9 Simple Steps toward a Search Engine Optimized Website

Search Engine Optimization - An Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is probably the cheapest and most cost effective form of Internet marketing. In fact some studies indicate Search Engine Optimization as being the second most effective marketing strategy. The increasing popularity of Search Engines and the fact that good quality and cost effective traffic can be brought through them to websites has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around how to make Web pages/Websites more search engine friendly or in other words better optimized. The result of this advent of Search Engine Optimization industry is the feeling among webmasters and novices in the industry that SEO is like rocket science and has to be handled by professionals only. Thankfully, the truth is that anyone can search engine optimize Websites. All it takes to optimize a Web site and get better ranking and traffic are 9 simple steps.

The 9 Simple Steps

1. Select Right Keywords

This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with "dog food". Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:

• Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
• Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
• Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.

2. Analyze Competition

Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.

Check out yours and your competitor's link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.

3. Page Creation and Optimization

After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEO's do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.

i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:

• Title tag
• META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
• Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content

ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.

iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.

4. Visual Review of Page

• Check whether your site has usable navigation.
• Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.

A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!.

5.Link Building

Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.

6. Submitting to Search Engines

If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don't worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.

You can refer the below link for details on submission to search engines

Altavista

http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7. Submitting to Directories

Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission.

8. Maintain

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.
It's important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.

9. Tracking

Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for "good keywords". Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.

Conclusion

At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.

If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

An Introduction to Title Tag Optimization

Title tags are the words that appear at the very top of your web browser, and they tell the search engine what the page is about. For example, see the top band of this browser. You will see "Title Tag Optimization - Search Engine Optimization Tips ". This is the title of this page.

Before discussing how to optimize the Title tag, lets see how exactly it looks in your website's HTML code.

< Title of Your Web page Here< /title >
< name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page">
< name="keywords" content="keyword phrases that describe your web page">
< /head >
< meta content="Brief description of the contents of the page" name="description" >
< meta content="keyword phrases that describe your web page" name="keywords" >
Title Tags - The Myth
"The Title tag doesn't really do much".

Is that a myth or the truth? Let's see! Title tags function much like the title of a book. Say for example, you need a book on "Search Engine Optimization". You walk into a library, search all the titles, see a book titled "Search Engine Optimization Tips", and take that book. Interestingly, there were some other books in the library, which had more information on Search Engine Optimization than the book you took. But, their title didn't convey that. Search engines also do the same thing: they look at the title of a web page and decide what it is about. There is no doubt among the SEOs regarding the importance of Title tags in Search Engine Optimization. One of the steps to increase a website's rank is optimizing the Title tags.

How to Optimize Title Tag?

Of all the tags, Title tag is definitely the most important when used correctly. When calculating your web page's relevance to a search, most search engines consider the content of the title tag as one of the parameters and display that content in search engine results pages (SERP). Title tag therefore needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it increases your website's position in the SERP, and it is attractive enough to encourage a surfer to click on your link.

Similar to writing your site content; write your Title tag for your audience first and the search engines second

• Have your keywords in the Title tag: Including the keywords in the Title tag increases the relevance of your web page, when someone searches the web with that keyword.
• Keep the Title tag short and readable: Search engines don't prefer long Title tags. In fact, Google prefers short Title tags. Because some search engines display Title tags in the search engine result pages, make them informative.
• Use different Title tags for different web pages in your site: Never give the same Title tag for all the web pages. The Title tag of a web page must be relevant for that page.
• Don't include your company name in the Title tag unless you think it will attract more users. Instead of your company name, you can consider a suitable keyword.
• Never keep the Title tag empty and never use irrelevant words in the Title tag.

Pay attention to writing your title tag. Don't ignore them, they are a powerful tool and must be used to their fullest advantage. The Title tag helps the search engines decide the theme of the web page being crawled for indexing. When a search for keywords is conducted, the Title tag is given heavy consideration by all search engine algorithms. Also remember, each page in your website is unique and needs a different Title tag. Place the most important keyword phrase for that specific page in the Title tag, and the page will get a certain boost in the search engines. Yahoo and MSN Search are especially influenced by keyword-rich Title tags. Look after your Title tags and they will look after your site traffic.

Concept of Database Marketing

There is a quote by "Thomas Prendergast"
"The Big guys know database and if you don't your lost!"

Database Marketing is a powerful and competitive weapon - especially on the Internet. The growth of database marketing is rooted in the small business philosophy of staying close to the customers, under-standing and meeting their needs and treating them well after the sale.

Corporate marketing is tied to BIG, general marketing or advertising campaigns with a single untargeted message. This message may be based on the companies Unique Selling Proposition (USP). However, customers have different needs and a single USP spelt out to the whole market is no longer enough.

