South Florida Web Marketing Blog

What will happen in the year ahead? I’m no fan of making predictions, but there are some major social media tactics that we can expect to affect businesses in 2012. Some of these tactics already have been adopted by select companies, but this year we’ll see mass adoption of these tactics by businesses of all sizes.

1. Social Listening for Marketing Intelligence

Last year we saw a plethora of new technology platforms that moved social media monitoring and started crunching some sophisticated data to gauge sentiment to drive marketing campaigns.

In my view, 2012 will be a year where businesses will take a step forward from simply looking at company mentions, debatable “sentiments”, and arguable influencer scores, and instead move toward combining all disparate social data to form a marketing intelligence that drives future marketing campaigns. Quite a few tools are doing this already, but expect to see more.

Marketers will no longer be tongue tied when asked by C-suite “mentions on social media…so what?” Instead, platforms will help marketers make smarter marketing decisions based on social listening.

2. Facebook – Advertisers and Brands will Focus More on Profitability

With Facebook on pace for a billion users, playtime is over. Businesses had in the past put lot of emphasis on the somewhat superficial numbers like number of Facebook fans without taking into account the quality of that fan acquired. What we’ll see instead in 2012 is businesses focusing more on profitability and a laser-sharp ROI focus when it comes to Facebook contests, Facebook ads, and Facebook only promotion.

Businesses will also realize that there is more to Facebook than measuring a linear conversion path from a fan to a paid customer. Marketers will be open to measure non-linear path of ROI measurement like creating Facebook-only promos to drive offline traffic. Retailers are a classic example, where lots of buzz and Facebook-only promotions will be done to drive foot traffic into retail stores. Besides large retailers, we’ll see an increasing number of small and medium-sized businesses adopt this strategy.

Advertisers will start measuring their Facebook Ads campaigns based on profitability that either helps generate revenues or supports in some kind of cost savings. Brian Carter’s new book “The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money with Facebook” is an excellent resource.

3. Google+ – Pedal to the Metal

Google will aggressively roll out new features to Google+ and make Google+ pages more business-friendly. The biggest advantage Google has is its integration with other Google properties, like in its search engine results pages, in paid search ads, Google Reader, YouTube, etc.

Google also put a great internal focus on social last year by restructuring its employee bonus and salary structure based on Google’s success on social. This internal focus ensures that everyone inside the Googleplex thinks of social all the time. So, this internal focus with external push to consumers could make 2012 a year of Google+.

4. Quality Content

We all appreciate the importance of quality content – content that is engaging, relevant, and unique to the user.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen this mad rush (and budget) from companies to create content with the sole purpose of creating content for SEO. But we all know what happened to that with Google’s Panda update! So, in retrospect, Panda was a timely and much needed update from Google.

Instead, what we’ll see in 2012 is a more structured approach by businesses to create content that focuses on provides unique value to readers resulting in higher engagement levels with their community members. We’ll see a more holistic approach from businesses with content, whether it’s videos, how-to content pieces, or other types of content.

5. Community Building

As marketers get sophisticated with planning and measuring their campaigns, we’ll find businesses paying close attention to their existing community members. An increased emphasis will be placed on building an engaged community as opposed to simply amassing numbers. This means community managers must energize their community members as well as engage members for a variety of things like product development, market research, and special product discounts, to name a few.

Community building and management is all about people, content, and consistency. This tactic will be widely adopted in 2012 and will become an integral part of community management.

6. Social, Local, Mobile (SoLoMo)

SoLoMo – the social, local, and mobile triumvirate, will get a strong hold in 2012 with more integrated campaigns combining social media with local offers involving mobile devices. Essentially, socially advocated mobile content has the potential to boost brand loyalty, and this can boost sales among nearby on-the-go shoppers.

Top daily deals sites like Groupon and LivingSocial are perfect examples of this where they using deals to drive local sales. Foursquare is perfectly positioned for this SoLoMo tactic. We’ll see more local merchants signing up with Foursquare.

7. Social Media Drives SEO

Traditional on-page SEO factors will still hold true since it’s all about making your content search friendly, but what we’ll see in 2012 and beyond is strong social media sharing activities will drive SEO results. Last year we witnessed Google’s push to integrate social results into its SERP’s (and the newly launched Search Plus Your World update) and the Facebook-Bing partnership.

