The Latest Changes to the Rules of Organic SEO

Organic SEO is changing even as we sit back and try to keep up. Google released a new algorithm called Panda in March, and has updated it several times since then — and Panda has changed everything. Until Panda, it was enough to follow a complex but definable set of rules regarding everything from keyword placement and density to creating a natural link profile.

Today, however, there is an art to SEO that simply didn’t exist before. That’s because Panda suddenly put rules in place that takes the “user experience” into account. For example,

EzineArticles.com used to look like this:

And now, it looks like this:

See the difference? The largest and most profitable article directory on the Internet did away with two navbars, and 3 different blocks of AdWords because Panda slapped them downward in the rankings until they complied. Their profitability is down because the AdWords are gone, but the other choice was to have it tanked completely because their pages simply wouldn’t show up on any search engine results pages.

Why did this happen? Simple: because according to Panda, your user experience sucks if you have a bunch of crap interrupting or distracting from your main content. There exceptions; Panda loves social bookmarking buttons and other ’share-me’ stuff and won’t penalize you if you’ve got it alongside your content, for example. But by and large, modern SEO means creating clean, easy-to-use pages just as much as it means creating keyword-dense, heavily-backlinked pages.

But wait — there’s more. Panda doesn’t just check your content pages for user experience. It checks every single page on your site and gives your entire site a weighted ‘usability score’ — which means that your entire site can get penalized if just one or two heavily-visited pages have a poor user experience.

What that means for SEO in the modern world is profound, because Google is now forcing us to juggle between satisfying the demands of Panda and being able to effectively monetize our sites — how easy that ends up being has yet to be seen.

Affordable SEO, Not Amateur SEO

Affordable SEO is the heart and soul of any startup web-based business. Small businesses don’t have the budget to drop vast quantities of money on pay-per-click marketing — though it is usually smart to spend a bit on it, just to get your income kick-started. In many ways, smart PPC management is the perfect compliment to affordable SEO — you get the income fast from your PPC campaign, you spend it maintaining that campaign and investing in some inexpensive but effective SEO, and eventually, the SEO will take over and the PPC campaign can be dropped.

That’s the fundamental essence of an expert route to success online, actually — find a way to make some consistent money up front, often with pay-per-click marketing or some other method of expensive but high-volume traffic generation, and then use the money you make to create backlinks and other SEO substructure to get your website on the stop of the search engine results pages.

The problem that many webmasters have is that they hire an SEO freelancer for pennies per hour on ODesk or Elance, and then they wonder why it’s been seven months that they’ve been paying for a service and haven’t gotten anything out of it. The answer is that they hired an amateur. It’s possible — and common — for amateurs to spend hundreds of hours doing what seems like valuable SEO work, building backlinks, posting on forums, commenting on blogs, and writing articles, only to get no results at all.

Professional but affordable SEO services might charge a bit more than a freelancer, but the results will be evident from the first week. Professionals know how to perform proper SEO, often utilizing ‘tricks’ that make every effort they put forth perform multiple functions at once — like giving your site a high-quality backlink while also driving traffic to the site to create sales, or writing an article and submitting variations of it in different places that all link back to the main article, driving the article itself up in the search engine results and making it’s effect on your website that much stronger.

The lesson here is simple: when it comes to search engine optimization, not everyone can afford to hire a huge company to work for them and make them king of the hill overnight — but everyone can afford professional SEO services if they know where to look, and anything less is just a waste of time and money.

Organic SEO is Like Organic Food for Your Website

Organic SEO is, at heart, the practice of creating the circumstances that will make Google and other search engines show your webpage on their front page. It’s an absolutely vital practice to the success of any long-term web-based business — in a very real way, if you’re not getting natural traffic, your website isn’t healthy — it’s on life support.

Like a healthy diet of organic food, organic SEO doesn’t have instantaneous effects — the goodness builds up over time. No one expects that if they stop eating Happy Meals and start eating right, they’re going to magically become perfectly healthy overnight — it’s implicitly understood that building a healthy body takes time and continuous effort. Organic SEO is exactly the same.

Similarly, like eating right, Organic SEO has some of the most profoundly positive effects on your business of any of the practices you could engage in. When you eat right and overcome your health problems, you wake up every morning feeling energized and ready to take on the world. When you have powerful backlinks driving your page to the top of the search engines, you wake up every morning to learn that you’ve gotten another thousand visitors, few hundred conversions, and dozens of sales overnight, and you’re ready to pay bills, set some aside for a rainy day, and go out for a night on the town.

