SEO, if applied effectively and consistently, is probably the ultimate online advertising tool for your business. While tactics like PPC campaigns and banner ads can cost a fortune to give you lots of publicity and have to constantly be maintained in order to be effective, at a cost of hundreds to thousands of dollars per month, well realized optimization essentially gives you long term results at no financial cost, at least if you take care of it DIY style and eschew SEO firms that in many cases don’t even deliver results unless they really know what they’re doing.

That said, Let’s go over some of the fantastic sales benefits of SEO that you can create for your small online business or blogging effort if you decide to take on your own long term, well planned SEO campaign and stick to it.

Free Advertising

We’ve already covered this as an essential selling point of optimization as a marketing tool, but it bears going deeper into since it’s so important. Simply stated, nothing, no form of advertising or paid promotion, will equal a strong optimization campaign in terms of building long term exposure amongst exactly the people most likely to buy your products and services.

If you start your SEO efforts off from the very beginning and apply a daily regimen of creating valuable content, networking amongst other high value sites in your niche and developing your exposure through the social media oriented side of optimization, you will eventually create a steady base of avid readers, followers and fans.

This will cost you lots of effort but it should not require you to spend lots of money, and this is a wonderful thing; while money spent is just money spent, regardless of whether it brings in sales, the experience you gain from doing your own DIY optimization is something you can apply and build on over numerous campaigns. SEO is an investment in skill instead of just an investment  in sales revenues.

You’re Creating Fans, Not Just One Time Customers

The best sort of business success involves creating repeat sales from a base of loyal customers that trust you; in essence, creating your “1000 True Fans” to quote from the famous essay by Wired Magazine founder Kevin Kelley. The very nature of SEO, especially modern SEO, which has moved away from spam oriented tactics, is to create perceptions of real value in the form of information and benefits that deliver help to your niche audience.

Because of this, if you apply a well-developed optimization strategy to your business site or its blogs, you will by default be delivering value and creating trust. In doing this, you’ll be turning what could have simply been one time customers who pay no more attention to you into long term followers. By receiving free and paid for value from you, they will thus give you long term monetary value in return, in the form of long tail sales.

Increased ROI

The ROI for your typical online advertising campaign is usually fairly easy to calculate: You simply factor in all the financial costs of a given advertising run and measure them up against your sales returns.  While this can lead to great returns on investments, it often also simply gives over net losses, despite the time and money put into planning your ads and marketing.

With SEO, things are a bit different in marked ways. For one thing, for the most part, you’ll be investing money instead of time into your campaigns. However, while time itself is also a valuable commodity to a business owner, in this case it is not time that’s been wasted even if it doesn’t lead to immediate results. The reason why: SEO is cumulative; every new effort put into it slightly increments your exposure to customers and your chances of increasing sales. Thus, your ROI can be measured over a much longer time-span and assuming you follow through with your campaigns, the net benefits can be much greater than their associated costs.

Few advertising campaigns offer this same cumulative investment value creation and even on a basic level that’s measured in terms of sales per x number of visitors, studies have shown that SEO driven site arrivals are more than twice as likely to make a purchase than those that hit your site through a placed ad.

Far Better Brand Credibility

One of the most important goals for any sales hungry entrepreneur is creating credibility for their brand. They know that credibility offers competitive advantage and competitive advantage in turn leads to better sales overall.

This is where SEO really kicks ass as a sales tool. It’s simply much more trusted than any paid advertising method. People put more weight behind what Google search results give them at the top of the page, and they put further trust still in sites that they find being recommended to them by their friends in social media and by other sites that they’ve already come to respect. Since all three of these are major aspects of defining your optimization over time, the eventual benefits they offer will also include the pleasure of naturally looking more credible to your potential buyers and not having to convince them as much when it comes to buying.

Dramatically Improved Information Access

Building brand recognition and business sales through a mostly SEO driven campaign of self-promotion has the added benefit of giving you a deep wealth of analytics information about your target visitors. Assuming you connect your site to online tools like Google Analytics, you’ll be able to examine an assortment of details about how your readers found you, what words they searched for and what exactly they were looking for.

