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A Guide to Some of the More Baffling SEO terms

With SEO now playing such an important role in making a site standout online, it’s important to know what a designer is doing to boost your online ranking. Rather than spend hours researching every term you don’t understand, here’s a breakdown of all the information and terms that you need to know:

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301:
A process which re-directs users to another web page. It’s a useful way to send users from an old site to a new page.

 

A

Adwords:
Adwords is a service developed by Google to help maximise advertising opportunities
Affiliate:
An affiliate site pays a host to place adverts and promotions for products on their site.
Algorithm:
A piece of coding which is used to determine the results of a search online
Alt text:
A way to describe images to search engines. Search engines can’t process images meaning that they use the alt text to determine the content within the picture.
Analytics:
A piece of software which compiles details how a website is accessed and used. The most popular software used by SEO firms to monitor how webpages are used is Google Analytics.
Anchor text:
The anchor text is the actual text in a web link. It shows the exact page that is being visited by users and gives an indication to search engines about what will be found on that particular part of a website.
Authority Site:
A site that has lots of links connecting to that page. Authority sites are often well ranked by search engines due to their high levels of traffic and connections to related content.

 

B

Backlink: A link from external sites that direct back to the main page where content and information is stored
Black hat: This group is used to describe SEO tactics that could stop a site being listed on search engines. Involves tactics such as spam emails, fraudulent content and links to malware/viruses
Blog:  A section or website which often posts content about a subject or topic. It can contain all forms of content such as articles, pictures and videos.

 

C

Canonical URL: The best webpage that relates to a topic that someone is looking for. There can sometimes be issues surrounding similar canons on sites that are spelt the same or have sub-pages
Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The CTR measures the number of people who click on an advertisement linked to a particular phrase or keyword. Clickthrough ads are often thought to gain more traffic than banner ads.
Cloaking: Cloaking occurs when websites present different data and information to various search engines. It is a technique that falls on the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour depending on the search engine. Also known as link cloaking.
CMS (Content Management System): A way to manage and post content on a blog or website. Some of the more popular CMS software includes WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
Content: The actual body of a page. It is made up of text, pictures and images to give a website substance and appeal.
Conversion Form: An area on the site that lets someone gain information about who is visiting the site and why they are there.
Crawl:  A crawler travels to different websites through the links placed on each page and gathers data on a particular subject or topic.

 

D

Directory: A place online where sites can be listed by their industry or topic for interested browsers to find
Domain: The physical address of the website. Often needs to be purchased from a web host
Duplicate Content: A piece of content that is similar to something posted by another web site. Having duplicates can hurt a site’s ranking.

 

F

Feed: A service which provides contents to a user or company when it’s posted
FTP (File Transfer Protocol):  This is the way file transfer between computers are monitored.

 

G

Gateway: A part of a site that opens up users to the rest of a website. It can be either directly found on the web page or indirect through search engines or third party hosts.
Google Authorship: Google Authorship is a way for authors to directly link their published content on the web to their Google+ profile. It allows authors and publishers to network all their work into one place.

 

H

Headings: A larger piece of text that is used to sum up the main content on a page.
Hit: When an external piece of information visits a particular site. Lots of hit often means a popular website
HTML: The main language used to create a website. It puts everything into place to determine the shape, look and size of a page. It is the main way for search engines to identify and find a page in its listings.
HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol): HTTP is the way information is transferred from the website’s home location to an internet browser. It is the most common way for a web server to connect with a web browser.

 

I

IM (Internet Marketing): An industry where companies use the Internet to promote or advertise a product or business.
Impression: An impression is where someone will visit a webpage for the first time.
Inbound Link: An inbound link is a link made by an external site and is a good indicator of a strong website
Indexed pages: The pages which are stored by a search engine

 

K

Keyword: The phrase or search term entered into a search engine by a user
Keyword Density: The ration in which a key word or term is included in a text
Keyword Stuffing: A time where the key word appears too often in a text. Frowned upon by search engines.

 

L

Landing Page: The first page which users see when they are directed to a website
Lead Generation: Is the process in which interest is created in a product or business. When someone is considered to be a potential customer, they are tagged as a lead
Link: A way to travel from one related site to another. Having lots of links can strengthen the ranking and appeal of a site
Link building: The way to gather and create links for a site.
Link Juice: A tool to help search engines rank search engines. Often focuses on the amount of links found on a particular page
Long tail: Long tail keywords are key phrases which often contain more than 2 words. Long tail phrases often contain a lot of details e.g catering firms in Melbourne

 

M

Meta Description: A small summary placed on search engines which describe what is on that particular page.
Meta tags: Meta tags are short phrases which tell search engines what the main subject are on a web page. Often 2 or 3 are needed to ensure a good ranking.

