What does all this SEO jargon mean.

Have you ever been left scratching your head, wondering what the Search Engine Optimizers SEO’s or Gurus are talking about.

You are not the only one.

There are so many terms used on the Internet that you almost need a degree just to understand what the experts are saying.

I thought you might like to be enlightened on some of the more commonly used terms.

I have divided my SEO Dictionary into two sections, Search Engine and Web site related terms

The More common Search Engine terms include,

Algorithm. This is the formula used by Search Engines that determines how any web page will rank in the search results.

Blind Traffic. Usually lesser quality traffic to a Web site gained by misleading promotions or search engine Spam.

Clustering. This is where a Search Engine lists more than two pages for the one Web site for any single search query.

CPA. The Cost Per Action. One Action may be to send one visitor to your site and the associated costings.

CPC. The Cost Per Click.

CPM. Cost per 1,000 impressions. Sending 1,000 visitors to your site via Banner or advert views.

CTR. Click Through Ratio. Equates to say, for every 100 Email you send out, you may have 2 people make a positive decision to visit your site, make a purchase etc …

Doorway or Gateway Page. A web page, specially designed to attract Internet traffic from search engines, then it directs these people to another Web site.

EPV. Earnings Per Visitor. Usually calculated as an average.

Filter Words. Words such as; is, am, an, for, do, was and the. Words that search engines consider irrelevant as keywords. Note, this is different to email filters used by ISP’s.

Hit. One single request (visitor) made to your Web site server.

IBL. Inbound Link. An incoming link from another site to your site.

Keyword Research. Research your keywords to optimizing your web pages. Wordtracker.com and Oveture.com provide useful keyword tools.

Keyword Density. The number of times a specific keyword appears on a page compared to the number of words on a page.

ODP. The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) Used by Google and other directory for many of their Directory listings. One of the best Directories to be listed in and it is free.

OSEO. Organic Search Engine Optimization. To Build a site that ranks high in search engines without spending large amounts of cash.

Outbound Link. An outgoing link from your web page to another site.

Page Views. The number of times the pages of your website are served or viewed as opposed to requests as this may also includes requests for images contained on your pages.

PPC. Pay Per Click. Paying a search engine to send people to your site. One visitor equates to one click.

PR. Google Page Rank, how Google rates your web page from 1 to 10. Aim to get 3, 4 or 5 and you are doing well.

Query. A search for a word or term in a search engine.

ROI. Return on Investment relating to Promoting your site, comparing your investment to your overall income from said site.

SE. Search Engine.

SEM. Search engine marketing. Promoting your site using Search Engines to get visitors to your site.

SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Creating search engine friendly page content to help your page to achieve a high ranking. or Search Engine Optimizer.

SEP. Search engine placement, positioning or promotion. Is your site number one, or on page ten in search listings.

SERP. Search Engine Results Page.

SPAM. Promoting your Web site by keyword stuffing and other deceptive means. The quickest way to have your web site banned from Search Engines.

Stemming. If you search for "painting" in a search engine that uses stemming technology the results will also include results for the words paint, paints and painter.

Stop Word. Words commonly ignored in a search as the word is commonly used and thought irrelevant. Common words such as. got, I, me, you and sometimes larger more common words like computer and Internet as searches including these words literally returns many thousands of results.

A Unique Visitor. When a new computer or person connecting to your Websites server. A unique visitor differs from pages hits or requests.

URL. Universal Resource Locator.

USP. Unique Selling Proposition. Effective advertising that conforms to certain advertising concepts.

That is a very basic list of the more commonly used terms used by the average webmaster or SEO.

Now lets look at some of the more commonly used Web site terms and abbreviations.

API. Application Programming Interface.

ASCII. American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

ALT text. The text that appears when you move your mouse over the top of an image or a picture on a web page.

Anchor Text - Also known as Linking Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink.

Below the fold - The content of a web page that is not seen by the consumer unless the consumer scrolls down.

CSS. Cascading Style Sheets, used with many newer websites to create rules for the items on a website.

html. Hypertext Markup Language. The most common form of coding used to build web pages.

dhtml. Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language.

DNS. Domain Name System or Server.

File. Common Internet File types include .zip .pdf .gif .jpg .png .swf

FTP. - File Transfer Protocol. Used to transfer files from your computer to the server where your website is hosted.

GUI. Graphical User Interface.

http. Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Note that http proceeds the domain name in a URL

ISP. Internet Service Provider. Connects your computer to the Internet.

JS. Java Script, used in conjunction with creating web pages.

MB. Megabyte which is 1,000,000 bytes. A GB or Gigabyte is made up on 1,000 MB

Meta Tags. Meta Description Content, Keywords and Title are used in the head section of websites. There are 50 or 60 other tags but these are the 3 most commonly used. They are very important when it comes to listing your site in Search engines.

Ram. Random Access Memory, Thats what you run out of when you have too many web pages open on your computer.

