Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

SEO Lessons from Local Businesses

By Trey McMartin in Featured

More than once in the six years that I have been providing SEO services for websites, I have had the opportunity to discuss with individual business owners their search engine optimization needs.

Now and again, I run across an individual business owner who is quick to say that SEO is absolutely worthless. When confronted with such an absolute statement, I like to press for details.

It has been my experience that people who speak in negative absolutes will have a horror story to share.

In this article, I am going to detail some of the stories I’ve heard, which frequently tells more about some of the people in our industry, than it does about the effectiveness of search engine marketing.

PROBLEM #1 – “I rank number one in Google, and yet, I have never earned a dime from my website…”

When I first heard this story, I was very surprised… After all, if your SEO company did good keyword research, there is no reason why you should not be getting traffic and a few sales from a top ranking in Google.

I pressed for more details… I learned that the company who built the website also did the search engine optimization.

12 Methods to Improve Website Return on Investment (ROI) Using SEO and Other Strategies

By Nashat Mostafa in Featured

Return On Investment (ROI) is the relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign.

If you are doing any online marketing campaign, then Return On Investment (ROI) is the most important measurement to estimate your success and the one metric that you must work hard on to improve over time.

Generally speaking, Return On Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.

Return on investment is a very popular metric due to its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a reasonable positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then this investment should not be done. Return On Investment (ROI) is the final measurement of success for any advertising campaign.

The Ebb and Flow of The Search Engines And How This Affects Ranking

By Dave Talbot in Featured

A lot of businesses employing an SEO consultant or link building company will often spend countless hours checking their Google ranking to make sure they are seeing progress but is this really necessary and are they focussing on the right aspects of the marketing campaign.

Equally they may insist or the consultant may offer monthly report to show that rankings have moved up (and sometimes down) but feedback shows that many business owners do not really understand the report they are getting, as they are expecting a definitive (the search engines are anything but) report, so when they check their rankings they are different but they don’t understand why.

This can lead to a level of distrust on occasion between parties but in reality it is merely a misunderstanding of the natural ebb and flow of the web from the business owners perspective, or perhaps a failure by the SEO consultant or link building company to fully explain the natural state of things to their client before the start of the campaign.

The purpose of this article is to provide business owners with a generic non technical third party perspective on the natural noise of the net,as well as highlighting a number of questions that they should be asking themselves before placing too much emphasis on a simple snapshot of time as the measure of success of the SEO campaign.

Variations in Google (and other search engines) happen on a constant basis which all affect ranking to one degree or another, for example these variations could include: which data center is serving your results (Google relies on a number of different data centres not just one), or what is today’s or even this hours Google algorithm variation that is being used to shuffle and sift the billions of pages in the index to give you your results.

Equally the discovery of a new page on a site or even a link pointing to a site can make a difference as can variations in your page content, and (simplistically) based on this Google does its shuffle and produces the search results that you see.

Are the results the same hour by hour or minute by minute? Well the answer is a definite no and due to these factors two people conducting the exactly the same search could see a different result at exactly the same time, a situation that is further clouded as more localised results are presented in the search engines. Additionally even if you were to conduct exactly the same search an hour (and sometimes minutes later) the search result can vary.

So does this make a ranking report a wasted piece of paper? This will depend on your perspective and understanding of what you are getting so the answer is yes and no.

A ranking report in whatever form you receive it (generally the more you pay the more elaborate it is) is merely a snapshot of time which is subject to a huge amount of variation. In my opinion it should be used merely as a yard stick of performance over time and at best should be used to monitor the trend of the SEO campaign (which could last from a few months to over a year depending on the competitiveness of the clients market) not be seen as a definitive performance metric.

The other interesting fact is that many ranking reports are produced using software that actually violates Google’s terms and conditions by automatically querying the search engines, so to get round this often the report is produced by querying the search engines anonymously from behind something known as a proxy server.

This fact alone can equally skew the reports findings depending on the proxy servers worldwide location.

Instead of watching for potential website ranking changes try to spend the time adding or organising more pages or relevant content to your site, as this will be much more beneficial both in the short and long term.

