Nevermind, you say, I can pay to be at the top of Google. Yes you can pay a lot to be a sponsored or pay per click website. Google makes a fortune from just that. However Google itself admits that its surveys show 72% of searchers ignore the paid listings and click on the natural listings, the listings that earn their position by being relevant.

Okay, you say, I’ll pay an SEO expert a lot of money to get me to the top. Yes, you can pay a Search Engine Optimization company, but the only guarantee is that you will pay a lot of money.

Let’s cut through all the spin. Search Engine Optimization is not a science. Websites really need to be designed for relevance to search engines using some common sense.

How Do You Define Relevance?

In a bookstore, how do you select a book about e.g. motorbike maintenance? You check:

• Titles,
• Front covers,
• Descriptions on the back covers,
• Size of each book,
• Tables of chapters,
• Samples of paragraphs, and
• Which of the books are more popular.

If the title of the book does not include the words “motorbike maintenance” there is every chance that you won’t find a lot of information about motorbike maintenance in the book. There is usually a description of the book on the back cover. If that doesn’t mention “motorbike maintenance” either, you are looking at the wrong book.

But of the books with “motorbike maintenance” in their titles, some are larger than others. Some have more chapters and pages than others. You expect that the larger ones will have more information than the smaller ones. You also question the bookstore on which of the books are selling more. That is how you decide which book has the most information and is most relevant to your search. Is that science or common sense?

How Does Google Define Relevance?

On the internet, if you search for “motorbike maintenance” Google will list ten million results in the order of relevance to your search. To sort websites in order of relevance to a search, Google has used its secret algorithm to weigh up:

• Domain names,
• Titles of the websites (meta-titles),
• Descriptions,
• Page headings and sub headings,
• Menu and navigation bar (links to inside pages),
• Quantity of information, and
• Popularity of each website based on the number of other relevant websites that link to it (same as in popularity of books).

We know those factors which are similar to those you used to find a book. We only guess the weighting Google gives to each factor.

The Factors

You want a website for your business or activity to be easily found by the audience that your website is targeting. So take into account the same factors that you use in selecting a book on that subject.

Domain Name

If your URL (web address) includes some part of the expression “motorbike maintenance”, e.g. motorbikemaintenance.com, Google will rank it ahead of those names that don’t, (if everything else is equal).

Title Tag

The website title meta-tag, that shows at very top left of the browser, is a very important item to Google, just as the book title is to you when selecting a book to buy. Amazingly, some web masters have simply put the words “Home page” into the title tag. That makes a web page very relevant to people searching the internet for a “home” but, not relevant to a search for “motorbike maintenance”.

Also include other words that people might search for, e.g. “motorcycle repairs”. If you are targeting a particular region, e.g. Australia, that word is needed in the title meta-tag to capture searchers who qualify their search for the subject in Australia only.

Description

The description meta-tag is also an aid to relevance, just as the description of a book is there to tell you what the book is about. However the words in the title meta-tag and description meta-tag should also show on the web page itself, otherwise they might be ignored.

Headings

The headings of each web page take the same importance as the chapter names in a book. Page headings are more effective if they are succinct, leaving out words like “and” “the” “of” and “a”.

Hyperlinks

The navigation bar can be text with hyperlinks to the inside pages. The text can look like buttons or tabs with the help of CSS. Google ignores images and javascript navigation bars. In the body text of the home page more points can be gained for keywords if they are hyperlinks to inside pages. Points are also there for those who place a keyword in their email address, e.g. bikes@ instead of info@.

Size of Website

The volume of information counts towards the relevance of the website to a search, just the same as the size of a book. We are amazed at people who put up a one-page website and expect Google to rank it high for relevancy in front of a 50-page website. Look at page one of Google for any search. Are any one-page websites listed there?

Popularity

Google believes that if other relevant websites link to yours, then your website must be more relevant than those that don’t have such incoming links. However the test is relevance. A link from a motorbike club is relevant for a motorbike maintenance website. A link from a gambling site is not relevant.

Are You Relevant?

