Understanding SEO And What The Crucial Key Is To Being Successful Online

Internet marketing opportunities are especially popular today, although they have gained a considerable amount of notoriety due to the inherent flaws in some systems, particularly with some fairly diabolical stories about MLM. However, if you have the determination, the right marketing model and a clear plan, there's no reason why you can't make a reasonable income on-line.

If you think about it all it comes down to is traffic and conversions to make money. I remember the saying that if you throw enough mud at the wall some of it will end up sticking. It's the same with traffic and websites. If you get enough people to see a promotion, at some point you are going to start making sales.

So individuals involved in internet marketing should have one aim and that is to generate traffic to boost sales and attract referrals. You can get traffic, both paid and free from a wide number of places but here we will concentrate on one form of free traffic and that is organic search engine traffic. I say free but the reality is that no form of traffic is free as time is just as important as money and it takes a lot of work to rank well in the search engines. A lot of people hire others to do some of the grunt work so as I said, in reality it still costs money. However, will search engine optimization (SEO) have an impact on your success as an internet marketer?

If you get it right there is absolutely no doubt that you will bring more traffic to your website and offers. Whether they convert into sales is another matter but the most important key to any success is traffic.

First of all, we need to go back to the basics of SEO. Currently, and for the foreseeable future, Google still reigns as the most visited website on the internet. Hence, in order to take advantage of the millions of web browsers who pass through this portal each day, most websites have the main objective of positioning themselves on the first page of results in order to gain much needed traffic. To do so, these websites must undergo some kind of SEO, i.e. structuring the website layout, html code, and content so that it can easily be indexed and ranked by Google.

One of the most critical steps in SEO involves the selection of the right keywords and phrases related to your website. Generally speaking, the longer the keyword term the more targeted the visitor as a term with several keywords can be very specific. Google has a widely used keyword tool that you can use to research the number of users who have searched for your keywords terms in any given month. This includes the number of average clicks per month and a descriptive rating of competition for those keywords, ex. low, medium or high.

Naturally, you want to select the keywords that have more searches with less competition. A keyword that receives 5000 clicks a month as opposed to 500 will definitely be more appealing but what of competition.

The figures don't always look as simple as they appear and with so much miss information on-line these days it's no wonder people get confused, so let's take this example to see what I mean. The keyword term "internet marketing" may have medium competition with 33,100 global monthly searches, 8,100 local monthly searches and a total of 648,000 results. "Multi-level marketing" on the other hand might have medium competition with 301,000 global monthly searches, 110,000 local monthly searches and a total of 8,240,000 results. Which one is better?

Using the keyword term "internet marketing" you would expect it to be easier to go for because of the lower number of competing pages but in actual fact, the page count is only really a guideline at best, as the true competition is better understood by looking at the backlink structure of each website that resides on the first page. So in a nutshell you cannot get a good reading just by looking at keyword and page counts so bare this in mind.

Anyway, after you compile your list of promising keywords, you can now go about building your content. This is where the next phase of search engine optimisation comes in. Be sure to include your selected keywords in the article titles, subheadings, article body, meta tags, website title, alt attributes, and most importantly, the anchor links that lead to other aspects of your website or blog. When conceptualizing your content, don't forget to include relevant videos, since these have more weight in Google's method of calculating rank as a result of YouTube's popularity. Among your webpages, the capture page is the most vital since this is where your site visitors become consumers once they purchase your product or service.

In addition to SEO, you should also work hard on increasing your page rank on Google. Aside from making sure you have interesting, original and valuable content rich in keywords that are appropriately inserted into the text, you should also endeavor to secure one-way links from a wide range of websites that have various page ranks from 1 up to 10.

If you pick the right keyword terms and write engaging content you will be at least part of the way to building up a potentially successful web presence. All you need to then do is follow the on-page optimisation to make sure the search engines know what your content is about and then start the various SEO tactics to get your website to rank.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7066849

Set up goals in Analytics to track conversions & ROI

Hi there,

You’re already using your Analytics reports to see valuable data about your website traffic and advertising effectiveness. The next step is to set up goals to track “conversions” -- a word we use to describe each time a visitor does something specific on your site (makes a purchase, fills in a form, spends a certain amount of time browsing, reaches a certain number of pages, etc.). Tracking goals shows you how effective your site design and ad campaigns have been, and helps you make smart decisions about how to make them even better. We've also shared some useful resources to help you learn more about Google Analytics and keep up to date with the latest news.

Create goals in Google Analytics and track ROI

What goals should I track?

