Engineering Magazines

Search engine marketing is by far the most efficient and effective way to advertise your business. With over 86% of internet users using Google as their search engine, the need for your business to show on the first page of Google has never been greater.

Many people are unaware of search engine marketing and just take for granted the results that appear when they search for something on a search engine such as Google.

However, search engine marketing seems to defy to current doom and gloom of the recession. Think about this:

“The average Britain spends 164 minutes online everyday, compared with 148 minutes watching TV”

Over half the world’s population now has access to the web and nearly 90% of them find what they’re looking for using search engines. 36% of people think that the result at the top of the first page is the market leader and 80% of people make their choice from first page listings alone. With over 21 billion web pages wanting a first page position how can you get your website on the first page.

This is called search engine marketing and I have listed a few techniques and tips to get you started with optimising your website to rank well on a search engine. Remember that this is a basic guide to help to you on your way.

Link building

First we have to look at how search engines rank a website and decide which order to list them. The simple (very very very simple) version is, Google changed everything the way many search engine rank. The initial creators of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) wanted to create a search engine that could rank a website for quality and list them in order of quality to the user. The way they decided to rank a website was to count how many other websites link to it. If other websites link to it then it must be good. So, essentially links mean votes. Like I said, this is the very simple version and there is so much more to it than this but it is a great place to start as it holds the most importance.

See who links to you and then see who links to your competitors and try to muscle in on some of their action. Simply go to yahoo.co.uk, then in the search box type “link:yourcompetitor.com”. This will bring up a list of websites linking to your competitors website. Then contact them and ask them to link to you too. Don’t be stingy. Make sure you have links going out from your website. Important though that you link to high quality websites, i.e. If your website is a property website, have links to the relevant governing bodies, Wikipedia or the largest property portals. Search engines will see your site as being a good place to get good content. Submit your website to online directories. This can be very boring and takes hours. But once you have had your site accepted in to a directory. You’ll have a link back to your website. Remember. The more the better. Subscribe to forums in your niche. You can include a link in your signature straight to your website. Remember though. Do not spam on a forum. Forum users will not like it and the moderator will probably kick you off. If you use a forum properly though you will find it quite engaging. Read blogs relating to you niche market. This is very educational as well as beneficial for link building. Read the blog then leave a comment about that blog. Don’t forget to include a link to your website though. Just don’t make it too obvious.

Social Media (web2.0)

“Facebook”, “YouTube”, “Flickr”, “Myspace” – These are all social media websites. They provide a means for people from all over the world to join online and share information. The way in which people communicate vary though. “Flickr” allow people to upload photos and share them with other users or even comment on pictures uploaded. “Youtube” allow people to upload videos etc. The number of people visiting these websites to share information is in the millions. So maybe you could use these social communities to spread the word about your website. Social media is a great way to connect with hard to reach people that share the same interests. There are a number of ways to do this.

Make your content interesting enough for people to want to view it. Then,unlike search engine optimisation, change the content often, This will make people want to keep visiting you. Make it easy for people to tag or bookmark your new content. Bookmarking is very fashionable at the moment. The most popular way of doing this is by getting an “addthis” button due to its ease of use, however, there are many buttons available. Use more than just text in your site. Create a video and submit it to a video sharing website like “youtube”, Create a PDF version of your content and create an audio version too. Submit it to appropriate websites. Don’t forget the link back to your site. Blog.Blog.Blog then blog some more. The simple truth is that the majority of internet users love blogs. So do search engines. Create a blog and use it. A lot. Submit it to sites like “technorati.com”. If it is good enough people will link to you and then share and tell others about your writings. Make friends. The social media community, are very social and friendly. They will want to talk to you and ask you questions. Make sure you are polite and take time to answer any messages. Negative feedback spreads faster than positive feedback.

Pay Per Click

This is a method in which you pay to get people to your website. Have you ever done a search on Google and found there are two columns. The Colum on the right is called sponsored links. They are adverts from businesses. They do not pay anything for appearing there but they do pay when you click on the advert (pay per click). This is a very fast way to get people to your website but you do have to pay. I would recommend getting a pay per click company to help here. It will save you a lot of money. However, if you must have ago your self here are some very basic tips.

