Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

If you are planning to start your website’s SEO after the completion of your web development, then it is high time that you stopped a moment and reviewed your own approach. If you want your SEO to bear results and to make your website into a search engine blast, then you must incorporate your SEO as part of your development cycle. If you have to incorporate your website’s SEO as part of your developmental cycle, then your SEO company should be part of your developmental cycle.
Your SEO company should be able to send directives to your web development team on the navigational requirements, file sizes, site architecture, content positioning, etc. Your web development team in turn should discuss with your SEO team on the suitable language platforms. For example usage of JAVA script can hinder your SEO efforts. If your web development incorporates a lot of JAVA script to create those stunning effects in your website then it will be both time and money consuming to have it replaced with a another search engine friendly script. On the other hand if your web development team is already directed by the SEO team on the usable and search engine friendly scripts, they will develop a solution using the search engine friendly script. Your website on the whole will be a search engine friendly website.
Thousands of such factors can be taken care off if during the developmental cycle if your SEO is made part of the developmental cycle. This will also give you the website owner a greater understanding of SEO and your websites search engine strength. One of the main advantages of taking the trouble right at the beginning is that your overall SEO spending will be reduced considerably brining you a lot of savings on the long run. Moreover, you will also be able to save a lot of search engine time. The longer you take to optimize your website the later it will start producing results. On the other hand when you launch a well-optimized website, then it can start attracting the search engines right from day one. You cannot expect for a better reason why your website’s SEO should be made part of your developmental cycle.
Certain things cannot be changed at a later stage even if you are prepared to spend the required time and money. In such cases, your website’s SEO will suffer a great deal. It is much easier to develop a solution that is SEO friendly than make amendments later. Therefore, we cannot stress enough the importance of incorporating your website’s SEO along with the developmental cycle. It goes without saying that your SEO team and your web development team should work hand in hand to produce the desired results.

Most of us tend to glaze over when words like ‘algorithm’, ’statistics’ and ‘trend variations’ start being tossed around. However, SEO isn’t a crap shoot or a gutsy gamble – it’s a science built on accumulated data and fairly predictable results.

You have to have content, which is creative, but you also have to have an idea of keyword density, rewrite rules, and other data driven numbers and percentages.

SEO is subjective at times – there will always be differences of opinion, and trial and error is a god part of certain aspects – but objectivity is certainly not absent.

The algorithms change, but they do exist, and at any given time there are definite rules which must be followed to achieve results.

Google, Yahoo and Bing’s algorithms are ever changing, which is why there is always a need for SEOs who are full on geeks, to reverse-engineer those algorithms and find the cracks to exploit. When you are able to define the algorithm enough to formulate a plan of attack, you are in essence working out your own algorithm to analyze your site and pages and turn the tables.

This means using all the data you can gather to make decisions. You have to create a benchmark against which to score your Content, Keyword Choices, PageRank, Indexation, Internal Links, Inbound Links, Hierarchical Linking Structure, HTML Templates and CSS

Examine all urls, title tags, internal anchor text, keyword prominence, H1s, and meta descriptions, Deconstruct your site and distill all the data you can from each component to figure out what your algorithm should be.

Then and only then will you be able to compete effectively.

You pay your SEO, and sit back. what happens next?

Well, ideally your site soars in the rankings naturally, and you start to receive higher traffic and more importantly higher conversions. A recent conversation in a forum I frequent got me thinking. The two involved were an SEO and a freelance writer.

The writer was shocked that the SEO had provided a service and was patiently waiting for payment instead of demanding instant release of funding provided. The SEO kept saying. ‘No – it’s cool. They’ll pay me when they see the results’. The writer couldn’t wrap their head around the idea that the SEO was willing to let their work be judged by its results. The SEO knew that what they had done would deliver the desired result, and that the proof was in the pudding.

Demand more than empty words from your SEO. Don’t be satisfied with vague promises such as ‘we will make your site rank #1′ or ‘we will get you a thousand back-links’. Ask questions:

Will you be using organic SEO or PPC to make my site #1?

Where do you get links from?

What kind of PageRank do the sites my back-links come from have?

How much will my traffic increase I mean,

How much will my conversions increase?

When can I expect to see results?

By asking all these questions, you gather valuable information about what your SEO actually knows, what they can do, and how fast they can do it. Your LAST question should be ‘How much will it cost?” – not your first.

A number of surveys have been conducted by various companies in an effort to understand and to project the holiday shopping trends for 2009. Most of the surveys concur in their results and they indicate that there is going to be a further reduction in the holiday shopping as compared to 2008. These survey results come as a surprise to many business owners. Many of us were under the impression that the black days are behind our back and that we can start looking towards a brighter future with the effects of recession subsiding. But consumer opinions state something different. It is probably because, families have taken a hard lesson last Christmas and they hoped that 2009 will be more hopeful; with no good news coming their way, they are left with no option but to fall back to “pessimistic safety.”
What do we mean by pessimistic safety? When people are pessimistic about the future, they will go slow on their spending. This will leave them with more resources and if things get better, they will be happy that things are better now and that they have enough resources to spare now. If things do not get better, they would have played safe and be on the safer side. That is what we mean by pessimistic safety. If people are going to prescribe to this view, then this puts webmasters and business owners under serious pressure. Many of us were hoping to make up for all the sales that we lost last Christmas and during the past year with 2009 Christmas shopping. Now we here of surveys that promise no good news to us, it is time to revamp our holiday promotion efforts.
If you have not started your PPC campaigns, it is high time that you started setting up your campaigns and tried various patterns to study their effectiveness. You are in fact left with no time; it has to happen now. This again is a good time to start your press release series for the holiday season announcing your offers and discounts to start getting the attention of the online consumers.
Your landing pages should receive special attention now because you cannot afford to let go of visitors that come to your website without making a sale because people have already made up their minds to reduce their holiday spending. Every visitor you lose is equivalent to 3 unsuccessful sales with the expected level of sales during this season. What every customer is looking for now is cost cutting and saving while shopping so give them what they need so that you can get what you need. Unless you create, a “You Win-I Win” situation, it is going to be a tough battle even this holiday season.

Is Email Marketing spam by another name? Is there any situation where this is OK? Or is it a dying way to connect with would be customers?

Email marketing drifts in and out of favor with web based companies, but has become increasingly popular of late for getting the word out about products and services – by way of free information. However, as more and more businesses turn to email marketing, email recipients are becoming jaded and hit the ’spam’ button on their email window.

When too many people receive unwanted email, the word gets out – resulting in a concerted effort to brand you (and your business) as a spammer. This can quickly evolve into a be a marketing nightmare.

That’s not to say that email marketing is no longer a viable marketing technique. It just needs to be approached with caution and handled with care. A few rules of thumb:

Ask First. Don’t send out mass emails to lists of people you have obtained in any way, unless you have their permission to email them.Limit your emails to the select group who say ‘yes’ when you ask, and save your time and money as well as your reputation.\

Only send emails to folks who opt-in. The best way to ask people to ‘opt in’ is through an online form that allows them to check a box if they want to get your emails. This checkbox can be located in your shopping cart checkout form, a newsletter sign-up form or a “contact us” form. Leave the checkbox blank, forcing them to consciously perform an action in order to start receiving emails.

Make it easy to unsubscribe. Taking people off the list should be every bit as much of a priority as putting them on; so give recipients the option of unsubscribing from the list. This can be taken care of in the form of a simple link at the bottom of each email: “click here to unsubscribe”.

As long as you are respectful and don’t spam, email marketing is fine.

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