Filter your SEO Strategy

If you aren’t on the search engine search results, you are nowhere. This could be your strategy to gain online visibility. SEO is far from being dead. We learnt that the businesses, online had tough time after the constant algorithm updates by Google. We cannot, altogether, shun SEO, but tailor it and learning our lessons. Google is adamant to fight span and have vowed to keep a strong check on manipulative links.

Filter you SEO links. You can take on the PPC that compliments the organic SEO strategy. It gets you instant visibility, traffic and recognition. But what we have learnt, PPC could be good as a short terms web marketing strategy. Opting on this medium for long term results has proven to hurt the ROI.

SEO today has grown towards being more natural. We have learnt through our past practices and from what Google is preaching, are that we must look at SEO from the users prospective. You content, instead of being shallow and sprinkled with unwanted keywords, must be aimed to benefit the user. Forget the Keyword quantity, quality and the usefulness of the content will garner much better search results.

So what are looking for when we are at SEO techniques?

We are looking at being more creative, we have to put more intent or we can call it “be more purposeful” and last but not the least we have to put in some real hard efforts. The bunch of three attributes could get our SEO going. Focus now is the audience. Google’s artificially intelligent BOTs smell the manipulative rats.

In the end, content remains to be the king. You are writing for your audience, you need to choose high authority relevant blogs for guest blogging; you would need the relevant images to go along with the content, make the content more purposeful and hence look around for creative ways of disseminating content and helping it to go viral. We must, here, not forget the role social media has to play with your going viral activity, but in anyway, it cannot be a substitute for your SEO activities.

Getting to Know SEO

Search Engine Optimization – more commonly known as SEO is not alien to many, yet is somewhat new for the people who are still getting their hands on with the web. Website is a fancy tool for some and for other it is waste of time and precious money. The believers in the web marketing yet are few. For those who preach and practice SEO, the skies seem to be dark. Some have come to the point of giving up on the hard core SEO practices, other are still perusing their way around.

SEO today is quite different from what it used to be in the beginning of previous year. The things were rosy for many whose web pages ranked at the top of the search results on the pages of prominent search engines. The game since then has tilted against them. Their keyword stuffed, search engine pleasing pages are not anymore liked by the search engine as these fail to show up for the intent and the purpose for which the user conducts the search.

The present day SEO wants our web pages to deliver the purpose and swing along with the intent of the web surfer. The artificially intelligent search engine BOTs get to know why and how of the search engine friendly pages. They can study the link pattern, whether the links are being gathered naturally or has the optimizer arranged to get the links to perk up the search engine positioning.

We need to know SEO of today. The things done yesterday are not good for today and our aim must be to achieve and improve our visibility for tomorrow as well.

• Isn’t it better to leave the web pages as they are?
• Build the Meta tags with the purpose with the keywords that the user actually use to find the product and services instead of wasting time on the keywords that don’t lead to conversions rather they just aim in getting the 1st position on the SERPs.
• Isn’t it better to build the web content for the web surfers instead of the search engines?
• Why not develop the web page interface to suit the needs of and the usage of the web visitor rather than the search engines.

We need to know what the current SEO demands and twist and turn our SEO strategy to suit the search engine needs of today.

Search Queries – Navigational Search Queries

SEO is done with the purpose of presenting your website on the search engine platter to the viewers with particular intents. Semantic search features have taken the best time away from the SEOs who made their websites appear on the top with the purpose of bringing in more web traffic. Thus the result of more click through, lesser unique visitors and even lesser customers. At many times these websites failed to foster good conversions and the owners of the website questioned the usefulness of the web for business.

We have been discussing the nature of search queries. We have studied the informational search query. We also understand by now that how do customers who are willing to make purchase search. Such transaction search queries mean a lot to the website owner. The SEO strategy must be based on the search query that the web surfer key in.

This means that we must optimize our site to fit the 3 types of search queries:

• The informational search query
• The transactional search query
• The navigational search query

With the power of the search engines to understand the intent, it is most important for the optimizer too, to understand the type and quality of the search results. Thus making sure that the conductor of the search reaches the destination with ease.

Navigational Search Query is the decisive search query that helps the web visitor to reach the destination with one click. If you are a brand, the website visitor is searching using the navigational search query will lead him to the exact website search results. Google we have learnt has reduced the number of search results for navigational search queries. At occasions like these we see the search results on the first page (SERP) reduced to 7 instead of 10.

