And yet (depending on the query), up to 80 percent of the clicks on a typical Google SERP are in the non-paid listings. That makes SEO a pretty essential online marketing channel. But how do you leverage it? Where do you even start?

Unfortunately, much of SEO has become about optimizing things like title tags, and performing mostly trivial page optimizations that come from looking at Web sites through a cardboard tube. There is a distinct lack of strategic vision out there.

Sure, it’s always important to get the basics of SEO right. And that often means picking the low-hanging fruit of on-page optimizations, including title tags.

But the value of that work has been depreciating over the last few years. It’s no longer always providing a competitive advantage — sometimes it’s just catching you up to the majority of Web sites already out there.

Today, the opportunity in SEO is (usually) less in these basic optimizations and technical fixes, and more about creating scalable, high-impact ideas and spreading them effectively. This takes strategy, vision, creativity, and deep knowledge of search, yet few “SEOs” can honestly say they possess all of these traits.

We all know the basics of optimizing a Web site according to best practices. What we don’t know — what so few truly know — is how to move the needle on natural search traffic in ways outside the norm. This talent belongs to a few bright souls only, and is worth millions of dollars in terms of the revenue it can bring to a company.

SEO can be life changing for a company. Yet, too often it’s about changing a Web site’s trivial content elements without consideration for the overarching strategy and traffic lift everyone is really looking for. So what can we do about that?

No, We Don’t Want Your Title Tag Recommendations

Working on large sites is a unique experience, with unique challenges and issues. Normally, we don’t work page by page, although there are always exceptions. We work template by template, site by site, and section by section. We work site-wide.

While a surprising amount of agencies charge “by the page” (which is laughable), there isn’t much value in optimizing N number of pages by hand. There’s no scale. And there’s no overarching relationship between a guaranteed number of optimized pages and a coherent SEO strategy.

SEO is hard. Coming up with ideas that can push free search traffic requires creativity, high-quality resources, and a little bit of magic. And those things aren’t easy to come by. They also aren’t cheap. Valuable SEO is a major investment.

It’s important to step away from the shackles of best practices and instead focus on initiatives that give you a strategic competitive advantage. But even beyond that, wider adoption of SEO requires a more creative approach, a more valuable approach. Here are a few examples areas to improve on:

1. Technical SEO audits should include problems that should be repaired, as well as an opportunity assessment. We don’t just want to fix things. We want to also grow market share in new directions.
2. Classic on-page SEO elements should be regarded as a given. Don’t engage with an SEO partner that will only give you title tags and meta data, for example. Ask them what the next step is.
3. Place emphasis on things impacting the user experience. Site speed, ease of use, accessibility, and features and functions that are fun to use and easy to link to should be of primary focus.
4. Link building should focus on creating valuable, influential, and unique contributions for the Web, rather than securing links from “high PageRank sites.”
5. A valuable SEO partner should bring thought leadership in the form of regular meetings and training, SEO style guides, and frameworks, intranet documentation and the like. A company should have SEO built into its fabric. And the C-level executives need to be aware of major SEO initiatives, and results of previous and ongoing work.

Quality SEO that generates traffic and revenue will never be easy to find. But by improving in areas like the above, and building a more strategic view of SEO in general, we can evolve the model and encourage more widespread adoption. Once companies see what SEO can bring, they will become believers.

It’s all in the details of course, but the above is a recipe for big ideas that can yield big results.

As stated on Bing official blog, the new platform has been build following the feedback of webmaster and SEO communities. The new platform also offers a hint of further updates coming in the following months which will likely add or adapt many of the Yahoo Site Explorer functionality. The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provides a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic.

The top level view of Bing Webmaster Dashboard shows a master list of all the sites that are verified, it shows an overview of clicks, impressions, pages indexed and pages crawled.  The other great feature is it shows the percentage of change and an easy color coded arrow to show if the change was positive or negative which makes it easy to spot problems or issues when viewing a large number of sites.

Getting down to specific sites, the dashboard shows clicks, impressions (as in Google Webmaster Tools), pages indexed and pages crawled along with crawl summary, pages with crawl errors, index summary and traffic summary with search query data (clicks, impressions and CTR) in chart forms - need to install Microsoft Silverlight 4 to get the rich charting functionality.

Index Explorer gives unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of pages have been included. Also Submit URLs allows adding URLs which are not currently indexed by Bing and it should consider them.

Crawl Issues give details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages.

