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9 Strategies For Ranking Higher In Search Engines

By Phillip Longmire in Featured

When it comes to getting your website to rank higher in Google, there are some things you need to be mindful of. What I want to do is give you some tips that you can use to not only rank higher in with your site, but generate more income from the work you put into your website.

Write For People Not Machines: While content is key to any successful search engine optimization, it’s important to remember that ultimately you are writing for other people, not the machines. I am not sure this can be overstated or said to many times. You have to be creating High-quality, readable, and informative content. If you do then you get readers and clicks. If you don’t then you spend your wheels. If you are looking for a long term solution, just remember that Quality wins over quantity in the end. The other thing that this allows you to do is build an online business or following without relying on Google for all your traffic. Outside of blog posting and forum posting.

Build Relationships With People: Ask an educational website or a non-profit to link to your content. Search engines look favorably on sites that have been linked to by reputable sources. Provide high quality information that will entice reliable websites to want to feature your site. The keyword here is reliable and perhaps I add readable websites. I am not talking about spinning an article and submitting it to article directories. Create content that these organizations will find useful and worthy.

Add To It Everyday: Websites need to be regularly refreshed with new content and pages to help with search engine optimization. Keywords are great, yet they can only help your site to an extent. If you are writing about popular subjects, it is easy to get lost in the crowd. You do not want your website ranked low. Keep your recommendations fresh by linking to appropriate and influential high ranking websites on a regular basis. Just like you want great sites linking back to you, you want to be linking to great websites.

Know What The Joneses Are Doing: Don’t forget to investigate your competitors’ SEO campaigns. Seeing what techniques your competitors are using to get to the top of search engine results pages can help you rank your own website. Learn from their success, then adapt and expand on the SEO methods they are using and use them on your own website.

Learn A Little HTML: Do not forget that search engines are not people. Use HTML, which they can read, to give your site an advantage over the competitors. Including other forms of programming is useful and perhaps even necessary, but including HTML as a back-up will give the search engine the information in needs on your website.

Mix Up Your Tactics: When it comes to marketing, backlinking, advertising, or whatever methods you use, you need to always be mixing up your tactics. Not only in the advertising you do off your website, but the marketing you do on your website. What you want to see happening is that people stay on your site longer, and that they click on your links. Both of these are measurable. In the bounce rate alone you can tell if someone just comes and leaves.

I know some have a bounce rate below 20%, but if stay around the mid to high 30% range and, or lower, you will be doing well. What we are talking about is increasing your overall profit and success during the course of the year. Learn A Little On-Page SEO: To better optimize your site for search engines, you should place keywords in the title tag for every post. Most search engines place more importance on titles than other types of contents. This means that using effective keywords is your title is one of the best ways to draw in traffic from search engines.

Learn Proper Linking Techniques: When linking back to your homepage through other parts of your website, be sure that you are linking to the domain name and not /index.html or another iteration that has something appended to the end. Your homepage will be placed higher on search results pages if you help search engines recognize that the domain name is the anchor of your site, rather than confusing the search engines by having two (or more) separate homepages (such as /index.html).

Also Work The Free Stuff: This really does work. You need to have some free stuff to give away. What you will learn real quick is that after doing this for a while, you will have more than enough free stuff to give away. A great way to get free stuff is to join a membership site that gives it away. Some are OK, but there are some membership sites that really give away quality stuff.

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Phillip Longmire has been doing internet marketing full time since 2008. He his a speaker, writer, and business owner. He works with business owners teaching them how to get more traffic to their sites. All his articles, advice, and know how comes from the front lines.

Small Businesses and Local Search Marketing

By Ajay Prasad in Featured

There is competition in every industry today and small businesses are fighting one another to keep from being eaten up by the giants. Visibility is everything and never before has ‘out of sight, out of mind’ been more applicable. Local search marketing is a digital marketing strategy that helps improve the visibility of your business.

People, while doing online searches, may assume you don’t exist, because a lot of times they use different keywords to search for the same thing. It is rare that people look for information by directly typing the company name into the search engines; they usually do so by typing the location, or the service, or the feature.

