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Initial Steps to SEO Success

Apr 1

Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization | Comments off

If you have focused objectives and a clear online strategy then SEO will almost always be a good cost effective addition to the marketing tool set. The first thing to understand is that search engine businesses, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, have customers to satisfy too. Their customers are searching and they expect to see the ‘best and most relevant’ search results. I expect like me, you get frustrated if your searches bring irrelevant results first. No surprise then, that the methods used by the search engine operators are designed to deliver customer satisfaction. They work hard to eliminate bogus SEO services that aim to cheat.

It is possible for you to make your website ‘the best and most relevant’ for certain searches and to convince the search engine operator you are just that too. That is SEO.  I assume that you will be committed to a long term marketing strategy, and to measuring results with a view to adjusting your activity. The steps include those of preparation as well of those of continuous repeated activities. The early preparatory steps are perhaps the most important as errors here will frustrate the effectiveness of the later ones.

Armed with our clear objectives and online strategy:

Step 1 – Keyword Research

A vital first step that should not be undertaken lightly. While experienced pay-per-click advertisers will know that you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, they should understand this not possible for organic search optimization. It is normally advisable to concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site around a core theme. Then, for individual pages only one to three phrases. For large sites with hundreds of pages it is hard to optimize every single page. The effort and cost of SEO to the full extent produces diminishing returns.

Step 2 – Competitive Intelligence

SEO is competitive. There is only one front page and only one top slot so it is important to know your competition and perform better. What are they doing? Where do they rank and for which keywords? Who is linking to their website and why? The less competitive your industry is online the easier it is for you to outperform your competition. This is an important determining factor in the cost and resources necessary to achieve your desired SEO outcome.

Step 3 – Web Design and Development

Like trying to cable an old building for modern communications or boosting performance of an obsolete machine, fixing a bad website design is much tougher than building properly from scratch. When you create a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. Almost all template-based websites are tough to re-engineer for SEO. A good design from the start will save you a lot of time and money. In most cases it will put you ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. In most cases a high performing design for SEO is also a user friendly design, but occasionally compromise is necesary.

Step 4 – Get Your First Inbound Links

There is no need to pay to submít your website to any search engine. Just as soon as you create inbound links from other websites to yours the search engines will find your website.

There are plenty of scam products and services. Avoid them. They are a waste of your money. No one can guarantee you a number 1 ranking. It must be earned and maintained by being the best and most relevant.

There are some web directories that are recognized by search engines and gaining a trade listing there will be a helpful kick-start to your SEO campaign. Then ask your customers and suppliers to place a link to your website from theirs. Most will be pleased for the favor to be returned.

Step 5 – Sitemaps

The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, it is advisable to create an account and register your website with them, just for the reports and statistics they provide free of charge and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

After completion of the first 5 steps, schedule them for occasional review. The remaining tasks require regular and repetitive effort. In Eleven Steps to SEO Heaven (steps 6 to eleven) we look at taking a website that is a SEO ready site with a ready to run campaign and look at the steps and work needed to claim a high search engine ranking.

About The Author:
Tim Meadows-Smith is an experienced non-executive chairman, director and business advisor from a classical sales and marketing background gained with famous global FMCG brand owners. He has worked with businesses globally in the FMCG, logistics, service and technology sectors.

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Realistic SEO Goals

Sep 27

Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization | Comments off

When you’re ready to make an investment of time, money and effort into SEO, it’s important that you set realistic goals about the results that you are expecting to see. Many people know that SEO can be extremely beneficial for an online business, however they don’t quite understand how the process works, or what they should expect. Therefore it’s important to get an idea of what you should be expecting both in terms of the process itself and the success you and your business will end up seeing.

The Basic Process of SEO

There are many different elements of an effective search marketing campaign. With SEO, the details definitely do make a big difference, and the most successful campaigns are the ones that combine many different strategies into one cohesive plan. The element of SEO that gets the most buzz however remains the use of keywords.

Keywords, of course, are the actual terms that people type into the search engines in order to begin looking for something. By targeting the right keywords and key phrases, you can increase your chances of being found by more individuals. Research here is of the utmost importance, because by digging down into the data you can find great long-tail key phrases, which have three or more words, which will enable you to be ranked as highly as possible.

