SEO Daily

Search tags: search engine marketing, ppc search engine internet marketing, search engine marketing firm, search engine marketing services, search engine marketing company, search internet marketing, search engine optimization marketing, professional search engine marketing

Search Engine Marketing: Applying Research to Succeed

If you want to succeed in your search engine marketing efforts, make sure that you base your marketing strategy on research. The better the research, better the results. You not only need to know the preferences of your targeted audience well, but also need to understand the industry and the manner in which your competition operates.

Your initial effort should be focused on understanding the industry you are involved in. Try to gather as much information you can on the product you deal in, such as – the source of the product, how to market it, why potential customers may need it, how to create a demand for the product… Research on these lines will help you in your marketing efforts. You may use many channels available online to further your business. Research efforts can be supplemented with online magazines, newsletters, blogs, and forums. Search the internet for industry leaders and read what they have to say about the industry.

Research about your competition to understand how they operate and what impact they have on the market. Check their website to see what information they provide to visitors. To succeed, it is important to know about your target audience and their preferences, as well. It will help you to learn who buys your products and for what reason. Know about the people who visit your website, and what they are seeking. Make sure that the website contains the information and the products they would buy.  The log statistics report is a great tool to learn who visits your website.

If visitors do not make any purchases, check what is wrong with the landing page. Is the information inadequate? Is the landing page not user-friendly? Is navigation confusing?

You will have to check these factors to ensure success in building a viable search engine marketing strategy.

Search tags: search engines, improve search engine ranking, search engine ranking, title bar, links, link popularity, meta tags, content

Golden Tips to Improve Search Engine Ranking

According to various surveys conducted, shoppers ranging from 80% – 85% use search engines to find products and services they wish to purchase. This fact alone makes it important for websites to improve search engine ranking.  Here are some golden tips to improve search engine ranking of your website.

Title Bar
The title bar is an important issue when it comes to search engine ranking. If you use Internet Explorer, the blue bar at the top of the page is known as the title bar. It has some words written on it that end with the words “- Microsoft Internet Explorer”. Does the title bar carry your company’s name, or worse, does it have the words “untitled” written on it.  To improve search engine ranking of that page, it is important that the title bar contains important keywords relating to your business. Optimally, you may use up to six keywords on the title bar, and not more.

Content
Content has a vital role to play to help improve search engine ranking. Search engines have nothing to do with graphics on your website. For them, text matter that contains keywords that potential customers use over the search engines is of prime importance. If your content does not contain any keywords, the search engines will ignore your website. So, ascertain the keywords that customer use to find your product or services and add those to your content.

If your content is presented as an image, the search engine will ignore it. Click on the left mouse button and hold it down. Now drag it over a text word. If it highlights a word or two, then your text is search engine friendly. If an entire block of words is selected, then your content is presented in graphic form, which the search engines will ignore. Ask your web master to turn your text from graphic to standard HTML text.

Meta Tags
Meta tags are not as important as they are made out to be for the reason that many search engines ignore them. So, they have limited importance in that sense. If you want to confirm that your website has meta tags in place when your home page is active, click on the “view” command on the top bar of your browser window. Select “source” from the drop down menu. Codes will display in a window, which might be incomprehensible to you. Look for a command that says meta name= “description” content= (that will describe your company and products). Another command that needs your attention is meta name= “keywords” content = (it contains the appropriate keywords).  If these are not there, ask your webmaster to add them.

Links
Link popularity is a great way to improve search engine ranking. Search engines place importance on websites that have incoming links from quality and related websites. Apart from improving search engine ranking, these links bring in more potential customers to your website.

Search tags: SEO, search engine optimizing, SERP, meta tag, search engine ranking, website content

SEO: Patience is the Key

You may have done a good job of search engine optimizing your website, yet do not expect it to start showing on the first page of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Many people have wrong notions about the SEO concept or are not aware enough to understand the requirements. A major percentage believes that fixing the meta tag will propel their website on the SERP, but that is not the case.

Search engines go for relevant results, closest to the keyword typed. The meta tag does help the search engine in its quest. For an internal search engine, keywords in the meta tag do help in narrowing down the search to the most relevant pages that a site user is looking for. Internal search engines have to look into a very small number of pages to find the relevant page, and the meta tag and content can be relied upon, since the goal of the web-page content and that of the internal search engine is to provide the information being sought by the user.

External search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, which have to go through an amazing number of web-pages to find the relevant information, do not completely rely on the meta tag. The reason - the website owner’s goals and the search engines’ goals may not necessarily be the same. A website owner’s goal may be merely to up its search engine ranking, where as a search engine’s goal could be to provide relevant information to the user. So, you cannot solely rely on the meta tag to give you quick results.