All of this information can then be used to improve your campaigns, content and the products you deliver, thus further increasing your sales conversions and ROI.

Know Your Guest Author:

When Matt Ellis isn’t writing poignant articles about technology and the business world, you can find him reviewing outsourced sales from Acquirent or working on his forthcoming book.

SEO or the Search Engine Optimisation is one of the best ways to drive traffic into any website without investing a single amount of money. The more you get traffic to your website the more profit you will make. But Search Engine Optimisation is not that an easy job and it takes time to show the result. There are many whether an organisation or an individual who hire SEO experts to work for their websites. But hiring an expert search engine optimiser can be a bit difficult if the recruiter is not smart enough and is not that much experienced in this field.

A good quality search engine optimisation results in better search engine placement as well as on the other hand it helps to bring profit on the amount that has been invested actually. A skilled and experienced SEO expert can suggest various ideas and techniques related to search engine optimisation to help his client earn money.

Therefore while hiring one should search for the following qualities within an SEO expert:

Risk Management:

SEO people should also have a basic idea of risk management. They should be familiar with a few strategies which prevent them from becoming the victim of huge Google sweeps which takes the websites that rank the top down and moves them out from the first page. Though it is not always possible to control Google but they can at least try to minimise the risk of getting paralyzed by this biggest search engine.

Quality Management:

Quality management is one of the most important parameters to maintain for the SEO experts. The SEO experts should have the capability of understanding the purpose of the website they are working on. If the site is for official purpose and has been developed to promote any brand or products or services then it is suggested that they should not make it cheap simply for the sake of search engine optimisation. An expert should know the way of applying various techniques in the right place. Sometime good practices can even be harmful for a site if they are not applied properly. For example, there are many who try to insert keyword in every paragraph of a content not knowing that he is actually spoiling the entire writing and the language.

Awards and Recognition:

It is true that everybody searches for an SEO specialist who can offer his service at an affordable price. But at the same time one should also think about the quality of the service. But the best price does not always give the best services. There are many who can offer their services at the most affordable rate possible. But it is always suggested that the recruiter or the client should always check their profile before finalising one. Through the portfolios the recruiters can get to know about the quality of the SEO experts and the type of project they can do. It shows their previous project reports, success, awards and recognitions.

Analytical strength:

Search Engine Optimisation is a dynamic process and the requirements vary depending on the websites or the blogs. Therefore, the SEO expert who has been appointed for a particular project should have to go through the site first and then he should understand the type of optimisation that is required for that particular site. This is an analytical power which is a must have quality for a good SEO specialist. He should not apply the same strategies for various sites.

These are some of the most important qualities which the SEO experts should have. While appointing a SEO expert one should check all these abilities to get the best possible result.

Know Your Guest Author:

Janet is a SEO expert who has a huge client base to boast off. She loves writing and maintains her own blog in her spare time.

Who doesn’t want their blog post to go viral?!  We all secretly hope the masses will find our words and ideas to be so amazing they want to share them with even more people.

But how do we go about making that happen?  Should we sit back and wait for fame and glory to find us?  Nope.  While luck and happenstance do play their role, us writers have to do some of the legwork too.

Be Authentic

Before you even type a word of your future viral post, you need to come to one very important understanding.  You need to be you. Write your post in your own voice.  There is no need to pretend to be someone you’re not.

Be Regular

The only way you are going to gain readers is to post regularly.  And you won’t achieve viral status without readers.  So be regular!

If you publish one post per day for a week and then take a month break, your readers won’t know what to expect.  Instead, establish a posting schedule and stick to it – whether you post daily, weekly, or monthly.

Also, don’t be afraid to give your readers a heads up.  Build anticipation.  On Facebook or Twitter, post something along the lines of, “A super awesome blog post is coming your way tomorrow.”

Be Negative

That’s right.  Be negative.  Tip your blog post title on its head.  Instead of writing “Top 10 Dieting Tips,” write “Avoid These 10 Diet-Busting Mistakes.”

Make readers feel they will be missing out on vital information if they don’t read your post.  Use negative words like stop, avoid, don’t, etc.  They’ll read your post just to make sure they aren’t doing something that’s on your list.

