How Search Engine Optimization and Sales Expansion Is Inter-Related

It has been observed that only having a wonderfully designed easily navigable web page is not enough to get high traffic. On the other hand, only writing a good content is also not sufficient for making a web page popular. So, if you really want to do something for earning revenue and sales through internet, you must do on-page as well as off-page optimization.

According to off-page optimization work has to be done with the data collected by the search engines. On the other hand, On-page optimization is basically related to a site link structure. It is needless to say that web page optimization needs a focused strategy on key phrases. Though there are mainly 2 types of optimization strategies, you can go for the off-page one. This is because; according to different survey reports it has been observed that off-page optimization generates more accomplishment.

Off-page optimization mainly includes factors such as, online directories, link popularity and last but indeed a very important one that is keyword. If the search engine can gather more information about your site, your portal will get more recognition from the online visitors. So, it is advisable to keep your page always accessible to the search engines. In order to do so, never forget to insert your targeted keywords in the domain, headings, link text and page URLs. But avoid incorporating too much keyword. This act of yours is considered as a spam.

It is suggested to use common synonyms and keywords throughout the entire body of the text on your portal. It is indeed a great idea to place those staff especially on both the beginning and at the end of the page. However, the keyword density should be maintained in a balanced way. Synonyms are usually inserted. This is because; we never know that what phrases the user is going to use while searching.

Usually, it is better to write the most important keywords in bold print so that people can easily notice it, then comes the content. As we all know that content is the king, you need to keep it original, relevant as well as interesting. Or else, a chunk of meaningless text will only make you disgusted and you will feel like running away from the site as early as possible.

From the above discussion, it is clear that search engine optimization is almost necessary to boost up the revenue. If you can optimize your page properly you can easily expect to rank high in the SERP and this will naturally bring more traffic to your site. Thus, get a huge number of visitors and make your business more profitable than ever.

SEO Tips and Tricks - Proper On-Page SEO for Easy Search Engine Traffic

If you have proper on-page SEO, you will drastically reduce the backlinking requirements it would take to for your pages to rank well. As everyone knows, getting backlinks can be a major pain so you might as well structure your site the right way so you don't have to do as much backlinking. The main factors for proper on-page SEO include your URL names, internal linking structure, HTML tags, and your web content.

Domain Name and Page Name

Your domain name is a determining factor in how you rank, but in the long run it is not extremely important. A webpage that is structured correctly and has more relevant backlinks will outrank a domain that has the keyword as the domain name itself. When you name your webpages, the targeted keyword should be included in the webpage name so that it is part of the URL.

Internal Linking

Internal linking simply refers to how you link your own web pages together. It is imperative you use the correct anchor text when linking your pages together. The main keyword of each webpage should be what is used as anchor text when that page is linked to from elsewhere on your site.

HTML Tags

Your title tag and the meta description should have the main keyword in it. Keep in mind that these tags are what appears in the search engine results, so you want to optimize them for high click-thrus from web visitors as well as for the search engines. Include your keyword in both the title and description, and present a benefit that your site has to offer in the meta description to entice click-thrus from the results listings. Another tag that should contain your main keyword is the header, or H1 tag.

Web Content

The days of keyword stuffing have been long gone. So what keyword density should you use in your content? It should be between 1%-4%, but if you want to be scientific about it you can take the keyword density of the top two or three sites and use the same keyword density those sites are using. Your keyword should be within the first fifty words of your content and then equally sprinkled throughout the remainder of the content.

So these are the main factors for good on-page SEO. By making sure your web pages are optimized for the search engines, you can be sure to outrank less optimized web pages with fewer backlinks.

Biggest SEO Mistakes

■ Leaving title tags to be auto-generated (from the post name, category name, etc.)

■ Squandering your “crawl equity” by letting pages get indexed that don’t deserve to be (“Email this page” etc.)

■ Having multiple “homes” for your blog

■ Not using unique “Optional Excerpt” to minimize duplicate content

■ Not using rel=nofollow to direct PageRank flow

■ Over-reliance on date-based archives

■ No stability in keyword focus on category & tag pages

■ Suboptimal URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories)

■ Only one RSS feed, and it’s un-optimized

■ Hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don’t own

■ Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally

Keywords

● Keywords are the words on a webpage that best describe that page

● Keyword selection is the most important step to effective SEO

● The keywords you use will be the phrases where you want to be highly ranked on SEs

● Time and research should go into selecting the appropriate keywords before doing any SEO

● What are the words one would use to find your site?

