Monday, December 18, 2006

What is the need of a SEO Consultant?

If you are not getting enough traffic from all your online marketing
expenses, then don't get too much worried with that. You are not alone in
this category. Most of the online businesses fail to generate sufficient
amount of quality web traffic even they spend quite aggressively on the
online marketing campaigns. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of
knowledge of various online marketing practices and activities. To overcome
this limitation, you should consult an SEO Consultant who has got a great
amount of expertise and knowledge in the field of online marketing and
business in your business domain or in related domains.

Normally people think of SEO Consultants as web content writers who can
write keyword rich articles or content.
Even though this is quite correct up to an extent, the truth is that the
content writing is only one of the most important jobs of an SEO Consultant
but it is not the only job. A good SEO Consultant can do a variety of things
to increase quality web traffic to your site. This includes generating
incoming links from relevant website to increase the Page Rank of your
website.

Conversion enhancement is one of the major things that any SEO Consultant
will do to increase your traffic. He will use techniques like copywriting
strategies, site usability, call to action tactics and advanced conversion
reporting to enhance the conversion rate on your website. The main focal
point for any of the websites should be the content. If the content is not
useful to your target visitors, you just can't run a profitable website.

Professional SEO consultants continuously strive to keep updated with the
latest evolving techniques in the field of SEO. Hence they will take less
time to produce perfect results which you are looking for. But, if you
decide to do it on your own, then there comes some great disadvantages to
your business. This is mainly due to the lack of your knowledge and
experience in the field.

You are definitely not going to spend enough amount of quality time
consistently to learn new strategies as it is not your bread and butter.
This results in the usage of age old techniques in your business. As you
know, internet space is the space that keeps changing literally everyday.
So, you will be certainly behind your competition. You will also waste a lot
of money on several online marketing campaigns and generate a very poor
traffic.

To avoid these problems, it is better to hire a professional SEO Consultant
who has got a proven track record in his field. This not only provides your
online business with good web traffic but also saves your valuable money and
time. You can concentrate better on your competent skill, building your
business, leaving SEO activities to a professional SEO Consultant.


----------------------------------------------------
Darren Dunner is the author of this article. Find more information on the
subject at http://www.the-content-writers.com/

Surefire SEO For New Websites

Have you ever wonder why some websites are more successful than the others?
Have you purchased a ready-made website, fire it onto the web and realize
that there is no traffic to the website? Are the gurus having secrets that
you don't know? Is there a missing software that you need to purchase?

The truth is, the problem doesn't lie on the website being created. The
problem lies in you. Websites don't promote itself, you have to put in the
effort to promote is. Two persons can purchase the same set of ready-made
website but one person is much more successful than the other because the
successful one spends time promoting it whereas the other one simply upload
the website and hope miracles to happen.

It doesn't cost a lot of money to promote a website, but it does require
some time and some consistent effort. In this article, I'm going to share
with you a simple and surefire way to promote your website - through article
marketing.

What do I mean by promoting your website? When I say promoting your website,
I'm talking about getting more websites linking to your website. That's
promotion and that's the most important thing you need to do after you have
launched your website. That is the main difference between a successful
website and a failed website.

Forget about link exchange. In most cases, if you have a new website,
chances are, other webmasters are not interested in linking to you! Also, it
takes a lot of time to search for link partners and convince them! I would
rather spend that time to create one more website. Think link exchange only
when you have a PR of 3. Use what I'm going to share with you to build your
website to PR3.

1. Submit articles to hundreds of article directories.

Create articles about your web site, add your own resource box/byline to the
articles and submit them to article directories. Remember to link to your
website through your keywords, not your url address. This will increase your
search engine ranking for the keywords.

Some of the article directories you can submit include:

www.ezinearticles.com
www.goarticles.com
www.articlecity.com
www.knowhowtips.org


2. Bookmarking

There are more than 50 bookmarking website your can bookmark your website.
Bookmarking websites have high PR and they are frequently visited by search
engine spider. This is another excellent way to gain one way traffic to your
website and even get your website listed!