In addition, the new tools delivers rich charting functionality that will help quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help make decisions. The good news for existing users is that  their Webmaster Center accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new tools.

As stated on the official blog, this is only the beginning, Bing Webmaster Team have many more features planned for release in the coming months. Whether Bing can leap ahead of Google with its webmaster tools is what remains to be seen. Also with competition rising there may be enhancements coming up from Google as well.

Facebook recently enabled a feature that instantly suggests a dynamically created Facebook ad based on a provided URL.

Facebook creates the ad by searching the HTML of the provided URL for certain tags. Specifically, it pulls the title tag, meta description, and an image associated with the main content, similar to how it pulls information when Facebook users shares a link.

The procedure for creating the ad is simple. Just logon to Facebook and on the right an option of “Create an Ad” can be seen. On clicking the option, a form like page opens. After that by adding URL and clicking on “Suggest an Ad”, the title, ad copy or description and image are automatically generated. Facebook inserts the first 135 characters from the meta description into the ad copy. The title is pulled from the first 25 characters of the title tag. However, you can edit the title and meta description tags, Facebook does allow the advertiser to edit the auto-generated ad content.

Facebook pulls ad images from the page out of which one can be chosen, which is much like the image feature when Facebook users share links. Also user can upload some other image instead of existing ones.

The “Facebook Ad Suggest” feature works well for marketers wanting to quickly advertise URLs to a page with a targeted action as the main focus and Brands seeking awareness rather than specific actions.

However, other options are the same as along with this, a target country, demographics of target audiences, likes, preferences and some other options can be defined to filter the ads. According to the targeting options it decides on the suggested bid per click.

So the idea of auto-generated ad copy is interesting and saves a few keystrokes when creating a new ad.

Google introduced a new enhancement to its AdWords location extensions that allows advertisers to show multiple business addresses in a particular area.

For example, if a potential customer is looking for a Toys”R”Us store in their area, the ad can now show them all the nearby locations so they can find the one closest to them.

If you’re a business owner, you can set up extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Local Business Center (LBC) account. If you’re not the primary business owner of the locations you’re advertising, you can manually enter addresses directly into AdWords.

Once extensions are set up, Google dynamically matches your business locations to a user’s location or search terms and show the address with your text ads.

For those who have existing local business ads, the ads will continue running as long as they are edited. If you edit a local business ad, it will be converted to a text ad with the ad’s address attached as a location extension. The new converted ad will look identical to the local business ad and will appear in the same places as your local business ads. AdWords Editor will continue to support the creation and management of local business ads.

Benefits of enhanced location extensions to advertisers:

• Adding multiple addresses within location extensions let the advertisers show up to four addresses at a time, which are relevant to potential customer’s location (up to four at a time)
• The results are updated dynamically whenever someone moves the map Enhances the ads with relevant information about the business to drive in-store traffic
• Can simply create new local ads with extensions from scratch or add extensions to existing text ads

In the broader sense, it can be understood as - every e-mail sent to a potential customers is considered e-mail marketing. However, e-mail marketing can be defined as:

• sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the customer relationship and
  to encourage customer loyalty.
• sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers a well as
  convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
• sending news letters to potential clients as e-mails to maintain a
  goodwill.

Direct E-mail Marketing is the fastest option for advertising your products and services . Email is one of the versatile and simple method to organize required the data base should be in a good shape. A proper and aggressive email marketing campaign delivers responses with in a short span of time. E-mail marketing has resulted in being the fastest medium to generate new business avenues & push the sales.

Email Marketing Benefits:

• Easily attracts new customers
• Keep in touch with existing customers
• Minimimun operating cost
• Simple method to organise
• Generates instant results
• Helps in generating repeat business.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is the recent activity which has captured the market. Social media looks at the social aspects of your business. It helps your business to flourish in the social media space. Social media platform leverages us to interact with visitors, users and customers in a better way.

SMO is all about the strategies that are being used to set up Social Media campaign for improving brand presence for your website/business. SMO allows your customers to learn about your business, interact and participate with you during their online experience.

Social Media Activities

• Tagging and Bookmarking
• Create a Blog
• RSS Feeds
• Discussion Forum
• Online Videos and Images
• Join social networking communities

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects including design, development, advertising, promotions and sales. As a result, marketing techniques and strategies such as: pay per click advertising, banner ads, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive advertising, search engine optimization, blog marketing, article marketing all come under the auspices of ‘internet marketing’.