Be Easy

Online readers like to skim.  In fact, a recent study shared some surprising information.  While visiting a website, the average reader takes in 20-28% of the words on the page.

Therefore, you need to make sure you blog posts are easy to scan.  Offer bite-sized bits of information.  Lists are the perfect format for a viral post.  The visitor can read one of the tips or all 20.

Be Useful

SEOmoz recently shared an interesting graphic.  While trying to determine which posts go viral, they reported the importance of cognitive impact and how that relates to the likelihood of appearing on the New York Time’s most-emailed list.

The most popular blog posts were the ones that were surprising (16%), interesting (29%) or had practical utility (34%).  These posts were much preferable to the ones that had obvious or useless information.

Whenever possible, provide hands-on, practical tips the reader can put into practice.  If you can add an interesting twist to the information or a shocking surprise, you’ll really have a winning combination.

Be Lengthy

We just established readers want practical, useful information.  It is extremely difficult to cover all aspects of a topic in a mere 300 word post.  Provide depth and detail – leave no stone uncovered.

Meanwhile, make sure the quality remains top-notch throughout the post.  Tip number 20 should be just as helpful as tip number one.

Be Appealing

Include a visual aspect with each blog posts.  This can be a chart, graph, photograph, infographic, or video.  Just make sure your post is visually enticing.  Use relevant, current (no out-of-date stock photos), original, and free for the taking (no copyright infringements) images.

Be Obvious

Be obvious about what you want readers to do.  If you want them to share your post, don’t forget to include sharing buttons.  This should be a no-brainer, but some bloggers really miss the boat here.

You will get way more shares if you include the share buttons right in the post.  In fact, list them at the top and bottom of the post.  Make it easy.

Be Authoritative

Over time, readers will learn to come to you for valuable information.  You’ll establish a foundation of loyal readers.  However, not all your readers will be repeat customers.  Quite often, you’ll have new visitors stop by.  Make sure these newbies understand your authority.

Emphasize the number of likes and tweets the post has already gotten.  Share a list of your previous posts that relate to the topic.  And showcase the number of comments made.  People will be more inclined to join the conversation if they know people have already done the same.  It’s the same as arriving fashionably late to a party.

Be Proactive

At this point in the game, you have already invested hours in the post.  You’ve researched the topic, written the post, edited the content, and found a graphic.  But you’re not done yet.  You still need to promote your post.

We are all well aware of the phrase, “If you build it, they will come.”  When it comes to blogging, the phrase should be, “If you market it, they will come.”

• Share your post on each of your social networks:
  • Put a link to your blog post on your personal and business Facebook page.
  • Schedule several Tweets to go out over the next few days.
  • Create a Pinterest board specifically for your blog posts and pin each one.
  • Broadcast your post in any LinkedIn groups you are a member of.
  • Check the privacy settings in your Google+ account; make sure your blog post link goes to everyone in your circles and to the public.
• Utilize valuable blogging tools like Digg, Reddit, Technorati, and StumbleUpon.
• Add your latest blog post to your email signature.
• Share a link to your post in blogging networks, groups, and forums you belong to.
• Comment on relevant blogs and include a link to your post.
• Ask influential bloggers to link to your relevant post in one of their posts.

Combine all these elements into a single blog post and you have a very good chance of going viral.

Know Your Guest Author:

This post was written by Steve, who is a custom thesis writing professional and content manager at FreshEssays.com. He focuses on writing of papers on history, education and college survival. Follow Steve on Google+.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, this a technical tool used to drive traffic to a particular website and to also increase the websites page rank for it to feature on the first page of any search engines like Yahoo and Google. SEO process is an ongoing process and requires good marketing strategy and long term commitment is absolutely necessary. A website is successful when it has the relevant content that goes with popular keywords (words used to type in search engines), and the web site has to be updated regularly for it to appear on the first page of popular search engines.

