Complete Search Engine Marketing

Executive Summary Introduction

Search Engine Marketing is the process of leveraging the usage of search engines to create website exposure for a company. This exposure normally is used to garner conversions in the form of sales, leads, subscriptions, downloads and any other definition of a user turning into a paying customer. This intent-based advertising is the core of Search Engine Marketing that amounts to the best return on each marketing dollar spent.

Fundamentals of Search Engine Marketing

At its core, Search Engine Marketing leverages user intent by optimizing an organic or paid search listing around that specific user’s intent. Instead of blind placements on billboards, mass mailings, and the like, Search Engine Marketing serves up specific advertising via ad creative or search listing based on what the user is actually looking for.

The premise of Search Engine Marketing will provide the most relevant result after a keyword query is entered, in the form of a title, description, and URL, whether it is organic or paid. There is much more control over these factors, known as “creatives” in paid search, but organic search results allow some customizing here as well. Depending on the relevance of your listing and how well it matches to the intent they have in mind, they will chose to either click-through to your site or not.

Why Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing, as an advertising and marketing channel, continues to grow its national and international reach and offers businesses and consumers the first true worldwide platform to conduct business. Industry statistics continue to show that more advertisers and consumers are searching to buy and sell what they need.

• In a study done by Pew Internet & American Life Project from 2000 – 2005, using search to find information was done by 90% of all internet users in the US. This number came in second to only Email users at 91%. According to March 2007 data from Neilson/Netratings, about 209 Million people in the US have internet access, which means that about 188 Million of them use search engines regularly.

• According to a statistical survey done by Hitwise in March, 2007, of the top 20 most popular websites on the internet, 18 of which are wholly owned by search engines. These websites make up for 26.85% of all website traffic on the internet. They include the search, Email, music and social media industries. The lone exceptions being eBay.com and Wikipedia.org. Of those top 20 websites, the Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN contextual, image and video search interfaces make up for 14.23% of all website traffic.

• In a scientific study conducted by Eyetools and Enquiro, the top three organic listings are viewed 100% of the time. The lower positioned listings get incrementally less attention as follows: rank 4 (85%), rank 5 (60%) rank 6 & 7 (50%), rank 8 and 9 (30%), rank 10 (10%). In that same study they found that the top paid search listing is viewed 50% of the time, with lower positioned listings getting incrementally less attention as follows: rank 2 (40%), rank 3 (30%), rank 4 (20%), rank 5-8 (10%).

• Based on comScore data from February, 2007, Google is the leading search provider in volume with 3.3 Billion searches per month. Yahoo scores 2 Billion, MSN: 730 Million, Ask: 348 Million and AOL serves 338 Million. These statistics show that the 5 major search networks were responsible for over 6.7 Billion searches per month or about 35.6 searches per user.

Attributes of Pay Per-click Marketing

Pay Per-click advertising works by charging the advertiser a set auction price that they establish for each keyword. Every time that ad is clicked, the advertiser pays that set amount. PPC advertising has both distinct advantages, which at the same time can be considered shortcomings, over search engine optimization and other forms of interactive and traditional marketing.

Advantages:

Being the latest and greatest in interactive and on-line marketing, PPC advertising offers guaranteed placement, complete transparency and analysis down to a very granular level. Through the use of built-in search engine tools, commonly available analytics, and tracking techniques, the marketer can track when the ad was clicked, how much they paid for that click, what that user did after that click on the site, and whether or not that click was converted into a conversion. They can then take that data, analyze their entire campaign, determine how successful their spend vs. return was and make an educated decision on how to improve that effort.

Campaign-wide decisions and changes can be made by quickly analyzing a set of data and making a few simple clicks with PPC thus giving it a distinct advantage over any other type of interactive media.

Shortcomings:

Because it is now considered mainstream, everyone from major international corporations to mom-and-pop shops are bidding on the same industry keywords, driving up click costs considerably. The strategy of taking a loss on a click but taking the chance of a consumer becoming a lifetime value customer is known as volume bidding and is sometimes employed by new companies looking to brand their name causing smaller companies struggling to compete.

Click fraud is another shortcoming where automated robot programs or manual ‘clickers’ perform erroneous or intentional clicking on PPC ads without any intention to view the site or make a purchase.

Another issue is trust: the users that are aware that they are clicking on sponsored listings tend to assume (correctly) that the site is trying to sell them something. Statistics show that a majority of searches are information-based so not all consumers will want to be overwhelmed with sales pitches on the site.

Attributes of Search Engine Optimization
Coined sometime in 1995 or 1996, “SEO” is the process of modifying the layout, navigation, content and popularity of a website to improve the chances of ranking higher in the “organic” or “algorithmic” search results. Ever since the rise of Google in 2001, external link popularity has become a major aspect of search engine optimization. SEO has some great merits that have helped it stay on top as one of the most effective interactive marketing methods around, but some of the basic aspects of SEO are also shortcomings that must be considered.

Advantages:

Search engine optimization tends to be less expensive than PPC advertising in the long-run. Attaining positive results through good navigation, content and link profile requires a lot of initial optimization work but with time, as those results appear, the long-term costs tend to decrease. SEO has also been known to have a slightly higher conversion rate than PPC advertising, thus improving the return on the marketing dollar.

Organic listings tend to have higher click-through volume which is an advantage over PPC advertising because you are not paying for each click. You can also use log file analysis and server-side analytics software to track the path of the user and various data points such as which keywords they used to get to the site, the conversion rate for organic results and project your final ROI.
Additionally, organic search engine optimization can show results for long tail and obscure search queries that you have never thought about. Google statistics recently pointed out that 50% of all Google queries are wholly unique – meaning half of all search traffic is hitting the long tail of keyword search. It is this long tail that is easy to optimize and rank well for—you just have to find it.

