Increase Your Success Rate in the Search Engine Optimization

Businesses across the world are becoming more aware of the needs of understanding the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). In order to ensure success in the competitive world of Search Engine Optimization, you need to follow a certain set of basic rules.

Below are listed some of the basics. Follow them and ensure the success of your online strategy.

1.Committing oneself to the process

You must remember that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a one time process or event. Search engine rules and algorithms keep on changing and updating on a regular basis. It is quite possible that the rules that were applicable last year do not hold much significance in the current scenario.
For ensuring success you need to be updated on the process, as it changes and upgrades. Remember, SEO needs commitment and long term outlook. Develop the same and reap the benefits.

2.Have patience with search engine optimization

Patience is the key to success and this holds true in the SEO world too.
It often happens that results take weeks and months to shape up.
Do not give up and persist with your SEO strategy. You will achieve success.

3.Becoming a student of SEO

For those taking the do it yourself route, becoming a student of SEO is the only option. A range of web resources as Search Engine Land and a range of online tutorials are available. Some printed literature is available too. Go through the same in letter and spirit and success will follow eventually.

4. Get some web analytics software

A well beginning is a half work done through. This is true in the case of Search Engine Optimization too. Have clearly defined SEO goals for your venture and get some web analytic software. This will help you check on things that work for you.

5.Building a great website

As a business owner, it is undoubtedly your desire to figure on the top of the search results. You need to do some soul searching and check out if your website is among the top 10 in the block. If not, you need to work on it and come up with a strategy to make it better.

6.Including a site map page

It is a fact that spiders cannot index pages that cannot be crawled. Having a site map will help the spiders find the relevant pages on your website and will thus help it understand the hierarchy of the website. This is particularly important if the site has a hard crawl of the navigation menu.
If the site is large enough, one needs to make several distinct site maps. Each one of these has to be kept under 100 links.

7.Having SEO friendly URLs

For better results, keywords should be used in URLs as also in the names of the files. The only thing to remember here is that you should not overdo things as a file having more than 3 hyphens look spammy and the potential users might ignore the same.

8.Keyword research in the initial phase

For those on a tight budget, the use of free versions of WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery is recommended. The AdWords Keyword Tool from Google is also recommended.

9.Opening up a PPC account

Even if you are using adCenter or Ad Words, you must know that this is a worthy way of attaining actual sales volume for the keyword. This option costs a bit but is worth the investment.

10.Using relevant title and meta description for every page

It is true that the page title is one of the most important SEO factors that need to be considered. There is minimal chance of primary term being ranked high without the same being part of the page title.

11. Writing for the users

As a content writer, you need to remember that your prime objective is to cater to the reader. Write for human beings and not for search engines. It is imperative to use a judicious mix of keywords and related terms but one should not ignore the fact that the content is being written for the reader. Add a human perspective to whatever you write and see the change it brings to your efforts.

12.Creating unique content

The creation of unique content is important for everyone but the same hold equal relevance in the online segment too. It is quite possible that the product or service that you are writing about is being written off by a set of content writers in other parts of the world. The challenge is to make it unique and attractive enough so that the customer is able to connect with the same. Have a thorough knowledge of the field that you are writing about and use unique product descriptions along with quality keyword research to come up with the expectations of the readers.

13.Using press releases

Develop good relations with the media community that covers your segment. You can get links from trusted media websites in your field. Try link building tactics as distributing releases online.

14.Starting a blog and participating in others

You can think of starting a unique blog in your niche. Write to yourself or get some guest bloggers to comment on your service or products. Promote your blog through various mediums, be it Facebook page, Twitter feeds, or email marketing. This way you will be able to develop a passionate relationship with your readers and will eventually reap the benefits as your success rate will increase.
In case you are into a service-focused business, using innovative services as Yahoo Answers can do the trick for you.

15.Taking advantage of local search opportunities

An emerging trend in the market is online research for offline buying. You can optimize your website to keep a track of local traffic by highlighting your phone number and address. You should be submitting the website to free local listing services that all the main search engines offer.
Featuring on the first page of any search engine brings worthy returns for any business. Follow the above-listed trick and you will witness an increase in success rate when it comes to search engine optimization.

Beginners guide to social media strategies

Stage 1 – Research

The first stage of a successful social media strategy should involve identifying industry-related areas of the web that will provide opportunities to create a buzz online for your client's industry. These include looking at niche social bookmarking sites, blogs, forums, and social networking sites. You should have records kept on file of what sites work well for which industries, this will save you time in the long run, this file will eventually get very large (trust me!).

Stage 2 – Registrations

Once sites have been identified that meet the project criteria the long registration process entering clients' details in profiles takes place. This will usually involve entering a “homepage” URL, company logo, and a brief summary of what the company’s goals are. Any additional promotional material would also be useful to help build up the brand within the different communities.

Stage 3 – Building trust

The key to creating a successful social media strategy is the relationships you build and the trust that you earn. When suggesting sites or information it should not immediately be the client's site or link bait, it should consist of industry related material. Commenting on related blogs, starting forum threads about the industry should also be created. This should be maintained for a period of time before moving on to the next stage. You should take a genuine interest what you comment on and write about, no-one likes a fibber!

