Marketing & Advertising Consulting » Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization: Why is Everyone Talking About SEO?

HP Jeschke — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 01:05:54 +0000

These days everyone talks about the search engine optimization. It is considered to be extremely important for online marketing. What the big deal? Why is everyone emphasizing the search engine optimization so much? These are the questions which need to be answered.

SEO or How to Get 'em boats out of da 'arbor Photo © CMJ Stock

When you are surfing the web, you may have noticed many websites with huge content on board yet with a few visitors. (You can get an idea how much traffic a web site has by checking it out at alexa.com.) Have you ever though why this is the case, I mean the little traffic? The only thing that they are lacking (assuming that they have sufficient and proper content) is search engine optimization. If that content and the website is correctly optimized for the search engines, it can drive a huge amount of traffic.

The search engine optimization aims at preparing the website to attain a better rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that the search engine optimization will involve refreshing every aspect of the website. Beginning from the URL and content, you will slowly be building links and will be working on submitting articles to article directories (Best bet here is www.ezinearticles.com) containing links to your website. All this is part of search engine optimization (SEO) and it is extremely important for the success of any online business. You will not get sales if you have not enough targeted visitors coming to your website.

Remember that believing that the visitors will come naturally to the website is a false concept. All you need to do to reject this belief is to make a search related to your keywords. How many pages do you see? A million or a thousand? Whatever the figure is, it is still huge. You will have to do things and you will need to put in effort in order to stand apart from others. Any natural or organic traffic will not come to your website if you are not located on the very first page of the search engine results.

If you have optimized your website, you might like to say that it cannot do anymore than what it is already doing. This again is not true. You can always improve anything and your websites is no exception. You can hire a search engine optimization professional and you will see the difference. Remember that hiring a professional is a job in itself and you must make sure that you are hiring the right person. Never believe in hiring the very first person who comes your way. Always perform tests and conduct interviews. Make sure that you are getting the best for your search engine optimization campaign.

Make sure that you are always adding excellent content on a regular basis to your website. All your search engine optimization efforts will dead end if you are not paying special attention to the content. Also make sure that the content is unique and is not copied from anywhere else (If in doubt, run it through copyscape.com).

High PR Web 2.0 Properties for Link Building in SEO

HP Jeschke — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:34:12 +0000

Building links is an important aspect of every SEO campaign. Aside from internal linking it is important to have external links as well. What you basically do is create some unique content, like artilces or videos and instead of slapping this content directly on your site, you create an account on one ore several of high PR web 2.0 properties and tab into their traffic as well.

photo credit: zipckr

By exposing your content to this particular audience you will increase your authority status, as well as getting additional traffic and some links that contribute to your site. make sure that the content that you create on an outside web 2.0 property is really stellar.

Each of these web 2.0 sites has a unique audience and they can either add value to your site (by voting, leaving comments etc.) or they can completely trash your site. So, make sure that you deliver a high value to these communities and you will be rewarded handsomely, not only by them, but also by Bing, Google and Yahoo.

What are Web 2.0 Properties?

Caroline Middlebrook defines this in an excellent post Link Building #2 – Web 2.0 Properties:

An Internet property is basically any kind of web page and web 2.0 is generally thought of to be interactive in some way allowing people to contribute to the site, rather than just read from it. A blog is web 2.0 (for the blogger), Facebook is web 2.0, Flickr is web 2.0 and social bookmarking sites are all web 2.0. It’s a broad word that encompasses many kinds of sites but what we’re interested in here are web 2.0 sites that allow you to have a slice of the Internet property for yourself – somewhere where you can create your own web page.

Here is a list of some Web 2.0 properties that you can use to create content on and in turn get backlinks for your SEO project:

If you know of other High PR Web 2.0 properties that should be added to this list, please leave a comment.

Internal Linking and SEO – How To Improve Your Ranking With Cheap Internal Links

HP Jeschke — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:19:05 +0000

It is not a big secret: Link building is very important for your SEO campaign. Collecting external links takes a lot of time and effort (Press Releases, Article writing etc.). One often overlooked asset are links from your own web site. This is especially true if your site has been around for some time.

As Nick from seoconsult writes:

Internal linking is an important part of SEO which can often be overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s far easier to solidify your internal links than it is to nurture links from external sites. A site with the right internal structure can score a higher ranking than a badly structured site with external links. Also, internal links are guaranteed to come from the page with the most authority on your business – your own.

If you have Blog that is powered by WordPress, you are lucky: There are several plugins that can help you build more internal links on the fly. It is called SEO Smart Links .

How does it Work?

SEO Smart Links scans your blog for keywords or phrases that match the titles of your posts and pages by default (and you can enable categories and tags matching too). These phrases are then turned into the links. The matching is case insensitive and the original case is preserved.

So If I mention “What Do I Have To Do For SEO With Bing?”, which is the title of one of my posts, it will be automatically converted into a link. This plugin improves your site’s interlinking markedly.

If you do not use wordpress, you still should consider building internal links. Just go over some of your older pages and add some internal links. While doing this you may also want to just add some updates here and there, which will be very favorably noticed by Search Engines.

Actually keeping your site up to date and adding new content on a regular basis is one of the most important SEO factors. If this seems too time consuming for your team, you can easily outsource this using services like odesk.com.

Is SEO or Search Engine Optimization Really Necessary?

HP Jeschke — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:19:57 +0000

You might wonder whether it is really necessary to do Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Well, if you do not care about traffic and targeted visitors to your web site, you do not need to do it. If you want to have targeted visitors that are eager to buy your products and / or services, you should read up a little on this SEO thing.

Search Engine Optimization is actually a lot easier than some people want to make you believe. There are basicallly two areas of SEO: On page SEO and off page SEO.

On page SEO deal with all the things that happen on your own page. The main things are:

- Navigation

- Title Tags

- Meta Tags

- Content

- Web Site Structure

You can read up on Positive ON-Page SEO Factors and Negative ON-Page SEO Factors . The Positive OFF-Page SEO Factors and Negative OFF-Page SEO Factors are the factors that are on happening on other sites, linking to yours.

These are things like

- PageRank (PR)

- Age of links

- Numebr of links

- Context of links

Most of the Search Engine Optimization factors come naturally if you build your web site with the visitor in mind:

If you deliver excellent, unique content that is keept up to date you have already built a good foundation. If you the structure the content in a way that is easy to navigate you are well on your way to get good rankings.

You can not really trick the search engines, at least not for a long time. All you can do is put some emphasis on certain things and improve certain aspects.

SEO boils down to knowing what to do and doing it on a regular basis.