The traffic in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN is massive. You will have to go that extra mile in order to break through this traffic, and make your passage smooth. I will now discuss some of the points in brief that you should keep in mind when you plan to optimize your website for search engines.

With the increase of web traffic in large amounts on the information superhighway, listing of your webpage with a higher rank on any search engine involves a lot of research and to some extent, expertise. So make sure that apart from this post, you look around some other, similar posts so that you are very well acquainted with the process of SEO. I would advise you to get suggestions from an expert if your website involves a niche list of viewers and you are very particular to move up the ladder faster.

While optimizing your website for search engines, most often you tend to snazz it up with a lot of graphics and flashy animations. What you forget in the process is that your website will take more time to load compared to others. This may lurk off visitors from your site. Avoid the use of images and graphics that take time to load. Have an easy to load design for your website to increase the hits for your site.

Another important thing is that; make sure you study the existing competition. First, make a list of keywords that defines your product (or service) the most. Additionally, come up with as many keyword combinations as possible. Think from a viewer’s perspective. Think about the process in which viewers will use keywords to gain information about a particular product or a service from a search engine. After you have prepared an exhaustive list, use them in different meaningful combinations and search those words using the most popular search engines like Yahoo, Google and so on. See the number of matches you get for the keywords you are interested in to judge the competition. Always keep in mind that your website must have content which matches the keywords, because ultimate content of your website is what the search engines give priority to.

So, is there anyone who wants to optimize his or her own website for the search engines? Well, do not waste any more time and start with your SEO plans immediately, as, the higher the ranking of your website in the search engine pages, the better the prospects you will see in your business!

Normally, this is a good thing for the business (and, of course, the SEO). A talented and hard working SEO can bring good gains to a business. For example, if a web site is already producing $500,000 in sales before the SEO gets involved, and their efforts result in those sales increasing to $1,000,000, then there is plenty of room for paying the SEO something for their work.

Unfortunately, it does not always happen quite so simply. It can happen that the business results don’t follow the SEO work, even if the SEO is very competent, and diligently does a good job.

Sometimes this happens because the company does not give the SEO the support they need. For example, the SEO initiates a link building campaign that they have agreed upon with the client, and the client is expected to develop content to support that campaign. If the client company does not follow through on that, the SEO ends up not being successful.

There are many of these types of scenarios, but let’s assume that the client company provides all the required support and think a bit about how it still might happen:

Poor focus. Many times I get in these conversations where the client is concerned about growing a weak part of their business. For example, let’s imagine that they have 3 product areas, each operating at 30% margin. One of them produces $1M in revenue per month, another that produces $200,000 per month, and another that produces $5,000 per month.

So the client focuses the SEO on the $5,000 per month product line, and after 6 months the SEO has done a fantastic job and scaled revenue by 4x. Client sales have increased by $15K per month as a result, and the additional margin dollars are $4,500 per month. This is not a lot of additional margin to the bottom line in return for the investment.

But what happens to the margin dollars to the company if they grow the revenue of the $1M per month product line by 4x? Plenty of money to pay the SEO.

This does not mean that companies should not invest money in SEO on weaker parts of their business. However, it is important to realize the the dollar return on that investment is likely to take a long time to materialize, so it should some from a “strategic” part of the budget, instead of the “operational” part.

Another example of this thinking is the SEOs search engine focus. Periodically clients ask us to focus on Yahoo and Live Search as our primary tasks for SEO work, because their Yahoo and Live Search revenue is far less than they see indicated by market share statistics that get published by companies like comScore.

The problem is the estimated market share of the 3 engines: Google (65-70%), Yahoo (15%), Live Search (5%). So just as before, would you rather we double the Google traffic or focus on the other two?

Note that in principle, a solid SEO strategy should cause increases in all 3 search engines. But, there are some things that can be done a little differently for Yahoo and Live Search, and I would suggest that you pass on them and focus on growing the larger opportunity.

Not enough opportunity. In this scenario, the SEO knocks it out of the park, and the increase in search rankings is great, and the company dominates on every term they are pursuing. But not enough sales result. How can this happen? If the opportunity the SEO focuses on is too small.

