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The Evolution (Not Death) Of SEO

By Jennifer Horowitz in Featured

There is a lot of talk about the “death of SEO” and “the death of ranking reports” lately. It all stems from some sessions at PubCon in Las Vegas.

Remember we all want to get our message out there and have our voices heard and one way to do that is to make a dramatic statement. So that is what you are seeing. The truth is SEO is not dead - it is just evolving. And the other truth is…. the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Page Rank Transfer from an Old Site to a New Site - Search Engine Optimisation

By Matt Blay in Featured

When moving from an old to a new website it is extremely important to consider the old sites existing organic search engine position. If the correct strategy is not undertaken then the old sites position in the search marketplace could be dramatically compromised. It’s important to gain an understanding of two specific areas of the old site before undertaking a strategy:

Search Engine Optimization Techniques for Improved Search Engine Ranking

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

There are several search engine optimization techniques that many people are unaware of that can provide you with improved search engine ranking. In fact, many of these techniques are referred to as ’secrets’ by many that are trying to sell their knowledge, but they are no more secret than my name.

Search Engine Optimization for Your Capture Page

By Dan Dimit in Featured

Everyone in direct sales that has a replicated website must have a capture page for differentiation purposes. Whether you’re in real estate, insurance, network marketing, or any other direct selling field, you probably know the importance of branding yourself to keep yourself apart from others. It’s also a great tool to build a prospecting list. Here’s how to use simple search engine optimization to get your landing page to the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any of the others.

Video Search Engine Optimization

By Randy Zlobec in Featured

Video Search Engine Optimization - Most of us know that a site that’s well configured for search engine access is a major part of getting high traffic levels. However, you might not have thought about optimizing your video as well as the rest of your site. Since multimedia content is becoming a much more popular way of distributing information, correct video search engine optimization is important.

For instance, on YouTube alone (which accounts for more than ninety-eight percent of the videos viewed via Google), more than eighty-two million people watched over four billion videos last year. That makes YouTube both the top video sharing site and the top video search engine.

YouTube receives as much as thirteen hours of new user-submitted video every minute, and more than fifty percent of the people watching videos online share links with other people. So, getting a good YouTube ranking could be an important way to bring people to your site.

For owners of video content, video search engine optimization is a good way to get exposure, ad income, and free traffic. Being discovered by the viewers has to happen before you can get lots of views. That means making sure that your data is rich in meta information, and that you use quality RSS or MRSS feeds that you update on a regular basis.

Make sure that your meta data is well placed and relevant to the topic. A cleaner can help you remove distracting or irrelevant meta information from the file.

Only after you produce well optimized content should you contact the search engines and submit your video. This places you in the queue of web crawlers, and means you’ll be indexed more quickly and more often than if you hadn’t bothered to submit. The more regularly your content is crawled, the better your chance of rating well on search results.

Index your site on other engines than Google or YouTube. They can spread your video to other search engines you may not have thought of. For instance, indexing your site on Blinkx will cause it to show up on Ask and MSN, among others.

One important part of your strategy should be a series of related videos. When a viewer sees a video online that he or she likes, there’s a good likelihood that this viewer will look for others like them. While a single great video will be popular and welcomed, you’ll do even better if it’s part of a series.

Use an embedded video player, too. Many viewers will be more inclined to view your submission if it’s part of your site or blog than if they had to go to your video hosting service to see it. However, you should avoid players that use only Flash. Don’t use pop-up players, which annoy more people than they amuse, and will actually cause you to lose views.

The more views you get, the more likely you are to be picked up by other sites, linked to, and rank well on video searches. You can even customize embedded video players to display playlists related to your company, and adjust the layout, and other information.

Create traffic by placing a video search box on your site. This adds unique content and boosts ad revenue. Make sure that you create a video of the appropriate length for your audience, and that you’re looking for the right response.

You can use analytics to find out how long a customer stays on your video page, which will tell you if your video is too long. You can also use analytics to tell you which of your videos get the best response. Once you know this, you’ll be able to decide which content should be linked first on your home page.