To be relevant to a search for any words, your web page needs to contain those words in its title, heading, hyperlinks and body text. Links from other relevant websites add to your relevance. Search engines use the same process that you use if you search a bookstore for a book on motorbike maintenance.

This article was not written to discourage readers from paying for SEO. However, it’s hoped that readers now understand more about what’s behind SEO. It’s not magic or science, but really common sense.

By Ken McKay (c) 2010
About The Author
Ken McKay is an Australian web designer at platypus websites.

And while this announcement, which comes as no surprise to those with their finger on the Google pulse, has drawn a few favorable responses from blog commenters, the overwhelming majority of readers have expressed concerns and doubts about the soundness of Google’s approach. At the forefront of these were questions primarily regarding the exact magnitude of any negative ranking impact carried by slow page loading speeds. Alongside these came a large number of complaints about the fact that Google‘s own Analytics script is a known load-time decelerator, and about the almost glacially slow rendering times of AdSense code.

When read together, many comments give one the impression that webmasters are becoming apprehensive to the point of stampeding, as is usually the case when Google does something new. Indeed, the overall consensus seems to be that load-speeds are about to become the ultimate criterion for search ranking performance, and that this will cause major ranking damage to the average website. One commenter even went so far as to announce that he/she will drop all Analytics and AdSense scripts because their slow performance will now obviously ruin his/her website’s performance.

But are these worries actually valid, or are they just the latest manifestation of unfounded Google-noia to hit the SEO sector?

Before I get around to addressing the question, I must admit that I knew this was coming some time ago. Consequently I was able to line up a few experiments on two sites from my own stable in an effort to gauge any real-term ranking impact once Google started to implement its changes.

What did I personally find?

Despite the fact that both websites are rich in graphics and content, both have not been updated regularly since late last year, and neither is what you might call a fast loader, I found absolutely no detrimental ranking effects for either site during the past couple of months. In fact, the slower of the two websites (average load-time 5.3 secs) actually experienced noticeable SERP improvements in the past week or so, which makes me wonder if there’s not more to all this than simple load-speeds. That, however, is another story.

Of course mine is only a limited sample, and a far from conclusive one. It is, however, one of many indicators one can find if one looks around. And with that in mind, let’s return to the question at hand. Are webmasters’ fears justified or ill-founded?

As usual, and as I’ve touched on already, each and every time Google does something new, it invariably precipitates a spate of trepidation and panic among the world’s webmaster and SEO crowds. Perfect cases in point include the implementation of the ‘Nofollow’ attribute, and the announcement that buying and selling links for PR was no longer ok, both of which together sparked major outcries throughout the online communities. And from what I’ve seen, the initial knee-jerk reaction that the Site-Speed announcement will certainly spell the end of the Internet as we know it is no different.

But seriously, although load-speeds are now a ranking factor, at least for English-language searches on Google.com, let’s not forget that it’s still just a single one of over two-hundred signals Google uses to assess a site’s rankings. And let’s also remember that Google is first and foremost about delivering relevant results, just as it always has been.

After all, what use is serving results from the fastest sites on the web, if those sites don’t actually contain the information the user is looking for?

In an interview less than two weeks ago, Matt Cutts himself said: “People shouldn’t stress out too much about Site-Speed, and the reason is that we’re always going to care first and foremost about quality. How good is a page for users?” Addressing Site-Speed’s function in assessing SERPs, he also said: “Don’t think it’s going to be the largest of the two-hundred factors.”

These statements are more indicators…

As part of my daily involvement in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum, I’ve had an opportunity to keep track of developments during the past five months or so since the Site-Speed topic was first raised. There, a number of highly enlightening discussions with the forum’s other Top Contributors and Google staff, along with the general speculations of a great many visitors, have provided quite a clear picture of Site-Speed’s role in the overall scheme of things. It is a role which, as is usually the case, focuses on a better user experience.

Let’s face it, it’s no great secret that the average visitor’s attention span is five seconds or less, and that long loading times do tend to make users hit the back button. And that’s exactly where Site-Speed comes in. It wasn’t ever designed to be the ultimate Google ranking factor; it merely provides a little extra fine-tuning by casting the deciding vote in cases where information of identical or similar quality is available on multiple websites and needs to be ranked with a better user experience in mind.

