Professional SEO | Internet Marketing

For online marketing efforts, search engine optimization is key. Here?s something to try: go to a couple different search engines and type in search terms that people would use to find the products or services that your business offers. Does your company show up in the top 10 or 20 results? Do your primary competitors?

The role of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts is to guide web-based businesses on choosing proper keywords to boost traffic and ultimately sales. Basic SEO errors can harm the ranking of your website, constructed with great care and thought.

For background, Search Engine Optimization relies on site context and content to determine site rankings. This happens with a combination of efforts including page content and meta tag optimization, paid submissions to important directories and engines and hand submission to free-listing search engines.

While extensive SEO and Viral marketing experience are not required, understanding of the social networking side of the web is a must that requires a set of technical skills

SEO companies see search engine optimization as the primary marketing channel for a site. Often SEO consultants destroy human centric copy and design for the sake of machine friendly pages.

Video optimization is becoming increasingly important, as videos seem to be doing especially well in universal search and are very attractive to site owners as targets of links. Video content can have a viral effect as well, by providing code for the insertion of your videos on third party sites, your video content can be easily dropped into any third party site, pre-configured with links back to your site!

Pay Per Click allows your site to be listed on the top of the search engines instantly. This is achieved by paying the search engines for every visitor that they send to your website. Each search engine employs a unique bidding system, which determines which sites are listed first in the paid listing sections of search results.

Setting realistic expectations is key. Popular Web sites and link bait phenomena such as Elf Yourself, FlashMobs, the Star Wars Kid, and JibJab are the exceptions, and definitely not the rule. These wildly successful viral campaigns should be regarded more as “lottery winners,” and less as campaigns setting the bar you plan to surpass with your own strategic marketing initiative. Most campaigns, especially commercial viral marketing campaigns, don't make it past the first wave of exposure, much less the second or third wave.

Anyone who has an online business may be quick to jump into several SEO techniques, thinking that these will be a quick opportunity for internet success. If you think however that SEO can be accomplished in a jiffy, you're bound to be disappointed. There are important factors you must know about search engine optimization. This includes the things to avoid, the things needed to generate a higher page rank, and finally the elements present in most excellent SEO services.

Search engine traffic is highly targeted. That's because potential buyers who find your B2B offerings through search engines are looking for your products and services on their own, so they are predisposed to hear your marketing message. You can't find a more qualified prospect than that.

Ad Advertisements a searcher sees after submitting a query in a search engine or web site search box. In PPC, these ads are usually text format, with a Title, Description and Display URL. In some cases, a keyword the searcher used in his or her query appears boldfaced in the displayed ad.

Search marketing is a non-intrusive marketing tool. Most advertising, both online and offline, interrupts consumer behavior. If a user goes to a web site for info, up pops an intrusive ad. Ads dominate and force articles to be continued on another page. With search engine marketing, the user is actively seeking your products, services, and information. They are delighted to be driven to your site.

Yet in this hazy cloud of uncertainty, two items in the online budget are clearly NOT being tightened: SEO and Viral Marketing. Rather, more and more companies are allocating greater and greater percentages of the online buy to these two increasingly accepted members of the media mix.

Link Building is considered by many people to be one of the most useful and effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique to achieve high ranking on the search engines. Actually, if you have not done or started doing any link building yet, you should seriously consider doing some now or at least contact an SEO company that would do the link building for you.

One of the most important ingredients in a good SEO link building campaign is link building. It can also be one of the toughest. Search engines can be a little tough on unethical link building strategies and if you add the growing use of ‘nofollow’ attributes to links, gaining quality links takes a lot of work. This list itemizes most of the link building opportunities available.

10: Link Farm: Link farms are outdated and generally result in search engine penalties. No longer worth thinking about.

09: Paid Reviews: There is an old saying in the IT world - GIGO - garbage in garbage out. Generally speaking paid reviews are poorly written articles on non-relevant sites. If you can get a good review on highly ranked relevant site then you may get value for your money - otherwise treat with caution.

08: Text Link Ads: There can be value in obtaining text link ads but these are generally from low ranking sites. As with the paid reviews, obtaining text link ads on high ranking related sites may be of value.

07: Link Solicitation: Obtaining links from related sites by solicitation can be difficult. You need to be able to prove to the site owner that there is a mutual benefit. The higher the site ranks the harder it can become. However this can provide a good cross section of related sites.

