The long copy versus short copy debate

There is the camp on the hill that say “long content is better”. They really don’t understand what they’re talking about in my opinion. What they’re doing is looking at other people’s (often good) results and making assumptions about the technique. It’s never about length of copy, it’s always about whether you have communicated your offer to your audience effectively and answered their wants and needs. That’s all. If you can do that in one line then why write a saga about it?

There are some equally ridiculous theories about short copy and using embedded links within page content to get people to move through your website and be subjected to more short pages. People mistakenly assume that if I have to scroll down a page that it’s bad from a usability perspective. Let me ask those people, when was the last time you went to a website page you were really interested in and stopped reading because you had to use the scroll bar? It simply doesn’t happen. I know we’ve measured it.

So who’s right?

To quote a line from Winston Churchill, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”. The following six tactics are used by successful marketers whom advocate writing long copy, embedded linking or a mixture of both. The main objective of these tactics is to get you to point 5 with a plan of action to begin writing your content so you can then do what Winston suggests, measure the results.

1) No-one sells your product or service better than you do.

The fact is you do. The first lesson of selling online is to always listen to why the guy selling the product or service is in business in the first place. I have worked for people who sell embedded hardware the size of a matchbox that works with a GPRS router (of course you know what that is don’t you?), to people who sell nebulizers (an easier one) and I knew nothing about either of those products when I started. By the time I had finished it was a different matter, because they taught me everything I needed to know. As a direct marketer it’s what you need to do with each product or service, learn about the target market, the product or services features and benefits. Then you need to learn how best to communicate those benefits to the target market.

2) Target your market.

By doing this you find out how best to write for your audience. The best way I can describe this is with an example. One recent client of mine sold niche clothing for women in New York. She knew her target market was women, young fashionable women in fact. Is that going deep enough? I told her it might not be. I said that a girl in her late teens might be affected by the description of a fashionable dress in a different way to a woman in her later 20’s. So who really is the target of that dress? Who buys it? Is it the young lady persuaded by “suave chic and sophisticated for a night out on Madison Avenue” or is it the young lady persuaded by “Cool, hip and sexy, a fashion statement that screams NYC”. Work out who the people are within your target group and write your copy and content for them. Rarely does a product or service have only one specific reason to be bought by one specific type of person.

3) Define your product or service features and benefits.

A feature is tangible. It’s evidence, it’s true and not disputed by anyone. It’s the steel case on the embedded hardware, it’s the weight and size of the nebulizer, it’s the acrylic material in the dress. Features of products or services are not what you sell to the customer, you might list them, but you don’t sell them. It’s hard to sell acrylic to a young lady but you might list it so she knows she won’t be allergic to the material (or knows that she is allergic). Benefits on the other hand are what you do sell. The weight of the nebulizer (12 oz) means the product fits into your brief case, purse, diaper bag or back pack. Notice how you’d communicate with 4 audiences there, the brief case for the business man, the purse for the housewife, a diaper bag for the mother and the back pack for the outdoor traveler. Again this targets people within a target group. Asthma affects all kinds of people, so while asthma sufferers are the target market, you’re communicating the benefits to as many different people within that market as you can.

4) Define potential psychological barriers and tactics.

Your people profiles at this point will require that you overcome different objections. Some will want to know how the service or product works and you need to answer their questions. Some will want to know why they should buy from you and not your competition so you need to show your differentiation. Some will need to know whom else you’ve worked with because they don’t want to be the “guinea pig”. Others will want to see more of what you do and see some 3rd part evidence maybe. You’ll need to offer guarantees, re-assure people about what happens when things go wrong. There are all sorts of psychological barriers to a sale that need to be thought about and catered for within the content. You can also use psychological tactics to help you, like instilling urgency in the buyer, or offering bonuses and incentives to persuade your visitor to take action.

5) Only now do you begin to write.

Once you have completed steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 you have the base material you need to write compelling content. How you break it down depends on what method you think will work best and like all good direct marketers you should measure to see which has the best outcome. If it’s a simple book sale then you might test a single sales page with a single call to action. If it’s a difficult to describe service with lots of reasons to back out or there is a whole plethora of products then embedded linking is not only necessary it’s very useful because you know what variables you can test.