For a small business SEO is even more important, because the budget is that much tighter and the profit margins are that much more critical. SEO represents that investment into your future, without which your business will be permanently hooked on ‘fast food’ — by which I mean paying for banner space, classified ads, and other expensive, less-focused traffic.

Like McDonalds, these alternate traffic sources are fast, easy, and they claim to be cheap — but in reality, in the long run, they cost you so much more than doing things right. Just like eating junk will eventually cost you more in medical bills than you could possibly save on your monthly food bill, paid traffic will always eventually catch up to you, wallet-wise, as your conversions suffer.

Far better to ‘eat right’ from the get-go, and achieve a truly healthy web-based business sooner rather than later.

SEO Guide – Benefits of On-page and Off-page

As netizens of the twenty-first century, we all depend on the internet for our day-to-day professional and social lives. We all are aware about the role the search engine plays in providing us information on a variety of topics. Owners of websites try out some tweaking activities to have their sites listed towards the top of a search list. This set of tweaking activities that allow a site to gain higher search rank is known as search engine optimization (SEO). The basic intent is to first identify a set of keywords that correspond to the product/service the website highlights, and modify the site according to some rules considered legal by the search engines.

Research suggests that 42% of the search engine users find their desired results by clicking the links in the first page of the search results. Only 11% turn to the second page links, and this percentage deteriorates drastically for the later pages. In this article, we will explore two important aspects of SEO – the on-page and off-page SEO.

On-Page Optimization

The on-page optimization activities involve modifications in various components of a web page. Some of these activities include—ensuring the presence of identified keyword(s) in the page title, Meta description, Meta keywords, header tags, anchor tags, body text (the actual page content) and so forth. The keywords should also be present in in-bound and out-bound links and Alt tags of images. The search engine spiders view websites differently than humans do. The search engine tries to find out the essence of a site by analyzing its underlying HTML code. If it identifies a string of words (keywords) spread across various HTML elements of the page, it attaches due importance to the page with respect to these keywords.

Off-Page Optimization

The off-page optimization involves a set of activities that promotes the site from behind the scenes. Stated simply, SEO professionals promote a site by back-linking to the site from various other relevant sites. If more links point to your site, higher importance is attached during calculation of the search results. It is to be borne in mind that both the number and quality of back-links matter. For instance, the back-links generated by link firms to a site can ruin the site’s SEO prospects. Even, the site can be blacklisted by leading search engines for practicing illegal SEO activities. SEO practitioners always try to provide back-links from quality sources (with good, relevant content) to the site being optimized.

Both On-Page and Off-Page Optimizations are important

In this age of competition, both on-page and off-page optimization are needed one after the other. If the competition for a keyword is weak, we can do away with the later; but such cases are extremely rare nowadays. With the continually changing algorithms of the search engines, both these techniques carry high importance. However, the on-page SEO activities need to be completed first.

Targeted Website Traffic – Discover the Secrets

If you are the owner of a business website, then you must learn Internet marketing strategies to get the most out of your web presence. If you have a site up and running, then you need steady web traffic to your site and maximum possible conversion of this “interested” web-traffic to “actual” sales closure. You need to have the right strategies in place to get people interested in your products/services offered through your site. In this article, we will explore a few of these strategies.

Common Pitfalls that Dissipate Web Traffic

At the outset, let’s have a look at some of the common mistakes that website owners commit that have a negative impact on web traffic generation.

• Some sites are loaded with jazzy banner ads that lack aesthetic sense.
• The content is sometimes written in corporate style that laymen often fail to interpret.
• The sales pitch is often made too quickly.
• Sometimes the enterprise owners remain anonymous, which raises the eyebrows of the visitors. After all, we engage ourselves in business transactions with people whom we know.
• Too many products and too many cross-links leave a negative impression on the visitors.

Steps to Improve the Impression of your Site

Here are some of the tips that can increase your site’s (and hence your products & services) acceptance to the visitors.

