Search Engine Optimization
The phases of an in-house SEO life cycle
Courtship Phase. Does your company want to find the best candidate to start up the in-house SEO program? For companies in this phase, you are seeking for the best SEO candidate for the job. In this phase many companies realize they could not afford Michael Jordan, but can hire a great SEO leader. Once your SEO is hired, put all of the right introductions when they start.
Honeymoon Phase. The SEO is in place and everybody talk about SEO. Recommendations come from every direction, and getting priorities is like a breeze. This phase may last about 3-6 months, depending on the corporation. The main advice here is to make the most of your honeymoon, read up to maximize potential of this phase and to minimize the impact of next phases.
Reality Phase. This occurs when it starts to get challenging internally. The shape of the upside bell curve could vary significantly for this phase. It could be deep and wide, or shallow and narrow.
After talking with other SEOs, this seems to be the most challenging for the more traditional companies, where the site is not the main income channel and management is competing for prioritization of their projects. Dotcoms seem to barely experience this phase, if at all, likely since search engine traffic is a part of the business model and SEO is of interest to all.
To make this Phase as short as possible, focus on educating the team and then pre-sell ideas so that resistance is caught and addressed, before you pitch ideas. Most importantly, during this phase you need to nurture the relationships you build in the Honeymoon Phase by transforming your connections into friends and help each other succeed.
If you find yourself in the Reality Phase with no end in sight, focus on the individual side of SEO, get people to help SEO. A great start to get you on the right track is to implement over-coffees and other tips from Duane Forrester, LLC. If the challenge seems to be getting management’s attention, let the numbers do the selling. Laura Forbes with Christian Science Monitor has an attractive approach for growing visibility for SEO-she gets SEO to enhance KPIs management is monitoring; when these numbers start to slide, she knows it is time to make the sell for SEO.
Synergy Phase. You have reached this phase when SEO and other departments function with synergy. You’re operating like a well-oiled engine with a process that keeps SEO in the loop, with ideas going back-and-forth among SEO and other departments. When you reach this phase, it’s simple to caught up with the busy work and let your relations become a lower priority. Remember the relationships are what you got here and their absence could send you back.
Search Engine Optimization will meet Online PR
We all know that content is king. To successfully market your products and establish yourself as a leader in your industry, writing and distributing articles is the way. One of the key benefits of getting your content rich articles indexed in the search engines is that you could increase your websites’ overall PageRank, while building exposure for your company.
Here are some tips to get started in right direction:
Add accepted keyword phrases in your article:
While writing your article; make sure to incorporate popular keywords in your headline, subheads, and abstract of your article. Placing these keywords may help prospects and the press to identify your article when they run a search in the major news feeds.
Include your website links also:
Whether it is in author’s byline or in the body of the article, if you are leaving to write an article, make sure to include your site link within the article as this is a good way to get inbound links from other sites, without having to return the favor.
Submit to PRWeb and newswires:
To get your press release indexed, and ranked, you want to consider submitting to an article distribution service like PR Web. It sends press releases to major news search engines, including Google and Yahoo News. Press releases distributed through this are optimized for maximum organic search engine inclusion. Search engines crawl naturally and resourcefully to index your press release.
Additional article distribution services
www.thephantomwriters.com
www.marketingsource.com
Identify the good websites for your article:
After optimizing your article; recognize which sites to submit your article to publish. There are thousands of publishers looking for quality content to publish. It is good to find high traffic websites that have the audience you are looking to aim. To find these sites, perform a search in Google by placing related terms like “article submission” or “article directory” in search box. For instance, if you are writing a self-help article, type the word “self-help articles” and target the sites that are on the first few pages.
Article announcement list:
They are newsletters, groups, or ezines, which permit you to “announce” your new articles to editors and publishers instantly. Most of these lists are sent out daily to their subscribers. So you can have your article circulating to main editors and publishers within hours of completion.
Here are some Article Announcement Lists that may distribute your article:
http://topica.com/lists/freeezinecontent/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles/
Become a contributing writer:
If you are an accomplished or aspiring writer with a little to contribute, you can consider becoming a contributing writer for an online community. Characteristically, you need not get paid for your work, but the amount of exposure is invaluable. You will also get credit for your article including a free link to your email address and your site!
