Successful search engine optimization is very much like a game of tug-of-war; your team will be much better off if you all pull in the same direction. By the same token if you take the time to consider small details in your website’s structure and ensure that all of the details are working together, you will ultimately benefit. I’m going to cover a few of the key elements to successful SEO and show how synergizing your optimization efforts can work for you.

Key Components of SEO
Let’s begin by breaking down some of the key components to search engine optimization, which include the Title Tag, URL, Header Tag, Content, Internal Links, and External Links.

Title Tag
The bar at the top of your browser is probably the single most important component to search engine optimization. Most sites that you find on the Web will say something like “Company Name – Home” in this area. That’s great—if you’re very well branded and only want to be found for your company’s name.

Instead, try putting your most important keywords in this area, and keep it under control. It’s a good idea to try to keep the total character length to less than 68 characters, including spaces. For the purpose of this blog, let’s make up a page. Let’s say this is a website that sells pet supplies, and we’re going to focus specifically on the fish tank page. So, we have www.yoursite.com/fish-tank/. Your title tag is “Fish Tank | Aquarium Rocks | Fish Tanks.” The total character length is 40. That’s pretty short, but it’s concise, and it’s all the keywords I want to focus on for this page. (Please note that this is merely an example. I didn’t research the proper key words at all and so this may not be the best example. It is for the purpose of illustration and nothing more.)

URL
Google seems to be paying more attention to keywords in the URL, so if you don’t already have rankings, if your site is new, or if you are redesigning your site and will be creating new URLs anyway, consider adding some keywords here. Sticking with our previous example, the best choice is www.yoursite.com/fish-tanks/.

Header Tag
The H1 tag is another key element that must be in synergy with the rest. This appears to most Web visitors as the “title” of the page. This header is usually big, bold and describes exactly what’s on the page. Some sites don’t have a headline or title above the copy at all, but having an H1 tag is another key element to proper SEO. Using our example, the H1 of this page is “Fish Tanks.” Are you beginning to notice a pattern?

Content
One of the most obvious components to good SEO is content, and yet many sites are lacking in it. Write 250 words or so of copy that is relevant to that page. Make sure that you’re using the same words/wording as the Title tag, URL, and H1. It’s probably a good idea to use the words “fish tanks” here as well.

Internal Links
If you are going to link from www.yoursite.com to the “fish tank” page, be sure that you use the words “fish tank” in the anchor text on that link.

External Links
Be really careful not to get all “spammy” here. If you can find relevant websites that would link to product/services pages that are relevant for inclusion, that’s fabulous. But do not, I repeat, do not get too focused on one keyword. Get some links to your internal pages from external sites that have “fish tank” in the anchor text and have these sites link to your /fish-tank/ page. Then, go get some other links for the /aquarium-rocks/ page that have the “aquarium rocks” anchor text.

Details, Details!
The point of this is to show that taking a little extra time to create synergy with your title tag, content, headers and linking is the recipe to successful search engine optimization. Of course, this isn’t everything that you need to know for search engine optimization. There are probably around 250 criteria that a search engine might consider to determine which website to rank for a given search phrase.

As always, if you’re unsure of a major change that you’re about to make, please consult with a SEO professional. Reckless changes to a website can have major effects on rankings and ultimately, your bottom line.

You can’t overemphasize the importance of top organic listings for ecommerce sites. Usually, retailers and wholesalers focus on paid search campaigns because it’s the low-hanging fruit. However, research shows that combining natural and paid search listings can give your paid search campaigns a lift in the click-throughs and conversions.

The iCrossing Search Synergy – Natural and Paid Search Symbiosis study documents this phenomenon, showing the following increases with combined PPC and SEO campaigns.

Clicks +91.80%
Actions +45.00%
Orders +44.92%
Page Views +43.63%
Visitors +40.69%
Time on Site +38.91%

Uncertainties of SEO

Some companies are ambivalent about SEO because of the perceived uncertainties of achieving top rankings. There are no uncertainties if you have the right SEO provider; it’s simply a matter of time for the search spiders to index and rank your site. Sometimes there is a problem in implementing the recommended changes. However, working with a provider you trust takes all the mystery out of achieving top rankings.

