cindy cenora

Why would it be a good idea to outsource to an SEO consultant? A skilled web designer can create an unforgettable page that can serve every need that you can dream of. However web designers may not necessarily have any skill with SEO. An SEO consultant will know how to get your page seen and seen often. Lets cover a few reasons why you may consider doing this.

One is that an SEO consultant devotes all of their energies and resources into learning their craft. Their skills are specifically used for website rankings. They can work with your design team from the ground up to make sure that your website not only makes maximum use of SEO techniques but also to save you time and therefore money in the long run by making sure it is done right the first time. This by itself will save you not only time but costly redesigning later.

Another reason is that you ant your web design team to focus their energies on designing the site. By bringing an SEO consultant in you can have two specialists concentrate on what they know how to do best. An SEO consultant is going to take their bag of tricks and essentially arm your website and engage in a battle of wits with the search engines and their ranking algorithms.

The web designer only needs to worry about overcoming technical problems. They focus on first making the site work and then making it work well. They will make site not only work for you but also to get it to work beyond what you originally needed it for.

The SEO consultant must continually improve their skills because they are not just getting your site ranked well today but continually get it ranked well. You need both of these specialists to work for you. Together they can give you what your need and more.

How to use search engine optimization to be found (rescued) on the Web.

A few years ago, my good friend Bill B. bought his first sailboat.

He called and told me: "Jon, today - I bought a new sailboat, and it's the happiest day of my life"! I grinned and told him: "I also understand that selling it will be your happiest day of your life". (Turned out I was right)

What does sailing have to do with SEO and this article?

The story continues: My buddy Bill did end up selling it a few years later (youll see why). I taught him how his boat could be found and sold via web search traffic to his website, which we set up together.

Today he has a thriving web business, and he has bought and sold many boats and accessories since those early years. He went full-time into the web business, and he understands the power of SEO and ranking high for key search terms.

What is the definition of SEO, and why is it important to your business?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, or as defined by Google: Search Engine Optimizer. SEO is a subset of the umbrella term Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Properly applied search engine optimization allows your site to be not only seen by the search engines, but when a search term (keywords, phrases) is entered, you can rank very high in the search engine results pages (SERPS). The results pages are typically a combination of natural (sometimes called organic) results, paid inclusions (directories) and pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

The wholly grail for online marketers centers around being found on the first page of Google, currently owning well over half of the market of all searches. If you further optimize in such a way that it brings *quality* traffic, that can be the ultimate return on investment (ROI), assuming you have a solid back office process. If you have optimized well for Google, you will rank good in the other majors (MSN, Yahoo) also.

Interestingly enough, Search Engine Optimization is not optimizing the search engines themselves, (SEO-ers can only make experienced and industry guesses) but rather optimizing the websites, content and related parts (links) so the users can find you easily. Its all about relevancy. Many folks hire professional consultants to perform SEO, and some attempt to do it themselves, which I will help you with during the months to come.

My sailing buddy was lost at sea.

That third weekend of his boat saga, he told his wife that a trip outside of the safe harbor and into somewhat un-chartered waters would be a fun and challenging experience, and he brought a friend along to assist.

Normally, he would have reviewed the weather forecast, map (lat/long), trip log, flares, emergency contact info and courses outlined, including both physical and radio contact points to coast guards and ports, but he neglected all this by making a stupid mistake: he did not fully prepare and made some bad assumptions.

It was a poor weekend to go out as well. A tranquil beginning, they were relaxing and enjoying the sea. However, the weather turned quickly into one of the fiercest storms and many hours later, they were missing at sea.

The coast guard and others were looking for them (SEO: visitors), his boat and crew had not prepared a strategy (SEO: competitive analysis, know your audience, know where you are (your value proposition), and what keywords to use) and this was a different route than anytime before (SEO: know who your link partners are that can help you get ranking/visibility/popularity via relevant links in your topical, themed community).

The next 24 hours at sea were not good, to say the least. Here they were, way off course, nobody could find them, and they had run out of options. By stroke of luck, one ship happened to cross their path almost 100 nautical miles off course. (SEO: Was this a random visitor?)