Stats. Your Web site Statistics.

URL. Uniform Resource Locator. The full IP address or Domain name of your website.

WWW. World Wide Web

Here is one you can use to impress your works mates.

YB. Yottabyte. 5 levels above a Gigabyte. Written down in Bytes as a one followed by 24 zeros. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

There are many thousands of terms relating exclusively to the Internet, Web sites, computers and Search Engines that had not even been thought of 10 years ago.

Many of the terms I have only covered with a basic description as some of these terminologies would take a page to fully cover.

So its not surprising that it can be very confusing to first time Internet users.

May your week be an enlightened one.

PETER GREEN.

Editor of ~ The INDEX ~ ezine.

Editor@Internet-income-index.com

http://www.Internet-Income-Index.com

Your Free Weekly Internet Marketing News, Ideas, Resources and Sources Ezine.

All to often, however, some people put too much stock in the posts they see, ultimately negatively impacting their SEO efforts.

In this article I look at some of the positives and negatives of online SEM forums and attending SEM and SEO conferences.

As part of my daily routine I visit a few of the search engine forums out there to see what people are talking about and what some have noticed.

Sometimes I come across real gems – stuff I can put away for later, or use with a client I’m currently stuck on.

But more often than not, the information you see is really mis-information in some cases. As such, one must be extremely careful in relying what is said on one forum.

A good example is when the Google Dance used to happen.

It was at this time that webmasters would watch Google and begin to sweat when their rankings dropped one or many positions. Some webmasters literally didn’t sleep during the days of the dance.

And many times you would visit some of the popular forums and see all kinds of conjecture and speculation as to what Google was doing.

My favorite posts were “on my website this happened, so this HAS to be what Google is doing.” Yet all to often this poor soul was basing his ideas on the effects he witnessed on only one website.

And that is a flaw with these forums. It’s not that the forums themselves are flawed, it’s that in some cases people posting on them make bold statements about the current state of the engines with little or no evidence.

They base their “fact” on observations made on one or two websites over the course of one or two days.

Generally, these types of posts are quickly debunked as myth, but sometimes they do more damage than good.

That’s because there are others out there who know even less and read these posts and take them as the truth when in fact they are mere speculation.

And it’s not just forums where this happens.

Many of the big forums now have events planned – conferences and the like - where you can now go hear those that post regularly also speak.

But it’s not the speaking engagements I have a problem with, it’s the speculation that happens before and after the presentations that worries me.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients come back from Webmasterworld conferences or Search Engine Strategies with their heads full of ideas on how to move forward, even though I know many of these “theories” to be false, or at least flawed.

You see, there’s lots of socializing that happens at these events.

You may be sitting down to their lovely boxed lunches and strike up a conversation with the person next to you. Before you know it you are sharing ideas, and the next thing you know he’s solved all your problems. Or at least you think he has.

But how well do you know the guy you’ve just been talking to? And how can you be sure that what he’s told you is correct?

This is what I’ve dealt with in the past and many times it’s the forums and conferences that can undo over 3 or 4 days what it has taken you to build over months and years - that is an appreciation from your clients that you do indeed know what you are talking about.

Here’s an example:

We once had a client from a major University. Things were sailing along quite nicely, changes were getting made and the site was beginning to rank quite well.

The client thought it would be a good idea to attend a webmaster conference. We recommended that she attend, but try not to place too much emphasis on what she had heard. This was because the conference she was attending wasn’t one of the “big” ones like WMW or SES, but more of a regional one put on by a local SEO company.

Yet she came back full of ideas on how to “help” me do my job better.

Things like turning off her URL rewriter because “search engines index dynamic content just fine.” and removing optimized meta tags because “search engines don’t use those things anyways” and halting all link building efforts because “building links can get you banned.”

Well you can guess what happened next – the site stalled in the search engines, and didn’t improve much after that. We pleaded with her to let us get back on track, but she was unwilling.

In the end, the client canceled unhappy with the results, but would never allow us to do the job we were hired to do.

All because she took what she had heard sometime during the conference as the truth to end all truths.

Now I’m not saying that what she was told at the conference was wrong. In fact, I’m inclined to believe that what she was told was mostly right. However somehow between attending the conference and coming back to work with us she had determined that she somehow knew more that I did about SEO.

Chances are she likely distorted what she had heard. Instead of “search engines don’t use meta tags” she probably heard “most search engines don’t look at meta keyword tag.”

And instead of “link building will harm your rankings” she probably really heard “improper link building can hurt your rankings.”

I feel she misinterpreted or otherwise twisted what she had heard into something else.

So if you are site owner, please don’t assume everything you read/hear in the industry spaces is correct. If anything I’ve found that you must question everything.

Even if it’s something that a well known industry expert has said, you still owe it to yourself to question it.