6) Measure the results.

When you’re talking about websites you can measure everything. Copy and content changes can be measured on a page very accurately. You shouldn’t just look at improvements in conversion (for a sales page for instance) but also improvements in the bounce rate, the click through to the page (if embedded links from other pages are used), as well as time spent on the page. The reason is that these (in this very simple example) three key performance indicators (KPI’s) will affect that conversion rate. The lower the bounce rate, the better the initial reaction to the page and audience relevance. The better the click through to the page means more exposure to the offer. More time spent on the page means more chance that the offer will be accepted. Improving those KPI’s will increase conversion overall, it’s why they are called ‘Key’ because they affect your bottom line.

In Summary

The point of this article is to illustrate that these so called “two techniques” when done correctly are simply the same thing presented in a different way. The direct marketer who writes a single (often long) page usually addresses all these points and a lot more that is out of the scope of this article. Similarly the guys that swear by embedded linking and doing it well also address all of the above in their content. They are both doing the old as print marketing technique known as direct marketing, except that they’re using it in different ways.

Creating a website that achieves a level of increasing and high traffic is very difficult. To reach this goal, many people institute a project of SEO, in which, they use article distribution, forum posting, link exchanges, blog writing, and much more. Although all these strategies are different they all have 2 things in common. The first of these 2 similarities are that they are both tactics of utilizing SEO and the second of which is that they create links to your site. This is the key in determining different reasons for using SEO as a method of advertising.

The main reason for using search engine optimization is to get your site to the top of a search engine and perhaps all the search engines for a key word or phrase. Unfortunately, this is much easier said then done. For the most competitive words and phrases, it can take months and even years to get your site to the top of a search engine for a key word or phrase. The reason for this is because most internet marketers that are knowledgeable about SEO know what it takes to get to the top of search engines and they can manipulate the search engines to get to the top. In most cases, those Internet marketers have been aware of these tactics for years and the sites at the top of many phrases have been around for a long time, so long that no site can every beat it unless they spend more then most people can afford.

As I mentioned before, All the tactics used to optimize a site create links to your site. This is, in some cases, worth more then any other reason for SEO. Some sites that are at the top of search engines are so hard to beat that you have to give up or wait years to pass the time requirements to reach that spot. What do you do if you are stuck in this position. what do you do if you want to have a site at the top the search results that are impossible to reach. This is were the other reasons for using SEO comes in.

Page rank is a rank that Google gives to all websites. This is not to be confused with the rank of a site on a page. This is a measure of a pages worth based on the amount of links pointing to it. I hope it is all coming together because this is where anyone can take a website and turn it into an income producing machine. The way you calculate page rank is by seeing the mount of links to a site. Other webmasters yearn for a link on a website that has high page rank. This is where an opportunity comes into view. A site with high page rank can sell ad space thousands of dollars a year. That is where the money comes in for those who can not beat the top website on the search query or when they are on there way to that key phrase.

When it is decided that SEO is going to be used to increase the value of the adspace on the site, large amounts of traffic must be generated. This can easily be done by optimizing a site for many different words and not for a particular key phrase. With this strategy, a website will gain traffic from search engines for many different phrases and words that are related to the topic. This will give you massive random traffic and will allow you to well ad space to other webmaster because you will have inflated amounts of traffic.

Optimizing a website for many different words is not for all sites and it does depend on the nature of the site. If an artist wants to paint portraits of families and they want to make there presence known online, this strategy is not for them for 1 reason. This artist needs to reach people that live near them and they need to reach a single audience. To do this they must utilize the more common use of SEO, which is to reach the top of search results for a certain phrase like “new york portrait artist”.

The method of SEO will change the way you use search engine optimization for your site. The decision must be made before SEO is begun to know how to use it. Are you going to use SEO to get traffic for ads or are you going to use SEO to get very targeted audiences. One is for a specific service and the other is for a more general an loose topic that allows you to be more free in your content. The choice is for the webmaster. This decision will determine if sales are created. Expand your knowledge about SEO and see more then just getting to the top of a search engine.

