SEO Tip of the Day: Use Web Directories

Back Links are one of the most important parts of successfully running a search engine optimization campaign. As a matter of fact, having well-placed links will do a lot to help to push your website to the top of the search engine result pages for the keywords of your choice. Although there are many different ways for you to acquire these links, there are some ways which are almost automated in nature. By taking advantage of every aspect of your link building campaign, you can not only get your website listed in the search engines quickly, you can also be benefited by the incoming links for a long time to come.

One of the easiest forms of linking that exists is that which is found in directory submissions. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of directories for you to choose from on the Internet where you can post a link to your website. Some of these directories are free to post links and others charge a fee, either a one time fee or a recurring fee. It is up to you to decide if it is worth the effort to post to the free directories and if it is worth the cost to post to some of the paid directories.

Some of the paid directories are very important for you to be listed in, regardless of what the price is. This is especially the case if you are a little bit experienced with search engine optimization and are fairly confident in your ability to get your website listed well on the search engines from your efforts. Some of the paid directories that you want to make sure you're part of include Yahoo and Joeant.com. Yahoo is fairly expensive at $299 a year but by having a link in the Yahoo Directory, you will be giving your SEO efforts of major shot in the arm. Popular directories such as Joeant are an excellent way for you to position yourself with some back links as well.

Submitting your website to the free directories is also an excellent way to give yourself a boost in the SERPS as well as getting yourself listed on the search engines initially. Google does not necessarily give as much weight to these free search engine submissions but remember, Google is not the only kid on the block. Yahoo also has the ability to send you a massive amount of traffic if you're positioned well in their search engine results and MSN can send you traffic as well. Each of these lesser search engines will place a lot of weight on many incoming links from these free directories.

All in all, submitting to directories, whether free or paid is an excellent way to set yourself up for success in your search engine optimization efforts. Make sure, however, that you don't stop with just a few simple directory submissions. Make it a part of your overall efforts to continue improving on your rankings in the search engines.

Web Page Optimization: Do it like a PRO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) both the bane and boon of many a person's existence. It's a known fact that the best way to get traffic to your website is by simply having your site show up in the first page or two of the major search engine's results. Visitors that come in from those search engine results pages (referred to as SERP) have two main things going for them.

They are more likely to buy, and they didn't cost you any money to get there. Getting your site onto those first two pages can be a struggle, and people are always watching what you are doing and gunning for the top spot. You have to keep aware of all of the latest tactics and methods and measure yourself against your competitors.

Yes, competitors. Many people aren't aware of the competitive nature of SERPs positioning, but it is. Keep in mind that you are ranked in comparison with the other sites in the results. If the search engine thinks that your content is more relevant, then you rank higher, if it is determined that your content is less relevant, then you fall in the results. If they know what they are doing, the other sites showing up for the searches you wish to rank high in are watching you, and the other sites on the first two pages to see what they are doing, and if they are rising or falling.

So how do you ensure that you can rank well against the other sites out there and rise in the SERPs? Well, for starters, let's assume that there are only three search engines, because frankly, Google, Yahoo, and MSN (in that order) represent the majority, the vast majority of searches. And Google represents the vast majority amongst those three. For the purposes of this article we'll focus only on Google. If you do right by them, what you do will be good for other search engines as well.

Before we go any further it's important that you understand the nature of SEO. It is not an exact science. The exalted minds inside the Googleplex do not share their secret sauce with the unwashed masses. The reason for this is simple: if they revealed exactly how their logic works, it would be exploited--this has happened before. The methods for performing SEO are based upon the trial and error of many, many internet users as they worked out what works, what doesn't and what will get your site unindexed - or worse: banned.

This is important. There are good and bad ways to optimize your site. The bad ways are called 'Black Hat'. Sure, they may work for awhile, and some Google can't (or doesn't bother to) pick up automatically. However you can report a site to Google as using Black Hat SEO tactics and Google will remove that site from the index (meaning it won't show up in search results). Removing a site from the index is usually only done for a certain amount of time and can be appealable. Banning is far more severe and banned sites are often gone for good with no way to get Google to add it back to their index. Beware of a lot of things that seem shady.

