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Pay Per Click promotion is the most popular and effective method of advertising goods or services on the internet.  Under normal conditions, PPC involves promotion appearing on distinct web pages and on search engine results pages. An advertiser creates what is most commonly a two or three line text ad which is subsequently displayed on website pages and search pages which present targeted results to the individual searcher or site user.

While someone who is viewing the results page or the site on which the advertising is featured clicks on that ad or banner, they are immediately redirected to the web page that the advertiser wants to show them. Therefore, because this click on their ad has allowed the advertiser to present their sales or landing page to that visitor, they pay every time someone clicks on their advert.

The amount that the individual advertiser pays for each click depends on many factors and is in particular dependent upon how much they are willing to ‘bid’ to have their advert displayed. This is because the position on the page where an individual ad is shown is mainly decided by how much the advertiser behind it is willing to pay for that position in an auction-like bidding process.

There are many different PPC advertising companies who place adverts all over the internet, but with minor variations, most of the PPC advertising networks work in a broadly similar way.  The advertiser chooses a keyword term or phrase that best describes or refers to the product or service that they are advertising and construct their advert around this phrase.

The online advertising agency through which they place their adverts then ensures that the ad that they have just created appears on websites and search results pages that best match the particular term around which the advert was created.  For example, if an advertiser is selling green widgets, then the primary keyword phrase around which they are going to build their advert is going to be something that mentions ‘green widgets’.  Consequently, the next time someone searches the internet for information about green widgets, it is this particular advert that is likely to be shown to them assuming that the advertiser has paid enough for the advert to appear on the first search results page.

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When compared to other forms of promoting or advertising your business, Pay Per Click advertising (sometimes known as Cost Per Click or CPC) has many advantages over using ‘free’ advertising mediums like writing and publishing articles.

• Using PPC to promote or advertise your business is an extremely quick way of getting your marketing message live and out there on the net. In many cases, your adverts can be online and viewed within an hour of creating them.
• Pay Per Click advertising enables you to extend your market reach. Although you may be able to get pages of your website featured in the natural organic search results, doing so takes some time and is something of a lottery, whereas using PPC guarantees that your advert will appear on appropriate search results pages and websites.
• The traffic that you bring to your website from PPC advertising is targeted, prequalified traffic. Because your advert has been shown only to people who have already expressed a degree of interest in the product or service that you’re offering by using a specific search term, the chances of them taking the action that you want them to take when they land on your site is significantly increased. Consequently, the conversion rate from PPC advertising is likely to be considerably better than it would be using free advertising resources like article marketing.
• PPC advertising programs usually offer the ability to track the performance of the adverts that you place using that particular system. It is therefore considerably easier to calculate such important factors as conversion rates (the number of people who do what you want them to do), the acquisition cost of each visitor and your return on investment (ROI). Because most PPC systems offer this information, you are able to improve your advertising and your subsequent results, which will ultimately improve the profitability of your business.
• If you want individual pages of your website to appear high up the search results page in the natural search results (those on the left-hand side of the search page), you have to optimize your site for the search engines. If you are using PPC advertising, there is no need to worry about search engine optimization although it is obviously a very sensible idea to make sure that your site is optimized too.
• Search engine optimization strategies take time and effort to learn and implement. Using PPC advertising, you can bypass this learning process to get your promotional materials live almost instantly.
• You have complete control over your advertising campaign. This is particularly appropriate if, for example, you are promoting a product or service that has relatively temporary appeal or is seasonal. For instance, you would not want to be promoting a Christmas related product in the middle of August and PPC advertising fits in very well with this idea because you can turn it on and off as you want.
• You choose whether you want to advertise only on the search results pages, or whether you want your advertising to appear on websites and blogs in your niche as well. If you do, it is even possible to target specific high traffic sites on which you want your advertising to be placed, thereby almost guaranteeing a healthy flow of traffic from these adverts. At the same time, because as a general rule, you should bid lower for content network advertising (i.e. ads on individual sites), this traffic is often extremely cost-effective.

