Social media optimization (SMO) is an important ingredient within your SEO and SEM campaigns. In the past, social networking sites were not much more than an oddity. Today, many have received enormous ranking authority from top search engines. If you are not leveraging these sites to improve your exposure and communicate with your niche consumer, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors. In this article, we will describe the influence that SMO currently has on search engine marketing. We will also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective social media optimization campaign. We'll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantages of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts. The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffíc. For years, gaining that exposure...

Continue reading Social Media Optimization - Shifting the Landscape of Search Engine Marketing

Creating an HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap for your website could be the easiest thing you do to improve your exposure on the web. For those of you who pay close attention to the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site, this could be the one thing that gets you onto the first page of Google's results. For those who don't devote too much time on the SEO of their site - this is a good place to start. By submittíng a sitemap to various search engines, you are telling them that you exist and what pages your site has to offer the World Wide Web. There are two types of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap provides a useful directory of all the pages that are in your site. While XML sitemaps play an important role in helping the search engine "crawl" the various pages of...

Continue reading Sitemaps and SEO

It is no real secret that a well written topical blog can significantly help out your website - so why aren't you doing it? The most common reasons I hear for not starting a blog involve a lack of time to write posts, and limited ideas to write about, but taking that extra time to get some useful content out there can do wonders for your search rankings among other things. An established blog that is updated regularly gets spidered by Google often, and increases the chances of new search rankings considerably. I have seen multiple situations where regularly updated blogs wind up ranking #1 in Google for relevant phrases literally within a couple hours of posting. It usually takes a well established website and blog to make this happen, but there is big potential if you do things the right way.While blogs work best if updated multiple times per...

Continue reading Blogging Your Way to the Top

A keyword is a simple word or phrase that is typed into the search engine by a user looking for information. For example if a searcher was looking for information on family photography tips, they might use some of the following common search terms. "family photography photography tips taking photos" If you used a keyword research tool like Wordtracker, you would discover that these phrases are very popular search terms. In fact, if you built a web page that focused on any of the keywords above, you would have a very difficult time ranking in the top 10 on Google's search results page? Why? Because the competition for general keywords can be fierce. Keyword competition is defined using the term Supply. If a keyword phrase as a high supply, it means that there are many web pages out there that are using this keyword. The higher the supply, the more...

Continue reading Using Long Tail Keywords to Your Advantage

Okay, you're the proud mama or papa to your brand new website. Now what? This isn't like the movies - just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. The Internet is a huge limitless space with ever-growing numbers of websites. You are just one small website among millions. How will anybody ever find you? How do you become visible? Right now, you just exist out in the web, untethered. You need to become visible when someone searches for you and one way to become visible to people is to become visible to search engines. And one way to become visible to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN is for your site to be tethered, or linked to other sites.If you've spent any time reading Internet marketing blogs you know that link building is a huge part of a marketing campaign. Backlinks - links that point to your...

Continue reading Free and Easy Link Building Tips

So much SEO.You might think, from all the buzz about search engine optimization - SEO - that it offers a cure for all the world's business ills. Somehow, SEO has been propelled from the backwaters of Internet geekdom into the forefront of modern business marketing. For example, if Google's own search results are any indication, the interest in SEO yields almost 50% of the interest in general advertising. That level of interest seems way out of proportion to the realities of business advertising.So Why All The Hubbub?The excitement seems to be around the notion that SEO means "free advertising", that it means, if you do it right, millions of people will be clicking through to your site willy-nilly having found you on some search engine and then will immediately do business with you. And behind all that excitement are thousands of overnight SEO "experts" that, variously, all claim to ......

Continue reading Finding Balance Between SEO and Non-SEO Traffic Generation

Let's face it, anyone can build a website. There are countless companies out there offering a vast array of web building solutions, some good, some great, and some quite frankly are a complete waste of time! But throwing together a website is really only part of the story, only part of the process. There are literally, hundreds of thousands of web pages, that will never be viewed and therefore stand no chance of commercial success. Some of those sites are relatively good; unfortunately their owners have misunderstood the process and have the cart before the horse... In the online world nobody just happens by your website, credit card in hand! If you've yet to build your website, or about to create a new site, stop! consider first exactly what you wish to achieve with that site, before you start. "Creating a website should follow a process proven to deliver a...

Continue reading Free Traffic and The 4 Vital Elements of a Successful Website

If you are online and are not already using article directories to promote your website, you are missing out on a free and highly effective marketing option. Article directories are great ways to draw traffic to your site without paying for advertising. However, to get real traffic to your site using an article directory, you must know how to use them correctly. What Article Directories Are Before you can use an article directory, you have to know what one is. Article directories are websites where thousands upon thousands of articles on just about any subject are posted. They are generally categorized to make it easier for readers to find information they want. They are also linked together, so a reader reading about "Hawaii travel" will naturally go from article to article on that topic. People can use the articles they find in the directories on their own websites, either for...

Continue reading Why You Should Use Article Directories to Promote Your Website

When you hear the word "bounce", you're probably more inclined to associate it with a checking account, not your website. But for those who study and understand website statistics, they understand that "bounce rate" is an important measure of your website's effectiveness. Bounce rate, simply put, is the percentage of people who come to your site, then immediately leave without viewing any of the inside content pages. Think of it like window shopping. Say you browse by a shop and don't really care to enter based on what you saw at first glance through the window. The window in this case is your home page. A bad first impression, or irrelevant content, can chase away a visitor and stop them from freely investigating the full content of your site. Google Analytics defines bounce rate as: "The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from...

Continue reading Your Website and the Importance of Keeping an Eye on Bounce Rate

"I want to be number one on Google for (insert hyper-competitive keyphrase here)." It's usually the first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization - a company wants to be in that coveted top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or specialty, when companies approach us with their desired goals for an SEO campaign, it's usually all about improving their rankings and positions...and often nothing else. Yes, achieving first page rankings or top spots on the search engines is an incredibly desirable accomplishment to many companies who want immediate and noticeable results. But with such a considerable investment in an SEO campaign, you'd think companies in need of search engine optimization services would also be concerned with their overall ROI, especially in light of the current economy. Vastly improved (or even #1) rankings are rather easy to achieve in an SEO campaign, even...

Continue reading Peeling Back the Onion: Metrics that Matter to a Good Search Engine Optimization Company