In the warzone that is the Internet, it is only natural and quite imperative to try and beat your competitors out of the running. Otherwise, you run the risk of being the one to eat your competitors’ dust. However, in a battlefield as fast paced and constantly evolving as the online business world, your competitors are not the only ones you must set out to beat. As a number of veterans in the search engine optimization field put it, your biggest competitor in the online community is yourself.  Being on top of your field requires your SEO to be better than that of your competitors, but staying on top necessitates that you be better than your own SEO. The following outlines a few guidelines and tips that can help you beat yourself in your own game.

Niche marketing

The kinds of improvements you need to make on your SEO depend on what kind of website you have. In other words, you need to make use of a particular technique if you own a niche website and another if you have a behemoth websites.

Let’s start with niche websites. If you have one and you did your SEO correctly, you have probably exhausted all possible resources and made use of all possible keywords. In other words, you have everything covered and maybe even thinking of expanding your site to include products related to your niche. If this is the case, it is best for you, in SEO terms, to build a new website for your expansion instead of adding a new category to your website. The reason to this is simple. Google and most other search engines favor websites that contain similar product. Search engines favor, for instance, a website dedicated to business books than a general book website with a business book category.

For behemoth sites

What about if you already have big website with various categories? How do you improve your SEO and make sure that you stay on top of the game? The answer is to let your search engine rankings.

A novice at SEO is going to need all the help that he can get to break into the industry and stay at the top. SEOmoz CEO and co-founder Randfish share his views on the top skills that helped him throughout his SEO career.

Analytical

This means gathering data, going over it and identifying patterns in the trends. This may not always have to refer to exhaustive research although it wouldn’t hurt to develop that skill as well.

Understanding the medium

A good SEO person should be able to understand the mechanisms surrounding the internet. Originally, understanding HTTP status codes and IP addresses took years for SEOs to comprehend. You now have a lot of resources at your disposal these days, so learning more about the internet should help you in your career. After all, this is the medium that you will be working on.

Empathy with search engineers

You want to learn how to look at things from the engineer’s perspective. These people’s concerns go beyond the user’s search experience. They are more focused with the potential problems that may come up in search. The more you understand things from their point of view, the more their moves – or at least most of them – begin to make sense.

Solid HTML experience

You can’t expect to become at least competent in SEO if you can’t comprehend the tags and markups that make up the web pages.

Finding common grounds when socializing with people

Just like in any other field, networking is an essential ingredient to the success of SEO. After all, you will be working in the midst of mistrust and suspicion coming from colleagues, developers and even prospective clients. It helps to know the right people and be able to find something in common with them.

Good memory

You want to learn to store important information in your memory. Information can come in the form of past experiences, from ideas that you stumbled upon in the blogosphere and from observations that you may have about the internet.

Visual art

It would also be a good idea for an SEO to develop diagramming skills so he can easily and effectively communicate his ideas. You don’t have to win a ribbon for your drawings but you might as well learn how to use images to relay your message.

Being stubborn

You just have to stick to your guts when you know you’re doing the right thing. And even when you’re not, trust your instincts. Nobody expected SEO to be such a big thing when it started but look at it now.

Humility

But when you’re wrong, you have to have the humility to accept that you are wrong. You also have to recognize that because you’re anything but perfect, there will be times when you will be wrong again.

Every website’s goal is to get on top of the search engine results. While many would go through great lengths just to attain the top spot, experts caution against adopting black hat SEO techniques such as link farms and keyword stuffing. You are putting your business at risk of incurring the wrath of the big companies such as Google and Microsoft – something that you can’t afford to happen especially since you’re relying on them to get you in front of your targeted audience.

Case in point: Microsoft has just filed a lawsuit against three people from Vancouver, British Columbia as well as a number of corporations. The software giant is suing for over $750,000 in damages.

Microsoft filed the lawsuit after it has found patterns of click fraud on its search engine. Last year, the company received complaints of click fraud by auto insurance advertisers. These people found a sudden surge of traffic into their sites coming from paid advertisements that run on the search pages of Microsoft.

The software company investigated the incident further and found the same pattern in paid ads for World of Warcraft. Traffic appeared to come from several different computers but in fact are simply coming from two proxy servers. Microsoft traced the ads to the same name, Eric Lam. Apparently the same person is behind both the redirected traffic for World of Warcraft and for the auto insurance sites.

Microsoft thinks that Eric Lam is probably running a low-ranking site but instead of competing head on, he is exhausting the budget of his competitors so he can gain an advantage. But regardless of the reason, Microsoft is still Lam and his colleagues for this fraudulent act.