So let’s discuss an example, using a small business that operates a pizza shop in Seattle. The goal of the company is to dominate on the term “Seattle pizza.” The SEO does a great job and gets the company to number one on that term.

Unfortunately according to Wordtracker, Seattle pizza gets 7 searches per day. That equates to 210 searches per month. Even with a 20% CTR (42 visitors), this may result in the sale of one extra pizza per month. Not a lot of money to pay your SEO there.

So, two main takeaways from this:

1. Focus, focus, focus. Focus your SEO efforts in the places where you will get the biggest bang for the buck. No point in throwing money away after all. And as I said before, if you decide to invest in a new product line or business, just realize that the financial returns may take some time to achieve.

2. Set goals and measure. You need to measure the results of your SEO investment. This starts by creating a baseline of the traffic and revenue from organic search. Then overtime you can measure how that grows. Better still, when you get started set some goals. While any competent SEO will tell you that predicting results is impossible, you should still set goals.

Certainly, most of the venture capitalists I’ve talked to at the Web 2.0 Summit have said they are shying away from companies that are based on the idea of growing an audience now and figuring out how to make money later. However, after listening to the presentations here over the past three days, it is clear that some of the key concepts of the Web 2.0 movement are, in fact, taking root in deep ways.

One of the most significant trends is how the big companies that make very complicated systems are reworking them using the principles of Web 2.0 companies, particularly the notion of programs that talk to other programs. They are breaking up their technologies into discrete modules that can work alongside data and applications from others.

Facebook can be credited with taking the first step to open up large parts of its service to third parties. Last year, it let their applications on its site. Now, through its upcoming Facebook Connect service, it will let other companies build applications that use its list of people and who their friends are to deliver new services.

Yahoo, a vastly more complex site, is restructuring to allow others to use many parts of its service: the content, the search engine, the social relationships embedded in e-mail, and such. That means that Yahoo information can be used on other sites, and developers can create applications to run on Yahoo. “If and when we can get our 500 million users on our platform, the power is huge,” Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive, told the conference. This, of course, involves reworking much of the software behind the site in order to connect politely and consistently with other companies.

Not to be outdone, Dave Girouard, who manages Google’s efforts to sell services to big enterprises, said that Google, too, developing a platform. “We want to you to have the same access to Google that our internal developers do,” Mr. Girouard said. He offered no details.

In a completely different market, Salesforce.com is transforming itself from service dedicated to tracking sales leads to a platform that allows many more options. Marc Benioff, its chief executive, told the conference about the company’s new platform, Force.com. Now customers can run their own applications on Salesforce’s computers, mixing its systems with those from other developers. The point is to help companies develop internal systems, Web sites for the public and even applications to run on social networks like Facebook.

By far the most ambitious effort along these lines is Microsoft’s new operating system called Azure, which is being developed under the direction of Ray Ozzie.

In the broadest sense, Azure is a system that enables a program to run on personal computers, on mobile devices and on Microsoft’s own data centers without losing track of important data. But as I talked to Azure’s developers here, it was clear that Microsoft is trying to incorporate both strands of Web 2.0 thinking into the new operating system.

First, it is designed to interact with many other systems. It can pull in data from other places and formats and create widgets that add features to Web sites. Microsoft insists that Azure will be more respectful of the various standards used on the Internet than the company’s other products have been.

Moreover, Microsoft has built what it claims are industrial-strength versions of some of the social features common to Web 2.0 applications, such as a combined list of updates modeled after the Facebook newsfeed but designed to keep track of relationships among hundreds of millions of people.

It’s too early to say which, if any, of these big-company efforts to build platforms will succeed. Some may well collapse of their own complexity. Others may be attempts by their creators to chase buzzwords. In 2001, you wouldn’t have been able to predict the Web sites that would prevail.

But I do think that we can count on moving into a world where very complicated computer systems are designed to talk to people and to each other, using the ideas developed in the Web 2.0 era, with or without vowels.