As a last word about load-times I would have to say that there are a large number of reasons to make sure your web pages load in a sensible amount of time. These should, however, be focused on your visitors, not orbiting around your Google-noia.

By Sasch Mayer (c) 2010

About The Author
Sasch Mayer has been a writer and web promotion consultant for well over a decade. In 2008 he was nominated as a Top Contributor at Google’s own Webmaster Central forum, where he still assists webmasters world-wide address a multitude of technical and promotional issues. Professionally, he provides a wide range of services, including professional keyword research, and help with W3C Compliance problems.

Why are these links to your site important? They can…

• bring potential customers to your site when they click on the link

• boost the number of visitors to your web site

• dramatically improve your search engine rankings

Even though there are software packages on the market that help automate the linking process, use them sparingly, if at all. The only way to succeed in linking strategies is (aside from creating useful content that will encourage inbound links) by manually creating the links. That’s a hard fact to swallow, given how I like to automate as much of my marketing as I can.

Here are the 10 most important inbound links you must have to your site:

1. Directory Links

Directories are indexes of online sites, typically organized by category. Links back to your site from directories like Yahoo Directory and DMOZ.org are very valuable. DMOZ.org is edited by human editors, and while it’s free, it may take awhile for your site to be added. Getting added to Yahoo’s Directory costs $299/year.

2. Press Releases

If you’re writing press releases, make sure they are optimized for keywords that someone would use to find a business like yours and include links back to your site, as well. Once written, you can have your press release distributed through a service like PRWeb.com, which will create links from high traffic news sites back to your site.

3. Article Directories

Writing and distributing articles through high traffic article directories, like EzineArticles. com, is a great way to get valuable inbound links from a high traffic site. By crafting an effective resource box at the close of your article, you can drive traffic back to your site!

4. Social Bookmarking

Similar to web browser bookmarks, social bookmarking sites store individual pages (bookmarks) online and allows users to tag (with keywords), organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources as well as share them with others. If you bookmark your content on these sites (like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us. com), you get a link from the service. By producing content that your readers love and then bookmark to their friends, the link increases in SEO value.

5. Blog Comments

To find blog posts on which to comment, you can use blog-specific search engines like Google Blog Search. Make sure these are blogs read by your target market, not your colleagues. Brand yourself by always using the same name and remember to link back to your site. Always leave a comment that adds to the conversation that’s happening within the comments.

6. Social Media

Now, Google also indexes your Twitter updates and your social networking profiles. Add that to Web 2.0 hubsites like Scribd or HubPage and you’ve got the option of creating many, many inbound links in a very short period of time.

7. Blog/Podcast Syndication

Submitting the RSS feed of your blog and podcast to syndication services will give you a link back to your site. In some cases, each time you publish a new blog post, the post itself will also get a link.

8. Video Syndication

YouTube is one of the most visited sites online, and the number of sites that syndicate videos is growing each day. These sites often allow you to link to your site either in your video’s description or on your profile page, or both.

9. .EDU and .GOV Links

Search engines place a great deal of credibility in government and education web sites, and the links carry a great deal of weight. Frankly, it isn’t easy to get inbound links from these sites.

10. Internal Links

Remember, if you have more than one web site, or a web site and a blog, be sure and link one to the other. You can do this by linking one article to other related articles, or link to categories or archives of information.

Creating a sound inbound linking strategy is a key component of your search engine optimization efforts. Try a few of the strategies listed above and see how your traffic and rankings grow.

By Donna Gunter (c) 2010
About The Author
Small business marketing Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals create authentic, profitable online businesses. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to improve your visibility and get found online by claiming your Free gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketíng Toolkit, at ==> TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about this, among other things:

“Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it,” explained Cutts.

“Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting,” he said.

“You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing,” he says.