So yes, black hat SEO practitioners, beware. While it will probably be more convenient for you to resort to shady tactics to get to the top of the search results fast, it wouldn’t really benefit you in the long run because you’re just going to find yourself banned by the search engines. Worse, they can now file lawsuits and sue you for damages, which can cost you more money than you would ever spend if you just invested in white hat SEO in the first place.

It wouldn’t be long before other search engine giants followed suit. “We have decided to become more active in the commercial fraud area on the enforcement side,” says Microsoft’s associate general counsel Tim Cranton. “The theory is you can change the economics around crime or fraud by making it more expensive.”

Most SEO professionals are too concerned about how long it will take for their search engine optimization efforts to finally pay off. Most of the time, the answer varies on how old your website is and the amount of keyword competition you have; these are the two main factors that may determine how long will it take for top 10 rankings to show. However, these are not the only factors.

New domain = low ranking?

Having a new domain can make it difficult for you to gain the trust you need to get the rankings for competitive keywords for at least three up to six or nine months. But this may not often be the case if you continue to produce useful content, and if you can immediately benefit from the consistent and authoritative links.

How fast can search engines index or crawl your redesigned site?

Searchenginewatch recently relaunched a large site with several pages. A chief directory level was gone, and it was impossible to execute redirects before launching. However, Google was able to index and return each of the new pages in 12 hours. They began to see a few more pages in the directory level from the monitored root four hours after launching.

However, there is a catch: as these events were taking place, every search engine was already getting rid of unused URLs using 404 errors, robots.txt files, etc. Still, search engines continuously index those that get rankings. Sites relying on several rankings for major keywords in home pages won’t be hurt by redesigns even if the new URL resolves to the root instead of directory-appended types.

After launching, how hard is it to maintain the site’s current rankings?

New domains have their brand terms ranked almost immediately after the initial crawl. Basically, a brand name that is unique will have no problem getting higher ranks sooner than other brands. Benchmarking is an important tool in helping you understand how crawling is done after redesigning the website. Cherry keywords like the top 10 to 50+ non-branded and branded terms should be monitored and measured.

Effects of the launch on your site’s traffic

Traffic can be affected after relaunching your site even if you are using top search engine optimization methods. A slight decrease in your traffic is commonly experienced after launch, which can be interpreted in dozens or sometimes hundreds of rankings that influence traffic.

Analytics is your best tool for monitoring the success rates of your post-launch traffic. Just make sure that it is well configured so you can view important data coming from high-bounce referrers, pages, and 404 reports.

Your implementation level can hinder the success of your search engine optimization campaign. Therefore, it is important for you to keep in touch with your SEO provider or with your own team of SEO specialists. If you have no idea how to implement a good campaign, simply ask for help from these experts.

If you have a new site, your initial goal is to gain brand ranking. The process may require you to contribute some careful attention and time so you can see the good results within 6 months. And if you have a redesigned website, your main goal should include the maintenance of your existing rankings for high-ranking keywords even after your relaunch. Then, you need to make sure that your SEO is ready and working. From there, you can decrease or increase your expectations on your overall success.

Getting conversions is difficult when you don’t have traffic. But while Google is probably the best source of traffic for any website, it is also important to note that the search company also has other search engines other than the web search that is popular to most users. As such, it would stand to reason that you should start working on ranking in them as well.

Your goal is to generate conversions by establishing online visibility. You just need to make sure that people find you regardless of where they are looking.

Youtube

YouTube is considered the second largest search engine. If you’re using online videos, you want to optimize them for visibility in this site. For instance, you want to craft an descriptive and accurate title and description. Use complete sentences for the description part and choose your keyword tags carefully. It’s also important to avoid keyword stuffing and to take advantage of the site’s social features. Encourage participation by enabling ranking and comments.

You will also want to use meta data, captions and watermarks on your video content. Integrating Google Maps is also a good idea if applicable.

Google image search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal enable Image Labeler in your Webmaster Tools account still under the same search company. It’s also a good idea to add images to your blog posts or news articles that are submitted for syndication in Google News.

Google News

When it comes to ranking in Google News, there are just a couple of things that you need to keep in mind. For instance, Google News indexes articles that are less than three days old and it indexes each article only once. You might also want to read Google News Help for Publishers to learn more about how this application works.

Google Maps

For this engine, it goes without saying that you need to consider how a local user would search for your business. He is more likely to use the city and state features so make sure that your website is optimized for these details aside from the usual business-specific search queries.

