At the very outset, your website should be user-friendly.  A visitor entering the net world and lands on your web-page should feel happy by easy navigation to the pages contained therein. Any glitch on this will drive away the visitor instantly. Secondly, clear, simple and pleasing web design is most important to get the concentrated focus and attention of the visitor.  If this is disturbed by distractions – for example a flickering ad – you will fail to reach the mind of the visitor with what you have laboriously prepared as your web content.

Thirdly, the visitor starts reading the webpage from the page titles and headings. So make them short, catchy, honest and attractive. The title and heading should reveal your concern about the visitor, as though by going through the contents of the website it is the visitor that is going to be benefited and not you as the promoter of the site.

There are a lot more for SEO but the above will be the starting points.

Surely Search Engines are there to connect sellers and buyers on line and for this they have been following some fool-proof methods.  They will show Mrs. Nancy your website about dog foods provided there are some ingredients.

First when Mrs. Nancy starts the search by typing the keywords for her search “Cooking home made dog foods”, the Google Search Engine will instantly show somewhere around 541,000 names of websites in a listing stretching around hundreds of pages, each containing about 10 or 20 items.  Mrs. Nancy will view the first page or at best the second page containing the information she wants. So your website should be there in the top 10 listings about home made dog foods or else Mrs. Nancy will not see your site, which is listed in the 45th page.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is putting your site within these first 10 listings in the first page. Choosing the right keywords is the key. “Easy to make home dog foods” will attract Mrs. Nancy rather than “How to make best home made dog foods”.  Likewise if you think from the viewer’s angle for adding appropriate keywords, your website will get prominence by its relevance in the Search Engines.

The starting point is you should know before hand, how much of natural traffic and sales are materializing to your site presently.  For this the web analytic program will be handy and by going through the statistics in last month, you will know which of the keywords and phrases have driven the traffic.

For example if you are running an online site for machine tools, your web analytic form will show as follows:

Monthly Web Analytic Export

This is for a regular business where transactions occur every month.  If what you run is a seasonal business, then there will be no transactions at all in off seasons and you have to select the data from the seasonal months – two or three at best.

The above format shows the keywords and phrases, which bring you natural-search referred traffic through the search engines and the sales they turned out at your site. You have to make a comparison of available keyword market that is on those keywords and phrases what are the number of searches made in an ordinary month and for the same keywords what is your site’s score.  KeywordDiscovery.com and Google Adwords Keyword Tool can help you in this regard to determine the current rate of success your site has achieved.

Then record the total number of searches as per your keyword tool estimates for each keyword and phrase generated. Now you can make a simple calculation to know the fact – Total Searches minus your traffic /Divided by your Traffic – to know the growth opportunity percentage existing for the keywords and phrases, which are driving traffic from natural searchers. Supposing the Google search total in a month for a particular keyword phrase is 10000 and for the same keyword phrase for your site is just 1000, then you can find the percentage growth opportunity is – 10000 minus 1000 divided by 1000 = 900%.

But this is not all.  The most upside work comes really from the keywords and phrases where you are drawing blank with no traffic and sales. The next task is big in identifying the keywords and phrases that your site needs for driving natural traffic and this needs in-depth research to ascertain what additional traffic the same keywords and phrases can send in to your site. Your keyword research tools can be used to find out the most popular ways of searching for the content, after identifying the keywords for which there is relevant content at your site.

The value of keyword research depends upon two things -1) the relevance of your site’s content to the keyword and 2) the types of search terms used by real users should be fully there at your site. In this context you can refer to PJ Fusco’s keyword research primer for more details on keyword research.

As can be seen from the above table, the keyword phrases “Magnetic Drill” and “Multi Drill” are already generating traffic and sales from natural searchers, whereas there is no traffic at all for the keywords “Portable Saw”, “Portable Panel”, ”Panel Saw” and “Magnetic Screw Driver”.

Now that you have collected all the data, you can sum the “Total Monthly Search Volume” column, so as to identify the total SEO Traffic upside. It should be remembered that this number indicates theoretically 100% of the total available natural search traffic. It has been studied by researches that the No.1 position ranking in search engine listings will average about 45% of the click-through available.  As such if you rank No.1 for the keyword “Portable Saw”, which is approximately 200,010 searches per month, roughly 90,004 searchers from them which is 45%, will be clicking through Google to your site.  However, a more conservative approach for 5% click-through rate is recommended in estimating the opportunity, with your efforts in SEO can bring forth for your site.