Gaining Top Rankings

A good SEO provider can improve your web site structure, content and inbound links to attain top rankings on the major SERPs. SEO professionals know the variables that affect search listings, which can vary by search engine. They will also explain these concepts to you and guide your technical people through the site change process.
Yes, you will be making changes to your site – changes that will improve your site’s performance in the SERPs, as well as your ability to convert visitors.

SEO Takes Time

SEO is a long-term rather than short-term process. In contrast, PPC happens instantly. These are two very different but important processes that work in tandem to make your site profitable. You don’t want to short change one or the other.

Once you implement the on-site and off-site changes recommended by a reputable SEO provider, you must wait for the search spiders to find and rank your new content. This can take weeks or months, depending on spider crawl schedules. Search spiders crawl the web on a regular basis, monthly or bi-monthly, with different spiders on different schedules.

Another reason for delays in improved rankings is the fact that SEO takes trial and error so it can take several different strategies to get the final result. Once achieved, your listings are long lasting if properly maintained. SEO is not a one-time process, it takes continual monitoring because the web is dynamic rather than static — new and re-optimized sites change the environment daily. 

SEO Services

It is critical to identify your strategic keywords, which are used throughout your web pages. Below are some examples of the critical tasks performed by professional SEO providers.

Keyword Research. This is the backbone of a successful SEO campaign. A good provider will help you select the keywords to achieve high rankings. Keyword selection should be based on your site goals and the popularity, relevance, and competition of our key terms.

Site Structure. This important review evaluates your site from a technical viewpoint. Good providers will correct potential problems with dynamic sites, Flash, heavy graphics and frames.

SEO Copywriting. This involves editing of your content for inclusion of relevant key terms. Search engines recommend a new page for every topic, optimizing each page for one to three key terms.

Title Tag. Title tags should start with a targeted key term and contain 5 to 7 words (50 to 80 characters). The term(s) in the title tag must also show on the page. The title tag is critical because it becomes the link describing your site in the SERPs. Make it powerful and descriptive because users see it when deciding to click.

Description Tag. The description meta tag should start with your most important key term(s). Use marketing copy with a call to action. You are allowed 150 words (250 characters). The description tag is important because it usually follows the title tag in the SERPs.

Linking Strategy. It is important to get inbound links from authoritative sites. A reputable SEO provider knows how to get quality links.

Paid Search and Paid Inclusion. A good SEO provider will utilize paid search and paid inclusion as necessary.

Web Analytics. A good SEO provider will provide reports on site visitors and other metrics on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis.

Advantages of Outsourcing SEO

While industry research shows that most firms perform SEO in-house, research also shows that outsourcing achieves better performance.

You can get better results by outsourcing to professionals because these experts focus on SEO full-time, providing a wide range of methodologies and pricing structures that can fit most budgets. SEO is complex and requires expertise for maximum results.

As mentioned before, SEO requires trial and error because of changing dynamics in search engine algorithms and the web environment. Outsourcing prevents the errors that can get you blacklisted.

Outsourcing versus in-house is cost-effective because SEO firms operate on economies of scale. However, the same expenditures by individual sites can be more costly.

Reputable SEO firms can provide up-to-date technical advice for site changes to improve rankings. However, in-house efforts are usually behind the curve because instructional material obsolesces quickly.

The above information should help you decide whether to do SEO in-house or outsource. If you decide to keep it in-house, be sure to contract for on-site training to ensure your team uses the latest SEO techniques.

If your company uses Yahoo Search Marketing pay per click advertising you probably are already aware there has recently been some changes, upgrades they like to call them, to the program. As a whole I am not particularly impressed but some advertisers I have spoken with seem very pleased.

Here’s what’s going to different.

