SEO – Self Help Search Engine Optimization

For advertisers using pay-per-click search engines, nothing matters more than the quality of search traffic, according to a new survey of nearly 300 businesses advertising on Search123.

The survey asked advertisers to identify which considerations are most important when selecting a pay-per-click search engine. Eighty-five per cent cited the quality of search traffic as the single most important factor. Bid prices and quantity of search traffic rounded out the top three criteria, at 67 per cent and 51 per cent, respectively.

“When we surveyed advertisers a year ago, search engine marketers said that bid prices were the most important consideration. Today, advertisers are squarely focused on traffic quality. The message to paid search engines is that traffic quality is not to be compromised. Marketers are looking not for clicks, but for `e-commerce productive’ traffic that yields measurable return on investment,” said James Beriker, CEO, Search123.

The following were the survey’s other findings:

 Fifty-three per cent complement paid search with search engine optimization efforts to improve rankings within algorithmically-based engines.

 PPC advertisers use less of other online marketing disciplines. Only 31 per cent use opt e-mail, followed by affiliate marketing at 24 per cent. CPM banner ads finished last with just 14 per cent.

 Sixty-six per cent regard PPC search as their most effective method of online advertising, compared with 15 per cent who believe SEO offers greater effectiveness. Banner ads did not register at all.

 Thirty-four per cent of respondents allocate at least 75 per cent of their online advertising budgets for pay-per-click search engines; another 21 per cent devote half to three-quarters of their budget to paid search.

 Seventy-two per cent track sales conversion data from keyword listings, indicating that the majority of search engine marketers are sophisticated about the relationship between traffic quality and ROI.

Based in California, Search123 operates a pay-per-click search engine in which advertisers bid for priority placement on search result pages and pay only when users click on a listing.

Inside Google labs, it’s hard to know what’s cooking. The latest one, though, has a whole lot of netizens buzzing — Custom Search Engine ( CSE), part of Google Co-Op, the google partnership programme.

Take a look at it for yourself at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/. Internet trend analysts believe Google is trying to improve the quality of search results for the specialists. Google will also get to collect user behaviour data more easily as this programme works only for those who register with it. A key factor behind CSE, according to a practitioner of Google AdWords, is the fact that Yahoo’s search engine marketing tool Panama is ready for launch, something that’s certainly worrying the company. He adds, “Google’s management is more bottomline driven than what it used to be in the past. Every product is made with the intention of making money for the company.” Adds Manish Vij, business head, Quasar Media, an Internet media firm, “It’s not the most relevant product from Google, but just a step to keep its publishers and happy and market share intact.”

Essentially, CSE lets you, the user, decide what sites should be included in the search. You can select from hundreds of URLs, a significant improvement over what other custom search engines like Yahoo! Search Builder and even Google’s Sitesearch offer currently, just one URL to search from. You have your own search index rather than relying on Google’s Page-rank algorithm to throw up the necessary results.

You can also customise the look and feel of the results page. The idea is that if you’re an expert in a particular area or field, you can set up an engine for others in your field to use. With the CSE, it’s likely that many hidden links and Word documents that weren’t always on the radar of the Google spider will now be available to a lot more users because these will start appearing higher in search results. It’s obvious that this has its advantages.

Consider realclimate.org, a website dealing with the science of climate change and one of the early adopters of the CSE. For this site, the built-in custom search engine will search only those pages that scientists would deem fit to be viewed by others in the field of climate change. This would ensure that quality information is available in a field where perhaps the best results wouldn’t make it to the first few pages. Similarly, healthcare and medicine are other fields where CSE has obvious benefits. CSE also becomes, in effect, surrogate search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO is like a tution class that makes a website smarter and apear higher in Google’s list of preferred pages. It is a tool whose practitioners are looked on with awe, SEO now becomes simpler and easier to execute, because more links indexed in the CSE will now show up in the regular Google search. Yet, for all of Google’s apparent altruism, it’s clearly yet another revenue generating stream.

Google’s ad inventory is limited to a certain extent by the number of search pages it throws up. The only way to increase this inventory is simply by increasing the number of search pages that wil be thrown up. In other words, Google has more pages to put their ads. This means they can make more money through their pay-per-click program, with more search results in which to plug their AdWords and more sites in which to plug their AdSense program.

For any business to succeed on internet or outside, it is important to understand the Return on Investment the owner is getting. It is generally the profit or turnover being made by them at the end of the day compare to the amount invested in the same. The rule applies to every aspect of our life also. When we go to college/school to study, we look for high marks which will assure us a good job in future. While talking about web portals, they also keep close watch on what their ROI is when investing & creating the site. This is because, every investment needs to yield results for it to be effective, else the approach needs to be changed.

