The Holistic Approach To Search Engine Marketing

The Holistic Approach To Search Engine Marketing

Holistic: [adj] Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts.

Holistic Theory: [noun] The theory that the parts of any whole should be considered in relation to the whole, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Although the word “holistic” is often used to describe a particular approach to medicine (in which the emphasis is on treatment of the “whole” individual), it is also appropriate to apply it to other disciplines, including Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There are three major components of SEM (and many minor ones, but we won’t touch on them here). These three primary parts are often used individually to great effect- but it is only when they are effectively used in unison that the “whole” can become “greater than the sum of its parts”. These major components are as follows:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click (also referred to as Pay for Performance) is very close to a pure form of advertising. Companies bid to have their ad copy show up for specific search terms related to their business. This ad copy usually shows up in a special section of the search engine results page, typically labeled as “Sponsored”. Companies that use PPC are rewarded with targeted visitors to their websites and have to pay the bid amount for each visitor they receive.

Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Natural search engine results are often considered to be more trustworthy than PPC advertising by searchers who understand the difference. These purportedly non-biased results can be likened to the articles in a trade magazine, while “Sponsored” results can be likened to the advertisements. A company that is mentioned in an article will usually garner a more favorable impression than a company that is simply advertising in the same magazine.

Website Conversion

The most often overlooked of the three components, website conversion is equal in importance to the other two. Conversion is the art and science of determining predominant user behavior on your website and trying to improve it - in other words, attempting to influence visitors to take a specific action on your site that eventually leads to a sale.

How They Work Together

While each of the above components by themselves can return excellent results, the power of each is multiplied when they are used effectively together. The results returned by any combination of the three pieces applied simultaneously will almost always outperform the collective results of the same pieces applied separately.

PPC with SEO:

Recent studies have indicated that search engine marketing is an effective brand builder, and this branding effect is amplified through placement in both the natural search results and in the paid results. This makes perfect sense - on most search engines, you have two unique opportunities to present your company and products/services for every search query. By taking advantage of both opportunities, you greatly increase your chances of being first-in-mind from the searcher’s perspective, at the time of the search and beyond.

There is a very popular approach from some search engine marketers to only use PPC for keyphrases where the site does not achieve high natural rankings. While this approach can certainly save money, it runs counter to the branding benefit espoused above (since it ensures that a site listing will either be in the paid results or the natural results, but never both). If your company has a high average dollar sale, and you have a chance to favorably impress a visitor with dual exposure before they visit your site, it usually makes sense to take that opportunity.

SEO and/or PPC with Website Conversion:

Often, firms are willing to spend many thousands of dollars to increase traffic to their site, but not a penny on website conversion. In a medium that makes it so easy for a searcher to look elsewhere, conversion is critical - and the net effect of raising your conversion rate from one to two percent is the same as doubling your traffic (and in one sense it is actually better, since it means that far fewer people have left your site unsatisfied). Conversion naturally works independently of any SEM initiative (provided that your website gets any traffic at all). But the combined effect of increasing your conversion rate and your traffic naturally yields more impressive results. Say, for example, that your website currently provides you with only two solid sales leads per week. By doubling your conversion rate, you will get four leads, and doubling your traffic on top of that will yield eight.

However, the above example does not take into account the quality of search engine traffic from targeted keyphrases. It is often the case that current site traffic is not particularly targeted (a look into a site’s web logs will often reveal a large number of search engine-referred visitors that found the site using non-targeted phrases). It is not uncommon to see conversion rates skyrocket as the quality of traffic improves due to targeted keyphrase advertising or organic search engine optimization. With PPC campaigns, you can further boost conversion rates by sending visitors to highly targeted landing pages- another example of how seemingly separate disciplines can complement each other so well.

The Bottom Line

The fact that these components are most effective when used in concert does not mean that each should not be tracked individually- of course they should. But do not be surprised when your returns on two or more of these disciplines used together are greater than the combined returns from the individual components used separately. And this presents a dilemma- a highly successful holistic SEM approach can make extracting exact ROI figures for each individual component difficult, since “the whole” has become “greater than the sum of its parts”. But as many savvy companies are discovering, this is a nice problem to have.

Keeping Customers Coming Back

Keeping Customers Coming Back

How in the Hell do I get repeat Visitors?

Create fresh content which keeps them wanting to come back, or send them places they will really enjoy.

Fresh Content

Using a blog, news feeds, and writing regular articles will provide your site with unique content that others may never have. Most businesses would do better off if they knew their business field a little better. That is a big reason for my SEO blog, I look around to see what others are doing and read the news constantly.

It keeps me up to date while taking an extremely small amount of maintenance time to keep that site updated. I need to keep up with what is going on anyway, so why not put the interesting stuff down in digital ink?

Divergent Paths

There are really a couple main ways to attack the search engine marketing idea and reverse broadcast networks.

Pay Per Click

If you are extremely intent on making sales and that is your primary goal then you need to create a smooth site with great usability that drives people toward the targeted action.
If you do it good enough and can write and target good ads then you should be able to beat most of your competition using pay per click.

The targeting takes a good deal of time. Writing effective ads take a good deal of time. Neither will be anywhere near as effective as they could be if the site still has major problems or lacks focus.

Organic SEO

• Link Renting: There are ways to manipulate search results. Currently buying links is another popular alternative to the pay per click market. It is a really hard tactic for search engines to compete with. Some essential resources are selling links to completely unrelated sites. I have seen almost instant results from some of my link buys.


• More Long Term Approach: Send your traffic away.

Sending Your Traffic Away

The best internet resources are not well known for just their content, but also for the content they refer others to. You have a limited knowledge base. You have a limited number of things you can think, do, say, or write in any given time period. Others can help solve your problems of limitation though.

Hyperlinks smoothly allow readers to "chose their own destiny." When I first created this site I was somewhat greedy and wanted to "keep my traffic." As long as you have this approach you are selling yourself short. You are ignoring the vast pools of work others have already done for you free.