Here are some important instructions and simple SEO steps to follow for your business websites:

Keyword

Researching a relevant keyword for your website is the first step that should not be over looked or taken lightly. Using paid campaigns for changing and testing multiple key words for a business website is possible, selecting a relevant keyword that goes with the content and theme of a web site is very important. The website owner has to be really careful when selecting a keyword and has to make sure the keyword selected has to appear at regular intervals (once or twice in each paragraph) in the given content. The selected keyword should not appear clustered in the content.

Web Development & Design

For people who are looking to create a new website will have to develop their website using architecture and design that are SEO friendly. This could save a lot of trouble, money and time to implement SEO tools as the website is already SEO friendly. In some cases the new websites that are developed to suit SEO tools are far ahead in terms of page rank and other competitive websites. SEO friendly design is very simple to develop and design and has to be user friendly as well.

Content

A good website has to have updates on a regular basis and should have content that is relevant to the keyword. Content building is an ongoing process, as the content has to be changed or edited as there are changes happening in the market regularly. The key for quality content is that the content has to relate to what the website owners business is and should not aim to sell the product directly; this in turn increases the business growth. Exposure of the business content in a web page should explain in detail what exactly does your business do, rather than having content that is only looking to make a sale.

Link Building

Links is what makes the internet whole and functional, without links each webpage will function individually and cannot be connected to other websites. Finding disconnected pages will become an almost impossible task without links. To generate traffic for a website Internal site links and inbound links are a must have, so when users view these links and click on them they are redirected to your website. These links are also important for SEO purposes, Inbound links are virtually important when it comes to search engines for good search results and for page ranks. Links are removed and added regularly and is an ongoing process.

Traffic Analysis & Page Ranking

It is always good to maintain a progress chart from the beginning so that it is easy to compare data in the present and in the feature. It is good to keep a look out for popular trends to increase the page rank of a website and to evaluate the traffic flow for a particular website. The most important tool for SEO is to increase the page rank of a website, but page rank alone does not fit the bill, the amount of traffic generated is as important as increasing a websites page rank.

Analysis of Conversion

To determine whether a website is doing well in terms of generating income, or simply put is your website profiting or losing money analysis of conversion will give the website owner the exact figure. Short term losses due to strategic functions is bearable, the problem has to be rectified immediately as losing money regularly on the long run will result in shutting down one’s business. Strategic planning and good marketing skills will indirectly or directly contribute to profit from the website in the long run. Web analysis plays an important part in the SEO process, as the user has to stick to the tried and tested methods.  A method that has been tried and has helped the website owner to successfully increase the page rank and to generate traffic has to be followed, and it is important to stay away from the methods that have failed. Testing a method on a trial and error basis for a few times before implementing it in the SEO process is very important.

These are some of the important SEO areas your business website should concentrate on.

Know Your Guest Author:

This is a guest post by Lance Goodman of dishtvoffer.com, a site that offers savings and current information on Dish TV, as well as dish.com services.

Business blogging is different from normal blogging. When you blog for your business, you do it deliberately to promote your business rather than just share your ideas or experiences. You will have to exercise caution so as not to over optimize your blog or under optimize where you could do better. Creating a good blog takes time and you will have to follow different strategies in order to keep it alive. Just filling your blog with posts doesn’t help achieve the results you are aiming at.

Therefore, experiment with different strategies and measure the results so that your business blog is well optimized. SEO is a continuous process and you will have to change your strategy from time to time depending on the different scenarios you face.

Post Regularly:

Posting regularly is the first step to optimize your blog. If you don’t, your readers might even forget to check your blog. As a result, you will lose your readership or you will not be able to build a strong readership. Moreover, search engine crawlers give more importance to blogs that are updated regularly than the ones which get updated once in a while. While it is important to write regularly, you should also take care not to repeat the same ideas in different blogs. Express unique ideas and address different issues within your niche.

Get Links from Authoritative Sites:

It is most important to get links from authoritative sites. You will not have any difficulty linking your blog content to those sites. However, the real task is getting links from them. To do so, you have to work even harder to create quality content which can be posted on those sites and get a link that will bring visitors to your site. I admit that it’s a tough job, but give it your best and try to bring in some of their visitors to your site. Such links rank higher than links that go out to highly authoritative sites. In order to do this, you will have to stuff your blog with quality content.