Owning the navigational search query will help, state the experts, in appearing in the organic search result as well as if we buy the keywords to appear in the sponsored listing.

Monitor your SEO expertise – Google Analytics help

Google Analytics have been here for quite some time now. The SEO gurus and experts have a gate way opened for them and now are in the arms length of monitoring the performance of their optimized web pages. The strategy change and adjustments have become easier. We no longer need to beat about the bush; we have everything in front of us in the form of Google Analytics report helping us to measure our websites performance.

A tool by Google that helps us getting customized reports on our websites performs, user behavior, most visited pages, which keywords have performed well in generating more traffic and similar stuff that helps the web masters to articulate the SEO strategy for better search engine ranking.

Let’s take a deeper look. Dan is a SEO expert. When we met and discussed SEO he was all over the place with the analytics. “If you don’t keep a regular check on analytics you will not know what is happening with your website’s performances. If you want to understand what on the earth triggers your website visitors to click through and arrive at your website and from which place on the internet they are entering your website. The exiting points are also outlined and hence tell the owners of the website and the webmasters how to tailor the website for its best performance.”

“Great, but does it tells us exactly from which source the web traffic is arriving at our website?” I asked. “Yes, it breaks down the points. If the traffic is flow through Yahoo, Bing or Google, it will tell you exactly how many do arrive through different search engines. Whether the visitors are coming through PPC ads, it will point that too. It will also tell you whether the traffic is coming through Face book, Twitter, Press Releases, articles or blogs.”

“Yet, my friend, if your browser is not cookie enabled it will not be read by Google Analytics. This tells us that, though very useful for the insight of your website’s performance, Google Analytics does not give a 100% picture. People with cookies blocked while browsing the net get left out.

On the whole the analytic gives us great measurement of performance results and helps us in our SEO strategy.

Learning SEO – 15 minutes or more

Reading through the SEO e-book and a few search engine optimization tutorials on the web made me realize how easy it is to learn SEO. Actually, I had been living in the fools land till now, thinking that SEO needed me to learn the software development basic skills. This is exactly what pushed me away from the learning optimization.

My research on the subject and my friend’s guidance led me to a number of valuable informative pages on the web.

Though very interestingly told, the learning curve, the beginning of the SEO process titled as the basics of SEO led me to understand the keywords remain central to the SEO strategy. This is easy to understand. We as visitors to the web do conduct our searches by keying in search terms. Sometimes we search with vague terms but many a times we are searching very specifically for goods and services.

The core of keyword research as they tell me is to arrive at the right set of keywords, as the correctness and the relevance will make or break the situation. Make us thrive on the web or make us lose the internet marketing game.

Understanding keywords

Conceptually, the keywords are the prime words that relate to your products, services or the marketing niche. I had to dig deeper to understand the process of keyword research.

Keyword research tools like Google Keyword tool, Word Tracker or Good Keywords help us to arrive at the selected keywords. We need to list down our search terms and check these on Google, Yahoo and the Bing to see the competition that we face for these search terms.

They also tell us in their SEO e-book that we have to go for lesser competitive keywords if we want ourselves to be seen on the web search results. Face less competition at first and then go for the bigger move.

Yes, Learning SEO is easy, but the fact of the matter is, putting it to practice is difficult. We understand the first steps but I guess practice makes the man perfect. I have requested my friend to let me help him in some SEO projects where he will supervise and I will work. Guess this is the best way to learn.

Organic SEO v/s PPC

Is PPC good for your web presence? Why do SEO companies focus on PPC?  The instant free web traffic flow to the website of the web business owners through the search engine ranking results and presence on the SERPs is the reason why the SEO companies preach taking on to the PPC campaign. The more you pay for the targeted keyword the higher the placement and hence, you will witness the increase in the flow of web traffic to your website. This is a short term strategy; is does not replace the organic SEO strategy.

The facts are:

We cannot do without organic SEO

PPC helps in getting instant visibility and can be used as a short term solution to long term goals. We cannot live with SEO but can live without PPC. Organic search engine results garner more trust from the web visitors

Does PPC help in Organic SEO?