Shortcomings:

With search engine optimization – search engine guidelines, best practices and algorithms are often updated and changed. What may have worked a year ago may not necessarily work today making SEO an art form that is incredibly hard to keep up with.

Compared to PPC advertising, SEO is also difficult to change once everything is in place. It may take a year or more to optimize a site to rank well for a particular search term. If that search term is discovered to not convert well after all that time, you cannot simply switch to another keyword. Changes often require the collaboration between multiple departments such as IT, Marketing, Sales, Legal, Copywriting and SEO.

More of the Good, less of the Bad

The basic premise of PPC advertising is to get more traffic out of the ‘good’ keywords, and less out of the ‘bad.’

1. Bidding – Bidding is the most basic strategy, where you bid down on ‘bad’ keywords to get less traffic, and bid up on ‘good’ keywords to get more traffic. Bad keywords can be defined as words that are less relevant and convert worse than good keywords.

2. Building – When a ‘good’ keyword is in the right position and is converting at a profitable metric, PPC marketers will build-out and expand that keyword, such as using different variations like ‘pens,’ ‘buy pen,’ ‘custom pen,’ and so forth, to get more traffic from similar keywords.

3. Subtracting – Negative keywords allow you to make a semantic distinction between two words with the same meaning. For example, if you are a company that has a keyword “windows for sale,” you would not want to be coming up on searches for Microsoft Windows because that would yield a 0% conversion rate as your website would be totally irrelevant to those looking for information on the operating system.

4. Testing Landing Pages – Unique domain landing pages can be built specifically to act as the destination for a specific set of keyword creatives. This method often leads to higher conversion rates because the user is taken to a page that is highly relevant to what they are searching for.

5. A/B Split testing – A/B split testing is performed by supplying search engines with 2 unique ad creatives and defining when and where each is shown. This allows the marketer to test which creative will yield the higher CTC Rate.

6. Multi Variant Testing – Landing page or multi variant testing involves analyzing multiple landing pages that deliver a different layout, call to action, conversion form or message. Often times, simply moving one part of the page to another area and changing some of the wording can significantly alter usability and conversion rate.

7. Day-Parting – Day-Parting analysis is useful when the business has specific limitations or previous testing has shown that certain ads perform better at certain times. If, for examples, your call center is operational only at a certain time, you can select your “Click here to speak to an operator” ads to only run during those times and not waste money on clicks that will yield to phone calls going to voicemail. Day-Parting allows for maximum return on the marketing dollar in these situations.

8. Geo Targeting – A company that sells products or services only in specific geographical area can geo-target ads to only run in the designated areas that you select. This technique allows users that are most likely to buy your products in that geographical location to see and click on your ads.

SEO Techniques

1. Content – In the field of SEO, it is often said that “Content is king.” High quality, useful and relevant content is one of the main aspects of SEO. Simply duplicating other site’s content will hurt more than it helps. Good, creative product descriptions and copywriting will also help generate high quality inbound links which are also an integral part of the organic ranking algorithm.

2. Link Profile – High quality link development that is highly targeted to the content on the page will be how to get ranked for ultra competitive keywords. The goal is to get backlinks with the keyword you are focusing that page on in the anchor text of the link to point directly to that page. It will further help if that linking site is somehow related to your site and has few other outgoing links to other sites and many back to it.

3. Navigation and Indexation – Navigation and indexation are the very basis of any site and are crucial to being listed in organic search results. Search engines will send crawlers or spiders to your site via external inbound links that can only follow text links for navigation. If the site is coded entirely in flash, JavaScript, or images, the crawler will have nothing to read: it can only read HTML text. Further, using strategically placed words in the anchor text of your navigational text links will help the search engines determine what the page you are linking to is about and therefore improve your ranking on that page for the keywords on which is it focusing.

4. Web 2.0 – Web 2.0 is a broad definition encompassing image search (Flickr), video search (YouTube), social media optimization (blogs), social media marketing (Digg), and user generated content (Wikipedia). These emerging marketing avenues and venues have provided a new medium for the development of the core SEO premises: content and link development. Leveraging the power of Web 2.0 can bring significant amounts of traffic to your site.

Combining PPC and SEO Methodologies

The experienced internet marketer will understand the need to use both PPC advertising and search engine optimization in their internet marketing efforts as both paid search and organic search is important and here’s why:

• Studies prove that when a user sees the website or brand name on the search results in both the organic areas and the paid, they tend to have more trust in that brand.

• As the trust in the brand is established, the user is likely to click on organic listings which will not cost the advertiser any money.

• Increased impressions of a listing will remain in the memory of the user, possibly bringing them back to that brand or search query later on.

• If you have multiple pages that are relevant to a specific keyword or broad phrase match; you can optimize a content-rich page to rank in the organic listings while guaranteed results for a less optimized page can be paid for.

Successful internet marketing should use both paid and organic search techniques. The difficulty is how to best integrate the goals to generate the best potential outcome. Here are some of the techniques to use:

Your main (top level) domain should always be optimized with proper usage of keyword focus, content development, code optimization, server-side setup, keyword prominence, link acquisition, and the main purpose of informing and having the full conversion functionality. At the same time, you can build what are called “micro sites,” which are prettier and more conversion-driven sites on new domains that are built with a specific set of keywords and high conversion rate in mind. This will encourage a greater conversion rate than your main domain that is more content-heavy and broad that will require the user move around the site.

In addition, micro sites that are just one page will rank lower than those with multiple pages that have the feel of real sites. Try and include a few pages connected via text links such as an “About Us” page, “Contact Us” page, “FAQ” page and search function page.

The most valuable aspect of combining your PPC advertising and search engine optimization is the use of paid search data to quantify, measure, and strategize your organic search campaign. Running the paid search campaign will allow you to test various keywords, implement different creatives, and determine how much you are willing to spend and what your potential return may be.