Below are some of the bookmarking website you can use:

http://del.icio.us
http://www.furl.net
http://jots.com
http://linkroll.com


3. Blogging

Blog is another type of website frequently visited by search engine spider.
Do a search on the blog related to your website and post some useful
comments to the blog. This is how you can get some good links to your
website.

Commit yourself to spend 1 hour a week to do these three promotions. After 1
month, you will realize that you are automatically getting good ranking in
some non competitive keywords. By then, if you are monetizing through
adsense, you should be to earn 1-2 dollars a day. This should give you
enough motivation to continue promoting your website and add more pages to
your website.


About The Author: Kenneth Koh is the webmaster for many websites, including
http://www.knowhowtips.org.

Company Blogs

Of the top 500 companies in the USA only 40 have a company blog. The reasons
for this are not yet clear, however some speculate that marketing agencies
do not have enough domain specific knowledge to truly comprehend the value
of a company blog from a PR, branding and direct sales perspective.

According to Bill Gates a company blog provides opportunities for companies
to establish opinion and thought, whilst creating a "human face" to an
organization.

Speaking with a blog consultant may help to explain the true ROI that can be
gained through effective blog management and implementation; a company blog
is an effective SEM (search engine marketing) tool that establishes
authority and provides direct sales conversions.

With the rise in social blogging, the commercial sector is set to follow,
with companies such as Microsoft already realizing and experiencing the
benefits of a company blog. They are able to respond to news as and when it
happens, they are able to attain feedback on products, and they have also
created a sales platform that speaks with millions of highly targeted
customers.


With blog consulting services from search marketing agencies and SEO
copywriting firms, the future of commercial blogging will be less about
public relations and far more about link building and SEO (search engine
marketing). Many companies are finding that a company blog is another sales
channel that enters markets that their sales domain cannot enter.

Let's think about a man who is getting started online - he approaches a
website design company and commissions a website design. After two months
online, he is disappointed to discover that he attains zero visitors, let
alone conversions, through his website.

He starts to look towards marketing, and wants to find out how he can rank
his website higher in the search engines. Is this man specifically looking
for an SEO company? No. Despite this an SEO company may have a company blog,
and they could provide the basic information that is needed to convert this
man into a sales lead through taking an authoritative stance.

Through speaking with a blog consultant it is possible to establish an idea
of the results that you will attain, and the blog management services that
are available to you. A competent blog consulting service should penetrate
far less competitive markets than search engines, with blog specific
directories and engines providing a format by which leads are less targeted,
yet less competitive.

With the recent upsurge of company blogging amongst small and medium size
businesses, many are opting for more than one blog on the back of the
results that they have attained. Through spreading a message across multiple
blogs they are able to represent different angles and keyword phrases in a
manner that would be impractical on a sales page.

As link building becomes a more exhaustive and costly task, blogging is an
area of the web, where savvy webmasters show a more kind-hearted approach to
providing links. A blog can be positioned within or out with a company's
primary domain name, meaning that any residual page rank can be distributed
to the sales page from highly content-relevant material.


About The Author: NameCritic's Blogging Services are reasonably priced. We
manage your blog for you. We update it daily with content written with SEO
for your keywords and phrases. Email NameCritic@blogs.pn to learn more.
http://www.blogs.pn

SEO or PPC - Which Marketing Campaign Is Best For Your Online Business?

Before you get started with the Search Engines you should decide which of
the two major Search Engine marketing strategies will work best for your
site. This will help you to stay on track and not waste a lot of time
needlessly.

The 2 major Search Engine marketing strategies that exist today are SEO
(search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click).
You should know and understand that these two methods are very different
from one another. This will help you to be better enabled to decide which
one is right for you and your web site.
Of course, part of this decision will depend upon what your web site is
like.

One of the main reasons why it is difficult to decide which of these 2
strategies is best for your site lies in understanding why you cannot use
both of these methods. In reality, there really is no reason why you cannot
use both of these methods.
In fact, it is encouraged to use both strategies because PPC can work well
with any SEO plan.