● Continuation on how search engines work…

● When a spider goes through a webpage, it determines the weight of frequently used words in the document, and considers them the most important in the document.

● The more you use a word in important places, the more search engines give importance to it.

● The words with highest weight are more likely to bring up your web page when used as a search term.

● You must decide whether to focus on less frequently used keywords (niche) or compete for the commonly used ones.

● Here are some tools you can use to see which keywords are searched for frequently

● Google Suggest (beta) (free)

● http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

● Google adwords

● Offers a free keyword tool with its adwords services

● WordTracker (paid)

learn about Tags

Meta Tags

● Meta tags are used to provide a description of the page, and a list of main keywords it uses.

● There is a debate over whether to cram loads of keywords into these tags, or just select the most important ones.

● Search engines are getting smarter everyday, so they may penalise you for cramming

● Some search engines reportedly don’t even look at the meta tags (e.g. Google)

Title Tag

● The text in this tag shows up on the top of your browser window.

● Quite important to include keywords here, as the title will give a general summary for what your page is about.

● Most search engines see this tag as an important tag for categorising what type of site you have.

Anchor Tags

● One of the most important tags you must use for SEO.

● Spiders use these to crawl your site, so you must have links to pages throughout your site.

● Other sites that link to yours will send spiders your way also.

● Google (and others) use anchor tags to rank your site in many ways:

● Firstly, text in anchor tags are given a lot of importance.

● If other sites link to you, this must mean your site is popular, and so you increase in rankings.

● The most popular sites would, in theory, be linked to by many websites throughout the internet.

H1, H2, H3, etc. Tags

● These tags are considered by search engines to be a description of your page.

● Very important to put in some keywords there.

● It is always a good idea to structure your content so that it contains these tags at beginning of paragraphs, tables, sections, etc.

● It is quite logical that a search engine gets the overview of a paragraph from a header tag

● We know what this slide is about by looking at the title of the slide

search engines

Which search engine?

● There are some main players which you must always consider optimising for, namely Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and AskJeeves

● Although Google makes up for almost half of worldwide searches, it is not always a good tactic to relate your site prominence only on Google

● If half a billion searches are made per day, this means that over 250,000,000 are made on other Search Engines

● Each search engine searches the web and ranks sites differently, so when you may be at the top of one search engine, you might not even be listed on another one

How a search engine works

● Search engines use programs called spiders, or bots, to search the internet and document their findings.

● Spiders firstly go to a webpage and analyse it

● Goes through the HTML code and categorises the most important words (keywords) in the document.

● It then moves on to any pages that linked from the current page.

● This is one way how search engines find new pages.

● It also visits pages that may not be linked by other pages, but were submitted by search engines.

What a search engine sees

● Spiders do not see a page like humans do, as it cannot describe an image, or tell you how pretty a site looks

● Instead, it looks at the HTML code and structures it to make sense.

● Using a text browser, or disabling images and CSS are a good way of seeing your site through a search engines eyes.

Search engine marketing

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?
SEM is the act of marketing a website via search engines by purchasing paid listings

What are paid listings?

These are listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs. In contrast, organic listings are not sold.

Paid listings:

1. Paid inclusions
- Advertising programs where pages are guaranteed to be included in a search engine's index in exchange for payment
- no guaranteed ranking
- payment made on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis
- eg Looksmart: a directory that lists pages and sites, not based on position but based on relevance. Advertisers pay to be included in the directory on a CPC basis or per-url fee basis with no guarantee of specific placement

2. Paid placements
- Advertising programs where listings are guaranteed to appear in organic listings
- the higher the fee, the higher the ranking

- eg sponsored links and Google’s Adwords
- can be purchased from a portal or a search network
- search networks are often set up in an auction environment where keywords and phrases are associated with a cost-per-click (CPC) fee.
- Overture and Google are the largest networks

Other internet marketing strategies

●Usability driven information architecture

●Effective copywriting (presented previously)

●Affiliate programs

●Email marketing and online newsletters

●Interactive customer relationships

●Web traffic analysis and web analytics

Conclusion

●If budget allows, undertake both SEO and SEM as SEM enables ROI tracking (leads and conversions)

●If budget is zilch, opt for SEO

●Recommendation for UniSA:
- SEO
- SEM for campaigns and international markets

SEO - what is NOT recommended

Flash and shockwave - spiders do not pick up these files

Image only sites - spiders do not pick up images

Image maps - spiders cannot read image maps.
Do not use them on your home page or critical pages.