After all, if the “expert” is wrong, and you’ve based your online marketing decisions on what they’ve said, there’s only one person to blame – and it isn’t necessarily the expert.

Similarly, if you’ve read something in a forum, be sure to double and triple check it against a few other reliable sources.

For example, if you’ve read something at the Webmasterworld forums, don’t be afraid to question the ability in the Searchenginewatch forums. Go a step further and question it in a few more places until you get a satisfactory answer.

Because while there is a whole lot of gray in our industry in terms of what works and what doesn’t there are some hard and fast rules to SEO. Ones that will help and ones that will hurt when applied to your site.

Rob Sullivan - SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com

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 are correctly understanding 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, 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.

John Krycek is a creative director at theMouseworks.ca http://www.themouseworks.ca">Toronto website design. Learn more about search engine optimization, internet marketing, web development and graphic design in easy, non-technical, up front English at http://www.themouseworks.ca !

Do you have a website or are you planning on creating a website in the near future? You owe it to yourself to at least learn some basic HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language). Even if someone else is creating and maintaining your website there are some basics you should know. What if that person is not available and you need to add or make changes to your website? I’ve always believed if you have a business, computer, website, or whatever, you need to know how it works. Don’t depend on someone else. Besides why pay someone else when you can do it yourself free of charge.

In this article I will explain some basic HTML formats for you. Believe me it will come in handy at one point or another. I, myself, have only learned some of the basics and I have been able to add, change, and make corrections on my own website by myself.

When you come across a website you like and would like to use a similar layout or text pattern, look at the page in HTML code. You can do this by clicking on “View” at the top of the screen, then choose “Document Source” or “Source” and you can see the page as a HTML document. If you are using AOL then right click on any area on the page without any text or images, then select “View Source”. At first it will look like Greek to you but after learning some basic HTML it will start to make sense.

First you will need a word processor program such as Windows “Notepad” or any other word processor you might have. You are working with simple text. You will need to save your document using the “save as” command and give it an html suffix, ex: Mynewdocument.html or Mynewdocument.htm (you can use either suffix html or htm).

HTML works in a simple, logical format. It reads top to bottom and left to right. What are used to set sections apart like bigger text, smaller text, bold text, underlined text are tags. Tags are commands. If you wanted a line of text to be bold you will place a tag at the point you want the bold text to start and a tag at the end of where you want the bold text to stop.

All tags start with the less-than sign < and end with the greater-than sign >, always. What is between these signs is the tag or command. You will need to learn what tag does what. Let’s first learn the bold command. The following is an example of making your text bold. The tag for bold is “B”. You can use uppercase or lowercase, it doesn’t matter. Here is an example:

Note: Due to the HTML codes in the article being formatted and possibly not showing up on the page in normal view I have replaced the < and > signs with the bracket characters [ and ]. Just remember to use the < and > signs and not the [ and ] signs in your document.

This is how it will look in HTML format - [B]This text needs to be bold[/B]

Here is how it will look when converted to normal view – This text needs to be bold   Did you notice the slight difference in the ending tag? There is a slash / before the B. That means it is the end tag. Only the text between the start and end tags will be in bold. Now let’s add a twist by putting one of the words in italics.

This is how it will look in HTML format - [B] This [I]text[/I] needs to be bold[/B]

Here is how it will look in normal view – This text needs to be bold   There are some tags that are an exception to the rule about having to have a start and end tag. You don’t have to have an end tag when using these tags. Here are some examples.

[HR] this command places a line across the page. HR stands for “horizontal reference”.

[BR] this command breaks the text and jumps to the next line, like the return key.

[P] this command stand for “paragraph”, it does the same thing as the [BR] command but skips a line.

Every page you create with HTML will need the HTML tag [HTML] which denotes it is an HTML document and the end HTML tag [/HTML] will be at the end of your document. The next tags will be your start Title tag [TITLE] and your end Title tag [/TITLE]. The title of your document will go in between these two tags. The title will show up in the title bar on your browser when you are looking at the page in normal view.

The following are some tags for Headings (there are 6 heading commands) and Font size (there are 12 font size commands):

[H1]This is Heading 1[/H1] – H1 is the largest heading   [H6]This is Heading 6[/H6] - H6 is the smallest heading   So, by using H1 through H6 you can change the size of your heading. Same applies to your font size. You will use [font size =”+1”] through [font size=”+12] and don’t forget your end tags!

You may notice that your text always starts at the left of the page. If you want your text to start in the center or to the right you will need to specify where you want your text to start. Here are some examples of aligning text:

[CENTER]Center this Text![/CENTER] - your text will be centered on the page.

Center this Text!

To align to the right you need to set the text as a paragraph unto itself by using the [P] tag and adding an attribute to it.

[P ALIGN=”right”]Text here will align on the right of the page[/P]

Text here will align on the right of the page

Why did I put an end tag [/p] since the paragraph command does not require an end tag (remember exceptions to the rule?) Anytime you use an attribute tag, as in the above example, you will need to have an end tag, whether you’re using the paragraph command [P] or the return command [BR]. Using the [P] or [BR] command by itself does not require an end tag, but if you are adding an attribute then an end tag must be used.

Adding an image to your page would require the following tag:

[IMG SRC=”image.jpg”] -you would replace “image.jpg” with your own image file. IMG stands for image and SRC stands for source. You’re telling your browser where to find your image file. Your image file could have a gif, jpg, or a bmp association.

Ok now let’s get a little more complicated and create a hyperlink on your document. This creates blue underlined words on the page that someone can click on and go to another location. An example is you’re creating a link to another website.

[A HREF=http://www.profitfromhomebiz.com"]Profit From Home Biz[/A] - this is what in looks like in HTML code. Note you are adding a description of the link that will be underlined, see the example below.

Profit From Home Biz – what it looks like in normal view. When someone clicks on this link they would be taken to my website.

This is a very important HTML format for when you need to add links onto your webpage. You may already know or will learn that reciprocal linking is very important in promoting your website and obtaining a higher page rank with the search engines. Sometimes the HTML code is provided for you and all you have to do is “copy and paste” the code into your webpage. Often it is not, so you have to figure out how to put the information into HTML code yourself. Just learning this HTML command has been a timesaver for me.

I hope this article has helped you learn some basic HTML and how it can benefit you. I know, I know there are HTML text editors out there you can use and they can do all of this for you. I have used a couple myself, but I still like to know how to do things on my own. I bet you do too!  Sometimes it’s just faster and easier to do it yourself.

I’ve just given you some very basic formats in using HTML, but you can find a lot more resources and information about learning HTML on the internet. Just do a search and I’m sure you will be overwhelmed at what’s out there. To view this article with the correct HTML formats please visit www.profitfromhomebiz.com/articles.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Debra Hamer is the owner of the http://www.profitfromhomebiz.com website where you can find lots of tips, tools and resources for starting your own work at home business. Visit her PlugInProfitSite at http://www.pluginprofitsite.com/main-4256 to have your own website setup and ready to go within 24 hours, complete with everything you need to start making a profit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is time to look at those SEO questions from the folks who need help and guidance. Let take a read of some of the Dear SEO Drama Queen email which floods her box every day…..this is a Prozac moment about to happen in the SEO world.

Dear SEO Drama Queen

I want a number one ranking for my web site. The keywords are clothes, sneakers and hats. I read so much out there on how important it is to be on Google. Can you promise me a #1 ranking for my 3 keywords?

Thanks
BA

Greetings BA Of course I can guarantee #1 ranking’s on Google for those very generic keywords that compete against missions of other sites. AN SEO who couldn’t isn’t worth their wait in gold. It is easy. First, I need you to purchase about 100,000 shares of Google stock. Once you are a major holder, we can then bribe Google to either place you on top or we will sell their stock to Yahoo.

Let me know when you have made the purchase
Best
SEO Drama Queen

Dear SEO Drama Queen
I contacted an SEO company and they stated their fees are $300 a month for 6 months. They stated they needed to access my site, make changes to code, write content, and help me decide on keyword phrases, build link shares and on and on. I think this is a rip-off as I have seen SEO for $25 a month and they do not need to work on my site or have me make changes, they just submit the site to 1000’s of engines. Should I go with the less expensive company?

Thanks
ST

Greetings ST
Cheaper is always better. Why should actually do anything to your web site. Do not use your valuable time on making your site better when you can have someone do everything for $25 bucks. I mean, why should you suffer, it is only your business, so do not put in the effort if someone can do it cheap. Let’s face it, your $25 bucks pays for them to spend a minute of time placing your URL in an auto program and pressing a button. Sure, 1000’s of engines no one sees, and sure, just because Yahoo, MSN and Google need you to manually place in a code before excepting, and sure, even though your site doesn’t even need to be submitted in most cases, why pay for an expert when you can go cheap and get the site submitted. Heck, save the $25 bucks, let the engines find you on their own and go to the movies instead.

Best
SEO Drama Queen

Dear SEO Drama Queen

I wanted to make fast money online. I joined a program that build my site and even provides me with products to sell, submits my site and stated the money would be coming in. I selected mattresses, even though I know nothing about them, but they promised I could make $1000 a month with just a few sales. I paid they fee, went into the online builder and selected my site template, pressed some buttons and now have a site. But I cannot be found at all….even when I search by my domain name.

HELP!
ZK

Dear ZK

Oh my! You mean they lied to you? Shame on them. You take the time to select a product you nothing about, pick a web template you believe looks good and expect the money to be rolling in. Heck, they even promised to submit the site to the engines. Sure, maybe the site is not deigned to be search engine friendly. Sure, your site is held deep in their subdirectories with all the other ‘want to get rich quick’ clients, sure, you never need to do another thing to promote the site….and yet you still cannot be found. I am shocked, appalled even. But surely, they would not lie to you. Maybe you should buy more sites from them for other products you know nothing about and maybe one day, you will get found and make a sale.

Best
SEO Drama Queen

Dear SEO Drama Queen

After much reading and searching, I found an SEO company that has a good standing in the SEO world. They were expensive, but promised to deliever. I paid the fees and the process began. But, I was expected to work on the site as well. I was expected to provide keyword rich content or actually pay them to write content for my site. I was expected to even make my site easier to read by engines, change navigation schemes and work on marketing lingo and something they called ‘site stickyness’ Why am I paying them when I feel like I do all the work. This must be wrong and I am getting ripped off? I have seen other SEO companies that say I do not need to make any changes and they will add 100’s of pages to my site that promise top rankings. What should I do?

Worried
LM

Dear LM
Get your money back now. How dare this SEO Company expect you to actually work with them on making your site more SEO ready? I mean it is your site, you should have some say in it, and if you do not want to make changes that will help the SEO achieve their goals…well then do not. Go with that other SEO Company. Let them add 100’s of hidden pages to the site. That way, in 3-6 months when Google realizes what has been done, any rankings achieved will be dropped…but do not worry, you will have 3-6 months of great placements and make lots of money. Then you can remove those bad pages, send an apology letter to Google and repeat the process again. I am sure that will be just perfect. Do not follow that other SEO Company as they expect you to work with them in a team effort, and as we know, there is no ‘I” in team

Best
SEO Drama Queen

My Dear Readers: Oy VEY…what I must put up with. Let us just remember, when you hire an SEO Consultant, be sure they know the facts and have the proof to backup what they say. SEO is a team effort. Your SEO consultant will request you make changes, will help make changes and will become a member of your team. 65% of people who hire an SEO do not follow their advice and thus, can meet with failer. Remember this, there is more to SEO then just adding a tag here, a word there, a link and so on. It takes time and hard work, but when done right, can provide you with wonderful success. I should know…after all, I am the SEO Queen!

Bonnie Burns is Director of SEO for http://www.GuaranteedTopRankings.com GuaranteedTopRankings.com has been in the SEO/SEM business for 6 years, serving clients big and small and delivering top rankings.

Designing a Better System for Search Engines and Information Distribution, information and knowledge are power. Having run out of things to study today, I thought about Researching and Research. Here are some observations on R and R. If you owned a body shop that would be remove and replace. For many Americans it is rest and relaxation, but for Wash Guys it is now researching Research (ing) and/or (ers). I believe that Search engines are getting better as that business model continues to perform before, during and after the Internet Bubble. However I believe they can do better.

Having used many search engines and multi-engines like Copernic.com and Alexa and Dog Pile for research I see some great benefits. Also knowing the similar search words without having to type them into the engine is benefit. I am impressed with the work of this group. They are improving the ability to retrieve information on the Internet will be the key to online learning and research. For instance here is one idea to be looked into, this is a good idea;

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/final-projects/knowman/

It is essential that search engines do well for those looking to find things, like a library catalog system like Dewey Decimal of the past. We need a good system for kids learning, scientists doing research and people like me who just like to do personal research or business research to better serve the customer and common good. I wanted to highlight the benefits of these new studies and possibilities to increase information flow and assist the worldly knowledge. Ongoing education is important, otherwise that muscle we call the brain will go flat.

With fuzzy logic and algorithms and tons of terabytes to search thru with all the data collection of the NSA and all the new technologies like 3G cell phones, video phones, etc. Searching thru the data and getting to the small pieces to solve the puzzle to catch international terrorists or for research needed to propel the human race we need to be thinking here. Especially since Search Engines are mostly for profit and with Google now a public company with shareholders they will want returns and that means profits and shareholders equity come before optimum searches.

With Microsoft integrating their Longhorn and Browser in the latest Windows with an upgraded searching feature and allowing the surfer greater waves and a better board search engine technologies probably rank way up there with a cure for AIDS, Cancer and Auto Safety. Because with increased collaboration we will get to all those others much faster, it has been proven, we are in the middle of a time warp where humankind will in fact hyperspace our evolution and the possibilities for life expectancy, curing diseases and what have you may in fact become reality within our generation, are you ready? Absolutely, but we do need some more tools to make it so, a search engine which can match our needs would sure be a wonderful gift to our species at this point within this present period.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

In this article I look at some practical examples of when to use analytics and some things you need to identify in order to get the most out of your analytics.

I came across a situation today that I thought I’d share. It has to do with a client’s analytics.

Many times, as a search engine marketer, it is up to us to tell the client what they should be looking for in their analytics. Right away this seems odd to me. It’s like me telling my client what their business model is, or how they should be selling their product online.

But this does seem to be a common thread among some site owners. They had an idea for a product or service and they wanted to promote it online. So they had a website built, and may have initially had it optimized. But that is as far as their experience goes.

They have no idea on how to track progress or improvements. All to often the numbers they do look at are not the best results to view.

two perspectives on analytics – SEO and client

With my client today, we were trying to nail down what should have been important numbers. And it was a very similar case – they had invested in this super-duper analytics package that was collecting and displaying data upteen different ways, yet they had no idea how to interpret the numbers.

They thought their traffic was increasing, but they had on idea why, really, nor did they have any idea what their customers were doing once they hit the website.

And, as sometimes happens, we fell into the trap of telling them what they should be looking for.

“You want to see search engine referrals going up. That means it’s working” or “increased page views is a good thing.”

But this really isn’t solving their problem is it?

Sometimes as search marketers, we need to step back and say “I know what I need for numbers, but what does my client need to see.”

So this was the approach we took today – let’s have a discussion with the client and focus on what they want to see, not what we need to show them to prove our value as search engine marketers.

When we were done, we had not only shortened their monthly analytics report to a few key metrics (down from pages and pages of statistical analysis) but we had also decreased the time required to complete this analysis.

Sure we still will do some of the analysis for our own purposes, but does the client really care how many backlinks or pages indexed they have? Not likely.

Nope, more often than not, the client wants to know that they are making money. Pure and simple.

So, if you can show them that they are making money, that’s all they really care about. You can add value as a search engine marketer by showing areas of improvement (“did you know that your Google referrals went up by 15% this month? That proves the value of our services, yada yada yada…”)

As long as you can illustrate the bottom line to the client in terms they understand, at that it is improving, then you as a search marketer have done your job.

Keep the pages indexed, backlinks, referrals by keyword and other non-client related data to yourself and present a concise simple report that even the CEO (who has 25 hours per day of work) can look at and understand that the SEO program is paying for itself.

Now let’s look at analytics from the client’s perspective.

If you are a client of an SEO firm, or just want to get a better idea of just how your site is doing online, first you must decide what it is you want to see. Do you want to see sales figures? Or would you rather just look at the aggregate numbers like total visitors and search engine referrals?

What has more value to you – reams and reams of data, or a simple, one page summary of overall performance?

As a recommendation, I’d say you only need enough data to make your business decisions.

In other words, if your website is e-commerce based, all you really need initially are the sales numbers over time. You should also understand how the sales cycle works, and perhaps look at your conversion funnel to see where people are dropping off. Most good analytics packages offer some sort of funnel analysis.

Understanding your sales funnel can also help you improve your sales. Sometimes an analysis of the sales funnel can help you determine where the drop offs occur. By modifying the funnel you can improve your drop off rate, increasing your sales. And really, this has less to do with SEO and more to do with traditional business marketing.

For example, let’s say your site gets 2000 visitors per month. Let’s also assume your site has a 3 step sales process, and your average sale is $11 per item.

If half of your site’s visitors start down the sales path, that means 1000 start (a 50% drop off rate at the first step – this could be due by a requirement to sign up to browse your site). If 40% of that total drop off at the second step, and 30% of that group complete the sale, that equates to $495 in sales, about a 2.25% conversion rate as only 45 of the original 2000 people purchased.

Now let’s experiment with the sales funnel:

If you can improve the final step of the sale by just 10% - that equates to an additional $165 in sales, a 3% conversion rate. However if you can improve the first step of the conversion, reducing that 50% bounce rate to 25%, you can increase your sales by $247.50 – a 3.38% conversion rate.

Further, if you shorten the conversion funnel by 1 step – making a 2 step sale, rather than a 3 step sale, you can increase your sales by over $330 – a 3.75% conversion rate. That’s still assuming the same number of monthly visitors start down the conversion path.

However, if you don’t or can’t find this data in your analytics package you wouldn’t be able to perform such analysis.

And this is where, if you are dealing with an SEO firm, you must get the data you need.

Simply knowing how many referrals you got from Google or Yahoo! won’t help you make the business decisions you need to make.

So whether you are an SEO firm or professional, or employ one, be sure that the metrics you see are the ones you need to make your decisions.

As a client, don’t be afraid to ask – what does this do for me? Because unless you’ve discussed your needs with your SEO, they will likely provide you with the numbers they deem as the best. That is, the ones that illustrate their value to you.

That’s not to say that those numbers are invalid, its just that they don’t do you as much good as those you need to make your business decisions.

Similarly, as an SEO, if you don’t know what your client needs to see, in terms of numbers, how can you justify your income from them. If search engine referrals have gone up, but conversion haven’t then there is no immediate value to the client.

Sure you can say “but we got you all these top rankings” but unless they are turning into sales, your contract with that client won’t last that long.

So be sure as you work with your SEO firm or client that you nail those metrics early, so there is no misunderstanding, and everyone knows what successes are measured by.

About the author: Rob Sullivan - SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com

Wouldn’t it be nice if the search engines could comprehend our impressions of search results and adjust their databases accordingly? Properly optimized web pages would show up well in contextual searches and be rewarded with favorable reviews and listings. Pages which were spam or which had content that did not properly match the query would get negative responses and be pushed down in the search results.

Well, this reality is much closer than you might think.

To date, most webmasters and search engine marketers have ignored or overlooked the importance of traffic as part of a search engine algorithm, and thus, not taken it into consideration as part of their search engine optimization strategy. However, that might soon change as search engines explore new methods to improve their search result offerings. Teoma and Alexa already employ traffic as a factor in the presentation of their search results. Teoma incorporated the technology used by Direct Hit, the first engine to use click through tracking and stickiness measurement as part of their ranking algorithm. More about Alexa below.

How can Traffic be a Factor?

Click popularity sorting algorithms track how many users click on a link and stickiness measurement calculates how long they stay at a website. Properly used and combined, this data can make it possible for users, via passive feedback, to help search engines organize and present relevant search results.

Click popularity is calculated by measuring the number of clicks each web site receives from a search engine’s results page. The theory is that the more often the search result is clicked, the more popular the web site must be. For many engines the click through calculation ends there. But for the search engines that have enabled toolbars, the possibilities are enormous.

Stickiness measurement is a really great idea in theory, the premise being that a user will click the first result, and either spend time reading a relevant web page, or will click on the back button, and look at the next result. The longer a user spends on each page, the more relevant it must be. This measurement does go a long way to fixing the problem with "spoofing" click popularity results. A great example of a search engine that uses this type of data in their algorithms is Alexa.

Alexa’s algorithm is different from the other search engines. Their click popularity algorithm collects traffic pattern data from their own site, partner sites, and also from their own toolbar. Alexa combines three distinct concepts: link popularity, click popularity and click depth. Its directory ranks related links based on popularity, so if your web site is popular, your site will be well placed in Alexa.

The Alexa toolbar doesn’t just allow searches, it also reports on people’s Internet navigation patterns. It records where people who use the Alexa toolbar go. For example, their technology is able to build a profile of which web sites are popular in the context of which search topic, and display the results sorted according to overall popularity on the Internet.

For example a user clicks a link to a "financial planner", but the web site content is an "online casino". They curse for a moment, sigh, and click back to get back to the search results, and look at the next result; the web site gets a low score. The next result is on topic, and they read 4 or 5 pages of content. This pattern is clearly identifiable and used by Alexa to help them sort results by popularity. The theory is that the more page views a web page has, the more useful a resource it must be. For example, follow this link today -

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.metamend.com/

- look at the traffic details chart, and then click the "Go to site now" button. Repeat the procedure again tomorrow and you should see a spike in user traffic. This shows how Alexa ranks a web site for a single day.

What Can I Do To Score Higher With Click Popularity Algorithms?

Since the scores that generate search engine rankings are based on numerous factors, there’s no magic formula to improve your site’s placement. It’s a combination of things. Optimizing your content, structure and meta tags, and increasing keyword density won’t directly change how your site performs in click-tracking systems, but optimizing them will help your web site’s stickiness measurement by ensuring that the content is relevant to the search query. This relevance will help it move up the rankings and thus improve its click popularity score.

Search Engines Can Use the Click Through Strategy to Improve Results

Search engines need to keep an eye to new technologies and innovative techniques to improve the quality of their search results. Their business model is based on providing highly relevant results to a query quickly and efficiently. If they deliver inaccurate results too often, searchers will go elsewhere to find a more reliable information resource. The proper and carefully balanced application of usage data, such as that collected by Alexa, combined with a comprehensive ranking algorithm could be employed to improve the quality of search results for web searchers.

Such a ranking formula would certainly cause some waves within the search engine community and with good reason. It would turn existing search engine results on their head by demonstrating that search results need not be passive. Public feedback to previous search results could be factored into improving future search results.

Is any search engine employing such a ranking formula? The answer is yes. Exactseek recently announced it had implemented such a system, making it the first search engine to integrate direct customer feedback into its results. Exactseek still places an emphasis on content and quality of optimization, so a well optimized web site, which meets their guidelines will perform well. What this customer feedback system will do is validate the entire process, automatically letting the search engine know how well received a search result is. Popular results will get extended views, whereas unpopular results will be pushed down in ranking.

Exactseek has recently entered into a variety of technology alliances, including the creation of an Exactseek Meta Tag awarded solely to web sites that meet their quality of optimization standards. Cumulatively, their alliances combine to dramatically improve their search results.

ExactSeek’s innovative approach to ranking search results could be the beginning of a trend among search engines to incorporate traffic data into their ranking algorithms. The searching public will likely have the last word, but webmasters and search engine marketers should take notice that the winds of change are once again blowing on the search engine playing field.

Did you find the information in this article useful? Feel free to pass it along to a friend or drop us a line at comments@metamend.com.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, a Victoria, B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software has been recognized around the world as a leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firm’s business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geo-locational, or GIS technology, which correlates online businesses with their physical locations, as well as their cutting edge advances in contextual search algorithms.

articles@metamend.com

The internet is the largest market place on earth. It offers unparalleled access to an international base of consumers – and referrers. However, the internet is also an extremely overcrowded place. With such an opportunity to make a business presentation to the world, many companies seek to take advantage of this unique chance for global exposure by creating a website. Yet simply having a website is not enough. A website alone will be lost in the crowd – a crowd of over 4 billion webpages indexed on the Google search engine alone. A website needs to be visible, and in a highly targeted manner, so that a company can connect specifically with potential customers. If any company is serious about generating sales within the largest marketplace on earth, investment is required in one form or other of internet marketing.

Probably the most desirable internet marketing options are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-click (PPC) campaigns. According to BBC research, 70% of internet users will turn to a Google search engine to locate web sites covering any particular subject. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring that these internet users, who search for keywords and phrases directly associated with your business market, find your website ranked among the top search results. The process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) thus creates visibility, and can clearly mark out a site from the crowds.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the building highly targeted internet links to key site pages on your website. At the heart of this process is the building of an Independent Back-Linking Network (IBLN), an artificially created network of sites that imitates the wider linkage patterns of the wider internet. Dozens of websites and tens of thousands of pages can be involved in an IBLN, whose sole aim is to promote a particular client’s website(s). Because of the variability of the Search Engine industry it is impossible to make any estimates as to what positions may be ultimately achieved on these search engines. However, an IBLN takes into account the algorithms and patents owned by Search Engines, and thus is able to account for future changes in the industry, and can create solid sustainable results. It’s a laborious and time consuming process and also takes time to take effect. Add to that the fact that even Google can take up to 8 weeks to locate any particular link, means that a properly conducted SEO campaign should be expected to take place over a six-month period, to ensure proper results. The primary aim of the SEO campaign would be to achieve targets agreed between ourselves and the client. The secondary aim would be to then exceed these results to ensure wider high rankings across Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

More on:

http://www.silverlion.biz
http://seo-book.blogspot.com

Personalized search is a hot topic especially since Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced they are aggressively developing this service. Most likely, people will be leery of personalized search if they think that this is just be another way for companies to market to them. Search engine research has shown that there are typically two types of searchers: information seekers and buyers.

Information Seekers

If personalized search is to work for the information seekers, then instead of lots of targeted marketing, the personalized search experience had better offer targeted information that the person can use. A better information search experience without having to bypass a slew of commercial sites would appeal to the information seeker.

Buyers

What if you already have the information you need or don’t want any information, but just want to make an online purchase? For buyers, information-only sites are something to be by-passed in the SERP’s. If personalized search can deliver the products and services the buyer wants, and not just what the marketers want to push before them, then buyers may find some value in personalized search.

Personal Choice

Personalized search must involve personal choice if it is to succeed. The Big Brother and privacy issues need to be held to a minimum. Personalized search needs to be an option that can easily be turned on and off as desired. Personalized search should not be equated with limited choices. The person needs to feel that they are in control and not the search engines. They also need to see real personal value in using this service.

What if a person is sometimes an information seeker and other times a buyer, or in the matter of seconds they switch hats? How will personalized search accommodate this person? Will the person have to toggle back and forth between a couple of different user profiles or click on and off a checkbox to switch between these two different forms of search? These are questions the SE’s will have to address in personalization.

Google

Google has a beta personalized search engine at: http://labs.google.com/personalized/profile.html that is pretty interesting to test. You’re told to click on Health, then the General Health checkbox and search for "stanford." When searching for the word "bob" instead of "stanford" at the Minimum Personalize setting the first three results are "Bob the Builder," "Bob Marley" and "Bob Dylan". The rest of this page has no health related information on it as well. But, when the slider is pulled to Maximum Personalize, "Dr. Bob" has the first two positions followed the other results mentioned above. Its obvious Google has a ways to go in developing this.

Personal Privacy

If personalized search is to succeed, then personal privacy issues need to be addressed and concerns held to a minimum. Will personalized search involve searching your hard drive to see what your interests are? Will your interests be stored in a cookie on your computer? What happens when multiple users share a computer - will someone else get hit with all sorts of Preparation H advertisements because of the hemorrhoid treatment searches you wanted to keep private? And will children be affected by adult personalized searches?

These are all questions that the SE’s need to address so that people do not feel that their privacy is being violated or put at risk. The more control and choice the user has over personalized search the more likely it has in succeeding for the search engines.

Copyright © 2004 SEO Resource

SEO Marketing Consultants

Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource, a California search engine optimization company, and has published many articles over the past 20 years.