 

N

Nofollow: When a link from one site to another is blocked. It can be a way to stop competition from getting an advantage from your site.
Noindex: A command which stops a site or page from being included on a search engine.

 

O

Offpage: This refers to SEO methods that aren’t directly related to the webpage itself. It includes techniques such as link building.
Onpage: This looks at SEO techniques that directly affect the status of the webpage. This includes inserting keywords and meta tags.
Open Source: Open source platforms are programmes which lets designers tweak coding and functions thoroughly to sit their particular need and purpose.
Organic Search: A way of producing results on a search engine through similar phrases or words that might be entered by a user.

 

P

Page Rank: The SEO ranking given to a webpage by search engines on a particular key word. The ranking ranges from 0 to 10 with 10 being the highest and 0 being the lowest.
Page Title: The name of the website that appears on the top of a browser. It needs to contain the main keyword of that site.
Page Views: The total number of times a page has been viewed by browsers
Panda: Panda is an algorithm used by Google to check the SEO qualities of a website and determine how they fit in with the policies used to determine rankings on Google
Penguin: Penguin is a programme used by Google looking to search for any black hat SEO techniques used by websites. It demotes their ranking on the search ranking if they violate any terms or conditions.
Plugins: Plug-ins are components and features of software which can be implemented into other programmes to monitor or enhance performance. Plug-ins are often used to help monitor the SEO features in web contents and articles.
PPC (Pay Per Click): A basic advertising method which allows for sites to generate income for whenever someone clicks on an advertisement created by an external source such as Google.

 

R

Redirect: A way of transferring someone from one page to another automatically
Robots: Robots are tools used by websites to measure and collect data from other websites on the Internet. May also be known as crawlers, bots or spiders
RSS Feed: A way for users to subscribe to content on a website and receive updates whenever something new is posted

 

S

Search engine: A site which lets users search for a particular term or subject on the Internet
SEM(Search Engine Marketing): SEM is the techniques and methods used by websites to promote pages to search engines and gain maximum online exposure for their brand or company
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the process needed to make websites appeal to search engines and ensure they are ranked well to a specific term or phrase.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): A results page showing all the relevant websites related to the user’s search term. Most pages display 10 results at a time
Sitemap: A place which lists all of the different pages belonging to one website
Slug: A slug is an abbreviated version of a URL web address designed to make it appeal to search engines. Slugs often incorporate just the main keywords and subject of a page
Social Media: A type of website where users talk with each other discussing their favourite topics. One of the best type of website to post links and appeal to a wide audience
Spam: Unwanted content that aggravates users or deemed unnecessary to that particular subject
Spider: A system which gathers information about different websites and computer programmes

 

T

Traffic: The actual visitors to a website:
Traffic Rank: A system which compares the busiest websites on the Internet.

 

U

URL (Uniform Resource Locator):  The entire web address that is found in the toolbar of the browser
Unique Visitors: These are the number of different browsers who visit a webpage at any one time. They are usually indicated by a different IP address.

 

W

Web 2.0: This is the new form of web pages which are designed to encourage more interaction with browsers visiting a webpage.
White Hat: The techniques used by SEO firms which are accepted by search engine to generate a ranking for a website
Widget: A program created by a website that can be downloaded onto a computer and give information about a subject or topic.
 
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Top 5 Online Directories Your Website Should be In

Build a STRONG online presence and increase search engine rankings by submitting your website on these top 5 online directories, starting today!
Online directories, unlike search engines where sites are listed according to relevance and search engine rankings, list websites in alphabetical order. This means your potential customers can quickly and easily find you from your name and business category.
In addition to basic information, some online directories (see the list of top directories below) also let you add a description of your business, thereby giving you a leverage to attract MORE potential customers.
If you want to BOOST your website ranking on search engines, you need to submit your blog in these top 5 online directories, from today!

 

Top 5 Online Directories Your Website Should be In

 

#1 DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) -

 

#1 DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) –

The Open Directory Product (ODP), also widely known as DMOZ, is a non-commercial, multi-lingual, and open web directory that is owned by AOL but run by a group of volunteers editors.
ODP list website based on topics and organizes similar topics into categories, which is again indexed into smaller categories.
As of October 2013, the Alexa ranking of ODP was 840, which means only one thing – most of your buyers are using this free online directory to search and buy products and services you have to offer.

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7 Killer Ways to Increase Your Web Traffic

So what’s the best ways to increase your website traffic?
Well, it’s the pressing issue of every bloggers and site owner to get MORE traffic to their site because it is the only way generate more sales revenues.
But most people worry when they do NOT see any rise in web traffic. There could be several reasons for that – lack of fresh content, backlinking methods, search engine rankings, among other things.
With that said, let me share you 7 simple yet highly effective tips to BOOST your website traffic for FREE. The best thing about these methods is that you do NOT have to be a “techy,” or even be an industry expert.
There are other options, i.e. paid methods like paid per click methods (PPC), to INCREASE website traffic, but it isn’t organic (FREE), and you’ll probably NOT have budget to spend money on this, especially if you’re just starting out.
Instead, use these 7 FREE killer ways to increase your website traffic, starting today.

