Internet Marketing|Seo|Blogging|Website Traffic

Spiders are fickle; humans are not. Well, when it comes website preferences, that is.

Search engines frequently shift or tweak their algorithms in order to offer more relevant results for their clients—human beings. While most of search engine optimization efforts cater to search engine spiders through attention to various types of links, site structure, IP address characteristics, and the like, focusing on web surfers instead will allow any optimization effort to weather any shift or tweak well.

Granted, human online preferences do evolve, but they always demand quality content, attractive and clean design, logical navigation, and a superb user experience. Search engines are moving towards tracking user behavior as an integral part of their ranking schemes; thus, fine tuning a site with more consideration to Homo sapiens tastes rather than to digital arachnid druthers makes sense in the long run.

Here are ten tips, listed in no particular order, for human-friendly site design:

1. Always have the end user in mind; make them come back.

Site visitors may come, but they will not stay if they cannot easily find what they are looking for. If site visitors are industry insiders, use industry jargon. When normal people visit the site, do not confuse them.

2. Ensure that each page is narrowly focused on a certain topic—the title of the page.

When a page focuses on avocados, talk about avocados, not healthy food. Specific pages rank high on relevance and seem logical to site users, and they show up individually on result pages no matter how large the site is. Also, when pages with high relevance ranking are used in payper-click campaigns, text ads linking to them are cheaper.

3. Judiciously use fancy features like Flash and AJAX.

These features could take a long time to load in a browser, and no one wants to wait. Further, indexing spiders cannot read their content (well, at least for now text is much easier on spiders); what they cannot read is not indexed.

4. Structure the site with humans in mind.

Homo sapiens users are inherently lazy and expect a logical way to navigate a site. Use clear menus that are consistent throughout the site with in-text intra-site links when appropriate.If a site is sloppily organized, what does that say about the product or service the site touts?

5. Make indexing easy for spiders.

What bots cannot traverse, they cannot index. Spiders only persist when they confront obstacles if their programming is flawed, and search engineers are paid to program well all the time. They are not paid to program spiders to decipher or guess how they must navigate a poorly structured site .Further, a text site map does not hurt and keeps all pages on the site within three clicks from the homepage.

6. Use original quality content that is naturally created.

Keywords are important, but search engines condemn unnatural use of them (see 1). Make sure that they are in the page title tag, at least once towards the beginning of the content, and in the anchor text of links when applicable. Use words that are related, like synonyms, to the keyword. While “keywords” acts as a keyword, “keywords” too close to “keywords” and other keywords is
keyword stuffing.

7. Link only to relevant sites.

Search engines use links to travel the Internet, and they keep track of who is linking to whom. If a site is for a Realtor, it should not link to a toothbrush manufacturer’s site. However, while linking to competitors is not advisable, a Realtor’s site could link to complementary businesses like a mortgage company or to a recreationally-oriented company that specializes in the realtor’s geographic area. What links would site visitors want and expect?

8. Design a visually appealing, not overwhelming, site.

A professional design will reflect positively upon a company and its products or services and vice versa .

9. Update content logically.

Search engines like up-to-date content, but refresh only when it is logical. For instance, how often does a car change makes or models? Never. When does it change color? It can every so often. How long does it stay in a particular parking space at the dentist office? Hopefully, not very long.

10. Respond to visitor feedback and needs.

Why would they come back to a site that does not meet their needs even if it was ranked highly? .To best gage this offer contact information and perhaps a survey from time to time.

Steve Petersen

New terminology is making our online advertising metrics world a whole new kind of economy. This vibrant economy surely will result in progress on a global scale—exactly what the industrial revolution promised for the peasant economy nations of the 19th and 20th centuries:

click-through rate (CTR)

The expressed average in “percentage per hundred” for ad impressions that once clicked arrive at the destination site. The CTR does not measure people who failed to click yet arrived at the destination site later on as a result of seeing the ad. For this reason, many researchers tend to see this as a measure of the immediate response to an ad, rather than the overall response. In cases where no visual information is available from the ad itself however, CTR is then equal to the overall rate.