People will end up finding good information if they look long enough. I know I am not an expert on everything. I would prefer to have people associate good information from other sites with my site, vice findinging it through search or from another website.

People have called me up and stated that they were amazed by that interesting Vaneveer Bush paper I linked to on my site. When I link to papers that were at the fundament root of a hyperlink society it builds credibility. I specifically am talking about a call that I got just this week. Only in passing he mentioned that article, but I wonder how many others have taken the leap of faith to talk to some guy because something I pointed to on someone else's website.
The web is just a sea of information and the traffic I get is never my traffic to keep.

Eventually I will go through this site and link out to hundreds, if not thousands, of additional resources. For me to try to "keep my knowledge" or keep my secrets only goes against everything that makes the web great. AND IT PROBABLY HURTS SALES TOO!

Internet Marketing Solution

Internet Marketing Solution

An Internet Marketing Solution, what is it?

Internet marketing solution, this term was obscure some years ago. But today, as the Internet has spread its roots to almost all spheres of life and business, it’s important to keep up with it. If you want to succeed in the Web sphere, you need to understand the notion of an internet marketing solution. The main mission of internet marketing is to increase the traffic of your web site from search engines. A measure you use for this could be called internet marketing solution.

The definition of internet marketing solution could be akin to a method of using the Internet to promote some products or services.

The urgency of Internet Marketing Solution

If you decide to make your own internet business, or already have and want to develop it, don’t think that just having a well designed web site with a worthwhile product will bring you success. The solution necessary for a web business lies in the fact that your site should be found by a large number of web surfers – your potential customers. The problem is that there are an incredible number of sites on the Web and it’s impossible to become noticeable without using an internet marketing solution.

In practice, the average search engine user doesn’t look past the 11th page of the list of web pages presented on his request. Generally, it’s enough to look through a couple of pages of such a list to find the information you need. And of course, top-ranked sites aretaken by users as more competent. You can rest assurred that such web sites are well versed in an internet marketing solution, otherwise, it’s impossible to reach and hold such positions. So, a lot of work is necessary to compete with them.

Initial Internet Marketing Solution

When we talk about an initial internet marketing solution, we should rather called it an optimization solution; we imply the preparing of a high-quality Web resource. To provide a high-quality web site, one must also incorporate an initial internet marketing solution, making it optimized for search engines and ready for the customer visits. You should know that your site will be valued by search engines robots which decide whether it is worth it to become indexed, and these robots don’t care about the visual design of your site, but instead take into consideration on-the-page and off-the-page factors. Of course conversely it is not rational to only employ modern optimization strategies without providing relevant content and visually appealing pages, which is also very important to your customers. Initial internet marketing solutions should include steps such as defining keywords, optimization of pages, web submission and link strategy.

It’s very important to find the most relevant and popular keywords and phrases. In other words what your potential customers enter when they search for the information, services or products you offer. The competition of these words should also be taken into consideration.

The crucial element of an initial internet marketing solution – is optimization of web pages for search engines. They will evaluate the relevancy of your resource according to the frequency of your keywords, found on the page.

As the development of your internet business will depend on the traffic, you should be concerned with this information. The importance of the initial internet marketing solution of submission is evident. The suggestion of your well-optimized site to search engines and directories should bring you expected traffic. In the most cases free, or natural submission requires a long time before your site is listed. Such prospects usually don’t satisfy owners of web business and they resort to paid submission, which realize this result in a few days, instead of a few months.

The initial marketing solution of link strategy lies in providing inbound links from relevant competent web sites. This could invite search engine spiders before your submission and will make search engines consider your site to be worthwhile, as other competent sources have made it a point to link to it.

The strategy in an initial internet marketing solution should be applied to every web site aimed at become high-ranked in search engines, whether this means offering services, products, or just information. Neglect will ruin all your efforts and a subsequent internet marketing solution will not be completely effective.

Direct Internet Marketing Solution

Even if all initial aspects of the internet marketing solution are applied and you’ve got a quality website, it’s not yet the time to relax, open your pocket, and wait for the money to pour in. There’s another step of work connected directly to the internet marketing solution. Part of the current web marketing strategy uses internet advertisings: text links, banners, contextual ads and different pricing models, such as pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, pay-per-signup.

Pay-per-click advertising is an effective internet marketing solution and which really guarantees top placement. Most search engines offer this mechanism, where you pay every time your site gets a visitor directed by the search engine.

Another solution is the pay-per-impression system, which is familiar to pay-per-click. But using it you pay each time a page with your banner is viewed. It’s not as expansive as pay-per-click, but a lot of people could be familiar with your business via this method.

Advertising types of the internet marketing solution require investment, and there are some other strategies which could bring you traffic without spending money, but some time. If the sphere of your business allows, you can write articles for other sites. Suggest them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters or websites; place there a link to your website and a description of your offerings. This internet marketing solution should bring you many links and win you the premier position in your sphere.

Additionaly, you should publish your own newsletter. This will increase your web site awareness and enhance visitors loyalty. Another internet marketing solution that is available is issuing press releases. Find out something newsworthy about your product, and submit this information to one of the press release distribution websites. Don’t forget to place your website URL to bring you more traffic.

Participating in topic-related forums, weblogs and newsgroups should also bring you authority and traffic if you post your web site URL in the signature. One thing, should be pointed about this internet marketing solution – don’t spam. Another developing internet marketing solution, RSS, is also a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites and personal weblogs.

Analyzing Internet Marketing Solution

If you tried your best to build a web business, paid attention to the notion of an internet marketing solution, it would be silly not to analyze this work. It’s important to observe the progress of the keyphrases of your pages. According to the results you get, definite measures should be made to increase the effectiveness of your promotion campaign. It’s important to learn as much as you can about your visitors and the revenues. You should find out which ad campaigns work for you and which do not. Only this internet marketing solution can determine that you aren’t wasting your money.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search engine optimization tips in this category are devoted to the art of building your webpages effectively and making them interesting for the search engines. The articles under this heading describe general notions and terms of the search engine optimization field, providing you with a comprehensive introduction into SEO (search engine optimization).

