Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has gone through a lot of changes over the years.  Search Engines are like little toddlers, they need to be taught what is relevant and quality for searches.  The goal of search engines is to provide the most relevant and best quality result to your search query.  The task of SEO is to provide search engines with all the necessary triggers of relevancy and quality to teach them what to display in search results.

The basics of SEO consists both of on-site factors, like header tags and title tags, and off-site factors, like back-links and social triggers.  Over the years the way we try to reach our goals with organic search has changed.  And with the introduction of Google’s “Search Plus Your World,” there has been a shift in search results based on the Google+ social graph.

If you do not have a Google+ social media plan in place, now is the time to adapt one.

6 Reasons Search is Changing

Google+ information is being heavily displayed in search results.  When you are logged into your Google account and perform a search, not only are you going to see the regular paid ads and the top ten search results, you are going to see Google+ results all over the page.

You will see the people that are in your circle along the top of the results page.  You will see content from your circle’s feed showing in prime locations in search.  Google+ is being displayed prominently and it will affect your traffic and potential conversion.

Google+ is in Search Results

Second, Google has made an aggressive change to the way search results are displayed.  They have introduced a new results box called “People and Pages on Google+.”  This is prominent and will grow in use.  This will only display when logged into your account, but the power is obvious.

Facebook, at the time of this writing has about 800 million active users.  Google has billions of users performing billions of searches each day.  The amount of data available to Google is significantly greater than even Facebook.

Google is essentially personalizing your search results based on your social connections and the things that you have indicated are your interests.  They are trying to learn what is most relevant to you and deliver the results that they believe you would want to view and your social connections help determine both relevancy and quality.

Google+ Adoption is Growing

Facebook has spent a great deal of energy and effort becoming the center of the social graph.  They have built an enormous amount of equity in “owning” the social space.  Google is making an effort to dislodge Facebook from that position because of the power of search.  Google+ is still a young social media platform.  At the time of this writing, it has about 60 million users.  It will reach 100 million by the end of 2012 and begin to grow at steady rate.

I don’t know about you, but when people perform a search using one of my primary keywords, showing up in organic search is good, but showing up in “People and Pages on Google+” would be great!  It is in a better position for clicks and gives me an opportunity to connect better with potential customers or users.

Enriching Result Snippets

The rich snippets that are being included in the markup will have impact in click through rates and impressions.  You now have images, icons of people in your circle, brands that you follow being displayed in the search result under a listing.  It is adding an element of social proof that search results have missed.

We will be more likely to click on links that people we know and follow have +1ed or shared on their stream than a link with no social proof.  Google is counting on these triggers.  These are the things that help provide them with better information that leads to better search results for its customers, you and me!

Social Triggers and Proof Matter

The current trend in search is to be biased toward social triggers and social proof.  The search algorithm is designed to deliver the most important content to its users.  The problem is that these mathematical formulas are missing a key ingredient, human behavior.  They are not able to understand and predict human behavior in a reliable, systematic way.  By incorporating the social element from Google+, they are able to utilize this data to help filter irrelevant and low quality results and deliver high quality relevant results specific to the user.

Your search results will differ from my search results because our social graph is different.  These triggers will impact the way Google delivers results.  Search becomes more personal.

SEO is Changing with Social

The impact of Google’s “Search Plus Your World” is yet to be completely understood.  It has already proven that is an important tool for online marketing and social marketing and it is now influencing SEO strategy.  If you have not began to look at how Google+ can improve your web traffic, jump in while there is still room to learn, grow and master.  Then you can become the authority that is showing for your keyword in the “People and Pages on Google+” results.

According to a definition, a back link of a website is a link anywhere on the web that directs towards the particular website. Any website on the web is incomplete without back links. Even with the most relevant content, a website’s credibility is still under question without quality back links. Search engines especially Google calculates the relevance of a site on the web according to the number of quality back links. So if you own a website, it is most important for you to understand the value of back links and apply while optimizing your website.