Remember that no webcrawler has ever bought a product or a service. If you’re a local business using video to advertise, clicks are a lot less important than calls. Include a call to action with your contact information as part of your video - thumbnails are an excellent way to do this. You can use YouTube to create thumbnails at the quarter, half, and three-quarter marks. Making sure that you have both a local listing and a video listing on Google’s Search Engine Results Page also increases your likelihood of getting visits.

You may also wish to make sure that your videos are high enough quality for and in the right format for television. Google TV is very affordable, and lets you create closely targeted video.

Don’t use Active X controls and export all files as swf format. Use Google Video sitemaps to help with navigation, and build a separate page for each video, rather than hosting many videos on the same page. Use a simple text title and description, and optimize that page as you would any other. Then, link to it from the index page.

Descriptions and titles need to be consistent across all your sites, and file names should descriptive and make sense to the viewer. Remember that Different communities require different approaches. Prominent keywords can help on many sites. However, while keyword rich content will help videos hosted on your site be noticed by Blinkx or Truveo, it won’t help on YouTube.

You’ll need to get the attention of the community in general. Video responses to popular, related videos can help get others to visit your contribution. Your content will appear in close proximity to videos that are already popular. Make sure you include an active URL in the description of your video, and end the video with a mention of the link. Annotations can help you link to other YouTube videos. Be sure to allow comments!

Never tag with irrelevant search terms, no matter how popular they might be. Remember that you need to appeal to real people, rather than just optimizing blindly. While you might turn up early in a search with good optimization, an unappealing video will cause people to pass you by. If you know what kind of content your audience prefers, you’ll be able to create the right video marketing plan for your business or organization.

Video search engine optimization is an important part of any video marketing strategy. If you’re planning to market your business or organization using multimedia content, creating it correctly and surrounding it with the right keywords and other information can help it be noticed. Before you submit a video, make sure it’s optimized.

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Randy Zlobec, president of RZ Concepts, Inc. an Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
company specializing in top placement throughout the Major Search Engines. RZ Concepts has been in business since 1996. Visit the corporate website at http://www.rzconcepts.com

5 Free Must Have SEO Tools

By Titus-Hoskins in Featured

Let’s face it, we all want higher
rankings for our targeted keywords.
So here are 5 Free SEO Tools you can
use to help you achieve those rankings…

5 Free Must Have SEO Tools

Unless you go the PPC route and pay for your
traffic, SEO or Search Engine Optimization will
play a major role in the success or failure of
your website. Therefore, it’s in your best interest
as a webmaster to learn everything you can about
SEO and use the right SEO tools to achieve an
advantage over your competition.

Needless to say, SEO or getting high rankings
for your keywords is extremely competitive,
especially for popular lucrative keyword phrases
which bring in the big bucks. You must be at the
top of your game if you want to compete.

One important factor in winning the SEO battle
is using the right SEO software or tools. Major
online companies use expensive software, hire
SEO firms and have whole departments devoted
entirely to search engine marketing - so you
know your work is cut out for you.

You’re probably asking yourself how can the little
guy compete against such stiff competition? Well,
it is not as difficult as you might think or believe.
For starters, you can use some simple SEO tools
which will help give you a slight advantage if you
use them properly.

Surprisingly, all of these SEO tools are free and
any webmaster can take advantage of them in their
ongoing SEO endeavors. I believe all webmasters must
learn and master SEO in order to succeed online or
get someone else to do it for them.

Over the years I have built up a passable knowledge
of SEO due mainly from running 9 or 10 sites and working
as a full-time online affiliate marketer. My livelihood
depends on me achieving high rankings for my lucrative
keywords in the search engines, mainly in Google. Also the
daily running of two websites on Internet Marketing Tools
has played a small part as well!

Along the way I have used countless SEO tactics and
tools to try to increase my keyword rankings. Here’s
a short list of my most helpful Free SEO tools that
I use on a daily basis in the running of my websites:

1. SEO Book Keyword Research Tool

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

This tells how many searches are made each day
for my targeted keywords. Invaluable information
to have for Search Engine Marketing and for choosing
your keywords. Most experts suggest you go for the
mid to low range keywords if you’re just starting out
and targeting long tail keywords (three or four words)
yields the best returns.

2. Detecting Online Commercial Intention

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

This MSN tool tells me the probability (percentage)
someone clicking my chosen keywords is likely to buy.
Another great tool for picking keywords if you’re trying
to earn revenue from your sites. Higher the percentage,
the more likely you will make a sale or earn revenue.