The definition of search engine optimization is simple; it is a number of techniques used to make webpages attractive to search engines and benefit from high listings via changes to a site to make it more search engine compatible. Nowadays, search engines are complicated and protected systems, and search engine optimization becomes merely a science.

Mainly, search engine optimization tips and techniques are important as you can get traffic for free. You can obtain the same or even bigger number of visitors by optimization alone without having to pay for advertising. You can find out that many Web surfers tend to ignore paid (sponsored) results, which are displayed by the search engines, but if you site is shown on the top of the first page of SE results for the query, you are able to turn those surfers into visitors.

It is vital for every site owner to keep an eye on how his website ranks in the top search engines and directories. The truth is that your company’s site prestige and reputation is seriously damaged if its rankings are not in the top ten for the related keywords, even more so if rankings in search engines are lower than top thirty. If this is the case, you might as well be invisible on the Web. According to researchers at Forrestre Research, Inc., users hardly ever go beyond the top thirty search engine rankings for a single search. It is estimated that the top thirty search engine results receive over ninety percent of search traffic.

Here you can find out how Internet consumers mostly find websites, according to the survey of Forrestre Research, Inc.:

Search engines: 81%

Link from another site: 59%

Viral marketing (word of mouth): 56%

TV: 48%

Guessed URL: 41%

Online advertising: 20%

Radio: 19%

Direct mail: 10%

The problem with search engine optimization is that every site owner does it, so when a new technique gets into public domain, it becomes too popular too soon. Consequently, search engines answer to this step by reducing the weight in their ranking algorithms of such techniques in order to maintain the usability of their search results.

Nevertheless, search engine optimization offers distinctive features that are low risk, cost effective, provide reliable and constant results, brand awareness, and affordability. For websites, every little bit helps, so search engine optimization tips and techniques are vital for any business and every site owner. Search engine optimization is what helps you bring your message to the broadest and most targeted audience. It helps you not to get lost in the huge amount of competition because search engine traffic never stops if you have once achieved good ranking. Search engines promote your pages 24/7. Such important showing as ROI is well worthy and fast due to the search engine optimization as you get only targeted traffic to a site with the help of SEO.

Now you can see that search engines work and features should also be well known. Without knowledge of ranking algorithms and the way result listing is generating, most of your work can be idle or invisible for search engines, so you should make your site attractive to computer robot programs called spiders, which most search engines use. They find the pages for future inclusion via the links in the pages from their database. In general, links and their quality play very important role for search engine optimization. Moreover, speaking about search engine optimization tips and techniques, we should mention that, “Content and links share the kingdom.” Search engine optimizers argue about the prevalence of link popularity and believe that it always will be a key component in getting top ranking, but let’s start from the beginning.

What Search Engines and Directories Take Into Consideration?

As you know, spiders (which most search engines use) regard your site as HTML code only, so your first task will be to get full notion of the structure of HTML document. Spiders work in the following way: at first, they select and build search engine database of pages. After that, spiders follow links of the already known sites. Therefore, your page becomes the subject matter of search engine spider. What will a spider see or ignore?

Title

Speaking about tags optimization, we should start from title tag as all the search engines consider the keywords it contains. These keywords influence the ranking because search engines give them a great deal of weight in their ranking system. It is true that search engines pay attention on them during estimating your pages’ relevancy towards keywords. However, keywords are important when your title tag finally appears in the SERP (search engine result page). Remember that the interests of real people and all search engines are the same, so your title (which must help identify relevant keyword phrases) should be attractive for the surfers of the Web as well.

Description

The next HTML tag is the meta description tag. The content of this tag will be shown in the search result list of most search engines and directories. Try to make it search engine friendly. However, there is some thought that the description tag is not important for search engine optimization but as this work is easy enough it’s better to create some proper sentences that incorporate important keyword phrases. However, if you have no meta description tag on your site, search engines make it for you via selection of text where appear keyword phrases important for users while searching or the first few words of your webpage. Therefore, in order to avoid misunderstanding and bad results, description also deserves your attention.

Content

The main idea here is to make your content focused on the relevant theme throughout the site using targeted keyword phrases and making it in a way that reads naturally. It will help to avoid the situation when a site attracted lots of visitors but confuses them by content written with only purpose to stuff keywords here and there.

Quality

This parameter is more important for directory submitting as your site will be reviewed by a directory editor. The quality of the site means you should focus your site design on usefulness and comprehensiveness. Your site will attract visitors not because of the keen graphics or the smart domain name, but rather for information contained in your pages, which will enlighten them and answer the purpose of query.

Popularity

Link popularity is a very important factor that influences site relevance in the search engine ranking process. It is widely known that all of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them, so getting relevant links from other sites is huge aid for your site. However, it can be a daunting task. Links pointing to your site from low relevant sites can hardly help your pages. Try to avoid low ranking, low traffic, or unrelated sites while you are looking for link partners; otherwise, these links will be nearly worthless.

A last but vital factor is search engine optimization itself, but we should also mention that each of the major search engines has its distinctive shade for optimizing the site. That’s why search engine optimization is the art of getting higher visibility across today’s most important search engines.

Usually for indexing, crawler-based engines consider more factors than those they can find on your pages. They are so-called “off-the-page” factors. In order to enhance popularity of your site for search engines, you should pay attention to the balance of link exchange, text used in links that point to you, what the Page Rank of the linking pages is, whether the page is present in some directories under related categories, among other factors. All these factors will be regarded by the spider before putting your page into an index. You can also artificially increase your page’s relevance by “on-the-page” factors. This is a very important thing to consider when building successful site, too. Using targeted keywords, adjusting the corresponding areas of HTML code, and other factors can help you in developing a nice site, but, of course, you can hardly control other pages on the Internet, those which link to you. Therefore, off-the-page relevance prevails in the crawler’s eyes.