My friend and his associate were rescued, and what a big lesson it was. They learned that careful preparation, planning and execution, as well as adjusting for bad weather (SEO: competitive analysis, thoughtful planning) are cornerstones to a successful trip. This also means never giving up, (SEO: keep content fresh, adust, and monitor changes in the search engine algorithms), you can survive!

Summary:
SEO done right can enable you to be found (in the sea of billions of web pages), and ranked well. You should always provide relevant information that the users are looking for, and youll have a steady stream of visitors, 24x7x365.

Make sure to include solid search engine optimization strategy, tactics and operational context for a safer (relevant) trip on the World Wide Web.

SEO is one of the most powerful online marketing mediums there is, and the display of those query results are completely free, and doing it right will elevate your positions.

When it comes to online marking strategies, very few can beat search engine optimization (SEO). By optimizing your website for search engines, the amount of targeted, organic traffic it receives can increase significantly. Below you will find some SEO tips that will help you on your way to becoming a SEO guru.

Simply linking your page to a large number of other sites will not guarantee good search engine optimization, so be concerned with the quality of the link sites rather than the quantity. Make sure that the sites you link on your web page will give your customer the right impression of your own site by making them something that they would actually want to see.

Whenever you are adding META keyword tags to your website for efficient search engine optimization, you should try and use lower case letters for all your keywords and keyword phrases. This is preferred by most major search engines and it is a simple tip to ensure that your ranking remains at a high level.

Use categories to separate your site as it grows. This not only helps search engines direct people to the exact part of your site they are looking for, but it also helps established readers find their favorite content quickly and efficiently. Categorize your site with keywords to watch your site hits grow.

In order to help crawlers and spiders index your web site, you should create a site map. A site map is a list of all the pages that make up your site. By creating one, web spiders will be able to discover even the most obscure and hidden pages, as well as to receive other important information. This will increase your visibility on the internet.

An excellent tip for search engine optimization is to make a video sitemap for your site. A video sitemap will greatly assist you in attracting web crawlers to you. You should list the video sitemap in your Google Webmaster Central account in order to have the best chance of success.

Trading content or links is an amazing way to get more traffic to your website. It creates additional backlinks on other sites which are already in good standing on Google, plus it generates fresh content for your website through trading articles or blog posts. These two factors can help your page rank rise dramatically!

Add a blog to your website in order to maintain the freshness of your site's content and to target specific long-tail keywords, both of which will increase your page rank. You can also place short blurbs from blog posts on other areas of your site to refresh the content on pages that are not typically updated.

If you want to drive more traffic to your site using search engine optimization, you must change your keyword density when it is necessary. You should make keywords and phrases make up approximately three to five percent of all the text and links of any page. This is the most efficient way to get the most out of search engine optimization.

By implementing some of the ideas and advice given above, you could outrank your competition on search engine results pages (SERP) in the near future. The SEO tips given above could also save you valuable time and money, as you will not be wasting resources on SEO techniques which don't work.

Daron Babin-Daron is the CEO of Webmaster Radio. Daron has been teaching and lecturing on search engine optimization since 1997. Daron got his start in television by working for NBC, but eventually found his way into the world of search engine marketing and optimization. His goal from the very beginning has been to create tools that benefit the community. According to an interview with the Online Marketing Blog, Daron is currently developing a pod cast search engine. He also mentions that Yahoo is his favorite search engine, while Google comes in second on his list.

Matt Cutts-Matt Cutts is a software engineer for Google. He began working for Google in January 2000, and is currently the head of Googles Webspam team. Thanks to the popularity of his blog, Matt Cutts has become a celebrity within the search engine optimization community. With an Alexa ranking of 1,262 (at the time of writing), Matts blog is one of the busiest on the internet. Because Matt has become the unofficial ambassador/liason between Google and the search engine optimization community, he frequently attends search and web master conferences. No matter where he goes during these conferences, it is guaranteed that he will have a flock of SEOs following and watching his every move.

