If you’re doing business on the Internet, SEO is an acronym you should know and understand. The letters stand for search engine optimisation, which probably doesn’t tell you a whole lot more than the letters. In a nutshell, SEO is the art of designing and modifying web pages that will be noticed and indexed by the major search engines so that when a prospective customer uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN to find a product that you sell, your web site comes up at the top of the list of sites that provide it. It’s a complex mix of balancing the various factors that influence how highly the major search engines rank your web site. To understand it, you need to understand what happens when someone uses a search engine to find something on the internet. Continue Reading…

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When it comes to making your web site visible online, how do you accomplish your ends? Do you submit your site to the search engines and cross your fingers? Do you pay for ads through places like google adsense? Do you spread information around town through flyers and word of mouth? While these might be effective on some small scale for your company, they are not the only marketing strategies for online companies. Search engine optimized content draws the search engine robots like a magnet, making your site rank higher in searches and drawing potential customers into your site. Continue Reading…

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Traffic. Blame it on the traffic.

People with web sites know how vital traffic is. The importance of attracting traffic to web sites is even more imperative when there is a product or service to sell. When traffic can generate increased sales, some mischievous web site owners – instead of adhering faithfully to search engine optimization rules – engage in search engine trickery. If we could call it search engine witchcraft we would. You wouldn’t believe what some people do to capture traffic. It’s like courting a lady with false, pompous charms. It doesn’t work. Continue Reading…

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To Market, to Market…
Choosing Your Own Internet Strategy

You’ve finally arrived! That web site you created looks like it’s going to be the belle of the ball. After a lot of editing, dress rehearsals, dry runs, and listening to your friends’ suggestions to tweak this and that, the web site has now come up from the ashes ready to do battle and promote your product or service.

Don’t rest on your laurels yet. You’ve only just begun. The next step is to roll up your sleeves, get down into the trenches and choose a marketing strategy or two. Continue Reading…

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What’s the Difference Between Pay-per-Click and Organic Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine positioning comes in two flavors – pay-per-click advertising and organic search engine rankings. Either one can get you a front page listing, and both will deliver traffic to your web site, but there are definitely differences between the two. Those differences may help you determine just which proportion of your internet marketing budget you sink into each kind of advertising or marketing efforts.

What it is:
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of paid advertising through search engines, most notably Google. PPC schemes allow you to pay for your listings to be displayed in the search results when someone types in particular keywords. Generally, PPC ads appear separately from links generated by organic search results. Continue Reading…

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Ensuring Your Website is SE Friendly

Web site designers and internet marketers are a divided lot these days. One of the primary questions in web site design has always been ‘Who is your audience?”. It’s a standard question for any marketer – knowing your audience is key to designing a site that will attract your market and get them to buy. The problem with that question when it comes to web site design is that there are TWO audiences for every web site – your intended market and the search engines. While your web site should be aimed squarely at the end user – your intended customers – approximately 85% of your customers will find your site through a search engine. That means that you need to make your web site friendly to the search engines as well as to the customers. Continue Reading…

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Search engine optimization has become a vital part of any sort of marketing or business on the internet. With millions of people daily using search engines to find information on just about everything under the sun, NOT being optimized is simply bad business. And while there was a time when do-it-yourself SEO was effective, that time has passed. There are so many facets to optimizing a web page for the search engines that it really does take a professional to do it properly. Choosing the right professional can be tricky though. There’s no accredited school of SEO, and no professional organization that certifies professionals in search engine optimization techniques, so you may as well be on your own when you’re searching for a good SEO firm. It’s not as bleak as all that, though. There are some tips that will help you find good SEOs and questions you can ask that will help you choose the best of them for your web site. Continue Reading…

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Five Questions to Ask Your SEO Company (And the answers you want to hear)

SEO has rapidly become one of the most recognized acronyms in the internet marketing world. Search engine optimization can help your site’s audience grow by feeding you lots of new readers from the search engines, and as much as folks would like to tell you that the search engines are only one part of your internet marketing strategy, they’re a pretty hefty part. The current estimates are that about 85% of all internet users turn to search engines when they’re looking for information, products or services. Continue Reading…

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Knowing if the search engine optimisation company you choose is doing a good job isn’t always as easy as it seems.

Many poor performing companies use “smoke and mirrors” techniques to try and baffle their customers to make it appear they are doing a lot, when in reality, they are doing very little. On the other hand, many great search engine optimisation companies perform fantastically, but their honesty, openness and their knowledge of what is actually achievable makes their clients think that they aren’t as good as others. After all, would you prefer just “promises of results” or would you prefer “actual provided results”? Continue Reading…

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Understanding how good a search engine optimisation provider is before you try them can be tricky. It is not always possible to judge how good a search engine optimisation provider is based solely on their website and the claims they make. You may find it useful to do more research to get the right company which can help you get the best results.

The primary test you could carry out to see how good a search engine optimisation company actually is could be to search for industry standard key words related to search engine optimisation and see where the companies rank on the search engines (you can find examples of key terms to search at the bottom of this article). If a search engine optimisation company is not found within the top 30 results, you have to ask yourself whether it is worth using the company. After-all, if they are not optimising their own site, can they be trusted to optimise your site? Continue Reading…

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