 Almost every website that expects regular visitors rely on what we call Search Engine Optimization abbreviated as SEO. A search engine expects a website to build quality back links with time, which is a long process. In a search query, the content of the website is considered more relevant which has the maximum number of back links from relevant sources. For example if you own a website based on gadgets, quality back links will be the ones which come from other gadget websites. Search engines will depend upon the source website’s content to determine the quality of your website’s back link. So you should not just blindly aim on having the maximum number of back links from any website but look for relevance. Natural back links can be slowly built with time and maturity of your website on the web. This way it is a long process and this is why we need effective SEO for back links. But to manipulate search engines for back links is not fairly easy.

Back links hold a high value in search engine algorithms. Hence a lot of people try to influence search engines by manipulating the use of back links. But these tips and tricks lose their influence with time and the algorithms just get tougher. Among the most common techniques are link farms and back link bombing. Sometimes when you click somewhere on a webpage, it automatically opens a different webpage. You might wonder if you have mistakenly clicked on an advertisement. This is instead a hidden link which is actually a back link to a website. These are known as link farms. Back link bombing is actually a deliberate attempt to fake the credibility of a website. Suppose if someone has 5 different websites under the same IP and he/she interlinks them together to sneak in a few extra back links. All the websites may or may not have similar content but under the same IP they are usually caught. This is called back link bombing.

A search engine considers both inbound and outbound links of a website to calculate its credibility. You should always keep a check on all the websites that link back to yours to make the links effective. A tool that can help you with that is the Domain Stats Tool. You should also consider the Backlink Builder tool that can help you find websites which has a content theme similar to your website. Another tool that can help you build more effective hyperlinks is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. Apply these tools for optimization and follow a fair and square method to enhance the quality and increase the visitors on your prestigious website.

About the author: Bethany is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. She recently read an article about Green building and liked it a lot. Beside this she loves cars and dreams of owning one of the BMW cars.

Enjoy this guest post by Ben ~

Social media has become an essential part of web promotion. Not only is it effective and helpful for increasing the popularity of your business or website, but it is absolutely necessary! Proper use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook will not only help your site gain exposure, but it will act as a catalyst for making your content more prominent and even viral.

The easiest and most important step to take when stepping into the “social” scene is adding buttons to your site to help visitors share your content. In other words, make your website “shareable” because the last thing you want to do is inhibit their ability to advertise your business for you. People love to communicate and we also love to share. Social media is the Internet’s analogy for word-of-mouth advertising. Neglecting to add buttons on your site for visitors to share your content is a lot like stripping them of their voice – let them talk!

TweetMeme is a fantastic tool for making your content very shareable. It adds a simple button at the top (or bottom) of all of your posts that people can use to tweet your content with literally 2-clicks. A common trend you will notice when observing popular sites in almost every niche is the overwhelming amount of tweets in comparison to “likes” on Facebook. Tweeting is easier and faster, and in an online world where we skim almost everything we read, we need to have quick sharing options for our visitors.

A common and effective layout for making your site easy to share is to include a button at the top of every post for Twitter and/or Facebook, a set of buttons at the bottom for a few popular social sites, and also the presence of similar sharing buttons consistently displayed on your sidebar. For the sidebar, the most important inclusions are Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS Feed. You might have other sites like LinkedIn that you like to use or a series of videos on YouTube – these would be good additions for your sharing buttons.

To further emphasize the importance of properly using social media, lets cover a scenario:

1. Someone visits your site and reads an article. They really like it, but they don’t see any sharing buttons and so it may not even cross their mind to tweet it or like it, so they move on with their day.
2. This same visitor comes to your site and reads the same article. However, this time there are social sharing buttons featured prominently on the page. This visitor tweets the post and it is quickly exposed to all of this user’s followers (dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people).