Ultimately, SEO will win because conversions will be higher (and relatively straightforward to measure) on organic search. As a result, more businesses will ensure closer collaboration between their search and social teams.

Summary

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the rapidly evolving social media and search landscape. Social and search are also closely intertwined so pushing on few tactics above will impact other tactics as well.

Over to you now: what other tactics do you think we’ll see businesses adopt in 2012?

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

.............................
Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2137307/7-Social-Media-SEO-Tactics-Businesses-Will-Adopt-in-2012

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website to search engines. While that is a simple idea, putting SEO concepts to work can seem daunting to a beginner. Luckily there are a number of SEO tutorials to get started.

Here is a list of SEO tutorials for beginners. There are comprehensive guides, as well as shorter quick-start tutorials. There are SEO overviews, SEO blog tutorials, a SEO video tutorial, and a SEO case study tutorial. All of the tutorials are free.

SEOmoz

“The Beginner’s Guide to SEO” from SEO management platform SEOmoz is an in depth tutorial on how search engines work. It covers the fundamental strategies that make websites search engine friendly. Topics include how people interact with search engines, keyword research, myths and misconceptions about search engines, and measuring and tracking success. Access the tutorial online for free, or download the guide by joining SEOmoz PRO for $99/month.

–

Google

“Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” is a best-practices guide PDF download available on Google’s Webmaster Tools page. The document began as an effort to help teams within Google. It outlines how to make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand site content.

–

Knight Digital Media Center

“Search Engine Optimization — Basics” is a tutorial from the Knight Digital Media Center, housed jointly at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. The tutorial features sections such as keywords, site structure and navigation, optimizing images for SEO, additional training, and related links.

–

Search Engine Guide

“SEO 101” is a tutorial by Search Engine Guide, an online magazine for small business SEO. The guide is a fifteen-part series on the essentials of SEO. The series covers SEO basics, title tags, meta description and keyword tags, site architecture, keywords, SEO copywriting, linking, and more.

–

SEO Book

“The Blogger’s Guide to SEO” from SEO Book is a tutorial on SEO for blog sites. It explains why blog SEO is different from SEO for other websites. It also features sections on keyword research, optimizing site structure, web analytics, and lists additional links to learn more about SEO.

–

Distilled

“Beginners Guide: Doing a Site Audit Using Google Webmaster Tools” is a tutorial by SEO agency Distilled. The tutorial focuses on using the free tools that Google provides as a starting point for a comprehensive SEO site audit.

–

Yoast

“The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog” from Yoast is a comprehensive WordPress SEO guide. The content is also presented in video presentation.

–

Practical eCommerce

“SEO Case Study” is a Practical Commerce series from Contributing Editor Jill Kocher — an SEO professional — on the SEO struggles of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. Kocher writes frequent articles for Practical eCommerce and Ecommerce Developer — our companion publication — on SEO topics that help merchants and web developers, respectively.

Related Searches

• SEO, tutorials

Related Articles

• Does SEO Conflict with User-Friendly Websites?
• 5 Free SEO Tools for Do-It-Yourself Analysis
• SEO Case Study: When Past SEO Efforts Hurt Today’s Traffic

.............................
Article source: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3249-8-Tutorials-for-SEO-Beginners

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re talking about advanced on-page optimization. Specifically, I have five tactics for you that go beyond the traditional “I’m going to put my keyword in the title tag. I’m going to put my keyword in the URL”, those kinds of things.

First one, starting out is this idea of semantic connectivity. We talked about this in the past. We did some research a couple of years ago, maybe 18 months ago on LDA, which is latent Dirichlet allocation, which, of course, is a form of topic modeling that we suspected Google might be using.

It’s a way to imagine the connections between words in a particular language. I’ll give you an example. Here is the word “cat”, and the word “cat” is probably closely related to the word “feline”. If you were a search engine and you saw a document with the word “cat” and the word “feline,” you would think that document is more relevant to a query for the word “cat” than a document that has the word “cat” and the word “whiteboard,” which maybe that would be very far away.