To rank in local search, you want to include pages in your website that mention where your company is based and the areas that you service. You want to indicate physical addresses, phone numbers, directions on how to get to your office and even landmarks to make it easier to locate.

A good copy is crucial to the success of an internet marketing campaign. It keeps the search engines happy because they are assured that your website is not full of useless and senseless information while at the same time, it improves your visitor’s browsing experience.

Getting users to stick around your website is more difficult than getting them into the site. Search engine optimization works to get your pages visible to potential visitors but the real work begins when your site starts attracting inbound traffic. After all, the whole point of your establishing an online presence is to turn visitors into consumers. And this, brings us back to the importance of great landing pages.

Objective

As a salesman, your primary objective for writing copy is to persuade visitors that you have a product that offers exactly what they need and then motivate them to react to the copy in the way that you want them to. You can adopt different approaches but the end goal will never change: persuade and motivate.

Getting started

Writing down the first clever idea that comes to mind wouldn’t work in copy writing. You need to research on your targeted audience first and define your product in such a way that it would appeal to the people who are most likely to look for it. You need to convey your message in a straightforward manner, making sure that you cover all the benefits and features of the product.

It’s also important that you position your product relative to similar ones in the market. You want to highlight the benefits of using it – what makes it different and better than what the competing brand offers. When you write your copy, you need to think in terms of the target market that you want to appeal to.

Be concise

The attention span of an internet user is very short. Anything can make it push the back button or move on to another site so you need to deliver your sales pitch within just a few seconds. As such, you need to craft a concise but informative copy. There is no ideal length but as a general rule, you shouldn’t use fillers just to make your copy look like it is full to the brim with information.

Writing

When you write your copy, always keep your primary objectives in mind. Use a natural and unaffected voice. Avoid using heavy terms that came straight from a dictionary just to impress the people who might be reading your content. Maintain a good pace and stay in the active voice. It’s also important that you avoid making false claims or invent figures that supposedly came from experts. Stay factual and don’t hesitate to repeat key concepts all throughout the copy to make it easier for the reader to remember what you want them to remember. For instance, you can repeat selling points but present them in different angles so they don’t sound redundant.

Google News can help attract more traffic into your website to improve your sales conversion rates. But to get your press releases featured, you need to follow certain editorial and technical guidelines set by the website.

Editorial

First of all, you need to produce 100% original content. Google will not accept news scrapers. Google News also offers a venue where you can track news updates from all over the world by subscribing to PR wires. Google also requires a website to have more than one author so one-man blogs wouldn’t make it into Google News. You need a lot of people working on your website to get in.

Organizational requirements

Google News only features operational organizations. Websites classified under this group come with clear editorial hierarchies, author bios as well as company information. Contact information should include a physical address and telephone number among others. For Google News to feature you, your website should show that you’re an operational publication – one that can guarantee consistently fresh and high quality content.

Google has not provided an official statement on the minimum number of articles that it requires to get your press releases featured. But it would be safe to assume that you need at least two to three in a day. The website should also have a few hundred articles in its archive because this is one proof that you’re already an established and operational website.

Format

Your articles should come with clear titles, the date of publication and author name. The titles should follow the format of news headlines and are supposed to summarize the content of the press release. They could also contain the names  of the people featured in it or the name of your company. This will help make sure that your article shows up in company-specific searches. As for length, keep your title within the twenty-two word limit.

Make sure to produce press releases and other materials that are at least 200-300 words long.

Ads and multimedia content

Google is perfectly fine with ads on your website. It actually encourages publishers for Google News to use AdSense. Advertisements are also indications that the site is attracting visitors and has a functional business model that will enables it to maintain consistency in publishing. Images are also accepted within the content although it does not allow content that is composed of purely images. The same rule applies for videos. Just make sure that you have text content to go with it.

Tags: google, seo

Facebook is primarily a social networking site. It connects friends, business colleagues and families through a virtual community. But because of its growing number of subscribers, it has also been tapped as part of effective link building as well.

However, because the website is first and foremost an online community, people don’t really visit it in search of a particular service. Directly promoting your product to the people in your network through Facebook may not work to your advantage. But there are a lot of ways through which you can use the social networking site for online marketing.

For instance, you want to start by building a network composed of everyone you know and those that you have only met through the internet. It’s also important to participate in groups that have something to do with your business so you can contribute useful information to your targeted audience. From there, you can find people who may have blogs where you can contribute content in return for links back to your own website. Make sure that you send unique articles for every person who agrees to your offer.