By knowing the average revenue value each visit can make your site, you can estimate the value of optimizing your site in order to achieve those additional visits by natural searches.

Further similar spreadsheets can be prepared by the growth columns sorted so that you identify the keywords and phrases that can represent the biggest opportunities for growth and that will give you a prioritized list of content-topics to be optimized.

The foregoing is only an example of six keyword and phrases and are a fraction of the total opportunity you want to be estimated on the keyword research for your site.

You will find that the ranking data is missing from this formula. Site owners would love to focus on them, since Rankings are easy and quick snapshots of SEO progress. It is true that higher the ranking, larger the traffic will be from that particular keyword.  But rankings are notoriously unreliable to indicate SEO progress, because of personalization, blended search, vertical research, and other factors that are large in number.

For reliably setting your expectations for SEO success, you can do well to sticking to traffic, sales and keyword research as the basis of your SEO upside estimations.

As can be seen from the above table, the keyword phrases “Magnetic Drill” and “Multi Drill” are already generating traffic and sales from natural searchers, whereas there is no traffic at all for the keywords “Portable Saw”, “Portable Panel”, ”Panel Saw” and “Magnetic Screw Driver”.

Now that you have collected all the data, you can sum the “Total Monthly Search Volume” column, so as to identify the total SEO Traffic upside. It should be remembered that this number indicates theoretically 100% of the total available natural search traffic. It has been studied by researches that the No.1 position ranking in search engine listings will average about 45% of the click-through available.  As such if you rank No.1 for the keyword “Portable Saw”, which is approximately 200,010 searches per month, roughly 90,004 searchers from them which is 45%, will be clicking through Google to your site.  However, a more conservative approach for 5% click-through rate is recommended in estimating the opportunity, with your efforts in SEO can bring forth for your site.

By knowing the average revenue value each visit can make your site, you can estimate the value of optimizing your site in order to achieve those additional visits by natural searches.

Further similar spreadsheets can be prepared by the growth columns sorted so that you identify the keywords and phrases that can represent the biggest opportunities for growth and that will give you a prioritized list of content-topics to be optimized.

The foregoing is only an example of six keyword and phrases and are a fraction of the total opportunity you want to be estimated on the keyword research for your site.

You will find that the ranking data is missing from this formula. Site owners would love to focus on them, since Rankings are easy and quick snapshots of SEO progress. It is true that higher the ranking, larger the traffic will be from that particular keyword.  But rankings are notoriously unreliable to indicate SEO progress, because of personalization, blended search, vertical research, and other factors that are large in number.

For reliably setting your expectations for SEO success, you can do well to sticking to traffic, sales and keyword research as the basis of your SEO upside estimations.

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That said here is a novel way for driving traffic to your site – “Siloing”.  This process was first published by Bruce Clay years ago and is still effective. (There is another technique published last year namely Page Rank Sculpting but that is totally different from Siloing).  The technique of Siloing works this way – you create a landing page with a theme or phrase according to your needs; there should be supporting pages which link to the parent landing page or similar landing pages at your site; they will not link to other supporting pages but only link to parent landing page.

This Siloing is very effective as you are creating focused content and all of them are linked to only the parent landing page – without diverting the attention of the viewers. Before embarking on this Siloing, we can have a look at the trends and patterns for searches made and the keyword phrase. The search statistics as shown by Google Insight to Search Tool with regard to Valentine’s Day are as follows:

Top Searches

Search Volume for Valentine’s Day

Related Valentine’s Day Search Terms

From the above you can form some themes that you can use in Siloing your parent landing page.  The following are examples you can make the themes on:

• Valentine’s Day (details of history, origin and related matters for the event)
• Valentine’s Day Gifts
• Valentine’s Day Cards
• Valentine’s Day Ideas
• Valentines Day Music
• Valentine’s Day Flowers (This is where your site is coming in reckoning)

Make the Landing Page centering around Valentine’s Day theme and this page can contain only general information pertaining to Valentine’s Day and the link should lead to the supporting page, within the text of the main page.  Each supporting page should link to the other supporting pages as well as the landing page. Remember that supporting pages only link to other pages within the Silo or alternatively at the top of similar Silos.

With this base idea, you can imagine a lot of other terms and phrases to form the supporting as well as landing pages such as – Valentine’s Day history; summary; Valentine’s Day Cards; Gifts; Gifts for Men; Women; Teachers; Co-workers and so on.

