By SiteProNews

These are tough times, no doubt. The pinch is on every business to cut unnecessary costs and improve efficiency. Those businesses that were squeaking by to begin with are now in danger of closing their doors.

Advertising is usually one of the first items on the chopping block (though it shouldn’t be). You’ve got to cut costs, and you certainly don’t want to lay off any employees if you can help it, so you start looking a bit more closely at your marketing budget to see where you can rein in ad spending. It’s a natural reaction to a tightening budget, and there is a good reason for it.

Most business owners know that you need to advertise. Sure, word of mouth is great - there’s nothing like a referral from a happy client to instill trust in a prospect - but you still need to be proactive in getting the word out. The trouble with advertising in the traditional sense is that it is difficult to know whether your efforts are working and what is generating the best value for your dollar. The uncertainty makes it hard to keep throwing money into your ad spend. When your budget tightens it is even harder to justify the cost when the benefits are fuzzy at best.

But marketing on the web is different. The costs are lower, return on investment can be much higher and traffic data allows you to chop out the dead wood and optimize your budget. Search engines are a primary driver of traffic on the web (second in use only to email according to a report by Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore). Search engine optimization (SEO), as a result, has receíved an increasing amount of well-deserved attention.

For most small businesses, SEO is new. Some have considered it, perhaps even done a bit of research on the topic, but haven’t yet invested in it. Others have invested in it in the past and found themselves disappoínted with the results. A few have found real success.

In this economy, why should a company consider a new marketing channel like search when they’re already looking to cut their budget? What about the risks involved in such a new endeavor? What if it doesn’t work? These are all valid questions. For those who spend most of their time building and maintaining their businesses and systems, reading up on what makes search engines tick is unlikely. Understanding SEO enough to truly leverage it for growth can seem a long way off.

So Why SEO, and Why Now?

1. Unparalelled ROI
A 2006 MarketingSherpa survey of 3,053 client-side marketers determined that SEO was viewed as the most valuable marketing solution in terms of ROI, even higher than email marketíng to in-house email lists. ROI is everything - especially in uncertain economic times.

2. Targeted Traffíc
Traditional “push” marketing/advertising options often have you publishing an advertisement in a place where you’re hoping it will get a lot of eyeballs. That’s great, but the real question is: who owns those eyeballs? Are they the right people? Do they want or need what you’re offering? With SEO, up front keyword research can tell you a lot about your market and what kind of language they’re using. When you choose your keywords and optimize for them, you’re addressing an existing need or desire - and you know that at least a good portion of visitors referred from search engines through your target keywords are looking for exactly what you’re offering. In short, SEO helps to drive high quality traffic to your website and gets your message in front of the right people at the right time.

3. Precise Tracking
Web analytics allow you to track your users with a great deal of granularity. The most basic and easy to set up analytics platform is Google Analytics - and it’s free. Out of the box, Google Analytics will tell you where visitors are coming from (including what search engines and keywords), what pages bring in the most users, what keywords have the lowest bounce rates (the measure of users who immediately leave your site after viewing one page), what keywords drive the most pages per visit and average time on site and a lot more. With basic conversion tracking you can even tie keywords to conversion rates - an incredibly valuable way to identify the most valuable keywords and focus on them. Bottom line: with web analytics you can identify the dead wood in your campaign and focus on better opportunities to optimize your marketing budget in real time.

How should you approach SEO? Hire an agency or consultant and outsource SEO

Hiring an SEO agency to either handle the full scope of work or to consult on research and strategy and delegate to your web developer makes sense in many situations. SEO agencies usually spend a great deal of time researching strategies and tactics and compiling resources - all of which can help you hit the ground running with your SEO campaign. But you need to find the right agency.

Let’s be clear: no SEO agency can guarantee you rankings or growth. If they tell you they can, they’re being either dishonest or foolish, or both. The bottom line is that SEO experts don’t control the search engines. Changes to Google’s algorithm can, and usually do, come unannounced. That is out of our hands.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the burden of risk should fall entirely on your shoulders. Failure of a campaign shouldn’t mean you lost your investment, the agency “did their best” and it just didn’t work out. Smart agencies recognize that the best thing they can do is share the risk with the client. How? Simply: they set specific goals and benchmarks and stick to them. That may mean they continue working at a discounted rate if they don’t reach a goal. On the other hand, they may choose to work on a performance-based contract from the start so their compensation will be linked directly to the return on your investment. The point is, it should be more of a partnership than a client/vendor relationship. That is as important now as it ever has been.