Rand Fishkin-Rand Fishkin is the owner of SEOmoz. SEOmoz specializes in providing companies around the world with search engine optimization services. SEOmoz is currently made up of nine different people, including Rebecca Kelley and Si Fishkin. At the end of 2006, Rand and SEOmoz made the decision to release their financial statements for the past year. According to these statements (which were only rough estimates), SEOmoz earned a total of $600,000 during 2006. At the end of the year, they had $64,000 in the bank. Only a year early, they had less than $4,000 in saved in the bank.

Many SEO are looking for the perfect SEO formula to make a perfect optimized page. This is a mistake because Google doesnt want a perfectly optimized page. They want a most relevant content. I am not going to give a talk about what everyone already known. You have to somehow make your SEO imperfect! Yes, imperfection is the true beauty of SEO.

If your page title and H header have the exactly the same words, and the majority of your inbound and outbound links have the same anchor texts, you are looking very suspicious, suspicious enough to not ranking well. Google is quite SEO-phobic. Even if you put the same word in different combinations in your alt tag 3 times, you would immediately fall. For example, if you put bookstore, online bookstore, and bookstore sale in 3 different image alt tags, you would see the immediate fall in competitive keywords in your next Google page cache because bookstore appeared 3 times. To reduce the risk of perfect SEO, you should mix things up a little bit and do thing imperfectly intentionally. You probably dont want to have more than 30% of your inbound links have the same anchor texts. If you already have most of your inbound links with the same text, you should build more links with different anchor texts and descriptions to dilute the perfection.

There are also some so-call poison words in your on-page link text, such as add url, links, link partnersThese would indicate of low quality content or related to spam. The search engines are more likely to de-weight it.

Another bad SEO practice is, somehow I think its too obvious, that people put the same word 3 times (or more) in the title. Thats not right, not for title, nor description, nor the bold text. For example, you dont do SEO Service SEO Company SEO Articles in the title. You would still see such kind of repeated words in search results, thats because they have strong back links. These sites have already been de-weighted silently by Google. If you have the keyword repeat more than 3 times, oh my god, you are sending Google a message that Yes, I am a Spammer. Catch me if you can. One time for a keyword is perfect, 2 times with different form, such as Online Bookstores in Bookstore Outlet is acceptable. Notice there is a singular and a plural version?

Do you submit your new website to Google, Yahoo and other search engines? I wouldnt do that. Not that its bad, just not worth it. As Google clearly saying in its official page that new website submissions would wait up to 6 weeks to be indexed. 6 weeks is quite a long time, and doesnt mean you would rank well after these 6 weeks. You still have a lot of optimization work needed to do after that. And some sites even dont link to sites with no PageRank. If you are not indexed, you dont get PageRank, then you dont get links from these sites. So, as soon as you brought a new domain, you build some content into it which doesnt need to be prefect. Then, you have to get your site indexed as soon as possible.

As you scout around for SEO services, you may wonder what sets one company's SEO services apart from another's. Companies which provide SEO services usually use different SEO philosophies, tools and methods for optimizing their clients' websites. These different approaches are usually termed as "hats" SEO services usually come in three different hats:

Black Hat SEO Services

Black Hat SEO is known as SEO spamming. From the second term itself, you may have an idea of what this kind of SEO service offers. Black Hat SEO is centered on creating sites that are targeted at manipulating or tricking search engines for better site ranking. Black Hat SEO relies heavily on automation to come up with large numbers of substandard pages and pulls links from other sites which are actually irrelevant. Consequently, this SEO approach usually gets poor or irrelevant search engine result pages or SERP quality. What is advantageous with Black Hat SEO is that it can get your site on the top of search engine rankings in a matter of a short span of time. However, this is not a wise SEO services strategy in terms of web design perspective. Worse, once search engines find out that your site maligns their results; your site may and will run the risk of getting banned or crashing on view. So if you want to get on top of search engine listings in a matter of days and are willing to take the risk of flouting some site behavior guidelines, Black Hat SEO services should do the trick for you.