Budget. Make sure you create a sensible budget and stick to it. Don’t get in to a bidding war. Don’t just rely on pay per click as the be all and end all for your business marketing. PPC is great for promoting specific products and services very quickly but you always have to pay for the result. Analyze your cost per click and cost per acquisition closely. Then compare it to your other marketing activities. See which one works best. Remember that sites such as Google take into account the quality of your website content being marketed more than how much you are bidding. PPC is my favorite part of search engine marketing due mainly to the sheer speed of return on investment BUT make sure it is done properly other wise it can be devastating. Always have two ads running at the same time for each product but with different ad text. Google will use the most successful advert for you and show that advert more often, helping you gain more traffic. Change to poorest performing advert and see if it improves. Keep repeating. This will eventually lead to you having the best possible advert showing.

Search engine optimisation

Remember the two columns we just mentioned. Search engine optimization is the are of optimizing your website enough for Google to rank it on the left hand column. This list is ordered on how relevant your website is. And you don’t have to pay for these listings. Ever noticed how all the big companies appear at the top of the first page. Now we should as “which came first – The chicken or the egg?”. Search engine optimisation is generally split into two categories onsite optimisation and off site optimisation. The first, when done property is very important but it will only get you to the starting line. Offsite optimization is the race itself. A good search engine optimisation campaign should include all the search engine marketing techniques mentioned and when you really get into it you can learn the more advanced techniques. Below are a few basics.

Include your keywords in your domain, title, meta tags. The first thing a search engine spider will read is your domain name. i.e www.yourdomain.com. This doesn’t mean anything to a search engine so ideally use www.yourdomain.com/your-key-words, or even better www.your-key-words.com . Then the next part is your title. Don’t just have “home Page” or “Front Page”. I would have “your domain – your key words”. This also matches the domain name. Then repeat the same in your meta data. And sprinkle it throughout your web page. Keep it readable though. Make each page different. This helps search engines differentiate them and should lead to them indexing each of your pages separately. Get a site map and submit it to major search engines. Don’t pay for this service though. It amazes me that people actually charge for this. Just type into Google “sitemap” and you should be presented with website that will generate you a sitemap for free. Keep going. Older sites generally rank better than new sites. It is believed that older websites must be more reliable. As there is nothing we can do about this just focus your time on other offsite optimisation such as link building, social media optimization and if you just can’t wait, Pay per click. Search engine optimisation is a long term solution but boy is it worth waiting for. Validate your HTML code. Visit “validator.w3.org/ “.This will ensure that web browsers show your website correctly and helps search engine to index your site. There is no point in optimising your website if it doesn’t work properly.

Other useful tips

Get Google analytics. It is one thing having a website but you need to know what people are doing when they are on it. Google analytics is very comprehensive and FREE but it does not report in real time. Woopra however does report in real time. The choice is yours. Before doing anything else you should get one of these other wise how will you know your efforts are paying off. If you decide to use a company to undertake your search engine marketing campaign (recommended) make sure you choose your search engine marketing company wisely. Don’t just go on recommendation. It is going to be a long working relationship so the important thing is that you get on with them. Do your own research on the industry. Think twice about search engine marketing firms that say they can guarantee a first page listing in a short time, the methods they use WILL end up in your website being banned. BMW found this out the hard way.

Search engine marketing is not an easy option but when done properly will bring untold rewards.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but it will give people new to the concept a few things to get on with and research. Look out for more articles that will start to break the subjects down into more detail.

A Professional online marketing, parthiban is working with WDO Technologies India. Is a leading web design and development companies have been Providing web design, graphic and logo design, web design programming, web content writing, SEO and the staffing of search engine optimization services around the world. T

Take into account the Search Engine optimization for the Web search engine positioning comes to implement a content manager can keep our investment in content is devalued by a poor presence in the search engines.

The managers of content

The generation, publication and file a huge number of pages in the major portals and Web sites poses many challenges that the management systems of web content (or CMS, Content Management System) Have tried to solve in recent years:



To facilitate the generation and editing content for the Web by personnel without specific training in programming.