Remember when you were setting up your old account? You had to generate separate ads for each key word or phrase. Now, titles, descriptions, and URLS can be applied to multiple keywords. This will cut down the time needed to create ads and will make it possible for quicker adjustments to your campaign.

If you have always wanted to test different version of an ad to see which is most effective the new manner of grouping keyword should make that easier. A single ad group will now be able to contain up to 1,000 keywords and 20 ads. This feature brings Yahoo Search Marketing more into line with Google Adwords.

If you already have an existing account you should have received an email telling you how you can see a preview of the upgrade of your account. This notice should come approximately one week before your upgrade is available. Once your preview is ready you can take a look at read-only version and get an idea of what’s up and how to navigate through the impressive collection of reports and ad building tools.

Whenever you are ready you can select to put the upgrade in place for your account. Now this process will take about eight hours and during that time you will not have access to your account so you will most likely want to choose a time during the night or other off period.

If you don’t want to fool with doing the upgrade yourself simply do nothing and Yahoo will do the upgrade themselves. Yahoo will send you an email telling you on what date they will make the changes. You will continue to use your old username and password but will need to go to the new login page. The emails from Yahoo will contain this link or there is a link to use on the old login page. If you have an account and haven’t heard from Yahoo you should probably get ahold of them to be sure there have been no mistakes.

While the new system isn’t an Earth shattering change it does make Search Marketing function more like Adwords. To my mind this is a pretty good thing as I have always found Adwords a good deal easier to work with than Search Marketing. Not bad, Yahoo.

Business and professional users searching for work-related information on the web are not finding needed data through general search engines like Google and Yahoo. A 2006 study by Outsell reported a search failure rate of 31.9 percent among business users when searching from major search engines. With one-third of the B2B and professional business queries producing unsatisfactory results on Google, this presents an opportunity for vertical search engines (VSEs).
Another study by Convera conducted in December 2006, shows that professionals in virtually every industry cannot find important work-related information on the major search engines. Convera surveyed 1,112 professionals in publishing, advertising, marketing, healthcare, finance, government and other industries. Results show that B2B professionals using general search engines do not find queried information quickly or easily.
One of the problems is that Internet search engines were not designed to be used as business tools. Another reason is that most industry professionals are not trained in research practices. As a result, only 4 out of 10 professionals are very satisfied with search results on general search engines.
· Only 11 percent always find what they are looking for on the first attempt.
· Only 43 percent always find what they are looking for after several attempts.
· Only 21 percent feel their query is always understood.
General Search Engines Work Well for Consumers
General search engines rely strongly on the popularity theory that rewards sites with authoritative inbound links. Website popularity and keyword relevancy (among other variables) help determine rankings. The relevancy model works well for consumer search, and consumers usually find what they are looking for on page one of search results. For instance, a search for Toyota Camry brings up 2,630,000 results on Google and 6,740,000 on Yahoo (at time of writing). So there is no scarcity of information on Google and Yahoo when consumers are looking for product information.
Professionals, on the other hand, get a mixed bag. They are used to instant success with their consumer searches, but when it comes to looking up business information, it’s a different story. Here’s what generally happens with many business searches.
When several business searches fail, 93 percent of professionals will enter a similar term into the same search engine hoping for better results. (This is the same result found in other studies on search behavior.) Some of them (53%) will try a different general search engine. When these searches lead nowhere, 52 percent will turn to a vertical or topic-specific search engine. A third may give up altogether; however, 41 percent will make 6 to 10 search attempts before quitting, and another 47 percent will try up to 5 times.
Sounds like work, right? So it’s no wonder that many of these professionals report getting lost or distracted. Here’s what professionals do when they don’t find what they need, and they don’t give up easy.
· 17 percent quit before 5 minutes
· 42 percent continue up to 15 minutes
· 24 percent continue up to 30 minutes
· 17 percent continue more than 30 minutes
So it’s no surprise that 70 percent of the professionals surveyed reported that they get sidetracked during the search process. Of that group, 68 percent end up on sites they did not expect to visit and are not relevant to their work.
When the search process fails, 52 percent believe the data they seek exists but they just can’t find it. Only 23 percent are very confident they’ve covered all the bases. About one-third admit to making decisions without all the needed information.
More Relevant Search for B2B