Local search marketing helps people reach your business when they search for related terms, not just the name of your company. It involves having your company registered on various local search engines. However, just registering is not enough. All your details need to be filled in correctly, along with descriptions, keywords, links and maps. Many sites personally make a phone call to check the authenticity of your company before they register you. This phone call ensures that you are listed on their site and thus increases the visibility of your website.

For small businesses local search marketing plays an even more important role. Rarely are there budgets for large scale advertising, and yet it is essential to get the word out about your business. Most of your potential clients are looking for what you offer by searching online. Your company needs to organically be filtered into their searches whether they are searching for you by product or location. The world wide web has revolutionized the way business is conducted nowadays, and online visibility has become critical for the success of your business.

You will surprised by the amount of footfalls local search marketing can organically lead towards your site. A lot of small businesses are unaware of these tools and hence lose out on the many advantages of it. This kind of digital marketing is extremely essential for small businesses and cannot and should not be overlooked. Google is a very important aspect of local search marketing. There are many ways to help you turn up on the front page of Google search results. You need a very strong web presence to help you do this, not only on your own website but also on other search engines, on local search groups and on listings websites. The constancy and accuracy of your information helps your company legitimize itself as a reliable and recognized institution, irrespective of size.

Digital marketing strategies form a large part of marketing plans, especially for smaller businesses. No longer do people flip through yellow pages when they can find what they’re looking for with the simple click of a button. Local search marketing puts on you the map; literally and otherwise.

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Ajay Prasad is founder of Global Marketing Resources, LLC, which runs a number of e-commerce websites under its umbrella. Ajay’s functional expertise includes website strategy, marketing management, business development, consumer research marketing analysis and strategic planning. Local Search HQ is a Local Search Engine Marketing company that aims to develop an overall Web Marketing and Local Search Marketing solution for small local businesses.

Why You Need A Local Search Strategy

By 3G Marketers in Featured

Approximately four years ago, Google made a major change in their search engine results page by introducing a “Universal Search” system that blended listings with video, images and news results along with the sites it gathered from crawling web pages. Universal Search also accommodated the increase in searches for location-specific information. Instead of just searching “restaurants”, many people were searching “restaurants Louisville KY.” Search engines tested this new interest trend by placing a map and local listings at the top of the results page. Heat map reports showing how users absorb a search results page implied that users paid a good deal of attention to the map listings at the top of the page.

This research also indicates that users interact with map listings and organic search results more frequently than the paid ads. This change prompted Google to prioritize local search to the top of the search results page, and in time most engines followed suit.

Before the rise of local search, users had to enter a search term plus a geo-modifier (e.g., Louisville, Kentucky, 40299) in order to get location-specific search results. Today’s search algorithms take into account the IP address of the user, showing location-targeted results without the searcher requesting it. A search for just “dentists” from a computer in Louisville will pull up dental offices in the Louisville, KY area along with the general information pages.

Google experimented with how many local search listings to display in order to maximize user experience. Originally, only three local search listing results were displayed as flags next to the area map. Google tried increasing local map listings to a 10-pack, but found that searchers did not like how far down the page that moved organic search results. Research indicated that local searchers wanted a selection of map listings, but also valued the organic search listings. This led to the 7-pack format, which presented seven listings at the top of the search page.

The most recent iteration of Google’s local search display is called “Place Search.” This format combines the organic listings with local map listings and positions the map on the right panel. There is also an option to see only local listings by clicking the “Places” link in the left-hand panel. The latest iteration personalizes local search by allowing users to select their location to see local listings in any area, not just their current location. This change puts even more emphasis on local search results by showing more robust listings with pictures, meta descriptions and review quotes.

Bing and Yahoo have followed Google into local search marketing. However, all local search does not work the same and they have different algorithms to determine business rank. Obviously, you get more traffic if you are ranked on the first page of local search. To obtain a high ranking, you must build out your business listing using geotags, reviews, citations, product and service keywords and additional information.