And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. “We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?” he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

“PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index,” says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, WordPress and Typepad blogs have the ability to “PuSH” their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

By Chris Crum, www.webpronews.com

Sometimes it is called the “semantic Web,” but perhaps the less-used term “everyware” is more descriptive. The new scenario is one of ubiquitous computing, the advent of cloud computing where a “thin client” (no- or low-powered PC, or even just a monitor and mouse) runs cloud-based applications using cloud-based data and services. The Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad are all examples of formerly standalone devices that were integrated into the Web, and connect people in a seamless, real-time and very simple way with – well, with everything, from libraries and department stores to other people, anywhere in the world.

From Read-Only to Interactivity

One of the Web’s true “parents” was Tim Berners-Lee, who had his own notion of how the technology and the Internet developed. The first phase of the Web had read-only capabilities. It was essentially a spectator experience until read-write functionality came along (sure, call it Web 2.0) that included services to enable contribution, collaboration, content creation and interactivity. The next step in Berners-Lee’s version vision, Web 3.0, is heralded as “new territory,” where users can assemble and run their own applications, create all sorts of cooperative and collaborative enterprises, and truly put their ideas in motion rather than simply uploading stuff to this, that or the other site.

People with money invested in other, still-useful devices – phones, PDAs, fax machines, etc. – don’t have to worry about Web 3.0 making them obsolete. In addition to letting users create their own tools, Web 3.0 is another step in the evolution of usage and interaction in which the internet holds multiple databases and content that will be accessible to many non-browser-based devices and applications. The obvious uses will be video that streams from a PC to a TV, picture frames that receive wireless updates from an online or local photo app, and phones that display items recommended by your trusted sources – friends, review sites, experts – when you’re shopping.

From Data to Knowledge

In addition to the foregoing characteristics, Web 3.0 is also said to encompass other important advances. For one thing, all sorts of inputs are possible, which means all sorts of new combinations become possible. Content can be made even more broadly relevant when it’s related to GPS, so that social networking, for example, can be enhanced by knowing who is where and doing what.

More importantly, you will get more and better control of your data and be able to establish a number of personalization systems to “wrap” your personal information with different levels and types of protection – so that you can share it widely, narrowly or not at all. Over time, the accuracy of recommendations and trustworthiness of ranking systems will help us determine which data sources to take seriously and which to avoid.

From Business Faxes to Online Games

With the rise of “linkable web apps” you will be able to use all of your different desktop, server and mobile devices and applications – telephones, fax machines and online fax services, instant messaging, pagers – and control them from a single browser window on your desktop, smartphone or handheld device. All of it will take place in an always-on, always-everywhere environment, with functionality embedded sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software, sometimes in both – so that when you need to take care of business without downloading the capability, you’ll be able to do so.

Along with more of the visual and voice-based services that are already starting to proliferate, there will be more lifelike avatar interactions in the growing virtual social networking world. This will lead to social shopping trips and virtual reality gaming far beyond anything currently being done.

In mid-2009, the “Wall Street Journal” ran a story on the development of Web 3.0 capabilities and the promise of ever-greater interconnectedness among technologies, products, services and people. The story even gave us a yardstick by which to measure the success of Web 3.0, if in fact it does succeed. If, as the WSJ puts it, “computing could become as integrated and invisible as electricity and just as important” – and we can attribute it to the new and improved Web – we’ll know that the promise has lived up to the hype. Here’s hoping!

By Chris Haycox (c) 2010

About The Author
Metro Hi Speed is a leader in online fax solutions for any sized business. Less expensive and more reliable than traditional fax services – you’ll enjoy the convenience and well as the cost. Visit us today for more information on our small business and corporate fax solutions.

“… new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

In other words, your tweets from Twitter and new blog articles will be appear as “Latest Results.” The latest results are featured in 2 ways.

a. On the search results page below the “News Results” (if there are news results). This appears for very hot topics that are getting a lot of activity.

b. The “Show Options” menu: click on “Latest” under All Results and the live search results will appear.

What Does This Mean for Small Businesses?

1. Customer Experience

Consumers are much more savvy and they are going online for more information. A quick Google search will provide them possibly more information about your company than you might have thought. A business cannot control what a person tweets about. As we see in the example below, tweets are posted when they mention a topic, business name, a name, etc.