Alongside these advantages, there are a couple of disadvantages but in truth, the upsides of using PPC advertising far outweighs the downside.  The most obvious disadvantage of using PPC advertising is that it costs money to do so. There is also the factor that whilst most of the individual clicks on your adverts are likely to be genuine, there will be a certain amount of ‘wastage’ caused by clicks from people who are not really interested in what you have to offer, competitors or even just people who think it is funny to waste your money.  Furthermore, using PPC only works for as long as you are willing and/or able to continue paying for your advertising. As soon as you stop paying, your advertising also stops.

Less obviously, if you are using the most popular PPC advertising program on the net, which is Google AdWords, you need to do some work to make sure that your advertising efforts fit in with what Google want you to do.

If you create adverts in the way that Google wants you to, your cost per click will be minimized whereas the opposite is also true. If you do not create ads the Google way, the cost per click is likely to be multiplied several times over.

Nevertheless, apart from the fact that using PPC advertising costs money, it is by far and away the most effective strategy for maximizing the number of people who are introduced to your opportunity or offer.

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We became quite accustomed to Google’s jumps from one algorithm changing to another. You may say that, WTF, Google is the master in his onw backyard. Yes, true, but internet it’s not quite a backyard and that intensely preached rich, memorable user experience that user is supposed to have might not increase as we or they may expect.

So, is it true, lots of so called internet marketers had become filling the web with spam and duplicate content, therefore constant changes in order to prevent them from turning SERPs into their own appendix were needed but it looks like this time there are lots of folks with legit complains against the recent changing.

The program change also appears to be touching extremely big websites with common stuff  pages, resembling E-commerce sites. As you know these kind of sites usually don’t have many IBLs and are  lost within million other web pages They also don’t have substantial quantities of exclusive content on them.

Look what Matt Cutts says:

What’s next?  I you look on webmaster tools, you can see that for a couple of months Google introduced the number the impression responding to a query and the number of clicks those impressions get; based on those 2 figures we can easily calculate the CTR (here is the example with this site ):

Search queries

Probably, in the near future, google will ranks sites similar to Ad Ranks on Adwords and will assign a quality score to each keyword.

Please let me know what do you think about this, thanks in advance

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Google changed its algorithm recently and redesigned result pages. This may have SEO implications but it wasn’t mainly about that I wanted to talk you about but about PPC adwords implications.

In terms of search market this change wouldn’t seem to have much effect, in the sense that google increased its domination during last month. But what’s going to be affected will be the rankings on serps, as since now users have a faster shortcut to different categories. Adding the left-navigation bar would leverage the power of some sites while will might affect others. Ranking well on overall search will still be a doubtlessly advantage and will allow certain type of sites to get more clicks as they did before.

Real time search has become since now very important and should be carefully considered on SEO.

But what I actually wanted to bring you in attention wasn’t seo, but implication for adwords ppc. Please notice that there were clear studies showing what were the best ads places for CTR and for conversions: the higher was the ad position, the more increased CTR but with lower conversion rate. There was an optimum place for conversions, I think this is about to change now, but we are going to see.

This was just a quick note for all our SEO clients.

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Google

Yes, angel and demon, love and hate of many web site owners and developers. Probably trying to stop spam, Google developed a system starting from internal PageRank formula that makes a lot of people feel aggrieved. Having at this point a lot of experience in SEO and adwords, I will try to share some basic facts I encounter within this field, even if that means for me putting my neck directly on the wolf’s mouth.

I run into several cases where Google misinterpreted SEO factors and penalized sites that had not any guilt, this is the side effect of hyper-controlling the Web.

Adwords

I could feel it on my own skin, that if your keywords are not targeted adequately on PPC,  Adwords will crush you.  Some guys suggest that instead of joining Adwords to do SEO for your website, which allegedly it will give you traffic for long time.  This is partially true, because at a certain point Google will change algorithm and take you out from a good SERPs positioning. Besides, if your site is new you are like doomed, because even if denied, the google sandbox exists and it might keep you there until it take the crap out of you.

It is true that if you have a decent new site Google would send you traffic on long tail keywords, but wave goodbye to 2 keywords search phrases before you site get a decent internal PageRank (which is told to be applied to pages, but this is a myth, the domain name bear the weight).