And it doesn’t stop there. The people who see that tweet might tweet it too, they might look through your site and tweet another post, or they might follow you on Twitter and become exposed to all of your new tweets. Simple processes like this can quickly multiply and expand upon your daily traffic, and all of this happens simply because you have made your website shareable.

Supplement your social media strategies with SEO. Check out our FREE SEO Course or download our FREE OnlyWire Account Creator to make social bookmarking effortless.

Have you heard the phrase Long-tail Keywords? Do you know what they are or how to use them?  If you are an online marketer you really need to understand the impact long tail keywords can have on being found through search engines.

Long-tail keyword searches are often used when someone is trying to look for a specific thing. They might type a question into a search box with their keyword phrases within the question. (ex., Where can I find a pink polka dot bikini?) Pink Polka Dot Bikini is a long-tail keyword.  Typically people will search for just the generic keyword term, bikini, if they are only interested in bikinis in general. However, if they are ready to buy a pink polka dot bikini, that’s the phrase they will use for their search.

Internet Marketers have been using these keywords and keyword phrases for awhile now to help rank in the search engines and get their websites positioned in that #1 spot. What this does is help them better answer the question their potential customer is asking.  By using the keyword phrase, pink polka dot bikini, when someone searches for the exact term, it’s a perfect match for the person searching and will most likely result in a sale.

The more specific you can make a keyword phrase, the better chance you have for someone to find you with that phrase. When you decide to target long tail keywords, you are positioning your site to be found by those who are typing in a more specific targeted search. If you are trying to rank high with other more popular keyword phrases and are aiming to get on the top spots in the search engines with the more common or generic keywords, you could possibly be losing out on these more specific searches. However, if you want to be found by those people who are ready to buy when finding exactly what they are looking for with the long tail keywords, this method works much better. According to Wikipedia statistics recent long tail keyword research has found that long-tail searches often exhibit a higher conversion rate by up to 200% compared to short tail (generic) keywords, and can be extremely profitable for search engine marketers in terms of a lower cost per action and higher return on investment.

If you are a marketer who is interested in using Pay Per Click as one of your advertising methods, choosing long tail keyword phrases could end up saving you money.  By using the more popular keyword phrases since they are more in demand can cost you a pretty penny. By targeting long tail keyword phrases, you not only have less competition, but have a better chance of reaching the exact target market you would like that will end up purchasing your product.

Doing your keyword research to find these long tailed keyword phrases is crucial to determine which ones are the best phrases to use. Wordtracker is a great program that will enable you to type in various keywords and find the best long-tail phrases that are being searched for within that niche. Also, Google’s keyword tool is another good resource. You should always track your results when using keyword phrases so you can see which ones are producing better sales and views. Once you have found a few long-tail keyword phrases that have desirable statistics, you can then use these for other marketing methods to gain as much as you can from your advertising efforts.

Do you have other keyword tools that you use?  Share them in the comments section.

Also here’s another great post about using keywords for SEO.

Please Share – What you need to know about Long Tail Keywords by clicking the social media links below.

Understanding keywords and how they affect our website has been a mystery to many online marketers.  Now the secrets to keyword research has been revealed in a 90-minute audio recording from some of the top internet marketers in the country.

In this downloadable recording, the four-member panel made up of Lynn Terry, Dan Morris, Suzanne Meyers and Karon Thackston discuss:

• why keywords are so important
• which keyword research tools are the best (free or paid)
• where and how often to use keywords in content
• how keywords are the foundation of your search engine optimization
• and much more

Recorded live at the Niche Affiliate Marketing System in Atlanta, Georgia, this group of savvy business entrepreneurs share their secrets to being on the first page of Google time after time with many different websites, blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t miss the opportunity to get your recording of proven tips, techniques and resources while its still available.

Keyword Research

Stop paying SEO professionals to optimize your site when you can learn from the pros in just a couple of hours!

Start driving more targeted traffic and get ranked higher in search results  – get your download now!