Most tweets, blog entries and company mentions will show up under “Latest” and not on the main search results page. However, if a consumer wants to see more information about you, they have the option at their fingertips.

2. Reputation Management

Not every business is on Twitter or has a blog, nor do they necessarily belong. However, ignoring your “Latest” news can present a problem. If a consumer is singing your praises, or worse a bad comment is written and you do not respond, you are adding fuel to the fire. That customer has been given a chance to continuously go on and on about your company/brand whereas the praise singer just got deflated with no feedback from you. Failing to monitor your reputation online could result in some missed opportunities or a poor company image that leads to reduced sales.

3. Spam

Yes there will be spam because spammers are going to jump on this like ants at a summer picnic. While Google will make every attempt to try and control spam, the current algorithm for posting in real time makes that nearly impossible. How will this affect a small business? Spammers could very well keyword stuff tweets to get ahead and push your company lower on the tweets area. This is going to happen. There is no control right now, but the key is to try and stay ahead of them.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Will real time search improve page rank? This remains to be seen. Will keyword laden tweets that are tweeted over and over from different accounts and push a company to the top of a searched term make a difference? Will this be seen as spam? Keyword laden tweets will give great results for a specific term, especially for those difficult to rank terms, and even if your company is atop of tweets for a short time, you may reap some rewards.

Real time search is not just the posting of tweets. It also posts company mentions from blog articles. So if your company has a blog, you may want to check out your “Latest” results.

In small business branding we have to consider social media marketing as an extension of your brand in the same way that we do traditional advertising. For some businesses, it is a time of uncertainty. As stated earlier, not every business needs to be on Twitter. A “crickets” account is worse than no account at all. But can you still just ignore the social media community?

The good news here is that, if you are able to squeeze in an extra hour as a small business owner, you can go and see what terms are popular in your industry, see what is being said about you, and see if you need to move full steam ahead in 2010. Most small businesses will need to do so because social media marketing has just started to make a big impact and getting in now will make a world of a difference in a year or so.

By Suzanne Vara (c) 2010
About The Author
Suzanne Vara is founder of Kherize5, a Las Vegas advertising & marketing agency for small businesses that creates strong brand images through customized marketing plans in traditional advertising and social media marketing.

The introduction and first five steps to SEO heaven discussed how to get a website ready for an SEO campaign. In part two (steps 6 to 11), we’ll explore the continuous and competitive process of earning a high search engine ranking for a SEO prepared website.

Step 6 to SEO Heaven – Web Analytics

As with any marketing, but particularly for online marketing, where the tools and results are so effective, it is essential to measure and track results. Market behaviour is very predictable. Accordingly, the effectiveness of each part of your campaign can be compared and optimized. The options for web analytics vary from free services to very expensive and customizable packages.

Whichever you choose, don’t put it off. Measure your results from day one and use them to improve your site and your marketing campaigns. That old statement ‘I know half my advertising does not work, if I only knew which half was not working I’d stop spending it’ is not true on the internet. You can and must know.

Step 7 to SEO Heaven – Content Building

Part of being ‘the best and most relevant’ result is having the freshest content, and the search engines look for that by regular visits to your site and reviewing your site’s progress. They use a formula, not usually a human being, unless they detect potential fraud.

Actually, good SEO means a website isn’t ever done, and the fact that it has to change and grow over time gives your customers a better experience. Search engines reward a ‘natural process’ that adjusts to changes in the market and your normal business growth.

Providing good quality content that is related to what you do, but not necessarily aimed at selling something directly, is a powerful, perhaps the the best, option to improve the traffic to your website and the exposure of your business. Most people do not link to pages that only serve the purpose of making a sale.

This leads to the next step in this 11 step process of successful search engine optimization for your website.

Step 8 to SEO Heaven – Link Building

The internet works through links, it would not be a “net” without links. A collection of independent pages that are not connected to each other cannot be found and, for the most part, that defeats their purpose. People seeing and clicking on links to your site make effective inbound links that search engines like to reward with a higher ranking for your website. They are also vital for SEO.