After all, very few people these days just type for something such as “football”. They may make a search however for “buying replica football jerseys”. Not to mention that ranking for generic terms and phrases is incredibly hard. Once you know the actual keywords that people use for your niche or industry, you can then go about including them on your site as a piece of your search marketing game plan. The result is that you will end up seeing not just more traffic, but traffic that is truly targeted, which will result in more prospects and customers for your business.

So how do you go about including keywords into your website after the research has been performed? Keywords can be used in any number of different ways, starting from the beginning of the process when you may want to choose a domain name that includes some of your targeted keywords. From there, keywords can be used in individual page names, in the links that you have from one page on your site to the others and most prevalently, in the written content of the page itself.

A crucial thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t overdo your keyword usage, a practice known as “keyword stuffing”. Not only with this turn off your visitors, who have a hard time reading the content you have on your site, but it also marks you as spam in the eyes of the search engines. Your rankings will plummet, and you’ll never receive the traffic that you have been craving. Ultimately, effective search marketing when it comes to the inclusion of keywords is all about walking the fine line between too many keywords and spam, and too few keywords and a lack of connection to those search queries.

It’s also important to note that while many people feel that “content is king” when it comes to SEO, content just for the sake of content isn’t valuable at all. Adding dozens of keyword stuffed pages to your website won’t produce results. What your site actually needs is high quality, unique and valuable content that serves a purpose beyond helping your search marketing efforts.

In addition to these onsite SEO tactics, effective search marketing also includes offsite SEO, primarily in the form of link building. Once your website is established, you can go about the process of generating incoming links leading to your site. Each incoming link from another site to your own is like a vote for your site in the eyes of the search engines.

The more votes the better, as your reputation and credibility will grow. Additionally, votes from more reputable sources do count for more, and will provide a bigger boost to your rankings. There are many different ways to go about link building, including directory submissions, article marketing, blog posting and commenting and on down the line.

Search Marketing Results

After you have begun work with an SEO strategy, what kind of results should you expect to see and how soon should you expect to see them? SEO works very quickly, but it’s not instantaneous and in many cases it is a gradual process. A few more links and a few pages of optimized content won’t send you to the number 1 spot in Google overnight.

However, continuing to develop your site in the right fashion and working hard to deploy a long term SEO game plan will get you to that highly coveted first page. You have to remember, all of those websites on the first page are there for a reason, and they probably have been doing a few things right. Therefore you can’t automatically supplant them when you start your own work, nor can you bypass all of the websites also undertaking their own strategies.

The bottom line is that you have to be in it for the long haul. The right combination of smart SEO strategies, consistently applied will get you to that first page, but you can’t expect to put a few keywords on your page and show up as number 1 tomorrow morning.

Once you know some of the basic processes involved with SEO you will be able to dive in for yourself. You have to remember to have realistic expectations though about what kind of work you’ll need to do, or what you would like to have done for you. Additionally, while there is an unlimited upside with SEO, there aren’t any free lunches either. It’s a process, and it can start working very quickly, but nothing is instantaneous or guaranteed when the competition is as fierce as it currently is with search marketing.

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Companies Increase SEO Spending!

Sep 24

Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

With executives gaining more and more information on the importance of search engine marketing, budget allocations for search engine optimization (SEO) are on the rise.  Simply put, the opportunity to maximize profits through online sales and lead generation has become too enticing to ignore.

A far as a long term strategy goes for customer acquisition and consumer presence, SEO is taking a larger role versus traditional marketing avenues.  Reports are in that corporate spending on SEO pursuits is expected to see a dramatic increase over the coming years.  With the current down economy, more serious talks are taking place in boardrooms across the country as to how these businesses will more effectively position their websites within the search engines.

Highly touted publications predict that organic search efforts (unpaid traffic generation) will rise anywhere from 17 to 20 percent while we simultaneously witness paid search (pay per click advertising) decline in the neighborhood of 11-15 percent.  A fantastic outline of this is depicted in the graph below, from our friends at eMarketer:

SEO Market Growth

SEO Market Growth

Surveys are also beginning to suggest that companies placed in the top 5 of organic search results hold a slightly higher value and garner more targeted click-through traffic.  This doesn’t mean that paid advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing doesn’t get its fair share of traffic, just that organic results are getting equivalent conversions as consumers become more aware of the differences between paid vs. organic rankings.

The most obvious way to positively impact search engine results is to participate in both paid and SEO endeavors.  Pay per click offers immediate results while search engine optimization is a longer process that takes time and persistence.  Many large and small companies are finding that a pay per click campaign becomes a needed initial expense while SEO initiatives take root.  Many businesses can then realistically begin to decrease dollars spent on pay per click as they see their organic search results rise.