Keyword Research

Writing has always been a popular means of expression. The advent of internet use has seen the evolution of writing from traditional pen and paper diaries to online journals or blogs. Because it is people maintained and mostly written in first person, a blog’s content is varied and diverse. Subjects may range from the absurd to the factual, and commentaries, opinions and observations on different activities, industries and mainly everything under the sun can be shared through this medium. A blog’s power and energy comes from interaction among its publishers and readers through comments and feedbacks given.

The release of automated publishing software has skyrocketed the popularity of blogging and catapulted it to the frontline as a valuable source of information because it simplifies and accelerates the process of publishing entries online. One of the most widely used blog publishing applications is WordPress, an open source software that is free to use.

WordPress is user-friendly and can be easily installed without any need for mind-boggling configuration or other technical nitty-gritties. One key feature of WordPress is its template or theme system. It can be edited, customized and personalized by simply moving or switching widgets thus eliminating the need for editing html codes.

Another practical feature of WordPress is its integrated link management. To drive traffic to your site, it is important to have it optimized in order to improve its ranking in search engine results.  What exactly is a search-engine friendly site and how is it done? The smart use of keywords will improve your site’s visibility and make it more accessible to your targeted audience. Luckily, you need not go through the daunting task of overhauling your whole website because WordPress allows every single page on your blog to be indexed. Taking time to make minor tweaks can go a long way in streamlining your site and helping it get the attention that it deserves. Don’t overlook the simple stuff like titles, description and text or content. To make your site search-engine friendly, read on and consider the following tips:

Blog Title. Adjust your title format so that the actual title of your post or article is displayed before your blog’s name or title. To catch a reader’s attention, make it short, sweet and simple. Writing a good description for your page gives the search engine and its users an overview of what your site is about before they actually visit it. Here is a great, free, resource to analyze your titles for emotionally connecting with your audience. http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

Meta Descriptions. Take advantage of WordPress’ All In One SEO plug-in to type in keyword-rich titles plus matching description for your entries. Make your site description unique and relevant to the content of the page. Similar to blog titles, meta description tags are designed to provide a brief description of your site’s content. This will be used by search engines and directories for indexing.

Rewriting URL’s with permalinks. Updating and customizing the permalink structure on web URLs and making it more comprehensive enables your site to become more user-friendly and search-engine friendly. Tags can either be date and name based, numeric, or fully customized by the user.

Using breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb navigation helps give people a perspective on where they are on your site. It can be added using a variety of plug-ins such as WordPress Breadcrumbs, Yoast Breadcrumbs and so on.

Generating a sitemap. If your site has lots of pages, site maps are a quick and easy way to help users browse the contents of your site. Several plug-ins and functions can be incorporated to the template of your choice.

Use proper keywords when naming photos and images. Again, we cannot stress how important keywords are. To be search-engine smart, you have to consider everything. For example, by renaming a photo of a weeping willow tree as “weeping willow” rather than just 0001.jpg, it gets a better chance of being displayed on the search engine’s photo search results.

Avoid content duplication. Weed out duplicate content on multiple pages by using the Robots Meta plug-in.

Link to related posts. Link building is an important part of the SEO equation. Keep in mind that you should only link to sites that are relevant and complementary to your own. Spamming is a definite no-no.

To achieve presence online, you need to have an edge over the others. This comes with careful planning, excellent presentation and valuable content. SEO is just one way of gaining momentum.  To stay ahead of the game it helps if you know your niche, keep realistic goals, become adequately informed and exercise best practices. One of those best practices is to comment relevant blogs, which gives you a link back to your site.  So go ahead, let me know what you think of this post in the comment section below!

Oh and by the way, on Thursday June 3rd at 7 pm eastern, I’m hosting none-other than The WordPress Chick, Kim Doyal in my Social Media “T” Room.  Click here Social Media “T” Room for more details and to register.  The teleseminar is free, so join us!

If you liked Do You Want to Know Why Search Engines Love WordPress?

