SEO the Waiting Game of Search Engine Marketing

As a professional Search Engine Marketer, I have tried every ethical optimization technique available to try to achieve top search results. Some work well and others don’t show any sign of improvement in ranking once completed.

What I have come to realize is that search engine optimization and good ranking take diligence and lots of patience in achieving great Search Engine positioning.

You can have the right keywords, the right met tags, quality page content, great back links, and submit to engines regularly. There is not magic wand you can wave to see your listing suddenly blow your competitors site off the map and get you in that top spot.

A new site can take anywhere from 1-6 months to show up in the search engines with the right SEO techniques. Existing web sites can take anywhere from 1 to several weeks for the adjustments you made to show the new positions.

Each search engine will update its data at different times. Google may index your site data within a week after you make your adjustments and take another week to shift your position for the keyword. MSN may take 1-2 weeks to index your data and your update your new positioning. Yahoo can take up to a month to update you web site data and positioning. Be patient it will happen.

I recommend optimizing your sites with the time frame in mind. If you advertise holiday specials, then you need to optimize you specials page in advance to target the holiday keywords.

Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy should be part of your overall Search Engine Marketing plan. If you have available funds, pay for paid inclusion or pay per click advertising for the keywords you wish to target while you are waiting for the natural placement to occur.

When you start to get great placement in the free ads area, turn off the pay per click ads for those words. Now you’re getting free traffic.

Remember free placement does not happen over night. You have to be patient, do your work, and make sure your information is relevant to what you want to list for in searches.

by Shawn Hickman

Choosing a Web Designer the Easy Way

by Steven Gardner

When you choose a web designer, there are many things that you need to be aware of and that need to be taken into consideration before you make a decision.

To some extent, the ability to work successfully with your web designer is sometime as important as their actual skill in being able to deliver the project.

A web designer that is skilled in what they do but is a pain to deal with can make the whole process frustrating and not worth the money being spent, especially if you have an emotional attachment to the project (which you should have being the one supplying the money and motivation)

That relationship can be worth a large proportion of the contract. However, there are some key things you need to consider. Be careful in what you get for your money. Some possible pitfalls you may want to check on

Obviously what do you get for your money

What is included? Design, Content, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Graphic Design, Updates? You need to get these details so you can compare your quotes against each other. You also need to quantify some of these things in terms of quantity, hours, numbers search engines submitted to etc.

How easy is it to incorporate your branding

Some template sites are hard to blend a logo or colours into them, be wary of template driven website companies, some of these people are skilled enough only to change the text on a template. Some designers design their sites from the ground up incorporating all of you design elements in their design. These companies offer the most flexibility.

How reliable is the services provided

With hosting and email, too much down time can make the whole experience unworkable. You don't want to have to change hosts after six months because your designer has provided you with a poor host. Some people rely heavily on email and these are the people that need to choose carefully so their business inst impacted.

What are the costs for making changes later on?

Updates and maintenance on your site is something that will eventually happen, even if you don't change the content frequently (see the Making Your Site Super Sticky Article for the benefits of this) you will eventually change some content and so you need to know what it will cost over a year.

Hidden costs

Make sure common things (like search engine submissions) are either not included or are an extra cost. Some key things can be omitted to keep the price down. Make sure you don't get sold short. An important one...is the web designer doing the job part time Are your web designers doing this as a full time job? Some designers are working during the day and then web designing at night. A lot of designers started out this way, but it can cause issues when you need something done and they don't do the job from 9-5.

If all these things check out then you have found someone who you can work with and provide you with a service that will get you your desired result.

Remember; choose a designer with the right skills, but also one you believe you can work with on an ongoing basis. Build a working relationship that will benefit you both and your web project will benefit as well

Steven Gardner runs DeepWeb Web Design, a web design business that caters to all businesses looking to get an edge with their presence on the Web, providing web design, maintenance and consulting services. You can find him at www.deepweb.co.nz

The Art and Science of Webpage Building

Webpage building is partly an art and partly a science. Art comes into play when you want to create websites that are visually pleasing. Science is also important because you need to understand the method that goes into building pages that are optimized properly for search engines.

If you want to make your own website that stands out among the many competing sites on the web already established, you will need to keep the art and science of webpage building in mind at all times. In other words, you need to create websites that are search engine friendly and user friendly all at the same time. Here are a few specific tips that will help you through the process:

Make the Site Easy to Navigate Today's web visitors are impatient and more than a little finicky. If they come across a website that is hard to navigate, they'll log off and go elsewhere. This is extremely important to keep in mind during the webpage building process. The site should be easy to navigate and should be set up so that the user does not get trapped in one section. If they hit the back button, it should take them back to where they were. When you make your own website, you will also want to put a link to the home page on every other page you create.

Watch Out for Broken Links Nothing is more frustrating to a user than clicking on a link that doesn't work. When you create websites, you should periodically review all of your outgoing links to make sure that they actually go somewhere. While this won't be something you need to do every day, it should be something you take care of once a month and during the initial phases of the webpage building process.

Keep Content Fresh If you want to make your own website, but don't want to keep updating it with new content, you might want to rethink the idea altogether. The only way to create websites that stay fresh and keep visitors coming back for more is to consistently update the site with fresh content. If you have the same old stuff on your site from month to month, visitors will notice and so will the search engines. Webpage building is an ongoing process. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

About the author: Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates webbusinesstoolsonline.com Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses and his continual research into further business improvements.

Simple Website Design Principles for Internet Marketing

An essential element of the success of any Internet Marketing campaign is the ability to not only generate traffic to your Website, but capturing the interest of the visitor once he's on your site. The are a number of techniques that the best Internet Marketing Strategies employ to ensure that their Website Design encourages a user to linger.

To a great degree all Internet marketing strategies - article marketing, blogging, search engine optimization and email marketing, depend on the quality of your Website design to close the sale.

As you design and continually refine your Website, maintain constant focus on what you are trying to accomplish, what message you are trying to communicate. All the principles in the world are worthless without vigilance to your ultimate objective.

Here are five fundamental rules of thumb to observe to make sure your Website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable Website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "I'm outta here"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

If you analyze every aspect of your Website Design and ask the question - 'does this contribute to my ultimate objective?' - you're Website should evolve into a significant contributor for your Internet Marketing efforts.

About the Author

by Michael Saunders

Designing Your Web Site for SEO

When designing your web site with search engine optimization in mind, you must remember to leave plenty of room for keyword relevant content.

What is keyword relevant content you ask? Keyword relevant content is content that has keywords relevant to your companies business that people are searching for in the search engines spread through out it.

The search engines crawl web sites continuously looking for sites with the most relevance keyword content to index and place in the top positions. When you do a search for a product, you expect the most relevant results to show up and the only way search engines stay in business is by providing the best possible results available.

Go to your competitor’s web site that is placing well for a particular keyword you are trying to place with. Count how many times you see that keyword listed throughout the web site. Most of the time you will see the sites with more keyword content doing better than sites with little to no content.

Also, make sure you use the same keywords in your metatags and page content. This will confirm the relevancy with the engines as they count your keywords in your title and description tags along with the keywords in your page content together.

Remember the most important rule about optimizing for your site. If your customers don’t understand what you services are, then getting traffic to your web site is completely meaningless. Add enough content to make your site relevant to the search engines but make sure it makes since to your visitors, after all that is what your in business for.

Have fun and be original.

By Shawn Hickman - Internet Marketing Manager
source: Web Solutions of America