Paid Search Challenges

The PPC advertising challenges facing this particular music download website and its company involve the complexities of scale. The music industry has many possible variants on keywords such as artist names, song titles, album titles, lyrics, record labels and many others. Scaling the keyword development and creative writing for the industry was a major hurdle requiring a significant initial investment. This industry is one with constantly evolving keywords: there are always new artists, songs, and albums being released and the company needed to keep up with each new aspect. Meanwhile, each search engine ad network has a different set of guidelines and interfaces that the company had to mold its campaigns around.

The music industry is highly competitive and keyword bid prices are constantly on the rise. Requiring the need of a campaign management team with a tight focus on conversion and maximizing the ad spend; the bidding and customer acquisition strategy was constantly audited, evaluated, and tuned.

The psychology of the user interested in legal music downloads had to also be taken into consideration with advanced PPC advertising techniques. The psychology of the free music download user is that of an ‘I-want-it-now’ consumer, and the usability aspect had to be optimized through negative keywords, landing pages, A/B split testing, multi-variant testing, day-parting, geo-targeting, web design and usability testing to match the consumer’s requirements.

Organic Search Challenges

Scale is also an issue with organic search and search engine optimization. The particular website has over 100,000 unique pages active, 90,000 indexed by various search engines, and adds about 500 new pages per day. Therefore, the IT team, in collaboration with the SEO and copywriting teams, had to figure out a way to automatically add various on-page and code elements such as the Title tags, Meta data, and content.

As for content and copywriting needs, since there are so many different ways to structure content around every aspect in the industry (artist, song title, album, and related information), a copywriting team was required for research and the development of unique, optimized content for each particular artist, song release and album.

The most challenging aspect of SEO for the site has been high quality link development. It is also the most challenging part to do correctly because it is the sole aspect that you cannot directly control. Many links tend to be un-optimized due to the limited amount of inbound link acquisition and the strict amount of control exacted on linking qualities. In this scenario, the company developed and fine-tuned an internal linking structure that best leveraged that attained link profile by imparting relevance factors in its navigational structure.

Other Search Engine Marketing Considerations

Web Design:

Web design can have a significant impact on both paid and organic search results as well as the user experience on the site. By not complying with noted search engine best practices in your HTML code, search engines can potentially decrease your organic search ranking.

The use of complex graphics, on-page scripts or image-based navigation are not search engine friendly and will harm the indexation of your pages and navigational ability of crawlers on the site.

Web design and W3C compliance also impact usability. A website with HTML markup errors can lead to poor user experience due to missing page elements, resolution non-compliance, cross-browser display issues and mobile devise layout problems.

A poor web design may also be unappealing to end-users. Better calls to action, simpler navigation, clearer fonts, faster load times and a “Web 2.0” design layout will usually merit a better conversion rate.

Analytics:

Analysis of success and failure is an integral part of any marketing campaign. In the case of the internet, websites, and search marketing, that need is exponentially greater.

A good log file analytics program will help determine which pages are converting better than others and why and also allow you to analyze many small data points on a very granular level. Most modern analytics programs allow you to test:

• keyword usage
• referring site
• time and date of arrival
• user entry point
• user path
• user exit point
• bounce rate
• time on page
• site visited before yours
• site visited after yours
• click fraud detection
• crawler tracking
• funnel analysis
• conversion rate of each link on the page
• ROI tracking
• map costs, revenues, and profits

You can use this information in both organic and paid search to determine who is buying and when, and decrease the possibility of those that do not buy from clicking on your paid listings.

Contextual Ads:

Contextual advertising aims to target users by providing related ads near content that is on the webpage. For example, a newspaper site might run contextual ads provided by Google or Yahoo! along the top, side, and bottom of its pages. These ads will be triggered by certain keywords used on the page making them very relevant ad placements.

Contextual advertising is more targeted and relevant to what the user is interested in at the moment than search engine PPC advertising; therefore, it tends to carry a higher CTR but a lower conversion rate. In addition, recent technology updates have allowed smart pricing functionality to automatically discount the amount the advertiser pays for the ad based on the likelihood of conversion as well as site exclusion abilities allowing the advertiser to not have their listing show up on pre-selected sites.

Conclusion

Search engines have been used as marketing tools since their earlier inception but as technology improves, new methods develop, and more ad spend is being pushed towards Search Engine Marketing, the complexities of making it work and the ROI succeed is becoming more challenging. Both PPC advertising and search engine optimization have unique advantages and some inherent shortcoming, but through their collaboration, each one’s advantages fill the gaps present with the other.

It is through information acquired from data sharing that both PPC advertising and search engine optimization benefit and combine to become a highly optimized Search Engine Marketing campaign. With branding, implied trust, budget allocation, and various on-page testing, the complete Search Engine Marketing campaign is successful.

It takes the collaboration of a wide range of teams to effectively integrate and operate a large scale and successful Search Engine Marketing campaign. It is this large-scale collaboration that most companies that do not focus on Search Engine Marketing alone tend to fall short and rely on experience and technology offered by a Search Engine Marketing agency.

Design and SEO Make Site Look Good and Rank Well!

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I’ll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

DESIGN CAN’T BE IGNORED

if you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you correctly understand some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought-If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that’s not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB

that’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you’re offering.

CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO

sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, “pumpkin bread recipe.”

From a design standpoint “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra” code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO

In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords “pumpkin bread recipe”. Note- why did I use the number 30? It’s safe to assume if you’re not on the first three results pages of a search, you’re not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn’t always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.

AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC

everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That’s ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.

REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY

if you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer’s attention. If it’s very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it’s home made jewelry, the site shouldn’t look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community can’t find you, you’re business will fail. So I’d have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you’ve got a cool to look at, content rich, and well optimized layout.

I’d make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I’d also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you’re creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.

PLANNING YOUR SITE

if your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren’t the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.
If you want/need to establish an online presence you will have to make some compromises. But how many? How much do you have to sacrifice in the aesthetics of your site to be seen? Examine the problem and read a real world case solution.

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques

You have created your website – uploaded content and images to create a pleasing online environment for your information – and are ready to launch. Yet, for all the relevant content and attractive photos provided, optimization for the search engines will require more than presenting a nice package. The site needs to be optimized for search results, that search users looking for information on your topic are able to find you. For newer sites, age can be a determining factor in how it is ranked among older sites search engine view as more experienced and relevant, yet with proper optimization and implementation good results can be had.

Some factors to consider when optimizing your website for good search rankings include:

Code – Is the HTML code that builds your website valid? Will a search engine spider be able to crawl your front page in its entirety, then go onto the listed sublinks without hitting any walls? Is your code free of dynamic strings that a search engine spider cannot read. If not, is the code altered in a way to keep the dynamic factors of your site without holding up a crawler’s ability to mine data from your website?

Content – Is the content you provide on site relative to the site’s topic? If paraphrasing from other sources, do you give proper credit? If your content is original, do you make it available to other sites of relevance to use, and do you include your link information? Is your content well-written, free of spelling and grammatical errors? Is there a proper balance of relative keywords that may be targeted in search? Is your content compelling enough to prompt site owners of relative content to link back to you without being asked?

Freshness – How often do you update your website? Do you use a blog to power your site with updated content? Do you syndicate your content through an RSS feed for other sites of relative topics to use? Do you use an RSS feed of relative information on your site to bring updated content to your visitors?

Keywords – How balanced is your use of searchable keywords in your content? Are the keywords used relative to the site’s overall content? Are you trying to trick the engines using keywords that are not relevant? Do you use too many keywords, or too few? Do you create anchor link text of searchable keywords, leading users to information deeper within your website?

Links – Do all of the links on your website work? Is every subpage within your site linked back to the home page? Do you have

How to use search engines more effectively

Almost anyone can pop onto Google or Yahoo!, type a couple words into their respective search engines and obtain a vast number of results – but are they the results you were looking for? Read on to learn how to use search engines more effectively and avoid unnecessary digging through wasteful results.

Let’s start with a brief overview as to how search engines work. Search engines accumulate their databases by using “spiders” or “robots” which crawl through web space while identifying and reviewing web pages. Once a spider gets to a site, the program indexes the words on the pages of the site. Additionally, web page owners may submit their websites to search engines for crawling, and the eventual inclusion in their databases.

When users search the web using a search engine, the search engine scans its index of sites and matches your keywords with the documents within its database. Therefore, when you ask the search engine to go to work for you, it is checking a database that was created at an earlier date, not actually searching the entire web as it exists at that very moment.

Once you’ve asked the search engine for some results, the engine will follow a certain set of rules to rank the web pages. These rankings may vary from one engine to another; however, the goal of each is to return to you the most relevant pages at the top of the list. In order to do this, the search engine looks for the location and frequency of the keywords you have requested within their databases.

While reviewing the rankings you’ll typically find two types of search results – those which were paid for and those which are organic, in other words, those which the search engines see as the most relevant to a particular search. Paid results, offered by both Google and Yahoo! allow you to bid on specific keywords (such as “preschool toys”) and create an advertisement that links to a website. The higher people bid, the higher and more frequently the advertisement shows up on the page when someone searches for that keyword. These paid results generally show up on the top and down the right hand side of the search results page.

Organic results are commonly seen as the more relevant and trustworthy sites to visit. These results are completely non-biased as search engines do not accept any money to influence the rankings.

Now that you have a better understanding as to how the search engines work behind the scenes – let’s get to the important question

SEO Case Study, Attorneys Chasing Vioxx Organic Search R

Last week the drug manufacturer Merck pulled their pain relief
medication Vioxx (rofecoxib) from the market due to studies
linking higher incidence of heart attacks and strokes to long
term use of their medication. The highly profitable medicine
was aimed at Rheumatoid Arthritis sufferers and others who
weren’t able to stomach aspirin, which is arguably more
effective than Vioxx is for most pain relief.

Top search engine rankings for the trademarked word “Vioxx”
were dominated by Merck-owned web site http://www.Vioxx.com
as of September 30, 2004. The site is likely to keep that
ranking now that hundreds of thousands are flocking to the
search engines and typing in “Vioxx” to learn if they or
their loved ones are at risk of heart attack from taking
the medication.

News organizations are all linking to http://www.Vioxx.com
site from online news stories about the health concerns and
financial repurcussions to Merck of the sudden recall. Merck
has run full page ads in top newspapers nationwide addressing
the sudden action and sending those millions of readers to
the http://www.Vioxx.com site and http://www.Merck.com site
to read disclaimers and learn how to get refunds for the
medication they already have in their medicine cabinets. The
inbound links will soar at a point when they probably want
it most so they can present their case to web visitors.

Taking the second position is the FDA page outlining the recall

and linking to more info at the FDA site
http://www.fda.gov/cder/drug/infopage/vioxx/default.htm
Third place for the single word “Vioxx” also belongs to an FDA
page and fourth and fifth positions are owned by a site that
appears to be a drug index at
http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/rofecox_ad.htm

Sixth place is currently held by
http://www.medicinenet.com/rofecoxib/article.htm at a medical
site that dominates for many drug and medical terms due to
extensive discussion boards and informational pages about
thousands of medical conditions and their treatments. Seventh
through tenth position are CNN’s news story on the recall,
then Yahoo News with a similar story, two online pharmacies
with curiously blank pages. Try to sell Tylenol from those
pages guys – don’t waste the traffic with blank pages!