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Getting people to your page is just the first part of having a successful and profitable site. Making them stay there, is another matter. Website statistics just isn’t about driving traffic to your site, but it’s about making people want to stay there and come back over and over again. Bounce rates, which is defined as the percentage of visitors to any given site who arrive at a page and quickly leave before looking at any other page. Therefore, the lower the bounce rate of a site, the better.

So how does one keep visitors from ‘bouncing’ away? Here are a few simple tricks to keep your audience riveted to your website.

Optimize your site

No one likes to be kept waiting, least of all people who can leave your site at the click of a button. A site that loads quickly and pulls up all the information anyone and everyone may need will make it easier for visitors to poke around your website.

Clear and Intuitive Navigation

There’s nothing worse than arriving in a new city and not know where north, south, east and west are. Think of your website as a new place for visitors to explore – make sure the roads are well planned, and road signs clear and concise. A visible navigation bar, labeled accordingly and no broken links are essential to keeping visitors to your site.

Have relevant content

According to a recent study by BBC News, an average Internet user spends less than a minute per website. How can you keep people longer than that? By giving them what they need, of course, through relevant content. If you run a website about fashion, then make sure from the homepage that your design and content reflects this.

Keep content fresh and updated

A soap opera writer once said “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry and make ‘em wait.” The same could be applied to your content – keep people interested and coming back for more. Having something new each day (or even every few hours) will keep people on your pages.

Have all the tools available

Web 2.0 is all about interactivity and socializing. Many blogs and sites make it easy to share links and content to their own social networking profile and interact with other users. You can install some simple tools directly on your website. Skysa, for example, installs a non-intrusive navigation bar on your site that lets visitors quickly access sites like Facebook and Twitter right on your site, without directing them away. (see mine below)

By making these few simple changes, you’ll see less visitors bouncing and more people sticking around your website.

Take a moment to think about how you would really answer this question. If given enough thought just about any business owner who utilizes the Internet for any purpose will likely find that whether or not they intentionally organized an Internet marketing campaign, they may already be marketing their products and services on the Internet. Let’s look at some subtle ways business owners may already be marketing their business on the Internet.

Do you have a website for your business? Business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their products or services online just by virtue of the fact that they have a website online. Having a live website means there is the potential for curious Internet users to access your website. You may not be actively promoting your website but you may still find that your website generates interest in your products despite the lack of promotional endeavors; this is a form of passive marketing.

Do you participate in message boards and include a link to your website in your signature? Again business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their website online. Savvy business owners realize the importance of participation in industry related message boards to create an interest in their products and services, establish themselves as knowledgeable about the industry and offer a link to their own website even if it is in the signature line of their posts. However, even those who don’t realize this, may already be inadvertently enjoying the benefits of Internet marketing just by doing something they enjoy.

Do you include keywords which are relevant to your business in the content of your website? Business owners who answer yes to this question are also already marketing on the Internet by optimizing their website for these keywords. These search engine optimization (SEO) affects the websites whether or not they were even aware of the concept of keyword density and how it can help to SEO a website. Business owners will likely use certain words often depending on the type of products and services they offer just because it is natural and logical to do so. This tendency, however, can result in search engines boosting your website rankings for these particular keywords. The concept of SEO is much more involved and complex than simply using keywords frequently but business owners can gain some benefit just by naturally applying relevant keywords to their website. A great free resource is Free Keywords Suggestion Tool from WordTracker.

Do you solicit feedback from your customers online? This is yet another example of how business owners may be accidentally marketing their business on the Internet. Most business owners realize the importance of soliciting feedback from customers and those who offer products online might solicit feedback in the form of online surveys and polls. Although the business owners may be doing this simply for a business purpose, the fact that it is done online makes it fall into the category of Internet marketing.