To ensure a uniform appearance of all content and its presentation according to a corporate design and editorial line with a predefined.

Maintain consistency in the structure of Web sites, allowing the incorporation of new content in the appropriate sections after approval and the preliminary screening of the persons listed.

Maintain a consistent navigation that allows users to reach each of the contents that are published at the time.

Avoid the existence of duplicate content (different URLs that show the same content), an orphan content (files left on the server unnecessarily because they are pages that no longer suggests any link or image files or multimedia to be shown on pages deleted) or broken links, pointing to pages that do not exist on the server.



The managers of content or CMS are software tools that allow decentralize the work of maintaining the content of a portal, so that non-technical staff from different departments of an enterprise can add, edit and manage their own content on a corporate Web.

CMS and search engine positioning: a symbiosis impossible?

However, despite its obvious advantages, the traditional approach of such tools has focused on providing the best content management by streamlining production processes, approval and publication of the same, rather than generate Web pages properly optimized to be competitive in the search engines.

The factors that make a Web portal is friendly to the search engines were discussed in various articles of this section, as well as the Basic Guide to Search Engine Positioning.

Among the problems, from the viewpoint of optimization for search engine positioning, appearing in a recurring portals supported by content management systems, include the following:



Dynamic URLs: search engines sometimes limit the number of dynamic variables in the URLs that indexed. The pages generated by many managers frequently contents include a large number of dynamic variables in your URL.

Unique Titles: The title of a page is one of the most important factors when it comes to positioning well in a content search engines. However, many content management systems do not allow users to assign a single relevant to each page.

Lack of support for meta tags: CMS does not have many specific fields for the user to specify the contents of the Description and Keywords meta tags. Although not as important as the way to achieve a good position in search engines, these labels are still playing an important role in the choice of the user to click on our site on a search results page.

Lack of keywords in the URL: dynamic URLs generated by many content management systems tend to be somewhat friendly to both the user and for the search engines, and do not include search terms that contribute to a better positioning.

Unable to post an optimization: the process of producing content that imposes the use of a CMS system makes it very difficult optimization of the post-generated content, and in the best cases, adding an extra work load that could be avoided if SEO company aspects had been taken into account in the implementation of the manager.



It is therefore ironic that precisely those companies that are investing more resources in the maintenance and creation of new content for their websites which, while less benefit from the volume that could mobilize such traffic due to poor implementation of their systems content management, from the standpoint of search engine positioning. A failure that in many cases is not due to shortcomings of the tool itself, but an ignorance on the part of technicians to implement the importance of having that content generated by it can be competitive in the search engines.

Making content management system the best tool SEO

But in the same way that a poorly implemented content manager may reduce the return on investment in content generation of a portal, one that has been taken into account the basic aspects of the optimization for the Web search engine positioning can be the ally most effective way to generate content that will be climbing the posts of more competitive. Let’s see how.

Use code valid according to W3C: managers of content based on templates, and users can not alter, to generate new pages. If we validate the code of these templates at home, we ensure that the pages generated from them also contain valid code. The use of valid code ensures that the page will display correctly in different browsers and search engines will be able to track smoothly.

Create a site map: nearly all content managers allow you to create and maintain an updated map of the site. Search engines limit the number of links that can keep 100 per page and be normal HTML text links. If you adjust our content management system for generating and maintaining a hierarchical map of the site with these premises, to provide search engines that can track each and every one of the pages on our site.

Limiting the level of subdirectories: search engines give more importance to the closer a page is the portal’s home page. That is why we must limit the number of subdirectories that shows the URL: many managers allow content hierarchically organizing the content regardless of the physical location of files on the server, introducing much more simple URLs that the actual structure of the directory.



Connect the control validation of the CMS links: Most managers control the publication of broken links that point to content controlled by the managers themselves, but few validated that a link that points to an address outside is not a broken link. If control there, make sure to connect it to prevent a user can insert a link to a website nonexistent.

Leave the control of the robots.txt file to the webmaster: some allow content managers to edit the content of the robots.txt file by the author of a page. In general, is better than only the webmaster controlling the contents of this file to prevent, through ignorance, a user can block crawling robots an important part of the Web.