The question is can we make both the saerch engine spiders and us happy? The answer is definitely a “Yes” provided that web designers can follow certain rules when designing web pages. They need to step out of their comfort zone and learn abit more about new web technologies.

Domain Name and URL Naming Convention

Having a proper domain and url name is quite often neglected. Many search engines actually put some weightage in the way you name your domain or url files. You will definitely want to include some juicy words in your naming convention. For example, if you site is about website critics and your url is www.sitecritic.com, this will definitely be better than a domain like www.bluecatfish.com. The same principle goes for hyperlinks. If you have 2 words as key words, you can use an underscore “_” or dash “-” to separate them.

Title

Do not fool around when writing the title. From my experience, this is the most important part of your webpage. Many designers like to put special characters such as ” * “,” | “, ” : ” or ” [ ] ” in the title to make it look unique. If you really want to make your webpage special, I advise you to do it else where such as in the body of the HTML document. You should include your keywords in your title. Like the previous example, if your web site focuses on website reviews, make sure you have the words “Website Reviews” somewhere in the title. Noticed that “WebsiteReviews” is not the same as “Website Reviews”. Spacing is important.

When writing the title, try not to write more than 8 words. There are no hard and fast rules on that but the fact is that more does not mean good. In fact, the more you write, the more your keyword density will be diminished. If you keep repeating the same keyword in the title, search engines will see your site as spam and you will be dead in no time. For example, a title like “Sitecritic Web Reviews” is much better than “Sitecritic Web Reviews, Internet Marketing, Web Design Ideas, Internet Directories, Budget Web Hosting, Melbourne”. I will have to stress again, do not fool around with your title.

Meta-Description

After the title tag is the meta description tag. Many people argued that meta description is no longer important. Based on my experience, they are still relevant in SEO rankings especially if your website is new. The principle in writing the meta description tag is the same as the title. The only difference is that you want explain abit more about the services that you provide in a friendlier format. You will also want to include your keywords in the meta description.

Menu, Content and Links

You should not use any javascript menus that hid the urls. Many javascript menus are fancy but actually not SEO friendly. What ever technique you are using to create the menus, make sure that the “a href” tag is visible. You might also want to include a variation of the keywords in the menus, links or text. Like the previous example, if your keyword is “Web Site Reviews”, you might not want to use the same word over and over again. You can vary it by using “Professional Web Reviews, Reviews of Websites, Site Reviews…etc”. Varying the keywords makes your content more interesting and is good for SEO as well.

When writing the contents, try to put the keywords in different areas of the document. Use tags like “b” or “h2″ to make the keywords stand out. Avoid urls that say “click here” or “view”. Though often used, they are not advisable for SEO purposes.

Text links are stonger than image links. It is therefore not advisable to use images as the main navigation menu throughout the website. If you would like to incorporate images in the user navigation experience, you might want to consider separating the text from the images. This can be achieved easily using CSS or the background image option in the table or td tag.

Images

Unlike many Search Engine Experts, I strongly encourage the use of graphics because I am passion about Web Design and is sad to see so many websites that are well optimized for search engines but look crap on screen. You need to balance between the amount of graphics used and downloading speed. Like I mentioned before, if your header banner or important images contains text , you could split up the text and use the images as a separate background or floating layer. That way, you can make the image size smaller and also make the text visible to the search engines. Transparent gifs are very useful for laying over other content or images. Appropriate use of jpegs and gifs can also cut down loading time by alot.

CSS Technology

CSS helps you to cut down your tag and gives more room for the spiders to read your content. The problem with CSS is that it is not as straight forward as tables. At the moment, CSS is also inconsistent in different browsers, so before you publish your web page, you need to check the layout in different browsers. I am actually not against designers using tables especially if they find the time spend in creating a full CSS site not justifiable. The fact is that there are still cases when using CSS is not advisable. An example is when displaying tabular data; Tables still excel in displaying tabular data at the moment. Unless you are using complex nested tables, the table, tr or td tags should not pose too much of a problem for the search engine spiders.