White Hat SEO Services

For every black, there is always a white. The same is true for SEO services. White Hat SEO services, on the other hand, relies on the advantages of putting in relevant and quality content as well as effective marketing strategies to place sites on top of search engine rankings. SEO services providers that offer White Hat SEO will focus mostly on your site contents. White Hat SEO providers will help you come up with contents that will attract people, and not search engines into your site. You should know that content is a very important factor in SEO building (if not the most important). With good content, White Hat SEO services will be able to get you more inbound links from other relevant websites. White Hat SEO is definitly considered to be the better SEO tool. It will not put your site in the risk for getting blacklisted and does not violate any search engine SEO guidelines. Most importantly, visitors who check your site will most likely be converted easily with your great content.

Grey Hat SEO Services

Grey Hat SEO is mid-way between the two tools above and is all about the balance between risk and reward. There are actually a wide number of SEO services solutions categorized under this. Some Grey Hat SEO services may tend to use more dubious strategies and take even bigger risks to produce fast and high search engine rankings. While many Gray Hat SEO services methods obey search engine guidelines, others might put you at risk. If you opt for SEO services using Grey Hat, be sure about what you are exactly subjecting your online site to.

Which hat should you choose?

According to major search engines such as Google, White Hat is good SEO; Black Hat is bad SEO, while Grey Hat is for the most part, dicey. Those using Black Hat SEO services might tell you that White Hat is too ineffective and Grey Hat may be safe but not as effective. Those who prefer Grey Hat may claim that White Hat SEO Services is only effective only when no Grey or Black Hats are involved. White Hat SEO services providers may tell you that Black Hat SEO users are cheaters and those providing Grey Hat are quitters.

Through all these varying opinions, know that it is still up to you to choose the right type of SEO services that you want. It is your objectives and goals that will determine which type of hat you should wear. From my point of view White Hat is better and more cost effective if you are serious about your business... and serious businesses exclude: gambling, adult, and pharmacy sites.

Writing SEO articles does not have to be complicated. In fact, it is really quite simple, once you know why and how you should attack the process. To better understand how you should write your articles, from a business point of view, lets look at three important business concepts that should play a role in how you design your SEO articles.

Understand your niche and focus on it. With such fierce competition these days it is relatively pointless to try and compete with websites that are in the page rankings of five and up. Utilize key words in your SEO articles that will really benefit you over the younger, less experienced competition and do not purposely go head to head with the big guys.

Know your market and understand it well. Just because you have a good product idea does not mean that you have a market for it on the Internet. Some concepts are best done at physical locations and do not do well in the virtual marketplace. Doing your market research will save you time and money.

Familiarize yourself with what your visitors are looking for and give it to them. With so many websites fighting for clicks and ultimately sales, you have little time to impress your visitors. If you do not catch their attention right away, they will go somewhere else. When you begin to write your SEO articles, make sure that you look at it from a visitor's perspective.

Now that you are aware of what you should know before you start a SEO article campaign, what is the next step? Here is a simple outline of the SEO article writing process:

Once you have chosen your topic of choice, you should do thorough keyword research to ensure you will be able to accomplish what you have started out to do. Make a list of a minimum of 15-20 main keywords. Then create another list of related keywords. This way you can use the first list as a tool to create your main pages and the related keywords to create your internal pages and SEO articles. This will give you the greatest chance of success.

Put the pedal to the metal and just write it. Don't waste countless hours trying to be perfect on the first draft. In fact, don't even worry about placing all of your SEO keywords as you write. Get your thoughts out and critique later. You will be much more effective and efficient this way. Additionally, don't worry about titling your SEO articles until you are finished writing. Many times what you intended to write about will change during the process.

Once you have completed writing your SEO article, do a good editing job and then strategically place your keywords throughout the article. Make sure however, to keep it logical and easy to read. There is nothing worse than reading an article that makes absolutely no sense. Your customers will remember the negative experiences if you give it to them, so don't!

SEO articles are one of the most effective marketing tools you have for your Internet business. Take the time to get it right the first time around. If you plan to hire SEO article writers, make sure they will write to your standards and get the process rolling!