Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Best Weapon For The Site Ranking War

A War For Attention

In this era of Internet, an average customer is flooded with loads of information, thus making it increasingly difficult for the marketers to grab his attention. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one such technique that is deployed for this. It is a process of making the website rank higher in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, etc. since higher the website ranks more traffic it is likely to receive.

The New Warrior

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has given rise to a new creed of professionals known as ‘SEO Consultant’. Basically, an SEO consultant is an information technology expert who carries out the optimization projects for his clients. The optimization service is a part of a bigger website marketing strategy but is offered as a stand alone service as well.

The Strategy

The process of a website Optimization basically involves editing its content and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to make it accessible to the indexing activities of the search engines. Although keyword search is the most common mode, SEO is not limited just to the text alone but also targets different types of searches like images, video, industry-specific searches etc.

The Reward

An effectively done Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service definitely gives a website a much increased web presence and that in turn is vital in attracting the customers and also in increasing the span of the business.

The Basics Of Search Engine Optimization

The concept of web search engines materialized in the year 1994 with the introduction of WebCrawler that popularized full-text search. Since then, times have been witness to a significant growth in the number of users relying primarily on search engines in their pursuit of relevant information on a broad range of subjects. This led to an increase in the number of search engines as several companies endeavored to serve people with reliable information on their subjects of interest. However, it was only around the year 2000 when Google Inc. came to the forefront connecting people with reliable sources of information and acquainting them of global as well as local businesses and service providers.

Over the years, as the World Wide Web gained prominence, the corporate world felt the need for Internet marketing to reach out to the potential and substantial base of online consumers. In this regard, businesses feel more inclined to rank higher among the major search engine results pages or SERPs in order to target potential consumers. And, this effectively brings us face to face with the concept of search engine optimization or SEO that forms a crucial part of any Internet marketing or web marketing strategy.

Defining SEO    

SEO essentially concerns optimization or improvisation of a website content along with its promotion to make it rank higher in SERPs based on the keywords specified by information seekers. The term “keyword” refers a combination of words or phrases that represents the user requirements of specific products or services. As a crucial web marketing strategy, SEO works in accordance with how the search engine algorithms operate in their quest of presenting users and information seekers with exactly what they are looking for.

The Best SEO Practices 

1. Identifying consumer requirements and keywords: For a business or a product manufacturer, a SEO campaign must begin with an analysis of the consumer requirements. A close analysis of the words or phrases that web surfers and online consumers are expected to feed the maximum into search engines can help businesses as well as upcoming entrepreneurs precisely define their niche and their website content.

For service providers, a SEO campaign must begin with a precise identification of the target consumer base. For instance, if you are a criminal defense attorney in Colorado, using keywords like “criminal defense attorney Colorado” and “Colorado criminal lawyer” would help you connect with local clients in need of your services. To summarize, keywords that are a combination of the city you live in and the service you have on offer can best establish your online profile and help you reach potential clients.

2. Competitor analysis: For businesses as well as service providers, an important Search Engine Optimization practice is analyzing the competitors’ websites and the strategies they employ in their quest of ranking higher in search engine results. A detailed and timely analysis of the web profile of competitive businesses with a similar functional domain can help you devise effective strategies in the long run.

3. Website design and content development with emphasis on keywords: A website design must primarily lay emphasis on the ease-of-access and ease-of-navigation. It must render a website functional across diverse computing hardware and software platforms with a minimal load time and a simplified user interface.

Having figured out the keywords, the very next step concerns proper keyword usage across the title tags, Meta tags, and other relevant HTML elements corresponding to your web pages. Also referred to as on-page optimization, this process involves becoming aware of how the search engines operate and the website parameters or elements they consider the most relevant while indexing websites in their database.

4. Working around the Description tags: The content included in the “description” Meta tags of a web page is used by search engines and presented to online users in the search results. If this content can be conceptualized as a precise summary of the web page content, it can work out to be one of those quintessential strategies enticing web surfers to click through and explore your website. You would do wise to make these web page descriptions keyword-rich, compelling, and unique so that they generate a call to action and help convert search engine visitors into your website visitors.   