If you think they are shady, chances are that the folks at Google will think so too and if one of those other sites in the SERPs wants to rise up and they visit your site and see your shady tactics, they won't hesitate to report you.

Yeah, it's a bit unfair, but it's the world we live in. Google's not alone in this--the other search engines will do it too.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's dive into the two ways to optimize your site.
On Page Optimization

This is what most people think of when they think of SEO. In reality it is the less effective of the two methods, though as Google improves its ability to determine real content from fluff it is getting more valuable. A bit of history first.

Back when people started realizing that they could make or break their business by where they came up in the SERPs, they started adding all sorts of content to their sites to improve their ranking. The most common of these was the meta keywords. These are words that are placed in the code on a website that tell the search engines what the site is about. Way back when the 'net was young, the search engines believed these keywords.

They don't anymore. People abused the keywords system by putting their competitors names in them, or by even putting completely bogus words in. A site looking to sell more jeans would put Britney Spears in their keywords to get people to visit them inadvertently. Needless to say, keywords play very little importance anymore. I have gotten sites to the #1 position on Google without using keywords at all.

As the search engines got wise to the whole bogus keywords thing, they started looking at all of the content on a website. They can only read text, so images and animated graphics (like flash) were ignored. People learned tactics to place all sorts of text on their site that was invisible to users, but that the search engines (looking at the source code) would see. So search engines started to distrust the websites themselves.

You're asking yourself how they can know what a site is about then. They asked themselves the same question and came up with an obvious answer: they can't. But other humans can. This is called 'Off Page Optimization' and is covered in the second type of optimization.

They never really disregarded the webpage entirely, but they lowered its importance in their overall factoring of a page's importance and relevancy. However, as their savvy increases and they have more computing power to analyse content, search engines are starting to consider the page's content as being more and more important. They can often discern the difference between human generated and computer generated text, and can tell if the content on a page is relevant to a particular topic or not. As they do this more, the page itself will continue to get more important.

There used to be a lot of tactics and tricks to get the search engines to pay more attention to your page, but the number one tip is now this: Write human readable content (don't try to write it to load it with terms and keywords) that has value and real relevancy. Make sure that you do use the words and phrases you think people will search for, and do use them more than once, but don't go overboard. Bolding and using larger fonts (and H1 tags) will help as well, but don't overdo it. If you make your page look too wonky it will not work for the second type of optimization.

Here's a quick rundown of things to make sure you do.

Make sure the page title is descriptive - make it different with each page if you can

Use the meta description tag and make it good - this is what most search engines show as the blurb about your site on the results page.

Don't worry alot about your HTML formatting. Search engines are used to reading crappy HTML and they don't care too much

Make sure you use your keywords in your copy more than once

Do bold them if it works in your content

If you can make it work, use an H1 or H2 tag. If you are comfortable with CSS you can make the text in them smaller (this is becoming less and less important).

Make sure to use alt and title tags on images. It lets the search engines know what the image is about and can cause your images to show up on the Google image search.

Use title tags on your links. It will help the search engines know more about the page you are

linking to and improve relevancy

Don't put too many links to other sites. Links out lower your page's importance.
Off Page Optimization

This is also called 'Off Site Optimization' which is a misnomer. Search engines care little about 'websites' and care more about 'web pages'. The reason for this is that they don't link to a site, they link to a page. So what is this mysterious type of SEO you ask? Well, if you read the on page part above you will have learned that Google and the other search engines decided that they couldn't trust the page itself too much as too many people put fake content on a page to generate traffic. So they decided that the best way to know if a page was relevant was to let people do it for them.

How do they make this work? Well, they simply look at who links to you and what their page is about. If your page is about sewing, and another page that Google knows people like is also about sewing and it links to you, then your page is probably not misrepresenting itself. This is the driving force behind what is called 'Page Rank'. Page rank is essentially a calculation of the importance of the pages linking to you vs the relevancy of your content to those pages. If a page about banking links to a page about peanut butter, then chances are that the search engines won't assign any importance to that link, but links between pages of similar content have high importance.