• Keep your paragraphs and sentences short, because people do not want to read long online.
• Write the content lucidly, so that every visitor is clear about your offers.
• Impart an attractive headline (if applicable, sub-headings too) within the page content.
• Do not use a small font size that readers find difficult to read.
• Stress on proper layout of the web page. Every element on the page should be properly spaced.
• Place the sign-in form link at a conspicuous place so that people can sign up easily.

Determine your Target Audience

It is surprising but true that many website owners do not have a clear understanding about the site’s target audience. One of the first things you need to determine is your site’s target audience. Determine the demographic aspects such as age, sex, race, and hobbies etc. Try to frame the idea of a person who is a probable candidate to buy the product. Once you frame your target audience, you are in a better position to position your site accordingly.

Targeted Advertising through Social Networking Sites and PPC Advertising

Today’s Internet activities are dominated by surfing popular social networking sites. People, mostly surfers of the younger generation, visit these sites to build and maintain social networks. They get benefited by a lot of stuff – from friendship to jobs. These social media sites offer targeted advertising facilities. By investing in this scheme, you can narrow down fruitless web traffic to focused visitors.

Another method of getting targeted web traffic is investment in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. It doesn’t involve a huge financial outlay, but helps you to reach your target audience quicker. It is in fact one of the most traceable forms of online marketing. People who are interested in your line of products will find the positioning of the PPC links highly relevant and would want to explore the sites.

At the end, we can conclude that getting web traffic is not as important as getting targeted web traffic. You need to do your basic homework first to identify your target audience, design your site accordingly, and invest in online marketing to pull targeted web traffic to your site with the potential of increased sales.

Can Google Buzz really help Search Engine Optimization?

All business sites are subject to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices these days. The main aim of SEO, as you are perhaps already aware, is to boost up your prospects of achieving a higher position in search engine rankings. People need information about products and services continuously. They go to search engines like Google and Yahoo!, type in one or more words in the search text box, and click the Search button. Within seconds a search list appears. The main aim of SEO is to tune a site to be search engine friendly so that it appears towards the top in the search list. An optimized site has a much greater visibility than a non-optimized site.

SEO practitioners continue to search for newer avenues to boost up their site’s SEO prospects. Many processes and techniques have become well-known and established today. But with the passage of time, newer things are coming up in the SEO arena. Some of these are quite nascent. Google Buzz, one of the latest social networking media, is one such tool that can influence a site’s SEO prospects.

What is Google Buzz Anyway?

Google Buzz the latest social networking tool offered by Google Labs. The tool was launched on 9^th February 2010. Google Buzz is expected to do what exactly Twitter and Facebook – the social networking giants do. But, Google Buzz doesn’t pose any immediate threat to these two social networking biggies. In Google Buzz, you can update your status and let your followers/friends know what you are doing. You can also share your choicest videos, pictures, and music with your friends. Google Buzz is easily accessible in our day to day lives as it can be accessed right from your Gmail account. Without going to the unique features that Google Buzz offers, let us concentrate on the tool’s SEO prospects.

Google Buzz and Its SEO Implications

SEO specialists are ranking Google Buzz high due to the implicit predisposition Google search engine is likely to have to its own new product. The ‘auto-following’ feature, by which you can grow your social networking activities quite rapidly from Gmail, holds great prospects in terms of increased visibility.

If you follow the behavioral pattern of Google search engine, you will observe that Google is now moving towards ‘real-time’ or ‘blended’ search. You will not only see the organic search list (the links that are listed free based on Google’s search algorithms) and the paid links, you will also see images, video, Twitter, MySpace and news posts in the list as and when they happen to match the search keywords. It is highly likely that Google will give importance to inbound links to your site from Google Buzz posts.

In future, these posts may likely be listed in the search list and may lead to increased traffic to your site. Google Buzz, being Google’s own baby, will naturally be in a more advantageous position in the area of blended search. In the launch video of Google Buzz, Google has already indicated that Google search engine will index Google Buzz posts. Thus, you can easily imagine the prospects Google Buzz holds as an SEO-enabler.

Importance of Keywords in Search Engine Optimization

If you are the owner of a business website, you will naturally want it to be
search-engine-optimized these days. The reasons for this is not too far to seek. Today’s technology-enabled people quite often seek information about products/services on the Internet. They use leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to locate the sites. With competition picking up, every website wants to have a share of the Internet pie. Every site wants to be listed towards the top in a search engine’s search rank. Here, SEO plays a big role. SEO slowly and steadily helps to tune your site to the expectations of the search engines. One of the basic and most importation aspects of SEO are finding the right keywords for your site and use it for optimization. In this article, we will explore the importance of keywords in SEO.