Inbound links play an important role in virtually every search engine when it comes to ranking pages in their search results. In the normal course of business links are added, and sometimes removed, all the time. This neverending organic process is monitored and measured by the search engines as an indicator of importance and relevance – so it is advisable to be pro-active in acquiring good inbound links. There are plenty of sites out there that should link to you, but don’t know you and your content. Help them to find your content and encourage linking to it.

Step 9 to SEO Heaven – Engagement, Trust and Community Building

Like it or not social media is a reality whole sections of society participate in for hours daily and is a fundamental indicator of relevance and popularity. Don’t allow your website to exist in an isolated bubble. Talk to people and allow them to respond and to interact with you.

People will talk about you with or without your permission. Much better to seize the initiative and become part of the discussion. Use it to build trust and deeper relationships with your customers or potential customers. Use it like research. Listen to what they say and learn about their wants and their needs. Listen and take note of comments, especially criticisms, and use them to improve. You can save the money you might have spent on focus groups and get feedback free of charge on the internet.

In relation to SEO, social media provides a huge opportuníty to expand your link building. For your business it increases your brand exposure for a fraction of the cost of traditional, more intrusive advertising campaigns that are usually less effective.

Step 10 to SEO Heaven – Ranking and Traffic Analysis

When you begin, or if you have already started, check where you are today to be able to track and compare with data in the future. Look for trends and evaluate the progress towards your goals. You know those goals which we set in the first paragraph before we began the campaign. The ones you should specify before you engage in any type of marketing campaign. Those goals were measurable I hope? If you view improving your SEO ranking as a measure of your business success rather than an essential step to achieving business success, you will maintain a high SEO ranking for the long term. Why, because the high traffic that comes with it will drive your business.

Does the change in ranking yield the traffic you expected? Does this traffic actually convert? Which leads us neatly to step 11 of SEO heaven.

Step 11 to SEO Heaven – Conversion Analysis

All of this effort matters not one jot unless you make your profit number (or the equivalent in not for profit organizations). It all comes down to one critical factor – what is your bottom line? Did you make profit or did you lose money. Web Analytics is part of the process of making this determination. Focus on the things that work and help your bottom line and stop doing the things that don’t. Work on the details to improve visitor conversion to sales. This requires testing. Don’t try anything upfront without testing it first. The things that work for others might not work for you and the same is true the other way around.

Many with experience in the SEO game will tell you that there is another, more important step that would make this article 12 steps to SEO heaven. That step is to be sure only to work with people who can really explain SEO in plain English. To be blunt, small, independent and one-man-band web designers rarely get SEO fully and their usually well meaning efforts end up costing you more than they deliver. They do get part of the story, but they fail you by wasting both your money and your time.

By Tim Meadows-Smith (c) 2010

About The Author
Tim Meadows-Smith is an experienced non-executive chairman, director and business advisor from a classical sales and marketing background gained with famous global FMCG brand owners. He has worked with businesses globally in the FMCG, logistics, service and technology sectors. He may be reached by email at Tim@Meadows-Smith.com. Find further articles at: www.timmeadows-smith.co.uk/blogarticles.php.

If you have focused objectives and a clear online strategy then SEO will almost always be a good cost effective addition to the marketing tool set. The first thing to understand is that search engine businesses, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, have customers to satisfy too. Their customers are searching and they expect to see the ‘best and most relevant’ search results. I expect like me, you get frustrated if your searches bring irrelevant results first. No surprise then, that the methods used by the search engine operators are designed to deliver customer satisfaction. They work hard to eliminate bogus SEO services that aim to cheat.

It is possible for you to make your website ‘the best and most relevant’ for certain searches and to convince the search engine operator you are just that too. That is SEO. Each of my 11 steps to SEO heaven is necessary. I assume that you will be committed to a long term marketing strategy, and to measuring results with a view to adjusting your activity. The steps include those of preparation as well of those of continuous repeated activities. The early preparatory steps are perhaps the most important as errors here will frustrate the effectiveness of the later ones.

