Essential Tips for Search Engine Marketing

Search marketing or search engine marketing (SEM) is all about harnessing the search engines for marketing purposes. For some, it's an obvious decision whether or not to use search marketing. Others need a little more convincing. But first, let's understand how it works...

The major search engines - Google, Yahoo (a directory as well as a search engine) and MSN - generate "natural" or "organic" search results or listings, as well as sponsored (advertiser paid) listings, whenever someone performs a search on particular keywords or keyphrases. As you might imagine, listings that appear on the first page of results - whether paid or organic - tend to attract the vast majority of clicks on the links included in their listings and, consequently, traffic to their websites. Therefore, if you know that the target market for your website typically uses particular keywords or keyphrases to search for the kinds of information, products or services you offer... you want your listing to appear as high as possible in the search engine ranking pages or "SERPs".

Is the very first position on the SERPs the best position to have? Well, opinions vary. Many search engine marketers believe that the top spot on the free listings is the best... but not necessarily believe that the top spot on the paid listings is as profitable as, say, a couple of spots down. Ideally, in as far as the paid listings go, this is something you should test.

Since SEM incorporates both paid and free search engine rankings, the means of getting high up in the free versus the paid results necessitates a somehwhat different methodology. Search engine optimization (SEO) is how marketers get their websites and webpages ranking highly in the free results. This is part-science, part-art. The SEs use complex math to rank different sites and pages. Therefore, if you understand how this math works, then, presumably, you'll know what to do to get a high ranking. Trouble is, no-one knows how this math works! The SEs keep their algorithms close to their chests. Consequently, it's a bit of an art to try to work out the science!

Meanwhile, paid search incorporates pay-per-click advertising and pay-per-impression advertising.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is as the name suggests: advertising where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your ad. Some of the major advantages of PPC are that you only pay for the results you want - prospects clicking on your ad - and you can readily measure the effectiveness of a given keyword or ad by means of the click through rate (CTR).

The other form of paid search is pay-per-impression, where you pay a certain amount per 1,000 ad impressions (CPM). Google, in fact, uses a formula to determine how much you ultimately pay for a given advertising campaign that incorporates both the cost per click (CPC) and the CPM. I won't get into the complexities here, but suffice to say that you can end up paying the same amount of money regardless of whether you pay based on a click or an impression, depending on your CTR. Also, Google actually favors ads with a higher CTR and takes that into account when ranking them. So you can actually get a higher listing and still pay the same per click than someone else, provided your ad is more effective for that keyword or keyphrase in question.

Paying to appear in the SERPs can be a good way to get started in SEM. You can identify which words are the most effective in pulling customers to your website. You can test the popularity of a new product or service. And you can test the layout and copy on your landing pages (the specific pages that people see when they click on your listing).

Search marketing is well worth pursuing if you're serious about building a web-based business. But given the work involved, that does NOT mean that YOU need to manage all your search marketing efforts. You can always hire individuals or companies to optimize your webpages for SEO purposes, or to run your PPC campaigns.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

"Ethical Search Engine Optimization" applies to SEO techniques and not to SEO practitioners. SEO practitioners can conduct themselves ethically towards their clients but it does not suggest ethical SEO. Ethical search engine optimization specifies the SEO techniques that fall in line with the guidelines of a webmaster. Any organization can better take care of their employees if the business owner has implemented their own ethical requirements. Ethics implies some sets of rules and guidance to which the company accepts and act in accordance with the norms of the business. Hence, all the tricks that do well in this task are called 'ethical SEO'.

Ethical search engine optimization is an accurate way for increasing the traffic to your website. It is concerned with designing of the best strategies to catch the attention of various customers through search engine links. The most important advantage with the ethical SEO practice is that it provides you with an authoritative place in the search engines. The reason behind this is that it does not embrace any sort of illegitimate means when advertising a website.

Benefits of ethical search engine optimization:

• Possibility of ranking for longer duration.
• No human added & automated penalties by search engines.
• Well optimize sites lead to companies paying to advertise on them.
• Clients will come across to your website and stay for a longer period of time.