Search Engine Marketing must take into account the two operational methods – using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click management system like google adwords or YPN. Search Engine Optimization will work better in the long run, whereas pay per click is mainly to draw specific bracket of traffic onto the site and this works only for a short time. All efforts taken by way of investment and links will go to waste if there is not much of traffic to your portal.

Pay per click works by having the user post as many ads on their page, or posting links on other pages or other websites. If a person surfing the net comes across these ppc ads, and clicks on them, the owner will get revenue based on the terms mentioned by the pay per click service provider. The ads placed need to be such a way that they draw attention to your page and keep the user captivated. User should stay on your website for long time. It is not that you are spending about $1 or $5 on the clicks and the person who comes over to your page and leaves, with no return. Sometimes even by running AdSense on your page, you might find the search engine throws up your page on the results page only if the ad is on the related page and nowhere else.

I have been using Google adwords as PPC for few of my websites to generate traffic. Its been quite a long time that i was using google adwords. when i come across a book called “Beating Adwords”, i was able to find out how i can squeeze my campaigns and make more ROI out of it. Beating Adwords is the very detailed book wherein you can find out how to setup, run and make more money out of your google campaign. Here I am placing link to download Beating Adwords book. you can post you reviews in comment in this thread.

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I have been to many forums and found that people like to do their own SEO initially and then give up later after they do not find reasonable results. I would suggest that they should keep on trying, until they really feel that their sales is directly dependent on their ranking in the search engines.
I have high respect for all the people who have achieved success using in-house/personal SEO and still are able to maintain there top spot for highly competitive keywords like digital camera software or photo software. The world of SEO has changed rapidly and so have the techniques. Now lets start with main subject that is “Making money online with SEO“.
The first well-known fact:

Higher the traffic better the sales.

It is a proven fact that among the billions of pages that are searched by search engines only a few make it to the top and these top 30 websites make the most business. Type in digital camera software for instance and you will understand what I mean. Do you remember how many times have you gone beyond the 3-4th page of your search page results? I would expect the same behavior from 99.9% of the Internet surfers as no one has the time to go beyond the top 30 listed pages. I am exaggerating when I say top 30 because mostly the top 10 get 75% of the hits. So if you are not at the top you are losing on a huge chunk of sales, unless you are advertising locally and are limited to a local business.

SEO Worldwide – Video

SEO Worldwide – The best bloopers are a click away

Google adwords is worth a mention at this point as millions use them and know their importance. The users of google adwords know that they will get listed at the top page (sponsored listing) for the specified keywords. However, they do not estimate the sales that they will make. They can easily do it in a month and then change their bid amount to be paying less in advertising on google. Being listed in the top page does not mean that you will end up with guaranteed sales. You need to have a real good sales page that will make the “buyer” feel the need to buy it. Remember it is all about making him feel that he needs it.

Search engine optimization will propel your page to the top 10 without having to pay for the adwords campaign that is a pay per click campaign and you might end up paying far more than your sales. Having said this if you choose the niche keywords for your campaign and have a good sales copy you are bound to make a lot out of the campaign. Out of thousands who click to your page at least 50 should buy your product.

The million-dollar question…

How will you benefit from SEO? How much should you spend?
If you have a good product and at a reasonable price compared to competition and feel that you can garner enough sales once your website receives traffic SEO will benefit you by providing you with exposure for the chosen keywords ( a proper keyword analysis for searches per month for that chosen keyword) will be conducted by the SEO expert. Depending on the competition you have for those keywords the plan will be chalked out by him. Sometimes only on-page SEO may take you to the top however, nowadays SEO has become a popular career with many top websites spending huge amounts on SEO to be listed in the top.

Your expense should depend on how much sale you are bound to make. A proper estimation of this can be drawn after the first month that you are listed in the top 10. Your expense can range from any where between $250-$2500 depending on the competition you face.

Be careful while choosing an SEO firm or person as they can use spammed techniques that can get you banned from search engines.

An appropriate linking strategy can improve the page rank for Google and the other search engines. But how can a search engine optimizer’s inbound links be spidered and indexed by Google and the other search engines?

The important part in a successful linking strategy is that pages linked to highly ranked sites are a higher value than those with fewer links. Links from serious and higher ranked sites are increasing the value of their destination, improving its position, giving a higher placement in the results list.