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G3 Marketers is an internet marketing service that specializes in online marketing for local
businesses. G3 helps businesses get recognized through dynamic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Google Places Optimization (GPO) as well as Yahoo Local and Bing Local. In addition, G3 provides Social Media Marketing (SMM) services which includes strategically placing your product, service or brand in front of millions of web users that religiously participate in social networking.

Use SEM to Generate Organic Leads – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Adam Shore in Featured

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably executed Search Engine Optimization campaigns and are interested in finding new ways to boost your website’s visibility and lead generation capabilities. True, SEO is a continuous process, and results might not come right away, but if you set your sights too far into the future, you may miss out on some immediate benefits. By implementing a pay-per-click lead generation campaign (PPC), you can quickly improve your SEO efforts both now and in the long run.

Both marketing channels are essentially trying to achieve the same goal – generate leads and increase sales revenue. When properly implemented, just about everything you do for SEO can be coordinated with your pay per click campaigns, and you can drive targeted traffic to your best and most profitable content using PPC. Combining PPC and SEO enables companies to maximize return on investment, provide consistent messaging, and jump start efforts that may have been slow to take off.

For newly developed brands or companies, marketers can use PPC to buy targeted traffic while the site gains search engine authority through SEO. At the point in time when your site has established its online reputation and built links and traffic flows, you can shift your strategy so that PPC becomes more of a complementary tactic.

Design Your Pages for People – Not Search Engines

This refrain is the go-to line of advice from Google’s Matt Cutts. Certainly, it is a safe phrase designed to summarize what your should do to boost your site’s SERPs, without disclosing Google’s secrets. If you have recently adopted ppc advertising after exhausting your seo ideas, buying traffic can be cathartic. PPC advertising is expensive. When you are charged for every click, you must rack your brain to maximize
the impact of each visitor. In doing so, you will notice that you begin to focus more on the behavior of visitors, and less on how you believe search engines will treat your content. You might be surprised to find out that by designing your content for users, you are actually designing it for search engines.

You can learn a lot about SEO by understanding PPC, and vice-versa. For instance, someone who has extensive experience with PPC can learn a lot regarding improving their quality scores by learning basic SEO basic best practices.

Unified Messaging

Many companies delegate the tasks of SEO and PPC to separate individuals. If this is the case in your organization, you should understand that both marketers are not competing with each other, are on the same team, and that their message needs to be unified. Both share the responsibility of driving traffic and generating leads. Communication is essential to ensuring that both marketers are utilizing similar phrasing and language. Again, the goal is the same, only the routes used to get there are different.

Social Media & Direct Links

It’s no secret that social graph metrics now play a key role in SERPs. By purchasing traffic, you increase the exposure of your website, and increase the opportunities for users to “like” your page, tweet your content, or directly link to it.

While social media recommendations, tweets, etc., are all the rage of late, direct links are still the most powerful avenue to boost your site’s rankings. Search engines treat backlinks from other sites as a recommendation of your site’s quality.

The same is true from social media, only with an added twist. Google now includes pages recommended through social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s very own +1, in search results for users. While this is still in its infancy, it stands to reason that recommended links experience a higher CTR than regular results, and thus, generate more leads.

CTR and Direct Search

Google’s algorithm has hundreds of components. Most SEOs believe that a site’s organic click through rate and volume of branded searches for your site are among factors Google looks at when ranking your site. By increasing the overall volume of traffic to your site, you are bound to see an increase in users searching directly for you.

Double Rainbow!

…or close enough, and it does mean something. Once your site has been indexed and ranks for your coveted keywords, you will begin to reap the benefits of valuable double links. A double link occurs when your organic listing appears on the same page as your ppc advertisement. Users will often see both listings and perceive your content to be relevant. Obviously, you would prefer if the user clicks on the free link, but even a click on your paid listing will improve your ad’s quality score, and reduce costs in the long run. Still, if possible, try to
creatively incentivize the user to click on the organic search result.