Conclusion

Web pages should not be boring and web designers should not bow down to the Google revolution. A well designed site combines both form and function and yet, still able to be search engine friendly. I strongly believe that this can be easily achieved if website designers are able to follow very basic rules in designing their web sites.

Fact #1: SEO can be complex if you want to compete with the big guys. SEO is all about outperforming your competitors. That means the less competitors the better your success rate will be.

Fact #2: SEO can ban your website from the search engines if you break the rules. I will not tell you the dark tricks of SEO that will ultimately get you on the blacklist of the search engines. This way you will not be able to break any rules and keeps you out of trouble.

Fact #3: SEO can be simple and effective. I will show you a few easy steps to increase the ranking of your website. You will be amazed about its simplicity.

Ok, here we go.

1. Choose your niche keyword phrase

SEO is all about being a little bit better than your competition on a single keyword phrase. You need to focus your website on a single keyword phrase. 2 or 3 words in a keyword phrase work best. Make sure that people are actually searching these phrases as well. Wordtracker and Overture are just two methods out of many to check for usability. If you optimize your website for the wrong keyword phrases you’re wasting your time.

2. Set your html tags right

Your keyword phrase has to be in the –title tag. You can ignore the keyword and description meta tags for now. They are not as important anymore as they were a few years ago. Make sure to have an h1 tag with the keyword phrase. Avoid having an h2 tag with the keyword phrase. Take control over the look and feel via cascading style sheets (CSS). This way it is much easier to control your website’s appearance and keeps the html code clutter free.

Sprinkle your keyword phrase throughout the webpage. Place your keyword phrase 2-3 times closer to the top, once within the first 25 characters and once in the last 25 characters of your text. Change the style variation of the keyword phrase. Make sure you have at least one underlined, one bold and one italic variation of the keyword phrase.

3. Check for errors

Spell checking is a must. Search engines don’t honor spell errors on your webpage very well. Check for broken links as well. Nothing hurts your ranking more than broken hyperlinks.

Well, here you have it. The 5 minute drill to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Ok, I admit it, it’s not this easy. On-Page SEO is only half the battle, maybe only one third of the battle. To really dominate the search engines you need to practice a well planned and executed linking strategy. This is also called Off-Page SEO. Off-Page SEO is your most important task as a webmaster.

The details of a successful Off-Page SEO strategy are too much for the content of this article. But here’s a little example on how effective Off-Page SEO is: Logon to Google and type in the keyword ‘click here’. To your surprise you will see that Adobe holds the #1 position for this keyword. Now analyze the Adobe page for a minute. There is no ‘click here’ anywhere on the page or within the html code. How in the world can they be #1 for ‘click here’? Millions of other web pages have a link to Adobe with the title ‘click here’ to download the Acrobat Reader. That’s why.

Nothing makes me happier than if you can improve the search engine ranking of your website by just a few positions by following my simple advice. 90% of all webmasters don’t bother and that’s the window of opportunity for you. Of course a short article cannot explain the total picture of SEO. However it is meant to give you some ideas on how to approach SEO. Have fun while practicing SEO with your website.

1. Home page is necessarily a higher PR than the rest of the site.

2. Older pages get highest PR.

3. Google considers “on page” factors or contents to judge PR.

4. Pages with most external link backs get the highest PR.

To justify our assertions more rigorously, let’s first quickly introduce the Page Rank Calculation.

Page rank measures the importance of a page using the Google page rank formula: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

The page rank shown on a tool bar is actually a scaled number between 0-10. The scaling is logarithmic to accommodate the widely different number of IBL’s, where a linear scale would not convey the information appropriately. While we are not privy to the log factor “lf” that Google uses for it’s Page Rank tool bar normalization, we take a stab at the number by making a few assumptions. We assume that Google is the highest ranking PR10 page. We use the number of links incoming to Google reported by Google itself. On March 29, 2006 it shows it to be 3,750,000 links. We further assume that the average Page rank of the links pointing to the Google home page is PR 1.

Therefore, to obtain the upper bound of the log factor(“lf”), we just take the appropriate root. (e.g. ((Incoming Links to Google)^(1/(Google PR-Average_Incoming_PR)) ) ).