Participate in Forums:

Participating in forums is one of the ways to build links to your blog. You need to do this regularly to see good results. If you start linking to your blog from the very first participation, you won’t be heard. It is natural that you won’t be recognized initially when everyone around is a stranger. Therefore, comment on forums regularly and answer others’ questions until you get some recognition in the forum. After gaining a little reputation, you can try building links to your blog so that the regular visitors find that visiting your blog is worth their time.

Write Guest Posts:

Another way to optimize your blog is to write guest posts. You can build links to your blog in the profile part of the guest post. This is a direct way of addressing a different crowd. But, remember that only the crowd is different, the interests remain the same. Therefore, you needn’t struggle much to prepare the content you are going to share unless you are not talking about something that doesn’t interest you much. So, choose the right niche, dive right in and impress your new audience with your posts.

Testimonials:

Have a testimonials page for you. It is good to have someone speak about the good points of your business. However, you need to take care when posting content on the testimonials page. Your testimonies should speak about how informative your blog is. I have come across testimonials packed with flowery words rather than what could be gained from the site. When people find such weak testimonials, the very next thing they do is hit the back button of the browser. Keep your testimonials clean and precise.

Share More:

By saying share more, am asking you to share more than the regular business stuff you usually do. You can blog about the events you organize. It could be a social event or a birthday party arranged by your business. It will help build an unseen bond between your readers and your business. However, you needn’t go about letting your readers know everything that’s happening in your business. Just deviate a little now and then, but switch back to the business mode, because you are just doing it to create an interest in the readers to visit your blog again. After all, you blog in order to promote your business rather than tell them you’re having fun.

Link to Old Blogs:

You also have to link to your old blog posts in your new posts. It is a great way to keep using the content you’ve created. New visitors might not take time to scroll through your archives and read your old posts. Therefore, you need to link certain words to the old posts to let them know that there is more for them to read. As most of your readers won’t have much time, they won’t know where the other informative posts are, unless you tell them. This will help you build good internal links.

Create cool posts and as always content is king. As you are blogging about your business, spice up your posts with interesting facts. People love to read lively articles than articles with just information. Keep your posts precise and steer clear of links leading to sites with a bad reputation.

Know Your Guest Author:

This is a guest post by Sharon Thomas of thecornersuite.com, a site that offers savings and current information on dish network internet.

The world of SEO is constantly evolving with new rules to follow and changes to keep track of. Many search engines have carried out algorithm updates in the last few days, notable among them, Google and Bing. Google itself has gone through over 500 changes in the last few years. In light of the fact that new updates will be coming your way, here’s how you can prepare for future algorithm updates.

Maintain a high standard

SEO is not just about the clever placement of words to get ahead on page rankings. As a site or blog owner, you must take responsibility for maintaining a high standard of content. The information on your site must be ethical and genuine and this will help your business in ways you cannot imagine. Most search engines are wary of rank seeking players looking for shortcuts to get ahead. So make sure yours is a website that is content-rich and service-goal oriented.

Do your homework

While great content is a start, it’s not enough when changes are taking place. Do your homework and understand the need for the updates. Luckily, you can get help from the search engine creates themselves. Check out Bing’s Webmaster Center Blog or the Quality Guidelines on Google for more information on what to do and what not to. The Panda update affected 1.1% of the queries in English. The October update was about making a page more usable to viewers by affecting the page layout.  Having an idea of history will tell you a lot about the future.

Get some help

If you put all your eggs in the same basket, you run the risk of getting into trouble from all sides. So think about partners to take your SEO forward. Harness the power of social sites like Twitter and Facebook or go in for some good, old fashioned PR. Put a market research team to work and respond based on what your study throws up.

Check rates and engines

There are two rates you need to keep track of- conversion and engagement. This will give you an idea of how people react when they visit your website and whether they get what they are looking for. The engines are useful to find relevant information and will help users decide if they should trust a site and go further and make it suit their needs and requirements.

Stay in the loop

If SEO is your world, then you need to know about changes as soon as they happen. Work on your RSS and news feed, get connected to the right people and ensure that you stay on top of your game.