 

7 Killer Ways to Increase Your Web Traffic:

 

1. “Content” Is Still the “King”

 

1. “Content” Is Still the “King”

Does your site contain only few static pages, like the “about us,” “services,” “products,” “testimonials,” and “contact us” pages? But you see, people want to know about your products and services as they probably aren’t ready to buy it yet. They just want to know more about what you do, what you offer, and how they’ll solve their problems.
So, simply putting up a product page with a sales pitch isn’t sufficient. You’ll have to promote it, and the best way to do that is post useful and factual content regarding those product and services to your targeted audience not only on your website, but in several different places like forums, blogs, and guest posts relevant to your niche.
The more presence you have on the Internet, the more search engine will trust your site and then rank your site higher than others.
Start posting helpful and interesting content using your blog posts, regularly.

 

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Before posting anything on your site, it’s also vital that you optimize your site as it is content for search engines.
Put it this way – if you can rank on the first page on Google search result page for all the major keywords related to your industry, you will get flood of traffic to your site as most site traffic usually comes from the 1st page on Google, especially from the first, second, and third position.
There are two types of SEO – on-page SEO (site and content optimization) and off-page SEO (backlinking).
If you’re a DIY, you may want to learn the basics of SEO to optimize the content and site on your own, but if you’re pressed for time and effort, then consider hiring a professional SEO consultant to optimize your site.

 

Microsoft Word - web 2.0 logos.doc

 

4. Social Media

Do you know that more than 1 billion users are active on Facebook, and almost 300 million of people using Google+ to connect with others? Twitter has become a popular tool to get real-time feedback from viewers for popular TV media. Yes, social media sites are very powerful tool to BOOST traffic to your site, and it’s never slowing down.
There are hundreds of social media sites, but you do NOT have to create an account with every one of them.
If you have social media accounts on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now Pinterest, that would be sufficient to flood your site with FREE traffic to your site, really fast.

 

5. Become Active on Blogs and Forums

 

5. Become Active on Blogs and Forums

In addition to social media sites, most people often visit forums and blogs to learn more about your product and services to see if they’re really making a wise decision in investing in what you have to offer. They are looking for reviews from other authority figure to know if you’re the real deal.
So, if you’re active on forums and blogs relevant to your industry, you might already be an authority figure there. When potential customers see positive reviews, comments, mentions of your products (especially when you’re active on it yourself) it becomes very easy for them to trust you.
This trust alone is enough to bring more traffic to your site. Do not forget to include a link back on the signature box when posting a response to a forum thread or blog comments.

 

6. Create Viral Content

 

6. Create Viral Content

Viral content has a unique property that makes it a powerful tool to increase website traffic to your site. It tends to distribute on its own as readers reading through it can quickly make a deep connection with the content, whether it’s positive or negative.
No wonder why most successful bloggers create viral content, over and over again.
They know how to arouse the emotion of their readers by crafting content that attacks the angle is a different way. That is what makes a content go viral, and it’s a definite way to increase your website traffic.

7. Encourage Guest Posts on Your Site

 

7. Encourage Guest Posts on Your Site

Another way to dramatically increase the web site traffic is to ask others (bloggers in your niche) to write a guest post on your site. After they’ve written a guest post for you, they’ll likely share that content on their own blog or social media profiles which will in turn help boost traffic to your site.
We would like to hear from you. Tell us some killer ways to increase your website traffic!

 

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SEO Company – How to Propel Your Online Efforts with Specialized Knowledge

If you are operating an online business, but struggling to rank for keyword phrases related with your niche, then you may probably look for a SEO company to propel your online efforts with their “specialized knowledge.”
Why should you hire an SEO company to take your business to the next level?
Because, after a certain stage, and most likely with your limited amount of knowledge on SEO and limited resources, it become very difficult to keep up with the SEO updates, rank for your major keyword, particularly if it’s highly competitive.
Yes, using the specialized SEO knowledge of a professional company is best way to gain MORE visibility for any business, especially if they have all the right tools, techniques, experience, and proven results so that you stay one more step above your competition, gain all the traffic you’ve craving for, and then, literally profits from MASSIVE online sales.