Another important section is optimization for a particular search engine. While all the major engines use different algorithms, you can play on the main purpose of all of them because the main their purpose is providing the searcher with the most relevant results available. It is the one common thread that helps your site to rank highly across all the major engines. Most of rules and search engine optimization tips for particular engine can facilitate you efforts in this way.

Optimizing for MSN could be formulated similar to the optimization tips and rules for all the major search engines. There are important both off-the-page and on-the-page factors when ranking. To rank highly on MSN, one needs to build a solid sized site, get a number of relevant links, and use balanced number of properly chosen keywords and quality content. Start from getting your site listed in the directories. The effects of the site and inbound links can be picked up very quickly, and you can rank well with good search engine optimization efforts in a few months on MSN. To rank well on the Yahoo! search engine, you should follow all the search engine optimization tips and techniques mentioned for MSN’s search engine. The distinctive factor for Yahoo! engine will be links and content of your site. More detailed information can be found in the Yahoo! devoted section of our site.

Google, which combines search engine optimization tips as for MSN as for Yahoo! search engines, regards even more factors. So we should take a closer and detailed look on its demands as a leading search engine. While Google would like you to believe that PageRank algorithm is main principle of their search technology, other factors are also regarded for site relevancy. Therefore, taking into consideration the leading place of this search engine, it is easy to see why every webmaster and website owner is primarily concerned about attaining Google rankings. Link building strategy plays an important role as far as the best practices in search engine optimization, as do quality content, size of the website, age of links, and so on.

In conclusion, optimizing for a new site can grow little by little, starting from the search engine, which will rank you more easily and qucikly. Gradually, you can develop your website popularity and number of links, which will help you to target more sophisticated and significant engine like Google. As we mentioned in the beginning, search engines strive to improve the quality of their search results, so optimization of your site should be continuous in nature for achieving better result in ranking.

Complete SEO Tutorial - Start from the beginning!

Complete SEO Tutorial - Start from the beginning!

SEO the short form of Search Enigne Optimization, is a tremendous need of the day for many webmasters...

You have made a web site and consider it as the #1 site that you could have ever made but, is that the case with the people of this world and most importantly, the search engines??

It's a fact that people are coming from the search engines and to let the world know that you exist you have to make search engines 'love' your site... and to do so you have to just take care of few things as listed below and I asure you that as you master these things you will certainly grow!!!

1. Site Concept This should be the subject that you like most! It could be anything. If you like travelling then you can make wonderful site on travel based, if you like animals you can come up with that site... just sit down for a minute and just think what do i talk about and what do you do for entertainment... because everybody has something special in him that makes him diferent from others.

2. Keywords Now, the next step would be to know what people actually type in the search engines to search for to get to the site that you want to make. Go to http://inventory.overture.com and type in the words that you think that people will type to see you site.

Extract few keywords from it but at the beginning just consider those that have less number of websites already on! Less websites= Less Competetion!!

3. On-page Optimization This is the very important section... Here you have to consider various things to develop a nice site. Your title tag must contain your primary keyword, the H1 to H6 tags must contain your keywords... your body text must have a proper balance of text and keywords in them... so that it is good for both the HUMAN and search engine ROBOTS...

4. Off-page Optimization This is of tremendous importance... These days search engines are considering sites that have proper balance of link exchange. Link exchange is a very important tool to enhance the popularity of you site...

Few places where you can make link exchange are

http://www.honest-links.net http://www.likmarket.net

http://www.link-exchange.ws

http://www.linkalizer.com

5. Wait and Watch as you grow! Now, that you have done all the things properly it's time to see the results... this could take some time but the rewards are just incredible!!

In the next coming article I would tell you how to get listed in the GOOGLE search engine in just 24-48 hours!!

Hope to see you on the top!!

Why is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) important?

Why is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) important?



Did Did you get tired one day from everybody's continual insistence that the Internet would revolutionise the way companies do business? Therefore, to 'get with the times' you hired a company to produce a tasteful, professional and up-to-date website. You integrated it with your backend accounting and financial systems so people could order products directly from the website. You then sat back and waited for the cash to roll in, right?

Now raise your hand if it didn't turn out to be that simple.

In the mad rush to get something (and anything) onto the Internet, companies made the leap unprepared. Many businesses forgot to ask one simply question: How will customers actually find our website? Since you literally share the Internet with another million websites, it is an important question. Being a perceptive marketing person, you realise there are four ways Internet users typically locate your site:


1. Learning it from traditional media such as TV, print, radio, brochures, business cards etc.
2. Link from another website
3. Recommended by someone
4. Found using a Search Engine (SE) such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc.



You only have major control over the first method - throw enough money into advertising and everyone will know about the site. You can even buy links from other websites such as the Yellow Pages. For companies that don't have the marketing budget of a large multi-national corporation, the fourth method is the only real manner of attracting new visitors. To make SEs a viable method, your website must appear in the top ten search results. Why? Nine out of ten Internet surfers do not go past the first 30 search results. Many do not even proceed further than the top 10 results.

How do you get your website into the top 10? An industry has arisen with the means and knowledge to answer this question. The process they employ is generalised as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is a methodology (some would argue art) employed to improve a website's rank in SE results given targeted 'keywords'. Keywords are the phrase(s) your target market uses to limit search results to locate your product or services. For example, you want your website to have a high rank when someone searches for 'ipod accessories'; but you don't really care if it rates highly for 'tropical fish' - that is not your target.

The key to this industry lies in the fact that SEs are actually very limited software programs. They don't have the intelligence to understand everything they see on the Internet. They use ever-evolving rules to score and rate a website's ability to answer a particular question. Armed with this knowledge, we can break the SEO process into three general categories:


1. HTML code optimisation: The first stage is the checking, and re-writing if necessary, of navigation and content structures on your website. SEs do not understand objects such as images, Flash, JavaScript etc. They will simply ignore them. There is no point proceeding any further if the SE cannot understand what it is seeing. Programmers undertake this category of SEO. A deep understanding of current web coding standards and techniques is necessary. Software packages often produce very poor results, and it usually takes a lot of human intervention to ensure optimum accessibility.