3. SeoQuake for Mozilla Firefox

http://www.seoquake.com

This is an addon for Firefox and gives you
invaluable SEO information on any site you’re
viewing. All the important info is here:
Google PageRank, Number of Links, Traffic Rank,
Whois, Keyword Density, NoFollow links… used
in conjunction with Firefox this tool will prove
invaluable.

4. Google Alerts

http://www.google.com/alerts

This is a great SEO tool if you use it to track
and build your links. Just create Google Alerts
for all your major keyword phrases and Google will
keep you updated on current links being formed/indexed
on your keywords. Also great for tracking articles,
urls, competitors… and staying up-to-date in your
niche.

5. WordPress

http://www.wordpress.com

This free blogging software lets you place very
SEO friendly blogs on your sites. Social media,
blogging, tags, RSS feeds… are becoming increasingly
important for online success so you must get your
sites into this whole mix in order to compete.
WordPress is a valuable SEO tool for improving
your keyword rankings. Blogger and Bloglines
are other blogging alternatives you can use.

I use many more SEO tools but these are the top five.
Try some of these handy tools and see if they can
improve your own keyword rankings like they did mine.
No harm in trying and you may be pleasantly surprised
at the results.

PR: wait…  I: wait…  L: wait…  LD: wait…  I: wait… wait…  C: wait…  SD: wait…

PR: wait…  I: wait…  L: wait…  LD: wait…  I: wait… wait…  C: wait…  SD: wait…

PR: wait…  I: wait…  L: wait…  LD: wait…  I: wait… wait…  C: wait…  SD: wait…

PR: wait…  I: wait…  L: wait…  LD: wait…  I: wait… wait…  C: wait…  SD: wait…

The Web Emperor Has No Clothes

By Jerry Bader in Featured

If you’re in business, you’re in sales; that’s just the way it is. We are all salesmen; we all have something to sell, a product, a service, an idea, a cause, or maybe just an opinion. And if you’re in business you have a website intended to communicate the value of that which you sell.

So if you’re in the business of selling something, and your website is the vehicle you choose to communicate your sales pitch, then shouldn’t your main concern be how effectively you are communicating that message?

Communication or Analytics

Instead of concentrating on effective communication, many businesses put the emphasis on search engine statistics: how high they rank on Google, MSN, and Yahoo, with the assumption that the higher they rank, the more traffic they’ll generate, and the more traffic they generate, the more sales they’ll get. At least, that’s what we are led to believe.

Here’s the problem: almost all the rank-generating strategies are aimed at search engine spiders, not people, so you have to ask yourself, who exactly is my website communicating to, robots or human beings?

The Secret Formula Doesn’t Exist

Why are today’s business owners and executives so mesmerized by this whole search engine thing? It reminds me of the story of an infamous Hollywood movie mogul and studio head who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Instead of firing the guy immediately, he was retained for some time for the simple reason his movies made money; and the dirty little secret in Hollywood is that nobody really knows why some movies are hits and others are bombs. So you keep paying the guy you think is making you money, no matter what he does, because maybe he knows something you don’t.

What we have today is a new generation of business leaders who came of age with the Internet. These Internet technology geeks and boffins are the new Web-wizards and wunderkinds: the guys with the secret formula. But like the movie industry, nobody really has a foolproof search engine recipe for success, but since most of the technical stuff is ever-changing, and over most entrepreneurs and business executives heads, they buy into it; that is until somebody tells them the emperor has no clothes.

What’s A Web Entrepreneur To do?

You heard the old expression, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” well it has never been so true as it applies to website marketing. The simple truth about websites is that success is based on a site’s ability to communicate a marketing message that makes sense, and is understood in an easy to digest format.

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

Search Engine Optimization Secrets Of A #1 Google Ranking

By Willie Crawford in Featured

It doesn’t matter how great your product is, what a bargain your price is, or how beautiful your website is - Without traffic none of that matters.

So at its most basic, the biggest determinant of your web businesses success is “getting eyeballs looking at your webpages.”

When looking at where the traffic comes from, it begins with others linking (or pointing the way) to your site. Since most people automatically turn to the search engines when looking for something online, that naturally tells me that the most important links that you can easily get are probably from the search engines.