You can portray beautiful pictures, run contests for viewers, give away free gifts for winners, and sky is the limit for new ideas. Actually there is no need to change your land page and only freshen it up with contents – every year or for every occasion.  Success will be yours in driving mad traffic to your site!

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2.) Unique Description: Titles are extremely relevant SEO factor. The description tag will be what your client el sees so make it pop!

3.) Writing a unique description is very important. If your content is like everyone else’s it will bore your readers and future customers.

4.) Linking Intelligence: One important step is finding sites in your niche and linking up with them. If they link you, that’s more eyes seeing your site. Another intelligent idea is find out where your competitors are linked at and try to get the sites to link you as well.  Out doing your competitors is a very vital step.

5.) Anchor Text Don’ts: Instead of using “click here” as your text, use a keyword. You will surely lose potential clients by advertising the “click here” link. Also, using it as a keyword will help your rankings.

6.) Blog It Up: Blogging about your site and what you are doing is a great and proven way to earn some traffic to your site. People spend so much time reading blogs, talking about blogs, and comparing blogs. So take advantage of that, and use a few minutes a day to post some blogs. Another great thing is to comment on other peoples blogs, related to your niche. Once done doing that, you will find opportunities to post up your link in the comments. Using these techniques can really increase your trafficking.

7.) Press Release Do’s and Don’ts: Make nice with the media when you have something real and important to share. If you have one over every little thing then people and journalists will be highly annoyed, and that is never a good thing for your business. Press release online is a great and sure fire way to generate some business.

8.)  Social Media Smarts: The best piece of advice I can give you is NEVER EVER SPAM! Spamming is a definite way to get ads removed, and get bad ratings. Yahoo answers is a good site to use to let people know what you’re all about. Photobucket or even Flickr is good to post photos on. A diverse group of people browse through those web sites daily.  Now a days, it’s even great to have a Myspace business site. With all the people on Myspace, businesses are creating Myspace web pages left and right. Myspace is a superb way to gain some more client el.

9.) Search Engine Tools: Use SET for your site, and see how they view your page. Some highest ranking sites are Yahoo and Google. Although Altavista is not widely known, it is also a very nice search engine. From there you can see where your site is ranked, and how your keywords are working out for you.

10.) Local Searching: It’s important to do a nice local search for clients around you. Some things to make sure you do are post a local ad, list your address and phone number on the sites and/or ads. Sometimes listing in your local directories can help big time, and pay off in the end.

11.) New Ways of Trafficking: If your Google or yahoo ranking starts to spiral downward, then find other Trafficking routes. Whether it‘s social networking sites, blogging on ten different web sites, or even taking out Craigslist ads. Just do what you have to do, to get more Trafficking, and never give up.

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Google and Page Rank has come a long way now. From the first steps of being just a domain name on September 14, 1997, created by two students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google Inc dominates the world of net as the most popular search engine. But its very first steps were taken by using a system which used back links, called BackRub.

It kicked off by selling advertisements which were based on keyword searches in 2000. It did this with the help of clickthroughs and price bids. It encouraged its clients and users to bid on the keywords. Those were the beginnings, but now the popular search engine relies on a bulk of its revenues for AdWords – an initiative that provides advertising for local, national and international distribution.

It is based on the pay-per-click principal. Through all this and from its transitional stages of being transformed into Google Inc, it relied on a set of simple designs, and this helped it gain popularity as its fan following grew. It provides information about add sites, updates, and sitemaps and its PageRank addon features help users rank their websites in their order of merit and user-friendly status.

The major factor behind Google’s success is its web search services. Page Rank helps in its search engine optimization program. A registered trademark of Google, Stanford University holds the patent for Page Rank.

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World economic trends are going to be the topics of 2009 and with it come the stock market speculations guided by experts.  Acquisitions and mergers of business giants are on the anvil, including that of popular Search Engines and one can not foresee what is to happen in 2009.  But one thing is certain for Search Engine marketers – it is not going to be what they have been experiencing over the last decade and major changes are sure to take place in the whole system. Change as a whole: 

Marketers should get ready for three primary changes.  Integrating the search options together with planning of other media options, inasmuch as the search volume is driven by any offline event or media campaign of significance and this is essential in capturing the demand. 

Next is to achieve best results, planning well the SEO and paid search is important. It has been well proved by studies that by clubbing Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing together, great results can be achieved. 