conversion rate

A percentage representation of how many visitors take a desired action that goes beyond simple browsing of the pages. Desired actions may include software downloads, newsletter subscriptions, membership registration, product sales or pretty much anything that goes beyond simple browsing. The largest influences on higher conversion rates are consumer interest, product attractiveness and ease of the process.

cost-per-action (CPA)

A payment model for online advertising; payment based entirely on actions that are considered ‘qualifying.’ Any action that results in fulfilling conversion rates can be considered a CPA action; the most common are sales and registration.

cost-per-click (CPC)

An online advertisement cost for every click made on a given backlink ad. As opposed to payper-click, this is the cost the advertiser incurs for every time her or his advertisement is clicked on to their destination site. Neither arrival at the site nor any purchases or other actions on that site is calculated in this cost.

cost per thousand (CPM)

The base price for every 1000 impressions of an ad banner that is seen or downloaded by a visitor. (M is the Roman numeral for 1000.) For example, if the CPM is $10 and the request is for 500,000 impressions, the final ad will price at 10 × (500,000/1000) = 10 × 500 = $5000.

customer acquisition cost

The final cost of acquiring new customers with current marketing strategies used by a site. This number is obtained by dividing the total amount of money spent on acquiring new customers by
the actual number of new customers obtained. Rebates and discounts are usually not included however this can be debated.

hit

Every time a file request is made to a Web server. This is a term that has been misleading in the past, instead of meaning “file requested from Web server,” it was thought of as unique visitors, page browsing or visits to a site. However, graphics can also be requested. Because a hit is merely the activity of requesting a file from the Web server, and every request is a hit, a single page view can represent several hits.

hybrid model

Any combination of online models for marketing payment, for example CPC and CPA or any other combination.

impression

A single instance of online advertisement displayed. The single act of displaying once is one impression on the navigator. Multiple displays are multiple impressions and so forth. One pop up or one banner on the front page are each individual impressions.

page view

Every request made to load a single HTML page. Also known as a page impression, these may or may not be of help to given marketing structures unless they generate a sale. If they do not generate a sale, they can even be considered an expense.

pay-per-click (PPC)

A more popular term for the receiving model of CPC. Any Internet structure that uses a CPC agreement between the impression ad and the destination site is using the popular PPC model as well; the difference is usually that emphasis on how to serve an impression more easily is given priority rather than the destination site itself.

pay-per-lead (PPL)

A receiving model for generating some kind of lead to potential clients. Any system that remunerates for contact information, such as name, address, email, or any information to produce a list of potential clients. Normally, PPL is only profitable when visitors themselves input the correct information voluntarily, otherwise it is usually fraudulent.

pay-per-sale (PPS)

Online model for every sale made on a site due to direct visitor referrals. In the PPS structure, not only must a potential client visit the site, but they must also buy a product if the advertiser is to make any money. Usually a percentage of every sale is the final remuneration of any PPS.

site stickiness

Total time spent on a site throughout a given period of time. Stickiness is a measure of how much time people spend visiting a site and how often they return. This can usually be seen in average minutes per month, other times it is measured in pages viewed per month. Minutes per month is the best indication of how sticky a site is or is not. The biggest advantage to this is having people see the same impressions a repeated number of times.

unique visitors

This term refers to those individuals who visit a given site or network at least once in a set time frame, usually thirty days. Unique visitors may be visiting for the first time or returning after repeated visits before the set time frame, but the usual method is counting the number of different IP addresses visiting per month.

website traffic

The amount of visits a site receives, usually per month. During the rise of the Internet Phenomenon, this was considered the most valuable tool for gauging a site’s success or failure, but now true success is usually defined through conversion results. Thus website traffic and conversion together equal results.

This discipline will continue to grow as new ways of doing business online are created and along with new terms will come a better way to describe exactly what we do as search engine marketers.

Aaron Pratt

Running your sites like you’d run a pub

What would you think your neighbors would consider the best pubs in your town? What do you base that on? I bet you thought of a pub immediately when you read that question, and you couldn’t come up with an answer to the second question that fast.

Now you should really get to know what makes a pub popular. It matters because what makes things popular isn’t really different in the online and the offline worlds. It’s all about creating buzz, making people talk about you (or link to you, the online equivalent) and making them feel something is happening that they shouldn’t miss.