2. Content tailoring: A SE rates web pages according to their relevancy given a set of keywords. You must therefore tailor your content with these keywords in mind at all times. Fundamental to determining which keywords are relevant is an understanding of your target market. You must know the typical questions they ask to find answers. There are websites such as WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) that can help you to determine commonly used keywords. Remember: this is not a race to see how many keywords can fill the page. There is an optimum keyword density. Too dense and it is considered stuffing or spamming - you will be penalised. Too little, and you are not considered an authoritative source. Choosing to hone in on a specific set of keywords per page is also prudent. You are not trying to optimise for everybody on the Internet - only those who ask a specific question.


3. Cutting-edge optimisation: SEs use algorithms that are proprietary secrets and continually evolve over time. Categories 1 and 2 focus on making your website accessible to SEs and ensuring you have high quality content. These are well-established principles guaranteed to improve your rankings - regardless of how the SE algorithms advance. To give their clients an advantage, SEO practitioners can sometimes try to abuse the SE algorithms. They may take advantage of loopholes or shady methods. A simple example is 'stuffing' a page with invisible text - white text on a white background. This is invisible to humans, but SEs used to index this content. If taken one-step further by stuffing the page with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it becomes 'spamming'. SEs are smarter today and will notice these devious tricks. Websites using them will be heavily penalised. Category 3 is a moving target - and hence carries risk if poorly executed. What works today is innovative, but may be heavily penalised in the future once people abuse it to skew results. You should always be wary of introducing any initiatives that fall into this category.



So if you decide to give your site the SEO treatment, how long before you see the results? Google re-indexes websites everyday of the year. The process it follows ensures every entry in its database is re-indexed every 4-6 weeks. Google will re-index 'news' sites much quicker - almost daily - to stay current. Other SEs use roughly similar periods between re-indexes. Therefore it can take up to 4-6 weeks for changes in the ranking to be observed. Will the three categories in SEO improve your ranking? Yes. Will they keep you there? No. The SE algorithms evolve over time. SEO is a form of marketing and is therefore an on going process of monitoring, obtaining feedback and tweaking. Most companies do not release a ton of advertising material with getting feedback as to how they can improve it in the future.

Please remember that SEO is not the ultimate and final word on creating a profitable web presence. It is only one aspect of your Internet marketing strategy. A good SEO practitioner understands this. They realise that there is more to the Internet than just search engines. Obtaining links from reputable websites, advertising using traditional media and ensuring your customers recommend you to their friends is just as important. If they don't reflect this in their overall strategy, consider someone else who does.

Towards a New Philosophy of SEO

The following overview of a common SEO campaign is not an attempt to describe the processes in use by all SEO's, and in fact there are a handful of really good SEO firms out there. Good SEO firms are generally identifiable by two common elements: Longevity and Customer Loyalty Overview of a common SEO Campaign:

II - On Page Optimization: • a) Add textual content that is keyword rich - Embed pre-determined target keywords throughout text according to the SEO's notion of ideal keyword density and usage. • b) Add Title and Meta Tags that are keyword rich - Often this involves composing code that is extremely keyword dense, which fortunately is no longer an effective technique to manipulate rankings on most search engines. • c) Miscellaneous other elements such as Anchor Texts, Alt Text, etc. are manipulated to increase keyword density. II - Off Page Optimization: • a) Link Building - Ideally this involves finding related but non-competing web sites of high quality to exchange links with. However automated ink spamming is a common practice that is employed, which although initially effective, can result in expulsion from search indexes. Furthermore link spamming degrades the overall quality of the WWW. III - Adjustment: • a) On a regular basis the various "optimized" elements are adjusted in an attempt to find an ideal combination that will result in top rankings for the target keywords. This is quite often a lot of guesswork and wishful thinking. The Mission of this type of campaign is to take an existing website, regardless of quality and Make it Appear to be the Best. When such a campaign is successful, the SEO has succeeded in reducing the quality of search results for that keyword by positioning a web site that does not deserve a top position. Furthermore link spamming reduces the quality of the internet link graph by forging unnatural connectivity families.

Overview of Proposed SEO Campaign:

I - Ground Up Solutions: • a) The construction of innovative, high quality websites that are built according to concepts that reflect knowledge of search engine technology. • b) Rejection of existing websites as a standard with few exceptions. Offer complete solutions of design and SEO to insure uncompromising quality. II - New SEO Methodology: • a) Traditional SEO techniques should be abandoned to pursue a true Search Engine knowledgebase resulting from scientifically sound research. • b) Abandon the concept of "tricking" search engines into ranking web pages and focus on building websites of high enough quality that they can rank well based upon their own merit. • c) Citation development will still be an integral part of this campaign however new systems, standards of quality and types of citations are implemented and enforced such that the idea of link building no longer accurately describes this process. A New Philosophy for Search Engine Optimization The Mission of this type of campaign is to build a highly optimized web site that Is the Best. Websites will achieve top rankings for 2 reasons: 1. They are constructed as comprehensive authorities within their industry. 2. They are designed to make the most of their natural strengths through an understanding of search technologies.

How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking - PART 2

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.
Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign.

Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking - PART 1

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized the page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in search engine result listings. This is especially critical because most people who use search engines only look at the first page or two of the search results, so for a page to get high traffic from a search engine, it has to be listed in those first two or three pages.

In short, Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Search engine optimization is the practice of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by winning top ranking on the major search engines for selected search terms and phrases.

Search engine optimization is the adjustment of html page entities and content for the express purpose of ranking higher on search engines. Search engine optimization is the skill of designing or re-designing a website in order to improve the search engine ranking of that website for certain relevant keywords.

