Search Engine Marketing Trends

SEM- Search engine marketing is one of the most important aspects for businesses who sell products and services online or who use their websites to generate sales leads. SEM can provide valuable solutions for driving highly targeted visitors to your site.

SEM Marketing Strategies

There are a few SEM strategies that if done properly can generate customers and make your site a favorite among search engines.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the art of making your site more accessible to the search engine spiders, as well as getting the maximum number of pages indexed. It is all about incorporating practices that search engines and users want.

Many site owners do not understand that SEO should be taken into consideration before you build your site and not afterwards. Fortunately, SEO can also be done after a site is built, but this costs money and time. SEO is just a matter of understanding what search engines look for when they visit your site.

For this you need to concentrate on:

• Domain Names

• The Title Tag

• Meta Description and Meta Keyword Tags

• Content

• ALT Tags

• Site Map

Some practices are not SEO friendly and should be used sparingly or avoid:

• FLASH pages

• Dynamic Pages

• JavaScript

Keywords & Phrases

Before you start writing the content for your site you have to know which keywords and key phrases to use. Keywords or key phrases are the words or phrases that user’s type into search engines. For getting to know the best keywords or phrases you have to research your target users thoroughly and understand their needs and desires.

Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission is the most important step after SEO. This is important as this will get your sight listed among the search engines and directories.

There are three ways to get your site listed in a search engine or directory:

• Submit your site directly to the search engines through a free submit form.

• Through links to your site from other sites such as directories.

• Paying the search engine to index your site.



Link Popularity

Link popularity is a key factor in search engine marketing and ranking well in search engines and generating traffic to your site. Link popularity is the number of incoming links coming to your site from directories, articles, or web sites.

The most important link factors are:

• Getting Links to Your Site

• Checking Your Link Popularity Regularly

Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion is a way of paying search engines to index pages from your site. This is a quick way of getting search engines to find and index your site. It is also called PPI (Pay per Inclusion). This is a good method to get noticed quickly, but in the end does not have a high ROI

Pay per Click Campaign

PPC is a form of online advertisement. The object of Pay per Click (PPC) search engine marketing is to drive targeted traffic to your website. You pay search engines money only when someone clicks on an ad on the search engine's results page or homepage. Hence the terms ‘pay per click’ because you only pay when the visitor clicks on your ad. This may sound an easy way to high ROI, but can prove to be a headache if not managed correctly. Since it is not important that every visitor is converted to a customer, PPC has to be carefully targeted and controlled.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic Search Engine Optimization is a process that involves analyzing and changing of the site's underlying code, architecture and content in such a way that it is selected and ranked naturally by search engines i.e. without any payment involved.
Search engine marketing is as important as any other advertising method for the advancement of your business or product. Maybe it is more important as it is viewed globally by millions.

Vishal Verma, a SEM expert works with SEO Consultant India consults clients about various SEO techniques and thorough follower of Website Optimization India trends.

How to optimize the Flash website

The SEO experts and Web designer professionals are getting the hot problem for optimizing the flash related websites. Flash movies and intros are frightening for SEO specialists. The reason is the spiders will not crawl the flash movies and search engines will not crawl the flash related sites. Flash movie contain the inside of the text in the movie you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course search engines are start indexing the flash movies if contain the plain text, this is just incompetent way for optimization of flash sites.

Flash movies are very composite to the search engine spiders to index the flash movies. The spiders only index the flash filenames only not the content. This will be applicable for all search engines. There is no difference of Google, yahoo and msn because search engines are really united.

Tips for optimizing the flash sites

1. create metatags

Creating the metadata is very important aspect in optimizing the flash site. even though it is often undervalue and misunderstood. Actually metadata is not the important to search engines but flash tools agree to add the metadata to your flash intros or movies. So the metadata fields are not empty.

2. Flash SDK search engine

This is the most important tool for the flash movies. This tool will extract the links and content from the flash movie. The tool named as implies swf2html. This tool extract the text and links of the macro media flash file and write the output into standard format of html document. Then you can save the file as it manually.

3. SE flash.com tool

This tool will show the your flash files is visible or not to the search engines. After installation of flash sdk software you can use SE flash.com tool too. Because it will give the extracted accuracy text from the flash movies. So this tool will give different results to you.

You should be following the basic rules of seo for flash related websites. They are don’t copy the content from your competitor sites; because it implies as doorway pages and don’t use the back ground color as similar to text color ; it will implies just like as hidden text.

Tips and Tricks for Search Engine Optimization

1. Write great content
Great content is where it all starts. You can have all the keywords in the world, but if your content is no good, people won't stick around on your site and search engines won't find your site valuable.

2. Write unique content
Unique content is important too. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.

3. Add new content all the time
Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.

4. Create a great keyword phrase
The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page. You shouldn't try to optimize your entire site to one keyword phrase - instead focus on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.

5. Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular
When trying to decide on a keyword phrase, you want to find one that is popular but not extremely popular. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the reality is that extremely popular keywords are very desirable and so very competitive. It's better to try to optimize for keywords that you can rank higher. You'll get more pageviews from a less popular keyword when you're on the first or second page of the search engines, than from a super popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.

6. Write an accessible site
Accessible HTML is accessible to both search engine spiders and screen readers. The more accessible you make your pages, the easier it will be for search engines to read and rank your pages.

7. Use the keyword phrase in your title tag
The title tag is one of the most important tags on your Web page. And placing your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning, is very important to get that phrase into the search engines. Plus, that puts your keyword phrase as the link in the search engine index.

8. Get a domain with your keyword phrase
Putting your keyword phrase in your domain name is a great way to optimize for that phrase.

9. Use the keyword phrase in your URL
Even if you can't get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.

10. Use your keyword phrase a lot, but not too much
The ratio of your keywords to the rest of the text on your page is called the keyword density. It's important to repeat your keywords in your document, but not too much. Keyword density should be between 3 and 7% for your primary keyword phrase and 1-2% for any secondary keywords or keyword phrases.

Optimizing for Google, Yahoo and MSN

Search engine optimization is a regular process, if you want your website to be a top ranker in all the major search engine results, its mandatory to update your website according to the changing algos of search engines. To gain higher rankings in the search engine results, first we have to understand the three internet giants Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are the three biggest existing search engines available. Almost all of us use any one of these three to make searches for any kind of information we want to look for on the World Wide Web.

Although these three search engines rule the internet industry but they all have a tendency to dominate another. Google has more or less succeeded doing this. Here are some facts about the three search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN, tweaking them can help you to rank well in the SERPs:

Let’s start with Google:

Google

1. Google consider the domain age most important as compared to other major search engines.
2. Quality links obviously can attract any search engine.
3. Active websites (updated regularly at any level) are loved by Google.
4. Get Listed in The Major Directories, helps you to climb success ladder on Google.
5. To please Google your HTML markups should be up to date as well as up to the mark.
6. Google with its advanced algorithm has started indexing websites which are based on LSI. Pages on your website should be relevant to your theme.
7. Your website should not be limited only to three to four pages to be indexed by Google.
8. Hyphens in URLs with keywords will definitely work.
9. W3C Compliancy in the source code is equally important for Google.

Yahoo

1. Keyword in Title Tag work for Yahoo.
2. Keyword Density is also an important factor.
3. Lot of Links (Site wide links work in Yahoo.)
4. Getting listed in Yahoo directory helps you to climb high on Yahoo, which is paid one.
5. Domain should not be too young in order to rank in Yahoo.

MSN

1. Keyword in Title Tag
2. Keyword Density Works
3. Freshness in content, relatively young websites can rank well in MSN.
4. Lot of Links (Site wide links work for MSN.)

Google is Updating its Page Rank Again

It looks like we are going through another PageRank update. I’ve seen some blogs and websites move up in PR just in the last couple of days. SEOJ is now a PageRank 5 - woo hoo!

Well, just a little bit of info for you on PageRank, if you are not all that familiar. Having a PR4 really is not anything super duper to be proud of. If you do everything right in the SEO department, you can reach a PageRank of 4 within 1 year, no problems. You really don’t start getting the recognition you deserve until you hit PageRank 5 and beyond. But for every step in PR you take up the ladder, the more difficult it becomes to get to the next one. I think there are two reasons for that.

No. 1, it gets more competitive as you move higher up in PageRank. But, you also have to do more to convince the search engines that you are a trustworthy source. You don’t really have to work harder. What I mean is, once you’ve got thousands of inbound links from authority sources, getting more of them is a little more difficult to come by. You really have to be a trustworthy authority; you can’t fake it. Faking it in the lower ranks is easier, in other words.

But keep in mind that whatever your PageRank is today is not your real PageRank. Google updates its PR about three to four months behind when it actually goes up. So it isn’t real time. Since SEOJ went up to PR5 just in the last couple of days, that means we were at a PR5 three months ago. Assuming that we are still on the incline with our PageRank, I’m likely between a PageRank 5 and PageRank 6 - something like a PR 5.4.

Google PageRank is ever evolving. It goes up and down on a daily basis depending on what you are doing on your website. If you get plugged with negative algorithmic karma then your PR will go down. If you do the good stuff then it goes up, but you’ll never see it in real time.

Many SEOs don’t put a lot of stock in it any more. I still think there is some value in PageRank, but it isn’t what it used to be. It is a good measure to watch to determine if you are doing all the right things and making the search engines happy. If you see your PR go down, look back over the last three months to see what you might have done to influence that.