SEO – What Is It And Why You Need It

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is not something new nowadays. Basically, if you want your online business to be successful, it's a good idea to optimize your site on a regular basis to make sure it's got a good position in the Web's top search engines.

Now, what in the world is this SEO?

Thankfully, most of us here, know what it is, but for those who came in late… SEO stands for search Engine Optimization.

So in other words SEO means if you trying to optimize your site for the search engines, you are basically optimizing your page for those keywords for which you want a high page ranking. Basically, in order to maintain your page-rank, you have to keep on top of what's happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your page rank yesterday may be meaningless tomorrow!

Search engines analyze title tags, image tags, link structure, directory structure, keyword density, prominence, and proximity, total words, total words in specific areas, alt tags, input tags, word repetitions, comment lines, domain name, directory name, filename, etc. The list is endless…..Moreover, to complicate things further, each engine has it's own unique way of ranking pages, so you need to create different pages to exactly match the criteria of each one.

So, do you have to use SEO?

The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need Search Engine Optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

For the past few years, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to, or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. So you basically need to get it done right. In other words, you need an expert...

Now once again why do we need to pay for SEO, when we can do it ourselves?
When you get online, you would want people to visit your blog and for this you will need traffic and for that you need Search Engine Optimization. Now, although SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your site, it costs aplenty, unless you are skilled in it. Likewise, maximizing the benefits of an optimized website will also yield lots of earnings for the marketer.

It is not that people cannot make money from the net; it is because people can’t get traffic to their site. This is mainly because one of the common mistakes in generating traffic which we all tend to make is the method of how we generate traffic. The biggest mistake here is that you are not focusing on generating traffic, but instead, you’ve tried almost every method out there that can supposedly increase the traffic to your site.

If we adopt a pattern, that is to say, the first day, you try and find more links for better SEO, then the next day, you try and generate traffic with article marketing and the following day you try obtaining with CPC advertising – then the chances of getting traffic are much better.

Basically, if you want your online business to be successful, it's a good idea to optimize your site on a regular basis to make sure it's got a good position in the web's top search engines. However, in order to maintain your page rank, you have to keep on top of what's happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your page rank yesterday may be useless tomorrow!

With the rapid growth of the Internet, it is no doubt why Search Engine Optimization has become one of the hottest topics within Internet marketing. The amount of daily search engine traffic is staggering, and for an individual who is thinking of marketing their products or services online, the Internet can be a virtually limitless gold mine of potential customers.

However, to reach these customers you will need to position yourself on those same search engines that so many people are using daily looking for your services or products. When queried, a search engine will reveal all of the sites that it has in its database about a particular subject or product. If your site happens to fall into the requested search category, this is called your site or page ranking [PR].

However, and as mentioned earlier, usually only the first few (top 10) ranked websites get to reap the sweet fruit of victory over their competition.

To make matters worse, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not something new nowadays. In other words, the search engine industry is continually evolving. You need to know which of the major "players" is powering the smaller search engines if you want to know where you should focus your optimization efforts.

In order to achieve this, you need to create multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for one source of traffic is simply not enough for most small to mid-size sites, or home-based business sites. Considering the competition most people experience with search engines, not to mention the ever-increasing trend towards ‘pay for inclusion’ with the major search engines, it can be a real challenge to get decent traffic from search engines.

Google is still extremely powerful with Yahoo! a close runner-up and MSN still a distant but threatening third. It must be also noted that many of the smaller search engines plus some paid listings are still powered by Yahoo and Google

Before you can actually begin to start optimizing a site, you must understand how search engines and their robots work. This information will give you a head start on the process of building an optimized web site.

Almost daily, we meet web designers who do not truly understand the function of search engines. This usually results in poorly developed sites in regards to search engine placement that usually disappear. Sure, anyone can build a site with a little practice. However, knowing how search engines work and building a site that meets its ever changing ranking criteria and also achieves top ranking results for key search terms, is quite different.