That depends on what type of business you’re running and what kind of objectives you have for your website. Here are some examples:

Business	Goal
online clothing store	completed purchase
entertainment listings site	newsletter sign up
news and weather site	time spent on site or pages viewed per visit

Creating Analytics goals

Once you've decided what conversions you want to track on your website, you can easily set up goals in Google Analytics:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account
2. Select 'edit' next to the profile where you'd like to set up a goal.
3. Under the 'Goals' section, select 'Add Goal.'
4. Choose a name for your goal and select 'On,' so Analytics will begin tracking this action on your site.
5. Choose your goal type (destination URL, time on site or pages per visit) and enter the goal details.
6. You can select a goal value to indicate how much a goal is worth. Have an e-commerce site? Analytics can track values straight from your shopping cart.
7. If you’ve set up a 'Destination URL' goal, you can also define its funnel: a funnel will show you up to 10 steps that lead to a goal and help you identify where in the path visitors drop out of completing your goal.

Goal reports

Once you’ve set up a goal (or goals), you can track your results by choosing ‘View Reports’ in your Analytics account, then 'Goals' from the report menu on the upper left of the screen. Your reports will detail your completed conversions (broken down by day or hour), conversion rate, and the completed goals’ value to your business.

Check out this short YouTube video to learn more about setting up goals in Google Analytics.

read more : http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81977

Backlink Building Service: How to Increase Page Rank Quickly?

Search engines use a variety of methods to determine which web pages are displayed first in search results. Many bloggers and webmasters focus on increasing Google page rank. Improving your page rank isn't something you can do in a day. This process requires a lot of work. Most SEO experts believe that Google page rank depends on the number of backlinks pointing to your website.

Here are a few tips on how to increase page rank and achieve a top position in search results:

Start by checking if your website has been indexed by Google. Download the Google Toolbar or use a free page rank checker to find out what your current page rank is. Submit your site to search engine directories to get quality inbound links and have your pages indexed faster.

Get incoming links from high quality websites in your niche. The best way to improve your rank is to obtain backlinks to your website from highly authoritative sites. The more links you have pointing to your site from relevant sources, the better your page rank gets. When you receive a request for a link, check out that website before linking back.

Make sure you have enough of the right keywords on your pages. It is recommended to add your best keywords in the first paragraphs of every web page so that search engine spiders can't miss it. Try to stick to one keyword per page. Monitor the progress of your keywords and key phrases. Ask some else to read your posts and tell you what they think your key phrase should be. Don't repeat the same keywords over and over again. Use Google Toolbar to check your keyword density.

Join at least ten social media sites, even though you only use three or four of them regularly. Social media profiles provide "Do Follow" links, which helps increase your page rank. Check your website for coding errors and remember to use SEO techniques.

In addition to getting relevant backlinks and using the right keywords, it is important that you write original content in order to increase your rankings. Google acts harshly toward any form of plagiarism. Create unique articles to generate organic traffic and get quality links. Establishing your own voice is essential because you are giving people a reason to come back to your site. Remember that the needs of your readers are what SEO copywriting is all about.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7065745

Another step to reward high-quality sites

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we're not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.

see more : http://insidesearch.blogspot.in/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Bigger & Tiered Index, Document Ranking, Sitelink Changes and More

It must be time for Google to share its latest list of search quality updates. And, like clockwork, Google didn’t disappoint today — the company has posted a list of 53 changes that affect search results.

This list is particularly interesting because of all the upheaval happening this month, what with Panda updates 3.5 and 3.6 occurring in an eight-day span, along with the Penguin update and a Google screwup related to parked domains. Yeah, April was a crazy month for SEO folks.

As always, there’s a lot to digest and the most important items don’t always reveal themselves right away. But here’s a look at the items that caught my eye after a first read-through of Google’s blog post.

Bigger, Tiered Index

Perhaps the biggest news is that Google has increased the size of its base index — the collection of web pages and documents it can show as search results — by 15 percent.

Similarly, Google also says it’s launched a new “index tier.”

Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename "Indexing"] The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.

New index tier. [launch codename "cantina", project codename "Indexing"] We keep our index in “tiers” where different documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.

That sounds almost like Google’s old “supplemental index” system that launched in 2003, and it may be tempting to say the supplemental index has returned, or something along those lines. But, as far as I recall, Google never said the supplemental index was going away; it said they’d stop using the “Supplemental Results” label on search results that came from it.

SEO & Ranking Updates

Google has also announced numerous updates that relate to how documents are ranked, updates that sound like they’re at least related to — if not part of — the larger Panda and Penguin updates that are already well known.

Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.

More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.

If I were to guess, I’d think that the first two items above could be related to “spun” content — one of the practices that Google likely considers to be a hallmark of low-quality content. But that’s just a guess on my part.

The last two items — authoritative results and domain diversity — almost sound contradictory. At least to me. On a Friday afternoon during a long week with international travel.

Sitelinks Updates

There are several changes related to Google’s sitelinks and “megasitelinks” — the additional links that show up below a top-ranking result for some queries.

If you spend time trying to optimize for sitelinks (and if you have an authoritative site, it’s probably a good idea to be doing that), these changes are worth reading closely. Here are those changes, word-for-word from Google’s post:

“Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename "thanksgiving"] This improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet.