This boils down to (3.75*10^6)^(1/(9)) or lf=5.38. Naturally, as the size of the web increases, or the number of back links that Google exports to outside world increases, “lf” is likely to increase. Our tool allows you to set a different “lf”.

We use the following formula to scale numbers to the “RPR”(real non normalized PR) and obtain the lower and upper bounds.

((lf)^(n)) =< RPRn < ((lf)^(n+1))

As an example when n=5, 4507 < PR-5 < 24,248

Naturally, some pages are a very strong PR-5(i.e. almost a PR-6), or a very weak PR-6. Therefore, we allow a user to set the strength of the page. The default is 0.5(i.e. it’s the equivalent of a PR5.5 page).Now, if the above holds, then “1”, “2” or “3” are irrelevant. Our contention is that Google has not changed the Page Rank calculation in any significant way, aside from tweaking the constants.The proof is obviously in the pudding. Let’s take three sample sites and see how the update of April 6, 2006 has affected them.

We turn to our Event Tickets Website and examine two pages on the site:

1. Tickets Website’s Home Page , PR-4

2. New Tickets Events Page , PR-6

The comparison is indeed telling. A page that was added a few weeks ago attained the highest PR in the site. While the home page with most of the back links stayed at 4. The reason is quite obvious if you examine the actual pages. The home page is donating it’s PR to a lot of pages, while the new events page has only 3 outgoing links(in addition to the common links). This behavior is predictable, if we apply the “backrub” algorithm. Happenstance, you say? Let’s look at another site, with less contents and a different “offer”/e-commerce pricing model. The common feature is that the navigation structure is exactly the same.

1. Tickets Website’s Home page , PR 3

2. New Tickets Event Page , PR-5

Coincidence, you say? Let’s look at a third site

1. Click Fraud Website’s Home Page —PR-4

2. Click Fraud Website’s Internal Page —internal pages like click fraud with no link to Zaralyzer but lots of links from external sites, PR-5 In conclusion, even the most trivial changes in site navigation structure can cause major changes in how the search engine view your pages. For a free Google Page Rank Improvement Consultation on how you can improve your site structure.

For More Information visit http://www.sofizar.net/improve-google-pagerank.php

A decade ago, businesses were wondering whether they need to be part of the Internet. By the late 1990s, plenty signed up and did the basics like placing keywords in the META data.

Unfortunately, that’s all some companies do – pick out keywords that may or may not be appropriate and pack them into the META keyword data set that search engines pretty much ignore.

Proper analysis requires sound thinking and judgment in many areas. We’ll focus on two major ones – Top 300 and page caching.

Top 300

What’s the Top 300? It doesn’t sound too valuable unless your biggest customer of the last 10 years actually traveled that deep into the depths of search engine information overload.

Actually, any number will do depending on your interest. Start with your 10 favorite search terms (or carefully targeted search terms). To track your growth, think big. If you’re ranking No. 292 one week and then a week later, you’re No. 154, you know you’re on the right track.

Too many SEO managers make the mistake of tracking the Top 30 results and miss out on the wonderful fact that they’re already No. 31. Don’t be poorly informed.

Page Caching

Google is the best for this because of how fast it continues to reindex pages. Create your own Google Cache Calendar – a Word or Excel document will do. List your strategic pages – say about 10 for starters. Apply the Top 300 rule, check your rankings and record the cache dates. Over time, those dates form patterns that can help you determine when Google will return next – enabling you to time your next set of SEO updates.

If you’re not in the Top 300, you can still get some perspective from the page cache analysis if you’re still planning to optimize a given page. It’s easy to find the page – if it’s in Google’s index. Just enter the URL as your search phrase or find some unique text from the page and search for that string of words with quotes on each end. Either will result in a top SEO ranking and you can grab the cache date.

The bottom line is that you need to track you’re progress before making changes to the strategic SEO pages.

1. DOMAIN NAME: Try and name your domain name after your business. In other words, if you plan on selling bricks from your website you could name your site domain name ‘bricksrus.com” or “thebrickbusiness.com” …any name incorporating the word “brick” in the domain name will help search engines index your site and page ranking over time.