How do Search Engines Work?

In order to use Search Engine Optimization one must know full functionality of Search Engines. The working is as follows:

Search Engines for the general web do not really search the World Wide Web directly. Each one search a database of the full text of web pages selected from the billions of web pages out there residing on servers. When you search the web using a search engine, you are always searching a somewhat stale copy of the real web page. When you click on links provided in search engine search results, you retrieve from the server the current version of the page. Search engine databases are selected and built by computer robot programs called spiders. Although it is said they "crawl" the web in their hunt for pages to include, in truth they stay in one place. They find the pages for potential inclusion by following the links in the pages they already have in their database (i.e., already know). They cannot think or type a URL or use judgment to decide to go look something up and see what's on the web about it. Computers are getting more sophisticated all the time, but they are still brainless. If a web page is never linked to in any other page, search engine spider's cannot find it. The only way a brand new page - one that no other page has ever linked to - can get into a search engine is for its URL to be sent by some human to the search engine companies as a request that the new page be included. All search engine companies offer ways to do this.

After spiders find pages, they pass them on to another computer program for indexing. This program identifies the text, links, and other content in the page and stores it in the search engine database's files so that the database can be searched by keyword and whatever more advanced approaches are offered, and the page will be found if your search matches its content.
Some types of pages and links are excluded from most search engines by policy. Others are excluded because search engine spiders cannot accesses them. Pages that are excluded are referred to as the Invisible Web. The Invisible Web is estimated to be two to three or more times bigger than the visible web.

Brief Introduction to Search Engines

While the public generally refers to all Internet searching tools as search engines, there are actually three different types of it. These types are as follows:

Search Engines - AltaVista, Google, Teoma, AllTheWeb, MSN etc

Directories - Open Directory, Yahoo, LookSmart etc

Portals - AOL, Netscape, iWon, Lycos, HotBot, Excite etc

Search engines and directories take the following variables into consideration when determining your site's ranking in the results for a specific search:

Quality - The quality of your Web site affects the directory editor's evaluation of your submission. Quality refers to utility or usefulness and comprehensiveness.

Title - The title is one of the most important factors in your site's eventual search engine ranking. Because directory search engines such as Yahoo! only search through the title, description, and URL you submit, having important keywords in your title is critical.
Content - For search engines that index your page using an automated process, such as AltaVista, Google, Teoma, AllTheWeb, MSN, Inktomi, the content is critical. The content must be brief, focused, and internally consistent.

Description - The Meta description tag must speak convincingly to the search engine user and must include key words and phrases.

Popularity - Popularity is a term used to describe search engines' measurement of your site's importance to the Web community. It factors in the number, quality, and type of Web pages that include links back to your page. Google has a branded version of popularity it calls Page Rank. Links to your Web site increase your popularity and offer search engine spiders robots more opportunities to index your page.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization fine-tune the code on your page to help you win for specific searches.

Search Engine Optimization is a science as well as an art

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the science and art of achieving higher visibility across today's most important search engines. In order to achieve the maximum and most beneficial results, search engine optimization today needs to be carefully planned and executed as an integrated project.

Benefits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Search engine optimization will absolutely provide the lowest-cost traffic to your site but results generally take months to show up

Search engine optimization could be thought as an investment for your site

Search engine optimization involves a one-time fee and minimal monthly outlay

Search engine optimization is time-consuming to implement, can mean recoding entire site

Search engine optimization take months for results to kick in

There is no guarantee for a specific ranking in Search engine optimization.

Targets a relatively low number of high-trafficed keyword phrases in Search engine optimization.

Over the long-term is much cheaper than pay-per-click

Produces long-lasting results - good Search engine optimization can last for a year or more
Substantial Increase in Search Engine Traffic, When the site ranks for words which people search often we get lots of targeted traffic, Compare the Organic listing search engine traffic with other types of online advertisements this one is much cheaper,

Return of Investment is very fast and well worthy, Since Search engine optimization send only targeted traffic to a site the ROI for a site is quick and pretty high

Return of Investment has direct impact n the conversion Ratio since this is targeted traffic the conversion rate is very high.

Search engine traffic never stops once achieved high ranking for you, Search engines promote your site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Who needs search engine optimization services?

There are over a billion web pages over internet, and most of them are never known. Only one company in hundred-employ search engine optimization services. It is vital to the business of any start up company, or even a traditional established company to be seen and know in the Internet. Search engine optimization services are required by the vast majority of companies in the Internet.

What does search engine optimization services do for your company?

Search engine optimization services greatly increases the number of customers to your website by optimizing your site to make it rank high in the major search engines, which would increase one's business and sales.

Getting Started with Blogging and Google Adsense

If you have ever wondered about getting started with blogging and Google Adsense, here are a few tips to make your new blogging business work smoothly and easily.

Blogging and Google Adsense

The first part of getting started with blogging and Google Adsense is creating a blog. If you haven't already made your blog with one of the many services and programs available, you have quite a few choices ahead of you. Generally, if you want to start your Google Adsense revenue right away, you have a couple of choices. First is to join an already established blogging network, such as WritingUp. This network allows you to blog and has already set up the Google Adsense framework, but you will need to create your own account. Additionally, the network does take a percentage of the money you make from your clicks.

The second way to create a blog using Google Adsense easily is to make your blog with Blogger.com. A subsidiary of Google, Blogger already has the Google Adsense framework in place as well, and you can actually sign up for Adsense while creating your blog with the site. The integration with Blogger and Adsense is pretty seamless, and if you don't already have a blog software that you use, it can be a great choice. Additionally, Blogger's ease of use may lead to you blogging more, increasing your chance for earnings.

If you already do have a blog, through another company such as LiveJournal, TypePad or WordPress, you may need to put in a little more effort to get started with Google Adsense. There are many tutorials on the Internet, and even on these blog service's own pages, that will tell you how and where to place your Adsense code in order to maximize profits. All you have to do is sign up with the Google Adsense/Adwords program and select the type of ads you wish to display.