Better ranking of expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] This change improves the ranking of megasitelinks by providing a minimum score for the sitelink based on a score for the same URL used in general ranking.

Sitelinks data refresh. [launch codename "Saralee-76"] Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the order of weeks).

Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] We’ve adopted a new technique to reduce duplication in the snippets of expanded sitelinks.

The first item seems to be saying that sub-sitelinks may show up instead of a text snippet, which I think means that some search results could have two layers of sitelinks — megasitelinks below the main result, and then sub-sitelinks below one of the megasitelinks. I’ve not seen anything like that yet.

Local-related Changes

There are a couple changes related to local/geo searches and search results.

Improvements to local navigational searches. [launch codename "onebar-l"] For searches that include location terms, e.g. [dunston mint seattle] or [Vaso Azzurro Restaurant 94043], we are more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the location.

Country identification for webpages. [launch codename "sudoku"] Location is an important signal we use to surface content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we’ve had systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.

In the first item, Google seems to be saying that it’s able to able to identify the correct local result for specific navigational searches — such as a search for a specific local restaurant — even if the site/page is poorly optimized for local search.

It’s reminiscent of the “Venice” update earlier this year which involved Google launching ways to better correlate web pages/documents to their locations.

Miscellaneous Updates

In addition to the items I’ve highlighted above, read through Google’s post for these other items that caught my eye:

• A change that should reduce amount of paginated results showing on a search results page.
• Two changes related to snippets, including one which promises to show more text from the beginning of pages.
• Three changes related to freshness — fresh results and freshness signals, and one that ignores fresh content if it’s deemed low quality. (There’s also an Autocomplete change designed to reduce the visibility of low-quality results.)
• A change that Google says will help it show more informative/concise titles in its search results. (For what it’s worth, just about every SEO that I know wishes Google wouldn’t change titles at all.)
• Improvements in how Google uses previous search activity to determine your intent as you continue to search.

That’s a lot to digest and something else may have caught your attention as being important. The comments are open, so let us know what stands out for you as you look through Google’s April search changes.

Read more : http://searchengineland.com/googles-april-search-updates-120370

7 Tips for Powerful PPC Ads

There in 7 Tips for Powerful PPC Ads before advertising. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Google ads are found above and to the right of your search results. Written with your keywords and key phrases in mind, they are highly targeted and are only seen by people searching for your product or service. As the name suggests, you only pay when someone clicks your ad, so they can be quite cost effective (if you know what you're doing). So how can you make sure your ads are effective? Well, here are 7 tips to help you create powerful PPC ads.
1. Know your audience
As with all your marketing, your advert will be targeted at a specific audience. It is important that you make sure your message is written specifically for them. Writing something for everyone will result in a wishy-washy ad that doesn't attract anyone.

2. Include your keywords
The whole point of PPC is that it's targeted, so make sure your keywords are included in the heading and body of your ad. Not only will this highlight your ad's relevance, it will also reassure the potential customer that you are offering what they are looking for.

3. Keyword only headings are a no-no
It may be tempting just to cram all your keywords into your heading, but it will create something ugly and meaningless. Your heading should be benefits driven, offer a hook and contain your keyword. That's quite a tall order considering you only have 25 characters to play with, so you'll have to get creative.

4. Be focused
Each ad you write should be focused on one benefit only. You only have 25 characters for your heading and 35 characters for your description, so there's no room for waffle.

5. Call to action
The best ads will have a call to action. It could be your phone number or a link. Either way it will add value to your ad and give you a way to measure its effectiveness.

6. Proofread
So important and yet frequently forgotten about – proofreading will prevent you from looking like a total amateur and publishing an ad with a blaring typo in it.

7. Test
The only way to make sure your ads are working as hard as possible for you is to test them. Try different headings, calls to action and benefits to see which brings in the highest response rate. Only through this continual process can you find the perfect formula. Over to you Do you use PPC advertising?
If so, leave a comment and leave your top tips for getting the most out of your ad.
See more : http://www.smallbusinessnewz.com/7-tips-for-powerful-ppc-ads-2012-05

Confirmed: Panda Update 3.6 Happened On April 27th

Google has confirmed they have pushed out a refresh on the Panda algorithm on Friday, April 27th.

I noticed an uptick in Webmaster discussion around Google changes over the weekend, mostly at WebmasterWorld and asked Google to confirm if there was an update. Google confirmed they refreshed the Panda update on the 27th, but it was a limited update not affecting that many sites.

This was an unusual update being that Panda 3.5 was released on April 19th, making a 8 day gap between 3.5 and this update, 3.6. Typically Google pushes out a refresh of Panda every 6 weeks or so.

A Google Spokesperson said:

We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.

Read more : http://searchengineland.com/panda-update-3-6-on-april-27th-120227