Friday, December 30, 2011

Promote your content

Content marketing forms the backbone of your SEO and drives most of your online marketing tactics in general. But creating great content is only half of the battle. It doesn’t matter how unique, informative, inspiring or useful your content is if no one sees it. That’s where social networks become incredibly valuable from a marketing perspective. Social media marketing thrives on fresh content and gives your social connections a reason to interact with your social profiles. It keeps your brand top-of-mind and present in their online social lives. Every time you share a piece of your content on a social network that creates a valuable inbound link for your site. Not just ways to drive traffic, these social signals are being used by the search engines to determine the importance of your content. The more times a piece of content is shared across various social networking sites the more valuable it becomes and the better it will rank in the long run. You don’t have to publish the whole blog post to your Facebook wall either. A small snippet and image is enough to attract the attention of your network. It’s a teaser to get them interested and give them a reason to head over to your actual blog/site to read your content.

Seo elements

The final key element of SEO is the acquisition of (votes of confidence) in the form of links from other relevant sites. The search engines are highly sensitive to these and reward them accordingly. Again this is a complex discipline in its own right and many businesses turn to specialist search engine optimisers. However, all of the techniques can be learned from online resources. Essentially linking must be about an exchange of value. One of the simplest options can be to trade links with other sites in an approach. Whilst there is a widely held view that the search engines are placing less weight on such links, this remains a widely accepted practice and really depends on the quality of the page you are linking from, the number of outgoing links it has already and whether you can be contextually linked from a body of relevant content. As an alternative, you can offer something of value to a third party in return for them linking to you, creating a much-coveted inbound only link. Under no circumstances must this be hard cash as buying links is regarded as an unethical “black hat” approach and is easily identified and penalised by the search engines. There is, however, nothing to stop you from offering some relevant free of charge content, many sites struggle to find the time to produce decent content and will welcome this. You should also find that seo optimizacija, over time, as the content on your site is indexed and ranked by the search engines, you will naturally attract links from other sites who consider your content to be useful to their own audience.

Affiliate Internet Marketing

Affiliate internet marketing is a further means by which you may be able to raise your profile in a cost effective way, especially if you negotiate a pay-per-action agreement as opposed to a pay per click. The latter can cost a great deal in popular categories, without necessarily getting results, whereas the former costs only when some agreed result occurs. Once again, there is endless information available on UK affiliate marketing programs and the financial risks can be minimal if properly managed. There are of course, other ways in which to promote your site including press releases and content syndication but the above activity streams represent a reasonably well balanced online marketing mix. Correctly planned and executed, the rewards can be considerable and in today`s pressured environment, although there are many excellent specialist providers in each area, the primary investment is that of time rather than necessarily vital operating capital which means you should always consider managing these activities in-house instead of automatically assuming it should be outsourced. You can even engage the initial help of an internet marketing consultant to create an internet marketing strategy for your business and to train your staff if necessary.

Social Media Marketing

Another broad discipline in its own right, social media marketing has now come of age as a valid element of the online marketing mix. Once again, keywords and decent on-site optimisation are vital in fully leveraging this channel. Other key success factors include identifying the right social media sites for your target demographic, and being seen to add real value. In achieving the latter, search the relevant social media sites, industry blogs and forums for questions relating to your industry, products or services. When you find relevant questions which will often be poorly answered, look for or add rich, relevant content to your own site which addresses the question and, if needed, expands upon it. Then post a summarised but useful answer on the social media site in question with a link to the relevant page on your site for further information. This helps all of the parties involved and establishes you as a credible and helpful industry resource. Although considerable time and effort is required, the brand reputation it can create is significant. You should also find that others will start to link to you as a valuable resource.