06: Hand Edited Directories: DMOZ and Yahoo are two of the major directories. DMOZ can take up to 12 months to get listed. Yahoo!, whilst a paid listing, remains reasonably good value. Directory links seem to have been reduced in value recently.

05: Article Directories: Article directories are hit and miss. You can spend hours putting together a series of articles only to find that most of them get scraped without any links back to your site. When the article is used legitimately you have no control as to the sites relevance or reliability.

04: Social Bookmarking: Having your site listed and voted on in some of the social bookmarking sites can provide some benefits to your link building campaign. Many social bookmarking sites incorporate ‘nofollow’ so don’t rely on them for masses of links. The traffic generated by lead to an increase in organic links.

03: Press Releases: Press releases can provide a quick lift in rankings. If the press release is well written and provides a little spark then you may find an increase in traffic along with an increase in organic links.

02: Edu and Gov sites: Obtaining links from these sites can be hard. The more important the link location the higher value. For example, a link in and Edu report or research paper is highly prized.

01: Blended Link Building: Blended link building incorporates a variety of strategies. The aim is to obtain links from a variety of sources, each with varying ranking factors but all from relevant web pages where possible.

Blended link building can be slow and tedious but it does produce great long term website rankings in the major search engines.

Links are vital for search engine rankings and can dramatically increase traffic to your website. Since the most popular search engines like Google and Yahoo use link popularity as one of the crucial factors in determining the importance or relevance of your website, increasing your link popularity score can help boost your website’s position – or ranking – in the search engine results pages

Writing by Nick Stamoulis by Search Engine Optimization Journal

Google Knol is a free online collaborative knowledge database or an experts' wiki but not an encyclopedia. Knol is not a direct competitor of Wikipedia, at least not in its current version. Wikipedia is anonymous -- there is no single editor in charge. In contrast, Knol includes the author name in the URL of the article. Google expects multiple knols on one subject rather than the current Wikipedia model of one article on a subject. The term "knol" ("unit of knowledge") refers to both the project and an article in the project.

More specifically, Google says Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. The company first announced Knol late last year, and instead of populating its databases with articles from everyone, Google kept Knol an invitation-only party -- until now.

Right now, a lot of the existing Knols – Google defines a knol as a "unit of knowledge”, and perhaps this will be how people name articles hosted on Knol too – deal with subjects of a more serious or scientific nature, like health. Google's help page says you can write "(Almost) anything you like,” adding that you pick the subject "and write it the way you see fit” as they don't edit knols nor do they "try to enforce any particular viewpoint” subject to the terms of service and their content policy, which disallows e.g[.] images containing nudity, and "spam,” a rather broad term in this case.

Google's Knol is an attempt to harness the vast forests of knowledge trapped inside people's heads and make it more widely available via the Web. Rather than the often anonymous group effort that makes up a Wikipedia article entry, Knol seeks to pull out that knowledge primarily from one specific head.

Moves by Google into mobile phones with Android and the bid for mobile spectrum in the United States should be welcomed, because they bring new competition into a traditional market; likewise Google's attempts to break into radio and TV advertising. Knol on the other hand brings the power of Google into a marketplace that is already rich with competition, and a marketplace where Google can use its might to crush that competition by favoring pages from Knol over others, on what is the worlds most popular search engine.

Google are also looking to have Knol references put in Wikipedia. If that happens, which is likely if the quality of Knols is high, then it will migrate people away from Wikipedia and towards Knol use. If the information is more reliable then this can't be viewed as a bad migration.

Looks like a fantasy scenario, but it is not that much of a stretch. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has been conduction some tests with Knol pages, and the results are surprising. of all the Knol pages that he created for test pages were ranking on the first page of Google's results after one day.

On the more consumer side, Google could use the atomized bits of knowledge (knols) created by authors to fuel a more semantically rich Web of connections. With tags, ratings, comments and other rich metadata and Semantic Web technologies, or even just the statistical approach Google prefers, knols could provide a framework for more complex and even natural language queries

Some new publishers decide to license their work via Creative Commons (hoping to be paid back based on the links economy), but Google wants no part in that! All outbound links on Knol are nofollow, so even if a person wants to give you credit for your work Google makes it impossible to do so.

