SEO – The game beyond

Our aim with SEO is more than getting the high ranking on the search engine search results. The purpose of the search engine marketing or the internet marketing is to let the people know about the existence of our business online. With SEO we get high search engine ranking and with the ranking comes the visibility on the web, thus the flow of web traffic is the gift that we get for the efforts that we put in the SEO game.

In a nutshell, SEO is the important element of our web presence online. This helps us to let the web visitors arrive at our business hub, enticing them to interact with us and buy. These activities need us to be more creative with our web copy, our marketing offers, our website design and our SEO techniques.

The game has changed every since Google woke up and looked at the black hats with a stern eye. Not just the quality of web content matters, but a number of features in the web design including the design code errors, slow downloading speed, quality of links etc are accessed by the search engines to determine the quality of the web pages, hence, SEO depends at lot on other features now, since the Panda and the Penguin updates have taken effect.

Now we get penalized by Google for over linking or getting 1000’s of links through the automated linking systems. Google knows what is best for the web users and in the effort of providing better and purposeful search results, the search engine leader tried to pull the breaks on the spammed websites.

The SEO strategies still yarn. The tight SEO algo changes opened new gates, new terms and now when the efforts of eliminating spam was about to get enforced, the SEO’s came up with the term negative SEO. New ways of pushing the competitors out of business took hold where spamming competitor’s websites with useless and irrelevant links came into use in the effort to get them delisted by the Google.

SEO, in the game beyond always the cut throat competition exists

Is Google Places gone?

Why is optimizing for local search results important? We need to understand the basics first. Optimizers got into the habit of optimizing websites for search engines. Good work, we need visibility, top ranking and free web traffic. Yes, we got the fruits of SEO. In this effort we missed out on few important things, we forgot the visitors, we forgot our target market, and we forgot the business prospects that would be searching for the products we are selling.

We understood the fact quiet late, that we have to target the local customers first, as these are people who would be interested to buy locally first, instead of ordering pizza from Japan. The global village is still spread on thousands of miles and not easily reachable for pizza delivery or even for a plumbing job.

Locals must find local businesses. IF we are not there to support their cause, and if we are not there to tell them that we have the answer to their quest for products and services, the local customers would look else where. Google Maps and Google places web search results were the best places to prove our local web presence.

Google now integrates the Google Places with the Google+, thus taking benefits of its strengths and send the world of customers reeling to the business places; they need to be in contact with.

Yell.com’s author Ahtisham Hussain cleverly puts this scenario in the following words, “Google are at it again and recently changed the name over to Google+ Local.  Yes, they have linked up Places with Google+ their social networking platform.

Most business owners who are serious about local SEO will have claimed their Places listing and updated with content including images, video, categories and location targeting preference.  The algorithm is not so straightforward to understand when it comes to placement of these ‘pin’ listings but now has a further twist.”

Google Plus is still there but with a new set up. We must take notes and get ready for the ride with Google+ local and give out our best presence performance for the viewers, to impress them and make them act on impulse.

5 SEO mistakes that we must avoid

SEO today has gone fragile. We could have given little thought to the nitty-gritty’s earlier but as time passed the search engine pulled the plugs, thanks to our own action where we had forced the stringent changes and enhancements. Yet many of us make mistakes and land ourselves in hot waters. To err is human, but some of us purposely do things that lead to penalties later.

Let’s see, what not to do. 5 mistakes that people usually make in SEO are outlined below:

Creating websites with frames and flash – The search engines do not recognize the flash. It passes away. While we attempt to make our web visitors happy with animations and flash intros, we forget that we are harming our SEO efforts. We know that the search engine read text and index the same, than, let’s not spend time and money on efforts that can do harm to the website SEO.

Pushing too hard on keywords and keyword phrases – We must understand the thin lined difference between the keyword usage and keyword stuffing. The required or we can say that the appropriate density today stands around 1%. If you are doing more than that, you will be in trouble. Forget the 3% to 4% keyword density.

Use Hidden Text – Do not make such a mistake. Any black hat technique will get you no where. Your SEO efforts would bounce back as soon as it is detected. Some SEO’s might tell you to use hidden text to get top search engine ranking, but they might not tell you that search engines have got smarter and can detect hidden text. If you want to get your site banned on the search engine, you can follow through.

Buying Links – Great, if you have already done this, be ready for the out lash by the search engine. This is a big NO NO. The trend of links is foreseeable, the search engine can make out whether you have gathered links naturally or you have brought these links from link farm. Many incoming links and those too from not so relevant sites, creates the buzz on the search engine’s platform.

Using copied content – Surely coping content from your competitions website is the easiest way out. Many of our friends used to prefer copying the text. It used to save “hell lot of time”. Good haa, bad for the search engine. Your content would not be ranked no matter how hard you try.

SEO, Using Press Releases

We have been reading many press releases with great interest. Mostly, the attractive title of the press releases makes us click and we read on. We are news hungry people. Every morning we try and gulp down news as it breaks on the BBC or CNN with our cup of coffee or while we are driving for work. Our passion for news gives the opportunity to businessmen to break their business news, stirring interest and thus we walk into their physical store or log on to their web store to find stuff.

On one hand, press releases have the power of bringing interested target marketing into the business net, on the other, more interestingly; it is the Off Page SEO tool which if built properly, with the relevant SEO elements can help in achieving multiple goals on the Off Page SEO.

Press Releases are:

1. Online marketing tools. The press releases, tells your business stories, gives the readers the insight about your business and leads many to your place of business. Some online marketers describe press releases as the best local marketing tool. 
2. Search Engine marketing angle must not be over looked here. Our purpose behind every online marketing and SEO strategy is to make our business and business activity searchable. Building in the search engine friendly features like using relevant keywords and phrases in our web conversations will help in triggering the search engine spiders and forcing them to visit and index the press release. 
3. The creative, original and purposeful press release get the attention of the other media outlet, gets pickup and gets more healthy back links for the website, thus strengthening the hold of the web pages on the search engines.

We need to write the press releases, get them published on the online press release journals and get them distributed through the press release distribution services to harness the fruits of the press release marketing activity.
Our hidden aim here is to get more one way back links and a higher page rank for our website. With prudent off page SEO steps we can ensure better off page SEO and better page rank for our web pages.