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.