Stage 4 – Release link bait

Once there is a level of trust associated with the company profile that is the time when the link bait or URLs should be posted. Using this method will ensure that the information that is posted will not be labeled as spam by the various site administrators or site owners. By this time the profiles created will already hold some weight within the various communities which will ensure a level of traffic.

Stage 5 – Generate traffic + links

Once the URLs and link bait have been posted this should immediately create incoming traffic to the client’s site or landing page. The secondary goal of such a strategy or possibly primary goal depending on the client will be the natural links generated as a result of such a strategy. If like-minded users find the linkbait interesting then by all accounts they should then bookmark the link on their own social media site, be it a blog, social bookmarking site, or forum. This will additionally create more incoming traffic to the site and generate a number of links that will help with the client's search engine positions for selected keywords.

Stages 3, 4, and 5 should be maintained over a longer period of time to keep impacting the search engine results positions. If this is not repeated throughout an extended time period then the increase in search engine positions will only be temporary.

Methods To Create Network Marketing Business Meet Your Needs

In network marketing, when people ask a question, you should provide the information they’re looking for. If you retain an index of topical information, people will see your website as a resource and still return time and time again. Keep your content fresh, useful, and plentiful, and you’ll see an excellent rise in visitors.

Know what your goals are. Successful businesses are made because the owner is constantly thinking about their company. They see that network marketing may be a business builder and something that must be done all of the time. Make sure you're doing everything that you simply can in order that your goals are going to be reached efficiently.

When bringing in individuals to your multilevel marketing website, make sure that you discuss ways in which joining can help those who register. Include TRUE recommendations of the co-workers and what benefit they’ve based on joining the organization you represent. Add graphs and statistics that factually show how their earnings is continuing to grow and keep growing.

When attending a gathering, trade fair, or maybe going about town, you would like to always look professional. Even once you dress casually you ought to be brooding about your appearance. Network marketing happens all the time, and you never know whom you might meet at the grocery store who’ll be interested in what you have to say!

If you’re not prepared to sell ice to an Inuit, you’re perfect for network marketing. People who attempt to get everyone that they meet into joining their downline will face great disappointment when those people both quit and begin badmouthing them. If people hear you've got a nasty reputation, they won’t even bother lecture you! Be choosy in whom you ask to join your team.

If you want to build up an effective home-based business, you need to be practicing relationship marketing. By listening carefully and needing to pay concentrate on stuff that people need, you’re going to get their trust and can handle helping these questions personal way. The special attention you show others now takes care of substantially afterward.

Outsourcing in online marketing

Anyone who is active on the Internet knows the problem: Too many construction sites that want to be served. Sometimes even the best team just can't keep up if you want to keep up with the latest technical developments. At least as far as the business with search engine rankings is concerned, there is professional help. If you do not want to take care of the topic of search engine optimization yourself, simply hire an SEO agency. This can be helpful and useful for many reasons. Problem: If you end the collaboration, the know-how is often withdrawn again. It is therefore better to hire a provider who will make the team fit on-site and thus ensure that you can continue with the SEO area even after the agency has left. That makes sense because search engine optimization has established itself in the marketing mix. Especially for shops or advertising-financed offers on the Internet, it is extremely important to be at the forefront of Google. If you don't end up with your offer at least on the first page of results, it looks bad. The “visibility” is simply not there and without “visibility” there are no visitors to the website. So if you want to make money on the Internet, you need search engine optimization.

How long does a blog post need to be?

People usually ask, “how long does a blog post need to be?” so I would like to share a few ideas with you.

If you want a post to be highly search engine optimized, then you will notice that there is a lot of conflicting information.  Typically, it seems SEO experts are saying you should shoot for between 3%/ 5 % words as a minimum.  However, on Jim’s marketing blog, I very often write posts that are apparently too short for SEO, yet the site gets a great deal of targeted traffic from Google.  This post is just around 70 words plus the title.

So, how long should a blog post be?
Here are a few ideas, based on some very successful bloggers and the approach they use.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg often writes posts that are just a sentence or 2 and some are just a few words and a link.  Marketing author and Squidoo founder Seth Godin, often writes posts on his blog, which are little longer than tweets, with other posts running to over 800/1000 words.  Other’s blog using photos, with almost no text and some use video.  My friend, the author and branding / social media expert Olivier Blanchard, writes excellent, detailed posts that are often a couple of thousand words long.

Each of those approaches are correct!

Blog post length and your desired outcome

Maybe a better question than “how long should a blog post be” is to ask how long a blog post should be, for your particular desired outcome?  If you want to share short, information-rich posts, then stick with the short format and focus on regularly updating your site.  This is what many short post format sites do and it works extremely well.  Short posts on infrequently updated sites get far less search traffic, as I found out for myself with my demo site.

If you are looking for posts that will score well for relevant key phrases, I believe it makes sense to shoot for longer, information-rich posts; 400 words plus.

Of course NONE of this matters, if the content is not high quality.  Content volume is far, far less important than content value.  High value content attracts links, shares and subscribers.  It draws people, creates conversions and makes things happen!