Link building through Facebook works because it allows you to get inbound links from relevant and reputable websites. Everyone knows that the quality of your links is just as important as the quantity so going through this strategy ensures that your website gets better search placement by virtue of link popularity.

But you can’t use just Facebook for link building. There are far more effective tools that you can also use to complement your link building strategy. Free Relevant Links is a good example. We offer a free link exchange service that ensures that you will only get relevant back links to your site.

What makes Free Relevant Links effective is that it allows users to choose as many as five key phrases and two descriptions that promote multiple keyword exposure. This will give you more assurance that your online marketing efforts will be rewarded.

Free Relevant Links is automated so you don’t have to do anything to start the link exchange as your category gets updated with new websites. Each time a website joins the system, our staff reviews the site to find out if it is worthy of availing the free links exchange service. This is one proof that you’re getting just relevant and quality links instead of spam.

With a free account under Free Relevant Links, you get a wide range of services and technologies including search exchange services, site monitoring, updated ranking reports for your targeted keywords and the XML Spydermap. For more information on these services, feel free to contact us through this website today.

Every SEO expert agrees that keywords play a big role in search engine rankings. The right use of keywords in various parts of a web page is critical in search engine optimization. Title tags, for instance, being one of the most important areas of a page, should be optimized for targeted keywords because they are the ones that are attributed to a page. The title tag is the first thing that users see when they search for a topic. This is what comes up in the search engine results lists that tells them about what the page is about.

The right choice and use of keywords is crucial to encourage users to click into a title tag and get to the targeted web page.

Title tags

Your title tags are going to represent your web page in the search results so they need to contain your targeted keywords. Title tags are so important because on their own, they have a huge potential for pulling your search engine rankings up or down, depending on how you optimized them.

A news-like format for title tags is considered more effective. Stuffing keywords into the tag can make your rankings go down so make sure to strike the right balance to make it both optimized for search engines and informative for your users.

The length

Google and other major search engines tend to chop off title tags, showing only the first 65 to 70 characters, including spaces. If you have a really long title tag, you wouldn’t be able to see the whole thing on the search results list. This can affect how the user perceives your page. For search engines, longer title tags are perfectly fine so long as they are properly optimized.

If a search engine shows only a part of  a title tag, it stands to reason that it also focuses more on this area although it’s still highly likely that the other half is still considered when it comes to search ranking for long tail keywords. It would be a good idea to try to create title tags that are short and succinct, taking care, of course, to include your targeted keywords so the page ranks better.

But if you really can’t do without a long title tag, at least make sure that the first part contains your main keywords. This is as much for search engine rankings as for the users who will click through the links. Searchers, after all, tend to click into title tags that contain the exact keywords that they are looking for (mostly displayed in bold fonts).

Keyword research on new websites is different from analyzing keywords for established ones. By keyword analysis for an existing website, we mean going over an old site that you haven’t seen or worked on before and finding out which keywords have been effective in driving target traffic to its pages. Before you apply your own search engine optimization strategies on the website, you need to find out how it has evolved and how it is faring against its competitors.

Internal analysis

Internal analytics should jumpstart your keyword analysis for an established website. This is quite contrary to working on a new website where you do general niche research first and then use keyword suggestion tools to broaden your search.

When you’re analyzing search referrals for high-traffic and old websites, you need to overcome the challenge of weeding through the high volume of long tail. For this, you want to start with the top referrals and sort them into patterns. You have to identify your core terms as well as the common modifiers used for each of these words. This is where your Excel would come in handy with its tables and color options that will help you visualize the pattern easily.

After going over the pattern, organize the patterns and key phrases according to topic, modifier and level, still using Excel. Sorting the list and arranging them in tables will help you figure out how to manage search engine optimization strategies for your targeted keywords.

• It’s a good idea to organize the words according to topic – i.e. general vs. specific; navigational, informative, brand-specific – the topcis you’re going to use depends on the goals of the site.
• Organizing the keywords according to level entails using your core terms as the basic level and going up as you add frequent modifiers and other terms to the core keywords.

Search placement

To find out more about a keyword’s potential to drive traffic into the website, you want to compare traffic numbers against the keyword’s position. For instance, if the site is getting substantial traffic for a high-ranking word that appears on page 2, there’s a huge possibility that the word would attract more traffic when it is taken to the first page.  This should drive your search engine optimization strategy for the site.

For older website, rank checking works to determine how much traffic the page can send and how easily it can get to the first page of the rankings for a given key phrase. To enhance your research and help you apply a more effective search engine optimization technique, you can also test keyword behavior using pay-per-click.