Avoid duplicate URLs: search engines are highly selective when it comes to punishing the duplicate content of a Web, so you must make sure that each page only exists under a single URL. In any case, if the users can get to the same content from URLs counterparts, it is better to schedule permanent redirects 301, which are not penalized by the search engines.

Reduce the garbage code: simplifying the HTML code using the templates and opt to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of tables to lay out the contents. The use of Cascading Style Sheets makes it easier to update a Web design chennai, reduces the weight of the file (layout traveling once from the server to the user, then it is already available in the temporary memory, or cache of the browser for following pages visited) and gives greater preponderance to the significant content of the page with respect to the total weight of the code of it.

Select the option of text for the navigation of the site: avoiding wherever possible the use of Javascript or Flash menus, as their links can not be followed by the search engines. In many cases, we can achieve through the use of CSS effects similar to those of the menus Javascript or Flash. If the content manager can create a trail of breadcrumbs (breadcrumb), activémoslo. Improving the usability of the site, helps put the user in the whole structure of the web and is a great shortcut to the search engines crawl the entire contents.

Do not forget that there are the headlines: the use of styles makes us forget the existence of a hierarchy of HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, etc..) Whose final appearance can also change styles, but they help search engines to better understand the logical structure of the page signal and what aspects are more important. It is therefore important to encourage publishers to use content headings rather than simply defining the text larger or smaller in size and font, if possible, limit to a single heading a top level (H1) per page.

Require the creation of a single title, and the addition of meta tags relevant: CMS schedule so that the completion of title and meta tags is a requirement for the publication of the contents and, if possible, activate a control to verify the uniqueness of title.

Require filling in the alt tag to add a picture to the content. This tag lets the search engines to index the best images, is working on the relevance of key terms of the page and improving the accessibility of content by individuals with vision problems.



Implement controls to prevent the issuance of duplicate content.

To encourage use descriptive texts into links: instead of “Click here”, using “More information on our customer support 24H.”

The best of both worlds

It is therefore evident that if the implement a content manager to generate and maintain the contents of a large portal takes into account aspects relating to the optimization and web search engine positioning of the portal we can encourage or, in some way, impose a certain discipline through the CMS system itself, involving the editors to create content pages easily traceable and indexed, which can compete adequately in the search engines.

The big companies have the raw material favorite search engines: content rich, original, dynamic and rapidly updated. Size all the capacity of managers of content to extract the maximum return on investment they make in their presence on the Web.

There is no black magic or knowledge of rocket science required to building websites that are easy for search engines to navigate round and give you the best possible ranking.

Get the fundamentals right and you will be ahead of the vast majority of websites created.

Originally there was SGML (Standard General Markup Language). This was the standard to which all information was displayed on the Internet. It is still the basis to which HTML and XML adhere. The Algorithms that Search Engine Spiders use to analyze sites are designed to recognize this standard and very little has changed! It is therefore imperative that you design your WebPages with this in mind. If you use it, not only will you produce WebPages that Search engines will love but will vastly improve the chances of your site being ranked highly for your desired keywords and phrases.

TEXT FORMATING TAGS

OK here are the three most important tags used for formatting your text:

[H1] the Main Heading Tag, tells the SE the pages main topic

[H2] a Second Heading and slightly smaller (e.g. subheading)

[p] paragraph and the body of text and content

A typical layout of your HTML code, and therefore your text, should look like this.

[HTML]

[HEAD]///////I’ll explain what need to go in this bit later on //////// [/HEAD]

[BODY]

[H2]Title of Your Page Starting with you Keyword Phrase[/H2]

[H3]Subtitle Including Some other Keywords/Phrase[/H3]

[p] Lots of useful information with the odd keyword thrown in but good useful information is what really makes a site successful, after all, Content is King – I’m now starting to waffle on. [/p][H3]Next Subtitle Including Some other Keywords/Phrase[/H3]

[p] Lots ore useful information with the odd keyword thrown in but good useful information is what really makes a site successful after all Content is King – and again I seem to be waffling on. [/p]

[/BODY]

[/HTML]

There are other basic HTML tags that you can use of course but these three are so obvious that it makes it an absolute breeze for Search Engines to look at your web page and instantly know what your site is all about and how to rank its content. OK, there is one slight problem though. If you used these tags as they are on your pages and in particular the text on them isn’t going to look that good on the eye and certainly won’t win any design awards. This is where Custom Style Sheets come into play in a major way.