You know what drives you out of a pub, don’t you? Consider some of the things that might:

· It’s empty.

· The music is not to your taste.

· The service is bad.

Let’s translate these things into a “things you should not do” list for site owners:

· Never officially launch a site when doesn’t have enough content on it.

· Know your readers26, don’t give them anything they won’t like, and please, don’t play music!

· Make sure your readers can find what they’re looking for.

Now that was easy, and you could probably come up with a lot more of those if you tried. You should also consider the other end, though: how do pubs get people into their place?

Some of the stuff I’ve seen pubs do:

· Give away free drinks at certain (unannounced) times.

· Arrange special events, like concerts, game nights, etc.

· Have so-called “proppers,” people hired to get people into a pub or disco, talk people into getting in, usually with incentives like free entrance and/or free drinks.

Now let’s translate these things into marketing actions you could do for your site:

· Give away stuff, or better, create a contest in which you ask people to create content for your site and award prizes for the best content29 (yes, this article is self-aware ;) .

· You can think of all sorts of special actions, but try to make it include interactivity. For instance: put a chat room up on your site and get a famous person to answer questions on a specific time. Or make a program available for purchase for a special price for just a short time. Announce this far enough ahead for people to be able to be there, and short enough for them to feel special for knowing about it.

· The equivalent of a propper in the online world is the paid blogger: buy blog posts. Pay people to blog about your site and create the buzz you need.

Now of course this is a thought experiment, but experiments like these should help you to do what any good SEO should do: think outside the box. The technical side of SEO is a necessary
“evil,” but in the end he who gains the highest amount of links is the one who wins any battle in the SERPs.

The only way to gain a lot of links naturally is being creative. Make people enthusiastic about what you’re doing. This doesn’t mean you have to create a full fledged community for each site you’re building. You do have to create some buzz though, and give people a reason to link to you. You can win even in the most competitive of SERPs by being creative, instead of spending large amounts of money on buying links.

And if you’re wondering where the free beer is? Well it’s at SES Chicago for all the judges if this article wins the contest.

Joost de Valk

If you are someone like me who has not written a line of code, but understands how critical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, then fret not. Help is at hand.

I have had the good fortune of stumbling across and being a part of the SEO industry and have found that SEO is more to do with good, logical thinking than any secret coding tricks.

Maximizing SEO return has two basic components:

1. Know the problem 2. Solve the problem

Know the Problem

By and large, the problems with SEO are twofold:

1. Search Engine Penetration

To be considered as a possible result for a certain query, the target page (not the site) must be a part of the search engine’s index. Lest assume that a target site xyz.com has 5,000 pages but when you run a check on Google (site:xyz.com), Google only displays 700 pages.

Clearly, there are 4,300 pages that Google is not aware of. And that of course is a problem.

2. Rankings on desired terms

Once a target page is in the search index, the next problem to solve in most cases is showing up too low for specific term. This is where there is no magic bullet. One of the best things to do is to take a close look at the links ahead of you and rationally ask yourself why are those pages more popular than your page.

Ranking is essentially a popularity contest with a twist. The more popular you are with the “authority figures/sites,” the higher up your listings will move.

Solve the Problem

1. Solving Search Engine Penetration

Search engines are on your side when it comes to reaching out to content that they have not had a chance to index. You should be let the search engine bots in and ensure that there are no technical road blocks in their way.

Removing these artificial road blocks is one of the best things you can do to get more pages in the search engines. To do that, think like search engines which can read only text and follow uncomplicated URLs and you will form the outline of how to address the lack of penetration.

2. Solving the Rankings issue

This is where you must be prepared to roll up your sleeves, test, wait patiently and then re-test based on your results.

Ask yourself if you were the searcher, what would you type in to get to the target page? Does your page have the complete information for what a searcher would be looking for? Not only must you pick the right words, you must also have the right content.

And of course think of how you can popularize your target page. Is there a study mentioned that would be picked up news publications, is there a quote that would be picked by news wires, is it
an interview with a celebrity, is there a calculator/tool that consumers will find useful and can be recommended by a consumer rights group, etc.?

With SEO as in life, it is the thinking and the planning that is the key. The execution is something that is done at the tail end of the engagement. If you have something that is worth sharing and people knowing about, SEO is not as hard and mystifying as it sounds.