Finally video media and transparent display of search results are going to be prominent for future searches through popular search engines and such others. Result is, simple clicks on the lists and conversions effected by them into business will not be enough, and they have to transform into meaningful engagements. Brand marketers of large volumes will be attracted by these offerings of Search Engines. In addition, the Search Engines as well as portals would like to have more up-sell options continuously, considering the effectiveness of Search Engine Marketing. In short, the way search engine result pages are shown to viewers will be changing dramatically, in view of the fact the present templates used are much older by a decade now and a change is imminent. 

Migration to new search options:

Online searches are no more the monopoly of few traditional search engines alone and this extends to newer platforms and portals as reported by the trusted sources – Ad Age and comScore. Within days of their reporting, that Yahoo is relegated to third place by YouTube as search engine, the latter announced a brand new platform for advertising.

Myspace is emerging as bigger search engine with 563 million queries from US, as reported by comScore, in 2008 October, compared to AOL with 424 million queries and Ask.com with 362 million queries. Similarly MSN.com with 1.04 million queries is almost touched by eBay, Amazon and Craiglist by handling combined queries of 980 million totally.

Marketers have a lesson or two to learn from these statistics.  Although we can not equate these queries with regular search engine enquiries, as they come from a totally different platform of video sharing site or social network site, the message is clear. The fact remains they are very great in volumes, judging by the numbers and search marketers can do well to keep an eye on these non-traditional sources of search and keep their sites positioned right there as best as possible.

SEO Models take a change:

First of all these non-traditional search platforms, where millions of viewers make their search, are having their impacts on the traditional Search Engines as well. The concept of Search Engine optimization undergoes a major change.  It is not any more that a site is getting the prominent rankings in the Search Engine Listings that could make best conversions of business.  It is how it reaches all the top listings of any given result page of the Search Engine that warrants merit.

There are consumers reaching the marketer’s site directly through Search Engines, by the prominent placement of the site in their result pages.  There are also consumers who get access to the given site through intermediaries, such as social networks, blogs, photo-sharing sites, Wikipedia, Twitter and the like. These consumers are steadily rising in numbers, with a striking popularity and the site marketers should never let go this opportunity.  What is required is the change of mindset to optimize their Web presence, rather than optimize their site concerned.

Search Engines are getting replaced by other devices:

The surest possible change in 2009 will be that consumers will be not entirely dependant on their computers alone for making searches.  Irrespective of the Search Engines, they have started using other devices – mobile phones for one. For entering their searches mobile devices like iPhone which perform the applications of a hand-held computer or Google Android SDK software stack, providing the tools and applications have emerged. The search queries raised from these devices are surprisingly large and with an array of novel features enabled by these devices, marketers should give importance to these devices.

Along with the primary task of getting top rankings in Search Engines alone, the new features of devices such as iPhone like text messaging by SMS; mobile couponing; click-to-call should be made best use of. The targeted audience should be reached through these devices to optimize their landing page and increase the opt-in traffic of consumers to the best advantage.

Again, Internet searches are extending beyond PCs to overlap other devices – for instance new TV models and set-up boxes enable searching the net through the TV screen using the remote, obviating the necessity for a computer screen.  Besides there are vehicle telematics like GPS device to make on the spot searches for locating navigation to a drug store, important tourist attraction or restaurant.  All these devices are growing wider and faster to occupy the place of computer and enhance the web experience of the consumers.

Marketers will do well to take into consideration these existing devices as also those yet to come, to play a vital role in consumer searches and be ready to modify their strategies for popularizing their web presence. 

Website promotion can be done in two ways – Pay Per Click by advertising the site on the Search Engines (and wherever you deem fit on other sites) and Search Engine Optimization by making your site on top of the Search Engine results.  In both methods, keywords recognized by the searcher make the difference and yield results effectively according to investment made.Out of the two, Pay Per Click has been demanding high cost over the years and so investors make a search for the alternative options, such as engaging a SEO Company, who are capable of putting their site up front in the Search Engines with professional techniques.  This way they can reduce the investment on advertisement as also enhance the visibility of their respective sites on the Search Engines.

Besides, the bitter experience of fraudulent practices by PPC advertisement agencies also drive site marketers towards SEO Company’s services, although the effectiveness of the service can be evaluated by the number of clicks they achieve there also. Comparatively it can be said that the cost involvement is less in engaging these SEO Companies, rather than going in for PPC advertisement campaign.