Well to me, the answer is yes and no. PPC does not help in organic SEO directly, but its surely helps in getting more traffic instantly to your website, which means, the as many people would visit your website, the search engine spiders would be trigged to index your web pages fast and allot a position in the SERPs.

While we are looking at our organic SEO to take advantage of our PPC listings, we must not forget that PPC will also be helpful in learning the desires of our website visitors and will be helpful resource to monitor the relevant keywords response. The visitors search habits and their search trend will also be outlined through our PPC ad campaigns.

This will affect our organic SEO strategy directly and we can improve upon the basics by embedding the most relevant and result oriented keywords in our website SEO.

Benefits of PPC 

Pay per click campaign can help you to get listed for the keywords that your website is not optimized for, hence, help in capturing the traffic that could have been lost otherwise.

Creating Brands Awareness – While organic SEO takes time to mature, PPC helps in creating brands awareness almost instantly by propping up on the SERP’s paid inclusion sections and leading the traffic, mostly the targeted traffic to your website.

Instant Placements – Depending how much you have bided for the keyword, you sponsored advertisement would be instant placed on the SERPs thus creating visibility.

SEO tip of the day

We strive for high search engine ranking. True, we have gone through Big Daddy, Panda and Penguin. The jolts were enough for the search engine optimizers to give them hardcore learning, yet, sadly we are still in the learning phase. Certain things are written on the wall, large as life, for us to see, but we miss out and cry for help. Some SEO strategies too are written on the wall and have been explained time and again to help out the people in their SEO efforts, yet we miss out.

Today I received an email from a friend offering the SEO tip of the day. Ramapati Singhania said in the email, “Did you know that it is possible to rank visibly higher in the search engines with a PR of 5 than it is with a PR of 8? It's true! Don't be obsessed over Page Rank. Focus on building true relevancy.”

We need to understand the depth of the message when we start building our SEO strategy. 

Defining the word relevance, the web dictionaries state “Pertinence to the matter at hand”. The definition gives us the clear cut road. Walking on this path chalks out the clear cut strategy that we have to build out web pages, our content, our graphics, our HTML elements close to our matter at hand, i.e. our business. If we are selling products, services or giving out information, we need to:

• Research keywords, research the most relevant words or search terms to our products and services or the information that we are disseminating. 
• Use these keywords in the Meta Tags
• Use these keywords when we are building website content
• Create relevance of images and graphics to our subject matter
• Strive to get links from the relevant sites

Relevance is the most important factor in our SEO strategy. It ensures that the site would be indexed by the search engine and kept in the proper category while the relevant links help in the creating a strong footing on the search engines. If the links are coming from the a relevant and authority site, does not matter if the belongs for page rank 5 i/o page rank 8, your website would definitely climb the ladder and get the deserved visibility on the SERPs.

SEO Strategy

To many people SEO is still an alien word, to some it means to apply technology to get your website up on the search results with the snap of the fingers. To us, the professionals, SEO is the science which is getting complicated day by day. Search engine strive to provide the best relevant and exact results to the web users and in this effort make add on to the features and drop some of the old ones leading to confusion for many people who work on set strategies.

From Big Daddy update to Panda and now to Penguin we have seen the shift. We have repented not to anticipate the moves and hence many rumors like “Google Hates SEO” were heard. Black hat specialists led the search engines to change the ranking strategies. Some of the things that worked earlier do not work anymore. Things that were more relevant before and now less relevant and hence more human factor is not inbuilt into the SEO strategies.

What do we need to do?

This is typically a question that I had been asking for quite some time now. The answer was simple, be natural. These are the days of semantic search being natural will help you to lead

The red blood cells behind your SEO strategy are the keywords that we select for optimizing our web pages. To arrive at the right keyword, we must learn about our business prospects interests, their search habits, the keywords and keyword phrases being used by them when they are searching online, hence, to pump up more fresh oxygen, the relevance of keywords and their correlation with the your website content is important.

The next most important element is building content, the web copy. Customer oriented content build for the website viewers is an important element. Keyword stuffed web content that does not make sense to the readers does not work anymore. It works best to chase the website visitors away.

Visitors and the web users are always central to the SEO strategy. We build websites for the visitors and hence must make all the efforts to fulfill their need and their thirst for information. Using the selected relevant keywords prudently will help in bridging the gap and make our website visible to the people surfing the net.