Here’s cat and here’s canine. Those are much more distant, but cat is relatively closer to tiger, but it’s even a little closer to meow. So, you get this sense of, ah, the search engines have a graph of all the words in a language set, how they’re connected to each other, what’s relevant to what, phrases not just individual words but the two or three or four word phrases.

This kind of thing can be very helpful if you’re looking at a document and you’re saying to yourself, “Boy, I talked about cats, but I forgot to mention anything about what they eat or what family they’re in or what they’re related to. I didn’t even use the word ‘pets.’ Maybe, I should be optimizing for those types of things.” Employing those closely connected terms can help to boost the relevancy and help boost your rankings.

Second thing on the list, block level optimization. There is a great YOUmoz post about this that we promoted to the main blog recently talking about precisely this type of thing where search engines will essentially analyze individual portions of a page. They’ll look at, oh, here’s a sidebar and we’ve decided that’s not really relevant because that’s navigational links or here’s the top nav. We’re not going to analyze that for relevancy as much potentially. We’re going to look at the header of the document, where the headline is, those first few sentences. We’re going to look at the middle of the document, maybe in paragraph forms, the footer of the document, the end. Are all of those things talking about the topic? Are they all on the subject, or is this something that starts out talking about tigers, but it eventually gets into a discussion on genetically modified foods? If that’s the case, maybe it’s less relevant to tigers. It’s just that the initial headline looked like it was relevant to tigers, and so therefore, we don’t want to rank this document for the word, tigers. We might even want to be ranking it for something like genetically modified foods. It just happens to use that catchy title.

So, make sure that your document . . . do this kind of check for all of these sections, making sure that they’re pertinent, that they’re relevant to the content of the query, that they’re serving the visitor’s interests and needs. If you have that kind of off topic diatribe, and I’m not saying you can’t go off topic in your writing a little bit and explore some storyline themes, particularly if you have a long expository piece or you’re writing a narrative blog post. That’s great. I’m just saying, for stuff that is hyper targeting a particular keyword, especially for a commercial intent or a navigational intent, this might not be ideal. You might want to make those more focused.

Number three, internal and external links. I’m not talking about the links pointing to the page. I’m talking about the links that actually exist on the page. You remember some folks from Google have actually in the past said that, yeah, we might have some things, some first order or second order effect things in our algorithm that rewards people who link out, meaning link to other websites.

Marshall Simmons from The New York Times was on a Whiteboard Friday a couple of years ago, and Marshall talked about how when The New York Times changed their policy to put more external links on the page off to other websites, they actually saw increases and boosts in rankings from the articles that did that, strongly confirming what Google had said about there being some sort of effect in the algorithm, maybe not directly but indirectly looking at, hey, is this person linking out or are they linking out to good places? If they are, we might want to reward them.

Another optimization tactic that’s on the more advanced side is putting good external links referencing relevant, potentially useful content on your pages. Linking out to other people is a wonderful thing too, because it puts you into the ecosystem. What I mean by that is if you link to someone else, other people go and visit that page. They might be talking about it. They might thank you for the reference. Someone might see that on Twitter. They might look in their analytics and see that you’ve sent visitors over and come check out your page and then link to something you’ve done. That reciprocation is very, very powerful in the organic web, and it can be useful, not only for this direct relevancy boosting signal, but also from a links perspective, from a traffic perspective.

Number four on the list, the happiness of visitors to a page. I know what you’re thinking. It’s sort of like, wait a minute, that’s not on-page optimization. That’s more like conversion rate optimization. Yes, but it matters for rankings because Google is looking so much at usage and user data.

I’m going to ask Kenny, who’s filming this video, going to wave, Kenny? That’s a great wave. Did you all see that? He looked great. It’s amazing. I’ll ask Kenny to put in a link to a Quora thread where a Google engineer, somebody who worked at Google, actually talked about how they use machine learning on user and usage data signals in the potential ranking algorithm to help better stuff come up when the rankings may be ordered normally just by their classic on-page link stuff and these types of things.

That means that if I can make visitors happier, if I can boost the value of what they’re getting out of the pages, I can potentially rank higher too, not just convert more of them but even improve in rankings.