By using PPC you can help users become more familiar with your web site.
Once these users become use to seeing your web site they will stick around.
Plus, the more often that visitors come to your site, the better the Search
Engines will like your site.
This is one of the many reasons why it is so important to try to get as many
people as possible to visit your site.

If you take some time to read about the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC
then you can decide for yourself which strategy will work best for your web
site. Since Search Engine traffic is still the best way to get targeted
traffic to your web site, a lot of marketers are still going to do battle
with Search Engine optimization.

You should understand that PPC is a form of text-based advertising on a
Search Engine. Whenever you use PPC you will be charged per click whenever a
visitor clicks on your ad to enter your web site. You will have to bid money
in order to be listed first. In actuality, this is the same as sponsored
listings.

On the other hand, SEO is an attempt to alter how you rank in the Search
Engines by looking at factors such as link popularity and Page Rank. The
rankings that you achieve through SEO will appear on the Search Engines'
main results pages, not in the box where the PPC links appear. A lot of
people like this method because it is free, yet you will have to invest your
time here.

Now that you know what is involved in each method, you are probably
wondering how you can tell which method is better.
Unfortunately, you really cannot say that one method is better than the
other because each of these methods serves a different purpose. Usually you
will be able to see that one method will be a better fit for your web site
though. Here are some pointers to help you make an educated decision for
your site.

If you are in search of stability and predictability then you will find this
with PPC. You may think that this is going to cost you a fortune, but this
really is not true. The stability and low cost are what makes this method so
popular. In fact, most web site owners will try PPC before working with SEO
because your site can rank high without doing all of the tedious work that
is involved in SEO (i.e. finding link partners, posting links, etc.). As
long as you have some money that you can invest in your web site then you
can rank wherever you want with PPC. Another advantage to PPC is that your
site will be listed when you add it, not whenever a Search Engine gets
around to finding it. Unfortunately this is a very competitive market and
CPCs (costs per click) are constantly increasing. This is because it works
like an auction wherein the more people there the higher the price will be.

On the other hand, SEO can be done for free. Unfortunately the traffic will
be unpredictable since you constantly have to guess, adapt and change your
strategies. This is important to understand because you could rank in the
top 10 one month and then fall out of the top 10 the next month, thus
loosing some important income. You also need to realize that SEO is slower
than PPC because Search Engines only update about once a month.


If you are still finding this a difficult decision to make you should think
about whether or not you have money to spend. If you do have some money then
go for PPC because it will have faster results. If your budget is tight then
go for SEO because all you will need to invest here is your time. The best
thing would be to use both SEO and PPC at the same time aiming for different
keywords with PPC than you are using in SEO.

Needless to say, while people are constantly looking for new, unique ways in
which they can bring more traffic to their web site, the SEO industry will
continue to grow. Nevertheless, it is still important to understand what PPC
advertising is. Once you have a thorough understanding of both SEO and PPC
you will be able to decide upon the best Search Engine strategy for your
site.


About The Author: For fast, higher rankings of your website visit
http://www.high-rank-directories-plus.com or
http://www.high-rank-directories-plus.com/ultimate-seo-plan-research-package
.html
today. Chris Taylor - author, internet marketer and SEO specialist -
http://Catdynamics.com

Tips For People Who Hate Writing In Providing Articles On Their Web Sites

Internet is all about providing information to people. Nowadays the amount
of people who are using this medium is increasing rapidly. Many internet
marketers know that people want information from their websites and not just
SEO enriched pages of advertising. As a website owner you can give any
information on the internet by providing articles on your site. By creating
an article and optimizing each page for a separate keyword you can get
search engines to include you in the results when users search for specific
word or phrase.

In addition marketing by articles have become increasingly popular in the
last few years. A lot of products related to article marketing such as
article submitter and article rewriter have been created to support it.

Unfortunately, although providing articles are crucial to keep ahead in
internet business, there is one dilemma. Not many people like writing
articles or have time to write them, and hiring people to write for you is
not cheap. The good news is there are some options available to provide
articles on your website.