ALT TAGS

These provide the Search Engine Robots with a description for any images you have on your page. They look as follows:

[img src="" alt="blue beach ball " width="50" height="50" /]

Place in good descriptive key words here without going over board i.e. no spamming the same words in every images alt tag 3 times each.

META TAGS – TITLE, DESCRIPTION AND ROBOTS

The Meta Tags and Title go in the Head section of your HTML and let Search Engines know what was important on a Webpage and so how to rank its importance. They can also tell the Search Engine what language it is written in and other files it needs to take into account. Typically it will look something like this:

[HEADER]

[TITLE]Greek Holidays Idyllic and Very Cheap[/TITLE]

[META name="description" content="Very Cheap Prices for Idyllic Greek Holidays and Vacations in Greece"]

[META name="keywords" content="budget cheap greek holidays vacations europe Greece sunshine"]

[/HEADER]

The Title Meta Tag is extremely important and is widely used by the SE’s most importantly Google. Make it between 5-10 words and put your best Keyword/Phrase at the beginning e.g. ‘Greek Holidays’.

The Description Meta Tag should be less than 150 characters in order to suit all Search Engines. Anything more than this will simply be missed out with some SE’s. The “description” is what most SE’s use to describe your site when listed in its results. Make sure it is ENTICING for potential customers. It should include at least 5 of your best keywords but DO NOT simply repeat all of them in your “description”.

The Keywords Meta Tag should be a string of keywords and 2-or-3 word phrases that people surfing the net might use to find pages like yours. It is a very common opinion amongst many experts that the “keywords” Meta Tag is used very little if at all by SE’s these days. This is very true but since some SE’s do still use them to some degree DO NOT repeat your keywords more than 3 times in either your “keywords” Meta Tag or your “description” Meta Tag. Some SE’s will consider this as ‘Keyword Spamming’ and your site could be seriously penalised.

The Robots Meta Tag is a simple instruction that goes in between the [HEAD] and [/HEAD] tags of your web page and tells any visiting Search Engine Robots whether than can index that page (INDEX, NO INDEX) or follow the links leaving that page (FOLLOW, NO FOLLOW). There are basically 4 variations of these instructions:

1. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"]

2. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"]

3. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW"]

4. [META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"]

The simplest way of using the tags is to use example 1. above on every page of your website that you want the search engine seeing and then put example 4. above on every page that you do not wish the Search Engine to see yet alone index for the world to see.

ROBOTS.TXT FILE

The Robots.txt file is actually the first thing Search Engine Robots will see when they visit your site. With the use of a Robots.txt file we can tell Search Engines what areas of your site are out of bounds. There are also many other uses for the Robots.txt file but I won’t talk about it here.

Using a text editor (notepad, BBedit etc) create a new file and name it, yes you guessed it: robots.txt. Place in it the following syntax:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /pictures/

Disallow: style.css

This syntax tells Search Engine that it may not look in to the folders “cgi-bin” or “pictures” (these could actually be any directories you name). Save the file, upload it to the root of your website i.e. yourdomain.com/robots.txt and that’s it.

The SEO benefit to you is not so much to give you a higher ranking but to make your site more Search Engine friendly… Think Kudos!

SITE LAYOUT – THEMED BASED WEBSITES – THE ULTIMATE SEO TECHNIQUE

Establishing a theme for your site and the contents’ structure can produce a dramatic increase in your sites ranking amongst Search Engines. All of the big search engines use a ‘Themed’ based algorithm in their ranking criterion. This is basically essential for them in order to return the most relevant results when a user enters certain ‘keywords/phrases’ into their search engine. Basically a Search Engine will spider every single page on your site and index it as one. It is therefore imperative to concentrate your sites content on the around the main theme and not to diversify too much.