We were talking about things like: Are these visitors completing actions? Are they spending more time on this site or page on average with a good experience than they are with others? What I mean by this is it’s not just, “Oh, my time on site is low. I need to find ways to keep visitors on there a longer time.” Maybe, you have something that’s answering a very, very short query in a short amount of time, and that’s making visitors happy. And, maybe, you have something that’s answering that query but after a long period of time, visitors are actually unhappy and they’re going back to Google and clicking, you know what, block all results from this site, I don’t want to see it any more. Or they see you in the rankings in the future, and they’re like, “Oh, I remember that domain. I do not want to go through that again. They had those annoying ads and the overlays, and they blocked me from going there.”

Every time I see Forbes, I was like, “Man, does this article look interesting enough to me to have to go through that initial screen of the ad, because I know I’m going to get it every time, and it’s going to take extra time to load?” On my phone when I’m browsing the Web, I’m always like, “I’m not going to click on that Forbes link. Maybe I’ll check it later on my laptop or my desktop.”

Those types of things are signals that the engines can look at. Are people coming back? Are they returning again and again? When they see this stuff, true they’ve got 25% market share with Chrome. They’ve got the Google tool bar. They have Google free Wi-Fi. They have relationships with ISPs. So, they can get this data right about where everyone goes, not just from search but all over the Web. They know what you’re bookmarking. They know what you’re returning to. They know your visit patterns. This kind of stuff is definitely going to make its way into the algorithm, I think, even more so than it does today.

Fifth and finally, some content uniqueness and formatting. So, you’re all aware of duplicate content issues, thin content issues, and the Panda stuff that happened earlier this year that affected a lot of websites. What you may not know is that there are a bunch of tactics that you can apply in an advanced on-page optimization scenario that can help, so things like completely unique. When I say “completely unique,” what I mean is not that you can’t quote someone in here, but just that what you can’t have is a mad lib style SEO where you’ve got XY blank Z blank ABC blank, and it’s fill in the city name, fill in the proper name, fill in the name of the business, and that’s the same across every page on your site, or that’s taken from a manufacturer’s description and that’s put in there.

You need to have that uniqueness throughout, and Google is very good at shingling, which is sort of a method for pattern detection inside topics or inside content. Don’t play with them. Just make sure that this is a highly unique piece. If you want to quote something, that’s fine. If you want to use media or graphics from somewhere else, that’s fine and reference those. I’m not talking about that, but I am talking about that sort of playing mad libs SEO is a dangerous game.

We’ve noticed that longer content, more content is literally quite well correlated with better rankings, particularly post Panda. What you saw is that sites. I’ll give you an example. I look at a lot of rankings for restaurant sites, because I’m constantly doing searches for restaurants and types of food because I travel a ton. What I see is that Yelp and Urban Spoon do very, very well. City Search often does well, and then you’ll see those independent, individual blogs. When they tend to rank well, when they’re on page one is when they’ve written that long diatribe exploring all sorts of things on the menu with lots of pictures of the food, an experiential post versus a short snippet of a post. You’ll find those on page three, page four, page five. They don’t do as well. That longer in- depth content, more of the uniqueness, more value in the content, more than I can get out of it as a reader seems to be something that Google is picking up on. I don’t know if that’s pure length. I don’t know if that’s something necessarily they’re looking at in the user and usage data, but it could be helpful if you’re not ranking very well and you’re thinking, boy, I have a lot of pages that are just short snippets. Maybe I’m going to try expanding some of them.

Using images in media, we’ve, of course, seen the correlation with alt attributes matching the keyword and images. That’s not what I’m talking about necessarily, but using images on the page can create more of that in- depth experience and can create a better relationship between you and the visitor. Those things could be picked up and used in other places, and then they’ll link back to you. There are all sorts of benefits.

User generated content, so getting comments and interaction down here at the bottom, that type of stuff often is an indication in search engines that, hey, people really care about this. It’s also an addition to the amount of content, and it tends to be very unique and valuable and useful. It uses those words that people on the Web would be using about the topic, and that can again be helpful for your content optimization.

Then, finally, Google is clearly looking at things like reading level and correctness of grammar and spelling. There’s now a filter inside Google. If you click on the advanced search in the little gear box on the top right- hand corner of your screen when you’re logged into Google, you can see advanced search. When you click that, there’s a reading level filter to say, “Only show me content that’s 12th grade and above.” Clearly, Google has that ability.