You can use free articles which has the same subject or topic as you want
from article directory. But it is not wise to only provide such contents on
your website since they would have resource boxes that could link or direct
your visitors to other site.

Another option is public domain contents. They are freely given to the
public for public use and you can do whatever you want with it, including
put your name as the author. Just choose public domain contents that are
very relevant with the theme of your website.

But there is a disadvantage of using public domain articles.
Because they are free, many people may also use the same contents with
yours. It could be predicament since your website needs to be unique.
Duplicated contents are not good both for search engines and visitors.

Another resource to get free articles which are free to edit is sites that
provide articles and ebooks with private label rights. Because the contents
are not free there will not be many people that use the exact same articles
with yours. It can even be better if you create an article from some parts
of a PLR ebook since not many people do it. But you should also edit them a
bit so that there is no possibility that search engines and visitors will
see the same contents they have seen on a multitude of other sites.

If you don't have time to rework public domain or PLR contents but still
want to make them look original you can hire someone to do it for you. There
are people who do part time that charge only minimal fees for this job.
Unique and useful articles are important tools you should utilize to improve
and explode your online business.


About The Author: Heris Yunora http://www.soft-promotion.com - Private Label
Web Content and Tools

How To Get More Traffic For Your Articles

Besides submitting your articles to article directories, in order to get
even more traffic, you should also optimize your submitted article to get
traffic from search engines.

This is particular so for new websites. Most of the more popular article
directories are pretty well search engine optimized. By submitting a article
with a keyword phrase that has low competition related to your website, the
chances of the article showing up in search engines is greater.

You might be thinking I can also do it with my own website, why put my
article that is well optimized on someone's else website?
The reason for that is because larger and more popular article directories
has been around for a while and the same article has more 'weight' in the
search engines if it is placed on their site than yours.

I have tested this and some articles I've have written for article
directories can rank in #1 or #2 position out of 10,000 competing webpages
whereas the same article on my own site is not even on the lst page of
search engine results. I'm not sure why but Google, Yahoo and MSN seems to
like certain article directories more than others.

Of course, your keyword phrase that you use in your articles must have some
search traffic and have low competition count.
As a general rule, look for keywords in your niche that have at least a few
hundred searches and less than 5000 competing webpages.

Here are a few tips on how to optimize your article

1) Put the keyword phrase in the title

Number one rule in SEO is to fit your keyword phrase into your title of the
article.

2) Insert keyword phrase in the body content

Usually for a 400 word article, I only insert the keyword phrase twice, once
in the beginning of the first paragraph and at the last line of the last
paragraph. It's important not to overdo it to the point the article doesn't
make sense since you want the reader to read your article and then click
through to your website in the author's bio box.

That's it, simple onpage seo anyone can do to attract more traffic to your
submitted articles. It may take more time to optimize your article, find the
keyword phrase to use etc but it can proof more worthwhile since you only
need to do it once correctly and get unlimited traffic from that article for
years.


About The Author: Discover the best keyword research tool recommended by
Ricky Lim at http://epromote.info/1/nb.htm that allows you to mine keyword
discovery, wordtracker and overture databases plus 13 other keyword tools.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Part 05

With an affiliate program, you will be recruiting affiliates to advertise
your product or link. Every time one of your affiliates makes a sale for
your site, they get a percentage of the profits. Affiliate programs are a
great ways to get hundreds of people promoting your site for you. ClickBank
is probably one of the most widely used affiliate sites out there, so if you
want to start an affiliate program for your site, that would be a good
starting point. There is a fee to use ClickBank, however.
If you want to try out an affiliate program without paying, there are sites
like PayDotCom. They are free, but you probably won't get as many affiliates
as you would with ClickBank.