SEO is about giving relevant content to your users so keep a lookout and update your page periodically, ensuring that quality is maintained. Write for people not search engines, make your information crisp and one-of-a-kind, do not focus on advertisements at the cost of a good user experience, make your text interesting with images and videos and work on the length of your text so that you don’t lose out on the next future algorithm update.

Know Your Guest Author

This guest post is brought to you by Nicole Wilson of cabletimenyc.com, a site that offers savings and current information on time warner cable nyc.

While some people seem to think that blogging is the end-all-be-all of internet marketing, those who actually maintain a blog know that it is hard work. Not only must you have the discipline to write appealing content on a regular basis, but you have to entice people to read it.

While many businesses establish a blog for SEO purposes, they forget that their blog itself needs SEO help as well. A blog will not be any benefit if no one reads it. There are a few things that must be done to make an effective blog.

Contrary to popular opinion, you can’t just type out 500 words every day, post it, and expect people to want to read it. You have to write about the right things and get the right exposure in order to get a good following. Unfortunately, getting an audience and creating content for that audience can lead to a vicious cycle. You may not feel that quality content is worth the time since no one is reading it yet. However, you must have a solid foundation in order to get anyone interested.

Even if your website is solidly built and you are adding awesome content each day (which is why most businesses choose to blog), you are not guaranteed to draw in traffic. After all, traffic is part of what helps boost you in the search engines, so you have to already have a reader base before you can expect it to start generating search engine traffic.

This is where SEO is useful for blogging. For even though you need followers to really up your ranking, you can use SEO practices to get these followers, making you a multi-tasking machine and giving you extra time to think up great content ideas. Here are a few techniques that will help you get started.

Stay Informed

In order for you to be an expert in your niche, you have to know what is going on in said arena. This means finding reputable news sources that you check every day. This also means following the lead voices in your field. Know what is happening in every aspect of your industry. This will allow you to write with authority on the intricacies of your area of expertise.

Having a full understanding of the foundation and current events of your subject will allow you to approach topics from multiple angles. Online content takes a lot of different forms, so utilize as many as you can. Comment on news stories; make comic strips and infographs about data and current issues; ask people’s opinions, and of course, share your own. You can write articles, take relevant photos, and crate images, all pertaining to your niche, if you are knowledgeable enough to relate many issues back to one.

Social Media

Of course, that all helps you create content, but you still need people to view it. This is where social media comes in, but social media, like SEO is a blanket term that often gets viewed as an easy-out way to solve all your problems. A successful social media campaign is hard work, but it is necessary in today’s marketing landscape.

Social media takes on many forms, and not just social networks. Blogging itself is a form of social media. The great thing about social networks is that they allow you to congregate your target audience in one place and market directly toward them.

So the first step with social media is to choose your platforms. Whether it’s one or two, you want to start small, so you can truly master the platform before moving on to another one. You can have accounts on 8 different social networks, but they won’t help you if no one is paying attention to them.

The trick is to produce quality content on every platform. You do this by posting things that people want to read. On platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, your posts don’t necessarily have to pertain to serious aspects of your industry, but they should be things that people want to read. You have to post regularly enough that people have a reason to follow you, but not so much that it becomes annoying and eats away precious time.

Depending on your industry, Pinterest may be the way to go, as you can share tutorials and inspirational quotes. If you’re a business-to-business, LinkedIn is probably the way to go. Whichever platform you choose, make sure you use social media to communicate updates on your blog and your main website, as well as share content relevant to your followers. This is the place that you can post interesting articles you find to promote conversation.

You can also use the blogging community to your advantage. Chances are that you’re not the only blog in your field. You can use these other blogs as ways to reach out to potential readers. Join in the conversations on other blogs. This will help you build relationships, and will get your name out there, especially if you contribute valuable conversation.

Ask other blog owners if you can contribute a guest post to their site. This allows them a little break and a different perspective on things. It allows you to expose your writing to a new audience, and perhaps gain some followers. Make sure that you offer to guest post for quality sites, as you will be associated with any sites you collaborate with. Also, make your guest posts just as good as content for your blog, as people will be judging you on what you write.