The past year has seen a number of new VSEs targeted at professionals. These resources offer options that allow professionals to tailor searches according to their own requirements. The most significant trend is that of trade publications developing their own online vertical search destinations for their professional communities. These customized search engines will provide a more relevant search experience for B2B users. When asked about their expectations for these new vertical search resources, nearly 90 percent of professionals indicated they believed such search engines would offer more relevant contact.
· 86 percent said VSEs would locate content more quickly.
· 85 percent believe VSEs would offer access to content not indexed by popular search engines.
Vertical Search in Wholesale Merchandising
Because the current general search options do not meet the needs of B2B and professional users, vertical search is becoming more important than ever before. Both vertical search engines and customized search engines are making it easier for professionals to find the data they need.
If you are in the wholesale general merchandising industry, the following VSEs put buyers and sellers of wholesale merchandise together:
TopTenWholesale is a B2B wholesale merchandise search engine offering pay-per-click, banner and promotional marketing to wholesale companies.
Wholezilla is a B2B wholesale product comparison search engine and the only wholesale search engine on the web that lets retailers compare pricing and product information from wholesalers. Wholesalers can submit their data feeds at no charge.
OffpriceNetwork is the only wholesale directory for the Off Price Apparel industry. Wholesalers can add their websites to the directory (6 sites for a $249 listing fee). OffpriceNetwork caters to the wholesale apparel and fashion accessory industry, offering over 80 categories, blogs, classifieds and forums.
WholesaleU is the most mature directory of wholesalers on the web, offering access to wholesale companies at no fee. Wholesalers can add their websites to the directory (6 sites for a $249 listing fee). Catering to the general merchandise, closeout, and dropship community, WholesaleU offers over 80 categories, blogs, classifieds and forums.
Vertical Search Meets the Needs of B2B
Today, it appears that general search engines do not adequately serve professionals, leaving them with unmet needs. The advantages of vertical search will go a long way toward providing professionals with relevant business results.

I’ve been reading a book called “Search Engine Advertising” written by Catherine Seda. I recommend this book to anyone who is trying to run a successful marketing campaign online: because a lot of us are too busy, or too lazy to pick up a book, I thought it would be nice to share with all of you what I am reading. Here is what I have learned so far:

There are millions of prospects online. Advertisers pay millions of dollars to reach these millions of prospects. Unfortunately, all of these millions of prospects are not interested in your product. Because search engines let the buyer tell them exactly what they want, you need to know your customer. By knowing your customer, you’ll have a better idea of what they are looking for online and where you should be spending your money.

Optimization v. Advertising

Companies spend a lot of money on optimizing their sites for the major search engines like google and yahoo. In short, optimization focuses on designing your pages within to attract spiders. To organically optimize your site, it is necessary to pay an inclusion fee to a majority of top search engines if you want specific pages indexed. While paying this fee, you are not guaranteed of what pages will be indexed by these search engines and you are not guaranteed high rankings on the results pages. If anyone guarantees you placement, run!!!!

When you decide to advertise on a search engine, you are in complete control of everything. You have control of where your company is found on the results pages. You have control of the landing page the prospects find. This means that you have instant visibility of what you want the buyers to see.
You, as an advertiser, have 24/7 control of your campaign. As we all know, you know your business best and you have 24/7 access to change any ad and experiment what is working best for you before you go out and spend the thousands of dollars on trying to optimize your site for the major search engines.

The key ingredient to any successful company is to have a marketing strategy. In you marketing strategy, you should identify the message you want your prospects to know. You should know who your target audience is. You should always define your goals.