 

Here’s how you can propel your online efforts with specialized knowledge:

 

Keep Your Content Up-to-Date –

 

1. Keep Your Content Up-to-Date –

Does your site contain the same old, outdated, or worse, irrelevant content on it? If it does, you will probably irritate your potential clients.
Don’t do this as your visitors spend plenty of time to come up with search terms to find exactly what they need. They want to land on sites that provide relevant and up-to-date information for their search terms.
Here’s how you can propel your online efforts – start creating relevant, unique, and helpful articles, with engaging pictures, and other documents. Keep them updated, frequently.
Remember the golden rule to online success – always keep it real and fresh.

 

2. Use Proper:Relevant Keywords on Your Site -

 

2. Use Proper/Relevant Keywords on Your Site –

People will find your site faster and easier when you use proper (relevant) keywords on your site and its content. This is because search engines often want to redirect customers to the most relevant site for their search terms.
So when you use highly relevant and popular keywords that best describe your business, then MORE targeted people will start visiting your site and purchase what you have to sell.
Plus, they will less likely visit your competitor’s site too.

Happy group of finger smileys with social network icon

3. Establish Social Networks –

Do you want to gain higher search engine rankings for your site, quickly? Why not use social media networks and become active to engage, inform, and attract your customers?
Create a Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other bunch of popular social media accounts for FREE and start interacting and building genuine relationship with our potential customers by adding value to them.
If they like what you have to say, they’ll not only purchase from you, but they’ll help make it go viral by sharing it to their friends, families, or someone they know who may benefit from it.
Not to mention, you’ll also likely see surge in rankings you’ve been imagining before.

4. Post Videos to Engage Your Visitors on Your Site –

4. Post Videos to Engage Your Visitors on Your Site –

Most people who visit your site are in a hurry, and they want helpful information quickly. As a result, they only spend few minutes and leave after they’ve found the information they need.
But if you want to keep you visitors longer on your site, there’s a better way to do so – upload relevant and helpful videos. Videos offer an effective and easy way to learn MORE about your services and products.
Not only people will understand what you offer, but they will also start to trust you more, and hopefully do a business with you, soon.

 

Get a HELP of a Professional SEO Company –

 

5. Get a HELP of a Professional SEO Company –

If you are newbie on the Internet, or simply don’t have the right tools, resources, and expertise to develop and maintain an engaging site, then you can hire a professional SEO company who have specialize knowledge to make your site relevant, popular, and highly profitable.
Hiring a professional SEO company is the best way to benefit your business and take it to the level you’ve always imagined.

 

To Sum it ALL …

Setting up a strong online presence and maintaining it requires that you are well-versed in the latest SEO methods and practices so that your business is always a step ahead of your competitors.
However, if you do not have the tools, time, and resources to follow effective SEO strategies, then you can hire a professional SEO consultant who can handle all these technical stuffs for you.

Contact us to get ethical, latest, and effective SEO services.

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How to Choose Yourself a SEO Specialist?

Hiring a professional SEO consultant may be your first step towards promoting your site/blog, but the wrong choice could be disastrous to you – pouring tons of money, hiring the wrong consultant, not ranking in search engines, and so on.
You get the picture?
So make sure you are aware of the advantages of hiring an SEO specialist as well as all the risks involved and potential damage a bad SEO consultant can do to your business and your site.

1. Don’t believe their “Hype”

1. Don’t believe their “Hype”

If an SEO consultant or a company guarantees “#1 ranking in Google” in a very short span of time, within a week, inquire about their SEO tactics. If they hesitate, just move and find another one.
Fast ranking is possible, however, it takes time.
In fact, it takes a lot of time, probably 3 to 6 months at minimum to rank for a competitive market/ keywords.
So do me a favor – ensure that your potential SEO consultant is not going to get you there by using Google Adwords paid service!
Well, there’s nothing wrong using Google Adwords paid service to bring more traffic to your site, but if your potential SEO consultant tells you that you are not going to rank well in search engines without pouring money in “Google paid service,” its time your move on.
Remember, paid service (ads) is not search results!
It is acceptable to supplement traffic to your site using Google ads in order to rank, but just ensure what you are paying for. Nobody can predict high SERPs rankings, but many SEO firms do make unrealistic guarantees.
Watch out when they make wild promises to submit your business site/blog to 1000s of directories, or any other “apple in the sky” schemes that are impossible to achieve.
Heard about the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true?”

Inquire About the SEO Consultant and Accept No Secrets

2. Inquire About the SEO Consultant and Accept No Secrets

Sit down and talk with your potential SEO consultant and figure out what you will be getting and also how they will plan to achieve those results.
Just remember – you are putting your business reputation on line when you submit your site to a SEO consultant. How your site will rank and get in the 1st page of Google could either make or break your business.
For instance, if the potential SEO consultant are using “black hat SEO” tactics or by violating Google’s rules, it is YOUR site/blog that will get penalized or even banned from SERPs.
Of course, most SEO consultants won’t tell you all the details about their SEO tactics as it would be tiring and time consuming.
Sometimes, the best search engine marketers also don’t know everything about the SEO methods they will use until they actually get “into” the project. If search engine optimization was that simple, you could have done that all by yourself wouldn’t you?
In fact, SEO is not only a time consuming process, but also a very complex and evolving process.
So, if a SEO consultant sighs away from giving you at least an overview of their optimization process and claim that it’s their “well-kept secret,” then they are someone you don’t want to trust your business with.