We’ve discussed several ways business owners may already be marketing online but what about business owners who want to have an increased online presence? For those who may already be marketing online accidentally, they may wish to launch a full scale Internet marketing campaign. The best way to do this is to hire a consultant with experience in Internet marketing and social media marketing, to assist in creating a campaign which is effective for your target audience. Tasting The Internet, can help develop a successful campaign for your online marketing success!

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By Roger Smith February 4, 2010

Time and again, I see companies not satisfied with their SEO results and laying off their SEO staff because of their below par performance. To save you from the disappointment and financial losses which you may face due to improper skills and inefficiency of the SEO Company or Expert you hire, I am going to share a few questions which you should ask while interviewing SEO’s for your company. But, before that, I want to make a few things clear. Search Engine Optimization is a time consuming process which usually takes 3-4 months to get results depending on the competition in your niche. Give your SEO at least 3-4 months before making any decision about his/her performance. Now, without further ado, let’s see the questions.  

Which browser do you use? If the answer you get is IE, opera or any other browser except Firefox then it means that you are interviewing an amateur SEO. Professional SEO‘s use Firefox because of the free SEO plugins you can use with Firefox. If the interviewee is already using Firefox then ask him about the plugins he uses for SEO to test his level of knowledge

What is the difference between do-follow and no-follow? Ask the candidate to explain the difference between do-follow and no-follow links. Why was it implemented? How will they find out which link is do-follow and which one is no-follow?

What are your favorite SEO blogs and Forums? Search Engines keep on changing their algorithms; hence it is very important that the person doing your SEO keep himself updated. Asking about the favorite SEO blogs and forums will help you to analyze the amount of effort an interviewee spends on updating his knowledge.

What on-site factors do you think are important? Ask about the on-page factors which he thinks plays a role in search engine rankings. If his strategy is to put more keywords in meta tags then just throw him out. Ask them to review your website and tell you the scope for improvement on your website.

What are your favorite link building methods? Everyone among us knows the importance of link building and how hard is it to get the quality links if your niche is uber-competitive. Ask about his favorite link building techniques or tell him to show you the best link he built for his client and see whether the samples of links is up to your expectations or not.

What SEO tools you use? You should be aware of the tools – free or paid, your SEO will be using for your website. What kind of tools he uses for keyword research, competitive analysis, link building etc. What are his favorite tools and Why? If these tools are not free then how much will you have to pay extra for these tools and who would be the owner of these tools after the project end.

How would you measure results? No SEO can guarantee results and if somebody is guaranteeing it to you then either he is cheating you or he doesn’t have proper knowledge of SEO. Every SEO has its own favorite method. It could be on the basis of links or improvement in rankings or increase in traffic /sales.

 How do you like to get paid? Some SEO’s like to get paid on the basis of number of links they get for your website, some would prefer to bill you for the amount of hours they worked and some may prefer to do performance based agreements. If you don’t have any prior knowledge of SEO, then you can go with performance based payments, they are expensive but the results are guaranteed but if you have fair knowledge about SEO, then you should either pay on the basis of hours worked or on the basis of number of links built. 

Roger Smith is a freelance writer and mainly writes on Conversion Rate Optimization, Landing Pages, Web 2.0, SEO and affiliate marketing.

Keyword Research – It’s not that hard, according to Nick Stewart creator of Nick’s Traffic Tricks.  I recently stumbled upon Nick’s site and fell in love with all the great information he shares!  He shows how to easily get traffic to your site and he gives a ton of information away.

So today when Nick sent me an email about his Keyword Research ebook, with the link to download it immediately without signing up for anything or entering my email address, I didn’t waste a minute in getting my copy.  Then if getting it free wasn’t enough, he said I could give it away to you!  Isn’t he nice? 

So here’s a link to get your copy and starting driving outrageous traffic to your website and blog!

http://tastingtheinternet.com/freedownloads/KeywordResearchBasics.pdf

Oh, and be sure to visit Nick’s site at http://NicksTrafficTricks.com and tell him I sent you!