What are keywords?

Keywords are single or group of words that people type in search engine text boxes to find information about what they need. Search engine optimizers need to detect these keywords while optimizing the sites. Keywords are used in the content and other areas to make the site tuned to the search engines’ expectations. The more focused a site becomes to what people search for, the probability of its location by people through search engines increases. When people use these words or phrases in search engines, they get two types of search results. There is a paid search result towards the top and right side of the list. The font size and style for these paid links (merchants pay the search engines to list their links that are relevant to the keywords) are a bit different. The other category constitutes the organic search results that the search engine has deduced based on its algorithms.

Keyword Selection

The search engine optimizers need to choose the keywords with care. The keywords chosen should have a high search volume. If more and more people search with the keyword, greater is the chance of increase in your site traffic. If by chance the competition for your chosen keywords is weak (that is, not many sites have detected the search potential of these keywords), your chance of crawling towards the first page of the search results will increase manifold. There are many tools available in the market for keyword research. However, it is better to consult with an elite SEO marketing company to choose the apt keywords.

Keyword Frequency

Remember, search engines regard the “content of a website as the king”. The keywords should be carefully spread across the content. They should be present in the title and the body text. Be careful not to repeat the keywords too many times. The best approach will be to write the free-flowing content and introduce the keywords at some places (particularly more towards the beginning and at the end of the article). The keyword frequency (or keyword density) for single words should not exceed more than 6% in the page. This percentage will come down to 3% for keyword phrases.

Other Important Areas for Keywords

For the purpose of SEO, you have to look at several other places to distribute your keywords apart from body text and content. Some of these areas are ‘meta’ tags, ‘alt’ tags for images, ‘description’ tags, headings (H1, H2 tags), link text for outbound links, and so forth.

Thus, we can easily infer that keywords are the pillars of SEO. Unless keywords are not researched for properly and not applied to the content appropriately, your dream of making to the first page of the search list might remain elusive.

Mobile SEO – A New Era in Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing has evolved a lot. The latest buzzword in search engine marketing is mobile SEO. We all are aware about the indispensability of mobile phones these days. Mobile phones are not only suitable for making calls; they can organize our lives; help us to send messages and video clips; help us take an impromptu snap; and even help us read emails on the fly and search the web for information. In this article, I am going to give you a brief introduction to mobile search engine marketing.

Expectations from Mobiles

In the current scenario, companies can expect a lot from mobiles in terms of product promotions. Companies have started contemplating the launch of products and services through mobile phones in order to reach a much wider audience. Mobile applications having the power of generating mass promotional messages can be developed. Search engine marketing campaigns can very well be routed through mobile phones in order to get a wider coverage. Mobiles have huge potential as a marketing tool. Once you do a little bit of study on this, you will be convinced about the tremendous potential of mobile phones as a marketing tool.

Mobile Phone Couponing

Couponing is one of the simplest forms of mobile search engine marketing. Web marketers can include the couponing method in their search engine marketing campaign. The process of SEO through mobiles involve the use of short code SMS or MMS couponing and this makes the SEO campaign more effective. Remember, mobile search engine marketing is similar to any email campaign. The only difference lies in the choice of the medium.

Negative Pulse

Many companies are not in favor of mobile search engine marketing yet. They feel that people are more hooked to their computers than mobile phones. The context and duration of interaction of a person with the web in his/her PC and in his/her mobile phone are quite different and hence they do not see mobile phones as a viable option. These companies are also of the opinion that only a few people redeem their mobile coupons. To the contrary, clipped paper coupons fetch greater responses. All these observations are going against the usage of mobile phones as a search engine marketing tool.

The Reality Lies Elsewhere

Though some companies are not in favor of mobile SEO campaign currently, still the medium has immense potential. The shift from web SEO campaign to mobile SEO campaign is still in its nascent stage. But once the companies get the feel, they will surely be bent on using this new age widget.

It always pays to stay ahead. Those who can foresee and are ready to bring a paradigm shift in their online search campaign strategy early, will definitely stay ahead in the race.