There is also a nebulous thing that we know exists, but don't know how to quantify. It is the matter of how much a search engine trusts a site. Sites with high trust have their outbound links given more importance than sites the search engine does not trust. An easy way to determine if a site is trustworthy or not is to think about it yourself. The folks at the search engines are humans, they will trust the same sites you do and distrust the same sites you do (give or take a bit).Untrustworthy Sites

Link/Banner farms - sites with nothing but links to various other sites. These used to work, but the search engines wised up and now having a link farm link to you will hurt, not help
Sites with a lot of advertising on them - The search engines know that these sites are mostly computer generated and have no valuable content, and so don't pay any heed to what they link to.

Black Hat Sites - sites that use questionable SEO tactics aren't ones that you want linking to you. Google is suspicious of them, no reason to make it suspicious of youTrustworthy Sites
Directories - There are two types of directories. Automatic and Human verified. Google knows which are which and if your site is listed on a human verified directory (meaning that someone looked at your site and verified that your description and content match the category you chose to have it listed in) then it knows that your content is relevant to the description you gave. Find the directories for your market (just google things like sewing boston directory or whatever your niche/market is and you'll find some to list in.

News Sites - Many news sites allow you to post comments on them. Don't spam, but find some relevant articles to your site and post a few comments. Its not advised that you place your link right in the article (unless you think it applies) but rather have your link in your profile.
Sites with high page rank - This is key. There is little point having sites with no page rank link to your site with no page rank. You want sites with high page rank linking to you. Install the Google toolbar and select yes when it asks if you want to view pagerank. This will let you know how other sites rank and help you determine where to try to get links.

There are a lot of other tips and helpful bits of information out there and I'll be posting a few more specialized articles about them. While there is a lot of bogus software and ebooks out there that will literally tell you no more than what you have read above, there are some that will help you carry out the suggestions above.

They'll suggest directories, give you reports on how well you rank against your competitors and many other things. Most you can do on your own, but they take time. Good SEO software should mainly remove the tedious, manual tasks involved in SEO and help you focus on more important things like niche research and adding actual, valuable content to your site.

If you run a local business, your first priority in search engine optimization should not be to focus on the most popular, universal keyword phrases,

Today let me share some really good and effective Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks with you. These Search Engine Marketing Tips are let me assure you first these are all white hat techniques and I will never be sharing any blackhat technique here on this blog.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques that are being employed by the SEO Guru's are no different that what you would see here or what you might read in Search Engine Articles on any good Article Submission Web directory.

Reason why I never encourage anyone to use black hat techniques are quite simple. Well these techniques might give you some success in fooling the system and you might end up making some money "FOR A WHILE' eventually you will be busted and then your account if its Adsense then that would be banned. It happens all the time and all those guys who are invovled in such things realise this when they get the Email from Google for there Account Suspension.

As said before Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing are quite simple and what is requried is patient and persistence. Anways enough of that lets get straight to what are the todays tips;

If you run a local business, your first priority in search engine optimization should not be to focus on the most popular, universal keyword phrases, but to focus on local keyword phrases that get fewer searches.

While it is a good idea to invest some time in optimizing for those popular keyword phrases throughout your seo campaign, you should first be concerned about getting visitors to your site, and, especially if you service a local area, you should be interested in bringing in local clients.

Essentially, there are two types of search engine optimization universal search engine optimization and local search engine optimization. The importance of each depend greatly on the nature of your business.

If you offer a service or product that clients throughout the country, and perhaps the world, are interested in, then you should optimize for universal keywords. Example: You sell laptop computers on the internet and ship throughout the world. Your primary interest would be to rank highly for terms such as 'laptop computers'.

If you run a local small business such as a flower shop, law firm, or car dealership, you want to attract local patrons, and it does no good to bring in customers from California if your business is in Maryland. If you run a car dealership you should be interested in terms such as 'baltimore ford dealer' or 'maryland ford dealership'.

A well-planned seo strategy first identifies which type of search engine optimization you require: universal or local. If you require local search engine optimization, here are a few helpful steps you can follow.

Analyze keywords on Wordtracker or Trellian and determine which are the most popular universal terms.

Log on to Google Adwords keyword phrase suggestion tool.

