SEO – Internet marketing

SEO is one essential element of the internet marketing. We have placed too much emphases of search engine optimization, creating an Air that SEO alone would get you the online business that your business deserves. The hard facts are still to be understood. I had been working on the search engine optimization projects of some clients and had the chance of learning with working. While I did a lot for the websites and helped them gain to search engine ranking, I still got complaints that the clients are not the business they intended to receive from SEO.

My friend, SEO is one medium of the internet marketing. While search engine marketing demands more effort, there are other online marketing mediums that will help you to support your web marketing activities. SEO is one, very broad means of getting the visibility desired by the business entity.

Keyword research and the use of the search terms in SEO

One we target our audience and learn about their search habits (thanks to Google keyword research tool) we can actually come up with the search terms our target market would be using to search for the products and services we are offering. Hence, we need more insights and more knowledge about our targeted audience.

Content

One thing that remains central to every internet marketing activity, especially SEO is the content. We need to write the web copy, we need to build the marketing copy, we also need to create interesting posts on the other social marketing mediums, and hence words play their part. Our written scripts need to be original, intended to educate the web visitors and help them to learn. For sure this content will be optimized for the search engines, yet, these must be customer focused and not search engine focused. Search engine would be your customers; these would be the source of bringing customers to you. If our customers do not understand our written scripts and pass away, we would have wasted our time and our client’s money.

For sure visibility on the search engines brings recognition, bring in popularity, helps in positioning our web pages on the search engine and create a lot of buzz, but we need to backup our SEO activities by other search engine marketing activities like Blogging, Press Release Distribution, Social network marketing, You Tube Videos and Tweeting about our products and services.

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.

Keyword Research Tips

If we are familiar of how search engines work and if we are aware of the customer behavior on the internet and if we are aware of the search terms being used by them to search for the products and services we deal in, your keyword research part for the SEO of your website becomes easy. Usually, this is not the case. The business owners perceive that inking the most common words related to our website design would do the SEO task well. That is not true. Before jotting down the keywords and the search terms we must keep in mind the following:

• Put yourself in the web visitor’s shoes and search for the products and services online to find the products and services you deal in. By using different variations of the search terms and by using the search terms that you have in your mind, will help you conclude what are the web surfers searching for and how they conduct their searches? You will also access your competition and hence form a SEO strategy.
• Our first aim should be to find the words, keywords that are most relevant to your business niche, phrases that are relevant and the long tail ends that can help in garnering more healthy results.
• Do not go after the keywords or phrases that show high traffic or high competition volume. If competition is high, remember, achieving good ranking would be rather impossible.
• Go after lesser competitive keywords and phrases. This will help you in getting to the top speedily. 
• Once you have achieved top ranking or prominent ranking for the lesser competitive keywords, getting to high ranking for highly competitive keywords would be rather easy.
• Make the choice for keyword, webpage by webpage.  By doing this, you will be able to select unique keywords for each pages, hence achieving ranking for each page of your website and getting more visibility on the search engines.

Understanding human behavior is an important element in the building your SEO strategy. Keywords have ruled the search engine marketing game and so has the user behavior. Keeping track will help in building a sustained search engine position.

SEO Tip - SEO during Website Redesign

It seems that SEO and the website design or redesigns are two separate things. Yes, front fascia tells us that both are entirely different but in essence the professional will tell us that both must be worked on with in combination. Both the elements, that is, the website design and SEO have a perpetual unison and must be applied together when the website is being structured.

If you have taken up the task of redesigning your web pages, be sure that you don’t disturb the search engine ranking. Our purpose with the redesign is to make the website more professionally and make an effective presentation so that our website helps fulfill the visitor’s quest of searching online, but in this effort, I have seen many websites getting dented as far as the SEO elements are concerned. We must remember that it not the color, graphic, images and text alone that make things happen for your web presence online. Search engine optimization elements play a big game for you.

Ramapati Singhania, once again said today, “Are you thinking about a change in design? If you are considering a re-design of your Web site...Don't just think about the new colors and graphics and layout, but also be aware of how the new page structure will impact your search rankings, bookmarks, and inbound links. There are many ways to overcome problems, and the goal is to plan for any problems in advance.”

We have a lot to do. Before even opening up our browsers and web design tools, we must sit down to:

• Decide what is our purpose for redesigning our website
• Keep the visitors need first
• Your need to prove your effective presence, SEO elements tweaking is important
• Keyword research to embed more new keywords to expand our online presence
• Designing elements that need to be embedded with the SEO elements,
• Image optimization
• Internal linking must not be disturbed
• Improving up user navigation.
• Making search engine friendly URLs
• Take care of Meta Title Tags, Meta Description tag and, H1 tags
• Install Google Analytics
• Has the Website Sitemap been made

Keep you website simple when you start redesigning. We must remember that redesigning the website is our business need for (a) to satisfy the visitors need, (b) to satisfy our business promotion and marketing needs, (c) embedding SEO elements will make this happen on the search engines and will effect our web presence and web 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.