In order to avoid hiring a “Bad” SEO consultant, you can ask these questions during an interview-

In order to avoid hiring a “Bad” SEO consultant, you can ask these questions during an interview:

  1. Ask them to show past success stories – i.e. examples of their work
  2. How do they figure out what keywords phrase to target for your business?
  3. Do they comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
  4. Do they have marketing experiences besides search engine optimization service and backlink building?
  5. Do they offer any other type of marketing services?
  6. What kind of result you will likely expect from them and the timeframe to achieve it? How will they measure the site’s success?
  7. How do they get backlinks? Do they use paid link schemes in low-quality sites that won’t do anything useful in search engine rankings?
  8. Localization is very important! Do they have experience in local marketing – in your country, city, or region?
  9. What different SEO strategies they use and what do they consider the most important?
See, finding a trustworthy SEO consultant can be really difficult, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t take time to make an informed decision.
Take plenty of time and select SEO Company wisely as it can not only save you lot of time and effort on your part, but also give you the results and awesome ROI your business desperately needs in order to excel online.
Remember – if your SEO specialist doesn’t know proper SEO, you’ll only attract more potential hazards and downfall than promoting your site online successfully.
Of course, you may want to choose us as your SEO consultant. We perform SEO (on-page and off-page) very well, and we do it right. Here is why.
Contact us and feel free to ask us anything you have in your mind to know about our professional SEO consultancy service.
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What has Human Behavior got to do with Search Engine Optimization?

Do you know the MOST overlooked factor in SEO?
Well, it’s user behavior!
Go and approach any SEO consultants and they will offer you incredible services like:
But they overlook one  very basic point – the user behavior!
SEO will no doubt get you at the TOP of the search engine result pages (SERPs), however, user behavior will help you be there. But often times, most SEO consultant will offer you a very bad piece of advice, i.e. set up a blog/site and then perform SEO second.
This is a wrong mentality!

 

In fact, you need to understand there are 3 steps to SEO,
On-page SEO

1.    On-page SEO

– Is creating content (pages and blog posts) that would be easy for search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing to read and understand what your pages are about, index it, and display it to people (potential customers) for relevant search terms.

Off-page SEO

2.    Off-page SEO

– Refers to link building to other RELEVANT sites (forums, blogs, article directories) in order to build backlinks (link back to your site) so that people can visit your site other than search engine page.
Here are some great ways to build yourself quality backlinks.

User behavior

3.    User behavior

– How internet users interact to your site (blog commenting, forum thread posting) will tell search engines whether your site rankings is correct.

 

What Search Engine Robots CAN’T see?

When search engine robots crawls through your website, they can READ the content, however, they can’t gain an emotional response to it.
Consider this example “How to get more free traffic to your site.”
Search engine robots can quickly tell this site is about SEO and also understand that there’s a lot of “How to” guides out there.
But how does it know it’s better than other websites?
The main job of search engine is to offer best search result pages (SERPs) for any keyword phrase, but it must be for humans, not for robots.

 

How search engine robots get emotional

So far, a robot can find this site and understand its’ context but to assess if it is a good site it needs some help from humans and internet users.

 

Search engine can only measure:

1.    Click through rate (CTR) – The percentage of internet users who click on the site link displayed on search result page.
2.    Bounce Rate – After click through, what percentage of visitors pressed the BACK button and how quickly they pressed the button?
Google has few more advantage!
Internet marketers serious about SEO have Google Analytics installed on their site which can tell a whole lot more like:
1.    After the click through, where do visitors go?
2.    How much time they spend on your site/ on each page
So, you see, the search engine robot calculates where a site/page should rank for a particular keyword phrase.
Then they utilize the “user behavior” to determine if that first calculation was good or bad. And then, they decide whether your site should move up or move down in the search results page.
Simple, eh?

 

SEO UPs and DOWNs

That generally means that it’s okay to use both content and code in order to gain better rankings, but only to see them drop back again.
Unless you are getting a help of an SEO consultant that knows and understand “user-behavior” is equally important as your page URLs, titles, headers, and other SEO factors.
So, user-behavior must be a key part of any SEO campaign.
While boosting your CTR depends upon the code, however, reducing your site’s/ page’s bounce rate or increasing the average time your visitors spend on your site is a whole different ball game.