Hence, a site with unique and concise keyword rich meta tags, relevant content writing, highly structured site navigation, and user and search-engine friendly site and site devoid of deceptive techniques is called as ethical search engine optimization. Thus, through this strategy, company can generate substantial amount of Return On Investment (ROI).
Source: http://www.itmatchonline.com/article/Ethical_Search_Engine_Optimization.php

Social Media Optimization

All those of you who are still stuck up with search engine optimization, in order to see your website on the top ranks with free flowing traffic. It is time now to switch your attention to a more beneficial concept of social media optimization.

You can call SMO or social media optimization, the latest fad of web 2.0. Like Search Engine Optimization this too is a time consuming yet profitable technique. Social networking is all about being social and engaging yourself in communities Online, which will give you and your website a wide exposure. Before beginning your social media optimization operation, make sure you have studied your website performance properly. Evaluate your website traffic and the nature of your target audience, so that you know whom to focus at once you are into social media optimization.

Once you have studied your website report, prepare your a rough social media optimization plan for your website and then begin the process. Your plan must contain a few important aspects like, targeted visitors and their movement in the website, keyword study, and social media optimization prospects. Search Engine Optimization and social media optimization play big role to promote a website. Search Engine Optimization is important as well as social media optimization too.

Several websites like Digg, Stumbleupon, twitter are great sources to begin with your social media optimization. Use blogs and forums, community discussions and open chats too to popularize yourself on social media platform. Videos, audios and images are also a part of social media optimization. Podcast, bookmarks and weblogs too help in Smo techniques.

The more number of people reading your web page or accessing your e-commerce website likes, the better is your social media optimization program including web 2.0 techniques. The simple idea of SMO is to reach out to as many people as possible in order to make your website popular.

Know more about search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques here.

After Changing Alexa Ranking what will be effect on Search Engine Popurality?

In recent Alexa has changed algorithm for website ranking and now many websites has gotten very good rank. But some websites go bellow by Alexa algorithm. Alexa team was working on new system so they can provide exact global ranking of website accrding to alexa algorithm.

At present Alexa is showing 9 months old data but they are trying to show several years data to users. This rank may help to SEO companies to show improvement in running projects and search engine popularity also.

Source:Alexa.com

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an important tool used by many Internet marketing companies. Although this term has many definitions, all have the same meaning. Affiliate marketing is a huge business piece on the Internet. It is a cooperative effort between merchants and an affiliate's website. For many years now, affiliate marketing has proved to be a cost-efficient, measurable method of delivering long-tern results. Many SEO campaigns have implemented it with great success, and it has become famous for Internet sites who are trying to make some extra or additional income for their site. Every day, people get interested to affiliate marketing and want to make money out of it. But in many cases, these new affiliates do not fully understand the affiliate world and make costly mistakes. In other words, affiliate marketing has often been misunderstood.

One of the common misconceptions associated with affiliate marketing is that the "selling" aspect is the primary one. Although selling is an important activity of affiliate marketing and the central function of a business operation. Another is that affiliate marketing is commonly linked with "advertising". While the importance of advertising in marketing a certain product is not to be underestimated, the fact of the matter is, advertising like selling, is merely a part of the many functions of marketing.

In affiliate marketing, an affiliate is compensated for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. The said compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit. The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing from the merchant's viewpoint is that no payment is due to an affiliate until results are appreciated.

Affiliate marketing is typically being run by affiliate networks and this affiliate networks are composed of two functional bodies, the group affiliates and the group merchants. Each has their special function and role when it comes to affiliate marketing. The affiliate network acts as a third party between the merchant and the associated affiliates. The network provides the technology to deliver the merchant's campaigns and offers. The affiliate network also collects commission fees from the merchant and then pays the affiliates which are part of the program.

The merchant is any web site owner that wants or desires to take advantage of performance based marketing. The benefits to the merchant are many. First, the merchant maintains and operates the affiliate program. If it would be extracted, the merchant needs to do their part by researching interested affiliate websites to ensure that they are a good fit for that particular website. Finding a fit for their merchandise would be the key to more generated income. The merchant has access to markets and customers without him spending valuable time searching out. Banner ads on affiliate sites are not distracting to the site user. It might produce interest for that product and drive the consumer to the merchants' website. It is also the merchant who decides how much he is willing to pay for each sale that results from a visitor sent from an affiliate.