---

Author: Dave Talbot: Correct search engine optimisation and link building services are vital ingredients for any websites success in todays online world. Without them most websites will simply not be found and as a result will never be successful visit =>> SEO Southampton for information on effective website marketing strategies

What Comes First – The Web Design Or The SEO?

By Dave Talbot in Featured

This really is the chicken and egg question of the internet age but depending on who you ask will determine the actual answer you receive.

A graphic designer based website development company will argue in a majority of cases that the design comes first of course. And let’s face it without that aesthetically pleasing to the eye design a visitor will bounce off your site within a matter of seconds or so they would have you believe. But then that raises the big question of how did they get there in the first place?

The most common web development curve goes along the lines of website gets designed ..looks great let’s go for it. Needs some content ok, copy and paste something out of our corporate /company leaflet…..time passes and no traffic!

And then more time until eventually perhaps 6-12 months later the situation is either so dire or the company are spending a fortune on Adwords that finally the SEO expert gets called in (or somebody gets intrigued by one of those SEO e-mails that seem to hound webmasters these days), and before you know it you are on a 6 month search engine marketing campaign to try and rescue some website rankings.

Is this really the best way to go? The thousands of business owners that have been through this exact cycle will certainly argue that it most definitely is not, as this hope and pray web development criteria delays any websites success by months and sometimes years, and even more frighteningly results in thousands in lost profit, turnover and ongoing prospect capture.

What is really laughable though is that if you actually read the sales pitch on any one of the myriad of web design companies own websites many of them blatantly claim to be SEO experts as if it is a badge of honour or perhaps a must have tick in the box but a quick check of their portfolio soon reveals that if they are the search engine marketing experts, then it is clearly evident that their clients are definitely not on the receiving end of this claimed expertise.

So what is the real answer, can you really optimise a website before you launch it? Absolutely, web design and SEO should go hand in hand and the thought process of optimising a website and SEO friendly website design should form the foundations of the web development brief right from the outset, as it is the site structure, and ultimately the content that will capture free organic web traffic and also mark the website as a potential authority site or an also ran.

The search engines don’t care about what the site looks like but so often this initial chance to make the best impact when the site first gets indexed is wasted, if all the search engines find is a poorly optimised site with scant regard paid to any SEO requirements or keyword capture.

Extra time and money spent on pre development SEO (which should at the very least include keyword research and SEO copywriting) gives an outstanding return on investment as invariably when the site goes live and gets indexed it will achieve a far better website ranking from day one and even in some cases a page one result straight away.

If a web designer is not promoting web design SEO as part of your initial client brief then they are selling not only themselves short but also the client, if they don’t have the expertise themselves then best practice would be to team up with a non competing SEO professional to give the client the best possible start and return on investment on their new website.

And to any business owners who are commissioning a new website, if your developer does not offer this service then find one who does as a little extra investment will see your website many months ahead of where it would otherwise be.

---

Author: Dave Talbot: Correct search engine optimisation is a vital ingredient for any websites success, and for new web development projects this is just as important as it is imperative to give the search engines the right initial impression of your website when it is first indexed. To find out more about the essential SEO services you should employ to give your website the kickstart it requires visit =>> http://www.advancedwebmarketing.co.uk

Most Important Components in Keywords Research

By SEO Sapien in Featured

Keyword research is like getting into the minds of your prospects. If you use an analytic tool to find out exactly what people are searching for in your niche, you can use those keywords to create content that answers all of their questions and relates to their interests. By satisfying the needs of your website visitors with informative content, you improve your credibility and thus boost your online business. Here are the 5 most important factors you should consider when conducting keyword research.

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

Home Newsletter Archives SEO Forums Webmaster Tools Webmaster Resources Link to SPN Top SEO Tools Website Templates SPN Partners Contact Us Privacy Advertise

ExactSeek SiteProNews MetaWebSearch SPN Videos EzineHub ISEDN DropJack NewWebDirectory.com SEO-News SEO-News Forums Blog Search FreeWebSubmission SmartWebGadgets