 

Good Design + Great Content + Coding + Links = Positive User Behavior

Most companies try to keep web design and content (SEO) separate, however, we DON’T.
Why?
How your site looks, how easy it is to navigate, and the way it encourages visitors to explore other content … all affects the bounce rate as well as average time spent on site.
That means good web design is a vital part of SEO, just like coding, content, and links are.

 

So, how come sites that are UGLY still rank HIGHER than other?

With SEO, everything is about competition. For example, website A with poor design but great content can rank higher provided that there isn’t a site with a great design as well as great content and SEOed in order to compete.
But it also means that Website A can topple anytime from the higher rankings as soon as another site with great content and design comes along.
Just ask online store owners!

 

All Round SEO Services

So, if you would like to discuss about overall SEO services, please contact us for a FREE 1 hour SEO consultation.
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SEO Service: To Spend or Not to Spend that is the Question!

If you are running an online business website, at some point or other, you probably have come across this question: “how much should I spend on SEO?” or “how much do I spend on SEO?”
Well it’s a tough question, but I’ll try to answer it anyway!

 

What is your major goal of your site?

The question “Should I spend for SEO or not?” begs for another question and that is “What is your major goal of your site?”

So, if you are running a real online business where you are thinking of supplementing your current income, or even, transform it into a “real source of income,” then I think you need to be open on “investing in search engine optimization (SEO).” Period!

SEO often turns out to be the foundation of online marketing and continues to be one of the major sources of regular traffic.
Not only will you need to invest money, but sometimes you will also need to invest considerable amount of time too and there’s a reason for that.
There’s a wide spread misconception across the Internet about starting online business! —
There’s a lot of build a site and see traffic mentality going on among website owners. In other words, most people think if you just set up a site/blog and leave it just like that, viola … you have money making machine overnight.
While it’s true that doing business online is cheaper and easier and even quicker than doing business offline (you don’t have to set up a physical stores and face other issues while running a brick and mortar business), but by no means it is a sure thing.
That means you still have to put effort to make it a success!
No, don’t get me wrong. I am NOT saying starting an online business isn’t worthy, or profitable, or you shouldn’t. I am just pointing out that if you want to grow your business and make it profitable, you need to treat it seriously too.
With that said, yes, you will have to spend both your time as well as your hard earned money into generating traffic. Because without traffic, you don’t have money, right?

 

So now you know whether you should spend CASH for SEO or not, another question pops up, i.e. “how much should you spend on SEO?”

Well, you will need to spend some numbers in order to:
  1. Figure out how many visitors it takes in order to make a sale.
  2. Plus, you may want to know how much a sale is worth to you and then fine-tune your SEO budget accordingly.
If you are using PPC as part of your SEO campaign (most website owners waste TONS of money on PPC that fails to convert) then spend wisely, otherwise, it can suck you dry!
For organic traffic, though, you may find SEO services costing you everything from $19.99 for “mass submission service” (avoid them as you’ll likely lose your $19.99) to thousands of dollars each month worst, you get your website penalised by the search engines like Google.
Likewise, most small- and medium-sized enterprises (SEMs) usually spend around $300 – $800 per month. Sometimes, the numbers may also go a little bit higher, probably $500 to $1500 per month.
So if you’re spending somewhere between that range, then you should expect to get a quality SEO services from SEO consultants.

 

Often do I get surprised to hear people getting irritated or even hesitant to spend for quality SEO services.

Business owners don’t hesitate to pay for their doctor bills, or a mechanic bill, or even hire an expensive web designer, but when it comes to marketing their business seriously, they resent to pay for SEO.
If you have both the SEO know-how and ample amount of time, then by all means, please don’t pay any SEO consultant for their search engine optimization services.
Instead, we encourage for you to do it yourself (DIY).
However, if you cannot dedicate few hours a day or don’t have knowledge of proper and current SEO tactics, it is highly encourage that you should budget spending for SEO services.
Remember, driving traffic to your online business site is the key factor to make it become profitable and certainly not an area where you want to go cheap.

 

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How Does Dead Link Affect Your Ranking?

Over the past decade, webmasters and SEO consultants has been debating whether dead (broken) links can really affect a website’s performance.
There are many SEOers who would argue that broken links will worsen user’s experience, although it may not affect their website’s rankings.
However, as search engine continuously roll out new algorithm updates, this view has changed recently.
SEO consultants around the world now fully acknowledge how dead links can impact a website’s performance.
That is the reason why most SEO consultants are focusing their effort on adhering to Google’s standards in hope it would not affect a website performance in terms of rankings.
Having a site with higher bounce rate could be disastrous to its overall rankings.

Dead links or 404 Errors

What is broken link (Dead links or 404 Errors)?