Your website content may be keyword optimized, but it may still not assure you a quick premier search engine ranking. Generating useful information and website content is a gradual process, which takes time. You build your website over a period and not instantly. Thus, don’t expect to show up in the forefront of the SERP in short time.

You cannot rely on links to catapult your website up the search engine index quickly. If that is your intention, you could end up linking to all the wrong websites. You would rather have genuine links for better results than linking with the intent of improving search engine ranking. 

Using the above techniques, you could search engine optimize your website with the intention of providing genuine information to the user, and not for the sole purpose of jumping ranks. A natural-results website may still take around six to nine months to begin showing results over the Google search engine.

Search tags: text links, search engine ranking, search engine, link popularity

Search Engine Optimization: Text Links
Text links have created quite a stir in the minds of search marketing experts and webmasters. Will they improve your search engine ranking, or result in getting your website banned? Will they help improve your link popularity, or increase the page rank of your website? Do text links have the ability to increase the flow of targeted traffic to your website? These, and many other questions might rankle your mind while on the subject of text links.

On the face of it, buying a text link (read ad) on some other website that directs visitors to your site is an innocent act. There is no harm in advertising your site, and it is your right to do so. Search engines have no qualms if you use links to advertise your website, as it is perfectly legal to advertise your business. 

Then where, you may ask, is the glitch? The problem with text links arises when they are not purchased with the intention to drive targeted traffic to a particular website. Many site owners or webmasters may make an effort to artificially raise the link popularity of the site being advertised. Links might act as a trade off between two webmasters, or an ad. It is not easy to learn the purpose of a link, and that creates problems for search engines. Text linkers normally keep tracking codes off since their web analytics software does not require them. Moreover, people buying an ad may as well get link popularity credits as part of the deal.

Thus, search engines are having problems with their algorithms. It is certainly difficult to tell apart the difference whether it is vote for a site or a paid advertisement. However, search engines can trace from the codes whether they are ads, which requires a lot of work, and thus not pass any link popularity. This way search engines count only the votes and not ads. Thus, your search engine ranking could drop, if you were dependent on link popularity of paid links.

What most website owners do not know is whether their website is search engine optimized. Search engine optimization is key to your website finding potential customers. For that reason alone, you may also be interested to know if your competitor’s website is optimized too. But, how can you tell, if you are not conversant with SEO? Here are some of the finer points to help you understand the SEO concept and analysis.

Search Engine Index
It is important for a website seeking search engine ranking to be placed on the search engine index. When you make a search engine analysis, you should know whether your website is listed on that search engine. Let us take the example of Google search engine, since it is the most popular of all search engines. To confirm whether your site is listed, make a search of it by name in the Google search engine. If it does not show up, type the words – site:www.url.com – on the search engine. The result will show how many web pages of your site are indexed on Google. In case of no result, the site may not have been indexed, or may have been penalized.

Links
How popular your site is depends on the incoming links. Inbound links lend credence to websites, and search engines consider these as a measure of popularity of websites. In short, more the number of incoming links that a website has, higher the ranking it is provided. If you like to measure the link popularity of your site look for the PageRank. It is one measurement that cannot be relied upon, as it is not very accurate and is not updated frequently. However, type in the Yahoo search engine the words – linkdomain:www.url.com. The results give a fair view of the links.

Keywords and Key Phrases
While doing an SEO analysis, it is imperative to find out the use of keywords and key phrases in the content. There are many places on the website where you can place key phrases. Looking at the source code, you will be able to find their location. Once you open a website, click on “view” on the Internet Explorer menu, and then on “source”. Check the title, meta keywords, and meta description to find whether key phrases have been used in these areas.

Content
Content is king; and that is what the search engine considers true. Check the content for keyword and key phrase use. Each page should contain a minimum 200 to 300 words and around 1 to 2 keywords or keyword phrases. If the density of keywords is too high, the website can be penalized.

Navigation
How user-friendly is your website navigation will help determine its search engine ranking. If all web pages are easily accessible, you can expect all of them to be indexed by the search engine. If the search engine crawler has a tough time crawling through your entire website, it will drop all those pages off the index that it finds difficult to access. To avoid this situation, it is imperative to have a sitemap on the website with appropriate text links to facilitate search engines access the entire site.

Keeping the above SEO analysis in mind, you can do a good job of testing your website and determining the gray areas that need your attention. Following the above pointers, you can ensure an improved search engine ranking for your website.