Here are a few good properties to consider writing for:
Suite101.com
About.com
Writing and distributing articles is the most promising way to boost your site’s ranking in the search engines. From this, you can also benefit from building quality links to your site, gaining editorial following, and most significantly sharing your knowledge with the rest of the world!
Know about Meta Tag NOODP
The NOODP Meta tag could be used to inform a search spider to not use ODP i.e. (dmoz.org) data for your descriptions and the titles in the SERPS. These days Google announced that Googlebot would now recognize this tag.
In most of the cases this would only affect age old websites, but what the heck here it is:
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”
Changes must take effect the next time when a supporting spider visits your page.
Creation of good Meta descriptions
Using same descriptions on every page of a site is not very useful when individual pages show in the web results. In these cases we are less possible to show the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that exactly describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main index page, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don’t have time to make a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the significant URLs like your index page and popular pages.
- Include clearly tagged data in the description.
The Meta description does not just have to be in sentence method; it’s also a great place to incorporate structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication. This can give potential visitors much related information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of in order – price, age, manufacturer – spotted throughout a page. A good Meta description can bring all this data in concert.
- Programmatically create descriptions.
For some sites, like news media sources, creating an exact and exclusive description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes smallest effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the some case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be proper and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and varied, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-related data we mentioned in the second point is a good applicant for programmatic creation. Keep in mind that Meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t offer users a clear idea of the page’s content, and are less expected to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.
- Use value descriptions.
Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly expressive. Because the Meta descriptions aren’t displayed in the pages the user sees, it’s easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google’s search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and measure of your search traffic.For more information http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&ctx=sibling#writegooddescriptions
Google corners almost two-thirds of US search market
The newest search market share numbers are from Hitwise: in the four weeks that ended March 31st, Google racked up fully 64.13% of all US searches. This is more than 10% since March 2006, if trends hold; Google’s share would pass the two thirds marks by August. In the same period, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask lost the share.
This is not good news for the search also, as it covers a period when all of them made main and improvements to their search engines.
Conventional wisdom has long held that Google is susceptible to erect attacks. The new Hit wise data suggest that, however, Google is really gaining influence in valuable verticals. Search engines grow in influence over the year, accounting for more total traffic sent to sites in the categories of travel, shopping, health, business, and entertainment, among others. However, in all of these categories, the growth of Google’s share of this “upstream traffic” is flowing outpaced its rivals. In shopping, for instance, Google’s share grew 14% whereas, taken together, all search engines increased their share by only 6%.
Of course, web market share numbers are disreputably fallible, they require further vetting. Meantime, those distressed for any sign of Google weakness, may take some comfort in this recent PC Magazine critique of the Gmail. Delighted GOOGLE investors wish to fuel their warm and fuzzy feelings, on the other hand, must proceed directly to Alex Iskold’s two-by-two matrix-laden evidence that Google is, in reality, the “ultimate money making machine”.
Simple Steps for the success of the website
Do something you are passionate about
This may noise quite funny but it is the single most significant thing you can do when building a website. You should never consider making a website because of the earning possible of it. Every subject imaginable will be a feasible source of income in a website.
There is another very basic feature to having passion for the subject. You will be capable to use and leverage what you already know about it. This means that all the learning you have done is instantly available for use on the website. But also, if you are fervent about the subject you are very much more likely to persist working on the website.
Add a new page of content every day
The first reason is that when you obtain a new web visitor he or she may come back another day to see if there is anything new or different. But if there is new content you have a regular visitor captivated, and the search engines love new content. If a website is growing at a regular pace they consider it to be very important and they will rank you consequently. This means that more people will locate you, and finding new content when they come back means more visits, which means better search engine ranking.
Get an external link every day
Try to obtain one new link to your website on another website every day. In gaining links we have lots of ways. Send emails to other webmaster in your common subject area and ask for a link exchange. Write articles for article directories and put a link to your site at the base of the article. Post informative things to forums and use your signature block as a link to your site. Join an online group or organization and post links to your site on their site or in their letter threads.
Examine Your Competition before Starting an SEO & Marketing Campaign
Thinking to add an effective search engine optimization strategy to your advertising and marketing campaign this year? Prior to starting your program, it is significant to first know who your online competitors are and what type of online marketing strategies they are already doing. You need to take some time to research and examine your local and national competitors online…before they evaluate you first.