Conversion Data

Increasing the total volume of traffic to your site can give you a better idea of which keywords actually convert into leads and sales. By using SEO alone, you are limited to data surrounding the keywords for which you have a high rank.

You naturally have pre-conceived and biased notions of what the best keywords for your business may be. Often webmasters and marketing coordinators are surprised when they discover leads generated by keywords they once deemed irrelevant.

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Adam Shore coordinates marketing for an offshore call center in the Philippines, while living in Massachusetts, USA. His expertise includes lead generation, data entry outsourcing, virtual assistant services, customer support, and appointment setting.

Marketing for Search Engines

By Karl Walinskas in Featured

As more and more people jump online and get comfortable with the ease of plunking down their credit card for purchases, it is becoming apparent that traditional marketing such as direct mail, advertising, and telemarketing just won’t be enough to get your small business over the top. Changes in the world that small business now sees are nothing short of mind-blowing. If you want to get your business, product or service noticed, you need to be marketing for search engines (SEM) and on board with the social media impact on business. Online tools today have changed the game and created new rules for information exchange and information commerce. Software as a service application, better known as SAAS, is bringing everything from Aunt Sadie’s bookkeeping services to your kid’s martial arts training regimen online as part of the mysterious but ever-expanding Cloud. Your business needs to be visible in the cloud, and marketing for search engines is your primary tactic of being found.

Interview with Ira Wolfe

The final piece of my Skype video interview with Ira Wolfe of Success Performance Solutions gets into the final 3 C’s of Marketing for Search Engines, including the most important piece of the puzzle – consistency.

Search Engine Advertising – A Good Investment?

By Toby Russell in Featured

I want to introduce you to a beginner’s guide to traffic generation by using paid-for ads on search engines. Now I have to be honest and say most of my experience has been really with Google Adwords primarily, however I’ve done some with Yahoo, which has returned some very good, cost effective results. Try them all and then decide for yourself.

Little Bit of History For You

Overture, which is now owned by Yahoo, basically created P4P (pay for performance), as we know it today. They realized and anticipated the growth in online shopping, that activity would increase dramatically, and advertising was going to be huge because of all the online businesses.

You need visibility to get web surfers to visit your site to buy, join your list etc. Placing ads that can send visitors to your sites not only increase sales, but traffic as well. Yahoo now has this service (since buying Overture some years ago), which allows ads for companies or websites to be visible in response to certain keywords that are entered by the browser.

More Visitors Helps Your List Building Activity

Any company can drive more traffic to its site by making use of this service. More traffic means that you’ll get more people seeing the pages of your site and getting the benefits of your site’s info, or better yet, buying your products or joining your list. If you’ve got a high volume of traffic, then it makes building your list somewhat easier and quicker as well. Naturally the advantage of getting people onto your list is that you are then able to market to them on a regular basis with the hope that they are not just one off customers, but over time will buy further product from you, and a website owner they have come to trust. Hence the phrase “the money’s in the list.”

The lifeblood of every website is to get a large and consistent traffic flow to the website. Visitors to your site are vital obviously, and if you can get as large a number as possible who are targeted (i.e. they have an interest in whatever your site is about) using internet marketing tips like these, it will help towards getting sales and increased awareness of your site’s products or services.

So How Does it Work?

Yahoo Overture works in basically the same way as Google Adwords. Both services use searches based on keywords and keyword phrases to place ads on sites that are relevant.

The browser’s keyword selection will determine what results come up. When you do a search, you’ll see ads on the right side of the results page. At the top of these ads will be paid ads. These are ones where the company or website has paid for them to be listed for that keyword or phrase.

Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you have a site that sells retail and wholesale auto parts. You can choose certain keywords that will bring up your ad when they are searched. When somebody types in, for example, Ford Explorer your ad comes up because you’ve chosen the phrase Ford Explorer for your ads.