Many people start blogging without thinking of revenue, but others start blogs just for this purpose. Remember that not all blogs get a lot of Internet traffic or views, so you may need to wait to earn a lot of money from Adsense. Some blogs never get to the point where they earn an appreciable amount from their Adsense accounts, so this is another consideration when planning a blog. The best reason to blog is because you want to, not because you expect to earn money from it.

Getting started with blogging and Google Adsense is a lot easier than some might think. All that is required is a bit of time, and you can start earning small amounts of residual income right away, without much effort.

Blogging for Google Indexing

When most people think of blogging, they think about getting their message out to readers. There is, however, another audience that can be used. Yep, blogging for Google.

Blogging for Google Indexing

If you want to make money on the web, you have to focus on getting rankings in Google. To get rankings, of course, you first have to get your site included in the Google index. The index is simply the database Google maintains that has all the sites it has found on the web. When someone does a search on Google, it accesses the database and creates search results. If you are listed at the top of those results, people see your listing and click through to the corresponding page.

Google started out as the friendly, little guy battling big, bad Microsoft. It was extremely user friendly for most webmasters and getting rankings was not particularly difficult. As sad as it is to say, Google has evolved into a large corporate monster. When it comes to the web, Google is now far worse than Microsoft and a virtual bully on the web. It does what it wants, when it wants, how it wants and it doesn’t really care what anyone says. Ah, innocence lost.

One of the current problems with Google is getting into its index. Google has a bad habit of refusing to index all the pages on your site. You may have 500 pages, but Google will only pick up 97. Just as aggravating, it will often fail to index important pages on your site that you want to be ranked. So, how do you deal with this problem? One way is blogging for the purpose of being included in the Google index.

Google likes to stick its virtual hands in everything. While this is annoying, you can actually take advantage of it in some circumstances. In this case, we are talking about using Blogger.com. Blogger is owned by Google. Since it is a Google property, the robots the engine uses to fill its index run through all blogger posting once every few days. Ah, I love the smell of opportunity in the morning.

To get your pages indexed by Google, you should really consider starting a blog on blogger.com. Since Google “reads” it every few days, you can create blog entries that get the pages of your site indexed. To do so, you simply create a narrative entry for one of your pages. Include only half the content on that page and then a link that says “Read more…” that goes to the page on your site. The Google robots will usually follow the link to your site and add the page to the Google index.

When taking this approach, it is important to understand that the page mentioned in your blog will not immediately appear in the Google database. It can take a few weeks, but it should eventually appear. If you are lucky, Google will also index the rest of your site.

Internet Marketing Trend

With so much information on the net regarding Internet marketing, identifying the best approach is difficult. Following is a discussion of the strongest Internet marketing trend.

Internet Marketing Trend

Internet marketing trends are a dime a dozen. Reports and studies often find things we all already know if we use our common sense. In general, more people are using the Internet to find services and products, the volume of sales is increasing each year, and people are nervous about identity theft. Wow, what a surprise. Let’s take a look at real trends you can bank on.

One of the key Internet marketing trends is a timing issue. While the Internet is available and used 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, buying trends do not encompass this vast time period. Instead, they are specific to particular periods.

In general, people are far more likely to take action on a site during the work week and during work hours. When they search for something during this period, they are already motivated to purchase. On weekends or holidays, sale conversion rates will drop as people are more likely to be blowing time just browsing around the Internet.

So, how can you use this information to your benefit? Your communications with clients should be oriented to occur during the week, preferably on a Monday or Tuesday. Your marketing materials should also be oriented to offer incentives for limited time periods, typically one or two days from Monday through Thursday. Finally, you should be sending out email newsletters on Monday evenings, so your prospects can read it when they come to work Tuesday morning. The hassles of Monday should be over, which will make them more receptive. These guidelines apply throughout the year with one exception.

The holiday season on the Internet runs from early November through the end of the third week of December. If you sell products or services that can be tied into the holiday season, you can’t help but make a bundle during this period. Prospects are highly motivated to buy and you need to get in front of them. Email communication should be sent every three days beginning in early November. The first Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend is a huge online sales day. From that point forward, you should be sending different email communications to prospects and former clients on a daily basis. This is your golden time, so get in front of your clients.

There is no single Internet marketing trend that is going to magically appear. Learn from the above and you can create an upward trend in your revenues.

SEO Target Marketing

Making sure that the right people see your advertisements and information about your company can be a struggle – but using techniques like SEO target marketing can really help get the word out.

Target marketing is a form of advertising that gears your commercials or ads to a specific segment of the population. While this might seem like a daunting task, chances are you have already started to use target marketing in your campaigns. If you choose where to place your ads on websites by who the readers are and the content of the site – you've already begun target marketing. SEO target marketing is just an extension of this process.

SEO, or search engine optimization, requires that you use certain keywords that are easily searched for within popular search engines. These words, or phrases, are easily found with some of the SEO marketing tools and websites that are available for your use – so finding which keywords would be best for your business is as easy as describing your company. Once you have decided on which SEO words and phrases are best for you, then you can decide on how to begin your target marketing plan.

One of the best ways to use SEO target marketing is through a well written and frequently updated blog with a specific theme. In order to get a lot of hits – another term for your site being pulled up on a search engine page – you will need to have fresh content, and lots of it. Blogs make this easy, because of their quickly updated articles and easy to search text and information. Many people search specifically for blog content when they want to learn something new – and putting your ads and information on these pages offers high visibility.

Blogs are also good because you can add keywords, or tags, to each entry or post. These keywords can be linked to many other blogs and information systems, through blog search engines like Technorati. By using these keywords on relevant posts that relate to your target audience, you can be sure that you will be cross linked from many other websites and blogs. This will greatly increase the number of people who will see your advertisements and learn about your company.

Blogs are a great tool for SEO target marketing – they can be on almost any topic, and appeal to any sort of audience you want to reach. They also make implementing SEO techniques easy and fast.