2. GOOD KEYWORD CONTENT: If you are designing your own HTML pages for your site, you probably already know that you need keyword rich text that uses keywords to describe your business, product or service. As mentioned above, if you are in the brick business, you could use words that describe your products like: “bricks, red bricks, cement bricks, cinder bricks, small bricks, large bricks, etc. By using the keyword “brick” you are helping search engines categorize your site and its relevance when somebody searches for “bricks” online. The use of the word “bricks” in your domain name and your home page content will help raise you up in the search queries. It takes time to get a good page rank and laying the proper foundation now will speed up the ranking process. One word of caution: Do not go over-board using keywords—you want to design your site for people AND search engines not just search engines. Be creative about using keywords so that your text flows, is informative to people and uses key words in a balanced manner.

3. SITE DESIGN: If you are using template based software for your website there is not much you can do to improve your site design except to make sure that all your site pages have a link back to the home page. A good place to place these links is at the bottom of each page, which say “home” so that when they are clicked they take you to your home page. The reason for doing this is when your site is crawled by search engine spiders each page is indexed. Over time each page will have a page ranking which, when linked back to your home page, will contribute those page ranks to the home page (similar to links from other sites). Long story short, it helps give your site relevancy to the search engines and this is helpful for new sites.

4. META TAGS: Meta page title tags and meta keyword description are not as important as they once were but it is important to know how to use them and to use them well. Page title tags is what describes each page on a website and appears across the top of your browser when clicking from page to page across the Internet. The page title tag should use the most important keywords that describe the page content and are relevant to your site. For example, a home page title could be changed from “index” to “ Bricksrus, Bricks, Bricks and More Bricks” … The point being that again the word brick is being used to help search engines understand your page and business. A keyword approach should be taken whenever possible.

5. USE ALT TAGS: Alt tags are HTML code that describes images appearing on your site. Search engines scan alt tags as they crawl through a web site and using alt tags is another great way to use keywords. Get the idea here? You want to keep building on your keywords. If you need help with HTML code, we have free info and manuals to show you how to get these things done. Just go to our site, and go to the Smart Link Zone, click on tech links and look around—you will find a TON of free information that will be very helpful to optimizing your site.

6. SITE PAGE CONTENT: The goal is to have a TON of quality pages on your site STUFFED with text content—the more pages the better. I question the value of spending time developing page content for a page rank. Instead, design your site to benefit visitors. If you want to build up your site content, you can do so quickly by downloading articles. Put articles like this one into your site by either directly publishing the article on your site OR use the RSS feed to import the article feed into your site. Once again, another technique to build page rank and relevancy.

7. DIRECT URL SUBMISSION: The best way to get your domain name URL registered with search engines is to take the time to manually register with the biggest and best search engines. Registering your site with Google is quick and easy, as are many other popular search engines. Be aware that some search engines want fee-payments before they will accept your site submission. My opinion is to avoid paying for site submission, it’s a racket. Registering with Google and the multitude of free search engine submission sites is the way to go. If you need links to free submissions search engines, go to our site, and go to the Smart Link Zone, click on tech links and look around—you will find a link page to over 25 free search engines.

8. LINK EXCHANGE: When you have a new site and little or no Google page rank, it can be difficult to get good sites to link to yours because it is basically a waste of their time to do so. Why does a company like Haliburton Corporation need to link to your bricksrus.com business? They don’t and they won’t in this example. The goal is to get sites with a high page rank to link to yours. What you can do to get your site URL listed on high page rank sites is to write articles (like this one) on QUALITY Ezine directories with Google page ranks over 5/10. Doing so puts your link on a quality site. For example, notice our link at the bottom of this article. When search engines scan this directory page they will see the SBS link pointing to our site. This helps with our page ranking. An added advantage is that articles like this are picked up and published by other sites which spreads our link all over the Internet with only the effort of writing the article. It’s good for the readers and website owners, like you, who are building content for their web site. It ‘s also beneficial to us because, as you read this article you are becoming familiar with SBS, and that is promoting our site to you, right? It’s a win-win situation for all.