What I’m saying here is that your content formatting, the way you’re putting things together, the length of the document, the in-depthness, and the correctness, these can all have an impact. Don’t just be thinking about keyword stuffing and using a few keywords here and there and putting it in the title at the front. Be thinking a little bit more broadly about your on- page optimization. You might get more benefits than even doing some link building, sometimes.

All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care.

.............................
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/FuU_phKmnTk/advanced-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday

Good small business websites build brands and bring in customers. In order for this to happen, people to actually visit, and for that to happen, a website needs to be designed around the principles of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

SEO, put simply, is how to make it easier for web users to come across your website when searching on Google, Bing, or any popular search engine. We’re not talking about Googling “Jerry’s Taco Kingdom” and seeing if you actually find Jerry’s website (if that’s not happening, then Jerry has other problems to worry about). If Jerry has effective SEO, then a web search for simply “tacos”, “Mexican food” or “restaurants with tortillas” ought to bring up his site as an early result, thus bringing hungry new visitors to his page.

Why is SEO so crucial for a new, small business? With the right design, a SEO-friendly page can become more than just a helpful information source about your company; it can be a cost-effective, precisely targeted marketing tool, able to generate as much (or more) brand awareness as a mailing campaign or a television ad. Traditional advertising can certainly be effective, but it’s a blanket approach. For all of the eyeballs you’re paying to reach, you’re very likely spending money communicating with people who have no interest in your product. By comparison, anybody who arrives at Jerry’s Taco Kingdom by searching for “tacos” online is almost definitely already interested in them.

There are a number of potential ways to boost your site’s SEO — caveat being “potential”. Google, Bing, and Yahoo securely guard their search algorithms, so nobody knows just exactly what factors will boost you to the top of the results page. That being said, there are a number of tactics that can certainly knock you down several steps, which leads us to a list of do’s and don’ts:

Do:

1. Design for your target customer. When putting together the actual meat and potatoes of your site, you’ll want to make sure you’ve checked off a number of basic tasks — ensuring the site appears properly in different browsers and complies with modern W3C standards, making sure all your images are linked properly, double-checking that viewing your site doesn’t lead to seizures in small children, etc.

When populating the body and tags with SEO-geared keywords, though, you may want to try being more specific than usual. To return to the above example with Jerry’s Taco Kingdom, the obvious keyword to include would be “taco”. Even with tacos being as delicious as they are, Jerry will be competing with thousands of other sites in the always popular taco market, and his page may have a tough time getting bites — yes, we went there.

So, what if Jerry tries to cast a narrower net? Perhaps the Taco Kingdom is one of only a few taco joints in his hometown of Wichita. Jerry might include keywords like “Kansas Tacos” or “Wichita Mexican Food”. He’ll face less competition in those searches, and he is also more likely to get customers searching from the area his business serves.

2. Earn the Internet’s trust. It may sound like a Catch-22, but in order to get visitors to your site, you’ll want to prove you’ve been getting visitors to your site. As unfair as it might seem, SEO experts agree that a large portion of your SEO is based on things that occur outside of your website. It’s one thing for Jerry to claim that his site is the premier source for taco-based news and gossip, but if everyone else starts saying it by linking to his site, visiting his site and including his site in their social networks, the search engines will take notice.

The important factor in this step is patience: you can have your own content optimized perfectly on day one, but boosting your site’s trustworthiness will take at least a few months. Don’t try to jump the queue by paying sites to link back to you, either (see Don’t suggestion #1).

3. Consider a blogging approach. You might think writing a blog might take far more effort than you’re prepared to devote to your website, but it’s no secret that writing fresh content is powerful for your SEO. Before you start putting together a plan for dozens of blog posts, it’s important to consider your approach. Do you want to run your own blog or would you rather contribute an article to another blog?

Doing the former will help you build up keyword-rich content that your users might find your site through. Be sure to use keywords effectively if you do that. When you contribute to other blogs with your unique expertise, the backlinks generated through those posts can be even more effective in building your SEO “juice”. Of course, if you’re ambitious, you can do both and cover all your blogging bases. The important thing is to decide what you can handle and stick to your plan.