Frames - only one page can be titled (titling is critical in search rankings)
- If the spider cannot read the complete page (because of the frames), it will not be indexed properly.

- Some spiders may not even read a frames web site

Password protected pages – spiders cannot enter password protected pages

PDF files - can be problematic for spiders. Although some search engines can index them, the pages must be interpreted into HTML and can lose much of their content.
- place PDFs lower down in your site

Dynamic pages - spiders cannot index some content on pages using ASP, CGI or other dynamic languages.
- Make sure important pages are HTML, no dynamically generated content.

Drop down menus – spiders cannot read them

Major SEs to submit to

:

●Altavista http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
(Search engines that also use this database - Looksmart)

●The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) http://dmoz.org/add.html
(Search engines that also use this database - Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Netscape )

●Fast http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
(Search engines that also use this database - Lycos)

●Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
(Search engines that also use this database - Yahoo)

●Inktomi http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
(Search engines that also use this database - AOL, Excite, MSN, Overture)

●MSN http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

●Yahoo http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest

let's learn seo

What is SEO?

SEO is the act of modifying a website to increase its ranking inorganic (vs paid), crawler-based listings of search engines

How do organic search listings work?

●A spider or crawler which is a component of a SE gathers listings by automatically "crawling" the web

●The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages and stores them in the SE’s index

●Based on this data, the SE then indexes the pages and ranks the websites

●Major SEs that index pages using spiders: Google, Altavista, Msn,

SEO strategies/techniques

1. Domain name strategies
- domain names are traffic magnets
> 63 million domain names registered
> 4.7 million domain names registered 1st quar 2004
- choose a domain name that will increase your search engine ranking. How?
- simple, short, no hyphens, no numbers
- use keywords, common words, advertising terms, product names
- choose a keyword that is important for your business

2. Linking strategies
- the more inbound links the higher the SE ranking
- if the site linking to you is already indexed, spiders will also receive your site
- quality of inbound links is critical
- how to increase links: a) good content b) good outbound links c) target a list of sites from which you can request inbound links
- links for the sake of links can damage your search rankings

“Link relevancy is critical in getting your site indexed by search engines”

“A small number of inbound links from high-quality, relevant sites is more valuable than many links from low-traffic, irrelevant sites.”

3. Keywords
- important in optimising rankings
- keywords are words that appear the most in a page
- the spider chooses the appropriate keywords for each page, then sends them back to its SE
- your web site will then be indexed based on your keywords
- can be key phrases or a single keyword
- do not use common words eg ‘the’ ‘and’ ‘of’: spiders ignore them
- write keyword-rich text
- balance keyword-rich and readability
- always have text in your page: at least 100 words

4. Title tags
- important in optimising rankings
- the first thing that a search engine displays on a search return
- must keywords in title to be ranked no. 1
- should have the exact keyword you use for the page
- every single web page must have its own title tag
- you can use up to 65 characters eg Ebay
http://www.ebay.com/ (title is littered with keywords)

5. Meta description tags
- the next- important

- displayed below the title in search results
- use dynamic, promotional language
use keywords

Meta keywords tags
- no longer carry weight with major SEs
- a myth that meta keywords alone affect rankings

6. Alt tags
- include keywords in your alt tags

7. Submit your website to SEs for indexing
- submit your site to search engine directories, directory sites and portal sites
- indexing takes 1 wk to 3 months

internet marketing

Key internet marketing strategies

●Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- no cost per click

●Search engine marketing (SEM)
- cost per click

Why is internet marketing important?

It gives companies the ability to:

●Drive high quality customers to their website

●Increase sales leads from customers looking for their products and services

●Build their brand online by communicating marketing messages to their target audience

●Increase their profile against their competitors

●Target a global audience via international search engines

●Be accountable with ROI tracking (SEM)