Internet Marketing – Long Term Strategy - SEO

Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.

Search Engine Optimization – “SEO”

Search engine optimization, or “seo” as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The reason seo is considered a long term strategy is…well, it takes a long time. If your marketing is focusing on highly competitive keywords, such as “Europe travel”, there is so much competition that you could be looking at two or three years before getting top rankings. The time period is really a factor of how fast you can build links. Sometimes you can move up within 6 months, but sometimes it takes a few years.

Is it worth it to wait for 2 years to get into the top five for “Europe travel”? There are over 2,000,000 searches a month for the keyword phrase. What do you think? If you offer a service or product related to traveling in Europe, how much money would you make if even 1 million people visited your site each month? Think about that.

The Big Three

There are three, and only three, search engines that matter when it comes to seo – Google, Yahoo and MSN. What about Alta Vista, etc.? They simply don’t have enough traffic to make them worth pursuing.

There are four keys to seo. First, you must research the amount of traffic various keywords are receiving. Second, you must modify your site to include the exact keywords phrases in the meta tagging and text. Third, you must add and add and add content to your site. The more content, the more the big three will like your site. Finally, you must trade links with other sites that have content related to your site.

The keys to pursuing a seo marketing strategy are discipline and patience. Let’s take a quick look at each.

You must have the discipline to stick with your seo effort when you are seeing no results. The desire to throw one’s arms in the air in frustration is going to be strong. Just remember that every step you take today will pay off down the road.

Patience balances feelings of frustration and you are going to have a lot of those. Look, it is going to take a long time, so resist the urge to whine. Stick a sign up over your desk counting off the months or have a regular exercise routine. If nothing else, you can day dream about all of the free traffic you are going to get one day.

Search engine optimization is not for the weak of mind or impatient. If you can stick with it, this long term marketing strategy always pays off.

Internet Marketing – Short Term Strategy - PPC

After spending a lot of time and effort on building a site, many wonder where they should start with Internet marketing. Site owners can be bombarded with pitches about marketing and it is hard to sort out what should be done. In this article, a short term marketing strategy is discussed.

Short Term Marketing Strategy

The single best short term marketing strategy is pay-per-click marketing campaigns. A “PPC” campaign simply involves placing advertisements on the results pages of search engines. In essence, you open an account with the PPCs, develop a list of keywords and create ads for those keywords. The two best PPC platforms are Google Adwords and Overture.

Google Adwords lets you place ads on Google search results. In addition to its own search engine, Google also supplies search results to AOL and other sites. When you create your ads, you can choose to place your ads on “content” or “search” results. Select only “search” results until you are sure the advertisement and your site coverts traffic into revenues.

Yahoo purchased Overture a few years ago for 1.8 billion dollars. Overture places advertisements on search results for MSN and, ta da, Yahoo among others. To build your ads, you search for keywords from a list provided by the PPC and create individuals ads. It can take a long time, but it is worth it.

Which PPC is Best?

Both Google and Overture have serious benefits. Google will send more traffic to your site than Overture. Getting your ad in front of AOL users is particularly advantageous because AOL users are buyers. For whatever reason, they simply seem to be more amenable to buying what you’re selling.

If Google is so great, why use Overture? In many ways, Overture has serious advantages over Google Adwords. One of the biggest advantages involves the size of ads.

To effectively run a profitable PPC campaign, you must get the maximum bang for your buck. One strategy for doing this is to qualify your traffic by explaining details in your description. If you only carry one model of a product, say that so money isn’t wasted with people who are looking for a different model clicking on your ad. With Google, you only get two to three words in your title and 8 to 10 in your description.

PPC advertising is a tremendous short term marketing strategy for a number or reasons. First, the advertising gets traffic to your site immediately. Second, it allows you to test the ability of your site to convert traffic into dollars. If conversions are low, you can modify the site and get immediate feedback.

If its time to get working on your marketing, research the PPC possibilities. Google Adwords and Overture have a lot to offer.

Branding Goal – Internet Marketing Strategy

Branding refers to the vague notion of creating an identity for a product or name brand with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the scene, the company has been able to create such a strong name brand that most people use the word “coke” instead of soda even when they prefer Pepsi. In the world of marketing, all bow before the marketing team that accomplished this branding.

The Internet, however, is a different beast. That same marketing team would be crushed if they went after a similar strategy on the net.

The Internet is so large that branding is an expensive and difficult goal unless you are the first major presence in a niche. Sites like EBay and Amazon were the first major money players in their fields, giving them a huge advantage over subsequent competitors. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant site, your branding goal is going to meet with failure or limited success at best. If you want to stick with your branding goal, the only cost effective and ultimately successful Internet marketing strategy is a width search engine optimization campaign.

Search engine optimization is simply an effort to get pages on your site ranked high in search results on the three big search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. To meet your branding goal, the best Internet marketing strategy is to identify every single phrase your prospects use to find services or products in your business area. You then build optimized pages for every single phrase and get them ranked.

This strategy has two benefits. First, it will produce free traffic to your site. If you build 200 pages and each gets 50 visitors a day, your site will receive 10,000 visitors a day. The second benefit is your branding goal is met because the site appears in all the top 10 rankings. Regardless of what the prospect searches for, they keep seeing your site. This creates both brand recognition and credibility. As they visit your site over and over, they will also become readily familiar with your unique selling position as presented on the site.

To identify all the phrases being used by your prospects in searches, you must use a tool provided by Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a program that analyzes web searches on the major search engines. You simply enter a keyword and it kicks out every phrase being used by consumers, how often they use it and how many sites are trying to get ranked under it. This information is the equivalent of your Internet marketing bible. Give it a look:

Word Tracker

If you have a branding goal in mind, avoid wasting your money on banners and such unless you are in a niche that isn’t dominated by any single site. Instead, use the width search engine optimization Internet marketing strategy to establish your brand and pick up tons of free traffic.