Bloggers: Are you making this common mistake?

Successful content marketing requires great, original content

Most of the content offered is poorly written advertorial blog posts; part advertisement, part editorial.  Successful content marketing is all about producing the best quality content you can, not these thinly disguised attempts to generate links.

The post you get offered is typically sent via email broadcast, to thousands of bloggers.  So, you will usually be using duplicate content.  One of the signals that search engines look for when ranking a site is duplicate content, as it is often used by content scrapers to auto-populate low-grade sites.

Think before you link

When a stranger emails you asking for links to their site, usually with the promise of a return link, (a link exchange) the best advice is to avoid them.   Similarly, when you get someone approach you asking for links to a site in return for a blog post, you should give it a very wide berth. Why?  Because Google is BIG on penalizing sites that link to what it calls bad neighborhoods.

Linking from your site, via a post someone wrote specifically to get link juice to a site you do not know, is a GREAT way to have your own site penalized.  Even if the links they put into the post they write for you point to a regular looking site right now, these are often switched later on, when enough links have been gathered and pointed to a bad neighborhood (see bait and switch.)

Google is always trying to get the most genuinely relevant pages/sites to the top of their results.  The most powerful way to improve a site’s rank in Google’s search results is to attract as many good quality links as possible (links pointing to your site.)  Link’s, according to Google, should be acquired organically.  People see great stuff on your site, so link to it.  That link is treated by Google almost like a vote.  As a result, Google regards link exchanges as a way for people to fool their system and get a better ranking than they deserve.

It can be a great idea to have people you know and trust, writing guest posts on your blog; however, using posts from total strangers is a very dodgy strategy, with little if any actual benefit for all that risk.

Removing dates from your blog posts: Why bother?

It started with me asking Brian Clark and Sonia Simone from copy bloggers if they would add dates to their posts.  Posts on copy blogger have no date; either in the post itself or in the URL.  So, if you land on a page on a copy blogger via a search engine or a social media link/bookmark, you have no idea if the information you are reading is 5 minutes old or 5 years old.  To get an idea of the date, you need to scroll down to the comments section and see when the first comment was left.

A number of people agreed with me, that dates were useful.  However, Brian and Sonia don’t just play around with copyblogger.  I knew there was a slight SEO benefit to removing post dates, but not much.  There had to be a far better reason why they were leaving the dates out, so I decided to remove the dates from the posts on this blog for a month and measure the results.

I quickly received some amazing feedback!

More shares and more comments

I quickly noticed posts getting shared more often on social networks.  It seems people look at the date of a blog post before determining if it’s recent enough to read, share, or comment on.

It appears that the date then acts as a filter, with each person holding a different threshold. So, some people may not worry reading a post that’s more than a week old, others may have a 6-month threshold, whilst others will be fine with posts that are years old.  If the date is not there, it seems more people start reading the posts and then make their minds up, based on the value of the content rather than the date it was published.

In short, well written, older posts started getting shared, “liked” and retweeted a lot more often.

With Google and Bing, both using signals from social networks as part of their algorithm, any extra shares, likes, and social bookmarks are of real value.

Lower bounce rates

Immediately, people started reading more posts on each visit to the site.  The bounce rate dropped from 74% to 59% over that 4 week period; starting on day one!  Although 4 weeks is a smaller dataset than I would use when working with a client, a consistent drop, the day on day for 30 days, is relevant.

In addition, as the bounce rate dropped the same day the date was removed, and stayed down every day thereafter; I believe there’s a real link between the number of posts a person reads as they navigate through this site, and those posts having a date on them.

I will keep you updated with my results over the coming months, as 30 days is still a relatively short test period.

Dates in blog posts: No one rule applies

blog post dates you are considering doing something similar with your blog, this is not a universally good idea.  Those date filters I mentioned earlier are there for a good reason; they stop people reading out of date information and believing it’s current.  The dates really matter, if your blog is in a time-sensitive niche, such as; news, politics, technology, automotive, fashion, music, sport, gadgets, etc.

But for blogs that provide evergreen content on less time-specific topics, such as; marketing, personal development, cookery, copywriting, body language, yoga, crafting, martial arts, etc, the post dates are far less important.  A 5-year-old post can be just as relevant and valuable, as a 5-minute old post.  For example, many of Seth Godin’s oldest posts are also his best, most relevant insights; even though he wrote them 6 or more years ago.

Date free with a caveat

I have decided to carry on without dates on posts here for now, but with an important caveat.

Any posts that reference time-sensitive data, will have the date included in the actual post copy.  For example, at the time of writing this, Facebook has 750million users.  That number will increase, or maybe even decrease, over the coming weeks and months.  So, if I were to mention it, I would say that as of June 2011, Facebook has 750million users: Rather than just quote the number. I will also be leaving dates visible in the comments section, so anyone can scroll down and see when the posts were published.

This blog is still fairly new, so it’s easy to adopt the date free approach from here on.  It’s a harder job on more established blogs.  For example, I will not be removing the dates from Jim’s Marketing Blog, as much of the content there would need rewriting, re-editing and there are close on a thousand posts there.