SITE STRUCTURE

The structure of your site, i.e. how your content is categorized and linked together, is meant to support and strengthen the overall theme of your site. Let me explain how you achieve this.

There are 4 main types of pages you need to be concerned with:

* Index

* Sitemap – (a.k.a. Table of Contents)

* Hallway Pages

* Doorway/Content Pages

View your site as a Shopping Complex. The theme is “Shopping”. It has an entrance (Index page). At the entrance there is a map showing you the different areas, stores, and the stores contents (Sitemap). From the entrance there are 3 possible hallways you may walk down one for “Sports”, one for “Home”, and one for “Toys”. Each has its own description of what specific shops you’ll find (Hallway Pages). As you walk down the Hallways you’ll pass the doorway to each shop on which is a very detailed explanation of what is inside the store (Doorway Pages). I’ll explain these pages in closer detail.

Index Page – Most Search Engine Optimization experts agree that your websites’ initial page of entry (index.htm default.htm etc) will never be the definitive page that Search Engines will rank highly. Make sure it looks good, introduces your visitors to your site, and lets them know what they can expect to find deeper within it. E.G. If your site was about Holidays in Spain, all you want to say here is “Come to Greece for your Holidays its great!”

Sitemap – A single page that is linked only off your Index page and links to every single page on your site. It should be laid out like a Table of Contents but with one or two keyword specific sentences for each and every link. This should be linked off your main page but DO NOT call/name the text in the link as “Sitemap”. It’s often thought that Search Engines will penalize this. Instead simple call it “Table of Contents”.

Hallway Page – This is basically the first page of each Sub Category. It should give a brief summary/paragraph of each specific topic within that Sub Category. E.G. Staying with the Spanish Holidays theme Hallway1 would deal with “Accommodation” and Hallway2 “Excursions”. A rule of thumb would be to focus these pages on keyword phrases containing 1-3 words.

Doorway Page – This is an individual page that is only concerned with a specific Topic of that Sub Category as mentioned in the Hallway Page. These pages are full of very specific topic related content. They will also be keyword/phrase rich focusing on 3-4 keyword phrases. E.G. Following the Hallway Page of Accommodation, Doorway1 could be “Hotel Rooms” and Doorway2 “Apartment Flats”.

How to Link your Pages

All linking should be done vertically throughout the site. The only exception to this rule is the Sitemap (which links to every page). Doorway Pages should be linked to the Hallway Pages above them and the Hallway Pages in turn should be linked to the Index Page.

Always use the Hyperlink Title tag. Its another great excuse to drop a few more keywords to describe the page you are leading the Search Engine Spider too.

Similar to the Alt Tag the Titale tag is placed within the syntax of the hyperlink and looks like this:

Title=”some useful keywords to describe the link”

LINK POPULARITY

Arguably the most important factor in getting a high search engine ranking. This has basically been Google’s little baby that most of the other Search Engines have also begun to adopt. OK the concept is simple: If Search Engines can see that other sites are linking to you, then they think that you’re popular. The more other sites link to you, the more popular you look. The more popular you look, the higher ranking the SE will give you.

Not all links are equal though. If the sites linking to you are about the same topic e.g. “Holidays in Greece” then Google is going see these as highly relevant links. Further more, the bigger the site that links to you, or the greater its Page Rank, the more weight Google will give to these links and so your Search Engine Positioning will benefit greater.

SEARCH ENGINE SITEMAP

Not to be confused with the traditional Site Map or Contents page, this page is designed specifically for the Search Engines and not for visitors to your site. Similar to the Robots.txt file, this file does not so much give your site higher rankings as it does make your site more easy to navigate for a Search Engine. Search Engine Sitemaps do require some basic knowledge of xml if you wish to build one by hand but do not fear, there are many tools available online to help you build automatically. If you are new to Google Sitemaps I would recommend reading their overview: google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview.

SUMMARY

If you can create a website that provides a clear understanding of the theme of its content with an easy to follow navigational system, you will have accomplished the fundamental basics of your onsite Search Engine Optimisation.