Since Google is currently the search engine getting the most use online, and therefore the one that generates the most traffic, that also means that you need to focus on getting a front page, or ideally a number 1 listing, at Google.

However, your search engine optimization efforts should involve structuring your site, and your other search engine magnets, so that it bring in BUYERS from Google.

At its most basic, and simplest, getting a number 1 ranking at Google that leads to an endless stream of sales boils down to three parts. They are:

1) Targeting The Correct Keywords

2) Optimizing A Page For Those Keywords

3) Getting Links From Sites That Google Loves

Let’s look at each of these.

First, you absolutely have to target the correct keyword. Your webpages and everything that you do needs to incorporate the keywords that your buying customers are actually typing into the search engines.

You don’t want to target the phrase digital camera, or printer cartridge. Instead you want to target a specific model of digital camera or printer cartridge, and you may even want to target people in a specific location looking for a specific model of printer cartridge.

That kind of targeting means that the people who find you are searching for something very specific, and when they find you by typing in that very specific search term, they click through and buy.

Next, you need to optimize your webpages for those keyword phrases. That generally means that you need the target keyword phrases sprinkled throughout your webpages. It also means that you want to use your target keyword phrases in your title and description “metatags.” You also want to include your keyword phrases in anchor text on your webpages (the blue underlined text in hyperlinks).

You basically want to include your keyword phrases in all of the parts of your webpages that tells the search engines what your webpage is about. This includes places such as italicized or bolded text, your menu items, and even alt image tags.

Finally, you need to get sites that Google thinks are important to link to you. Ideally, these sites include your keyword phrases in the anchor text when they link to you.

Many who study search engine optimization full-time are convinced that the external links pointing to your website are THE part that makes the biggest difference in most cases.

Having an authority site link to you is like having a respected authority in your community give you an endorsement. They are telling the search engines, and the rest of the world, that they recommend you. By using your keywords in the anchor text, authority sites are also telling Google (and other less important search engines) that that is what they consider your site to be about.

This factor is so powerful that I have personally often gotten a number 1 position on Google for my most important keywords by just tapping into one free website optimization tool… one authority site! In fact, I recently did an interview with David Preston, an expert at teaching offline businesses to tap into the web in ways that most of their competitors never even dreamed of. In the interview with David, we discussed in-depth, how I easily get free front-page listings at Google in a day, and how I often get #1 listing for my ideal keywords in just hours. You can get the MP3 audio of the interview that I did with David at: http://WebsiteSearchEngineOptimizationSecrets.com

I mention David and that interview because he taught me another CRITICAL part of effective search engine optimization. He taught

me how to focus my efforts on the buyers with lots of money to spend… customers who have already budgeted that money for what I have to offer.

So there you have my very simple three-part search engine optimization formula for getting a free number one ranking in Google in as little as a few hours. That fourth part, focusing on the buyers actively looking to spend money is a bonus

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Willie Crawford is an Internet marketer with over 12 years of experience at generating massive website traffic, and sales using viral marketing techniques. One of his favorite traffic generation tools is rebrandable PDF’s which he creates using the software at: http://ViralDocumentToolkits.com

Are You Ready to Outsource to a Search Engine Optimization Company?

By Scott Buresh in Featured

So, you are the marketing manager of your firm, and you’ve finally decided to pull the trigger and hire the search engine optimization company that you’ve been talking to for months.  The budget has been cleared, the SEO firm is ready to start, and it should be just a matter of time before you start seeing a huge uptick in business.  Right?

Not so fast.

An experienced search engine optimization company will tell you that an ill-planned campaign can be a non-starter from day one.  This usually happens when there is no clear understanding of what will be required of the client to make the project run smoothly.

Search Engine Optimization: It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You

By Erin Ferree in Featured

Many small businesses start their websites and put a “Links” page up as one of their first few pages thinking that this will help them rank better.

While it’s a nice gesture to link to your vendors, associates, resources, and products you like, and your customers may even find this page helpful or interesting having a links page alone won’t help your website to rank better.

Instead, You Want Your Website to Be Like A Prom Queen

That’s not to say you want your website to wear a sparkly dress or a shiny tiara or make a sappy acceptance speech.

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