Using this technique, you don’t have to worry so much about optimizing your site’s content for search engine optimization. However, in my opinion an important internet marketing tip is you should SEO your site anyway, as highly optimized sites will always rank better and can take advantage of changes in web technology that are bound to come about from time to time – so do it anyway.

By using Yahoo/Overture it’s possible to get your list listed on the first page, obviously depending on how competitive your keyword choice is and the budget you have to spend. A word of caution here – keep your budget very small and tight until you have tested the system. However, using search engine advertising is a quick way to get more traffic to your site. But obviously the best plan is to use SEO and other free methods of traffic generation as well.

OK So What’s The Cost?

The only trouble is that you’ll have to spend some cash to use this method. Yahoo/Overture has a number of different pricing options, depending on the number of keywords your ad has in it, or the number of times you get clicks. They also offer deals that allow your ads to show up on third party sites and not just search engine results pages. Visit their site to check out the current costs.

As far as the third party sites go, they’ll put your ads on sites that are relevant to yours. In other words, they are going for the same or similar keywords. This ensures that the people who might be interested in your site will see it. It would be meaningless for them to put your ads on an unrelated site.

Invest in Your Business’s Future

You can and should see this money as an investment. The idea is to pull more visitors to your site, and thus to increase sales. When it works, you will make good on the investment. The trick then is to work on your site so that those clicks turn into cash. In other words, don’t just get them there; get them buying and joining your list.

They say it takes money to make money. Actually, there are a number of free or low-cost ways to drive traffic to your site. But using Yahoo’s Overture (and the other search engines ) can help you get there faster. It offers quicker traffic on a bigger scale. If you don’t want to wait around for the search engines to start finding your site, it can be well worth the money!

So there you have it, Internet marketing tips like these are all about using the arsenal of tools, tips and methods to quite literally ‘market’ your site.

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Toby Russell, Internet Marketer, Publisher & Property Investor offers tried and tested methods to help you succeed on line. Find out how to drive huge amounts of targeted traffic to your own Internet Marketing business with his popular Free step-by-step Special Report. Chapter 12 tells you how to use PPC advertising, available at => http://www.startinternetmarketingonline.com

Why Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy Must Include YouTube!

By Paul Summers in Featured

Anyone with knowledge of Internet marketing will be aware the vital part driving (targeted) traffic to your website plays. In the traditional sense, if you have a shop selling the finest goods on the market, but it’s hidden away in some back street, the likelihood is that potential customers will not stumble upon it. The same goes online.

If your website is sitting there, but no one knows about it, your chances of sales are pretty slim. There are ways to drive free traffic to your site. Article marketing may be the best known, but another major part of any search engine marketing strategy simply must include YouTube.

Now, we all know YouTube for the variety of entertainment clips and short films available. But there are numerous instructional videos also, that can teach you anything from how to take a great photograph, to how to potty train your hamster! The shrewd Internet marketer can quite easily use YouTube’s services to promote their own products or, if working as an Affiliate, those of a vendor. Here’s how to use YouTube as an important tool in your search engine marketing strategy.

* Create a short informational or promotional video, related to your product. The ideal length is around 60 seconds, but this can vary, depending on the content you want to include. Making a video sounds difficult to a newcomer, but is actually very easy. Most modern PC’s include the application Windows Movie Maker, or equivalent.

It is quick and simple to use, and you just drag and drop your images into the timeline space at the bottom

* You can add narration, just by connecting a microphone (or use your PC’s in built microphone). It pays to write a script to read to, unless you are just following text you have put into the video

* Alternatively, you can just use text, where appropriate. As you drag your images into the timeline, you can choose the text option to insert this before, after, or on the selected image clip

* If you are not narrating, it’s best to add a simple accompanying audio track. Don’t make this too distracting, but a pleasant experience for the listener. Some soft jazz or classical music normally does the trick. Be careful – you can’t just copy music straight from your mp3, because of copyright laws, YouTube will just reject it. You can, however, obtain short royalty-free music on line, from companies such as Sound Dogs, for just a few dollars

* Once you’re happy with the video, you “publish” it onto your computer, ready for upload to YouTube.