Enter local search engine optimization keyword phrases in the box provided (check Descriptive words or phrases). Utilize the most popular universal keyword phases and localize them. If the most popular universal term is 'ford dealer' then search for 'baltimore ford dealer. All try searching for local counties and other local cities from which customers may come to your business.

Google will provide information regarding that particular keywords level of advertiser competition and both last month's and this month's search frequency. If the local keyword phrase has been searched, record that phrase and continue to the next one.

Once you've developed a substantial list of local search engine optimization phrases, you can continue on with your internet marketing campaign.

Search Marketing Predictions for 2008

Last week, we shared some New Years Resolutions from several search marketers and social media marketers. I asked many of those same marketers what they thought 2008 had in store for search. Again, I'll be sharing their responses in two parts.

If you want to share your own predictions, or discuss any of the ones shared here, feel free to join the conversation in the SEW Forums.
Q: What do you predict will be the three most significant happenings in search for 2008? General themes, specific events to watch for, or even straight-out predictions would work.


Amanda Watlington, owner of Searching for Profit

Top theme for me is a bit gloomy. If the pundits are right we may be lurching into a recession. Again if they are right, it will last throughout the year; hence it is not a short term blip in the purchasing radar. Other than the dot-com bust, which did not uniformly impact the broad economy as a whole, we have no data on how search performs during a time of reduced employment and lowered consumer spending – typical hallmarks of recession.

Search is a pull medium, with the consumer doing the pulling via the keyword. In the past decade consumers have continued to elevate their level of engagement with search and have increasingly integrated it into their daily lives. We have enjoyed huge growth as a result.

I am curious and a bit anxious to see: What happens to search when the searcher's daily life changes – loss of job, loss of home, loss of health insurance – all part of the ugliness of recession. Do laid off consumers reduce their searching as they no longer have the fast broadband connections they once enjoyed in the workplace? Should we be looking at differing times of activity? For many of my client sites, the busiest times are at the end of the workday. Will this shift? Will we see changes in traffic and basic site visitation metrics?

Clients have enough experience by now with search to have developed expectations as to what they believe it will deliver, but those expectations have been framed during a time of continuous growth in the online sector and for the economy as a whole. During recession, I expect that we may see lots more lookers and less buyers. The malls were very busy at Xmas, but the buying was slow and the discounts and early sales were used extensively to draw in the purchaser. Huge sales reduce margins and increase business risks.

What will this mean for search? In my opinion unless the site owner has a firm grip on the metrics of search as it relates to the cost of selling the goods, they may falter, particularly if the recession extends through multiple seasons. Last year would not have been too soon to focus attention on improving conversion of paid search. Every marketing dollar is more precious during recession and must be spent ever more carefully. So that being said, improved bang for the buck is a must-have.

As search marketers we are the insiders. We are supposed to know and understand search in all of its dimensions. We are moving into uncharted territory. It is not territory that I am excited to explore, but I will go there nonetheless.
Andrew Goodman, principal at Page Zero Media

1. Justified or not, there will be renewed calls for investigations into forms of "bias" in how Google serves up content, how it downgrades the performance of its direct competitors in both paid and organic listings, etc. For the time being, these claims and charges will remain toothless, as it is an election year and no one is actually going to do anything about anything.

2. Rich Skrenta's search engine startup, Blekko, will be acquired by Yahoo even before it comes out of beta.

3. Jason Calacanis will discover that he doesn't have "unlimited access to capital."

4. Google will release the GPhone. It will be one of the most embarrassing flops in Google history.

OR, Google will begin giving away free mobile devices of some sort, intended to create loyalty to the Google brand and software. This too will add fuel to the fire of "antitrust" and "unfair competition" charges being bandied about, and again, nothing will happen soon because it's an election year.

5. Several prominent Googlers will be accused of bias in their support for presidential candidates, especially Barack Obama. Their responses will refer to such basic Constitutional rights as the First Amendment.