If you apply some methods to Adwords properly, it can be a huge boost for your traffic and referral success.  Adwords can bring instant traffic to your website, which can be very advantageous if you have a brand new web site and you are not getting enough traffic yet.

For beginners especially I don’t recommend marketing the index page (home page), but they may want to consider advertising some other purposely built pages. It can be very profitable if you are advertising a product or service that converts well and you have a good comprehension of how to use Adwords.

ROI

The formula for ROI is as follows (keeping in mind that the “revenue minus cost” in the top line equals profit): Profit/Investment. For any campaign where the advertiser’s goal is to get a conversion, whether it be a sign-up, a sale, or something else, the ROI should be greater than 100% – which simply means that for every dollar spent on adwords, they’ve made a profit.

Adwords offers a free ROI calculator, which allows you to determine the optimal spending level and return on investment for running an PPC advertising program.

There are several ways to calculate ROI, but for PPC probably the best way is to start from CPA (cost per acquisition), which allows to get some figures to be transformed in percentage. Based on this percentage, you may calculate how much each click brings to you.

If your goals don’t have values, you won’t be able to calculate the return on your investment.

Keywords

Keywords are very important in adwords because they are ad triggers and they may determine the relevancy of the ad related to users search query. Keywords have an impact on landing page quality, through a relevancy score that’s assigned. CTR, landing page quality and ads relevancy are the main factors determining keywords QS. If you don’t understand very well the importance of QS, you better give up advertising on google. Roughly saying, QS is google finding for keeping out unprofitable ads, a kind of PR for ads, which is expressed in AR (ad ranking). AR will determine ad position on the page.

As a general rule for QS, delete poorly performing keywords and optimize keywords to bring in convey more qualified leads. Identify which ads are performing and which aren’t. Refine your Keywords. Use word combinations and phrases that describe your business. Utilize exact and phrase keyword matching options. Use the AdWords Keyword Tool to generate negative keywords. Eliminate unrelated keywords, broad keywords (here are some tricks, because broad match has its role), one word keywords. Use brand names and product parts. Add misspellings. Create new Ad Groups to improve exposure CPC Adjustment & Conversion Results  Fine tune your bidding strategy. Higher bids for converting keywords. Lower bids for general & non-converting keywords (or better, take them out). Check your keyword’s ad position.  After a new campaign has been running for about a month check the percentage of (CTR) of all expressions of keywords in each ad group in the tab “Tags” index.  Your income is determined by the interaction Alternative fruitful between keywords of the ad and landing page, all three work together in a good relationship.

These are general rules, but in fact, if you don’t know how to maintain or the heal QS for some keywords, you better find some others. Remember that you can lower QS for any keyword, which will lead to about 300% increase of the first page bid for each QS unit.  You see, here only the experience might help you to keep it on the right track.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are perhaps the most important part of your online marketing strategy and now that Google is factoring in the relevancy of your landing pages into the Quality Score of your Google Ad Groups, creating landing pages is more important than ever.  An effective landing page is a crucial component to help you convert browsers into buyers and to get your pay-per-click ads in Google to rank above your competitors.  Each new landing page has a unique URL so that you can point all the traffic from each of your Ad Groups in Google for example to the respective landing pages you have just setup.  You can use Google Analytics custom reports to segment data in many way..

Conversion

In my understanding there no direct relation between CTR and clicks and conversion rates.  For higher positions, there seems to be higher CTR, as well as lower conversion rates for these upper positions.  For inferior positions the CTR rates drop, but the average conversion rate goes up (this is very important!).  Also you may find that in a lot of cases the clicks have nothing to do with actually displaying content to the clicker so conversion rates have no direct correlation to clicks, clicks are only directly related to fees you pay google.  Compare keyword conversion rates and ROI and see how different search result positions perform for each keyword.