Messages must be tailored to specific segments of the market and ultimately to the market segment of one, the individual customer. Computerizing the customer database makes it possible to address messages more specifically and market additional products to each customer.

The characteristics of fully fledged database marketing are ....

1. Each customer and prospect is identified as a record on the marketing database; markets and market segments are groups of individual customers.
2. Each customer and prospect record contains not only identification and access information but also a range of marketing information. It also includes information about past transactions and about campaign communications.
3. This information is accessible before, during and after the process of each interaction with the customer/prospect, to enable "you" to decide how to respond to the customer/prospect's needs.
4. The database is used to record customer/prospects responses to campaigns.
5. The information is available to marketing policy makers to enable them to decide such things as which target markets/segments are appropriate for each product/service etc.
6. Selling many products to each customer, the database is used to ensure that the approach to the customer is co-ordinated; and a consistent approach developed.
7. The database eventually replaces market research. Marketing campaigns are devised such that the response of customers to the campaign provides information, which the company is looking for.
8. Marketing Management automation is developed to handle the vast amount of information generated by DBM. This identifies opportunities and threats more or less automatically! This is fully fledged marketing automation. Very few companies have succeeded in doing this; but many have it as their goal.

DBM presents many challenges to management. It requires careful maintenance of great volumes of detailed customer data. Accessing the data, interpreting it, and using it to drive or support the marketing function requires a long-term marketing systems development policy.
It also requires computing and marketing people to work together, often educating each other. And, it may well require most people in the company to forget their traditional way of doing business.

DBM will only work if dealing with customers is viewed as an on-going process (Customer Contact Process).

The ladder of loyalty is a key concept in DBM.
1) No awareness of business or product/service.
2) Awareness of business
3) Awareness of product/service
4) Positive perception
5) Reognition of personal benefit
6) Enquiry
7) Objections overcome
8) Sale of product or service
9) Entry into continued relationship.

DBM is used to move customers up the ladder.

The essence of database marketing is communicating directly with the customers and asking them to respond in a tangible way. It provides the means for the customer or prospect to respond and is set up to measure and fulfill the response.

It sets up or reinforces a relationship with the customer, which is "fulfilled" when we follow up a customer's response to our communication. Fulfillment may be in many ways; a personalized email, a telephone conversation, sending literature (pdf), a sales visit, attendance at a web seminar, exhibition or store, or sending products to the customer.

So DBM is a broad discipline, not a separate marketing communications medium, but a way of using any medium to elicit the desired response.

Source :- Veretekk

Role of an SEO in Internet Marketing

Today search engines play a great role in providing information about every thing, whether you want information about any latest movies, songs, foods, hotels, any specific services every thing is provided by search engines.

But there is one question arises which information is helpful to user & which is not? This question is very common between the users who uses Google, Yahoo, MSN for finding services & other information, because in this corporate world every one wants that, their services will reach to the users & there is lot of competition for this & the result of this war of corporate world is suffered by the users.

So what should be the solution for providing right information to users. Yes now this is the right question. The popular search engines follows some strategies & the websites who follow these strategies will listed in SERP. The strategy of these are very simple, they says that, the websites are content rich & the content will be well presented. The search engines hates the flashy & heavy images.

Now the another question arises, how the websites are designed & developed according to search engines ? This is again a good question. To develop & designed websites according to them somebody have to do deep research of Google, Yahoo & MSN. But who will do this, a designer, a developer or someone specialist in search engines. Yes a specialist, a specialist who know all about Google, Yahoo & MSN, will optimize websites according to the them. From here the role of SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) comes who will do optimization for your websites.

A SEO assist in designing & developing the websites according to Google, Yahoo & MSN. But the work of SEO is not ends here, it has total responsibility to promote the website, so that more people can reach to websites & use the services, products & information. The SEO community is related to marketing industry, that's why it brings more focus on to the end-user. Due to this marketing background SEO's enables to find the targeted audience.

But how to find an effective SEO expert, who will bring you in front of their corporate world. All are proving that they are best, but the best is one who gave results. GateSix Technologies is specialist which offers SEO services of web site to build up your corporate identity, increasing your product presence across the world and make to stay ahead of your competition. If you are looking for leadership status or maintaining your leadership status, GateSix is the right choice for your search as a Search Engine Optimization Company. Gatesix is expertise in helping to strategically improve your search engine placement with desired keywords by using innovative and widely accepted search engine optimization technique and implement search engine marketing campaign to have the top ranking among your competitors.

So why are you standing behind in the crowd, & waiting for your turn, just try Internet Marketing Services of Gatesix.