6. In Myanmar, Internet usage will continue to be restricted or banned. A blogger will be executed publicly. It will lead to external military intervention. Pro-am journalists will bravely enter the country and images of repression will be posted on NowPublic, YouTube, etc.
Anne Kennedy, managing partner of Beyond Ink

In 2008, we need to keep an eye on Wall Street. Here's why: as our market expands to include many more businesses, which is good, many potential customers will be publicly held, and sensitive to economic factors such as stock prices, prime rates and quarterly earnings reports, always dodgy for marketing budgets. That search marketing provides measurably superior ROI to other media is good. The challenge remains to convince marketing folks inside such companies of this, when search is strangely foreign and often in conflict with traditional marketing principles.

We need to watch our backs for competitive undermining from Madison Avenue agencies, who are already worried about their own budget allocations for 2008, given the anxious U.S. economy. The last time a recession reared its ugly head, they were the first our established media partners jettisoned from new business as they drew up the gangplanks to save their own revenues. Search marketers worked smarter and more nimbly and prospered then, but are we solid enough to do it again?

Marketing budgets will be cut. Our task is to increase the search proportion regardless of this, which means dedicated effort to befriending and convincing traditional marketers that search is their best strategy.

The shape of 2008 will be set by the efforts of folks at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and the resulting effect on the economy. The race for the White House will prove distracting and even divisive to our customers, and raise the noise-to-signal ratio considerably by competing for space in the search stream.

With the search engines, dwindling transparency is of concern, both in PPC pricing and organic results.
Dana Todd, executive VP at SiteLab International

1. We should see a leveling-out of the search market share pie this year, although I think it's going to be end-of-year before we see it hit a ceiling. Google will continue to take share-of-queries from the others, but will cap out at 85% or less. The others will focus on leveraging their non-search ad programs to make up the revenue losses.

2. The Google/DoubleClick merger will prove a strain for Google, as they find themselves in the same boat as Yahoo after its Overture acquisition. Selling both performance advertising and display advertising is a challenge, and creating synergies between the sales/customer support teams of both organizations will take years. However, the behavioral targeting potential upside is huge if they can get it integrated.

3. Google's stock price will take a tumble, but probably not as bad as some folks might think – it's not going to collapse the way many internet stocks did in the last bubble. Wall Street is fickle, and many are looking for reasons to doubt Google's valuation. I see it taking a wallop at the end of the year, Q4, losing about 2/3 its stock price.

4. Ad exchanges will NOT prove to be a significant evolution in the display ad world, as advertisers test the model and find that remnant inventory is still remnant inventory, even if it's in a bargain bin. With a few exceptions, most of the insta-networks will die this year. Even behavioral will not drive significantly higher CPMs for display. What WILL drive up pricing is scarcity, as the premium spaces fill up their inventory. Expect to see a growing gap between premium and non-premium ad space.

5. Yahoo will separate its publishing properties (e.g. Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance) from its advertising networks (display, search, mobile), which will give it more flexibility in providing a larger suite of offerings to advertisers. Alternately, AT&T will buy Yahoo to help bulk up its mobile and local/directory products.

6. Google News will take on Yahoo News head to head for users – this is one area where Yahoo has dominated easily, and it's an under-monetized asset. If Google can beat Yahoo News in uniques, they can easily leverage the DoubleClick display business into the property.
Danielle Leitch, EVP of client strategy at MoreVisibility

I feel that Yahoo will be someone to watch in 2008 as it relates to its market share and where it could shift to another player. I'd expect a possible acquisition or partnership to do rev share with someone else's search results, versus trying to compete with their own.

Also, I see adaption of the industry as a whole shifting from just acronyms (SEO, CPC, SEM) to "interactive marketing." As a result, I believe agencies will become more full service then they had been – which could lead to mergers or partnerships in that area too.

Education and training will be important. Although I don't know I could say that the focus will be to try and bring it in house, I do expect that companies will be requiring their own staff to be better educated on the areas that their interactive marketing agency manages for them. So training and education (online and offline) should be an important area (and opportunity) to get addressed to advertisers this year. Agencies will become more accountable than ever before, as clients push for harder-to-obtain metrics and results.
David Berkowitz, director of emerging media & client strategy at 360i

1. Consumers gain the most control yet over their privacy. Ask.com is already trying to turn privacy protection into a differentiator, but we're going to see this spread. It's going to be much easier for consumers to turn on and off features that will associate their searches and online behavior with personally identifiable information.