9. REGISTER A SITE MAP: Develop a site map for your site if possible. This is a problem for many template-based-web site services that do not allow you to have direct access to the root directory of your domain. Why? Google requires that you upload an HTML key-code into your root directory to prove that you, in fact, own the domain name you are submitting a site map for. If you have access to your root directory of your site, by all means register a site map with Google, it will help with page rank. Again, we have easy to use site map generators in the tech section of our site as described in earlier paragraphs.

10. SEARCH OUT SEO SITES: There are a TON of search engine optimization sites online that will give you a lot of helpful information about getting your site ranking improved. We have taken the time to find the best for you and they appear, as with everything else related to this article, in our tech link section of the Smart Links Zone on our site. If this article has overwhelmed you with terminology, I suggest you visit SBS and look around, you will get a lot of free answers…. One additional thing: Download the free Google tool bar. It has a meter that shows Google page rank on a scale from 1 to 10 which will help you identify sites that are worthy of link exchange (at least 1/10).

To your unwavering success!

Copyright © 2006 James W. Hart, IV All Rights reserved

A professional plus dedicated search engine optimization company is supposed to make available with you with customized and well-targeted internet marketing methodologies, services along with solutions. The SEM strategy should assist you accomplish maximum consciousness about your website, products as well as services. It is supposed to deliver beleaguered traffic to your website. It is supposed to attain higher level of sales through your website, assist you keep your costs low as well as create brand trustworthiness among your target spectators.

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An effectual search engine optimization approach should assist you achieve top 10 ranking for your chosen as well as targeted key phrases in head of state search engines such as Google, MSN in addition to Yahoo. In a recent research conducted in July 2005, Nielson/Netratings testimony that the search engine market share was maximum for Google at 48%. Yahoo along with MSN had the market shares of 22% as well as 12% correspondingly.

A well-designed SEO process be supposed to involve in-depth investigate for high quality search engine optimization keywords investigate that are appropriate to your website; writing as well as incorporating high quality, appropriate and embattled, search engine optimization keywords wealthy articles that are of attention to your target audience; defining as well as incorporating Directory organization in the website with the intention that directories as well as file names hit the top keywords you wish to optimize; programming that make certain that text content out weighs the html content as well as the web pages are able to be seen in all types of browsers

More to the point, your SEO solutions provider is supposed to build up your link popularity through link exchanges by means of flattering non-competing sites. You be able to also choose for a well-devised Pay per Click Campaign in Overture, Google Adwords as well as other less important PPC search engines.

Orient Info Solutions is a most important IT solutions provider that dedicate yourself to in creating deliberately positioned and targeted SEM campaigns meant for you including SEO, PPC campaigns, Link Popularity and online promotion.

The best way to attract inbound links to your site is to feature interesting and informative content that people will want to link to from their sites or blogs. ‘Link Bait’ is the name given to content that attracts links. Although linkbaiting sounds like something that is pretty black hat, it’s actually just the term coined for content that naturally attracts inbound link.

For example: The Energy Fiend Website managed to get a link from AOL’s homepage with their Caffeine Test tool. And the Subservient Chicken is perhaps the best example of linkbait, generating thousands of links within days.

Perhaps the best proof that linkbait works is that I am linking to these sites whilst writing a post about linkbait! Matt Cutts wrote a nice post about link baiting which in itself of course, is link bait!

This article in itself may prove to be link bait – someone else whilst writing a blog post might want to link to a page that explains what linkbait is and hey presto, I’ve caught a link!

The fact is – if your site is just like all of the others in the sector then why should people link to you rather than your competitors? You need to give them a reason to link to you. Interesting tools and informative content are things that you should be thinking about, basically, something that you think people would want to read.

If you take this site for example. I would like to rank well for Online Marketing related keywords and phrases, so I would ideally like links from good quality sites in this sector. I therefore want to introduce content to the site that will draw links from such sites, such as SEO tools, maybe some informative content about online marketing, or a directory of affiliate programs ;-).

Link Baiting should be your first thought when trying to generate inbound links, it’s free and relatively easy, All you need is a little imagination!