Similar results can be obtained using any of the search engines with the same keywords or phrases. To improve the search engine position, the most often recommended solution is to make a linking campaign.

An inbound links method is a proven solution in the high ranking attempt of almost every search engine optimizer. Some inbound links may come from the sites that had added interesting articles about the main site’s topics. If the keywords are used with a moderate frequency, keeping the article’s content pleasant, attractive, and interesting; this kind of linking strategy can bring spectacular results.

But what about the reciprocal links? Are they really useful for this strategy? If a long list of reciprocal links exists, does the website have spectacular improved position on the results pages? After a few important experiments, it looks like the result is not as spectacular as the premises are.

Only a small part of the reciprocal links is considered valid by Google and the other search engines. The part applied to the page rank is not as important as the number of reciprocal links is, so this technique must be applied with measure and prudence.

Those thoughts are the results of my personal experience in a  site’s ranking. I used all the SEO possibilities I knew, but using inbound links was the most powerful tool to improve my web site ranking.

Every link added is ranking the site higher than linking every page individually. If the link also contains valuable keywords for the website content, the results are more promising. A linking strategy well done for each site containing single articles listed on small sites is bringing good results.

The page rank can also be improved by designing a sitemap. It is wise to have a page that links to all others to get every page spidered and indexed.  It is not difficult to create a map page and link it from the site’s home page. The results will be appreciable.

To begin linking your sites with other sites, you can start by joining a linking directory. This will help increase your page rank, but you must make sure people are linking back to you. Don’t just add a bunch of links to your page and think you’re done. You have to have your link reciprocated on the other person’s site. To learn more about joining a linking directory, go to:

http://www.MyLinkMachine.com

Everybody is looking for the magic formula that will get their site listed on the first page of Google. Because of this, the internet is full of search engine optimization experts that are willing to take your money once they sell you on their new theory of Google’s algorithm. You have your choice of SEO Consultant to full fledged SEO Corporations all willing to take your money and optimize your site. None of them will promise specific results.

SEO Elite Software

That’s because Google is a very sophisticated search engine and their algorithm changes constantly. Google’s algorithm has one primary goal and that is to deliver relevant content. All of this effort is to identify good websites with quality content and to weed out the sites that are “optimized” to trick the algorithm. Therefore… if you have a good website with quality content then “optimizing” your site may be counter-productive if there’s even a slight chance that Google would think you’re using tricks.

That’s right, let Google’s algorithm smell your website optimization techniques and your status as a good website with quality content may be in jeopardy. Google is looking for websites whose webmasters are putting their time and energy in to building and maintaining a good website with quality content not spending their time and energy trying to trick the algorithm. So, the best thing you can do is to put your time and energy in to the reason you built your website in the first place. Whatever that reason may be, it probably was not to learn and practice SEO techniques.

Be organic. Be yourself, even be one with your website. Google likes sites that are organic and built by people with a clear purpose. Understand and embrace the algorithm. Do not fear it and try to trick it. It is there to do good.

As I’ve said before, don’t lose sleep over search engine optimization, lose sleep over conversion rate. Spend your time maximizing your site for your visitors. A good site with quality content will get top rankings naturally.

SEO Elite Software

So, the trick to tricking the search engines is to have no trick at all. How much easier can that be?

This article will guide you through the main reasons why duplicate content is a bad thing for your site, how to avoid it, and most importantly, how to fix it. What it is important to understand initially, is that the duplicate content that counts against you is your own. What other sites do with your content is often out of your control, just like who links to you for the most part… Keeping that in mind.

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How to determine if you have duplicate content.
When your content is duplicated you risk fragmentation of your rank, anchor text dilution, and lots of other negative effects. But how do you tell initially? Use the “value” factor. Ask yourself: Is there additional value to this content? Don’t just reproduce content for no reason. Is this version of the page basically a new one, or just a slight rewrite of the previous? Make sure you are adding unique value. Am I sending the engines a bad signal? They can identify our duplicate content candidates from numerous signals. Similar to ranking, the most popular are identified, and marked.

How to manage duplicate content versions.
Every site could have potential versions of duplicate content. This is fine. The key here is how to manage these. There are legitimate reasons to duplicate content, including: 1) Alternate document formats. When having content that is hosted as HTML, Word, PDF, etc. 2) Legitimate content syndication. The use of RSS feeds and others. 3) The use of common code. CSS, JavaScript, or any boilerplate elements.