2. At least one of the major engines will test adding in display elements such as logos and other images in search ads.

3. While Wikia's search engine won't pose a major threat to the existing order, its presence and activist community will cause the major engines to discuss transparency much more openly.
David Wallace, CEO of SearchRank

I think more people are going to be watching Google closely in how they treat the information they have. In other words, what their policy continues to be regarding privacy issues.

I hope (crossing fingers) that Google will lose some of their market share, allowing the other three (Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask) to pick up some of that share, especially Ask.
Deborah Richman, SVP of marketing & business development at Collarity

If I'm looking at the top search engines:

1. That Google's going to game-change the contextual ad business with banners next year
2. That DoubleClick and Google will figure out new sales deals to draw in big publishers
3. That Google's not going to make much progress in search algorithm, and still include Page Rank
4. That Microsoft will make money from its publisher deals, and not from increased consumer market share
5. That Yahoo continues to milk its traffic (unless that well-known Microsoft deal prediction happens)
6. That Ask.com will try to cash out somehow, with some Diller financial engineering

If I'm looking at other search engines:

1. That human-powered Mahalo and Cha-Cha won't make it big
2. That some vertical searches will have shake-ups, maybe health
3. That other print publishers try to buy smaller vertical engines
4. That some of the shopping engines will keep dropping away
5. That metasearch will not be the answer to better search

If I'm looking at social sites:

1. That social search will finally be useful, not just for friends
2. That Digg will get acquired by Microsoft
3. That Facebook will open up and allow friends-data sharing
4. That MySpace will figure out how to get in the mobile game better

If I'm thinking about widgets:

1. That widgets become another online presence just like a website, a blog, or social page
2. That we all get smarter about how to distribute them, not just on Facebook or Google gadgets
3. That we start testing what belongs best in them, either links, search or content
4. That publishers start to really get comfortable with controlling content off their domains

Debra Mastaler, link building specialist at Alliance-Link

1. Reputation management is going to be the hot service this year. With more sites adding and encouraging customer reviews, it's going to be very important to monitor what's being said about your company and provide counter-spin measures to affect rankings if needed.

2. I think you'll see a lot of the smaller SEO single shops/agencies merging and/or partnering with larger companies. SEO is no longer textbook, its success relies on custom link building, reputation management, usability and content generation tactics rather than Titles and tags. Single person shops won't be able to offer the broad and specialized services and will either need to partner out or merge.

3. More private forums are going to blossom as people become hesitant to talk openly about what works and what doesn't.
Eric Enge, president of Stone Temple Consulting

1. Google will continue to implement changes to make paid links less and less interesting. They have opened the door to overt action, and they will not turn back. The other search engines will simply bask in the glow of the results of this. This allows them to reap the benefits without taking the heat.

2. Awareness that search (SEO and SEM) is just one of many marketing-related activities will increase. As a result, SEOs will be forced to work more closely with marketing, development, and design.

3. People-driven search engines (such as Mahalo) will struggle to succeed, and fail. Groups of people do not have the capacity to be objective, and extensive human review of each search result cannot be made scalable. Ultimately, a machine algorithm will be shown to be fundamentally better.
Fionn Downhill, president of Elixir Systems

1. The Search engine marketing industry will continue to mature and there will be more consolidations of traditional SEO companies

2. Rather than the predictions from previous years that traditional ad agencies will acquire SEO companies to implement search, I see more agencies implementing their own search departments with consulting and poaching from traditional SEO firms.

3. Traditional old-style SEOs who have not adopted more of an agency model will fold, or they owners will move on to other things. ( I am working hard not to be one of them!!!)

4. Kevin Ryan will get drunk at SES New York on St. Patrick's Day
Frank Watson, director of SEM and co-founder of Kangamurra Media

1. Wikia will get some groundswell. Although it will not threaten the majors, it will grab a decent amount of market share.

2. Facebook and MySpace will be pushed aside by some new social media/networking program. The shelf life is not a long one.

3. Second Life will fall away, and possibly close, unless they develop niched "worlds" that are more easily accessed and developed.

4. China's percentage of global search share will increase dramatically, be it through Baidu or even Google and Yahoo China.

