SEO Marketing World

A growing trend in search engine marketing and search engine optimization is known as Social Media Optimization. This involves uses the myriad social networks available to drive traffic to your website by marketing through them. Interestingly, this also works to increase your link popularity, which will in turn boost your PageRank. However, there are some things to remember in order to make your social media marketing strategy most effective.

Not all social networks or social media sites will be beneficial to you. For starters, you have to have a good idea of who your target audience is, and what social media services they might use. These are the places in which you should focus your efforts.

Another thing to remember is that on many social networks, users are hyper aware of spam. Therefore, you’re going to have to get creative about where and now you submit links, because you don’t want to come off as a blatant marketer. When using social bookmark sites, such as Digg or Del.ici.ous, don’t make overt attempts to have your content voted to the top, either by encouraging others or creating false accounts and voting for your own content. This is considered black hat SEO in many circles, and your content can be removed if this is discovered.

One thing that’s important to remember is to provide specific tags for your links. Specific keywords and tags can help you stand out in a crowd. Rather than competing for a popular keyword such as “used cars”, try being more specific, using something like “used car parts” and try to tackle a niche. This will result in more attention in that niche and much better results.

When you link, link to content within your site that will be useful to users. Providing them with something specific is much better than linking them directly to your homepage. Remember, providing specific, useful content to a niche interest group will ultimately be much more effective than trying to reach everyone through general, boring content. A great idea is to link to an article within your blog, and then use the blog to relate back to your main site. Make yourself look like a specific expert, and your SEO and social media marketing will be most successful.

Improving the popularity and visibility of your website is important to any webmaster, and most often it can be done by securing a good foundation on which to build in the future. Whether you’re running your own informational news website or an e-commerce website, these tips can help you get noticed.

One of the best places to start is in your website design, and if you’re going to spend money on anything, this is where to spend it. Having a professional looking, easy to navigate site design is going to keep users coming back and contribute greatly to the reputation and credibility people lend to your site.

Try to provide something that users can really use. Avoid just letting your site be an informational brochure about your company or business. Add blogs and provide information on current events related to your industry or service, or provide video or photos. Provide something for your users that you think will encourage them to want to show their friends.

Stay up to date and stay topical. If your business or website is involved in the health food field, and you miss the chance to report on a bacteria scare in vegetables or a new type of health product being released, your going to miss out on the opportunity to generate tons of valuable traffic. Keep your site up to date.

Ask for and respond to criticism. Getting to know what your users want is key to providing it for them. Ask for suggestions and heed the best advice you get to improve your site and give your audience what they need.

Learn about search engine marketing, forums and blogs, and the rest of Web 2.0 and use them. Everyone else is doing this, so in order for your site to keep up, you should too.

Do things that will attract attention. We’re not saying be outright controversial or offensive, but do or cover things that will get you noticed and talked about through the Web 2.0 methods we just mentioned.

Optimize for Google. Google control 80% of the search market, so if you can place highly in their rankings, you’re opening yourself up to a huge volume of traffic. Learn what it takes to rank highly and design your site to comply.

Social media sites can be very good at drawing traffic to your website, as well as at increasing your link popularity and thereby your PageRank. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.ici.ous are proven to draw vast amounts of traffic within a very short amount of time.

StumbleUpon is a different type of social bookmarking site, but can produce just as effective results. StumbleUpon allows users to add a toolbar to their browser that includes a like/dislike vote feature. If a user likes a site, it will be submitted to StumbleUpon. What’s interesting is that unlike the other sites mentioned, StumbleUpon draws a lower amount of traffic over a longer time, but that consistency can be very beneficial to your search engine optimization. Here are some tips to improve your own StumbleUpon ranking.

• Get on StumbleUpon and rate sites that you like. Getting involved in the community in this way will make your website get more visibility to users with similar interests.
• Add new friends frequently. The more people who see your site and site’s that you give thumbs up, the more your own rating will improve, and thus your visibility.
• Create and submit new websites often. If you have a new site, new content or a new blog post, submit a link to StumbleUpon. The more sites you have in their database, the more likely that users will find you. Cross linking between these sites can have a great effect on your SEO as well.
• Choose titles and tags carefully. Try to appeal to those with relevant interests, so you can improve the quality, and not just the quantity, of your traffic.
• Use several tags rather than just one. This will spread out your appeal and attract more viewers.

StumbleUpon can be an excellent part of your search engine marketing strategy, and a great way to generate useful, specific traffic for your site.