The enhancements to Ask.com will help the site retain existing users and attract new, said Caroline Dangson, an IDC analyst.

Natural Language Search

Ask.com’s new technologies differ from those used by competitors such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and MSN Search because they enable Web surfers to type real questions, instead of a series of keywords, said Erik Collier, vice president of product management at Ask.com.

To find out what football games are on the TV Sunday afternoon, users simply type in, for instance, “What NFL games are on TV this Sunday?”

That is where DADS comes in. The acronym stands for “Direct Answers from Databases.” The technology takes structured data feeds and converts them into information that Ask.com tags.

“It’s different than a traditional syntactical text matching. We’re understanding what the subject is, so we have discrete subjects. We’re talking about TV listings, event listings that have a much smaller semantic breath than a general word search. We optimized that, and it is discrete. We are able to identify that as a TV query; translate the different piece of your sentence into what they really mean,” Collier told TechNewsWorld.

So, today is Monday, Oct. 6, then “this Sunday” means Oct. 12, and NFL means the National Football League.

“We don’t get lost in that traditional what does ‘a bat’ mean when someone says ‘bat.’ That’s DADS, and we’re going to be doing that across a lot more verticals or discrete data sets. Right now, we’ve done that with our TV and event listings,” Collier added.

Giving Structure to the Unstructured Web

Direct Answers From Search (DAFS) is a bit different, in that it does gather the information from a structured feed. It is information gathered from the Web around which Ask.com tries to create some structure in order to best answer users’ questions, Collier said.

“It’s a much more difficult proposition. We’re trying to extract information from the Web pages themselves and trying to then create an answer to a specific question term. If you said, ‘What is the largest state in the U.S.?’ then it would have a DAFS response that would tell you directly on the page, ‘Alaska is the largest state,’” he explained.

DAFS does not offer quite the same level of natural language comprehension as DADS because it is more difficult to deal with unstructured documents on the Web, Collier noted.

Similar to DAFS, AnswerFarm combs through the unstructured content on Q&A sites such as WikiAnswers and Wikipedia searching for what Ask.com calls “Q&A Pairs.”

“There’s a question and an associated answer with it. It flips the way people interact with Web results,” he said.

Say a person asks, “How do I get rid of love handles?” On other search engines the questioner would receive some document it has identified as having a lot of keyword matches, and it will return a title and description in the search results, according to Collier.

“You don’t really know if that page will answer your question. AnswerFarms are different. Let’s say that same URL (universal resource locater) does answer [the question]. We present it in a way that the question, not the title of the page, is immediately visible. And instead of traditional description text, the start of the answer is given,” he stated.

“I love AnswerFarms because it changes the way that people interact with search engines,” Collier added.

Market Status Quo

The new technologies are intended to produce more relevant results so users click less. “Our goal is to return the best answer the first time, every time. We think its a better approach. We make your search faster and we’re trying to reduce the amount of clicks it takes for you to find what you’re looking for,” said Collier

“People don’t want to talk to a search engine like a computer. They want to be able to do a search the way they would ask [a friend] over the phone. ‘Hey do you know what the largest state in the U.S. is?’ instead of ‘state, most area, square miles.’ That’s not the way you really want to ask it. You want it to understand all those implicit things, all the background knowledge you provide in a single word,” he pointed out.

That may be true, but IDC’s Dangston does not see the new Ask.com posing any threat to its leading search competitors, Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

“The Ask.com redesign is not a game changer. Google has incredible brand recognition. An incredible number of U.S. consumers are in the habit of Googling. We know that media habits are hard to change. According to IDC’s recent U.S. consumer online attitudes survey, 75 percent of online Americans said they had used Google.com in the past 30 days whereas only 15 percent said they had used Ask.com,” she concluded.

The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.

The internet is fast becoming the battle ground for business to garner their share of the market. With increasing internet usage, people around the world are searching for all sorts of products and services online these days. It has therefore become important for almost every business to have a significant online presence. Merely having an online presence though will not guarantee business. Websites need to attract traffic and this is where PPC advertising steps in.