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It has been a while while Microsoft and Yahoo have announced a 10-year internet search partnership in an endeavor to take away users from search giant Google.  What’s going to transform for the field of search engine optimization after this Yahoo and Bing transaction.  While Google has no plans to change the user interface like what Microsoft has done with Bing, it is said that Caffeine will change the way Google search indexes, crawls and ranks the search results, making it much better than it is at the present.  Microsoft Bing rolls out more new features Real time search extended, Foursquare added to Maps Microsoft introduced new features to its Bing search engine together with Quick Tabs, an Answer box, and new mapping tools powered by Foursquare to deliver real-time data embedded in maps. The improved search functionality saves users a bit of time by helping them get to where they’re going faster.

Microsoft previewed quite a lot of new features for their search engine at the Search Engine Strategies 2010 Conference in New York , highlighting foursquare integration and new design ideas. For instance, unlike the simple Google interface, Bing results include a list of links for enhancing your search.

Microsoft has incorporated foursquare’s widespread location-based data for a real-time experience with Bing Maps.  Microsoft hopes to incorporate much more significant data into the Bing search experience-an effort you can already see being experienced.  Microsoft executives have been transparent about their intentions to pursue bold measures to disrupt Google’s dominant place in the search market.  Microsoft and Google have considerable weight, and it is not at all clear how Microsoft will handle its “low cost” and bundled search products.

Microsoft hopes to incorporate much more significant data into the Bing search experience-an effort you can already see being tested.  Users can anticipate all of these updates to be rolled out before the weather goes bad again, and our best deduction is they’re interesting enough to gain the search engine a few more fans.  In the world of search and discovery, there aren’t many viable examples that give users the information they didn’t know.

In addition to some sunshine, the next few months are going to see interesting updates from Bing.  For example, unlike the simple Google interface, Bing results incorporate a list of links for enhancing your search.  Modifying the user customizable Bing Search Preferences for basic personalization of search engine results.

So, who’s going to win?  Hard to say… but the battle is keen… It’s obvious that end user will benefit after all of this competition. We are looking forward to see new features from the 3 search engines giants.

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A deeper look into PPC advertising

PPC is often known as search engine marketing, IMO the most powerful web marketing tool. In one of my previous posts I presented some figures related the advantages of paid search. I’ve noticed there are lots of users seeing PPC as being somewhat isolated of SEO, which am going to point out it’s not true at all. Actually, successful PPC campaigns are tightly related to SEO, especially on Adwords, where the variable Quality Score comes in place.

I want you to understand that the presentations on this blog are not merely theory, but insights given by practice on the most complex PPC campaigns and SEO you can imagine. The author has a deep knowledge of web marketing theory and his prospective doesn’t aim to simply throw some words on a blog – as you can find a lot on the web – but to share some important facts with you.

Why PPC depends a lot on SEO?  First of all, for 2 simple reasons: (1) the quality score (QS) is related to (a) ads’ relevancy plus (b) landing’s page quality and (2) QS is the most important factors influencing your campaigns’ cost.

BID RANKING determines the position of your ad on the page (AD RANKING) and is calculated from Max CPC x QS. Please keep in mind that a high quality score may determine an ad to have priority against a higher ranking ad, if the ad ranking is a result of higher max CPC and lower QS. You may better understand this if you look closer to the formula:

Actual CPC = (ad rank to beat / QS) + $0.01

Let’s assume that you are on the fist position with ad rank = 20 and QS = 5  (this means max bid = $4.00) and the second position has an ad rank = 12 and QS = 6  (hence max bid = $2.00), you have to pay ( 12/5 ) + 0.01 =  $2.41 (CPC).  But you may have the same ad rank with a higher QS, for instance:

Ad rank = 20, QS = 10, therefore max bid is $2.00, but in this case your actual CPC would be:

(12/10) + 0.01 = $1.21 !!! which is basically half of the money for the same first position!!! You can easily imagine how this does reflect on  your budget: you cut to half your advertising cost!

Conclusion

This is a brief example pointing out the tight relation between PPC campaigns and SEO. All 3 main factors determining the QS are related to SEO: CTR (apparently not that close), ad relevancy (which is connected to landing page content) and landing page quality (how your landing page is organized).