Pay-per-click advertisements were posted by agressive class
action attorneys to run alongside organic search rankings and
appeared immediately on the day of the recall announcement.
The first search for the word Vioxx done at Google on Friday
October 1st brought up an advertisement for
http://www.Vioxx-heart-attack.com as the first result in the
Adwords listings along the right side of the page. The bids
were below a dollar a click on Friday, but are rapidly
escalating as ever more law firms jump into the bidding war.

The real test comes now for organic search engine optimization
firms as they set out to gain top rankings for their class
action attorney clients. Interestingly, I’ve just finished
reading the John Grisham novel, “King of Torts”, about a young
“mass torts” attorney that made over an hundred million
dollars by being the first to run nationwide television ads
seeking clients injured by a faulty drug manufactured by a
giant pharmaceutical company. Although the protaganist in the
story has a web site to collect leads, nothing is mentioned
of PPC advertising nor is it likely to be discussed in novels.

In “King of Torts” nothing is ever mentioned about organic
search engine ranking of his web site either. Settlement seems
to have come faster than would be possible to gain top rankings
for a highly competitive search phrase. It will be extremely
interesting to watch domain name sales related to Vioxx, since
keywords in domain names always help rankings. Some that are
showing up in PPC ads include the previously mentioned
Vioxx-heart-attack.com, Vioxx-side-effects.com, Vioxx-Claim.com
VioxxRecallLawyer.com and Vioxx-Lawsuits.com.

As of October 4th, 2004 the only NON-news related site in the
top organic results at Google that are NOT online pharmacies,
government agency sites, NIH (National Institutes of Health)
or an information site http://arthritis.about.com/od/vioxx/
is a site that emphasizes giant class action lawsuits at
http://www.bigclassaction.com/class_action/vioxx.html which
has a PageRank of 5 as of October 4th at 5pm Pacific time.

The final ranked site of top 30 for the single word “Vioxx”
at Google is the legal information site Findlaw in their class
action section at http://injury.findlaw.com/vioxx/ which asks
your zip code on first visit and must use IP delivery for
robots visiting the first time since there is nothing on that
page about Vioxx if you’ve never visited the page before.

Now we will see what techniques are used by Search Engine
Optimization firms that hurriedly post sites full of links
to gain search position for the word Vioxx in order to sell
more links to those agressive law firms and attorneys (and
they’ll run expensive click-through Google Adsense ads).

Without doubt, the most SEO savvy attorneys will compete at
a fever pitch for top rankings over the next few weeks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Banks Valentine does search engine optimization for
http://www.VioxxLegalHelpCenter.org
Keep informed as new sites dominate the phrases related to
Vioxx, heart attack, stroke, Vioxx recall, class action suit,
Vioxx personal injury claim, Vioxx legal help, About Vioxx at
http://www.RealitySEO.com

How To Rank In Ask.com?

Are you getting targeted traffic from Ask.com ?

Some of you may have noticed the traffic coming in to your site from ask.com. Although the traffic is “just a trickle” compared to traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, it is extensive compared to other search properties.

In this post, we’re going to talk about why it’s important to pay attention to and begin optimizing for Ask.com We will give you some information about how their algorithm works and tell how you to do SERP research to improve your rankings.

First of all, it is important to know that Ask Jeeves was recently purchased by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp, making them “players” and giving them more funding and a wider reach than they’ve had before. IAC has plans for Ask.com:

Ask Jeeves is one of four world-class search technology providers, with approximately 42 million U.S. unique monthly users, and is one of the largest generators of online advertising in the world. Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of IAC, said, “Ask Jeeves was founded almost ten years ago based on the idea that simple text search results alone are not sufficient or satisfying – but, rather, that consumers want answers to questions – and questions posed in natural language and answered with spot-on accuracy were especially desired and appealing. Of the many search engines launched during that time, Ask was one of the very few that established itself … and we believe that in the future it has the potential to become one of the great brands on the Internet and beyond, and by beyond we mean in wireless, in the search for anything on any device. It is that belief, powered by IAC’s wealth of resources and thriving businesses, together with the continuing strong management of Steve Berkowitz and his team, that is the impetus for this transaction.”

http://www.irconnect.com/askj/pages/news_releases.html?d=74889

Additionally, although Ask only has a small share of search traffic, it is enough to warrant some attention:

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451

Including Ask owned properties Iwon and MyWay, Ask represents 5.3% of searches, just behind AOL. This could result in decent traffic, especially if you are already well established in Google, Yahoo and MSN and are looking for additionally sources of relevant visitors. Also, if you offer a niche product or have a very large website, Ask can result in more traffic to your site.

How does Ask.com rank websites?

First, we have to establish that Ask.com uses technology that they purchased from Teoma. Teoma’s claim is that although it scans only a fraction of the content covered by major engines like Google, it produces well ordered and relevant search results by initially eliminating all the irrelevant sites and then considering the popularity of only those that relate to the search subject in the first place. It also provides other ways to sort through thousands or millions of search results by allowing users to refine or expand their search. Teoma was created initially from research derived from Jon Kleinberg’s HITS. The HITS algorithm focuses on identifying communities, and and authorities within those communities. You can read our review of HITS here: http://www.authoritydomains.com/understanding_kleinberg.php Hubs and Authorities.

Based on this model, Teoma works by responding to a query. In real time, they match the query with relevant pages by using Term Vector analysis (matching the query with words on the page). Then, they expand the set of sites by including sites that link to or from the initial set of about 200 sites. Subsequently, they analyze the linkage structure and determine which sites are hubs and authorities. They determine this by checking the total number of outbound and inbound links – if a site has many outbound links to sites that have many inbound links, it’s considered a hub. If a site has many inbound links from sites that have many outbound links, it is considered an authority. Results are then re-ranked to include these calculations.