More to come in the upcoming weeks:
Jonathan Prescott

With all the talk recently about SEO I thought I would throw in my 2 cents. I did a search for SEO in Wikipedia and something caught my attention. They talked about the different types of SEO efforts and they narrowed it down to two categories: On Page Factors and Off Page Factors. I found this a very easy way to look at SEO. The On Page Factors refer to efforts that would be made directly on the website we are trying to optimize. This would include changing source code, adding meta tags etc. For most of us web development rookies this is something we will need some serious help with. Then I read on and found Off Page Factors. These are efforts that can require a novice web education. Participating in PPC and Paid Inclusion are 2 major parts of Off Page SEO efforts. These tools will create back links to your website making it easier for an organic search engine to find it. So what I took from this is that I don’t have to put on my programmer hat to participate in SEO efforts. So if you are looking for Search Engine Optimization for your website then PPC to your hearts content, not only will you find buyers but the web will find you!

Brian Werner

Keywords are a very important part of optimizing your Web site for SEO. Keywords are words or phrases that people enter into their favorite search engine in order to find what ever it is they are looking for. If your site is relevant to their search, and you have wisely chosen your keywords, you have an advantage over the Web site that didn’t.

Keywords need to be found in various parts of your site, including:
Page title
Page content
Meta tags (These are in the source code for your site.)

You need to understand what people are searching for before you get started. Here are some steps to get you on your way:
1) Make a list of every word or phrase you think people would use to find you.
2) Think of common misspellings for your words and include those on your list.
3) Think about variations of words, for instance, if the may be hyphenated or have spaces.
4) You may want to ask someone who isn’t an expert in your field to give you some words they would use in a search for your products or services.

Your list may be getting long now, but don’t worry, we are going to thin it out in a moment.

You should now look through your list and decide what words are the best for your site. There are also tools you can use to help you with this.

Wordtracker – http://www.wordtracker.com/ is very popular. Starting at $8.00*/day – it is really a great value

KeywordDiscovery –
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ – offers software to help you manage a myriad of your SEO efforts. This software is reasonably priced at around $300.00*.

You can always search your favorite search engine for “Keyword Suggestion Tool” or something to that affect.

Now that you have narrowed your keywords it is time to write or re-write your site content. You want to use these choice keywords as often as possible on your site, as long as they are relevant and not repetitive. This will help your keyword density. Keyword density is the number of keywords used on your page divided by total words on the page. As a general rule, high keyword density is good for SEO.

Once you have good relevant keywords and good keyword density, you are well on your way to strengthening the SEO efforts for your site. This will lead to better organic searches and in combination with other SEO efforts, you can soon find yourself on the first page of many search engines.

Wikipedia defines search engine optimization as a subset of search engine marketing that deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (aka “organic” or “algorithmic” search engine) listings. The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

Um…ok. Thanks wikipedia, but let’s put that in laymen terms. There are three methods of search engine marketing (SEM) that will increase the visibility of your web site in search engine results pages (SERPs). The three subsets are:

1. Search engine optimization – the goal here is to improve rankings for your important keywords in search results by improving a web site’s structure and content. The search engine sends out little spiders that scan all the important data on the whole site and store it in the search engines’ data base. The search engines will display the most relevant results first. There’s a lot more involved than just the spiders, but this is a good start. Because search engine optimization takes a very long time and is quite costly, most sites make use of pay per click advertising so they can start seeing results instantaneously. A combination of SEO and PPC will provide more exposure and results than either strategy alone.

2. Pay per Click (PPC) advertising – also known as sponsored search and search engine advertising, the advertiser is only charged when a user clicks on the ad. The ads can be text ads, banner ads, video ads, or even audio ads. Pay per click advertising allows advertisers to target specific users with certain interests.

3. Paid inclusion – this is different from pay per click advertising because it guarantees inclusion but not placement. Paid inclusion ensures your ad is going to be viewed when a user does a search for your keywords or phrases. You usually pay by month, 6 months, or year and now your listing is included for relevant searches. There is no way to be #1 in the search results unless the marketing company has exclusive positions available which will be not be included in the costs of the basic inclusion.