In the first case, we may have alternative ways to deliver our content. We need to be able to choose a default format, and disallow the engines from the others, but still allowing the users access. We can do this by adding the proper code to the robots.txt file, and making sure we exclude any urls to these versions on our sitemaps as well. Talking about urls, you should use the nofollow attribute on your site also to get rid of duplicate pages, because other people can still link to them.

As far as the second case, if you have a page that consists of a rendering of an rss feed from another site – and 10 other sites also have pages based on that feed – then this could look like duplicate content to the search engines. So, the bottom line is that you probably are not at risk for duplication, unless a large portion of your site is based on them. And lastly, you should disallow any common code from getting indexed. With your CSS as an external file, make sure that you place it in a separate folder and exclude that folder from being crawled in your robots.txt  and do the same for your JavaScript or any other common external code.

Additional notes on duplicate content.
Any URL has the potential to be counted by search engines. Two URLs referring to the same content will look like duplicated, unless you manage them properly. This includes again choosing the default one, and 301 redirecting the other ones to it.

By Utah SEO Jose Nunez

Jack had an amazing idea & started his online business with a vision of making it big someday. But few years down the line Jack is left wondering as to why his business isn’t turning up the way he expected it to!

Mark thinks that he has a better service than his competitors, but still fails to understand why their Balance Sheet figures are running into millions, while his are still in few thousands!

All these puzzling facts make one doubt himself. But my friend, the problem is not with the idea or the service! The problem lies in the promotion strategies. No matter how good an idea or a service is, it won’t be successful unless you put it to the right people in the right manner. Good Web Promotion can do wonders to an average idea; forget what it can do to a good one. Had Jack & Mark adopted the right kind of Internet Promotion strategy, they would have achieved what they wanted to.

Everyone will agree that today’s Web Promotion is dominated by Search Engines, or to be precise, Google. If your site is in the top thirty, for the right “Keyword”, you can be a winner. But how can one make it to the top & stay there for a long time? (Mind you, in this dynamic world called Internet, sticking to your position is as important as getting there!)

The best way to “optimize” your site is through a new “Organic Method of Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) that Google & other search engines just love, generating “Quality One Way Links”. One can generate quality back links by way of “Directory Submission” & “Article Submission”.

Online directories provide you with quality back links, which is precisely what you are looking for. Apart from this, you need to submit your site to the most appropriate category & with a brief description about your business. Thus, they also send targeted audience your way!

Another way of generating quality targeted audience & one way links is by writing quality articles & submitting them to Article Directories! By writing a quality article, you are not just informing your potential customers about your service, but are also sharing your knowledge with them. Again, Article Directories gives you an opportunity to inform people about yourself & also provide a link to your site. This way, people get to know about you & your site. And if your article provides a visitor what he came looking for, you have most definitely found yourself a new client!

Had Jack written an article about his idea & explained his service to his target audience and submitted his site to Hundreds of Search Engine Friendly Directories, he would have been on “Cloud 9” by now. Had Mark written an article informing his potential customers, how his service is better than his customers & also submitted his site to Online Directories, his Balance Sheet too might have run into Millions.
To summarize, when you submit your article or your site to various online directories, this is what you get -

1. You generate hundreds of quality back links to your site.
2. People who search these directories may find your article or your sites description interesting & visit your site. Thus you get large targeted audience.

The end result is that your site satisfies all the criterions set by various search engines to have a favorable Rank. You thus reach high positions in search engines & stay there for a long time!

Search engine optimization has become the most crucial element of ranking high in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Dogpile etc. There are several websites on the internet which boast about SEO techniques & tips and guarantee top placement in days. How do you believe and invest your hard earned money in a company who does not have a background in search engine optimization believing their claims?

The question is “are you ready to play a gamble with your site?” Honestly the answer would be a big NO.

No one would like to waste their money. So, what is the way out? How about doing your own search engine optimization? It is a very long drawn and tedious process if you do it manually. So, how to go about it?

Are there any softwares available to do the SEO?

Yes! there are several SEO softwares available in the market. But, how do you know which SEO software is reliable and meet your search engine optimization needs and most importantly, whether they would live up to their claims?

SEO software is the answer to implement the major SEO techniques. What are they? SEO is primarily divided into two parts.

• On page optimization
• Off page optimization

On page optimization

On page optimization involves:

• Title Tags
• Meta Tags like meta keywords (lost its importance now due to keywords abuse) & meta description.
• Alt-Image tags
• H1, H2 tags
• High keyword density
• Quality content
• Ease of navigation
• Internal Linking and more…..