There presently exist two types of major search engines, robot-indexed and human-indexed. It is important to understand the differences between the two because the way they index pages will dramatically affect your sites position within them. The main idea of web site optimization is about getting ranked on search engines. So, it has nothing to do with how fancy your web site looks or getting ranked in the last few pages. This is where the page rank plays an important part for which SEO is an important criterion.

Obviously it is important to have a practical and easy navigation system and favorable looks, so that you can maintain the visitors you receive form the search engines, but those all come to play after the page rank.

About 95% of the search engines on the Internet are self-indexing or spider / robot indexed. The other 5% are human indexed and are usually referred to as directories. At this point, the important point to learn is that human indexed search engines cannot be manipulated and optimized for, as freely as a spider index search engine can. The good news is that with the advancements in the robot indexed search engines and their algorithms, they are getting closer and closer to human indexed search engines.

Search engines will simply keep on producing traffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords and gets lots of searches. This is not always easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get some traffic. Search engines frequently change the algorithms they use for page ranks and for ranking sites. They don't want unscrupulous site owners manipulating their indexing methods in order to get high rankings. By doing so, they damage the integrity of free search!

Regardless of how poorly the site has been optimized, the domain name (URL) will be indexed in most search engines and in almost every case; search engines will be able to return a web site address when asked. This means that if you were to go to a major search engine and type in your site name, you will probably see it right on top of that search engines results. Don’t be deceived by this type of search engine response as search engines categorize sites based on keywords, and visitors search for sites using keywords not the site URL.

Bottom line, most search engines will be able to return the correct URL address for any site if asked to, provided the site was indexed by them. This does not mean that the site is ranking well.

Once again, if someone searches for your domain name, it should pop right up on most search engines.

In fact, if this does not happen, that means your Internet presence has some fundamental deficiencies. To be successfully ranked on a search engine means your web site must achieve a favorable position over others based on a scale such as the keyword used for the search.

As mentioned earlier, the search engine industry is continually evolving and it is difficult to put the entire process into one article. It would take a couple of pages to go about each phase and for those interested in hard-core SEO, it is better to get hold of a book or a much more detailed article source.

Basically, just use the above to get a brief idea on how and where you should focus your efforts on Search Engine Optimization.

Improve Your Search Engine Ranking Potential

The basic "out the box" WordPress SEO settings are not enough to fully optimize your blog, but there are a number of plugins you can use to enhance your WordPress blog further:

1) Make a decision - to use, or not to use, the www. prefix in your blog URL's...

If your blog uses URL's which include 'www.' and others which do not, the search engines will index two versions of your blog and aside from the possible waste of bandwidth from double spidering, one of them will be filtered as duplicated content. While this problem might be real or just a storm in a tea cup, being pro-active seems to be the wisest option.

You need to decide which system you want to use and stick to it, always!

The Redirections plugin by John Godley allows you to specify which system you want to use and will automatically create '301 redirection' for other URL's. For example, if you decide to use the 'www.' prefix any link to your blog that does not contain the prefix will automatically be redirected to the correct URL which contains the 'www.' prefix.

The major advantage of using this plugin is that it also creates re-directs if you choose to change a post slug (used for the post file name). It also creates redirects if you decide to change your permalink structure and already have posts indexed in the search engines using the old permalink structure.

2) Create Optimized post title tags

The SEO Title Tag plugin by Stephan Spencer is an essential plugin. By default WordPress places your blog name, a separator and then your post name in the title of each page (i.e. between the [title] tags). The SEO Title Tag plugin reverses this and places your post name before your blog name in the title. From a search engine optimization stand point this is advantageous, because:

- It gives the keywords in your title more prominence.
- It provides more meaningful search engine listing results.
- It provides more meaningful browser bookmark names.

One of the major advantages of this plugin is that you have the ability to create a unique title tag for your blog index page and separate title tags for your category pages. By default, WordPress just uses the blog name for the index title and category names for the category page titles.

3) Include description and keyword meta tags in your blog's [head] tags

Including meta keyword tags in your blog's header is not a necessity, most search engines ignore them, but including them won't harm your search engine optimization chances on some of the simpler search engines.