Let’s face it. Everyone would love to be among the first companies displayed in the search engines’ results page. Not everyone has the time or money to invest to keep up with the continuous changing algorithms the search engines use to decide which ads to show first. That’s why, especially in a competitive industry, a combination of search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and paid inclusion is going to get you the best bang for your buck.

Justin Prescott

There are so many things involved in getting your site optimized for search engines. How can you stay on top of all the rules for being SEO’ed? Here are a few resources I would suggest:

What is SEO?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Other resources:
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.seroundtable.com/
http://www.selfseo.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/

The most important thing about running a website and keeping it up-to-date is staying current with new web standards and following through with all your SEO tasks.

Don’t forget the importance of having links to your site from as many relevant websites that you can. Advertising on those sites or offering link exchanges will help your Google rating as well. Ever wonder what a Google Page Rank is, and how it works? Here is some great information on that topic:

http://www.google.com/technology/
http://www.google-pagerank.net/

Good luck!

Kevin

Search engine marketing is transforming at lightening speed. This transformation is being forced by marketers who need to target specific markets. Google, Yahoo and MSN crawl through billions of websites. A majority of the searches done on the major search engines is either a consumer related search or a web surfer looking for information on a topic. It’s simply not possible to sift through billions of web pages. Business to Business marketers are now relying on vertical search engines ( also know as specialized search engines ) to target the audiences that are relevant to their business models. Web users are also becoming much more reliant on vertical search engines to quickly find information, products, or research on a certain topic or industry.
Vertical Search engines, like Toptenwholesale.com , offer both marketers and users a very unique experience. Toptenwholesale focuses on being the information super highway of wholesale merchandise. A store owner, reseller, ebay seller, or retailer can find millions of products offered by 1000’s of wholesalers at any time. One will also find editorial coverage on the industry, forums, and blogs all related to wholesale, wholesale marketing, product sourcing, and successful strategies for reselling merchandise. Wholesalers, Importers, and manufactures know that they can reach a highly qualified buyer by advertising on Toptenwholesale or one of its affiliate sites ( Wholesaleu , Offpricenetwork, or Wholezilla). Well over 15,000 retailers use Toptenwholesale and its network every day locate wholesale goods and over 1000 wholesalers use the Toptenwholesale to display their wholesale goods in front of an entire marketplace.
Marketers are always thirsty for new ways to increase their ROI. In the inline game, this can online be done by increasing your CTR ( click through ratio) which will inevitably lead to much higher conversion ratio. Businesses need conversions, not clicks. It’s very true that Goofgle and Yahoo can you send 1000’s of clicks a day. But let’s face it, it makes much for sense for a marketer to pay top dollar to get 100 clicks and 10 conversions, than have to fight for 1000 clicks and get only 10 conversions. Google and Yahoo are great search engines. There is just no way fore them to truly regulate the types og keywords that their clients are purchasing. A small wholesale company, imoprting goods and reselling them to stores, should not have to compete against companies like Sam’s Club and Costco for keywords like “wholesale”. Wholesale is defined as the business of buying and selling goods in quantity, at a discount, so that those goods can be resold to consumers. Do you go to Costco to buy goods and resell them to your neighbor? I don’t think so. Small mom and pop wholesalers can not compete with an advertising budget as enormous as Costco’s in the online marketing world. The only way to compete is to find vertical , niche outlets where true regulation is done, and an ROI can be achieved with out breaking the bank.
As SEM ( search engine marketing ) transforms, marketers will continually hunt down niche marketers for their clients. The major engines are already trying to address this threat they face. However, the problem with gigantic companies, is that it’s almost impossible for them to think niche. Google and Yahoo have laid a great foundation. It’s now time build and construct new levels of search in the spirit of giving the internet user and marketer much better, more relevant experience.

Jason