Step 1 to SEO Heaven – Keyword Research

A vital first step that should not be undertaken lightly. While experienced pay-per-click advertisers will know that you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, they should understand this not possible for organic search optimization. It is normally advisable to concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site around a core theme. Then, for individual pages only one to three phrases. For large sites with hundreds of pages it is hard to optimize every single page. The effort and cost of SEO to the full extent produces diminishing returns.

Step 2 to SEO Heaven – Competitive Intelligence

SEO is competitive. There is only one front page and only one top slot so it is important to know your competition and perform better. What are they doing? Where do they rank and for which keywords? Who is linking to their website and why? The less competitive your industry is online the easier it is for you to outperform your competition. This is an important determining factor in the cost and resources necessary to achieve your desired SEO outcome.

Step 3 to SEO Heaven – Web Design and Development

Like trying to cable an old building for modern communications or boosting performance of an obsolete machine, fixing a bad website design is much tougher than building properly from scratch. When you create a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. Almost all template-based websites are tough to re-engineer for SEO. A good design from the start will save you a lot of time and money. In most cases it will put you ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. In most cases a high performing design for SEO is also a user friendly design, but occasionally compromise is necesary.

Step 4 to SEO Heaven – Get Your First Inbound Links

There is no need to pay to submít your website to any search engine. Just as soon as you create inbound links from other websites to yours the search engines will find your website.

There are plenty of scam products and services. Avoid them. They are a waste of your money. No one can guarantee you a number 1 ranking. It must be earned and maintained by being the best and most relevant.

There are some web directories that are recognized by search engines and gaining a trade listing there will be a helpful kick-start to your SEO campaign. Then ask your customers and suppliers to place a link to your website from theirs. Most will be pleased for the favor to be returned.

Step 5 to SEO Heaven – Sitemaps

The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, it is advisable to create an account and register your website with them, just for the reports and statistics they provide free of charge and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

After completion of the first 5 steps, schedule them for occasional review. The remaining tasks require regular and repetitive effort. In Eleven Steps to SEO Heaven (steps 6 to eleven) we look at taking a website that is a SEO ready site with a ready to run campaign and look at the steps and work needed to claim a high search engine ranking.

By Tim Meadows-Smith (c) 2010

About The Author
Tim Meadows-Smith is an experienced non-executive chairman, director and business advisor from a classical sales and marketing background gained with famous global FMCG brand owners. He has worked with businesses globally in the FMCG, logistics, service and technology sectors. He may be reached by email at Tim@Meadows-Smith.com. Find further articles at: www.timmeadows-smith.co.uk/blogarticles.php.

Not everybody is a fan of the increasingly personalized search results they get from Google. Some criticize them as a way for Google to give advertisers reasons to rely on PPC as opposed to the less predictable organic results, and others just find it disruptive to relevance.

In terms of relevance, I think it can work both ways. There are many cases, as I believe is the intention of Google, when a personalized result will simply be more relevant because of that personalization. This could be due to location, because it comes from someone within my social circle (a [arguably] trusted source), or from something I have bookmarked in the past (Google bookmarks are synced with the recently launched starred results feature).

However, there are times when Google’s system of personalization does get in the way, particularly with that starred results feature. When they appear, the starred results are generally (though not always) provided above all the rest. In some ways, this makes sense, because if you starred them yourself, you likely found them to be quality results. However, when you starred that result, you may not have done so with relevance to a specific query or topic in mind. You may have just liked the site and wanted to remember it.
In fact, most of the starred results at this point (given how new the starred results feature is) simply come from pages that have been bookmarked in Google Bookmarks (if you have been a user in the past). If this is the case, chances are that when you bookmarked a certain page, say a year ago, you didn’t take into consideration that Google would one day use that bookmark as a personalized search result in a possibly unrelated query down the road. How could you have known?

There are plenty of times when these bookmarked/starred results do come in handy in a Google search. That said, they are not always the most relevant, and do not always deserve top rank on the SERP, even when they are given just that.