Here are a few guidelines and questions to consider during performing research on the Internet about your competitors:
Website Design and Layout
Position of Keywords
Off Page Factors
Uses of Spamming Techniques
An experimentation in Coolness for SEO Geeks
Do you like to know how to be the coolest guy on the planet?
Then might be the judge?
That’s the initial question, right?
“Coolness,” is in the eye of the beholder.
What I’m chatting here is a little contest SEO geeks have been into for a few years. You could call it an experiment or a contest hundreds of internet marketers are running for the prized place of being called “The Coolest Guy on the Planet.”
Google is considered the most appropriate internet search engine. This means that any search term you look up in Google would give you more appropriate results than any other search engine. In the world of SEO Google is the site you optimize your site for.
If your site is well ranked by Google it is generally well ranked by the other search engines like Yahoo and MSN as well. So how do you become “The Coolest Guy on the Planet”?
The answer lies in how you optimize your page. Several factors include how relevant your page title is. How often you use the keywords “coolest guy on the planet” in your page? However the most significant factor is not on your site at all, it’s on other people’s web pages.
The leading factor is the links to your site. Google and other search engines consider your site more important when it has links from several other sites. These links are considered as votes. So it’s somewhat democratic for you or your site to turn out to be the coolest guy on the planet.
Rank High in Google by SEO Authority
The latest word in Search Engine Optimization is “Authority.” Now Google is emphasizing websites with Authority. What it means is a web site is given Authority from other sites and from Google itself. There are 3 ways to obtain Authority.
1. Web 2.0
Everyone knows the Web 2.0 explosion. Socially oriented networking web sites, You Tube meant for video, blogging and also social bookmarking web sites. Using these type of web sites is the hottest way to increase the Authority that Google gives to your website.
2. Links
One giant determining factor in page rank is the number of links from web sites with high Google page ranks. As these links are one way inbound links they give your site authority. This is a prevailing statement that tells your website is high quality and good for them to link to you. Link exchange could be useful as long as you exchange with websites that have high ranks with Google. The more, value links your website has, the higher your page rank will become.
3. Content
Targeted content is necessary. First know what your target market is looking and provide a solution with your targeted key words. Your site must consist of minimum 250 words of content that is frequently updated. Google will spot your web site as a fresh resource for the keywords that you are targeting. This gives you upper hand over many sites that allow their information to become unrelated because they don’t update on a regular basis. This would give your website Authority in the eyes of Google.
The key to rank high in Google is SEO Authority. A well developed marketing campaign that fully use socially oriented websites, highly ranking inbound links and fresh website content is bound to be extremely profitable.
Make excellent Use of Press Releases and Other Techniques
The search engine optimization is not on instant gratification, as the results usually take some time to bear fruit, and would be chiefly true if your a beginner in the online marketing world. It’s a fact that SEO isn’t a one-time event, as most search engine algorithms often change, therefore the method that worked well last year may not work this year. This task entirely needs a long-term outlook and obligation from you and your optimization experts.
Learn to make Well-Thought and Interesting Content
This is of crucial importance for all involved; though it’s a tough challenge for online retailers. Write your own descriptions using proper keyword research methods, to target actual words that online searchers use, and make huge product pages that grow above from the rest. In addition, placing quality content serve as a superb way of getting inbound links.
Learn To spread Your Sources of Traffic
As search engines like Google might bring you 70% of your Web traffic, what if the next huge algorithm update hits you hard? A fine way will be to use newsletters and other subscriber-contents, as these could aid you grasp on to your targeted traffic or niche customers no matter what search engines do. By creating good content, posting an updated blog, you would be able to get viewers of loyal prospects and clients that may help you to survive the negative flops of the search engines.
Learn How to make use of Press Releases Properly
A good way to increase your online exposure is to build up a lasting relationship with media casing your industry or your local region, including getting links from trusted media Web sites. Effectively distribute press releases on the Worldwide web could be an effective link building strategy, and must be able to open the door for exposure in news search sites. You need to know that you should issue a press release when you have anything newsworthy to report, so need not waste someone else’s time.
Find Out Utilizing Relevant Title and Meta Descriptions on Your Page
You must know that the page title is the most important on-page SEO aspect, as it’s kind of rare to rank highly for a primary term with no term being part of the page title. You must know that meta description tags will not help you rank well, though it often appear as the text clip below your listing, so it must include the relevant keywords and written so as to encourage online searchers to click on your listing.