Paid Search Marketing

Here you are optimising your presence in the paid results which are listed alongside the natural results for given searches. Paid search Marketing offers the dual advantages of immediacy (in stark contrast with the long haul seen in natural search) and the opportunity to achieve presence for highly competitive terms that may be untenable in natural search. In a pressured economy, paid search campaigns must deliver very clear returns on investment and the costs of such campaigns must be managed in considerable detail. Keyword identification and good on-site optimisation are thus of equal importance in paid search. Understanding the correct balance of terms for which you wish your listing to appear is ever more important and the data you will have previously assimilated in optimising your site will come into play here. Some degree of experimentation is needed and if budgets are under pressure it may also make sense to explore lower volume, lower cost paid advertising options. There are also a number of free or low cost tools that will allow you to manage and track your paid campaigns in considerable detail across multiple paid search providers. The effort you made in optimising and enriching the content of your site will also ensure that you don`t pay a premium cost per click as a result of a so-called “landing page quality score” employed by some of the major paid search engines and will, of course, maximise conversions from the traffic driven via the campaign. One final key point here is to note the ad copy used by any competitors appearing above you in the paid listings. Google and Yahoo Search Marketing, are known to use the click-through rate as a major factor in determining your position in the paid results, rather than solely the maximum price you have agreed to pay per click - so the most effective ads will win.

Seo services

Search Engine Optimisation – From SEO consultancy to fully-managed campaigns, Optillion offers Search Engine Optimisation services covering every aspect of website optimisation.

Search Engine Marketing – Our long-term experience with pay-per-click-advertising and online shopping services means you’ll benefit from a wide range of expertise.

Social Media Marketing – Optillion works with a number of established and emerging social media platforms, and can help you use these to implement dynamic brand and customer relationship management.

Internet marketing services which can easily be managed yourself include the following four principal areas, the importance of each being determined by the sector in which you operate and the degree of competition. Perhaps most importantly for businesses under financial pressure, with the exception of paid search, the primary investment is time rather than money.

Statistics vary but there is a widely held suggestion that some 85% of all traffic to a site will arrive via the search engines, the most dominant of which is Google. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an ever more complex set of disciplines designed to achieve visibility in the `natural` or `organic` - in other words unpaid - search results in Google, Yahoo, Bing together with a range of smaller search engines.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Promote your website

You will finally know what it is you really need to do and what you need to do to develop a strategy to promote your website.

Let us first look at what it is that gets pages ranked in the top of the search engines. Search engines each have their own secret methods and algorithms for ranking websites with the overall mission to get the most relevant content in front of someone searching for particular keywords. There is an endless battle going on between the search engines to bring us the most relevant content and SEO experts trying to find loopholes to get their clients to the top. Although black hat strategies can work for a period of time the clever guys at Google will soon find out what you are up to tighten the loophole and ban you from the search engine. This is known as being Google slapped and can take a long time to recover from.

You need to have keyword rich, quality themed content. This does not mean a load of gobble packed with keywords. Quality means keyword rich content with well worded phrases and paragraphs linked to those keywords. The search engines are getting a lot better at reading pages and they are no longer looking for just keywords but entire meaningful content related to the keywords. Links to your site from other web pages. It is important to have links pointing to your website from other relevant websites. They will have no effect from non-related web pages. Although you will not lose marks for having bad quality links from link farms and other non related websites it will not aid your quest for SEO. Authority sites are the best form of links to have; sites that already rank high in the search engines containing your link will throw a lot of weight. Older sites will tend to rank higher because of the experience and durability factor, as long as they are active sites and updated they will rise in time. Remember that search engines want to deliver the most up-to-date relevant information so keeping it current is important.

A search engine optimization expert cannot assure you of a first page ranking, unless of course he works for the search engines and has control to put you there. All he can promise is his efforts in trying to get you on the first page. Don't believe that an SEO expert can get you 100 Page 5 links for $100. A single link from a site this high up will probably cost you $50 a month. The higher the ranking website you want to link from, the more costly it will be.