While comparing both PPC campaign and SEO Company promotion of the website, the latter is the choice – as the Search Engine rankings depend upon the effective background work by the SEO Company, irrespective of the investment made.  This can be understood by the following illustrations:

PPC Marketing Method:

Simply put, PPC Marketing is no different from print media advertisements, bill boards, television advertisements etc.  They serve the purpose so far as they are in the respective places by attracting the audience – any one of them who happen to see them. People in general notice them and only the interested parties take note and act upon.  There is no way targeting the audience and narrowing the viewing.  Secondly once you stop paying for these advertisements, they will be removed from the pedestal and go off the view of the audience.  Needless to mention that consumers have a short memory.

This is what happens to PPC Campaigns, where an ad about your site will be there as far as you pay and will be removed when you stop paying.  In other words they appear instantly on the Search Engines or Web directories or wherever you want them online to be and go off instantly when you don’t want them or not paying for them. The relative statistics about number of viewers, traffic reports, charts and what not, so painstakingly collected when your PPC Advertisement was on, become useless and the investment made towards this will be a waste.  You will never be able to work out the cost per click in real time usage.

Search Engine Optimization Method:

In direct contrast with the PPC Campaign, you engage a SEO Company to promote your website in the Search Engine listings, whenever a viewer on the Internet makes a search for the site.  An efficient SEO Company will study your site first of all and make all the changes required – whether it is keyword relevance or density or linking up the site to the Search Engines - when they crawl over the site for recognition.  Once this is done, the Search Engines automatically place your site at the top most places or at best within the two pages of Search Engine Listings.

This is a onetime investment you are doing for putting your site up front and traffic to your site is flowing from the Search Engine Listing continuously and permanently.  There is no ending for this even if you are not engaging this service afterwards.  However, it is always advisable to keep the SEO Company, to do the service first and then keep a track on that, so that they can gauge the effectiveness of the results achieved and take corrective action as and when needed if the results are not up to the mark.

The major advantage of engaging a SEO Company is they can bring in opt-in traffic to the site by Search Engine Listings, which is more focused on the targeted audience to whom your website is meant for.  More traffic means more business and you get what you want – the Return on Your Investment – for a very long time to come.

Search Engine Optimization – is the key to keep your website upfront, whatever business you are involved in, including business from home.  For many it is a difficult proposition to understand how this can be accomplished, unless they are experts. Simply put, a well and thoroughly optimized website can attract search engines as a magnet does to iron pieces and if you succeed in this, then you are through to get visitors in a line to your website. 

For finding out a site among the hundreds and thousands of them out there, people type out “keywords” or a particular phrase on the search engines.  If your site has these keywords or phrase, automatically the search engines divert the viewer to your site – no doubt.  The trick is to put those keywords and phrases in your site and this is where the service of right and ethical SEO software is coming into reckoning.  By so doing your site gets the top most or immediately behind the top most places of the Search Engines’ lists as a result and the searcher gets your site readily. 

That said the need for such right and ethical SEO Software can be fulfilled by software like SEO Elite very effectively.  Such software can do minimization of your tasks in Search Engine optimization, provision of intuitive ways so that you can use your experience to get mileage on your investments, inclusive of your website.  You will have enough time, therefore, to achieve best results for your business from home. 

As such SEO Elite can – 

1. Boost your ability in examining the top ranking sites listed in popular Search Engines like Google and Yahoo and find out how they are there.
2. Analyze your links to show you the Alexa and PR rankings of your link partners’ sites
3. Provide a suitable program for article submission, whereby just by the pressing of a button you will be able to submit the articles of you to article directories which are on top.

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Search Engine Optimization is the key in bringing your website, for whatever purpose it is created – business; propaganda; advice; providing information or clarification on anything – to the forefront, to be available to billions of searchers of Internet everyday the world over.  With a view to help search marketers, here is the list of Top 15 sites related with SEO, wherefrom you can get the comprehensive and complete service towards your efforts in maximizing viewing of your site through popular Search Engines of the Internet. 
In providing the list, supportive credentials, as certified by the authoritative sites like Yahoo Site finder for Inbound Links; figures of monthly visitors from Compete Site Analytics; figures of monthly visitors from US as gauged by Quantcast; Traffic Rankings as given by Alexa, (The Web Information Company) and Web Page Ranking accorded by Google Search Engine are given, with few introductory details of the site concerned.