You will need to set up an account with YouTube (it’s free) before you can upload your video. If possible, your account name should include a keyword associated with your niche.

For example, using the Hamster example above, your account name might be “HamsterPottyTraining” or similar. An email address will also be needed. Yahoo works well for this, and again try to use your keyword as your account id.

One YouTube video won’t have a major impact, but repeat the process over and over again, with new videos, including links to your website, or related promotional articles, and you should soon see an upsurge in traffic. Utilizing YouTube in your search engine marketing strategy works very well indeed.

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Discover how you can learn and apply a successful search engine marketing strategy, by checking out www.summersonlinesolutions.com. Here you will find amazing FREE Internet Marketing Training that takes you step by step through a complete and easy money making process that you can implement from home.

Chasing Leads: Offline Lead Tracking in SEM Campaigns, Pt. 2

By Scott Buresh in Featured

The newly coined term ‘results measurement’ is used by companies to define the purposes of lead tracking in SEM campaigns, and is a valuable means of understanding the many decision factors your prospects use to choose your company for its products/services. A finely-tuned lead tracking channel – often aided by your search engine marketing company – demonstrates to the potential customer that his or her inquiry about your company’s products/services was received with a sense of urgency. For SEM campaigns, proper lead tracking may not be the only fast track solution to increased sales, but does give potential customers insight into how your company values its leads. With a greater ability to track leads and responses, an immediate follow-up is also possible, allowing prospects to decide if your response time was fast enough and if your company provided a better customer experience than your competitors.

In the last article, we discussed how an ideal lead tracking scenario equates to greater success when it comes to closing leads in SEM campaigns. Plus, knowing where your leads come from helps determine which channel is the most profitable and, of course, which should be continually refined to bring in even more quality leads. Though this may be common knowledge, we are led to the two less-than-ideal scenarios that are unfortunate, though surprisingly frequent, despite the prevalence of comprehensive lead tracking software and tools.

Lead Tracking Scenarios

Scenario #2: Workable– The client company cannot, for whatever reason, have web leads automatically populated in its sales database, which, in this case, is often a proprietary system built in-house. Yet, there are still some ways to identify leads properly, which your search engine marketing company can help you compile for SEM campaigns. PPC leads, for example, can be supplemented with added parameters when sent to an inbox to reveal their source. With the right lead tracking in place, you can easily have emails pop right into your inbox with a header that notifies you that you’ve just received a lead via a specific channel. In these cases, the onus is on the person who enters the leads into the sales database to also include the lead’s source.

Ideally, your search engine marketing company needs to meet and/or correspond regularly with you to discuss the source and quality of each lead within your SEM campaigns. Leads can be analyzed at the individual level, so that when a lead closes, it can be attributed to the proper channel (organic SEO, email marketing, PPC, etc). With frequent collaboration between the search engine marketing company and the client company, ROI for each individual channel can be deduced, and expenditures on each channel can be properly allocated to maximize performance.

Scenario #3: Common but Unfortunate– In this scenario, the client company usually has limited offline lead tracking ability. Sometimes the leads are sent directly to varying sales people who use their own individual systems for tracking their leads within SEM campaigns.

Clearly, this limits the ability of the search engine marketing company to properly allocate ROI to individual web channels. Even if the individual sales people take note of where the individual leads came from, compiling all of that data into something useful can be a bit like herding cats. The client company also can’t determine which online sales and marketing initiatives are the most effective to developing SEM campaigns and could therefore unknowingly cut the most profitable initiatives when times are tough. Another consequence is that your sales department could be spending time chasing bad leads from the same sources day after day and not even know it.

Furthermore, when your search engine marketing company is trying to come up with ROI calculations, the math tends to get fuzzy. You and your search engine marketing company are left with vague numbers regarding offline closure rates, value of the average sale, and the like, making any attempt at deriving useful ROI figures a virtual stab in the dark. As you can imagine, such a system does not allow for informed decisions in regard to your individual online initiatives.