Don’t:

1. Don’t try to game the system. Your website needs to be genuine, full of user-friendly, original, and honest content. The general rule of thumb is to create your site for your visitors, not the search engines. Have you ever browsed a site and discovered, hidden at the bottom via invisible text, several paragraphs full of nothing but keywords? This is done in an effort to catch the eye of automated sitecrawling programs, which regularly scan the web on behalf of the major search engines to try and catalog the millions of sites that make up the Internet.

However, getting caught at this kind of tactic is a surefire way to get your site yanked out of the search listings altogether. The same goes for plagiarized content, inaccurate content or other methods meant to appeal to robots and not users. Fill your page with valuable content that an actual human would want to read, and you’re well on your way.

2. Don’t forget to track your progress. Like anything you want to see change. You need to track your progress and see if you’re getting closer to reaching your goals. With websites, this means setting up a package like Google Analytics and monitoring how people get to your site and if it’s happening how you expected.

3. Don’t set your expectations too high. Doing your own SEO strategy is a learning process. Unfortunately, you can’t see your results right away. It can take weeks or months for your tactics to play out and earn you the results you’re looking for. The good news is that with patience and practice with the items shown above, you’ll get to where you want to get with SEO.

Photo Credit: Marynchenko Oleksandr/Shutterstock

Matt Shampine is co-founder of New York-based startup Onepager. Prior to Onepager, Shampine co-founded design agency Simande, where his responsibilities included business development, client relations and project management. He is also co-founded and currently runs website We Are NY Tech, where he profiles one person a day from the New York tech community and moderates the job board.

.............................
Article source: http://betanews.com/2011/11/13/smart-seo-tactics-for-small-businesses/

from Eva-News

You can find just 12 effortless steps to follow straightforward Look for Engine Optimization for SEO starters, expertise and in-depth knowledge of these steps can take in you for the expert level as well, this article has just an overview in the uncomplicated SEO.

1. Search and pick proper keywords to target

Collect the firm terms Check keywords relevancy with market and conversion Check competition Check count on term tracker and Overture Make estimate targeted visitors chart utilizing Google Adwords Distribution of keywords on the basis of their weight

2. Effective post Title Tags

Title tag may be the most crucial tag, virtually all look for engines evaluate webpage with title tag and verify the relevancy with other issues of the article as well, and research engines also offer results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links during the very first line of each query result.

3. Potent and optimized META Description Tag

Description tag stands out as the incredibly crucial tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any value to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.

4. Highly effective and optimized META Keywords Tag

Keywords tag has lost its value, research engines hold getting smarter, they’ve set their personal criterion to identify internet pages with their relevancies, they consume each term as “keyword phrase” which is presented at webpage and they maintain those words in priorities with their densities. There is no harm in utilizing this tag for marginally better results.

5. Integrate search keywords within Internet site copy

Since a really early stage of look for engine revolution, look for engines were able to evaluate site with relevance to their content, while they had been not quite efficient and intelligent like they are these days, but they were able to read the content at website and content even now plays really essential role in top ranking positions.

6. Web type points to avoid ensuring your internet site is look for engine compatible

Usually a website is developed keeping few points in mind for example user friendliness, attractive design, beautiful flash animation, easy navigation, buyer particular or function oriented. Actually all these points are extremely fascinating and significant but what benefit is your internet site if it has no visitors, look for engine compatible websites are designed and developed keeping look for engine policies and algorithms in mind, which enable sites to be quickly crawled and understood by look for engines.

7. Potent Alt Image attributes

Alternate text generally called Alt, is a text description that will be added on the HTML tag that displays an image. The ALT text is displayed by the browser as soon as the cursor is moved more than the picture. If pictures are turned off during the browser, the Alt text is automatically displayed instead.

8. Strong and optimized text navigation menus

Navigation is a very critical component of any website; it gives guidelines to web site traffic and directs them to relevant component in the website.

9. Link titles and anchor link effectively

Link title is displayed text by the browser as soon as cursor is moved more than the link.

An Anchor link is really a small several from a hyperlink, a hyperlink directs to a complete webpage but anchor link directs to a particular area of a particular webpage, it can be at exact same write-up or various write-up or even at various domain.

10. Set up research engine friendly internet site architecture

A Website’s info architecture can greatly affect on its search engine visibility. Particular document elements, just like the web site navigation scheme, and model technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, can interfere with search engines potential to spider a site.