5. Bill Gross will roll out something this year that will eventually be seen as another "GoTo" type innovation.
Greg Meyers, SEM consultant at SEMGeek

1. I believe you will see the birth of "political PPC" due to the upcoming 2008 election. I think PPC will play a major part with regard to the ads/creatives messaging as well as the keyword selections. Every tactic that is being used on older media channels such as TV, radio and print will be mimicked in PPC. Not only will they be bidding on all of the candidates names and negative campaigning, but more importantly the issues for which they stand for (abortion, taxes, environment, etc..)

2. I see the search engines spending more of their R&D money on contextual advertising. As PPC continues to get more expensive, advertisers will have to find alternate ways to generate cheaper, relevant traffic.

3. I also think there will be more companies and corporations bringing search marketing "in-house," as more and more people get exposed to this industry. This is a result of the future economy and the knowledge of blogs and search engines making it easier to execute.
Gregg Stewart, senior VP at TMP Directional Marketing

Local starts to make and impact. First it will be national brands going local via their distribution channels (e.g., dealer, franchisee, etc), then local businesses beginning to embrace search.

If Content is King, then Surely Relevance is Queen!

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the search engine world of late and there are lots of conspiracy theories as to why these things happen.

It is easy as a webmaster to get caught up in these webs of intrigue.

You get email notes about them, you view so-called experts' thoughts on bulletin Boards - hey you probably even read things in newsletter articles!

Well I hope so anyway....

The big driver for webmasters currently appears to be content and link building.

While link building is important I don't believe it makes Queen. Maybe a Prince. Content and links DO go hand in hand but, without relevance, the Kingdom is doomed. Sorry I will stop the analogy now! :-)

If your site is about finance, then finance content is best supported by finance link exchanges. Relevance!

If your site is about finance, then finance content supported by casino link exchanges from a PR8 site while in the short term may help,…but all the signs are saying this is not a long term strategy.

Okay,so what is the best strategy?

Keep EVERYTHING relevant. It is that simple.

Make sure that you only swap or link to sites that are relevant to the content on your pages. Yes I am suggesting link exchanging on pages of your site not a links page.

Links pages seem to be being abused. There are rumours that pages called links, resources or partners are not passing page rank. You could be wasting your time building links that are not giving you any benefits!

Delivering relevant links from relevant content is the future.

Look at sites such as www.bbc.co.uk or www.independent.co.uk. News sites have the right idea. They have 2 or 3 relevant internal links to other articles on the same topic or links to internal tools that are related. These usually can be found at the right hand side of the article.

They also then have weblinks or external links to sites of interest that are related to the topic. These are relevant!

Another benefit of this is that with a content rich site you can add hundreds of links quite legitimately and really add some value both to your Rankings and your users.

With a content-poor site it is difficult, you have to add link pages or create a links directory. A five page site will need to add 10 or 12 good link pages to compete and even then with algorithm changes, this may not be prudent.

Having a site with 400 pages means you can easily add 3 links per page, so you have 1200 link options straight away.

Hopefully this explains that relevance runs a close second to content.

Always bear in mind when writing content that relevant links will not only boost your search engine rankings, but you will also add a service to your visitors.

Link Building

Getting more traffic from search engines is a common goal for every webmaster and web enabled business. Natural traffic from search engines is not only free of cost, but also can be highly converting. But it’s not as easy as it seems. To get considerable amount of traffic from major search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google in particular, your site should rank very well for some specific keywords and phrases related to your niche.

Link building campaigns is one of the proven off-site SEO activities by which you can rank well in your niche. If you rank higher in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) for popular and frequently searched keywords in your niche, you enjoy good and free stream of steady traffic; targeted to your business and website theme.

Achieving top placements in SERPS for your keywords on search engines like Google isn’t easy. Your website can only rank well if it has good rankings. Backlink count and link value of those backlinks is one of the most important aspects which decide if you’d rank well for particular keywords. If your site is established and offers good information, products or services, many other sites will naturally link to you; but not in a way as you’d need for better rankings. Natural link backs to your site builds up slowly, only after your webpages are indexed in search engines and rank well enough so that people can find and link to them from their websites out of their own discretion; hence the need for professional link building and SEO services.