Reciprocal Links

Now these don’t carry as much weight in Google as unique inbound links but can be useful in ensuring your pages get crawled on a regular basis and if done in the right way, can also generate visitors, yes that’s right, real people!

There are a number of automated programs that you can use to find and contact link partners but remember there is a fine line between contacting someone to offer them a service that may be beneficial and simply spamming them! The best tools are those that allow you to find link partners automatically but also allow you to make the contact personal which will give you a better response rate. Remember, when looking for link partners you may also find other advertising and promotional opportunities and partnership possibilities so it’s always worth keeping your eyes open.

You can also use a number of online services to generate automated reciprocal or ‘trinagular links’ (where you link to a third party site for a reciprocal link from another). This sort of automation is against Google’s policies so will likely see you penalised or banned from the search engines. If you are focussing all of your attention on building reciprocal links without adding any value to your site then you are unlikely to do well in the search engines.

Buying Links

Purchasing links is a common way of increasing the number of inbound links to your site. Google does now however devalue the weighting of inbound links that look as if they have been purchased, which includes site wide links and links that don’t look natural. There is also speculation that link sin the body of the text of a page carry more value than links in footers, headers and sidebars so my advice would be that if you are buying links, you shouldn’t just look at potential SEO value but also the number of visitors that you may be able to get from those links. This way if the SEO value doesn’t materialise, you should still be able to benefit in increase visitor numbers directly.

You may find that you are approached by companies offering to sell you hundreds or thousands of inbound links. My advice would be to avoid such companies like the plague! This sort of black hat SEO will not work. I receive 7- 8 of these phone calls every week. Common sense tells you that if a product is any good, they wouldn’t need to resort to cold calling to try and sell it!

Generating inbound links is a good way to increase visitor numbers and improve your SEO positions. The phrase ‘Content is King’ Applies to this ares more than and in Search Engine Marketing. Without good content you can’t get good links! Using automated tools can be a useful way to generate link partners but if your site adds no value, you will never rank well in the search engines.

Myth 1. It’s all about meta tags. In the 1990’s, search engines used meta tags to rank Web sites. Because site developers began to manipulate the system by loading misleading keywords or by “keyword stuffing,” search engines now discount or ignore them.

Myth 2. Hiding text will improve my rankings. Invisible keyword-rich text in page code is old news to search-engine spiders. Today, hidden text might prompt search engines to remove the site from the database.

Myth 3. Piling on keywords and key phrases in my Web content will ensure high rankings. Actually, keyword/keyphrase density of 3-15 percent is recommended. Higher percentages may penalize your site.

Myth 4. Doorway pages are effective. A doorway is an independent web page created for the purpose of redirecting traffic to another site. Search engines consider most doorways spam, and severely penalize them.

Myth 5. Multiple domains will do the trick. This is a time-consuming and expensive strategy. Listings run as high as $300, but development costs are enormous: since search engines easily detect mirrored sites, each domain must be uniquely created. Better ROI comes from putting all the effort into a single, well-optimized site.

Myth 6. I need to submit to 1,500 search engines! Not so: five search engines bring in 99 percent of the traffic. Advertisers can safely ignore the rest.

Myth 7. I can rely on site submission and optimization software. These programs are ineffective and are routinely blocked by search engines. Because search-engine-indexing rules continually change, SEO requires on-going human review and evaluation.

Myth 8. More reciprocal links will automatically raise my rankings. While Google’s exact formula is unknown, quality inbound links rate highest, and unreciprocated links rate higher than reciprocated ones.

Myth 9. We can do SEO in-house. This one is tempting for businesses that underestimate the complexity of the task. Executives should consider whether their candidate will have the time, focus and on-going networking and training opportunities to be effective.

Myth 10. All SEO firms are the same. If that were true, high rankings would be a matter of luck. But SEO is a chess game, not a lottery. Beware of firms that promise the world and guarantee results. Top firms are committed to painstaking research, hard work and continuous training.

This Top 10 list hits the main points; but there are many other ways SEO can go wrong. In contrast, a solid program increases visibility and brings high qualified traffic. Because the rules of engagement change daily, periodic strategy review with a competent SEO partner is essential.