Also, Teoma owns the patent for DirectHit, so they also include clickthrough counts in their algorithm.

They also may be using many other modifiers to their core algorithm. The best way to understand the rankings is to analyze the SERP’s for various keywords, particularly your own keyword sector.

Getting listed in Ask.com

There is no way to submit to Ask.com They discontinued their Site Submit program, so there is no way to pay for inclusion and there is no free “add url” form.

The only way to get listed is to get Teoma’s spider to find your site by following links from other sites. After you get links from other sites, you can watch your server logs to see if the spider is visiting your site and grabbing your pages.

Here’s the information for finding Teoma in your server logs:

The crawler comes from the IP address of 65.214.xx.xx and will be called egspd433.teoma.com. The user agent shows as Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma).

For more information, please visit this page: http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/aj/teoma.htm

How to Optimize for Teoma

First, it’s important to ensure that your site has regular on-page optimization and your keyword is included throughout the code of your page. Teoma uses regular Term Vector analysis to determine what your page is about and it is used when constructing the first set of results. So make sure your keyword is included in your title, text of the site, meta keywords and description, and other relevant areas. The meta description tag is important for Teoma, so make sure you have your keywords mentioned in your meta tags, and make sure that every page has a unique set of keywords in the meta keywords and descriptions tags. Also, remember that Teoma indexes the entire text on a Web page and does not ignore the stop words like “on”, “the”, “and” etc, so craft your on-page campaign accordingly. Basically, use standard on-page SEO techniques – the same approach you have been taking with Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Off-page Factors

Having ensured that your site has proper onpage optimization, you then have to conduct a very focused link popularity campaign. Instead of working on a non-relevant reciprocal link or buying generic links, it’s important for you to get links from sites that are within your “community”. Remember that Ask works by identifying communities and ranking the top, most authoritative sites in that community.

Who is part of you community?

To optimize for Ask, you first have to determine what sites belong to your online community. Who are the experts? Which sites receive a lot of links from other relevant sites? Which sites have great lists of relevant sites in that community? You have to do the research and have a very clear map of your community. You can perform this research simply by typing your top

keywords into ask.com and making a list of the sites that rank. Then, visit those sites and become familiar with the community. Take notes when you visit them, listing things such as, do they have a lot of links out to other sites in the community? Do they only have a few links out to other sites? How can I encourage them to link to me? Don’t forget to visit the sites that are related to yours by clicking on the keywords that appear under “refine” or “expand” your search on the right side of the SERP’s.

Then, you have to start establishing yourself in your community. Imagine you just moved to a new area and wanted to make friends. What would you do? You would bake your famous oatmeal cookies and go knock on the door of your neighbors to say hi and introduce yourself. Same with your website. You would visit established sites that belong to your community and ask them to mention you in their websites. Ideally, you have something unique to offer, something that other sites in your community don’t offer, this way they’ll be happy to link to you.

If you are offering a product, try to get other sites in your community to review your product. Pay them to post your review, or give htem your product for free. If you are competing in a competitive area, try to find a niche for yourself where you can establish your site as the “big fish” in a small pond.

Offer something unique

You will have an easier job getting listed on other sites from your community if you offer something unique that is not currently available in your community. Also, you may consider finding an incentive for other sites to link to you, like offering them a discount if they buy your products, giving them free advice if you’re an expert on something, or offering a free tool that they can add to their site with a link back to yours.

Finally, try to generate new content on a weekly basis. This advice is good for all search engines in general, and will also help you with Ask. This will also encourage people to link to you, as they see you are constantly developing content and are offering “value” to the community.

Conclusion

Once you have established yourself as an expert in your community, it’s important to continue building your reputation by getting other related sites to link to yours. Also, use keywords that belong to their “refine” or “expand” search feature, on the right hand side of the SERP’s, to get your site listed in those SERP’s to link to you. All the sites listed under those keywords belong to your community. If you continue growing your site, adding content, and getting links from other sites, you will see your rankings increase and stabilize in Ask.com.

Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Marketers

There are no secrets on how to rank high with the major search engines because effective search engine optimizations are now immense. What is search engine optimization? Before we discuss that thing, you have to understand first how search engines work and a bit of know-how.

Search engines are into providing their users with the most relevant and up-to-date information to match the search term that was used. They are sophisticated pieces of technology which allow users to quickly find relevant websites by searching for a word or a phrase. Search engine results are useless to users if the information doesn’t relate to the search term, or if the results are old. People expect the most up-to-date and fresh information that is useful to them.

Updating your website everyday and adding some materials will help you get noticed by the search engines. So, if you are going to sell any type of product or service online, you have to optimize your website for the search engines, in order to boost traffic and sales. It is because over 90% of your business will likely come directly from search engine results. And for that reason, it is absolutely important to optimize your site for search engines for you to have the greatest deals in the entire world.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which webmasters or online business owners utilize strategic copy to augment their website’s status. It is certain that the internet has grown so fast over the years and the competition for the best search engine position has created an enormous market. Therefore, better understanding the fundamental elements of Search Engine Optimization is vital for an online business’ success.

Making use of effective search engine optimization techniques will improve the page rank of your website. There are many tricks that can be used to increase page rank; the most effective method is to provide high quality content consistently. This seems like a simple concept but there are many websites that fails to provide content that visitors find interesting. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. So, if you can set your website apart from those boring, lifeless sites then do it. You’ll surely have a step closer to achieving high page rank through search engine optimization.