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As I am working for a while as a SEO expert and PPC professional, I would like to share with you some basic facts that I learned in a live environment. You may search and find a lot of theory about SEO on the Web and you can even conduct your own successful SEO without too much of investment. However, I’ve noticed that there is a boundary for a self teaching person, and that’s not because of lack of ability of that person, but rather because of lack of information. I must ascertain that there are on the Web lots of contradictory theories regarding SEO, which makes even harder for a newbie to get to the right point on this area without a minimum of experience.

Why 3 layers?  And why layers, term that make us think of design or even programming?  Well, because though everybody seems to know the difference between on page and off page seo, not every single person gets the right relationship between these 2 and the 3 one, which is traffic they finally would like to generate, or – even more specific – money.

I. ON PAGE LAYER

OK, there is a lot of stuff on the internet about how to do on page seo as it should. Let me pinpoint some of the major mistakes “self seo professionals” do:

1. Title: even at the faster glance it’s obvious that most sites don’t have the proper titles. And am not referring to the html source, where title must be the first tag after opening page tags, but the title’s structure across the site.  There are basic rules to be followed for the title.

Remember:

a. Keyword frequency

Frequency is the number of times your keyword is used in the analyzed area of the page.

Example: If the page’s first heading is ‘Get the best ABC services provided by ABC Company’, frequency of keyword ‘ABC’ in the heading will be two. Frequency relates only to the exact matches of a keyword. Therefore, frequency of key phrase ‘ABC services’ will be one, because as exact match, this keyword is used only once.

Search engines use frequency as a measure of keyword importance.

Search engines rate pages with more keywords as more relevant results, and score them higher. However, you should not use too many keywords, since most search engines will penalize you for this practice for being seen as an attempt to artificially inflate rankings.

b. Keyword weight (density)

Keyword weight is a measure of how often a keyword is found in a specific area of the Web page like a title, heading, anchor name, visible text, etc. Unlike keyword frequency, which is just a count, keyword weight is a ratio.

Keyword weight will depend on the type of keyword, that is if the keyword is a single word or phrase. If the keyword includes two or more words, for example, ‘ABC services’, every word in the key phrase (i.e. both ‘ABC’ and ‘services’) contributes to the weight ratio in the weight formula, and not as one keyword (‘ABC services’).

Keyword weight is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword).

Example: The title of a Web page is ‘Get Best ABC Services’. Keyword weight for ‘ABC services’ is 2*1/4*100%=50%. If you reduce the number of words in the title by removing the word ‘get’, so the title becomes ‘Best ABC Services’, than the keyword weight will be larger: 2*1/3*100%=67%. Finally, if you only keep ‘ABC Services’ in the title, the keyword weight will become 100% — 2*1/2*100%.

So, to increase the keyword weight, you should either add some more keywords or reduce the number of words in the page area. The proportion of the keywords to all words will become larger, so will the keyword weight.

Many search engines calculate keyword weight when they rank pages for a particular keyword. Normally, high keyword weight tell search engines that the keyword is extremely important in the text; however, a weight that is too high can make search engines suspect you of spamming and they will penalize your website’s rankings.

c. Keyword Prominence

Prominence is another measure of keyword importance that relates to the proximity of a keyword to the beginning of the analyzed page area. Being the keyword that is used at the beginning of the Title, Heading, or on top of the visible text of the page is considered more important than other words. Prominence is a ratio that is calculated separately for each important page area such as a title, headings, visible text, anchor tags, etc.

HTML pages are written in a document-like fashion. The most important items of a document’s visible text are placed at the top, and their importance is gradually reduced towards the bottom. This idea can be also applied to keyword prominence. Normally, the closer a keyword to the top of a page and to the beginning of a sentence, the higher its prominence is. However, search engines also check if the keyword is present in the middle and at the bottom of the page, so you should place some keywords there too.

The prominence formula takes the following factors into account:

i. Keyword positions in the area,

ii. Number of words in the keyword, and

iii. Total number of words in the area.

100% prominence is given to a keyword or keyphrase that appears at the beginning of the analyzed page area.