Increasing Your SEM Lead Tracking Abilities for Success

As a company, we work very hard to get clients up to at least the workable scenario (#2) in order to prove the value of individual online initiatives and to knowledgeably hone SEM campaigns for the best possible return. Even though scenario #3 isn’t the most effective and modern way to run a sales department, it is still fairly common. We’ve had many clients who had very weak tracking elements in place, and, step by step, we’ve cajoled them into a more uniform and robust tracking system.

Almost invariably, once clients see the impact on their bottom lines through improved lead tracking, they start demanding more and more tracking information and transparency – rightly so. Of course, any good search engine marketing company will be more than happy to oblige.

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Scott Buresh, internationally recognized internet marketing authority and CEO of search marketing firm Medium Blue, is consistently published and cited by influential industry publications and contributed to How to Build Your Own Web Site with Little or No Money: The Complete Guide for Business and Personal Use (Brown, 2010), The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google for Dummies (Wiley, 2004). In both 2008 and 2010, Medium Blue was honored to receive a prestigious American Marketing Association award. Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and national clients, including the Atlanta Humane Society, Afterburner, Inc., Oliver Wight Americas and DeKalb Medical. To see how we can help you achieve your online marketing goals, please contact us.

Google’s New Search Engine: YouTube!

By Titus-Hoskins in Featured

Only half joking when I say Google’s new search engine will be YouTube, because there are many strange things happening in Googleland. As a professional search engine marketer I have to keep my eyes glued to what is happening with Google, the most dominant search engine in the North American marketplace, if not the world.

Since my livelihood depends achieving high rankings in the search engines, you more or less become conditioned to jump every time one of them makes a move, especially Google. Recent changes within Google with the Caffeine and the May Updates (we won’t even mention the WonderWheel) had a few of my profitable keyword rankings in Google jumping all over the place.

Well, things have calmed down and everything has fallen back into place and traffic to most of my sites are up. However, even before the dust has settled on those changes, Google is on the move again. There are rumors that Google is developing a Facebook killer, its own social networking site that could compete with Facebook.

Can this be true?

Only Google knows for sure but there are some other concrete changes which already have been made by Google which keeps one wondering. For example, Google has moved the enormous list of YouTube users into its Google Accounts system. You can no longer log into your YouTube account with your old username and password, users must switch and log in through their Google Account.

This is somewhat curious because ever since Google bought it in 2006 for $1.65 billion, YouTube has kept its own brand. Why consolidate it with Google Accounts? Could this move have something to do with the endless stream of data and content which is flowing into YouTube every second? More importantly, does this change now make the handling or manipulation of this data easier for Google to incorporate into its search engine rankings?

This has to be questioned because there are other recent changes within YouTube which are also curious. Users can no longer rate videos on a five star system but must now use a thumbs up for like or a thumbs down for dislike. A much more “Black and White” rating system which is more in line with the one used at Facebook.

Forget the Bing/Yahoo union which has already begun, Facebook is becoming Google’s biggest competitor when it comes to online search. Facebook is showing the traffic and numbers which can make a one-trick pony like Google more than a little jumpy. Google has to compete with Facebook, not only for the attention of the majority of web users, but also now when it comes to online search.

Granted, Facebook is still in its infancy when it comes to search, but its “Like” rating system and search box must have Google paying attention. Keep in mind, Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol doesn’t rely upon keywords but lets users rate the webpages which are most popular or liked. This grass roots consumer or user ranking system will grow in importance as the general surfing public becomes more aware of just how “fake” or “manufactured” organic results are in the major search engines, including Google.

Link buying and selling, keyword positioning, fake software generated content… all are making it hard for search engines to return valid organic results to web users. One obvious solution is to draw more of your organic results from real live voting users who actually rate the content or webpage. These kinds of ratings are much more harder to manipulate by the big multi-national companies who have suddenly realized the pure economic generating power of getting top rankings for lucrative keywords in the search engines.