Now let's take a look at another way to bring visitors to your site -- by
providing them a valuable resource:

Starting a Newsletter. Starting a newsletter, ezine, or community can be a
fantastic way to bring repeat traffic to your site. So by all means, if you
can provide a newsletter once a week, then do so. A newsletter, ezine or
even a discussion community builds a loyal subscriber base and brings more
traffic from referrals to your site. You can put a subscription box on your
website with some information about your newsletter. Then, all subscribers
have to do is enter their email address, which will be sent to your
database. There are a variety of programs out there that can help you start
a newsletter, some of them
for free. To get started with a basic newsletter, check
out the free software at the ideamarketers web site. This is a good
starting point, although there are many other free newsletter software
programs you can find as well.
When your newsletter gets bigger with more subscribers, you can always move
to a more advanced newsletter program that costs.

Offering Something for Free. Offering your visitors something for free can
also be a great way to bring traffic to your site. You could offer a free
ebook, for example.
If people can obtain something free, they're more likely to visit your site.
Not only that, but then you can submit your site to the freebie and free
stuff directories out there. People seeking freebies will then come across
your site and visit. Not only that, but your link in the free directories
counts as a backlink! If you do end up using this tactic, be sure that your
site offers lots of quality content. Your visitors may come for the
freebie, but they stay, and return, for the content!

In Closing, bringing traffic to your website is an ongoing process. Let's
take a look at the steps we've discussed:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Quality Content Dynamic Content Lots of
Backlinks Buying Ad Space Starting a Newsletter Giving Something Away All of
these steps can be used together to bring the most traffic possible to your
site. Building a great site certainly doesn't happen overnight, so be
patient and keep at it. With diligence and attention, you can take your
website to the top!


----------------------------------------------------
Steve Renner, Author, Marketing Expert, Marketing Director, The Affiliate
Community http://www.affiliatecommunity.com

The SEO Guide Part 1

It helps you to get your web site to appear in search engine result pages
(SERPs) for keywords that that are relevant to your business.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo all use their own formulas to calculate the relevance
of your pages, but here are a few common factors to guarantee you will rank
above those not using them. Of course, one of the most important factors you
want to check out is the company's track record of results. There are a
couple of factors that have effect on your search engine positioning, here
is one important one, the on-page optimization factors.

If you want a healthy return on investment (ROI) with search engine
optimization (SEO), your success - or failure - hinges on the keywords you
select when combined with other factors like link popularity and web site
design. This would include such tasks like modifications to your keywords,
description, title tags, comment tags, alt descriptions, and title
descriptions of anchors and the actual text of your web page.
The TITLE tag first is the most important part, the "< TITLE >"
tag. Words people are most likely to search on put first in the title
(called "keyword prominence"). Optimizing Your Title Tag.
This is because most engines & directories place a high level of importance
on keywords that are found in your title tag. Your page title is one long
uninterrupted road sign instead of several small ones.

If it was possible to master seo techniques, and be sure that we can get
high rankings by editing just the Meta tags that would be very easy, but
this is only one part of search engine optimization, but that's just not
going to happen. These factors all relate to your own site and include your
domain name, page names, meta tags, keyword density, titles, headings and
last but not least the content. Optimizing your meta tags and dropping a few
keywords into your web site won't pay the rent. Things like the page title,
Meta tags, heading tags, comment tags, and anchor text were the only things
that mattered. Back couple of years ago you could just tweak, title, headers
and description on each page and by doing this you could create fantastic
seo results.

By including local information in your tags and web pages, you help
prospective customers find specific information on the area and business
they are searching for. Localized search engine optimization is the addition
of local search terms to your tags and web pages. Keywords / Description /
Alt Tags / Title Tags / Page Content.

Make sure that all your tags properly closed and that there are no tags
missing, when search engines spider your site and your pages are not
complete the search engines might ignore the page. The science is formatting
the pages with the right meta tags and submitting them in the right way to
the search engines.

Search Engines are also interested in the text of the site.
Anchor text is the text the web visitor sees on the web page, which is
hyperlinked to your domain name or URL. When submitting to other sites use
your keyword phrase for your anchor text when ever possible. You can just
take it that plain text is the food for search engine spiders.earch engines.