PPC advertising is growing rapidly at a mind boggling pace. Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that out of the total amount of money that is spent on search engine advertising, a whopping 81% is spent on PPC advertising. These figures do not come as a surprise to those businesses that have benefited from PPC advertising. There are several success stories of businesses that have been able to make the most out of PPC advertising campaigns.

The key reasons for the popularity of PPC advertising include:

1. The risk involved is low since the investment is minimal.
2. These advertising programs are fast to implement when compared to other media.
3. Advertisers can manipulate ad positions and also control costs with them.
4. Instantaneous results are a good possibility with PPC advertising.
5. PPC advertisements give an opportunity for businesses to test their products for online marketing feasibility.

PPC: A Brief History

Contrary to popular perception PPC advertisements are not a recent phenomenon. They have been in existence for well over a decade now. The term was increasingly heard during the mid 1990s when the dotcom boom happened. One of the companies that pioneered the concept was goto.com which later on was rechristened Overture. In 2003 Yahoo took over Overture. The actual PPC scene began to see hectic activities once Google launched its ‘Ad Words solution to PPC. Almost every major search engine is into this form of advertising these days.

The minimum price for click which is popularly referred to as ‘cost per click’ varies from one search engine to another. It also depends on the competition involved for a particular keyword list or phrase. It is for this reason that particular keywords and phrases are known to cost more on leading search engines.

Steps Involved in an Effective PPC Advertising Campaign

Although PPC advertising can look a relatively simple process, there are several issues that you will need to deal with once you decide on an advertising campaign. From choosing the right keywords to designing an attractive landing page, you will need to take care of several aspects.

A PPC Ad.
Several businesses have taken advantage of PPC advertising to make profits. With proper planning, you can implement a meaningful PPC advertising campaign, which can in turn mean more profits to your business. Let us look at the steps involved in making an effective PPC advertising campaign.

1. Selection of the appropriate keywords or phrases is the first step involved in PPC advertising. Remember, keywords and phrases are the cornerstones of success in a PPC advertising campaign. They are the foundation on which the entire campaign is built upon and developed. If you are already advertising on other media, then you also need to ensure that your PPC advertising campaign also complements them too.
2. Before you implement your PPC advertising campaign, you must first of all decide your budget. Proper planning will ensure that you do not overspend, while at the same time get effective results from your advertising campaign.
3. You must be clear as to who your target consumers are. This way you will ensure that you reach potential consumers through effective advertisements.
4. One way to target your target consumers would be to decide on a niche. Even if your niche market were to be small, a well directed and created PPC advertising campaigns can work wonders for your niche business area.
5. It is not enough if you just advertise and then assume that it would be effective in getting more business. You should constantly monitor your PPC advertising campaign. Always remember that the internet is a dynamic place, where things change very fast. You therefore need to make sure that your PPC campaign is in tune with the changing trends.
6. You must have a close look at statistical reports that are associated with your online advertising campaign. This will help you gauge the effectiveness of your PPC advertising campaign.
7. The best way to go about creating a PPC advertising campaign would be to hire the services of professionals. This is so because they will be experienced in creating the right copy or content for your PPC advertisement. A well written and concise copy can make the difference between success and failure in a PPC advertising campaign.
8. Along with working on your PPC advertisement, you should also simultaneously make sure that your website is attractive and easy to navigate, since your PPC advertisement will be leading web visitors to your website.

This form of advertising ensures a win-win situation of all the parties involved and it is no wonder that it is growing at a rapid rate. With increasing internet connections, the future holds immense possibilities for PPC advertising.

If you live and breathe search marketing, these questions are often pretty easy to answer. But when you’re busy running a small business, these questions may as well be rocket science. One way to get answers is to analyze what the search engines think of your web site, and walk a mile in the search engines’ shoes, as the saying goes. When you learn to do that, it’s easier to solve those questions that you’ve been curious (or desperate) to answer.

Three ways to see what search engines think of your site

1. Use the search engines’ webmaster tools.

All three search engines offer tools for webmasters to help you understand how the engines see your site. At minimum, you should connect your site with Google’s Webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. MSN also recently launched its own Webmaster Center, and you should consider connecting your site there, too.