A website URL that doesn’t exists or works is called a dead link, or broken link. When you type the URL in the browser, such link will bring you to a 404 error page.
But why does broken link occur on your site?

 

Broken links occur on your website for several reasons, including:

  1. The page is been removed permanently
  2. The URL is placed incorrectly, and hence, you end up in a 404 page
  3. The page address is changed, but the URL attached in the link isn’t
  4. Lack of proper navigation
While few dead links, or broken links, or even 404 errors may seem normal to search engines, nonetheless, leaving unnecessary dead links on your website may be seen as a low quality website.
Not to mention it won’t escape the scrutiny of search engine spiders!
As a result, both ranking as well as the indexing of your website gets affected.

 

Here are few ways how broken links affects your site’s performance in search engine results, including its rankings:

Google “disapproves” broken (dead) links

1. Google “disapproves” broken (dead) links

Google have been very deliberate in its intention, as specified in its webmaster’s guidelines, to check for dead or broken links and correct HTML in your site.
While it’s okay to have few broken links that displays 404 error, having excessive amount of unchecked dead links on your site will definitely reduce its search engine rankings.

Dead Links aren’t user-friendly

2. Dead Links aren’t user-friendly

SEO services can either make or break your site. Leave too many dead links on your site, and your site visitors find it distracting, or even irritating, and move on to the next site on the search result page.
Not only this will decrease the amount of free (organic) traffic your site gets, but search engines like Google will also interpret this as site having a high bounce rate.

Broken links badly affects your site’s conversion rate

3. Broken links badly affects your site’s conversion rate

Yes, dead links will affect your conversion rate as people become discouraged to continue on when they see a blank 404 error page that doesn’t seem to guide the visitors anywhere else.
With that said, you need to quickly customize your 404 page!
Insert links to major section of your site on your 404 error page so that your visitors still have an opportunity to visit other section of your website instead of looking at the blank and ugly 404 error page.

 

4. Broken or dead links blocks search engine spiders

Did you know that when search engine crawlers come across broken links, they’ll face a dead end? As a result, they won’t be able to crawl further and index your site properly.
So, don’t be surprised when your site or page doesn’t appear on search engine results page (SERPs).
Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing considers user experience as the BIGGEST reason for high search engine ranking. And, of course, link validity is one of the key factors to enhance user experience.
So, we can conclude that broken/ dead links do affect your website’s rankings negatively as it contributes to high bounce rate of a site, which search engines interprets as something wrong with it.
That is why, it’s important you make sure your site doesn’t have more than 2 to 3 dead links.

 

Take Action, Don’t Procrastinate!

Remove those dead links or create a customized 404 error page as it could be one of your saving graces in terms of website ranking.
Make sure you check your pages on your site, check links in it, and update it (if need be), plus update your sitemap every time you remove a page or change a URL link to avoid having broken/dead links on your site.

 

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Where are Your Website Visitors coming from?

So you have been successful at driving traffic to your site but haven’t paid any attention as to where your visitors may have come from?
In search marketing sphere, we need to be aware of where our visitors had been in order to figure out what they are trying to accomplish on our site.
Our website traffic is arriving from 2 different sources: search results and display ads.
Let’s simplify so that you understand why traffic from these two sources might be doing on your site and how you need to tweak little things in your site, like your posts (landing page) for example, in order to address their needs.
You see, search engine traffic wants something instantly, such as solution to their problem, more information about a product, and basically everything else.
On the other hand, traffic generated through the display ad is made up from those curious ones whom you have managed to distract from whatever they were searching for on the referring site.
As each visitor is from different sources, your landing page also needs to be slightly different too. That means the 2 universes MUST also land on 2 different posts, or 2 different landing pages.

The Search Universe

The Search Universe

Traffic coming from the search universe essentially wants to find answers about a product or a service.
With this clue, you can design a landing page that offers answers to their pressing questions by imagining what their questions may be!
Just consider, what would they ask if they were to call your business?
For example, if someone was searching for the keyword phrase, “domain names registration services,” wouldn’t that translate into “Hey, I would like to give me your quick quotation for domain name packages?”
Once you’ve framed your visitors’ intention, it would be easier for you to imagine how your landing page would be like, wouldn’t it?
On the other hand, you DO NOT want to create a “Welcome to our Domain Name Business Site!” page that talks about when you started your business, how many people work at your firm.
No, you do not want that to happen!
They simply want a catalog home page (using professional pictures) that clearly highlights each category of services.