First up is the Site Explorer, which takes your URL and returns tons of information: Summary, Top Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Top Pages. Each section is represented on the results page, but you can click on the tabs and get more in-depth info if you like. You can choose the Fresh Index or the Historic Index and run the report on either the domain, the subdomain, or the page itself.

My favorite tool, the Backlink History, also shows up here in the results page but not in its own tab. Now, a note on the Fresh vs. Historic Index: the Fresh index gives you information from a rolling 30 day period and is more, um, fresh, while the Historic index gives you everything in Majestic’s history for a site.

The Domain Information gives you your Referring Domains and External Backlinks, so you can quickly tell if you have a lot of sitewides (if you have 10k backlinks and 10 referring domains, yes, you have a lot of sitewides.)

Your backlinks and referring domains are broken down into educational and governmental and the following information is displayed: Referring IP Addresses, Class C Subnets, Indexed URLs, Images, Nofollow Links, Redirects, Frames, and Deleted Links. You’ll also see a number called the Majestic Million which is a list of the top one million domains as rated by Majestic SEO.

The Backlink History shows your 2 charts: 1 is your external backlinks discovery over the past 12 months and the other is your referring domains discovery over the past 12 months. You can click on these two charts in order to go directly to the Backlink History tool and get more information.

The Top Backlinks area shows the Source URL, Anchor Text, Target URL, and Last Crawl Date.

For competitive analysis, this information can easily be used to see where you stand compared to others in your niche.

For potential link partners, use this data to identify the top pages on a site and go after a link on that page. With so much information, there are truly countless ways of using this data to help better your link building efforts.

Note: I’d love to include a screenshot here but the information you get takes up a large amount of space and I don’t think I can do it justice. Since you can see the Site Explorer for free, even if you can’t get all the detailed data, I’d suggest checking it out for yourself.

Next up is the Backlink History, which has been something I have relied upon many times (especially when clients are trying to convince me that they know their competitors aren’t matching/beating their own link building efforts.) You can again use either the fresh or historic index here and you can compare up to five domains. Currently, subdomains are ignored.

Monday, November 28, 2011

How do search engines rank web pages?

This section is a bit technical but it will help you to understand how search engines specify the position of a web page in the search results. Search engines use mathematical formulas to determine the rank of a web page. These mathematical formulas are called ranking algorithms. Although search engines don't reveal the exact algorithms. All major search engines use the same principle to rank websites. The exact ranking algorithms differ from search engine to search engine but the principle is the same. We'll use the ranking algorithm of Google as an example.


How does Google rank your web pages?

Google explains the ranking algorithm on their company pages:

"Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important.

It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

As mentioned in the quote, Google uses PageRank (which is a mathematical formula and not the same as the green bar in the Google toolbar) and hypertext-matching analysis to rank your web pages. What does this mean?


1. You need good links

To get good results for the PageRank factor, you need good links from related pages that point to your site. It's a simple principle: if page a links to page b then it is a recommendation from page a to page b. The more links point to your website, the better your rankings.

The quality of the links is also important. A link that contains the keyword for which you want to have high rankings in the link text is better than five links with the text Click here. A link from a website that has a related topic is much better than links from unrelated sites or link lists.



2. You need optimized web page content

While the linking concept is easy to understand, the hypertext-matching analysis factor is a bit more complicated. Google explains hypertext-matching analysis as follows:

"Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google's search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word.

Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."

As Google analyzes the full content of your pages you also have to optimize the full content of your web pages. It is not enough to edit your meta tags. You have to optimize all factors that can influence your search engine rankings.


One page is not enough

As mentioned in the explanation of Google's hypertext-matching analysis, Google also analyzes the content of other web pages on your site to ensure that your web page is really relevant.

That means that you must optimize different pages of your website for different but related search terms. The more web pages of your website are optimized for keywords about a special topic, the more likely it is that you'll get high rankings for a special keyword that is related to that topic.

It is not enough to optimize a single web page.

Why do you have to optimize your web pages?