Ok, this recommendations are taken randomly from a desktop SEO optimizer, but it look like everybody writes about but very few follow them.

2. Headings

Your pages must have a h1 tag and a well defined headings structure. This is one of the most overlooked on page seo rules.

3. Semantics

The SEs are looking for the theme of the page rather for the keywords. Keywords are only indicators for the theme. Their density has a certain importance, but it’s rather about context than isolated keywords.

4. Internal links

Too much javascript may keep away good rankings on SERPs. SEs can read it, but don’t rely on that.

5. HTML errors

You may not realize the impact of too many html errors on SEs. That causes pages to load slow and DOM errors may puzzle the spiders.

II. OFF PAGE LAYER

I may refer it as a layer, as long as SEs see external links as a part of the target site. In my previous post I said, somewhat metaphorical, that SEO is going to die in a certain regard, as more complex search optimizations replace it. But, on the other hand, I believe, based on what a IT system means, that search engines are going to survive and rule the internet long time since now on. Actually, technically speaking, you cannot replace the role of a search engine, as you cannot put anything else instead of a database. Therefore, different types of marketing will come and pass but they all will gravitate around SEs. There is the new trend with SMM (social media marketing), VSO (video search optimizing) and so on, but they all rely ultimately on a kind of search engine. And you cannot get rid of Google, Bing or Yahoo (as some folks would want to) because of the simple fact: they have (1) technology and (2) the know how, the human resources, the intelligence.

So think of Search Engines as of a very large database to which users send queries for relevant results. Please have in mind that SEs treat each user as his own client, which means will do their best to provide meaningful results. We are clear so far with FROM clause and SELECT query but what about WHERE clause? Or ORDER BY?  Order by what?  This is where off page seo comes in place. You would be amazed if you saw how many entities are trying to spam the SEs index. Behind the scenes, there is an ongoing battle between spammers and SEs. Why?  Simple, because for many of them good rankings mean money. So, a few words about the 3^rd layer, the money layer.

III. THE MONEY LAYER

Called real traffic by some folks   You know, when a site owner asks for seo, he/ she actually is not that much interested in links, tags or whatever technical term, but only to be on top of SERPs. I explained in one of my previous posts why pure SEO cannot reveal as an isolated method certain ranking factors, as there are some other variables as well as players. SEO is not like playing a ball against a wall but playing with a real, opposite (from market share prospective) opponent. So, you are in a game where each player wants to outsmart you.

According to my experience, I dare to affirm that internet is a very large and there is still place for everybody. If you are smart enough, you may pinpoint your niche and see your business easily growing. However, if you want a large piece of pie, you must exercise your “muscle” and invest some big buck before feeling the taste of success.

Am going to talk more about the money layer in one of my future posts. The idea is that not all traffic is money traffic and that users may move back and forth on your site without bringing much value or profit to your business if you don’t know how to play this game.

So, have in mind that traffic doesn’t mean necessary money, leads and conversions and that SEO itself brings traffic only as a “secondary effect”, as it’s not its main goal.

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SEO and major players

Recently, a number of web market specialists came up with some puzzling assertion: SEO is dead! Let’s take a look behind the curtains and try to find out what lies behind their declarations. In one of my recent previous posts on this blog I said that SEO – the way we knew it – would die soon. Major players like Google, Bing and Yahoo reacted somewhat slow and with no appropriate strategy to the recent configuration of the Web. Yahoo has had for a while some community centered approach, Bing is quite new on the scene and Google had a powerful community but rather for the initiated users than for average web surfer. Yahoo strengthened, step be step, on quite a regular basis, the social side of its service, while Google extended the concept of its own social media, trying to mimic/ follow the social media trends.

http://videos.webpronews.com/2010/03/11/the-death-or-redefinition-of-seo-discussed/

But there is a new factor that we should take into account by now: mobile search and mobile apps. Java ME and similar platforms made it a piece of cake for developers to build their own search apps even to implement new web search algorithms. Some of the relies on Google API but some others are building their onw search engines and web databases.  All 3 SEs giants are doing well on this  round, as they launched their own mobile gadgets (read: mobile devices) and apps in order to stand out the rising competition and enforce positions on the market.