While Wikipedia and Knol share some attributes, Google is a business, so where's the money? Authors can -- at their discretion -- sign up with Google's AdSense program, let Google serve up advertisements next to their Knols, and possibly earn some revenue for sharing their knowledge.

This is not to say that all of Knol will be spam. Indeed, it's likely that the prominence of having content within a Google-hosted service may attract some outstanding authors. Manber certainly expect this, saying that he hopes content is created that will be so good that Google itself will rank it tops in searches.

via gistweb

Commandment 1: There are No Rank Guarantees.

Search Engines alone control their indexing and ranking algorithm. Do not try to trick Search Engines. The only way to improve your search engine rank is by obeying by the rules. And the rule is very simple: make it logical and structural. Web content is primarily for the site visitor and not crawlers.

If your Search Engine Specialist sold you magic "Top rank on Google in 10 days ". Forget it. There are no short cuts. Top ranking in Search Engine Natural Results will take time and hard work is needed especially in developing the content on your website and the links to your site which is called as link building.

Commandment 2: Keyword Ranking is Not the End, It’s the Means.

Ask yourself what will a top search engine rank get you? Most businesses are interested in increasing sales on a website or at the least driving qualified traffic. keyword ranking for the right keywords (keywords used by your target audience) is important. There are seo specialist who will try to show case results for keywords that occur only on your website. Be aware of it.

Commandment 3: Know Your Competition.

"Keyword Rank" or "Serp" is a keyword placement, keyword position and more so in the Search Engines’ natural results. How well you do in the search engine results is a function of how much hard work you have done in relation to your competition. Analyze your competition’s keywords, links, keyword density and spread, but be sure not to copy your competition. Be competitive

Commandment 4: Use Search Engine Friendly Design.

A search and visitor friendly design is needed for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough for repeat visits by search engines and potential customers. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLs and avoid those long URLs with query strings or what we called dynamic URLs. It is better if we use keywords in your URL or domain. It is the number one factor to rank in the search engine.

Commandment 5: Select Keywords that are Worthy.

You must research your keywords before targeting. Use tools that give you a good idea of a keyword’s search potential like wordtracker, adword, keywordiscovery. It is important to know the number of searches for a keyword in the last month and per dy. You should also find out the number of web pages that are targeting the keyword. It is advisable to start a campaign with keywords with moderate competition and a high number of searches.

Commandment 6: Write Great Content.- Content Writing

Even if your website site is perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with great content. Great means it has contextual and editorial value. Great content brings repeat visits and increases the chance of conversion. Great content is factual and appeals to your target audience. Your web page should have your desired action embedded in the content and you must ensure that the content is fresh. Keep adding and editing content regularly.

Commandment 7: Use Good Linking Building Strategy.

Hyperlinks make your content accessible and contextual. You must hyperlink in the right context within the website and to other websites. Good links are appreciated by the Search Engines and by visitors.

Commandment 8: Write Relevant and Original Meta Content.

Meta content or meta tag is like a business card. Just as your business card tells who you are and what you do, Meta content tells the search engines the relevance and context of a web page. The idea is to include only what is relevant to the page in the Meta Content but to include everything that is relevant.

Commandment 9: Acquire Relevant Links.

The links you acquire are the roads to your web page for search engine bots and visitors. Good links improve your webpage’s equity on the World Wide Web and bad links make a dent in your equity and credibility. Be selective in reciprocal linking. Both reciprocal and one way links work, if you are prudent in selecting the links. Submit your website to the relevant sections in relevant directories.

Commandment 10: Consult Experts, If You Need To.

If you have the competence, there are two ways to learn - learning from your mistakes and learning from others’ experience. You can choose either. If you have the time and can wait for the online dollars, do it yourself. If you want to get started now, it may be useful to consult the experts.

About The Author
Resources: seoreview
The author is Rank Uno, an expert in Search Marketing with over 10 years Onlëne Marketing experience. He heads www.rankuno.com, the specialist in online marketíng and Search Engine
Optimization.

Every business wants to be found. Figuring out how to get your business to show up in the rankings when a potential customer uses a search engine is an art form.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is fast becoming a must-have body of knowledge for business owners. Nearly 91 percent of all Internet users resort to a search engine to find information, according to a recent survey by the non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project. The question is: how easily can they find your business?

Tips in learning about search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) is fast becoming a must-have body of knowledge for business owners.

About the Author
Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends. [via Technology Inc]