One of the most frequently asked questions by webmasters and search engine optimization speciualists is how one can structure their site to make it more accessible and readable to the search engine crawlers? We all know that the crawlers are out there scanning our sites and assigning them a ranking based on what they find, but how can we structure our site to make sure the crawler will give us a high rank? The biggest factor in search engine optimization and search engine marketing depends on making your site accessible and easily scannable for the crawler. The easier time they have scanning your site, determining its value and finding keywords, the higher they will rank you. So here are some tips to help make your site easily digested by the search engine crawlers like the infamous Googlebot.

First of all, make sure all of the content on your site is easily reachable. Crawlers navigate primarily by simple html links, so ensuring that this is how your site can be accessed is key. Javascript and Flash code is very difficult for the crawler to digest, and often times they ignore all such code altogether, so hiding links within this code will not allow the crawlers to reach all of your content.

Also, make sure that all of your content is easily readable, meaning that it should be in plain html documents. If a crawler has to evaluate scripts on your page to get to you content, chances are they will miss it entirely.

Another thing to consider is how you present your content. If you use a multi column layout that is confusing to the eye or just plain complicated, chances are it will appear that way to the crawler too, and thus they’ll have a difficult time scanning your content. Remember, like most users, the crawler is looking for the most relevant, easily readable information to determine the best pages among many.

However, this doesn’t mean you’ll have to take away from the quality of your site by making it overly simply. Just remember to use text content to help explain your visual content. You can use pictures, but be sure there is text or a caption explaining the relevance of the picture. The same goes for tables or graphs. This will help the crawler and your users better understands your site, which will benefit your traffic as well as your potential for being ranked highly in the search engines.

Just remember, things like Flash animation, video and visual effects can be good for websites, but don’t overdo them. Otherwise your site will be a turnoff to both search engine crawlers and your visitors!

SEO is a huge part of any website’s strategy for marketing these days, but there are right and wrong ways to go about it. In general, we see that some mistakes are more common than others. Below we’ve listed the 5 most common misconceptions and mistakes regarding search engine marketing so you can avoid them.

1. SEO is not a one-time fix-all. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Keyword popularities change, trends change and new strategies come up to appeal to the search engine crawlers. Don’t think you can just hire an SEO agency, optimize your content, and stay atop the rankings forever. Search engine marketing requires fine tuning, and is a journey rather than a destination.
2. Black Hat tactics don’t work. They may at first, but over the long haul, the risk vs. reward for using black hat SEO is very little. If a search engine finds you to be using unethical SEO, it can be very hard to work your way back from their bans and penalties. Avoid using doorway pages and hidden text, and build a solid white hat SEO strategy from the beginning for success in the long run.
3. All content needs are keywords. This is a huge mistake. It’s much better to plan your strategy around a few solid keywords you can really compete for than to jam your content full of any and all keywords. To any user this will be immediately apparent, and they will not return as your content will appear useless. You can always change your keyword strategy to try more competitive ones as things change. Build a good foundation and tinker with it rather than going for the gold from the beginning.
4. No agency of SEO firm has deals with the search engines, or can guarantee anything. Anyone who says they can get you in the top ten overnight is lying, because SEO changes take weeks to manifest. Any company that says this is of questionable legitimacy.
5. There is no “most important part” of SEO. Search engine marketing refers to using a combination of tactics to develop your brand online and get it notices. Link building, pay per click and keyword rich content are all important parts, but only their use in combination will create an effective overall search engine marketing plan.

Everyone can always use new techniques for getting high quality inbound links to their web site, the best way to improve Page Rank, and a key part of search engine marketing. The best link building strategiess will incorporate a number of techniques and methods, so here are a few you can add to your existing strategies.

One of the best ways to increase your links and your credibility as a site is to become an online resource for information in your niche or subject, and the best way to do this is to start a blog. Blogs typically do very well in search results when you use simply keyword strategies, and they can be much more effective than many black hat SEO techniques. Even one blog post a day can do wonders. Just fill the blog with backlinks to your site, and you’ll generate lots of traffic, as well as boost your Page Rank. Blog services like Wordpress or Blogger are great, as they do well in search results.

In addition, look into expanding your content pages. Don’t limit your site to just pages featuring the basics of your service. Create subpages with lots of information concerning your topic, and issues related to your topic. Your directory structure and filenames structure can be effective search engine optimization factors as well, and the more content and articles you have, the more you’ll be able to make use of them. Be sure to employ cross linking here as well, as linking within your site is effective for Page Rank as well.