The affiliate or the affiliate marketer also sees a lot of benefits. The affiliate is a web site owner that promotes one or more merchants and their affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing can generate a full-time income for the affiliate. But this is not an easy task to accomplish. The affiliate needs to have a better understanding with the merchant what the commission will be, expected payment method and time involved in the contract. The affiliate has also the responsibility to stand for the merchandise their user based would be most interested in. For example, if the site has a user base of mainly stay-at-home mothers, then on-line job openings such as surveys would be a good match for them. This group would also appreciate direct links to children's products and informational sites. Merchandisers often provide targeted, best-seller items and personal support to their affiliate. They often offer sales promotions that will benefit the merchandiser as well as the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a great situation for both the marketer and the affiliate. If they would work together, they can be an advantage to both. Plus the fact that it seems to make sense, it is easy and inexpensive way to start, and you can be up and running within a few days. But there is one thing to consider, it is how to get traffic and make your offer different than all others.
Source: seoarticles4u.com

On Page Optimization Tips

Actually SEO services divided into three parts. The First one is known as pre SEO suggestion. In this particular SEO industry several SEO analysts are using this part before choosing the domain name of a site. They usually put the targeted market or most targeted key phrase into the domain name.

But if the client is not influenced by this pre SEO suggestion and if they are keener to put their brand name into the domain then the remaining two parts are available for SEO analyst. The first one is on page optimization and off page optimization.

You can define the off page optimization as the entire web promotion of a site. The total SEO work done on the back end of a site is also known as off page optimization and entire SEO Work done into the front end of a site which is viewed by visitors and crawlers is known as on page optimization.

The cumulative effect of off page optimization reflects to the growth of keyword placement into the search engines through on page optimization. Thus it is know as the basement or you can say the soul of any SEO services. This part of optimization is done very carefully, smartly and should be done after a strong internet research for that site.

1. Title tag of every page should be unique and keyword infusion into the tile tag should be done smartly.

2. Meta descriptions of all pages should be written uniquely and also a well measured knack of keyword alteration into the description should be their.

3. Try to avoid image links or flash links or Java script links for inter linking of you site.

4. Optimize the images of your site with Alt Tag because crawlers are unable to read images. Thus put some effective sentence into the Alt tag which is containing your selected key phrases as well.

5. Ensure search engine bots with adaptation notification are placed at all of the pages.

6. Do not forget to check whether any broken links exist on your site or not.

7. In case of internal linking of your website, you should use text links and try to alternate your keywords into those texts.

8. Remember you should use targeted keywords as text in case of cross linking between your own pages.

9. Do not forget to infuse your selected keywords into your web content for every page and those keywords should be relevant with the page content or topic.

10. Try to spread text links for important web pages from your main page (index page) of your website.

11. If the site is older but newly come to you then check whether their any black hat techniques are used or not, if so then remove them quickly.

12. Remember links of your all web pages should be short and easily accessible by search engine crawlers. Change unwontedly long links if exist.

13. Do not forget crawlers are unable to read image contents. So try to avoid images for placing your content and place contents within the text part of your web page.

14. Make sure that robot.txt of your site should be placed with appropriate instructions.

15. If your site has enormous pages then situate a site map at your website for visitors.

16. Canonical issue should be solved before starting off page optimization.

17. Try to place a common header and footer text within H2 tag. Here you can alternate your keywords for increasing keyword density.

18. Do not forget to situate a XML feed or a ROR sitemap at your site and the link of that feed should exist as a link at the index page of your website.

19. Ensure the important links of your website should be static. Try to avoid dynamic links for your important business pages.

20. W3C Validate is mostly required for SEO which ensures conformity of your site with all kind of browsers.
Source: seoarticles4u.com

Social SEO

Social SEO may be the way to go! Using Social Bookmarking websites is actually great way to promote your website or Blog. They are becoming one of the best advertising tools today, particularly since they have extremely useful tools and features that users can make the most of,to improve their search engine optimization. Social SEO is easy and fun for may affiliate marketers.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking allows visitors to store, to organize, to share and search bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. This enables Internet visitors to access and add their preferred bookmarks from any computer from any place.