Harmit S. Kamboe

Search engine optimization (SEO), is about creating a website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings. SEO is aimed at achieving the highest position in the organic listings on the search engine results pages. SEO is very useful for driving visitors through targeting the high volume, low intent generic phrases. To do this you need to define a list of keyphrases to work with. A website that’s optimized for search engines can reap huge benefits for the website and ultimately the core business. A key benefit of SEO is that it is relatively cost effective since there is no payment to the search engines for being placed there.

SEO is a long term strategy. To identify the correct investment requires a long term cost/benefit analysis.

The data below shows the importance of appearing in natural or organic listings—which receive between 60-80% of the clicks for a given search.

· 81.7% of users will start a new search if they can’t find what they’re looking for in the first 3 pages (typically 30 results).

· Over half of Internet users search at least once a day, while around half use search toolbars from one of the main providers, Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

· 42% to 86% of websites are found through search engines.

· There are 300 million searches carried out every day.

There are three main factors that determine the search engine ranking of a website:

· Site optimization

· Site popularity

· Link popularity

Site optimization is about placing the right keywords in the right places on a website and making the website accessible to search engines. Site popularity can be achieved through online and offline marketing and through link popularity —the more websites that link to a website the more popular it will become.


The number of searches by people trying to find information is still growing dramatically. Nielsen//NetRatings reported that there were 5.7 billion searches in the US in January 2006, a 39% year-over-year increase from 4.1 billion in January 2005. Furthermore, the number of searches in the US is more than 183 million per day.

SEO Quick Strategy

The motive of search engine optimization and submission is to attract targeted traffic by attaining very high positions in the search results using the most appropriate keywords relevant to the content of a website

The following six steps are guidelines for increasing search engine rankings:

· Search engine optimization strategy

· Identifying competition/related websites

· Determining target keywords

· Design for the search engines

· Optimizing page content

· Link popularity building

Step one: Planning/creating search engine optimization strategy Strategies should be created for each market and each interactive property. Every property should be looked at differently; broken down by its core sections and core user audiences. The goal is understanding how users interpret and find content on an industry-specific website.

Step two: Identifying competition/related websites Use the search engines to identify competitors. Search with the keywords that you expect users to use to locate your website. The websites that are ranked in the top positions are the competitors whom you have to beat to reach the top. This helps when trying to build links to your website.

Step three: Determining target keywords/key phrases Effective keyword phrases are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are three core tools out there that can help locate good keywords/phrases.

WordTracker

WordTracker is one of the most essential SEO tool for keyword selection and research which will suggest hundreds of related phrases based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it

Overture

Overture’s search term suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than WordTracker. It works in much the same way as WordTracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.

Google

Google AdWords Keyword Tool tells you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.

Step four: Design for the search engines Search engines scour the Internet looking for web pages to index, following links from one web page to the next. To ensure a search engine ranking, all pages on a website must be accessible to search engines.

Some search engines have problems with:

· Links accessible solely through frames, image maps, or JavaScript

· Very long pages

· Very short pages

· Flash pages

· Long JavaScript (JavaScript should be placed in an external document)

· Dynamic URLs

Step five: Optimizing content

The foremost criterion for a website to be able to attain and retain top search engine ranks for a long period of time is to have a great content. In the world of search engine optimization, content is king! A real long term solution that adds significant value to a website is to create firstrate content and give related websites a reason to link to a site directly.

Lack of content can be harmful

Quite simply, search engines love content—the more content there is on a page, the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 250 words, ultimately penalizing that page in the search rankings.

Step six: Linkability/popularity

Inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in search engines. It’s not just the quantity, but also the quality and click-through rate of links to a website which is important.

The objective here is to get descriptive links on as many relevant and highly trafficked sites as possible. This is first done by getting on the large web directories (Yahoo!) and then the local industry-specific directories. The next step is to identify and locate related websites (typically not direct competitors) to exchange links with.

Aman Kumar

We live in an incredible age. Information is obtained at the speed of light. Ask me anything and I will find the answer right now. Long gone are the days when you’d have to blow a ram’s horn at
the top of a mountain to send a signal. I can communicate with anyone right now. Anything I want to buy, learn, or compare—I can do it right now.