The next significant factor for an effective search engine optimization is to include keywords and phrases within your content. To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you have to make sure that the keywords and phrases you have on your site are the keywords and phrase that your site is actually optimized for. The more keywords you use in your content, the more likely it is that online visitors will find your site when they do some research with those words. If you are unfailing with these techniques, then your overall search engine optimization will increase, boosting your page rank.

You should also have to develop a linking strategy as a part of your search engine optimization. Not only does this provide free advertising for your site, but it makes the impression that your site is imperative because of its affiliated links. For each link that you have pointing back to you, that is another chance for your potential customer to find you. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.

Another is to develop a content stratagem. People who get to search from the internet are looking for information. The more information you provide for them and the more helpful it is, the more likely you will make the sale. Writing articles is the most effective way to build up content for your site. When writing articles to post on your site, make sure that you develop a clear means of arranging their content. You can do this by simply adding a new page to your site. This will allow room for extra articles to be added as you write them, and will allow you to build up an archive of articles which will maintain to draw online visitors. Make sure also that you have included your archived articles in a directory that is next to the root web of your site so that the search engines will catalog your online articles.

Always keep in mind that search engine optimization methods are important in developing your site’s status. With that thing in mind, make sure that you write high-quality, keyword rich content and link your site to and from a deliberate family of other sites. These things will help improve your site’s popularity and coerce increased business through your online business.

Bursting forth from the Sandbox to top of the Google’s Rankings

For a considerably long period, Google happened to provide new sites with a temporary boost, known as “fresh boost” or “new site bonus.” But recently this search giant seems to have set a new trend in place for Search Engine Page Rankings (SEPRs). It was found that that Google SERPs of brand new sites turned out to be pretty pathetic after the initial glorious days at the top of the search rankings. This phenomenon is popularly referred to as Google’s Sandbox.

Google’s Sandbox is like a quicksand

Though “Sandbox” sounds pretty pleasant, it very much resembles a quicksand than a playground as suggested by its name to many web professionals.

When a new website is indexed in Google, it gets propelled to the top of the SERPs charts for a short yet glorious time, and then, slides downhill only to be buried deeply in the sand at Google. In other words, Google’s Sandbox is about a brand new website being placed on probation, or a hiatus or in a moratorium and kept lower than expected in searches, before being given full value for its incoming links and content.

How does it affect the website?

The Google’s Sandbox is said to be a filter placed on new websites to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process. Websites in the Sandbox does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. The new website will be there in the result pages, but it does not rank well no matter how much original, well optimized the content is and how many quality inbound links the site does have.

Which sorts of websites are vulnerable to be mired in the Sandbox?

While all types of sites can be placed in the Sandbox barring a few exceptions. The problem appears grave for new websites seeking rankings for highly competitive keyword phrases. More competitive keyword driven Websites seeking rankings in highly competitive searches are likely to be in for a much longer duration.

How long does a site remain buried in the Sandbox?

Hiatus in the Sandbox varies from one to six months, with three to four months being the average stay time frame. It has been observed that less competitive searches are given the much shorter stay, whereas hyper-competitive keywords often get sojourn in the sand for six months. The most frequent time of burial is said to be about three months for most search terms.

What distinguishes sites trapped in sand and a Google’s penalty?

Sandbox is a Google-only event. Many folks while they see good rankings in Yahoo and MSN Search of their sites mistakenly believe that they have triggered a Google penalty. However this is generally not the case in point.

Sites penalized by Google do not appear in the Google search engine results pages for even the less important searches. Moreover, sites which have invited the wrath of Google show no page rank, and have a grey bar on the Google Toolbar. And none is true in case of sites mired in the Sandbox.

Google’s Sandbox: Letting website grow to its natural evolution

Google is looking ahead for Websites that offer quality content. It is an effort to prevent spammers from creating web sites that are just a flash in the pan, and to discourage the violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which was not an exception in the past, to say the least.

Google’s Sandbox has deliberately been instituted to put a check on the use of throw away spam sites to build early traffic, and to slow down the purchase of expired domain names, among other things.

Google continues to strive that its ranking algorithm, inbound links, original content rich with keywords, and the use of anchor text are not tampered with for a short term gain severely affecting its credibility and quality standards. This stand is driven by the vision of Google that Website should grow gradually to its natural evolution.

Getting grounds before getting grounded in Sandbox

Getting grounded in the Sandbox is almost near-universal for sites. So, it is the best to be prepared for the eventuality. Planning ahead to be buried in the Sandbox may lessen the damage, using the time to your best advantage. To keep the Sandbox filter from causing severe harm to your online, and even your offline business, employ the following strategies:

The sojourn in the sand may be cut short to a degree by purchasing and sending live a website, before it is ready for prime time. Make it sure that you add as many incoming links as possible to get keep on adding content to your site. Do anything but increase your site’s appearance on the Interner Purchase and register a domain name and park it. By so doing, some of the sand time will be run through the Google hourglass, before your site is ready for launch. In the meantime, you can be preparing content when your site goes public Plan the time of your website launch to have the Sandbox time period passed off when your site needs high search engines rankings the most. Plan for entering the Sandbox by putting your site live at least three months earlier than expected. Rising from the moratorium: Key strategies that really works!

All your apprehension and concern apart, your stay in the Sandbox is simply an excellent opportunity to improve upon your site, and enrich it the way Google will never ever refute to accept in the top rankings. You can dig in the sand to carve out a niche in your site optimisation.