Blogs are useful for many reasons. Alone, they are a great place to share information and become part of a community. As part of a business site, those aspects are amplified in marketing attempts. Fresh content really helps a website, and blogs are the perfect platform in which to present consistent content. Just remember to use strategy, because if you go in without a plan, you may join the ranks of many of the dead blogs in the catacombs of the interwebs.

Know the Guest Author

Jeriann Watkins is a writer living in Boise, Idaho. She enjoys writing about many subjects, including white-hat SEO and new advances in internet technology. She currently works for Page One Power, a relevancy first SEO link building focused company . They have an in-depth SEO link building blog full of free great information.

Finally after about 4 weeks of Google Dance, my blog posts have regained its position on Google. The traffic to the blog, in fact has increased and is more than what it was just before my blog fell off the rankings post the EMD update.

For people who do not know about the EMD update, you can read my post on it and its consequences here.

With all these changes and movements in and out of the first page of Google, I felt a collection of the best posts on SEO and related stuff from around the web would be a great idea for the Sunday Roundup this week, more so because I missed the last week. So here is a collection of the best article from around the web on SEO and related search engine marketing.

1. Deconstructing The Google EMD Update – Well, it’s official – no more free lunch for EMD, now that the Google EMD Update has launched. It worked well, for a long time. A whole industry of exact match…
2. Content Zombies: How to Fight The Walking Dead – Google’s algorithm updates tried to prevent a zombie content apocalypse. It’s debatable whether these attempts have minimized the threat and were fair to the uninfected, but containment was necessary. Load up on SEO ammo and learn how to survive.
3. How to Update Your Keyword Research Process for 2013 & Beyond – Quantify the business impact, keep a pulse on mobile, monitor social platforms, and be competitive. Incorporate these principles into your keyword research process and you’ll position your SEO campaigns for sustained revenue and customer acquisition…..
4. 10 Lessons About Enterprise SEO – From giving SEO recommendations proper prioritization, to integrating social with SEO, and to developing a strong training and communication structure, these lessons will give you tangible ideas on how to improve your own enterprise SEO campaign….
5. Multiple Domain Choice: SEO Considerations of Single vs. Multiple Domains – It can be tough to determine whether you should operate under one umbrella-website or under multiple domains. So what are the pros and cons for working with a single domain or multiple domains? Here are some important SEO considerations….
6. Social marketing and search engine optimization – As you know, social media marketing is essentially an independent direction, which at the same time is widely used with other developing technologies, such as SEO (search engine optimization), in the end leading to …
7. The Only SEO Your Blog Posts Need : @ProBlogger – This guest post is by The Blogger. Okay, I know you’ve read posts about SEO, PageRank, and other things we bloggers should all know about. This stuff is helpful, but it has come to overshadow some of blogging’s golden …
8. Your Guide to Google’s EMD Algorithm Update | Search Engine … – Google has unleashed yet another algorithm as part of a series of updates that are aimed at providing users with better search results and experience. This….

For many people, creating a website seems like an extremely easy and convenient way of making money. However, there are a lot of things involved in making a good website and then publishing it on the Internet, and one of them is search engine optimization, or in short, SEO.

When you make a website and register it with a host domain, you just throw in another drop in to a constantly expanding sea of other websites. Some websites make a lot of money, while others not as much. Now, most of you might be wondering why that is, yet the answer is fairly simple. This is just because the optimization done on the website is not as good as it should be in order to gain more traffic.

Ask yourself, how do you come across a good website? With the help of a search engine of course! Whenever you type in a key word in a search engine, it shows up a huge list of a variety of different websites that might be of use to you. But, have you ever wondered how the search engine brings these websites up? That is just because these websites make use of effective search engine techniques in order to enhance their visibility over the Internet.

These include the posting of articles that include a certain density of a keyword that relates to the website, the posting of pictures and videos which might also be useful in increasing the visibility, as well as a variety of other techniques such as link building, online advertisements, on page optimization, forum postings and a variety of others.

