C and S Software

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a very mysterious and confusing marketing tool for many small business owners and managers. Based on conversations I have had with colleagues and business owners, there seems to be a disconnect between the perceived need to implement SEO and an understanding of why SEO may be important & exactly what is involved in the process…”I’m not sure what SEO is and what the benefits are…but I think I need it”. Why should your small business embrace SEO? What are some of the benefits? What are some of the pitfalls to look out for?

Why SEO is Important

Most consumers use search engines i.e. Google to find what they are looking for on the internet. If lead generation is one of your website objectives, then it will be important for your site to come up near the top of those search results (preferably on the first page). Here are a couple of interesting statistics regarding online search and the importance of page ranking:

74% of consumers use search engines to research local businesses, products and services 69% of consumers will click on a website link on the 1st page of their search results Only 10% of consumers will view past the 3rd page of a search result

Basically, 7 out of 10 consumers won’t go to the second page of their search results. “If your website relies on customers finding you when they’re ready to consider your product or service, then SEO is an absolute must for you – and it can generate long-term rewards,” says Rudy Lopes, Vice President of The Smartacus Corporation , “One of our websites, college-cram.com, provides help to students looking to study; advertising to them when they’re not studying is a waste of resources. Showing up on the first page of Google when they look for help is what keeps our numbers so high.”

Benefits

Drew McKenzie, Brand Leader for Creative Department, has experienced the benefits of SEO. “Results have indicated we are getting 5-10 new web generated leads per week, whereas before we received none. In general, via SEO, we have claimed our rightful spot in Google, where, in the past, we did not have a presence. It is resulting in a significant advantage over companies who have not optimized their sites. In my opinion, SEO is mandatory and not optional.”

The primary benefit of a good SEO strategy should be improved page rankings for your small business website. It seems simple enough…implement SEO and watch your website move up the search engine rankings. But there are some other factors that need to be taken into consideration. “The main benefits to using SEO are improved ranking against search queries and ability to extend the exposure of your site” says Nick Dimitrakiou, Partner of the media practice at Kinesis Marketing, “Yes, your results will improve, but you need to be very focused on identifying which keywords are most important to your business, and optimize the site based on those key phrases. Generally, you can expect to see results after a couple of months, but be patient as it is a slow build.”

Manage Your Expectations

It’s important to manage your expectations with respect to the results of your SEO initiatives – Going in to your SEO project with a long term view as opposed to a quick fix is your safest bet. In some cases, results may present themselves sooner than later. On a recent project, the local SEO that I work with suggested that a reasonable waiting period prior to seeing tangible results was 6-9 months. As it turns out, we ended up getting some great results within 3 months. It can really depend on the depth and breadth of the SEO initiative that is required. After an extensive SEO effort, Shannon Kavanaugh, President of Go-To-Market Strategies, saw results within weeks. She is also careful to point out that maintaining positioning required an ongoing effort, “It’s much more time consuming than one might think – You have to keep up on it constantly. Also, the SEO rules change all the time, but all the effort is definitely worth it.”

Pitfalls

Finally, your small business also needs to be aware of some of the SEO pitfalls and what to look for if you’re hiring a SEO consultant. Lopes from Smartacus commented on the fact that a lot of companies do little bits of the process and blanket their service as SEO. “The trick for owners that want SEO for their sites is to make sure that their potential SEO vendor has previously demonstrated success, and in a proper white-hat way – Just like the old cowboy movies, white hats indicate the good guys; black hat techniques are frowned upon by the search engines and can get you penalized or even kicked out off a results page.”

If properly researched, implemented and managed, SEO can provide a real competitive advantage for your small business – but there are pitfalls to avoid. A final word of advice from Nick Dimitrakiou at Kinesis Marketing…”Never go with a provider who claims they will guarantee you positioning!”

By: Mark Smiciklas

About the Author:

Search engine optimization is something you are going to need if you want to be
successful with an online business. It is one of the best forms of website
promotion available. There are so many businesses online, that you have to have a
superior ranking with a search engine in order to get customers in your virtual
door. To do that, your search engine optimization has to be perfect. Without it,
the other guy will be getting all the business.