   

5. Link Building: What do upcoming entrepreneurs do in the real world to promote themselves? They advertise on or link with the most popular of media outlets with access to masses and classes alike. Similarly, in the online world, a business needs to build a network of links by getting listed across social media outlets like blogs, publishing articles, submitting URLs on web directories, and spreading the word-of-mouth by placing links and advertisements across popular advertising channels.

6. Website Analysis: There are several free website analysis tools, such as Google Analytics, that can help you track the quantity and quality of your website traffic from time to time. The need of the hour is to get acquainted with the working of such tools and techniques and utilize them to know how your SEO efforts are faring against the methodologies adopted by your competitors.

While there are several other significant ways that can lead to better search engine rankings, the above stated practices can be classified as the fundamentals of search engine optimization and marketing. It is also important to note that any SEO campaign must be reviewed from time to time and that it does take time before one gets to see the results. SEO practices must never stop, if you aim to rank consistently higher in SERPs and build up a significant web presence. 

10 Tips To Skyrocket Your Online Reputation

When you are earning thousands of dollars from your online business than it becomes increasingly important to have positive results all around whenever someone searches with your business name, your name or with your domain name. A single negative link can result to loss of thousands of dollars to your business. A negative link could be:

• A negative review from any unsatisfied customer.
• A blog or comment from any of your frustrated previous employees.
• Negative reviews about your products or services.
• A rip off report filed against you or your business name.
• Upsetting details about the top management executives of the company.
• A dedicated domain devoted to decrease your reputation.

 

So, these types of negative links can leads to losing a good customer that can leaves you frustrated since, he had read something bad when he searches about you on Google. Sometimes, these kinds of links are posted by some of your competitors with the intention to plunk down your online reputation and to harm your online business. So, here Online Reputation Management becomes must.

If we talk about the rip off reports, unfortunately it is almost near to impossible to remove or delete a rip off report about your business or company name. At the same time, it is again not possible to remove any type of negative links from Google. So, what to do next, if we can’t remove those links? Here, the answer is to manage your online reputation and try to create and promote the positive links and make them appear above the negative links on Google.

Here, I am recommending some tips or strategies that can help you to push down the negative links from the top results:

1. Create Social Media Profiles: Create some online profiles on some high ranked social media sites like linkedin, flickr, myspace, facebook, etc. probably with your name or with your company name and put some good content describing your products/services.
2. Promote Social Media Profiles: After creating some profiles, try to promote them using some Link Building strategies like social bookmarking, blog commenting, forum posting and the like.
3. Create Your Blog:  Create a blog using any of the free blog networks and quickly start creating pages on that blog about yourself or about your business and at the same time, try to link them to the other pages your create.

4. Create Sub domains: If possible, try to create some sub domains of your main site and perform some SEO Services to promote those sub domains.
5. Register Some New Domains: If you are ready to pay for your reputation, you can create additional sites of your business. You can register some new domains and create some single page websites describing your business and about the achievements of your business.
6. Create Profiles On Some Wikipedia Sites: Register on some wiki sites as their links show up in the top results on Google. You can create the profiles with your name or your company name on some wiki sites like Mediawiki, Knol, Medpedia, Wikihow and the like.
7. Start Distributing Press Releases: Write some press releases about your company and start distributing over some paid press release sites like prweb.com, businesswire.com. Or can distribute them on some free press release sites. Make sure to link those press releases to the pages or links you created above to promote them. There are very strong chances that some of the links will appear on the top results on Google.
8. Article Submissions: Write some articles and submit them over some good article marketing sites and gain link them to the pages or profile links you created.
9. Forum Posting: Join some good forums of your niche and start posting on them. But here make sure to register yourself with your name or with your company name.
10. Blog Commenting: Search some posts related to your niche or of your area of interest and start commenting on those post with link on your name of company name.