SEO: May 2009 Archives

Although on site optimization is only one part of SEO, it's still essential to ensure your site is built in a search-engine "amenable" way.

But is it necessary to adhere to every tenet preached by SEO experts? Are there certain processes or practices that you should definitely follow and others that are nice to have?
Companies should try to adhere to specific practices when building a Web site. There are three key areas to consider when optimizing a Web site: navigation/linking, design, and content.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3633547

Maintaining any healthy, balanced relationship takes a lot of work. There's the compromise, the willingness to do things for each other, and, of course, the endless honey-do list.

When you're talking about a relationship with the online users who share your interests, maintaining this balance is critical, takes effort, and relies largely on the reciprocal sharing of links. Those links need to be earned through commitment and value given first without expectations.

By linking to valuable content and driving traffic back and forth within a neighborhood of good sites, you can provide your users with an expanded universe of knowledge across a myriad of subcategories within your content area. In addition to nurturing the ongoing dialogue you strive to produce with your users, the creation of this neighborhood will establish you as a credible source for relevant industry information.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3633649

In its simplest form, SEO is a three-step process: break down crawling barriers to help the engines efficiently index a Web site; craft keyword-targeted content that appeals to search engines and visitors alike; and, most critical, practice link-building for targeted terms and phrases.

Social media optimization, on the other hand, is primarily about knocking down the walls of user-generated content to be a dynamic part of an online community. It's not a simple process and it takes time. Just because a "Digg This" button has been added to a blog or Web site doesn't mean every post or product is compelling enough to be considered socially buzzworthy.

Social media is just another liberating facet of content optimization tactics that can lure in thousands of new visitors and hundreds of inbound links. When it works, it's scalable. But it doesn't always work in a predictable manner.

See the full story: http://www.clickz.com/3633618

Buying into SEO is a difficult process. Without at least a basic understanding of SEO, it's really tough to tell the difference between someone who knows their stuff and someone who talks a great game without backing it up with results.

Many companies looking for SEO help -- even those with a decent understanding of SEO -- try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:

1. What is this firm going to do for me?

2. How much do they cost?

When you're hiring for a particular position in any business, you're looking at that individual's background. You aren't just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You're hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.

For some reason, these basic principles get lost for people when they search for an SEO company (or hire an in-house optimizer). By selecting an agency or employee purely on cost, you could be setting yourself up for trouble ahead.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3633648

I have a saying that I often apply to many situations in life: "Don't go to China to get to California."

How does that apply to online marketing? More often than not, we determine an online campaign's success through some high value action, like lead capture, video view, or something similar. But just as often, and even though these actions are at the heart of a campaign's success, those actions are hidden or put at the end of a process or banner.

 Critical messages and calls to action are obscured by creative, images, and messaging, and they're relegated to the back of the visual and click-path sequence. Yet those items' resulting metrics are the first thing people look at when evaluating a campaign's key performance indicators

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Online search is a critical component of doing business today, and not just because people need to find whatever it is you're selling. Search engines are the barometer of relevance in our digital society. If a Web site lands high in a search result, the collective feeling is that it must be important and relevant to a large number of people, lending credibility and trustworthiness to the product or service being offered.

Thus, visibility in search results reaps many benefits, not the least of which are prosperity and good reputation. I know very few companies that wouldn't want those benefits on their side.

See the full story: http://www.clickz.com/3633516