The Display Universe

The Display Universe

Although display visitors are slightly difficult to figure out, nonetheless, they still do leave some clues that can help you to help them.
Just pay attention to ads they click, or the site where they might have seen those ads.
Additionally, if you use display ads among certain niche, or topics, or keywords, you can quickly understand who your traffic are and what do they want in general.
For instance, people who just left your domain name registration site last week may be tempted by a coupon offer for the item they had almost purchased.
Once you have a clear idea as to where your visitors are coming from and what their intentions are, you can devise a landing page accordingly.
For example, an audience of photographer whose search term and browsing behavior clearly shows them to be an enthusiastic about “DSLR camera supplies,” you can then focus your energy on crafting out a page that helps them how to make their next shots amazing.
On the other hand, visitors coming from an ad display network who have just read an article about “Ways of placing Buddha statues,” would likely appreciate a page that offers them specific information about those particular techniques.

 

Additional Clues

Additionally, you can also look for other clues to find out where they may have just been and their mindset of their visitors, like Geography (country, state, region, or city they searched through), as well as the time of the day, and even, day of the week.
While city dwellers may just be hobbyists, tourists in a foreign land may be running a “DSLR Studios.”
Similarly, while weekend or even evening visitors may just be hobbyists, visitors who come to your site during work day may be professional photographers.
Just remember, while there might be several different ports of entry to a country, however, there will only be one from a particular place.
Likewise, while they may be hundreds of different ways for your visitors to find your site, nonetheless, each of them arrived from one specific place.
Not to mention, they all arrived with a passport stamp that tells where exactly they had been.

 

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Press Releases Do Not Help Rankings or Does it?

Several Mondays ago, Matt Cutts from Google wrote in Google forums that link coming back from press releases do not help in search engine rankings!
On the other hand, SEO Consult blog performed a test explaining how press release backlinks can actually help in ranking your site higher in Google. Ironically, the test was conducted on Matt blog where SEO Consult published press release with a link (anchor) text “sreppleasers” on PR.com pointing back to Matt’s blog.
Shortly after, Google indexed the press release and Matt’s blog started to rank for the text link in that press release!

 

What Did Matt’s Comment Mean About Press Release Rankings?

So, what Matt meant in his comment in Google forum when he said, “I don’t think press release links can benefit your website’s rankings” Did he mean it won’t be useful for high competitive keywords? Or was he pointing to particular PR sites? We aren’t sure, though!
Meanwhile, there has been LOT of discussions on whether putting backlinks on press release can actually help in search engine rankings for specific phrases. Although Matt Cutts thinks that having backlinks in press releases don’t really benefit search engine rankings, the above example proves it otherwise.

 

Press Release – Does it really help in Improving Site’s Ranking?

Just like article directories, a press release is a tool that helps you improve your brand awareness. If you’re launching a site, you can write an informative press release about it and post on high ranking press release sites like PR.com or PRWeb to let the world know about your product/service(s).
However, submitting a press release along with an anchor text to a “spammy” PR sites for the sole purpose of gaining higher ranking is NEVER recommended. If you think you’ll gain better rankings through low quality PR sites, it will likely go down the drain just as article submission sites did when thousands of SEMs tried to manipulate SEO rankings by placing spammy backlinks in their articles.
So, we highly suggest that you stick to what works and what Google recommends. That means creating press releases containing useful links that provide in-depth information on the topic to publishers. In other words, attract traffic naturally by writing down high quality and useful content.

 

Press Releases – Effective Tips to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Well, if you are really serious about BOOSTING your site’s ranking through PR sites, then here are 5 effective tips you can follow:
1. Select relevant keywords – In your SEO campaign, you always need to be aware of list of keywords that you will aim to build rankings of your site. So, choose few keywords from your master list that has high relevance to the press release content.
2. Use proper keywords in Press Release – After you’ve chosen few relevant keywords to the content of your press releases, insert them naturally into the title as well as the body.
Don’t try to stuff the keywords as they will disrupt the flow of the article and irritate readers. Distribution services will abruptly reject those press releases that appear spammy.
Plus, make sure that you have an anchor text with your main keyword in it so that visitors are taken to a more relevant page on your website.
3. Pay for legitimate distribution service – Although you may find large number of FREE press release distribution sites/services out there, nonetheless, they come with limitations – links are not allowed in the press release when used as free and you have very little control over its distribution.
Instead, use a paid distribution service as they offer you the best opportunity to have your PR get picked up and indexed on several other related sites.
4. Post as a web page or a blog – To make press release more valuable, write a copy of it in a slightly different manner and post it on your site/blog. Not only it will improve your website content, but it will also retain for long allowing visitors to find more information whenever they require.
5. Use social media for promotion – Once you’ve published the press release, use social media to promote it and ask others to share it by putting up like and share buttons wherever appropriate.
If your readers find your press release attractive and interesting, they’ll more likely share them, and as a result, you’ll receive more social connections and build you online presence better.
In summary, we think press releases are not only useful to inform your audience about important news about your site but also BOOST the search engine rankings to attract more readers to your site.

 

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