SEO is scalable - you don’t have to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Sometimes just taking a few small steps here and there over time adds up to success. Other times you need a one-time overhaul of your site, or maybe a long-term relationship with an expert who can help chart the course. It will depend on the goals you set for your website and how realistic they are given the limits of time and resources. But search engines are going to remain the primary driver of traffic and sales on the web for the forseeable future. SEO, for that reason, shouldn’t be an afterthought to your marketing plan, even in tough economic times - indeed, with such a high potential return on your investment, it should be a priority.

Should Small Businesses Invest In SEO During A Recession?

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Will the buying text links help your search engine rankings? Does it increase PageRank? Can it get your site banned? Will these links bring valuable traffic to your website? Are there good and reliable brokers out there to do it for you?

In essence, there’s nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to you. Advertisements on other people’s sites are not Google’s business or any other search engine for that matter. It will not get your site banned or penalized in any way, although it may harm the site that they’re sitting on.

There are brokers out there who offer their services to mainpulate placement; the attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of your website.

To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean a vote from a site that thinks your site is useful. However, this practice is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. As long as there’s no obvious way for robots to work out whether a link is truly a vote for your site or whether it is simply a paid ad, the trick is for the advertiser should in no way indicate that it is, like having a heading above the lniks that says “Advertisers” or the like. And really, there should be as few outbound links from that page as possible.

Sites that sell these links should by now be savvy enough to figure out that leaving noticeable “footprints” in the code is just plain dumb. It should be established by now, and no doubt the link brokers will tell the site owners if they don’t already know, that there are no “footprints” which the robots can detect. But by circumventing the rules site owners that get paid for links assume the search engines count ads as votes.

Catching out the supposedly “black hat” practices is what every single major Google update has been about. In the past Google massacred sites like Washington Post (from PR7 to 5), Washington Times (from PR6 to 4) and Forbes.com (from PR7 to 5).

Google alos emplyes human snoopers to stop this happening, but in the main it should work. You just need a clever broker in tow.

Buying text links. Tut tut

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1. Search engines put a lot of weight into keyworded domain names and the older the site is the better. We really should have thought about this ourselves years back and bought webdesignbangkok.com but alas, we didn’t. If you’re launching a new website, you would do well to research the keywords used in your industry - and if that keyword can realistically be competed on - before you buy it.

2. Optimize your site with a spread of keywords across the site. By simply stuffing everything you can think of into the title of the home page is hopelessly bad practice. I have seen so many sites do that. It’s called keyword diminution. If you haven’t got these keywords in the text somewhere, there’s really no point in putting them into the title. The search engines are looking for pages that have the keyword in a header tag, called and h1 tag and in the copy, best placed in the first, middle and end paragraphs. Secondly, to stop wasting people’s time You need to optimize your site to meet their needs of your audience, not what you dream up in bed at night.

3. You should use KeywordDiscovery, WordTracker or at least Google’s AdWords keyword selection tool to gauge exactly what keywords people actually search for. The phrases you “think” people use in search usually is incorrect. And when you have done all the work and have to recover later, it takes a long time for it to settle. Also, regionalise. If you are a fitness trainer in Bangkok, using generic keywords such as “fitness trainer” will get you competing with the entire world. Don’t!

4. Your site architecture and navigation needs not only on your keyword research but on organiszing the pages so that they appear on tier 2. By that I mean, the home page is tier 1 and links to your inside pages should be linked from this page. Don’t use dhtml or Flash either, or the search engines won’t be able to index them. Design your site to be “search engine-friendly”. Search engines can’t read JavaScript links and menus, and can’t interpret graphics and Flash. If you want to use Flash, use it as an on-page element, not thesite itself and if you really want to use it inthe navigation, make sure you provide alternate means of navigating your site with text links. So, for instance, if you have only a drop-down menu the search engines will never find the inside pages.

5. Outbound links to the inside pages are also vital and use a filename that matches the keywords. So for Flash Design Bangkok, name the page flashdesignbangkok.php. Don’t use links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Also, copy the title into the alt tags if grahic links are being used.

6. Write your copy around the main keywords for all of the key pages on your website, and make sure the search engines can “see” this. Also, it is best practice to ensure your copy is at the top of the page and that slogan and newsletter sign-ups don’t get in front of the copy. This is a crucial component to having a successful website.