For example, if I perform a search for “matt cutts”, his personal blog (which is the top organic listing) is probably the best result for that query, but since I have written about things Cutts has said in the past, and have a particular article bookmarked for my own reference, that article appears at the top of my results, over his blog. It’s not THAT big a deal really. It doesn’t take me long to look down and find his blog if that’s what I’m looking for, but it does push the more relevant result down, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Google is now testing some list sharing features within Google Bookmarks. Given Google’s increased focus on social web elements and how they fit into search (think social search, real-time search, Buzz, etc.), one can’t help but wonder if Bookmarks will play an even greater role in Google’s search product going forward.

By Chris Crum

http://www.webpronews.com

Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the web. It’s nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some dupe content for whatever reason, you don’t have to lose sleep every night worrying about the wrath of the Google gods. They’re not going to shoot lightning bolts at your site from the sky, nor are they going to banish your entire website from ever showing up for relevant searches.

They are simply going to filter out the dupes.

The search engines want to index and show to their users (the searchers) as much unique content as algorithmically possible. That’s their job, and they do it quite well considering what they have to work with: spammers using invisible or irrelevant content, technically challenged websites that crawlers can’t easily find, copycat scraper sites that exist only to obtain AdSense clicks, and a whole host of other such nonsense.

There’s no doubt that duplicate content is a problem for search engines. If a searcher is looking for a particular type of product or service and is presented with pages and pages of results that provide the same basic information, then the engine has failed to do its job properly. In order to supply users with a variety of information on their search query, search engines have created duplicate content “filters” (not penalties) that attempt to weed out the information they already know about. Certainly, if your page is one of those that is filtered, it may very well feel like a penalty to you, but it’s not – it’s a filter.

Penalties Are for Spammers

Search engine penalties are reserved for pages and sites that are purposely trying to trick the search engines in one form or another. Penalties can be meted out algorithmically when obvious deceptions exist on a page, or they can be personally handed out by a search engineer who discovers the hanky-panky through spam reports and other means. To many people’s surprise, penalties rarely happen to the average website. Sites that receive a true penalty typically know exactly what they did to deserve it. If they don’t, they haven’t been paying attention.

Honestly, the search engines are not out to get you. If you have a page on your site that sells red hats and another very similar page selling blue hats, you aren’t going to find your site banished off the face of Google. The worst thing that will happen is that only the red hat page may show up in the search results instead of both pages showing up. If you need both to show up in the search engines, then you’ll need to make them substantially unique.

Suffice it to say that just about any content that is easily created without much human intervention (i.e., automated) is not a great candidate for organic SEO purposes.

Another duplicate-content issue that many are concerned about is the republishing of online articles. Reprinting someone’s article on your site is not going to cause a penalty. While you probably don’t want every article on your site to be a reprint of someone else’s, if the reprints are helpful to your site visitors and your overall mission, then it’s not a problem for the search engines.

If your bylined articles are getting published elsewhere, that’s a good thing. You don’t need to provide a different version to other sites or not allow them to be republished at all. The more sites that host your article, the more chances you have to build your credibility as well as to gain links back to your site through a short bio at the end of the article. In many cases, Google doesn’t even filter out duplicate articles in searches, but even if they eventually show only one version, it’s still okay.

Inadvertent Multiple URLs for the Same Content

Where duplicate content CAN be a problem is when a website shows essentially the same page, but on numerous URLs. WordPress blogs often fall victim to this when multiple tags or categories are chosen to label any one blog post. The blog software then creates numerous URLs for the same article, depending on which category or tag a user clicked to view it. While this type of duplicate content won’t cause a search engine penalty, it will often split the overall link popularity of the article, which is not recommended.

Any backend system or CMS that creates numerous URLs for any one piece of content can indeed be a problem for search engines, because it makes their spiders do more work. It’s silly to have the spider finding the same information over and over again, when you’d rather have it finding other, unique information to index. This type of unintended duplicate content should definitely be cleaned up either through 301-redirects or by using the canonical link element (rel=canonical). When it comes to duplicate content, the search engines are not penalizing you or thinking that you’re a spammer; they’re simply trying to show some variety in their search results pages and don’t want to waste time indexing content they already have in their databases.

By Jill Whalen (c) 2010
About The Author
Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum. For more information go to http://www.highrankings.com