Why is Social Bookmarking very good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

social bookmarking websites are very popular, and by being on their front page, you get your traffic grow, because others will find you on the internet through the social bookmarking site, or through other social SEO sites. In the long run, the many inbound links to your site will add up, and give you a great back link reference, thus creating better link popularity for you and increasing your website rank. Between your increased traffic and better link popularity, social network sites, bookmarking sites, and forums will create a viral marketing campaign for you by creating quality backlinks and increasing your website traffic.

About the author
The Social SEO Guide has more detailed information on social seo. For a limited time only, they are offering a Free Internet Marketing Course for those interest in learning more about how to market to different people.

Google's new algorithm for page rank

Google has recently launched an update for its search engine's algorithm. Nicknamed "Jagger," this update has resulted to critical changes in the way that Google gives weight to certain factors that it looks at in coming up for PageRank. Because of this, there have been dramatic changes to Google's search results. Google for its part has claimed that it is only out to give out more relevant search engine results that would maximize the searcher's experience.

Over the weeks after the update was implemented, several sites that have not been placed in top spots have suddenly flew in ranking while some of those that have been ranked high previously have found their ranking fluctuating.

What is the update about? And what changes have been introduced into Google's system?

Older Sites See Prominence in Results

One of the three affected areas is the domain age or the website history. Google has decided to place emphasis on the site's age in calculating PageRank. One obvious effect of this is that older sites have suddenly appeared in the top spots of every search result page, outdoing the newer sites.

This change has brought about several questionable effects. If the older sites have a lot more information than the relatively newer site that has previously held the top spot, then it is good. But if they don't, then Google has inadvertently prejudiced against newer sites with better quality. By default, older sites have outdated information that would most likely be irrelevant or lacking information to help a web searcher in his quest for information.

On a positive note, the greater weight on the older sites has resulted to suppression of a black hat technique of launching multiple domains just to gain ranks.

Google Recalculates Values for Backlinks

Google has also made changes to how it gives value to backlinks, or links that point to a site. Previously, Google simply calculates the number of links that point to your site (treating it as a vote of support along the way) in coming with up your page's ranking. With this update, Google has now placed varying weights depending on the link's age. Newer links have lesser values compared to links that have existed quite a long way before. Google has adjusted its algorithm in a manner that links start to gain more weight after periods of time.

This update has affected those webmasters that resort to link buying to build up their inbound links. No longer could they depend on these methods to quickly gain rank because any new link posted for the site would still take some time before it could build up some weight to materially affect the site's ranking.

PageRank Loses Part of its Importance

The latest update has resulted to lesser importance for the PR value in the calculation of ranking. Google apparently has realized that a high PR value is not at all related to a website's relevance and importance to a search query. PR, after all, is calculated by the number of backlinks to a site together with an importance factor that is determined by how the site being pointed to is related to the site making the referral. High-quality links carry the heaviest weight in the calculation, since these links are coming from sites that are considered relevant (and thus important) to the site being referred.

PageRank has come under various abuses by some SEO experts that use black hat techniques to artificially inflate sites' PR values. While having high PRs serve little to the page's actual ranking in results, artificially high PR sites can once in a while swindle a link-buying webmaster to buy links from them.

This is related to the practice of PR buying, where a webmaster buys rights from a high PR site to post a link to his site. This practice stems from the long-running belief within the SEO community that a site being linked by a high-PR site gets the PR value of that site. Hence, webmasters buy links from high-PR sites for that purpose, although with the age delay addition to the algorithm this practice has lost its effectiveness.

There has been speculation that PageRank will be replaced by TrustRank, a similar algorithm used by Google's competitor Yahoo although this has never been proven by public statements. It is also said that Google might have decided that TrustRank is irrelevant. Since they are similar, Google could have concluded that its own PageRank algorithm is irrelevant as well, although most people find this unlikely.