Custom Business Blog – How to make it successful

Engagement into business today calls for the creation and upkeep of a website. As global citizens of the 21st century, we are aware about the extent of technological invasion in our social and private lives. The Internet plays a pivotal role in disseminating information and providing entertainment. If you want to survive competition, you need to reach out to more and more prospective customers today and your easiest tool should be your website. However, just hosting a site with some graphics and stagnant content will not help. You should make your site dynamic by putting in contents that are deemed to be useful by the readers. Appending a custom business blog to your site and refreshing its content periodically is a good idea to generate increasing web traffic. In this article we will discuss how custom blogs can be utilized to generate interest of your potential customers.

Advantages of Business Blogs

Some of the advantages of maintaining business blogs are:
• Custom business blogs can draw materials from existing marketing and communication plans easily.
• They are targeted towards building long-term relationships.
• Custom business blogs can gauge the expectations of potential customers.
• They help in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the parent website.

Prior Preparations

Don’t take a custom business blog lightly. If you want to make it a hit, you need to make some prior planning. Make a note of the following points:
• At the first step, spend some time in understanding your audience, what their expectations are, and what attractions can pull their attention towards your blog.
• Pay some attention to the graphical design of the blog page. Professionally elegant templates should be considered.
• Start researching on how to promote your blog for various search engines and on various web directories.

“Content is the King”

There is an adage in the web parlance that “content is the king”. Appealing graphics are not as attractive to viewers as quality, informative content. Remember that web surfers are always hungry for information. You should provide as much as information into your content as possible and periodically update your blog with newer, more relevant content.

Some Useful Tips

Here are some tips that can help you reap rich dividends out of your business blog:
• Try to include interesting stories that has some relevance to your product/service in the blog.
• Use news feeds that will give constant flow of informative content for your readers.
• Do not forget to update your blog regularly.
• In addition to the blog content, use images and video clippings generously. This will further highlight your product/service.
• Try to draw users’ participation through comments, posts, and surveys.
• Be careful in your approach to link your blog post with your main site. Do not use your blog page as a link farm. Try to entice the readers about the product/service you are offering and provide links to the appropriate web pages of your site. Do not force the links. Let them be naturally included in the content. Make your blog page search engine friendly.

Thus, we see that custom business blogs are essential tools for promoting your product/services online. They go a long way in maintaining a sustained relationship with your present and potential clients.

Video Billboard Marketing

With the Internet becoming one of the most profitable means of marketing, companies have begun to make great efforts to come up with unique marketing strategies that can keep them on the top of the search engine rankings. With millions of users online everyday you need to create a marketing technique that will help you attract your customers to what you have to offer. At Elite SEO Marketing, we help you to do just that!

Video Billboard Marketing today, is one of the best marketing strategies that you can come across. It has a huge impact on viewers and is much more interactive than a banner advertisement because it appeals to both visual and auditory senses. After all, the human brain is much more receptive to story telling and thus, when you use a video to market your product, you end up making the buyer more interested in your product through your story telling.

Why video marketing?

Indeed it is not surprising that the Internet giant Google decided to buy the largest internet-broadcasting site in existence – YouTube. Video directories like YouTube and Yahoo!Video are extremely popular and thus, if your company’s video comes up in their search, you are assured of great customer responses. After all, YouTube is believed to have a greater distribution power than even NBC, CBC and Fox combined – so you can well imagine what a well-placed Video Billboard Marketing strategy can do for your business.

We at Elite SEO Marketing help you to stay at the top of your competition by creating and distributing online videos about your company to all major video directories on the web. Since all search engines today pay a lot of attention to content coming from video directories, you can be confident that your video will feature in the search page if it is relevant. With each click you receive, the popularity of your website will increase and you will be able to feature in the top searches!

What kind of video billboard marketing technique is best for your company?

At Elite SEO Marketing we decide upon the video after reviewing the kind of services that you offer – that way, we can help you to come up with a marketing video that is more effective and made exclusively to meet the requirements of your business. You can make the video billboard to demonstrate the service you offer. Alternately, you can also use it to introduce your team to the clients in a unique manner that will catch their attention and interest.

The Video Billboard Marketing Strategy that we help you to create and develop at Elite SEO Marketing will ultimately help to generate interest in your product and your company as a whole, thereby driving the traffic to your website and increasing your client base.