Our lives have been transformed by the Internet—an incredible knowledge base that contains every fact, product, invention, and concept ever recorded since the beginning of time. It enables, creates, and provides instant access to knowledge. It gives us the Power of Now.

There may be thousands of websites that contain the information that you seek, but only a handful will get your attention. These websites hold the power to influence and affect the way you make decisions. The people who deliver this knowledge to you are very powerful. These people are the SEO and SEM consultants.

Successful SEO/M consultants intricately understand the Internet. They know what creates a buzz, how to create the buzz, how to keep the buzz buzzing, and how to influence people with the buzz. They know what people want, need, love, and crave. SEO/Ms have incredible power because they create and promote the websites that attract visitors. These websites rule eCommerce; they affect opinions; they rule the Internet. SEO/Ms make this happen.

Successful SEO/Ms don’t just have their finger on the pulse of the Internet; they create the pulse that is the Internet. There are so many brilliant sites on the web that have penetrated my life and millions of others: Google, eBay, craigslist, Netvibes, Snapfish, MySpace, Zillow, Blogger, forums, blogs, news sites, cool tool sites, and so much more.

I remember the first time I performed SEO on a site a three years ago. I did one little thing—I changed the title tag of one of my client’s sites to include the keyword phrases we were targeting —”New York Caterers” and “Catering New York.” A few weeks later, the site ranked #3 for those phrases in Google and #1 in Yahoo. I just could not believe it. I was so surprised, I sent an email to Jill Whalen asking her how it could be that I got a site to rank #3 in Google when all I did was change the title tag. That was my first taste of SEO, and it was very powerful.

As a web designer, I know that a great web design won’t get much visibility without SEO/M. A site needs a pleasant design, great content, intuitive navigation, good usability, graphics, and cool tools to get people to stay and return, but it needs SEO and SEM to get found and thrive.

The Internet has transformed our lives by giving each person the power to make a difference— whether it’s by participating in an online community, or writing a blog, or creating a website with a cutting-edge way of getting something done, or a new way of presenting information to make a visitor’s experience more meaningful.

A great website with great SEO/M is a powerful combination.

Risa Borsykowsky

What does ‘SEO’ mean? Search Engine Optimization, duh. No, no. What does it mean? It means ‘to optimize a site for search engines.’ I guess that’s pretty close, but going with that thought alone can actually land you in a bit of trouble.

We often talk on SEO and what the searchers are looking for, how they are acting, how to optimize a site, etc. But we often neglect a very important idea. Simply optimizing a site for the search engines isn’t really the best idea. If we do that and that alone, then we won’t likely find success in our business endeavor. We would then neglect our clients’ needs and/or any help that we might provide to the online community.

Optimizing a site for the sole benefit of the search engines could result in spam or content that sounds too repetitive because we are trying to make sure our keywords are on the homepage a certain number of times to achieve ‘density.’ We may end up getting tons of links to and from areas that are less than acceptable because we keep thinking that ‘Link Popularity’ means ‘get as many as we can.’ We may end up in jail because every time we walk into Albertsons we keep hearing ‘It’s your store.’ So, what should we be doing?

Yes, SEO means ‘to optimize a site for search engines,’ but we should be thinking of it as ‘optimizing a site, so as to show search engines what the site is about and how it can help the online community/consumer.’ If you have relevant copy on your site, you will likely be using your desired search terms sufficiently anyway. And with the ever growing use of Internet , search engines
will pick your site out. If you have relevant and helpful text on your site, you will get quality inbound links from other sites simply on merit. If you just remember that it’s just a jingle, your hands won’t become idle and attempt to steal your favorite candy bar.

In closing, we shouldn’t be making and optimizing sites for the search engines. Do it for your visitors. So what if Google doesn’t give you the best ranking? Given proper content and quality, you will get the visitors. Yes, optimize the site for the crawlers. Make sure you aren’t doing anything black hat. Correct errors. Clean up the code. Make proper use of header tags and meta tags. But do this for your visitors, not the search engines. The search engines will love you for it.

Josh Garner

Everything you need to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you learned in kindergarten. Really. You may already know much more than you think.