7. Your keywords work like this: they must agree right across the page. So, take the page flashdesignbangkok.php. Flash Design Bangkok needs to be in the title, meta tags, h1 or header tag and throughout the copy. Domain names, filenames, title tags and header tags are critical to the SEO process as they’re given a percentage marks for correct usage.

8. Make sure your site is “link-worthy.” Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site’s overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without your even asking. It’s fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

9. Start link building from the outset. You’ll need some bulk links to get you started, then start using press releases, blogs, blog comments, social bookmarking and a whole gamut of resources to see your site flying. When, after a few months you can see your site rising, there are companies that can help get links from relevant, high PR websites in your sector.

10. Add a seamless WordPress blog to your site and get writing. Make sure it is registered with the blog and RSS directories and use sites like pingoat.com to get your RSS feed listed as well.

Ten useful tips to get you to the top of the search engines

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Everybody’s reaction to this headline would surely be a resounding “yes”, but in order to achieve this a website needs to be “optimized” to compete for keywords that people actually search on. This is called search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website on search engine listings for keywords and phrases that correspond to a website’s content. The strategies we employ are a finely balanced, and it requires expert knowledge of the way search engines operate.

How is it done?
First, we research keywords that are actually searched on — we don’t guess — and are relevant to the pages on your website. We then place these keywords on every page of the site. Once the optimization process is in place, the SEO efforts do not end there. By merely having your website listed on the search engines is not enough to attract traffic and generate sales.

As searchers rarely look beyond the first of page, it is important that your site is highly placed; and it will not start to climb through the rankings until you start to make a series of submissions to relevant directories and other websites, preferably with a reasonably high Google PageRank™ (PR). PR refers to Google’s ranking system (1-10) and relates to the importance of your site according to the number and value of sites linking to it — a kind of online voting. The higher the PR of ‘relevant’ sites linking back to your website, the higher the placement.

Many businesses fail to optimize their sites effectively, by placing a large number of keywords on their home page; this overly broad search optimization strategy doesn’t work and, in fact, actually hinders a company’s marketing strategy. We spread keywords throughout the site.

Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads and results in increased sales volumes, and search engine optimization techniques are at their most effective when used as part of a niche online marketing strategies.

Our search engine optimization and link building services provide you with:
• A thorough analysis of your website, including a review of your site’s content and identification of any architectural flaws, such as the use of frames or Flash splash pages, and general misuse of keywords, that hinder placement;
• Restructuring the title and tags, the text, internal links and filenames and making recommendations as to why they need changing;
• Provision of quality one-way inbound links from websites that have the same theme as your own by making manual submissions to general and industry-specific directories;
• Providing you with a detailed monthly report on submissions and placement analysis.

In summary, search engine optimization is the fundamental part of any company’s internet marketing strategy; it is the process of improving your website’s rankings on targeted keywords, primarily with the ‘big three’, namely Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Our role as an SEO specialist is to achieve visible results for your company by promoting your businesses online. Our services provide you with:
• Increased and targeted online traffic;
• Competitive strategies for placement;
• Measurable return on investment (ROI);
• Increased conversions;
• Broadening of market share.

Are there any guarantees that our site will be at the top of the listings?
Any reputable, SEO expert will always tell you “no”, we never guarantee placement. For example, if one enters “music” into Google’s search box, Music Yahoo! is returned at #1 with 4.46 million websites linking to it. Who in their right mind would ever give you such assurances for that search term? However, we look at more manageable keywords that can be successfully competed on for placement.

SEO packages - a unique and fairer pricing model
According to an article published by the FT in late December 2007, “India’s information technology outsourcing sector is heading for crunch time next year, as a rising currency and increasing wage and real estate costs force the industry to rethink how it does business. Multinationals continue to view the country as one of the most viable outsourcing destinations, but competitive pressures are making other countries look attractive. Analysts believe that a longer-term shift in strategy is necessary if India’s IT companies are to prevent more work going overseas to emerging centres such as Vietnam, China and Brazil.”

In fact, we have found many customers complaining that the industry’s packages being unfairly priced according to the “number of keywords targeted” and “guaranteed number of keywords”. This method, they feel, is too expensive and opaque.

Top Placement on Google, Yahoo! And MSN?

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