One would expect the importance of old style backlinks to be replaced by more valuable social bookmarks, such as how many Diggs, Tweets, Facebook and YouTube Likes… will determine what rankings a piece of content receives in the search engines of the very near future. And in the process, one would also expect the already massive corruption of organic search results, to become much more democratic and truly reflect how web users rate content on the web.

Most savvy webmasters have already made it easy for their visitors to bookmark and rate their content by displaying handy social bookmark logos and buttons on their sites. This is probably a wise route to take as the search engines, especially Google, will probably place more emphasis and value on user generated ratings supplied by such sites as Facebook and YouTube.

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All views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author Titus Hoskins, who is a full-time online marketer. To find out more about him and his sites, just Google his name.

The Painful Truth About Getting Your Website To The Top Of The Search Engines

By Ivana Katz in Featured

“How do I get my website to come up on top of the search engines?” – That is one of the most frequently asked questions I get asked by clients.

The truth is, it’s not easy. With millions of websites on the internet right now and thousands being added each month, everyone is striving to do the same – to come up in the first spot (or on the first page).

In reality there are only 2 ways you can come up on top:

1. Set up a pay per click advertising campaign, such as Google Adwords
2. Optimise your website for keywords (also know as Search Engine Optimisation)

Keywords

Before you embark on either of these marketing methods, you need to understand about keywords.

Keywords or key phrases are the words that visitors type into a search engine to find a service or product. The best keywords are those that are commonly typed in by your potential customers, but which aren’t used much on your competitor’s websites. In other words, if you optimize your pages for keywords your potential customers use a lot, but your competitors haven’t thought of, you win. But here’s the catch…you’ll never get to know which are the best keywords for your website simply by guessing.

There are many tools you can use to find what keywords people are using, including Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.

If you are serious about finding the perfect keywords, I would recommend using a tool called Wordtracker – www.wordtracker.com. Through a series of simple steps, Wordtracker identifies the best keywords to use on each page of your website. Wordtracker’s suggestions are based on over 300 million keywords and phrases that people have used over the previous 90 days. (In other words, there is no “guessing” when you use Wordtracker. Everything is based on the keywords millions of people have actually typed into search engines.)

Best of all, their competitive analysis tool enables you to find those “best keywords” – the ones your potential customers use, but which your competitors don’t know about.

Once you have identified the best keywords, you can either run a pay per click marketing campaign or optimize your website for search engines.

Pay per click

Pay per click advertising is when an advertiser (you) pays for each qualified click that sends a search engine user to your web page. PPC requires you to bid on keywords or phrases that relate to your business. The best known pay per click services are Google AdWords and Overture. Generally you can bid from as little as a few cents per visitor. However, the more you bid the higher up in the search engine your advertisement will appear. Pay per click is a great way to deliver targeted and qualified visitors to your website at a very reasonable price.

It is a good idea to experiment with different PPC search engines to find the one that works best for you. In addition, you will need to spend time testing your keywords and ads.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines prefer to list sites that contain good content. In order to rank high you need to create a website that has maximum content and which uses lots of relevant keywords to your service and products.

Once you decide on the keywords, use them in

• Your website’s domain name
• The title of your page – This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window
• The heading of your home page
• The first paragraph of your home page
• Meta tags – Keywords, page title, description
• Titles of your graphics
• Alternative (Alt) tags – These appear in place of images when the browser preferences are set for text only.

Whilst it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords you may be penalized or even banned by some search engines.

Another important thing to consider when trying to optimize your website for search engines is to have as many relevant links pointing back to your website from other complementary sites. This can be done through link exchanges or by writing articles/posts and submitting them to article directories or forums. Ensure you include your domain name at the end of each article/post.

If this all seems too overwhelming, you can employ the services of a Search engine optimization company, who will make your website’s content more search engine friendly.

Please remember, having your website listed at the top of the search engines is not the only way to promote your website. There are lots of other ways you can get visitors to your site for little or no money.

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Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet. If you’re looking for a professional and affordable website designer, visit www.web4business.com.au and download a free website plan.Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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