No matter what online activities a company decides to begin, proper reporting is the key ingredient to success.  Without having the proper tracking and reporting infrastructure in place, many dollars can be wasted on poor decisions.  There becomes no way of properly gauging the return on investment received from these pursuits without the statistics to back it up.

Web analytics are vital in order to gain useful knowledge and information when judging the results of a campaign.  Google offers “Google Analytics” which is free and only requires a small line of code be added to your site.  The type of data supplied from Google about a site’s traffic and visitors sources can be extremely helpful.

The bottom line with increased investments put toward companies’ online efforts is that anyone not exploring the options with search engine marketing is sinking further behind the curve.  In addition to increased traffic to their website, businesses need to consider SEO much like their public relations arm.  Getting ranked in the search engines gets customers in the door but in the end, it is the products and services offered that ultimately make the sale.

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‘Quality Score’ Explained

Sep 18

Posted by admin in Pay Per Click Advertising | Comments off

For anyone that has ever researched pay per click advertising or how to better improve their Adwords search placement, the concept of “Quality Score” is sure to have come up.  Seems like we’re learning more and more from Google these days about the concept of Quality Score and how it can impact your Adwords campaigns.

So what exactly is Quality Score?  Quality Score is the rating assigned to your pay per click ads (by Google) based on the relevance your ad and destination URL have in relation to the keyword(s) you are bidding on.  Staying true to form, Google strives to provide relevant content to all of their search results, paid or organic.  If they didn’t have some way of monitoring relevance then Adwords would simply become an auction site.  Ads would be placed solely based on the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay.  If you thought this is how pay per click advertising works you are sorely mistaken.

You see, if ads were placed solely on the willingness of an advertiser to pay the highest amount with no consideration given to it’s relevance to the search phrase, I’d go as far as to say that we’d see Viagra ads pop up in just about every search.  Google assigns Quality Score to prevent this very occurrence from happening.

Factors involved in calculating Quality Score are many.  However, the main ones you’ll want to concern yourself with seem to be:

  • Relevance of your ad to the keyword phrase a user queries
  • Relevance of the specific ad to the keyword within the ad campaign
  • The historical click-through rate of your ad for a specific keyword phrase
  • Relevance of your keyword in relation to the landing page you use as your destination URL

Now that we know a little about what Quality Score is, the next question is naturally “How do I increase my Quality Score with Google?”  Following right along with what we know affects your Quality Score, you’re best served by managing the following:

  • Verify that your ads and keywords relate to one another.
    • Make sure to include the keyword in the ad itself
    • If possible (without looking forced), try to use it twice
  • Group similar keywords, but ONLY similar keywords, within campaigns
    • Knowing that the same ad will appear in the results of any keywords you include in a campaign, it’s best to make sure your groups are small and targeted
    • Ideally, you would set up each keyword as its own campaign
    • Expecting one ad to cover multiple keywords with high relevance is unrealistic
  • Pay close attention to keeping your keywords relevant to your customer.
    • Its great to have lots and lots of keywords, but only if each one has some tie to the customers your want to attract
    • By keeping your keywords (and ads) relevant to your customer, your click-through rate will be much higher
  • Make sure to use specific (relevant) landing pages for your keywords/ads
    • Don’t automatically send everything to your Home Page
    • If your keywords relate more specifically to a drill-down page of your site, link your ad to that page
    • Don’t expect your customers to work to navigate your site… send them directly to what they are looking for

By following these general guidelines and keeping your Quality Score high, you will not only achieve higher search result placements but you’ll be rewarded with lower cost per click.  Google wants their user experience to be a good one so they will give preferred placement to ads with high Quality Score.

(please find this blog posted at Technorati – wc8bse2hdz)

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Why It’s a Good Thing I’m Moonlighting

Sep 16

Posted by admin in Business Insights | 1 Comment

At first glance, the title of this post might be a little confusing.  Perhaps it’s a little scary.  To think that I’m openly telling you, as your prospective SEO expert, that I’m working other avenues of online marketing.  That working on my clients’ search optimization isn’t my entire focus.

Now let me explain why you should consider that a GOOD thing.  Let’s face it, in learning the ropes of effective search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, there become open doors all around to make money.  After learning the craft over the last year and more, I have become proficient in getting businesses noticed by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Wouldn’t you expect me to put these talents to use for myself just the same as you? 