You can have the best looking, most informative web page on the Internet, but if no
one knows about it, you won’t get any customers and your business will suffer. One
key strategy to bringing in traffic to your website is search engine optimization.
Basically, users type a keyword or phrase into a search engine and potentially
thousands of web pages may pop up. But you don’t want your prospective customers to
have to look four, five or even ten pages deep into the search results to find your
page.

To know how to best go about optimizing your page for a search engine, you first
need to know how search engine optimization works. It helps to know for what
keywords a typical user will be searching. Some website owners help improve their
ranking in search engines by changing the page’s coding or structure, so the actual
work to make the page more optimized all happens behind the scenes. The user
visiting won’t actually notice changes on the page. Other website owners choose to
optimize their page with unique content. This helps the placement of their web page
when someone is searching with a search engine such as Google or Yahoo!. The unique
content is easily indexed.

It is also wise to use directory submission, that is, submit your web page with
different directories such as Yahoo!. This can also bring traffic into your website.

To do this, just search for the site’s directory submission page, enter your URL,
website name, keywords or phrases, and a brief description and submit it.

Once you get the customers into your site, if it is well done and informative, they
will want to add URL to their bookmarks so they can visit again. Just remember that
website optimization is a key part of your Internet marketing and business success.

By: Ramiro Trevino

About the Author:

Characteristics of search

Understanding how a engine works helps you to understand how your pages are ranked in the search engine, but how your pages are found is another story entirely. That’s where the human element comes in. Process means different things to different people. For example, one of my colleagues identified the Internet using the same words and phrases he would use to tell someone about a topic or even the exact question that he’s trying to get answered. It’s called natural language. Another, however, was trained in search using Boolean search techniques. She uses a very different syntax when she’s creating a search term. Each of them returns different results, even when each is using the same search engines.

The characteristics of detection refer to how users search the Internet. This can be everything from the heuristics they use when creating a term to the selection the user makes (and the way those selections are made) once the results are returned. One interesting fact is that more than half of American adults search the Internet every time they go online. And in fact, more people search the Internet than use the yellow pages when they’re looking for phone numbers or the locations of local businesses.

This wealth of engine users is fertile ground for SEO targeting. And the better you understand how and why users use search engines, and exactly how search engines work, the easier it will be to achieve the SEO you’re pursuing.

The process of collecting information about web pages is performed by an agent called a crawler, spider, or robot.

By: Darwin Jalen

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), considered by many to be a subset of Search Engine marketing, is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from Search Engines, usually in “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Those efforts may also be seen in more narrow vertical Search Engines involving areas such as local search. Many site owners and consultants engaging in SEO attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site, and the quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting further information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other specific action.

In a broad sense, SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Creating web pages with SEO in mind does not necessarily mean creating content more favorable to to algorithms than human visitors. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search Engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by Search Engines while also appealing to human visitors.

The term SEO can also refer to “Search Engine Optimization”, a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out Optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees of site owners who may perform SEO services in-house.

Search Engine Optimization often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective SEO can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term “Search Engine” Friendly” to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

By: Khan Mehboob

About the Author:

So you have made a great website and it’s just not getting the traffic it deserves, and you don’t know what to do next. You have told all your friends, you have spent lots of time and money on advertising and it’s still not helping. Well, if you didn’t already know this, most of your websites traffic is going to come from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. there are hundreds out there but these are the big three, and the ones you really need to focus on. To get these sites to notice you can prove quite difficult, especially when you don’t know where to begin. Well here is a guide to get you started on your way to a high page rank in the big search engines.

Step 1: Submit your URL
There are websites out there that give you the option of submitting your URL to hundreds of sites at once either for a small fee, or in some cases for free. You can use these if you want, but to get the best results you are better off submitting your URL to each search engine individually. There are four that I recommend you submit your URL to immediately. They are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and DMOZ (the open directory project). The big three you want to submit your URL to because they are the most commonly used search engines, and a lot of smaller search engines derive their results from these engines. The DMOZ however, is not a big name search engine, at least not compared to the big three. You still want to submit your URL to them though because they are an exclusive group, and getting your web URL in their directory can improve your page rank in all other search engines. To submit your URL simply visit the site you want to be included in, and hit the “ADD URL” or “SUGGEST URL” link. If you can’t find the link you can always just use the search engine and search for how to add your link to that particular site.