All of these techniques are employed online in order to increase a website’s visibility so that more people are able to view it. Appropriate tags are important when putting up pictures and videos, while the more written content you post, the more recognition your website will get. Not only this, but SEO also includes the submission of articles in various other article directories that might help you in increasing your chances of gaining visitors. Content writing is crucial in SEO, as it is one of the primary methods employed by search engine optimization experts.

All of these methods need to be carefully employed if you wish to create a website that has the potential to succeed. Anything that might help you in increasing your visibility on the Internet and gaining a larger number of visitors to your page is important, because that is ultimately the aim of every website.

If employed correctly, SEO, or search engine optimization can be used easily in order to earn a lot of money just with the help of a website, so it is absolutely imperative for people who have just started out in the online business to learn more about search engine optimization and the advantages that it holds for people. A proper design of your website is also very important, and you must make sure that it has been publicized in the right places.

About the Author

This guest article is by David Ritchie, a freelance writer currently interested in DVD ripping software reviews.

Make the most of your online marketing dollar

Small business owners can no longer afford to ignore SEO; 7 out of 10 Americans now shop online, making SEO critical to any successful marketing strategy. Especially if your business serves a geographic area, local SEO is easily the best way to maximize the impact of your marketing dollar. Let’s explore some of the reasons that small businesses need SEO.

1. Local SEO is the best way to reach mobile users

Every day, more and more prospective customers will look for your business on their smartphones—and investing in local SEO, including Google Places, Yelp, and other location-based search engines, will ensure that they find you. Particularly when they’re in a hurry, phone users glance at the top-ranked item for their search, and make a snap decision; which means your business needs to be the first thing mobile users see when they search for your industry and location.

2. More precise targeting than traditional marketing

Local SEO is far better bang-for-buck than traditional marketing, and the margin will only grow wider as more and more customers look to search engines to connect with local businesses. Buying a local TV ad or renting a billboard reaches a very broad, vague population, but local SEO targets motivated, interested customers who are looking for exactly the product or service you provide.

3. Some local SEO is free

Most elements of your local campaign will cost nothing but time. For starters:

• Build a social media presence with regular updates and customer engagement
• Create a simple, attractive site for your business that will bring customers to your checkout page in as few clicks as possible
• Get featured on reputable local blogs with guest articles or press releases
• Encourage customers to post favorable reviews on Google Maps, Yelp, and Yahoo! Local

While these steps alone won’t bring the results that a full-scale SEO campaign can, they’re a powerful force multiplier on any other marketing tools you choose.

4. It’s much easier to be a big fish in a small pond

Because SEO is so scalable, the level of your competition depends entirely on the search terms you try to rank for—which means that if you try to rank for generic, global keywords (and compete with mega-corporations with huge marketing budgets) you’ll spin your wheels and get nowhere. However, it’s very possible to outrank and overcome your immediate competitors. Local SEO means focusing on your real-world customers and competitors.

5. Targeted local SEO is much more effective

Particularly for small, service-oriented businesses, your marketing dollars are most effective when they’re laser-focused. Amateur SEO consultants waste endless time and money winning friends for their clients in far-flung corners of the globe, while neglecting the people who are likely to actually patronize the business.

6. Your website may need tweaking

Most web design is intended to be visually-impressive to the client, but neglects the tools of efficient design that draw traffic and leads. Consequently, the internet is full of attractive, flashy sites that are a positive nightmare for lead generation. A designer who knows his or her SEO will create both an appealing interface as well as a frictionless path for customers, from landing page to checkout, with as few clicks as possible.

If your site is pulling in healthy, high-quality traffic, take a look at your analytics to find out what’s working—where are your customers coming from, and which of your pages are they most interested in? These statistics can be deceptive if you aren’t paying attention to local traffic in particular: your local visitors may not have the same interests as your overall traffic, so it’s important to recognize the nuances. No matter what fun ideas others may suggest, your whole design should be built around ensuring that customers have a direct, painless path to checkout. If you accept credit cards or cash in person, never let a customer go without asking how they found you.

About the Author:

Shawna Davies is a staff writer for Going Cellular. She has a talent for organization and helping people navigate new technology. She’s a confessed gadget freak, but when she gets out of the house, she loves spending time at the lake with her husband and young son. They live in Beaumont, Texas.