Whether it’s affiliate marketing, launching new e-commerce sites, blogging for traffic or whatever, you should expect me to be doing these things for myself if you are to ever trust me to do it for you.  I dare say that if I weren’t moonlighting on projects aside from the nuts and bolts of Zirkel Exchange, I run the risk of losing credibility.

I liken it to a realtor who doesn’t own property for themselves or a stock broker that doesn’t manage his own portfolio.  By putting my own skin in the game (so to speak) of online marketing and e-commerce I hope to prove that my tactics and knowledge are solid like a rock.

Every client is different and I learn something new from each one of them.  The same holds true for my own ventures.  By exploring new markets and opportunities I see available when I am online I am able to broaden my depth of knowledge beyond just what I might learn from my existing client base.  Besides, I’d much rather try and fail at something new when it is my own test site than to experience that disappointment with a paying customer.  By taking my ”off hours” to work on my own SEO projects, I am essentially opening up a platform for experimentation at no risk to my clients.

The SEO business is a tough road to plow and continuing education needs to come from hands-on experience.  New ideas are constantly being presented and I receive hundreds of emails a week with the “latest and greatest, must try” techniques.  By putting these tools to use in real world situations for myself first, I am able to form an even sturdier bank of knowledge on which to stand.

For these reasons I hope it is clear why I am open about the fact that my SEO and PPC clients are not my only source of income.  I am passionate about this business and I cherish the relationships I have formed with the businesses I help.  But I honestly do not believe I could perform as well as I do for them without having first seen success for myself.

For an example of one of the e-commerce sites I have launched and manage, please visit the Swimwear Clothing Store.

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3 Tips for Better Search Rankings

Aug 30

Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization | Comments off

SEO refers to search engine optimization. It is a process to increase the organic search rankings of a website. There are millions of searches being done online. People search for almost every imaginable thing from how to care for their pets to how to make money from home etc.

While searching, people enter some words or phrases in the search box. These are known as keywords or key phrases. A website owner’s aim is to have high rankings for a lot of important keywords related to the site’s niche.

The advantage of high rankings is that you can get thousands of free visitors to your website without spending a dime on advertising. And this traffic will keep coming to your website automatically as long as your site is still ranking high on the search engines.

What’ more – your site will be getting visitors even while you are sleeping, eating or enjoying time with your family.

In order to enjoy all these benefits, we need to optimize our website in a certain way so that it stands a good chance of ranking highly in the search engines. Each search engine is different and gives priority to different factors.

It may be almost impossible to optimize our website keeping all the search engines in mind. Thankfully we don’t have to do so. If we focus on just the top 3-5 search engines, it should be sufficient for us to get thousands of free targeted visitors.

Start Your SEO Efforts from Here:

Let us discuss 3 important areas you have to focus on first in order to optimize your website for higher rankings.

1. Pay Attention to Title: Each webpage has a title. What you place between the title tags is very important from SEO point of view.

You should place your most important keywords which you are targeting in the title. The keywords should be placed in the title is such a manner that it should make sense to humans also.

Our webpage titles should appeal to search engines as well as human visitors. If your title is just a bunch of keywords without much sense or appeal, then people will may not click to visit your site even if you have a high ranking in the search engine.

2. Pay Attention to Header Tags: Header tags are like subtitles of your page. Again header tags are important from human as well as SEO point of view.

Header tags should also contain your important keywords so that the search engines understand what your page is about. These header tags are also important for human visitors to your website. If someone is just scanning your article, he/she can read through the subtitles to decide whether the article is of their interest and deserves to be read further or not.

3. Pay Attention to Content: Your articles should be of good quality and useful to the reader. They should serve some purpose.

The article should contain your important keywords written in a natural manner so that it makes complete sense to human readers also. If you write high quality content and spread your important keywords throughout the content then stand a good chance of impressing the search engines as well as human visitors.

These are the 3 most important parts of your webpage you should pay attention to if you want to gain high search rankings. The benefits of top rankings are immense. So start paying more attention to your article titles, subtitles as well as the actual content.

If you do so then you can reap the benefits in terms of good search rankings as well as high conversions from website visitors.

There are many other factors that need your attention in order to improve site rankings, but all efforts should start from here. You should first and foremost try and optimize your content then worry about other factors.

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