Step 2: Submit a sitemap
Sometimes submitting your URL doesn’t get you listed fast enough, or at all, and this is why a sitemap is important. A sitemap is in short a list of your websites individual pages. The sitemap lists them all and when you submit your sitemap to a search engine it tell their crawler robots to crawl your pages. This method can sometimes get your site listed in as little as 24 hours. The two sites you are going to want to submit a sitemap to are Yahoo and Google. Each one of these search engines requires you submit a sitemap in a different format. Yahoo wants a txt style format, and Google wants a sitemap in XML. You can use online free sitemap generators to make your sitemap for you if you don’t know how to make one on your own. To find one just search “free sitemap generator.” Once your sitemap is generated follow the instructions given by Goolgle and/or Yahoo to submit it to them. For Google you can find the instruction in their Webmaster Tools section, and for Yahoo you can submit your sitemap on the same page you submit your URL.

Step 3: Get other websites to link to yours
Getting the big name websites to link to yours can be a very difficult task. A lot of these big name websites disregard 99% of link offers they receive, and they receive hundreds of offers everyday. The reason for this is because of two main reasons. One, you did not ask them the right way. Two, they don’t feel that the content on your website would be beneficial to their users. First we are going to take a look at reason one. Most people who write to the web-masters present their link exchange request as follows……..

Hi, my name is (your name) and I have recently made a website. My website is all about (whatever your website is about) and I’m really trying to get it noticed. I was wondering if you would consider putting a link to my website on your website. In return I will put a link to your site on my website. You can check out my website at www.(yourwebsitename).com. Please write back to me even if the answer is no, and please give me some tips to make my website as good as yours.

Okay, 99% of people write to other websites requesting a link exchange like this, and they get nowhere. That is because they get this kind of request everyday, and usually sites who present themselves this way are not worth linking to. If you really want to get sites to link to yours you should write to them as follows……

Hi, my name is (your name) and I just got done reading your article on (whatever the article was about). I really enjoyed it and you presented it nicely. I have a website that is about just this kind of thing, and was wondering if you would give me permission to include a link to your article on my website. I really feel that my users could benefit from the knowledge on your website. You may also want to check out an article I have that is similar to this one, that I’m sure you will find beneficial to your website. You can check out the article at www.(your website name).com/(your articles exact URL).htm. Feel free to have a look at other articles while your there. If you would like to give me permission to have your link on my website please e-mail me when you can, and if there is anything else I need to do other than put your link on my site please let me know. Thanks for taking the time to consider my website.
(your name).

This is a much better e-mail because you are showing that you value their website, and feel it would be beneficial to your users. You are also not asking for a “link exchange”, you are asking for a content exchange.

Now looking at problem 2, the solution is very simple. You have to write good quality content, and keep adding to it daily. Do this and you will find that sites will be coming to you asking for content exchanges.Note: There are programs out there where you can pay to have websites linked to yours. But don’t be fooled, most search engines disregard these links because you didn’t earn them the proper way.

Step 4: Let your website age
Not much to really do with this one, just sit back and let your website get a little older. The reason for this is that search engines take a websites age in to consideration when assigning it a page rank. The older your website is the more credible the search engine will find your website content.

Thats it for SEO, but you still are going to want your website to get noticed in other ways as well. Put your URL in your signature and post on blogs, get involved in Google and Yahoo groups, and use advertising tools like Google Adwords to get your ad out. You also may want to try using Yahoo Answers to promote your website. Answer peoples questions that relate to the content of your website, and establish yourself as an expert in your field. You can also leave your website as the source link so they can visit your website to find content similar to their question. Hope this guide helped you, and good luck with your website.

By: Matt Rankin

About the Author:

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