Off page optimization

Off page optimization involves:

• Link Building to improve Link popularity
• Reciprocal Linking – Two way links
• Non-reciprocal linking – In-bound links
• Use of keyword rich anchor text in linking text
• Improving Google page rank
• PPC advertisements
• Directory submissions

It is a well known fact that off page optimization has more value than on page optimization. It does not mean that on page optimization has no value and requires no optimization. On page optimization has its value and should not be ignored.

There are several SEO softwares available to implement the off page optimization by improving link popularity by building both reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. There are websites which offer monthly membership accounts to use their Link Popularity software and some other websites have their software available for one time fee. For a beginner it is always better to go with one time fee software to keep the fixed expenses low. You are here to do business so you need to think and plan every dime you spend towards business success.

So, what to expect from a SEO software selling website?

• Not a one time seller without any future upgrades
• A website with good technical support
• A website with a proven track record
• A website with a forum with quality user feedback
• Most importantly these website’s SEO software should have good product reviews.

We see many SEO software companies doing their own product reviews and it looks more like self propaganda than an honest product review. We need websites who test and verify the claims made by the SEO software companies and publish their honest feedback. This would help the newbie website owners to make an educated decision after reading the detailed unbiased analysis published on a third party website.

There are very few websites that do this and should be encouraged to test and verify more of these SEO softwares and help the website owners to learn and implement the off page optimization techniques. This would save time and money of the online entrepreneurs to improve their link popularity and increase their search engine rankings. Higher search engine rankings bring more traffic to the websites and hence more sales. It is a known fact that we can drive visitors to websites but converting them into buyers totally relies on how effective is the content and ease of website’s navigation.

We should develop effective content in the form of relevant articles linking to your website. Writing an effective article is a skill which needs to be developed by reading other articles and other e-books focusing on writing best articles. Now we should know the list of quality article directories to submit to in the right category. This would be another tedious and time consuming process and this demands an SEO software whose sole aim is article submission to various article directories.

Another way of getting traffic to the website is thru PPC i.e Pay Per Click. There are several PPC programs available like Google Adwords, Overture PPC, FindWhat etc. Now the question is choosing the right keyword relevant to the content of your website is very important. You might choose the right keyword which is highly competitive and may have to pay a high bid price to get the higher placement in the sponsored links. We need an SEO software to optimize the adwords campaign to choose the right keyword combo to choose for the PPC. This would save money and time and helps beat the competition.

There are several other effective methods to do the off page optimization and there are several SEO softwares available in the market. So, in conclusion read the product reviews, and see the important features of the selling website as mentioned above for the final decision as which SEO software you should get your hands on.

Wishing you all success in your website’s search engine optimization.

Every website listed in the search engines has a position, or ‘ranking’, and each one of these rankings can change very quickly, in some cases as often as weekly or even daily. One day your website’s in a good position, then the next you’re wondering what happened to it. Staying on top of this situation is a must for any SEO professional – you need to become a search engine ninja. If that’s what you want to do, then you need to keep these things in mind at all times:

• Good SEO requires frequent updates and ranking checks.

You might have a good spot today, but all it takes is for a few new sites to open, and before you know it you’re back down at the bottom. If you pay attention to your rankings, then you have a shot at fixing things that go wrong before your rankings fall too far.

• You should check all your links weekly to make sure they work.

Maintain high-quality, relevant reciprocal links and check them weekly to make sure they’re working. Remove any dead links, as search engine crawlers may mark you down if they find them on your site.

• Tweak and assess your website on a daily basis.

You need to continually assess and tweak your listing to keep your site in its proper place – that is, at the top. This ensures that your site is in the best position possible, and helps you keep your competitive edge.

• Maintain the content on your website.

Update your content weekly at the very least, to make sure that search engine crawlers come back frequently. Even the smallest changes will be picked up on by the search engines and will help to maintain your ranking. If you can’t write, find someone who can: you need content.

• Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO.

If you can’t decide what you should be doing or you don’t want to keep up with SEO on your own, you could consider hiring a specialist. Consulting with an SEO specialist will still allow you to make your own changes to your website and learn which things work best, but you’ll have someone to answer your questions if you need them.

You should review your SEO techniques at least every few months, to see how the algorithms have changed and to devise new plans and strategies for increasing your rankings based on those changes. Any SEO ninja will tell you that there are only really two major search engines that you need to worry about: Google and Yahoo. You can do well even if you only have the time or energy to focus on these two engines. Being an SEO ninja is hard work, but it can be very rewarding if you’ve got the dedication for it.