11. Creation of research engine friendly sitemap

A internet site map helps targeted visitors navigate large, hard sites by showing its entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram from the Internet site for Web designers.

12. Robots.txt and its META tag

Robots.txt is really a file placed on your server to help the many search engine spiders not to crawl or index particular sections or pages of the site. It is possible to use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent particular areas of one’s website from getting indexes or to problem individual indexing instructions to particular look for engines.

Quick SEO Guide! 12 Steps of Look for Engine Optimization Procedure – Check Out seo guide and seo technology

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Article Source: http://eva-news.com/sme/marketing/quick-seo-guide-12-steps-of-look-for-engine-optimization-technique/2377757/

It’s that time of year to review the web stats report for your website.

If you have web stats being collected by your web hosting company, I would spend the time to look them over.

• Search for which keyword phrases are being used to find you
• Examine which web pages are getting the most traffic and which ones are not
• Review the404 – 500 errors portion of your stats to see what people are missing or what is not working – this is something to pay close attention to and something that can be fixed
• If you can see how much traffic is coming to your website,  can you see if there is any trending?
• Are you being visited by the Major Search Engine Bots?
• Are you getting links from undesirable websites?
• Can you tell what time of day you are getting the bulk of your traffic?

Now is a good time to review your web stats, these tidbits of information can help you move forward in planning your marketing for the up coming year.

If you do not have web stats from your hosting company – not to worry. You can setup an account with Google Analytics. It takes time to learn all the nuances and how to totally use all the features, but the core reporting is very useful.

You will have to copy the code snippet to the bottom of all your web pages. This can be a task if you do not have a common footer. Remember, it is always best to place the code above the </body>. So your web page can completely load in the event the code snippet cannot contact Google. Once the code is in place, the Analytics will be able to collect loads of useful information.

Best of luck and keep marketing your website.

SEO is a process. A carefully planned process.

SEO is not something you bang out in one day.  It grows over time, if implemented correctly.

SEO is not something that can be applied to all categories of business.  A business like an insurance company requires a different process then an auto repair company. Understanding the business process also helps in the optimization process.

SEO requires that you follow a series of steps to make the optimization process  truly effective to achieve the best possible search engine ranking results.

The process actual begins before the website is ever built. The domain selection is extremely important.

The web hosting you select to house your website needs to be robust and offering excellent support. You want your website to display the pages in a fast manner – not sluggish.

The website needs to be designed with three main thoughts – Original Content, Ease of use and minimal code (as best as can be done to accomplish the desired appearance). The menu system needs to make sense as well as provide easy access across the website. I would also suggest the use of breadcrums and  properly named web pages with keywords.

Once the site is built,  the final phase of optimization can be performed.  Titles, Descriptions and numerous small tweaks to make the web page more attractive for  the search engines.

I always setup Google Analytics so I can track all our efforts and to determine what is working and drawing traffic.

Once this website is completed, I check the W3C compliance and correct the code until it is clean! Why spend so much time doing this?

• First, each web browser can present the web page differently if the web page is not compliant.
• Secondly, some web page coding can prevent the search engine spiders from fully indexing your web site.

If the website is compliant, it’s time for the main submission to the search engines to commence. I do the major search engines and a few key directories carefully by hand. Choosing the information to submit in more of a marketing manner.

Be sure to submit to the local business sections of the search engines.

Then I wait a month to start a monthly link building process – under 40 links per month, blogging articles, press releases, directory listings, etc. Less submission are better. Finding good solid sites to submit to can be a daunting task, but you can use a wide array of software products to help.

The process sounds simple, but most people do not have the time to do this correctly. There is plenty to understand and more techniques to use to make the optimization of a website a successful activity. I probably use about 75 additional techniques that can aid in a website ranking.

If you need help doing Search Engine Optimization for your website, contact us. We offer cost effective solutions for marketing your website.

Good Luck in your Website Marketing

I know people want to get their websites into the search engines, but you have to think before you start this subbmission process.

The Website Optimization process can take a few days to do correctly, but it is well worth the  effort.