Some people think that it is enough to submit a website to as many search engines as possible to get high rankings. Unfortunately, that is not the case. If you do not optimize your web pages, then you won't get high search engine rankings.


1. Not all websites can have high rankings

There are billions of web pages on the Internet. It's obvious that not all of them can be listed in the top 10 results on search engines. Search engines only list web pages that they find relevant to a special keyword. You must make sure that your website is such a site.

If search engines cannot find out that your website is about fishing equipment, they cannot give your website high rankings for that keyword. The process of changing your web pages so that search engines find them relevant is called search engine optimization, seo.


2. Your website must appear in the top 10 results

75% of searchers never look further than page one. Most search engines display ten results on the first page; and very few searchers click the links to look at the second page.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out: "Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results." Danny Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine Marketing Columnist, puts it out this way: "Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your website."

For that reason, search engine optimization is crucial if you want to be successful with your website.

Why do high search engine rankings increase your sales?

High search engine rankings are the perfect way to get more website visitors, more customers and more sales. Recent statistics show that having high search engine rankings is the key to the success of your online business:


1. Your customers are on the Internet and they have money

More than 1 billion people use the Internet (Source: Nielsen/NetRatings). Web users spend twice as much time online as watching TV (Source: Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society). Consumers spend more than $143.2 billion online per year.



2. Your customers use search engines

More than 80% of all Internet users find new websites through search engines (Source: Georgia Tech/GVU Users Survey). That means that millions use search engines every day to find websites.



3. These people are interested in your goods and services

Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated visitors to your website you will ever have. After all, they have taken the initiative to hunt for online resources on a certain topic. And then they clicked your link to learn more.

My blog helps you to get your website in front of these potential customers. In other words, this blog helps you to make sure that your website is seen by people who want to buy your goods and services.

The basics

Before you start to optimize your web pages, you should know some things about website promotion and search engine optimization. In this chapter, you'll learn how search engine optimization will help you to get more customers and more sales. You'll also learn which things you should avoid.

Indexing a web page

After a web page is crawled, the next important step is to index its content. The indexed web page is stored in a giant database on servers around all the world, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the key words and expressions that best describe the web page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information, but also generally search engines like google deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a web page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your web pages correctly and for you, to get some higher ranking.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database on the servers around the world. Since it is likely that more than one page contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string and algorithms. There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy od a content or a web site. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like a keyword density, internal and external links, description... That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string in order to et the best and relevants content.

What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Google or Yahoo etc. periodically change their algorithms (every month) and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes of this important algorithms. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to seo, if you'd like to be at the top of search results. The last step in search engines is activity and retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser, the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant web sites.

How Search Engines Work

Do you know how search engines work? The first basic truth you need to know about seo is to learn that SEO are not humans. While this maybe might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines like google view web pages aren't. Unlike humans search engines are text-driven to webpages. Although technology advances rapidly, also search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in great movies. Instead, search engines crawl the webmaround the world, looking at particular site items "mainly text" to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver quality search results that matters – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving all this data.

First step, search engines (like google) crawl the web to see what is there for data. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or googlebot, as is the case with Google. Spiders are follow all links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way in the world wide web. Having in mind the number of pages on the web (over 50 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared, or if an existing page has done some modifications, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two if there is no new data to crawl.

What you can do for better ranging of your website is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images or other things like flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered and also not indexed in the search engine, and ranking.

All seo steps are very imprtant, so be aware of what you are doing when you creat a new website.

What Is SEO?

Whenever you enter a search query in a search engine and hit enter you get a detailed list of web results that contain that query term. Users are normally tend to visit websites that are high at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the search query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites and web locations rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

SEO is a great technique which helps search engines find and rank for your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query you are entered. SEO helps you to get more traffic from search engines like google yahoo or bing. This seo tutorial covers all the important and necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization for your web site and - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines like google.