Internet Marketing also covers a number of areas related to getting visitors to your website through search engines. Getting ranked highly in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN/Bing is one of the most cost effective ways to get visitors to your website and generate new business.

As media is approaching closer to global audience through the Internet, marketing through internet is evolving gradually into a broader mix of components and is becoming an increasingly important part for online businesses, as it is the only form of marketing being practiced for such business.

Every business needs to advertise in order to compete. Knowing the right direction and where to dig for internet gold is a huge step. If you have a website and are wondering ‘what now?’, then you really need to be thinking about marketing your website online and to do this you need to make some headway finding out about Website Marketing and SEO, if you are able to capture a fraction of that you can receive a lot of visits to your website.

When it comes to Internet marketing for online business, marketing strategy is one of the major aspects of advertising.

Few major benefits of Internet Marketing:

• Lower costs
• Multiple business models - Article Marketing, Email Marketing, Blog Optimization etc.
• Everything can be done online.
• Great speed of distribution
• Global audience available

Best part of Internet marketing is lower costs of dissemination of information to global audience also it helps adding potential customers and the number of quality leads to your business.

• Internet marketing helps you to attract potential customers who are in search of products and services that you offer.
• Marketing your business with pay per click advertising increases the probability of getting business from the ones who are looking for key services within a certain area.
• Internet marketing is a cost-effective outcome for advertising, a new business. However, in cases like banner or flash advertisements Internet marketing could result in lavish expenditure.
• No matter, whether your business is a small-scale or huge scale, it is very important to advertise in order to compete. Internet marketing is truly helpful in getting the target audience.
• One of the major goals of Internet marketing is to present the website in a way that it stands out of the crowd.
• E-mail marketing is a type of Internet marketing that helps you to reach thousands of people at the same time.
• Through Internet marketing you can advertise using affiliate programs. You can choose any product according to your interest and expertise and can earn by promoting chosen product. This is where the beauty of Internet marketing lies.
• Along with these advantages, there are a few more advantages such as 24*7 presences, flexibility, better sales performance, broaden revenue horizons, worldwide popularity, chances to expand business in a shorter span.

Having a well designed website encourages the prospective clients and customers to get a sense of who you are and what your business is all about. The more you are able to get targeted customers to your web site, the more you will be able to generate leads.

Internet Marketing Services includes the following:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is an art as well as a science. If your website attains a top positions on the Organic Search Results it is entirely the result of search engine optimization (SEO). For SEO process major search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. This is the shortest and the easiest way to search for the products and services on internet.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is shaping the way we work, play, shop and market ourselves online. SEM is marketing of products and services on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search Engine Marketing is the base for the success of any online venture.
There exist two parts of SEM:

• Pay Per Click
• Affiliate Marketing

Email Marketing
Email Marketing is one of the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet! It is becoming increasingly difficult to launch a successful email marketing campaign. Now days, there is lot of competition that may minimize your exposure. Email is so versatile and relatively simple to organize, as long as your data base is in good shape. A typical email campaign will deliver responses within 72 hours. This is the fastest media to generate new business avenues & push the sale.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)
SMO campaigns increases visitor traffic and brand awareness. This type of marketing is an interactive marketing which helps to find out the customer views about various products and services.
In simpler terms, Social Media Optimization is the next advanced level of Internet Marketing which if combined with traditional SEO will surely reap a great success in online business. ]]> http://blog.ishir.com/401/internet-marketing-services.htm/feed http://blog.ishir.com/399/search-engine-optimization.htm http://blog.ishir.com/399/search-engine-optimization.htm#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 10:04:58 +0000 ISHIR Marketing http://blog.ishir.com/?p=399 Search engine optimization abbreviated as SEO, is one of the most effective things one can do online. It is an active process of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to gain valuable traffic to the site from search engines via “natural” search results.

Why SEO is required?
If your website cannot be found by major search engines you miss out the opportunities available to the website provided via search results – as people search for specific terms, phrases, content, services, products, or information which you may be dealing in.

These search queries can be of extraordinary value to you. Investing in SEO, either through time or finances can result in an exceptional return on investment.

SEO is all about common sense and simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible.

It is important to understand how search engines work?
Search engines collect data about websites by sending an electronic spider to visit the site which stores the content of the website in search engine’s database. These spiders are known as ‘bots’. Starting in the top left hand corner, spider reads site content line by line from left to right.

Also, search engine optimization relies heavily on the proper use of keywords and keyphrases that describe the website’s content.

SEO is an extremely powerful online marketing technique – use SEO wisely!