1. Look at the web content – what does your message say? Is it clear? Can it be easily followed?
2. Was the web page optimized? Titles,  Descriptions, Meta Tags, Properly Selected Keywords, Keyword Density, Images, etc.
3. Is the web page as close to W3C compliance?
4. Is your menu easy to follow?

Optimize your  web pages before submitting them to search engines. Taking the time to set the foundation for your marketing will make all the difference in being found in the search engines.

.

I am always faced with the task of  explaining what Web Marketing is – for website owners looking for help with marketing their websites.

Most of the time, I hear that all they want is to be on the top of the results in the search engines, but they do not realize how to get there.

The first thing I have to do is to carefully review their websites and list my observations.  I can then draft an e-mail letting them know what I see and what I feel they need to gain the rankings they want. Sometimes the ranking expectations cannot match the fierce competition, which forces more expensive means to market a website, but other methods can be developed to pull portions of a larger market.

Most of the time,  my honest e-mail will help the client understand what is involved and how I approach  web based marketing. This is how I approach reviewing a website:

• I examine the website to locate the strengths and weaknesses.
• An outline is created of what I need to do:
  - Keyword Analysis
  - Determine how many web pages require Optimization
  - Checking the code on each web page and fixing errors
  - Optimizing each web page with the selected keyword phrases
  - Submissions to the search Engines and Directories
  - On going Link Building
  - Setting up blogs, newsletters and/or forums
  - Pay Per Click campaigns
  - Monthly Web Site Reporting – Visitors, Web Page Rankings, Keywords Used, Landing pages, Demographics, etc.
  - Plus any other processes I feel will enhance their rankings
• A complete marketing plan is developed with the understanding that the client can modify the plan to suite their budget needs.
• The estimated expectations are explained.
• I also explain that there are no guarantees for Natural Optimization – Since the Search Engines can change the algorithms at any time – thus changing the rankings.
• There are reasonable expectations with pay Per Click Marketing, but it can be expensive and must be measured carefully to determine ROI. If the cost outweighs the return, then it is not profitable to do.

The hardest aspect of Marketing, is explaining the process and using the time test ways to increase a web site’s visibility. You also need to be open to new ideas and changes in the market place, like video, social networking and new technology.

I spend the time marketing for my clients, because I know my clients cannot take the time to market for themselves and run their businesses at the same time. You need to have someone in your corner you can trust to do the things that have to be done to produce targeted traffic, yet look for new opportunities to market your website in a profitable way.

Lee Smith
Search Engine Marketing Technician
Contact page

.

The title is important!

In the eyes of the search engines – having the same title on all your web pages is like having One web page for your whole web site. The title is a short description of that web page. It provides a short phrase telling the search engine bots what the focus of the page is. This information is part of the process to index the content of your website in to the vast search engine database of information. It’s like getting listed in the yellow pages under one listing when you could be listen in 10 areas!

Having all the pages with the same title does not help your marketing.

How does this happen?

It is actually normal for any web designer to create a template of the web page and reuse it for every page in the website. Then every page will look different to the web site owner but the header information will be exactly the same which the web site owner will not notice. The header is part of what the search engine look at to index your web site.

Unless you have request optimization when ordering your website, it is not usually part of web site construction.  As a web designer myself, I can respect the fact that web designers do not know. Most web designers do not optimize websites, because it just like building the website. It takes a good deal of time and training – normally it’s something that will effect the price to the purchaser and many web designers will leave  off.  This comes back to the consumer requesting a website and asking for your best price.  Would you pay $150-200 per page or $75-$100? The true difference can be found long term.

When you submit your website to the search engines, the website that is optimized, stands a very good chance of being found, compared to the site with no optimization. When you see the results of a search measure in the tens of thousands, where do you want to be? Without optimization, you are not going to be found in the top 20 unless you plan to use pay per click or spend heavy advertising dollars.

Optimizing a website is not easy

Part of optimizing a web page is creating titles for each web page. You just cannot just slap some new words in title. You want to carefully select a keyword phrase that will best describe the page and something that visitors may use to find you. It takes time to carefully craft an optimization that will provide a successful marketing campaign.

Training , experience and knowledge can make all the difference in creating a sound web site optimization plan and with that in place – you can then stand a chance to be found.

Understanding the web marketing process is the first step to success!

Lee