The armies of programmers that create search engines work very hard to get computers to do a bad job of what you do in the blink of an eye: make a judgment about a web page that makes sense—common sense.

This article introduces the basic ideas behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO), using concrete examples to reinforce these principles. It also aims to teach you the information needed to make informed SEO decisions on your own.



In the beginning

First, a little history. Millions of years ago dinosaurs roamed the earth. A hop, skip, and a jump later, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was invented. Believe it or not, HTML, was not meant to be another confusing programming language (if you do understand them, bravo). Rather it was meant to be simple to understand—a layman’s language, so simple that it’s not even programming, it’s just “markup.”

Now, if you view the source code of some very popular sites (e.g. eBay or Amazon), things will look pretty confusing.

How can a computer language meant to be simple become so horrendously complex and confusing? What happened? How did we stray from the path of simplicity, elegance, and beauty?

Well, we Web developers happened. And we happened in the worst of ways. We decided that we wouldn’t just use HTML to mark up our newfangled hypertext. No, we used HTML as a Swiss Army Knife and tried to create pixel-perfect layouts with a simple markup language. Well, it did slice and it did dice, but it made a horrible mess. We tried to control the look of a website by throwing embedded tables, along with other atrocities into the mix. The jumble of unmatched parts would pile up until we got what we wanted or the computer started to smoke. My current score: smoke, 2; what I wanted, 13.

Yes, in the end we got a site that worked. But we ended up sacrificing our soul—the original ideal of clean and simple HTML—to do it.

HTML+CSS+SEO = The way things ought to be

Fast forward to present times and we find a culture that can, sometimes, learn from our mistakes.

My most important golden rule of SEO is: “Make each webpage with your user in mind, and the search engines will follow.”

Search engines try to give results that make sense. So make your web pages make sense! While the basic rule really is that easy, there are some ground rules to keep in mind which may not be obvious.

First, remember that computers are dumb. Even the best search engines are stupid compared to a human. You need to make it easy for them, speak their language. This means you should use meta tags with keywords and descriptions; make your title relevant, add alternate text to links and images—basically take every chance to say to the robot spider, “Here, this is what that means.” Each of these elements adds extra information which may be obvious to a human but is very important to a dumb computer program. This text may not be visible to the user, but you should pretend that it is. Design your HTML source code as if that is what the user saw.

Second, this advice applies to white hat and not black hat SEO. Black hat SEO uses tricks to fool the stupid computers. This article is meant to help them instead.

What this all means in practice

When the world inherited CSS, some designers used it to make sites pretty again. But just as important, the separation of content and presentation returned HTML to the path of simplicity and beauty.

SEO is the final element of the new equation of elegant web design. SEO helps users and robots to navigate the maze of a website’s information architecture. SEO provides signposts to guide a user forward and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to show them the way back.

What the heck does that mean, exactly? Some examples will help this make sense.

The URL itself

Consider these two URLs:

http://www.domain.com/cgibin/store.cgi?section=Shakespeare&id=4867635 and

http://www.domain.com/Shakespeare/Romeo-and-Juliet/

If you were at a library, and these URLs were, oddly enough, the titles of two books, which would you be more likely to pick up? The second choice is much more natural, sensible, and informative. The URL is a label, and it should make sense. The second choice is also easier for the user to remember, write down, and tell a friend about. Can you remember the Dewey decimal number of the last library book you borrowed?

Title tag

The title tag is one of the most heavily weighted on-page SEO elements you can design for. And some people don’t even fill it in.

As an example, the title tag on this page is well optimized:

Make your title simple and explain in one line what the page is about. This is best for both the search engines and your users. I’m starting to follow you, but why does all this matter?

It is important to follow the golden rule because if users find your pages clean, on topic, and helpful, they might return. Better yet, they may link to your site from another web page. This is called a backlink.

Building backlinks is an undervalued SEO concept that is overlooked by many organizations, and it’s also a main factor for determining search engine results today.

By designing your website with the user in mind you are killing two birds with one stone. You make it easier for search engines to read through and understand your site. Also you begin to build a site presence through backlinks.

These relationships are essential for any modern site. Just as in any other business, happy customers are the best kind. So work for your customer, not for a stupid computer.

James Bowden