Theoretically, Microsoft had a major advantage, at least from the start, but maybe at this point Apple took the lead with iPhone and iPad, though Google is doing well with Android and Nexus.

Why SEO turns to SO

Till now, it was pretty easy to optimize for SEs a site, even after the meta tags were out of equation: it was all about some standard on page items and inbound links (IBLs). Now, we can clearly see how the search market became fragmented, each player striving to get the best slice of the pie. Big companies understood quite fast the importance of the newcomers and built consistent strategies for all search environments. This is why some folks talk now about Search Optimization instead of Search Engine Optimization. However, those who claims the death of SEO, tend to forget that SEs are smart enough to control (which is index) the content of any major web player. At a certain point, maybe social media leaders  will try to control tighter the access of SEs to their content, or even to deny it and build their own SEs. Would that be a smart move for them?  Hard to say… Same story with mobile search apps.

What we should do

It’ obvious at this point that SEO became rather Search Optimization (SO), in order to keep up with the evolution of Web. IMO, it’s less probable that Social Media will try to get rid of SEs. Even if there are lots of search web apps, the capacity of Google, Bing and Yahoo of gathering and sorting data is huge and cannot be beaten easily by whatever  comer. Therefore, on page optimization and good content will still be the backbone for ranking well on any kind of search, as all search service providers will want to provide relevant results for their clients. Even without internal PageRank, back links are good, as they increase the traffic and visibility of a site. Placing more content on social media sites, media centered portals (video and photo especially) it’s a good choice for SO and will definitely reflect on SEs.

My personal belief is that social media is a bubble which is not going to last too long, at least in it’s actual format, but Search Engines are the strong entities and they are going to rule the web long time from now on.

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Search Engine Optimization is a part of web site marketing, aiming to achieve the best results from search engines. Optimizing for search helps to define the target and focus the web content as well as internal structures that provide maximum exposure for search engines.

Nowadays, most people asking for SEO rush into what they think is the best SEO strategy: getting inbound links (IBLs), getting over the most important aspects of SEO, which is on page optimization. If you are familiar with database queries (SQL) you will easier understand how a SE respond to a query. The issue on stake is data retrieval, given the nature of uncontrolled heterogeneous documents on the web. When a user type a query into a search engine, the database is scanned for pages that may be relevant to that query. You may see it as a multiple join query on tables like ‘doc index’,  a pre-sorted data retrieved from index, PageRank, lexicon, each table being on its turn filled with sorted data. So, even if we are told by Google that internal PageRank is one of approximately 200 factors, the Google SE anatomy shows us a more or less 20% weight of PR.

But this leads us to the importance of relevancy of a term within a web document and underscores the magnitude of  on page SEO. So, let’s have a recapitulation of basic SEO principles:

1. The best timing for SEO is at the same time with the web site design;
2. On page factors are residing in head and body of the web page;
3. Each page should focus on 1 -3 keyword phrases. This allow the web site to achieve a high relevance, very important factor, as I mentioned  previously – each page on site should be about a distinct topic;
4. All on page factors are equally important;
5. Usability and accessibility are always important SEO guidelines; optimize for users, not for SEs;
6. HTML elements have no negative impact on SEO, except special elements, like anchors, alt tags or whatever element  containing major errors;
7. Don’t try to game search engines, it won’t work. Black hat seo is just a term invented for short time frauds, as they cannot last long;
8. It is important to repeat certain expression, but not abuse them, as may lead to keyword stuffing suspicion, which is penalized on SEs;
9. Link effectively, not abundantly – avoid JavaScript links and HTML links with special attributes;
10.  Use on page factors wisely, as title, meta tags, headings, body and footer area, bold keywords, alt attributes and remember that page structure is also important. Use a sitemap, robots txt, avoid “bad neighborhood”, don’t place too many links on one page and use a different name for “home” anchor text (usually your domain name).

OK, be sure that if you use wisely all these factors, it would be one of the most effective marketing strategies with the highest ROI of all methods. Questions?  Don’t hesitate to ask!

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