As you probably know, inbound linking is one of the most important components of a search engine marketing strategy. But often times people simply understand how using the options for link building that exist out there on the internet are key to the overall construction of your website as a whole. You have to get links from the right sources, and ultimately, those sources are going to have to want to link to your site, so your content needs to be useful, informative and make your site sound like the best out there.

So how do you build this kind of winning site? Follow these steps and you can’t go wrong. For the purpose of this example, let’s say you’re building a site to help promote your Classic Car Repair Shop.

Step 1: Understand who is going to be most likely to link to your site. Some examples of this might be auto parts dealers, writers at magazines and web sites specializing in classic cars, classic car bloggers, local auto show organizers, craigslist auto message boards, or car repair social networks. Submitting links to these sites will be your main goals, before you go submitting links to general directories.

Step 2: Expand your focus. Now that you’ve decided on the most relevant sites and services for linking, think about some others that may be related, but may be a step or two removed. Examples could include car photography, car repair advice, or car sales sites.

Step 3: Generate content ideas. You want to make your page as dynamic as possible. For a classic cars site, you could have interactive graphic menus highlighting different parts and components and their location within the cars, which could lead to menus with pricing and services available. You could also have videos detailing certain repairs or custom car building. Lots of photographs or projects, and interviews with the team of mechanics. Get creative!

Step 4: Hire great designers and get your name out there. Hire the right people to help you build a great site, and then submit, submit, submit.

Follow these steps to link building and content creation and your site will be a guaranteed hit.

While Digg.com can be a great place to submit articles and information that can help build your search engine optimization link building strategy, there is a new feature in place on the site that can make it harder for SEO marketing strategists to get their articles noticed. The feature, called the “Bury” button, is featured right below the headline and intro clip of the article, next to the comments section. Its purpose is to allow users who feel the article is irrelevant or blatantly for marketing purposes to vote to “bury” it so that other users won’t spend their time reading it.

And it’s working! We’re hearing more and more stories about articles featured on Digg becoming less and less effective. So to avoid be buried, here are some tips you can use to make sure your articles maintain high visibility.

The first and most obvious step is to not make your link building articles look like link building articles. Search engine marketing has to look realistic. Remember, the best types of articles to post for link building will contain real, usable, relevant content. A lot of people are very aversed to anything they see as marketing material trying to masquerade as journalism or content, so try to make sure your articles look as legitimate as possible.

Another option is to avoid Digg and try marketing directly to important bloggers. In most cases these blogs know you’re trying to boost your linking, but in the end, if you provide them with interesting, relevant content, they’re not going to care.

Use StumbleUpon to gauge whether or not to submit to other sites. If your piece gets a lot of positive votes on StumbleUpon, you can generally feel confident that appearing on other sites, it will do well as well.

In general, just remember that the best viral content will be attractive to a general audience either for usefulness or novelty. Try to think like a reader or user, and make your link building material as useful as possible to your market.

When you’re building your search engine marketing strategy, a wide variety of link building techniques can only benefit you. The more inbound links you have to your sites the better, and having a wide variety of sources for these links can be beneficial to your ranking. Here are some more unconventional link building techniques you may not have previously considered.

If you use several vendors, businesses or web sites in an industry related to yours, try building a favorites page, ranking these sites in order of your preference for them. Write a brief description of the site and why you find it useful. Then contact the sites listed and invite them to use your “testimonials” by linking to them. Companies won’t be able to resist this outside source of good publicity.

Another good tactic is to keep your eye on news sites that post stories relevant to the focus of your site. Once stories go up, try to be the first to comment on them, and provide links to similar or relevant topic within your site. Blog comment links are proven to generate a lot of hits, and the relevant traffic you’ll receive will be equally beneficial to your site’s business.

When a new social network goes online, be one of the first accounts to sign up. Be sure to include your business name in your account name, or to set up an account specifically for your business, if possible. Often times, social networks will blog about the first accounts to join them as away of increasing their visibility, which can also increase yours.

Create a screensaver or desktop wallpaper that promotes your business or web site and submit it to all the free screensave/wallpaper sites that you can find. Many of these sites will allow you to link back to your site, whether the user downloads your wallpaper or not.

As with other search engine optimization techniques, these methods should be employed in unison with many other for maximum effectiveness.