About The Author: http://www.linknetics.com is software that helps
http://www.linknetics.com/reciprocal-link-exchange.html

The 3 Types Of Keyword Database

If you have been marketing on the internet for a while now, you should have
realize the importance of keyword research. It doesn't matter how or which
way you earn money online, most likely or not, you still must have the
proper keyword research skills to analyze what these keywords means.

Keyword research is the first foundation step for any website, seo strategy
and even article marketing. Without doing keyword research, you are only
assuming keywords you think people are searching in the search engines which
may not be true.

Most people uses overture keyword inventory database to find out what people
are searching for online because it's free. The other two keyword database
are wordtracker and keyword discovery which are paid subscription.

Comparing the 3 keyword database

Let's take a look at how all 3 keyword database gather their database of
keywords.

For overture, it is the collective keywords gathered by the yahoo and
overture search engine and it tracks keywords up to 30 days.

One disadvantage of overture is the keyword search volume may not be always
accurate as it can be skewed by automated bots hitting their search engines.


For wordtracker, it uses meta search engines such dogpile and metacrawler to
gather its keyword database. It tracks keywords up to 90 days and it's
keyword database has approximately 330 million keywords.

Wordtracker database is more accurate than overture as the chances of
automated bots hitting meta search engines are pretty remote.

The disadvantage of wordtracker is that it does not accurate represent the
internet's search volume keywords since meta search engines only takes up
less than 1% of total keyword search volume.

For keyword discovery, it gathers data from more than 180 search engines
with the majority from google. It tracks up to
365 days and has approximately 32 billion keywords in its database.

The major advantage of keyword discovery is in its massive keyword database
which can allow you to dig up keywords that may not show up on overture and
wordtracker.

Now you might think keyword discovery is the best keyword research tool
since it has the largest keyword database.
However it may not be necessary depending on what you want to do. For
example, if you are just trying to come up with new ideas for a product or a
website, then overture and wordtracker will be sufficient.

If you are trying to gather a large keyword list for your niche, then use
keyword discovery. If you are doing ppc with adwords or yahoo search
marketing, then developing a huge list of keywords is important and keyword
discovery can do that better than wordtracker or overture.


About The Author: Discover the keyword research tool recommended by Ricky
Lim at http://epromote.info/1/nb.htm that allows you to mine keyword
discovery, wordtracker and overture databases plus 13 other keyword tools.

SEO - Google's Sandbox Is A Myth

The "Google Sandbox" argument has been around for a very long time; it is
much loved and loathed by many people trying to do Search Engine
Optimisation.

The truth of the matter is Google's Sandbox does not exist.

People doing SEO who refer back to the "sandbox" as a reason for websites
not performing as they should are either naive or are dishonest.

I have recently tested the alleged "sandbox" theory on a number of sites and
at every hurdle the sandbox theory failed.

In one particular test I registered a car insurance domain and slapped up a
bunch of content. Now, anyone who has been in SEO circles for any amount of
time will tell you that car insurance is a highly competitive industry and
Google would have most certainly "sandboxed" the site.

However, four months later, the site is on the first page of Google's search
results for a highly competitive search term.

The site is also moving very quickly on an ultra competitive search term
that should appear on the first page within a month or two.

Search Engine Optimisers who believe in the sandbox theory all too often
blame their own poor performance for why the website is not ranking highly
on Google.

Getting a site's on-page optimisation right as well as building a sufficient
quantity of relevant backlinks will get any site to rank well.

Google's search algorithm can detect if a site has been selling links, this
obviously will nullify the effect of the link.

Therefore, if you buy a whole lot of links, there is a chance that the
majority of the links will not be passing page rank to your site and the
links will probably be wasted.

Google's also algorithm detects a number of other techniques that search
engine spammers use to manipulate the results.

If you want to create a website that performs well in Google's search engine
results, create a site with lots of quality content and get relevant sites
with a high page rank to back link to your site. It's that easy.


About The Author: Chris Angus is a freelance writer and journalist. He is
available for hire and website promotion.http://www.illustratemyname.com
http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk