Google Webmaster Tools lets web managers control their Sitelinks which are being displayed on Google results, it also alerts us to error pages or pages not being properly indexed by Google, and a displays info on how Google picks up the incoming links to our sites.
Bing Webmaster tools provides users with a range of graphs displaying info such as pages crawled, traffic summaries over the past six months.

Yahoo Site Explorer gives similar information with clearly indentified sections such as feeds, crawl errors, stats on their own indexing of your site.

The information provided by these three tools are essential in understanding how your web is being displayed to these search engines and will help identify areas which need to be improved or analysed to help scale the heights of search engine ranking.

Setting them up is relatively easy and if you don’t have the time, or don’t want to play around with a ftp program, just ask your web developer to set it up for you.

Are you or your web manager tracking your site on the major search engines? We are big supporters of using Google Webmaster Tools, Bing’s Webmasters Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer to upload XML Sitemaps and track the ways the different search engines are indexing our own and our client’s sites.

Google Webmaster Tools lets web managers control their Sitelinks which are being displayed on Google results, it also alerts us to error pages or pages not being properly indexed by Google, and a displays info on how Google picks up the incoming links to our sites.

Bing Webmaster tools provides users with a range of graphs displaying info such as pages crawled, traffic summaries over the past six months.

Yahoo Site Explorer gives similar information with clearly indentified sections such as feeds, crawl errors, stats on their own indexing of your site.

The information provided by these three tools are essential in understanding how your web is being displayed to these search engines and will help identify areas which need to be improved or analysed to help scale the heights of search engine ranking.

Setting them up is relatively easy and if you don’t have the time, or don’t want to play around with a ftp program, just ask your web developer to set it up for you.

The more content, the better. Of course the content needs to be of good quality. Basically, a search engine will view a 50 page site to be more important than a 5 page site. Here are some ideas as to what can be used for additional content:

Educational Content

Adding useful information aimed at educating your visitors about your product and/or service can be extremely beneficial. Not only will search engines be happier, you’ll find that other web sites within your industry will be more likely to link to your site for the benefit of their own audience. If you know of a popular site in your industry that offers helpful links, try to think of what content you can create to inspire them to add a link to your site.

News

News articles are probably the most popular method of content creation, used by many of the major SEO companies today. All web sites should be able to create a news section filled with articles relevant to their industry. Articles can then be archived so that search engines can find them, even if they may seem out of date. Over time larger sites can accumulate 100′s of extra pages in their news section.

Expansion of Core Information

You may be able to expand the information that currently exists on your site. For example, you could create a separate page for each staff member in your business. Or you could offer a more in-depth explanation of your product or service. You may want to run a forum or a blog on your site that is focused on related topics to your web site.

Content must be applicable to your site

Keep in mind that all new content needs to be related to your web site. You will also need to think carefully about how you link all of the new information together. The basic rule of thumb is to minimise the amount of clicks a visitor needs to make from your home page to your new content. Also, make sure that you do not exceed 100 links per page.

Quality Relevant Link Establishment

Establish links from other quality web sites within your industry. The deciding factor in securing strong search results is the strength of your external link network. Building up quality links to your site is a very complicated process. Links need to be built to simulate a natural progression on a search engine, so you cannot build too fast. Links also need to be from relevant web sites with good PageRank. In building this network you will be communicating with hundreds, maybe thousands of webmasters. If you are planning to build links yourself, you will need to make sure that you have a good management system for following up and checking you link exchanges.

Here are the basic rules of good link building:

• Site must be Relevant:

  Ensure all of the sites are related to you industry. Do not swap links with sites that are very general unless they are a major portal with high PageRank.

• Link Page Needs to have a good PageRank:

  Source links from pages with at least a PR2. The higher the PageRank the better. Of course sometimes PR0 or PR1 links can be beneficial if the relevancy is very high. Ideally it is good to build up a network of PR4+ links.

• Link Page should have less than 50 links listed:

  The fewer links on a link page the better. If you can imagine a links page having 100 search engine points. If 50 links appear on the page, each link could theoretically be worth 2 points. If 10 links appear, each link could be worth 5 points and so on.

• Avoid Free For All Link Pages or any suspect sites:

  Google and other major search engines will penalise web sites that link with bad neighborhoods. These sites are usually very easy to spot. If you are ever unsure about a site – avoid it!

Things to avoid

Using the same colour text as your background

Even if you’re using an image background, this technique is heavily penalised and may result in your site being black listed.

Do not hide content by using layers

Some webmasters will hide search engine rich content behind a layer so that no visitor will be able to see the content. This technique is likely to result in a penalty. CSS layers seem to be OK. A general rule of thumb: keep your code as simple as possible.

Cloaking domain names

There was once a popular SEO technique that has now become very dangerous, which involved cloaking one domain name to another. The idea was that you could fill a page with very high quality search engine content, then redirect all visitors to that page over to another site without the user seeing any of the information. In most cases this technique is easily detected and therefore best left alone. If you’re unsure if your domains are being cloaked, contact your Web Hosting company or Web Designer.

Using link programs that establish large amounts of links quickly

There’s a number of linking programs that provide a large volume of links in a very short period. While this seems to be a great solution to link building, it can be extremely detrimental to your search engine results. Basically, linking too quickly is now penalised by engines like Google. Also make sure that if you are using a link management system, that your link building is customised and not just part of a link farm. A link farm is a group of web sites that are required to link to every other site in the group.

Change to a new domain!

We have occasionally seen instances where, against our recommendations, a client has completely moved or redirected to a new domain after having an already established, well ranking domain. Usually brought about by a re-branding campaign. With a re-direct please be aware that you may not see results drop straight away but from our experience it can have dire consequences.

Sign up for ‘free for all’ style linking strategies

These are very easy to obtain (for a reason). Google is well aware of them and they can certainly incur big penalties.

SEMs mostly get confused about two terms: SEM strategies and SEM tactics. It has been found that 90% of the marketers tend to define strategies as tactics or vice-versa. The definitions of these terms clear the confusion to an extent. A strategy is defined as a “long-term action plan for achieving a goal”, whereas tactics are described as “near term actions taken to solve specific problems or accomplish specific goals” (investorwords.com).

Now think of a scenario where a big SEM project is handed over to your firm. The project is usually accompanied by a vision statement provided by the stakeholders. This vision goes beyond the normal demands of the clients, like getting a higher page rank or bringing in more traffic. But smaller SEO projects will tell you right in the beginning about what they really care for and that is more traffic. It is actually the strategy which has an all-embracing approach for achieving the project’s vision. Tactics, on the other hand, are the actual steps that are planned and implemented in order to fulfill a strategy’s objectives. But tactics come into the picture only after a strategy has been approved. Hence, it is always better and more effective to start with the strategy and then move ahead with the tactics.

Still confused? Let us take a real-life example. A hypothetical company called XYZ Ltd. has to develop an effective SEM strategy for their latest product ‘M’ in order to take over the current market leader, ABC Ltd. The problem is that ABC’s product ‘N’ is such a well-known, established product, that XYZ Ltd. website can never be the number 1 authority site for prolific and relevant keywords. Now, you create a SEM strategy to improve the image of ‘M’ so that consumers are drawn to buy it over ‘N’. For doing so, you can think of tactics like using the best SEM practices to get top rankings on Google and educating visitors about the advantages of ‘M’. You can also frame a strategy to build the brand awareness for XYZ’s products by implementing tactics like creating a product website and placing banner ads at highly-visible, strategic web locations.

You can have as many strategies or tactics as you want to depending on your project’s budget and its scope. Sometimes strategies and tactics overlap, but only in limited number. Tactics are indispensable but strategies are very important in guiding your team and harnessing their efforts in a better way.

To the makers of Google, it is nothing short of the fairy-tale crystal ball where they can see everything happening around in the universe. Everyone online is sort of an open book to Google whether you want it or not. And just when you thought that Google already knows too much about people; about what they thought, what they dreamed, what they pursued, what they shopped, what they searched, Google comes up with another milestone idea to get people even more personal; the ability to promote, remove search results by every individual on the planet and add unique comments to any of your preferred result. Wow, so what if you decide to promote a website from 50th page to 1st page. And let’s say you demote a top ranking result into oblivion, never to be seen on the 1st page again. So in one click did you just kill the hype and hoopla of search engine optimization?

Because the best of optimized pages could literally be gone out of your sight with this tool if you decided to have it so. And if it is really so, then this is the END OF THE WORLD. Is it the END of conventional SEO? Do i hear a pin-drop silence?

No need to panic yet. If you see the buttons then you must have noticed that they appear only when you are logged in to your Google account, and the reprise is that they only affect the results that you see, not what the world does. Do i hear a sigh of relief? If you want to skip my detailed analysis and description of this feature, you may straightaway read the conclusion at the bottom.

How does Google promote/remove actually work? A specific example.

To check the same, simply log in to your account, let’s say you do a Google search for the keyword phrase “webkinz dollar store”, and click on the promote button next to a result in a subsequent page. You will immediately see it magically go to the topmost SERP in the 1st page. If you click on ‘promote’ for another “webkinz dollar store” search result,  it will move into the second place on the 1st page itself. You can move the second web page to the first position by clicking “promote” on it again. Now Log out and search again for the same keyword, you will see your selected pages dropping back to its original ranking position. Login again and you will notice your chosen pages are back to your promoted order. If you click remove on any of your promoted website, it will return to its previous place in your Google search results. But If you click remove randomly on any un-promoted website, it will be permanently removed from any results. Of course you can get it back to the search results by clicking on restore at the bottom. The results are associated with your Google account only so they will be constant across any computes of you account logs.

At first instance it is bound to give the webmasters a cold feet with the thought that Google has handed over the fate of search engine results to people and everything about SEO goes to the dumps. It convincingly looks like, as if now people are to alter, improvise the worldwide top results for each search term. But it certainly isn’t the case. It’s only for your own Google account, for your own personalized result page order. And it is important to know that every new search term will have entirely different promoted and removed results than the other.

I’m sure even the biggest of SEO experts, guides and critics must have lost their nerve for a second with their first experience with Google promote and remove feature just as much as I did. So the big question still remains, is this the end of our struggle and success with SEO? Is it really all up to searchers and surfers to decide the ranks of our web pages? Are we supposed to watch helplessly all the big and popular web pages get to the top, while the smaller ones vanishing away? Thank the stars that it isn’t the case.

What is Google promote / remove system called?

It’s called SearchWiki. SearchWiki lets users have their own order of promoted and removed results, and leave comments on specific links. Google thus remembers changes that are made by the account holder to the organic search results pages, and subsequent searches will then be displayed as per the user’s customisations and notes. And most importantly, users will also have the option of seeing how other searchers have rated and reordered search results and view their notes as well, making search results a innovative community based initiative.

Who does searchwiki help?

In course of time, it will surely make a huge impact on how SEO affects a site in my opinion. Prior to this feature, a webmaster was the only individual who had an influence on the SEO aspects but now each and every Google user has the ability to decide where that site should be listed, making search engine results a different concept altogether. It may even revolutionize the idea or existing technology like browser bookmarks and RSS readership.

Customized search result page? Is it happening?

The way it stands now, it isn’t a possibility e.g., a specific page could be pushed to the top result for everyone just by getting shoppers or enthusiasts to ‘promote’ that site a million times. Neither can your competitors outrank your site by clicking on removal link a thousand times.

Yes, you can now customize your search results with the organic rankings, deletions, leave notes against each page for future reference and see how other Google users have tailored their searches. SearchWiki notes will be visible to other users, identified with your Google Account nickname.

What are the implications of Google searchwiki on SEO?

It is like an alarm bell for everyone to straighten up their act, specially thin affiliate sites, spammers or the ones resorting to black hat stuff. Yes sooner or later there will hardly be a scope for anyone to deviate even by an inch from the core of search engine fundamentals. That is relevance and accuracy.

Yes, many things will be affected from sales to delivery and reporting. SEO won’t be dead but it will have evolved and more oriented towards content than techniques .

Google has been remarkable in preventing spam and this new tool on the prima-facie would not only generate more direct data for Google analysis but would also also initiate a mass spam removal movement worldwide. As far as promoted and removed data is concerned, Google obviously is wary of SEO masters using proxy servers running multiple alias sites and redirect pages and unethical methods that can easily used to promote a single page. Hence they will never make a mistake of simply considering all the votes gained for a page to it’s ranking algorithm for organic searches without due verification. All of this will give Google a whole new perspective to search user habit and patterns by allowing the user to mix and alter the organic results itself. Unthinkable but true that it is already happening.

What if Google decides to apply the promotional and removal data to page ranks? Dooms day?

Top 10 ranking results will be flooded with the sites that the majority of people prefer. The hottest and most popular existing pages will fill up the top slots overnight, for every imaginable keyword search phrase. The scope for newer, smaller, unpopular websites will virtually perish with no place in the top noticeable positions. As a result it will hardly ever gain a promotion. And slowly it will stand as good as removed even if it is not.

It might be great to force people to look at the most popular websites, but the small ones which are less marketed or are comparatively of less value or quality will never stand a chance. Lesser traffic can never be the final diagnostic indicator.

But look at this from the perspective of a person who’s looking to find something out. If I need to learn about the “webkinz dollar store”, I don’t frankly care whether that comes from a small blog or a an unknown forum page, as long as I find the info I need, and its reliable. And I can always find them right where i need from anywhere in the world.

For those concerned about SEO.

The agony or the anxiety about it’s effect on SEO and rankings could be erased in a second just by reminding ourselves of the one and only governing factor about search engines, that their existence itself depends and will always be on it’s ability to offer accurate and relevant information to the users and not anybody else. Even searchwiki, this new Google tool is intended with no other intent but relevance. Isn’t it so common find relevant content even after page 10 at times? ( I don’t know about you, but I do search deep when I need information ). In such a case one would either bookmark that page or copy the content for future reference. I always sympathize with quality web pages nowhere near to the top ranking positions. That proves that just great content alone can not guarantee top ten results. A multitude of factors like SEO, backlinks, sandbox are responsible to drive a page to the top. And the process itself is slow.

Relevance will now be “of the search (Google), by the search (Google) and for the search (Google).” Sounds quite like a democratic definition of a search engine.

Not so long ago when webmasters saw the immense potential in harnessing people’s bookmarking habits, the craze of social bookmarking sites diggs, del.ico.us erupted overnight giving search relevance a completely relative meaning.

Things will now change. What better to bookmark a page from within the searches in just one click with no further accounts to log in to.

Backlinks and quality links are still the driving forces behind a websites rise or fall. It is equated as votes earned from other sites. As far as Google’s stand point is concerned, a natural promotion of a webpage from different un-suspicious IP addresses can count as votes of relevance for a search phrase.

Scientists are maybe still trying to unify the forces of nature into one formulae, but looks like Google almost successfully unified the world.

Welcome to Google monopoly. Look how it gets bigger by the day.

One Account: Where your world converges.

(Oh if you haven’t got a Google account yet. You will be compelled to have one sooner or later)

One Search Engine: The keyword manufacturing unit. Keyword demand supply chain. Unlimited Manpower at work for the biggest keyword market. From where internet business and ecommerce are governed.

One Search Tool (External keywords tool) : Manufactured keywords put on window display. Who does have a better authority to declare than Google itself, about what people are exactly searching for? Take it or leave it.

One Traffic Estimator: (Google lets you judge the cost of your keyword too) Window shopping for keywords.

One AdWords: Ok so interested parties can shop for keywords from the keyword store.

One AdSense: Auctioned keywords recycled back to the people (searcher) working in the keyword factory.

One Webmaster Tools: The manufacturers of keyword money are now the safekeepers of all your keyword rich belongings.

One Analytics: Realtime live tv telecasting keyword news to keep the buyers and sellers interested.

One Web history: Refined fuel for the keyword engine machinery. Everyone’s web habit and online track records are well kept with Google. They exactly know geo-specific, cultural specific keyword needs. Well who better to assign a price-tag to a keyword up for auction?

One Homepage (iGoogle): If all these have become second nature to you, then iGoogle is the way to stay hooked. You will get a handful on your finger tips.

And Now Google searchwiki: Google taking control of what you thought is best for you.

It is like, you have helped manufacture some great and moderate keywords so far, so why don’t you manufacture some great result pages with your click votes too. After all there are a free gazillion keyword workers (search engine users) in the factory (Google) at any given point in time. Keep working a bit extra and Google shall know what exactly the gazillion wants to see or not see. The fairytale crystal ball is for real now.

Where do you stand? Your best kept secrets are the best resources to the Google rulers. Google knows what buyers want, what sells most. Google knows what sellers want, what buyers are willing to pay, how much are they willing to pay for, where do best buyers come from and the sellers too. The world wide web is not so entangled for the big G anymore. They conquered the world faster than Alexander.

Everyone’s Top 10 Pages will look different for the same search phrase. Scary to even think about it.

Google has gotten perfect at eradicating it’s imperfections. And if you thought you had a reason to point a finger at them due to erroneous relevant results, they gave the baton to you to improvise. Google may use 20 million algorithms in a millisecond to offer what is relevant. But now they will have a gazillion more from an entire planet to vote for and review their own definition of relevant searches.

Conclusion.
What are the future projections and it’s impact on SEO practices?
1. Analysis of top ten projections and reporting is likely to change based on a world consensus.

2. The definitions for pagerank and rankings for single phrases and e-commerce variables could change. If a considerable number of people are not seeing a particular result in the first pages because they have it custom configured for a particular phrase with pre-selected results crowding the top, then definitely there would be lesser click-throughs as even the top sites will be pushed back further. Thus resulting in lesser visitor count for subsequent pages and affecting pagerank algorithms.

3. Marketers and SEO experts will have to look at a bigger picture than being obsessed with pagerank and rankings for single phrases.

4. Google AdWords will become more eminent as an assured method for topping the results with paid rankings, even if the user’s result page is highly customized. This means more revenues for Google.

5. When everyone starts to promote their favorite sites, the quality of content will definitely become even more undeniable (as it should be), and “classic” SEO techniques will need a complete re-orientation.

6. Marketers and SEO industry now thriving on Google, will be more proactive on Yahoo, Quil etc as alternative options.

7. Since this feature is only for Google user accounts. As of now the page rank and result pages outside logged Google accounts will very much be based on the organic SERPs. Especially given the fact that yahoo still owns more account user bases than Google. But eventually they will dominate even more with search engine market share, because of their unlimited customizable features.

8. As this Search Wiki tweak can be highly prone to spams, we won’t really see any sea change in the PR status radically soon until the rest of the planet not on Google account register and start using the feature.

9. Analytics will be even more laser focussed. Google will harness immense amount of personalized data and use them to improve relevance of results. You now will have to option to know your promotion vs removal ratio for every indexed page. You will soon know your popularity rank as much as your PR rank.

10. You will soon be presented with realtime reviews on your web pages moderated or not moderated by Google.

11. Websites with genuine content and relevance will now be a super must to even fair anywhere near.

12. SEO will spell “Authority pages” more than “Optimized pages”.

13. Survival of the fittest will be the new Google theory.

14. All onsite testimonials and reviews on products, services often clinically engineered or manipulated will matter less because you will have realtime online reviews even before you land on that page. (Google comment feature = Realtime reviews)

Millions of webmasters and people must still be biting their nails, trying to figure out what is wrong or right with our big Google. How is it likely to affect the already established businesses, websites and SEO? But I hope this article gives you enough insight about our fate or growth on Google in near future.

Another search engine revolution has begun with Google Promote, Remove and Comment Feature. Are you ready for the change?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Krsna_Solo http://EzineArticles.com/?Google-Promote,-Remove-and-Comment-Feature—Effect-on-SEO&id=1806691

How Search Engine Marketing (SEM) works?

Organic listings, also known as natural or “ethical” listings, are the ones that are not paid listings. They appear in the search engine result because the search engines have decided that their content is relevant to the search being made by the user.

In order for a site to be deemed relevant content-wise, Search Engine Marketing firms do extensive profiling on keywords that are being searched in regard to the website they want to promote. These keywords are then carefully planted all over the site so as to catch the attention of the Search engines. The entire content of the website is then written with the keywords in mind.

The trick here is not to overdo the keyword bit or the site will be labeled as spam!
Links within a website make the site editorially important and easier for Search Engines to pick them up. The more links point to a website, the more relevant a search engine will consider it and then place it higher on its results page.

Why Organic Search Engines work better?

It has been seen that organic search engine results are trusted more by users than paid advertisements or listings. The mindset being that the listings are unbiased and fair and will give better results .In fact a survey found out that out of a group of 100 net users 86 prefer sites listed in natural or organic searches than those that pop by through paid advertisements. The same survey also showed that 30 out of the 100 participants were rather annoyed by the paid listings when they showed up and never ever went to any of those sites!

The importance of SEM firms

Advertisers can turn to professional website design companies to help them get the right keywords and get high listings on the free search engines’ results.

Some times however advertisers and marketers in their rush for great results place some hidden keywords; text etc that may cause “over optimization” and the site might get banned.

Organic search engine marketing is a wonderful and powerful tool that comes free of cost but needs to be used judiciously.

Paid search engine marketing, on the other hand, is marketing through paid advertisements through Google ad words or Yahoo Search marketing etc. for listing of their web links under sponsored pages.

The cost of these paid advertisements has been on the rise while the traffic on these sites has been decreasing rapidly which makes them a rather uneconomical option. This trend has forced marketers the world over to look at Organic Search engine advertising to divert traffic to their websites.

There is something about the blogs…

Search engines on a whole prefer blogs to static web pages. Blogs often get higher rankings than web pages and pop up faster than a normal web site. If all other factors like design, outlay, content etc are equal, yet a blog gets precedence over a web page. However, not everything is dismal for the static web page advertiser.

Blogs generally benefit from the use of plug-ins, to become very search engine friendly. In fact, a “power blog” is a Word Press blog that has SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) links and this can be installed to be used as a platform for social marketing as well. This is called using the power of a blog to market a site without really paying for the site listing!

How that helps?

When you use a blog as your display place, you are no longer dependant only on Google or Yahoo Search engines to pick up your link. Instead, the RSS ( Really Simple Syndication) that blogs use will make sure that visitors from other websites who are syndicating the content on your blogs also bring in more guests and get greater number of links to your site. You will have multiple streams of traffic to your site then.

Link Up!

Another key factor in attracting traffic is to have links in your site. The number of links
In your site plays a huge role in getting high rankings in the Google Search engine.

The “Trackback” option in wordpress allows you to link upon with other websites for free.

The long and short of it!

In marketing as in other business processes, you need to have a clear understanding of the keywords i.e. which words describe your site or your business the best! Using wrong or inappropriate key words can deflect traffic to other sites.

Now to come to the next important part, should the key words be short or long ? Generally, the Keyword Phrases are short and highly competitive which means that many other websites are using them as their keywords, hence selecting the right keyword phrase to get the best results is very important.

Remember that all Organic Search engines depend on Keywords for ranking the sites and hence chose them after a lot of deliberation.

After selecting your short base keywords, you will require long key words too.
For example if you are a content providing firm then “content writing” could be your short key word phrase and “technical content writing for engineering” could be a long key word phrase.

Once you have decided upon your long phrase keywords then start marketing your business or site using free organic search marketing.

The mainframe for this kind of marketing is “unique content creation”. Search engines will pick the links only when the content in it is Unique , something that it does not find in most other websites. It does not matter if it is a long article, blog post, blog comment, forum post, or a video; what matters is it’s “specialness” in comparison to the deluge of sites on the internet!

“You are capable of what your keywords are capable of!”

The major focus in getting maximum momentum from search engines is to use your keywords wisely and effectively.
In fact with the Search engines getting keyword savvy, it is not only enough to have good keywords, but also important to take a more encompassing view at the entire page and its editorial contents

Basically, when creating your unique content use synonyms for your target keyword wherever it is natural. Do not over stuff keywords in your site, just use it where it comes naturally and where it makes sense.

This concept of social marketing applies to postings on blogs, social networking and news marketing, all alike.

Use these Internet Marketing strategies to get the maximum advantage from Organic search engines which can really boost up the traffic to your site, blogs or network and help you achieve your business goals without even paying for it!

Social marketing includes posting on social networking, social news and social book marking websites and use blogging too for your marketing advantage.

Whether you are a marketer, affiliate, professional blogger or super-affiliate, search engine marketing should be on your “Must do List”.
Finally in the race of rankings it is important that you leave your competitors far behind in the free search engine results and bring in greater traffic and higher returns on investments; rather than shell out loads of dollars for a paid advertisement!

The web is certainly the only interactive medium in the world and that too in the real sense of the word. It is therefore very accurate in its presentation of the facts about the actual customer perception. No other medium is as powerful in its prediction of the consumer’s likes and dislikes as the internet because the consumer is directly interacting with the seller and can give real time feedback.

It allows its users the benefit of accessing information about not only the product but also the competitor’s offerings, compare and contrast the benefit and disadvantages of both.

In this unique way, the internet is indeed different from all other mediums of advertisement and it is these features of the Web that giver it an extra edge overall of the other mediums like the print and television. There are several other ways in which the net overtakes its other counterparts in providing an advertising edge to all those who chose it to display their products. Some of these are:

1. Accurate and instant feedback – The best thing about the net is that it provides an instant feedback to its advertisers and gives a very accurate view of what the consumer or the target audience wants and desires. It also tells the sellers about what is wrong with the product and what the target customers really thinks about it. To begin with, it tells the advertiser whether the advertisement was actually seen or not, whether it reached the target audience and whether it was able to deliver the message to the desired audience or not.

Unlike most other advertisement mediums, the web allows the advertiser to know exactly whether the particular ad was clicked on or not. In fact, if the ad was clicked, the advertiser can even get to identify who clicked it and from which location and at what time. It is any advertiser’s dream come true and provides him with a wealth of usable information.

When advertising on the web, the sellers can even track the “web foot prints” with the help of server statistics and cookies to see who all visited that ad and clicked on it. These footprints also tell us where did they came from, which all pages did they visit, on which page did they spend most of their time and when and where did they exit? It provides complete and comprehensive information about the advertisement.

2. Better Returns on Investment(ROI) - There is not an iota of doubt on the fact that internet gives better Returns On Investment (ROI) made and is the most cost effective and efficient medium for advertising.

It is the only medium where the advertiser pays ‘only for the banners’ that have actually been displayed. When an ad is placed on the web page, the advertiser does not have to pay anything. He only pays for it ‘if and when’ the customer clicks on it. Banners that only appear but aren’t clicked are not chargeable to the advertiser. This is something unheard of in any other medium. In the internet parlance this is generally, referred to as “pay per click”.

If the user ‘clicked out’ of the page before the banner was loaded or even after it was loaded he did not click on it, then the advertiser does not have to pay for it. It is that simple and so much cost effective.

3. Non-intrusive advertisements – While most other mediums are considered very intrusive, the advertisement through the Net is a non-imposing medium. Internet advertising is considered non-imposing because the consumers have the choice to decide whether they need to click on the ad or not. The ad is not just forced on them, they make a conscious choice to view the ad and in case they do not want to watch it, they are free to do so.

However, the important question is that should advertisers switch over to the Net and not bother about other mediums of advertising?

There is no straight answer to this question. It all depends upon what is the product, who is the target audience plus internet cannot replace the other mediums completely; for the simple reason that, the number of net connections in the world is just about 12 % of its total population! Many experts have mulled over this tricky question of whether the Net will completely sweep away the conventional forms of advertising like the Newspapers, television, radio, billboards, other outdoor advertising etc,. Nevertheless, the answer to that is NO. Even though we all agree about the efficacy of Web advertising and its cost benefits; yet at the same time we all know that every person spends time reading newspapers or watching T.V or listening to the radio and these remain a most important form of advertising. All through this time, advertisers the world over, have been using conventional media with great élan and success and now advertising on the net can also be added to its glorious list!

The smart choice would therefore be to couple up the power of internet advertising with that of other conventional forms of advertising so that advertisers can get the benefit of both the worlds. Most companies today devote 10 to 15 % of their entire advertising budget to web advertising and get great success.

Time is right to utilize the power of the web to enhance your product’s reach to unimaginable corners of the world through the simple yet effective tool called the World Wide Web.

Does everyone benefit from Internet Advertising?

No, it all depends on the target customer. If the product is aimed at rural youth, then placing an ad on the net will not be of much use, but on the other hand, if the target consumer is urban youth, then it is a good idea to have net advertising. Similarly, products for small children, old people and women in rural areas where internet connectivity and reach is not possible do not benefit from net advertising.

Yet more and more producers and sellers are using the net for advertising and with great results. Everything from entertainment, insurance, finance to consumer durables is available on the net world. Remember, this is just the beginning…

Just think of it. Promoting your own website sitting at home on the internet sounds to be a bit easy. People perceive such things as work for those who do not have anything substantial to do. They are highly mistaken. Marketing on the web is just an extension to a person who is intelligent enough to put all his time and energy into something which is productive instead of going out in the sun and working. It can be a testing task but if done with some sincere effort, it can bring in a lot of accomplishments.

Many corporate conglomerates have admitted that combining online marketing with its distant offline cousin is perhaps the most productive strategy to unwrap up a broad customer base and generate huge amounts of revenues. Once a person decides to get involved in a particular online business, then he has to chalk out the most effective marketing tactics which work for him and other marketing gimmicks which help that person succeed in his endeavor. Once the tactic is identified, then it is all about proper implementation and lots of consistent enterprise.

Web Marketing: In Detail

There are lots of people all over the world who keep coming out with innovative ideas like combining conventional marketing techniques with web marketing, with the end result being a deadly marketing concoction. An exciting and inviting introductory message conveys a good impression. Charting out short term goals as well as long term goals combined with a balanced approach help a great deal in attaining the objective of drawing a stable flow of traffic to a particular website. Drawing visitors on a regular basis requires a person or an organization to keep employing new and innovative ideas.

The thing with long term plans is that they take some time and patience to bring in customers. If the plan is efficient then the customer base becomes permanent as the website becomes very reliable. So the money that the entrepreneur is supposed to earn takes some time to come which might become frustrating. Regular short term goals help in making money at regular intervals. There is no fixed formula which guarantees success in online marketing. If a strategy does not work, new strategies need to be though of.

Web Marketing: Smart Ways for Promotion

Start writing your experiences on web marketing. This is also a shrewd way of telling people to come and visit your website so that all those aspiring to get into web marketing can learn a lot from your experience. It is also one of the most inexpensive ways to promote one’s website as all it demands is some time and attention from the person. Start giving advertisements on your website. Choose only those ones which are high on appeal and impact which the user would like to visit. Earnings can also be done from these ads.

Get into joint ventures with other budding web marketers. Make a team with your partner and make it a point to pitch in equally with ideas. The flow of suggestions will never end which make the task more relaxed. The effort will be doubled and so will be the results. Be open to criticism and take it in a constructive manner. Feel free to criticize but in a subtle way so that your ally does not feel humiliated. This way, a good rapport can be struck which helps in achieving durable aspirations. Encourage each other to perform better and retrospect on all the shortcomings.

Web Marketing: A Summary

People visit websites at home and at work. Look out for matter which keeps their interest and post such advertisements which look exciting. A web marketer should have the nature to read a user’s mind and instinctively figure out the product or idea that would work and discard all schemes that would yield no result. Do not let short term failures deter you from pursuing your long term aspirations. You might get stuck in a Catch 22 situation where there might be no way out but keep thinking of new strategies for promotion. You never know what might work.

The Way Forward

To start with ensure your website has some web stats software, this can be a paid service or a free based service such as Stats Counter. Secondly have a reputable company review your website and suggest an online marketing strategy and outline the options available to your company and the results and time frames you can realistically expect.

For more information call the Design Industries team on 1300 73 63 63 or email seo@di.net.au

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization essentially refers to the process by which you can increase the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines with the help of the search results generated by them for certain targeted keywords. This means that your website can be designed and optimized in such a way that it allows popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! etc. to skim through and understand its contents thoroughly, making it more “SEO-friendly”. This in return would make the search engine display your website’s URL to the users who are searching for similar content as available in your website.

Another aspect of this kind of optimization is the rank of your webpage on the search engine. It is obvious that the higher the ranking of your website, better the visibility it will enjoy among the search results and hence more users will be attracted to clicking on its link. But for businesses the quality of the user traffic frequently becomes more important than the traffic’s volume. A positive “conversion action” is required which means that a profitable number of your website’s visitors indicate interest in the products or services that your company offers through different means of interaction like making purchases, downloading offerings and requesting for information through queries. This might lead you to wrongly conclude that SEO is just a form of advertising because all it is doing is bringing in more traffic to your site. You may also consider getting enlisted in paid search results for a given search terms. But you must remember that the basic idea behind SEO is to get top search engine rankings based on your website’s relevancy to a certain keyword, and not because you are paying for the same.

The use of SEO as a marketing strategy involves an understanding of how search engine algorithms work along with a good knowledge of the terms commonly searched for by Internet users. It also requires some technical know-how – basic HTML skills are a must. Hence, we can consider SEO as the technical counterpart of Internet marketing.

How does SEO work?

SEO works on the tenet of satisfying the algorithms of search engines. Search engines use advanced mathematical equations and theorems to analyze, sort and rank websites. The websites which get the top spots in the search results are the ones which conform to the algorithms with the highest relevancy. Although many search engine optimizers have tried to demystify the inner workings of the search engines and decode their algorithms, no one has discovered a magic tool to figure out the exact formula of how an SEO works. But to make things simpler, we can abbreviate the sequence of activities performed by a search engine to deliver results, as “CIPRR”. The explanation is given below:

1. Crawling: The most important thing to remember is that search engines are “text-driven”, that is, they crawl the Web, with the help of a tool called a spider or a crawler, to make note of items (mainly text) to get an idea of what a particular site is all about. These spiders follow the links from one page to another, indexing all the information they find on the way. Because of the enormous number of web pages on the Net, it is obvious that a spider cannot scan your website everyday to check for any new links or modifications. This means that there is nothing you can do with your SEO efforts during the time period when the spider does not visit your site. But you can optimize your website during this time too by checking for the items on your site that are viewable by the spider, with the help of a tool called Spider Simulator, and remove the redundant items according to the results displayed by it.
2. Indexing: After crawling a webpage, its contents are indexed and store in a colossal database from where it can be later retrieved for use. Indexing is essentially a process which involves the identification of key terms that provide the best description of the page, which then helps in the assignment of particular keywords to the same page. You can help your page get better rankings by helping the search engine in optimizing the process by enhancing and correcting the keywords and information on your site.
3. Processing: When a user enters a search request, the search engine processes it by comparing the search string with the pages of its database. Usually more than one page contains the particular search string.
4. Calculating Relevancy: The next step involves the search engine deciding the relevancy of each page in accordance with the user’s request. This is done with the help of numerous algorithms. Since every algorithm gives different relative weight age to some common factors, like metatags, keyword density and links, you may notice tHat the same search string can give dissimilar results in different search engines. Also, commonly used search engines like Google and MSN, have been known to modify their algorithms periodically. This should be a good enough reason for you to permanently devote your time and efforts to SEO, if you want to retain your top spot.
5. Retrieving: Finally, the search engine displays the long list of search results in your browser, which have been sorted and indexed neatly in the decreasing order of relevancy.

Although, we know roughly how search engines work, as I mentioned before different search engines work on varied principles. It might be useful for you to know these differences, like Google gives a lot of importance to links, while Yahoo! and MSN gives weightage to keywords. If your domain is older in comparison to others, Google will show its preference to you unlike Yahoo, which does not believe in this kind of discrimination.

A Few Useful Tips Here are a few tips to optimize your search engine to rise above the ranks in search engine results:

• Optimize your website for the right keywords. Conduct a keyword research to know the keywords which will reserve your spot at the top. You can do this by using like SEO Book, Keyword Discovery etc. Also, you can use the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool which can help you figure out how websites determine the theme of the website and the related keywords which fit into the same. Make your site keyword rich and use keywords in special places.
• Look for good websites to backlink to you. You may also consider link-bartering and buying links but be careful about the quality of the sites that you link to.
• Use Meta keywords in the heading of a document, but limit it to 10-20 words. This is a useful practice, although all search engines do not give importance to this. Also, include keywords in your Meta Description tag because it will appear in the search engine’s results.
• Pay attention to your website’s content. Search engines look for websites with fresh and original content which is updated regularly. The content should be useful and have practical value to the visitors of your website. You can also include news sections and RSS feeds on your site.
• Use headings and bold and italic text effectively to make the useful information stand out from the rest. Put <b> and <i> tags around some keywords on every page, but do not overdo this.
• Keep your web pages “short and sweet”, that is, their size should ideally not exceed 50 kb, so that the users do not have to keep waiting for your pages to load. Also, avoid using Flash, images, frames and JavaScript as it is against SEO guidelines and spiders find it taxing to crawl.
• Assure that your website is free of any syntax errors, declare the type of your document in the beginning and validate your CSS and HTML because search engines are quite biased against pages with errors.

Unethical SEO: White Hat vs. Black Hat

SEO techniques can be broadly divided into two categories. If a technique conforms to the standards and guidelines of a search engine and involves no unethical practices, it is considered a White Hat. White Hat also ensures the consistency of the content indexed and ranked by search engines. Reversely, Black Hat SEO techniques attempt to achieve higher search rankings in a deceptive manner. Black Hat SEO not only breaks the rules of search engines, it also creates a poor experience for the user on the web. Some of these techniques include creating hidden or invisible text, text that is colored similar to the background or positioned off-centered, stuffing in long-lists of unnecessary keywords and packing in “doorway pages” or pages that the user will never see but will be crawled on by spiders.

These tricks can seem tempting and may work temporarily, but your site may get penalized, receive lower rankings or even be banned by search engines. A notorious example of this was the removal of BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany by Google in 2006 for their deceptive Black Hat practices. So the lesson here is, use White Hat SEO for higher rankings and stay away from any technique that even remotely resembles a Black Hat SEO technique.