Anchor texts and link titles of the backlinks are very important in terms of off-site SEO. Link building and off-site website optimization services from trusted individuals and SEO firms are a great option to build quality backlinks with optimized anchor texts and link titles from trusted and related websites to your niche. Such services and packages ensure you get linked from pages highly related to your niche and with good link value.

The link value of pages linking to you is determined by various factors like domain age, page content quality, number of outgoing links, credibility and so on. Backlinks from authority and high page rank sites are highly rewarding but difficult to get. Similarly, one should be careful not to submit for FFA (Free For All) sites and directories and unrelated niches or “bad neighborhoods” as it may seriously hurt your search engine rankings, SERPS position and credibility.

There are several ways to build backlinks with great link value to your website:

* Blog Review Posting
* Directory Submission
* Text Link Advertising
* Press Release Submission

Professional and ethical link building activities always have a positive result on your SE rankings and increase your link popularity substantially; bringing you more free, natural or organic traffic. I’d suggest you not to involve in shady link building practices like spamming and Black Hat SEO activities which may bring good results for a few months, but can get your sites banned from search engines indefinitely.

How to submit blogger blog to google

I have been asked this question many a times and still keep on receiving the question in my emails and as comment to my post elsewhere that how do you submit a blog to Google. Especially how to submit a Blogger's blog to google.

Now firstly let me star right from beginning so everyone could easily understand. Follow these steps for verification of website or Blogs.

1) Go to Google Webmaster Central. They might ask you for logging in. If you have google account well and good if not , create one on gmail its fairly easy. Now once you have logged in to Google Webmaster account. Then it will ask you to enter the web URL. Enter the Blog or Email address.

2) Now it will prompt you for verifying the website if its not already verified. Once you hit the verify tab. Then it will give you two methods of verification. One would be to upload a file at the rood of your hosting domain and the other one is to edit a code inside your home or front page.

3) Now if you are going to verify a website then its easy. However, verifying the blog could be tricky. As the Blogger blog doesn't give you any option to upload anything. But most of new guys what they don't know is that they still have an option to verify their blogger blog through the 2nd process " Entering HTML code inside the meta of the blog "

4) Now copy the code from the webmaster central page, assuming that you are already logged in to the blogger. Go to the customer layout option and there you will find a tab for EDIT HTML. Hit that and then paste the code from Google Webmaster Central right under " head " tag which would be at about 8 or 9th line inside the script.

Make sure that you don't change anything else. Cause that might ruin the script. And that's all there is to it. Once you have saved the HTML page after pasting go back to the Google Webmaster Central and hit verify and it will verify you blog.

So that's how easy it is to verify your blogger's blog in Google.

Hope this helps.

In case of any confusion you can still put your comments and I'll make sure to answer your query asap. For more quality article and daily basic and effective SEO TIPS, bookmark the blog so you won't miss a thing.

Till Next Time.

Mark

SEO requires surfer friendly content

At times I have come across websites whose content is too complicated or is not easy to comprehend for an ordinary person. One thing to keep in mind while reading or posting any content on your website is to make sure that you remember the “Rule” you are not going to visit your website yourself, the website is created for people or readers so keep this thing in your mind to optimize the text for them.

Easier the content of your website, easier for the user to get the information and if they find it useful they would like to come back to it again.

Therefore, in order to create a good impression and retain the traffic to your website you need to create the content keeping in mind the targeted traffic.

The readability of your web pages influences your sales

Many webmasters and bloggers use long sentences or use technical jargons in order to create an impression of a professional in the field and what they end up creating is a bad impression instead. The average web surfer is not all that equipped with technical jargons so try to simplify things as much as you can.

Now apart for creating easy to understand content your layout of the website should also be easy to navigate. If you are hosting a website for sales or pay per click campaign then special attention is required to ensure where you place the ads and what layout would be best for the work.

SEO is again not only a practice for the search engines it is a practice to make the readers or web surfers experience on your website more productive. Thus need to pay special attention to each and every detail.

However, in my next article I would highlight how to tweak the layout of the website from Search Engine Optimization or SEO point of view.