allows spiders to index all pages in a site easily from one page. These methods should increase SEO using only White Hat techniques.

You can list the basic keywords important to your web site or domain, and rewrite the titles and text for keyword density. The page rank of your site will improve if all the keywords are listed or in the domain and titles. You may also look to add tag clouds for keyword density and link calculation. There are some interesting keyword cloud applets, widgets, and plug ins that are easy to add an increase keyword density. SEO work for a site can be a way to build a better business through keyword density. Analyzing your web site to see if it includes these basic SEO techniques is a way to get started in planning a campaign. If the extent of it is too time consuming, then you can consider professional SEO or outsourcing through a group of freelancers for it.

PPC: The Hype Behind A Mere Click

Posted on 15 November 2007 by Neha

The popularity of PPC advertising is directly related to its success as an online method at reaching users and driving site traffic. Most anyone who has followed a PPC advertisement has ended up at a sales page with a lot of information on how to become rich, earn this or that amount of money per month, or realize amazing profits, if one would only just join the program and pay a certain amount of money. The question of how to really know if these websites are for real or a PPC fraud is usually just a matter of common sense. If a web site’s offer sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t going to work as well as it is presented. But for other types of web site promotions, sales, special events, current events, and announcements, the PPC advertising is effective and a great tool for web promoters.

Pay Per Click ads have the ability to increase sales fast. The PPC ads appear immediately on search engine results pages when the campaign is started. If you are using PPC ads for affiliate advertising, that means in one day you should have a good idea about the over all effectiveness of the campaign. If it successful on the first day, you will see sales and business, or affiliate commissions. If it does not yield any results after one or two days, then a new campaign is needed. This is the opposite of SEO, whose techniques may take longer to register results such as increase in page rank, but whose results will also be more long lasting as the links stay active over time. For this reason, SEO campaigns need to focus on permanent links, or whatever passes for permanent in the rapidly changing world of the internet. Some links may automatically expire or be deleted over time from a site, there is really little that can be done but build thousands of links continually for a site through SEO.

PPC hype is based on its quickness, and the ability to experience the results of the campaign immediately. PPC hype is also based on its effectiveness in generating traffic. PPC hype may also be a consideration inflating its cost, but this is typically driven by market demand for keywords, and based in effective marketing campaigns with results. PPC is easy to test and get started and opens up many possibilities for web promotion.

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