Here’s how you embark on…

Use the time in the quicksand to add incoming links to your website whilst you are in Sandbox. Better still, if you can employ a link exchange strategy right at this time. Reach out to useful directories as good sources of one-way links, additional Page Rank, and potential visitor traffic. Submitting to the various Internet directories, including The Open Directory Project, is quite advantageous in the long term Design and develop promotional and marketing strategies for your website to raise and maintain traffic levels during your hibernation in the sand. Building a community, or building strong inbound links through partnerships pays better off. If you establish traffic sources outside of search engines, you will see a welcome increase in your traffic levels once you get out of Sandbox. When you got trapped in Google’s sand, you may put aside a budget for an Adwords Program, i.e., Google’s pay per click advertising program. This will, of course, help you out in getting exposed and promoted on Google as well as many search and contextual partner sites Prefer not to discount traffic from other search engines such as Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN, all of which do not seem to have any type of Sandbox. It may work pretty fine because sites that have well “on the page” search engine optimization do very well in these engines.

What do you need the most while in hiatus? Right Strategy Mix, Time and Patience

The Sandbox is not something you are eventually doomed to. It is not the ringing of death knell for your site either. It is not aimed to hold you back from succeeding.

Time and patience are your best friends while faced with this predicament providing that you execute the right strategy mix. You may not need to pull all the hair out of your head. Adding some powerful incoming links, with strong link anchor text, and adding relevant and rich keyword, and fresh content will help your site rise from the Sandbox, sooner than the later.

Search Engine Optimization Service

Since now a days there are so much competition in the web market so SEO or Search engine optimization is highly required. It helps you in increasing the traffic of the website. So for proper optimization (both on page and off page) you should always look for god SEO companies.

It is always better if you have local SEO companies. For example if your site is of Florida and you are targeting the Florida Market so it is better that you choose Florida SEO companies. This will no doubt help you to vigilance your work personally and moreover the local company will always know better about the local market very well.

Expectations in Search Engine Optimization Service

1. Good Position in the Search Engine Result Page

When your site is properly optimized it will definitely improve its rank in the search engines. This improvement can only be achieved by SEO professionals. SEO professionals have updated knowledge about the SEO and the tools that are used to improve the search engine rank. SEO professionals should have the capability to explain all your queries about the work and optimization step that they are following for your website.

2. Optimization of the Keyword

You have to choose the proper keyword for your website. Keywords are very important for your website. These keywords will bring you the desired traffic you want for the site. Some of the traffic will be converted into customers so we can see that keywords help you in betting better search engine rank.

Moreover the content of the web page should be keyword rich. More the number of keywords more is the chance of the page to get better ranking in the search engine. But the content should be look keywords stuffed otherwise it can adverse effect. Also the keywords should be relevant to the page. Keyword position in different search engines varies. So constant monitoring is required.

3. Better Page Rank

Page Rank or PR is like the grade that is assigned to your webpage to show the quality of the page. Page Rank is also somewhere related or associated with the order of listing in the search engine result page (SERP). Since the algorithm of the search engines always changes so naturally the PR also changes for the web pages. Thus the SEO professionals should have a constant observation on the pages so that they can have the best possible chance to improve search engine rank of the site.

But it will be not fair enough if you expect to better ranking in fortnight. This is always a long term project. It undergoes multiple trials before getting good ranking. It is impossible to get good rank in one month.

4. Advice on Website Design

The website should be designed in SEO point of view. For example the web pages should have proper title, description, keywords. There should not be any canonical issues. The images of the site should have proper alt tags. There are many other issues that should be solved.

So you can see that constant monitoring is highly required. You should always ask for rank report from the SEO company so that you can have a look into the improvement your site have. Since every day new sites are generating so naturally the rank of your site may change. Thus the SEO company must have a proper plan of action to improve the rank of the page.

How To Link Your Inner Web Pages To Improve Your Search Rank

Ranking your web pages so that you climb the search engines requires a good understanding of links. You are probably aware that having good incoming links from authority sites can make a dramatic difference to your search engine ranking. What many people overlook is the links that they have implemented for their internal pages. When you are looking at your onpage optimization can be a perfect time to ask your self, Have I implemented the right linking strategies within my website?

To start this off, take a look at anchor text. Whilst doing your onpage optimization you will highlight the keywords that you consider most important. What many people will over look is the links to internal pages that they create using these keywords. Whilst we know that one of the key factors search engines rank a site page for is incoming links to pages, many people will pass by the opportunity to include incoming links from their own pages.

Linking your own pages is a great way to create one of the strongest types of incoming links. Maybe you have heard that incoming links that are directed toward your page via anchor links are some of the strongest links. If you have wondered just how to get these types of links to your pages, well here is the perfect opportunity. Anchor text is the word or phrase that holds the hyperlink to your page; when you link your pages together using anchor text, it is the perfect opportunity to get exactly the kind of strong links that will boost your site in the search engine page rankings.

When you are preparing you onpage optimization factors, this is a great time to check that the anchor text and internal links you have established are in line with the onpage optimizations you have done. The first thing that you want to do is make sure that the page title contains the keywords. For example if you have a site that sells shoes, if the page you are trying to direct the links to is for ladies shoes, then you want to make sure that the onpage optimization reflects this.

Make sure that you have the right heading in the navigation bar. If you have a page that is about ladies shoes, then you need a ladies shoes page within the navigation bar. Following this, ensure that you have the keywords ladies shoes in the page title, this means making sure that it says ladies shoes at the top of the browser window. Next make sure that you have bolded the keywords ladies shoes somewhere in the page. Also make sure that you use the keywords at regular and natural intervals throughout the page text. When you have done all this, the last step is to check that the term ladies shoes is in the main heading of the page.

When you have completed these onpage optimizations, you then want to make that final, crucial internal link. Establish direct links to the ladies shoes page from your other pages, via that anchor text. Ideally if you can create anchor text links tied to the term ladies shoes on every page of your site then do so.

Generating these internal links may well be the simplest link generation that you can do for your page, and yet it is one of the most often overlooked. Remember that your website is yours to do with as you please. Getting other links is not going to be as easy as this, so make the most of it. Create strong internal links that are focused and effective; its a great way to quickly and easily boost your search engine ranking.

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