2. Use the site:yourdomain.com search command to diagnose problems.

Even if you don’t use the various webmaster tools provided by the search engines, you can still learn a lot about what they think of your site with this command. Here are some:

• How much of my site is in the index? If you have a 500-page web site, but the site: command shows that only 75 pages are indexed, you’ve just learned that you have crawling issues. It could be that your internal navigation is preventing the bots from reaching all your pages, or it could be that your site doesn’t have enough trust/authority to be crawled more deeply. (Getting more quality inbound links, especially to deep pages on your site, will help with the trust/authority problem.)

• How often am I being crawled? Each search engine shows a “Cached” link with each result in the SERPs. If you click that link, you’ll learn when your pages were most recently crawled. What does it tell you? Crawl frequency is another sign of trust. If you’re not getting crawled regularly, work on creating quality content and attracting quality links. Check your main competitor regularly to see how often they’re being crawled — if it’s a lot more often than your site, set your goals accordingly.

• Do I have duplicate content issues? I once worked with a client whose CMS published multiple copies of each page at different URLs. The home page, for example, was available at domain.com and domain.com/home/. The CMS also had e-commerce forms on a secure server, and it recreated the entire site on the secure server, so that https://domain.com/about/ had the same content as http://domain.com/about/ — and both were in the index. I quickly discovered all of these problems by using the site: command.

• Are my page titles and meta description tags unique? This is another aspect of duplicate content. If you have a lot of pages with similar page titles and meta description tags, you’ll find fewer pages getting crawled and indexed. When you run the site:domain.com, it shouldn’t look like the image below.

3. Use third-party SEO tools.

You can diagnose problems with third-party SEO tools that will help you learn more about how search engines view your site. Here are a few worth trying:

• Index Rank will show you the rate at which Google is indexing your site. Use it to find indexing patterns, like how many new pages were indexed in the last month, three months, six months, etc.

• SEO Browser will let you see your site the way a search engine spider sees it. Use it in conjunction with the site:domain.com idea above; if a site:domain.com search reveals that only 25% of your pages are in the index, SEO Browser might help identify crawling issues that spiders are having.

• SEO Digger will show you a list of terms for which your site ranks in Google’s (or MSN’s) Top 20. The list this tool provides isn’t perfect, but it can be educational to see what terms you rank for, i.e. – what terms the search engine has decided to associate with your site.

Perhaps best of all, all three of these tools are free.

Final thoughts

Many small business owners don’t have the time or desire to become an SEO expert, but they still have important questions that need to be answered for their company’s long-term success. Connecting their sites with the official webmaster tools offered by each of the big three search engines is a great way to begin getting answers. Using the site:domain.com command on any search engine can provide additional information, and some third-party SEO tools can also reveal what a search engine thinks of their web site. Together, these tactics can help any small business owner walk a mile in the search engines’ shoes and solve those important questions that need to be answered.

We’ve seen a few sites attempt to help turn the web green, but most of them have been little more than gimmicks. Blackle purports to conserve energy by offering a “black” version of Google, which it says uses less energy than the engine’s standard white. But Google has gone on to say that black may actually increase the amount of energy consumed by visitors (of course, this didn’t stop Google Israel from turning its site black in honor of Earth Hour).

Today, Y Combinator startup CO2Stats has launched a search engine that aspires to be truly green. Greenseng (sounds like Ginseng) is a standard search engine, pulling results from Google’s Custom Search to produce results. But instead of relying on a dubious method of energy conservation, CO2Stats measures the amount of energy used by its servers and the computers of its users and purchases renewable energy certificates (similar to carbon credits) to offset the environmental toll.

CO2Stats CTO Alex Wissner-Gross says that Greenseng isn’t meant to generate revenue though advertising. Instead, the site is using proceeds from its certification business that allows websites to purchase renewable energy certificates in return for a badge that labels them as “Green Certified”.

But while Greenseng may not directly be earning any money, it may help CO2Stats pull in a slew of new customers. In its next iteration, the site will be using Yahoo’s powerful BOSS search API to incorporate some of its own data. Users will be able to see the environmental footprint of each site in their search results with data pulled from CO2Stats, which may give companies more of an incentive to get Green Certified.

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/greenseng-a-green-search-engine-that-actually-conserves-energy/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/why-i-hate-social-bookmarklets-proof-they-don%e2%80%99t-work/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/why-i-hate-social-bookmarklets-proof-they-don%e2%80%99t-work/#comments Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:21:30 +0000 Kelvin http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/?p=179 The social media bookmarklet has become a de-facto element in most new website designs. And while I love social media and think it can have some huge benefits for websites; I think including social bookmarklets like AddThis to a new web build default is at best lazy-ness and at worse symptomatic of a complete miss-understanding of how social media works.

So after I went off on a bit of rant about them in the office I thought I needed an experiment to prove my point.

I chose the bookmarklet tool from AddThis and using Yahoo Site Explorer I found some websites using the tool.

To get a random selection of websites I chose the website ranked 1, 101, 201 etc on SiteExplorer all the way to 1001. The idea was for the websites to be of mixed quality, as it would have been too easy to choose rubbish websites and try and make my case with those sites.

For each of these sites using the book mark tool I tested there presence on Digg & Delicious to see if to some extent the bookmarklets were working, then finally on stumbleupon (which isn’t included on addthis bookmarklet by default) to ascertain whether the sites in question would have gained their votes without the bookmarklet.

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/why-i-hate-social-bookmarklets-proof-they-don%e2%80%99t-work/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/forming-good-title-tags-for-local-businesses/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/08/forming-good-title-tags-for-local-businesses/#comments Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:52:00 +0000 Chris Silver Smith http://searchengineland.com/080825-135200.php

If you're looking for a quick improvement in your local business site's rankings and don't have a lot of time, you can't go wrong with making some simple improvements to your homepage title tag. The text within the title tags is one of the top signals used by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines to decide what keywords are relevant to a page, and it's also one of the most frequently neglected parts of a site design. If you have a good title tag, you can rank at the top of the search results for users seeking your business — and a bad title can leave you in the dark.

Below are a few details on how to make better titles and get your pages to rank higher.

Click to continue reading...

With the recent increase in internet usage and more recently in internet access via mobile devices, online marketing is becoming increasingly important to the success of any business today no matter how small or large.

Online marketing has evolved in recent years. The rise in the popularity of social networking phenomena and the resulting rise of social media websites such as My Space and Facebook provide website owners with new ways to market and promote a business online. Online marketing today is not only restricted to major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Today an effective online marketing strategy is aimed at increasing a websites profile not only on search engines but on a number of online channels that were previously non existent.

Today an online marketing strategy focuses on Search engines, Blogs, Forums, Social Networking websites as well as PR and Article websites.

The following are some of the ways to market your business online and generate traffic to your website.

1) Organic search engine optimisation

Organic search engine optimisation is focused achieving high rank in the non-paid section of search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
This is the most important method that can drive a lot of free traffic to a website and probably the most difficult and time consuming. If you are able to achieve a first page ranking for your website on major search engine such as Google, you may never need to use any other form of paid advertising ever.

2) Pay per click Advertising

Pay per click advertising presents a quick and efficient method to promote your products and services on search engines and increase traffic to your website. Pay per click refers to the paid ads that usually appear on the right or top of search engine results. With Google’s Adwords for example you can have your website appear on the first page within an hour of starting the campaign. As compared with Organic search engine results; pay per click can be expensive as cost is calculated each time a user visits your website. However pay per click is quick to achieve and expenditure can be controlled easily by specifying the maximum monthly or daily budget.

3) Creating your business’ profile on Social websites such as My Space, Face book or You Tube

Many people may consider these websites as purely a way for people to communicate informally and share personal information. However due to the sheer volumes of people who visit these sites make marketing on them a highly effective way to enforce your brand and drive massive traffic to your website. You can create your websites profile on these sites free of cost and make your website visible to millions of people.

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