Some search engines will use your meta description in their search listings, others like Google will display all or part of a sentence which contains the first instance of the keyword or phrase being searched. The most obvious thing to do would be to add your keyword phrases into the meta description tag, but these must contain a call-to-action (e.g. make the reader want to read your article).

Creating a compelling meta description which includes all your keyword phrases makes it somewhat difficult for programmers to build a plugin for creating automated meta description tags...

The most common meta description solutions are plugins which take the first 100 or 150
characters from the first sentence to include them in the meta description. The most effective meta keywords plugins are those which also handle the tags you add to each post.

Here are two plugins for you to consider:

i. The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin by Christine Davis is the ultimate tagging solution for bloggers, but it can also include the tags you add to your posts as meta keywords. This plugin can be used for a number of different features on your blog, so it makes sense to use it instead of different plugins for each feature.

ii. The Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo takes your post excerpt or if you don't enter one, the first 20 words of your post content and includes them in a meta description tag.

To get the most out of this plugin you need to get into the habit of writing an attention grabbing post exert (or first sentence) for all your posts. This is a good article writing habit to get into whether you use the plugin or not.

All SEOs / SEMs are Spammers

It is all about traffic

When building up a site, the first thing that you need is traffic.
If you want to make more money online, the first thing you need is also traffic.

When you get online, you would want people to visit your blog and for this you will need traffic.

It is all about traffic.

And generating traffic is the most difficult yet a very fun part for every online business. It is not that people cannot make money from the net, it is because people can’t get traffic to their site!

One of the common mistakes in generating traffic which we all tend to make is the method of how we generate traffic. If today you are trying to figure out how to increase traffic to your site from many methods, and you keep on looking for new ways to generate traffic, then you are making this mistake!

The biggest traffic mistake here is that you are not focusing in the methods of generating traffic. You’ve tried almost every single method out there which claims that they can increase the traffic to your site. Today, you try to find more links for better SEO, and tomorrow you try to generate traffic with article marketing. The following day you try with CPC advertising, and so on and so forth.

Now this is not the right way for generating traffic.

What you need to do is to focus in one traffic generating method until you can successfully generate the volume of traffic that you desire, only then you can consider of trying other new methods. If you trying to tap in every methods, in the end, you will only generate a few traffic from each method.

So first become a pro in just one single traffic generating method first and then the rest.

Now don’t make this mistake anymore.

Have fun and enjoy

NEWS: Pepperjam Wins Best Company to Work For Award

Just a small clip on Pepperjam....

Pepperjam is the industry’s leading full-service internet marketing agency and is recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. Pepperjam is made up of a team of industry veterans and experts, including internet marketing guru and international speaker Kristopher B. Jones.

This blog covers internet marketing, everything from pressing issues in the search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, media planning and management space to pressing issues and trends in the broader e-commerce industry. Look here for exclusive pictures and real-time commentary from industry events such as Search-Engine Strategies (SES), Affiliate Summit, the Linkshare Symposium, Commission Junction University, Ad Tech, EcomExpo, PubCon and many more.

A few days ago we were notified by Happenings Magazine that they were named as one of the best places to work for in Northeastern, Pennsylvania (NEPA). Now NEPA has a population of over 1 million people and hundreds of cool businesses, it just so happens that Pepperjam is apparently the best place to work for!

Well Pepperjam would surely be kicked to be recognized as a kick-ass place to work.

In a company press release Michael C. Jones, Chief Operating Officer of Pepperjam said, “In traditional work environments, employees drag themselves into work everyday and have fun and relax on weekends. Not at Pepperjam. At Pepperjam we have consciously created a work environment where people can have fun and enjoy life all the time.”

Happenings Magazine cited a ping pong table, a stocked refrigerator of Who’s Your Daddy Energy Drink, and a Nintendo Wii in the Pepperjam lounge as only a few of the reasons why Peppejam employees love coming into work everyday.

The magazine noted that Pepperjam gives all employees free membership to the YMCA, free pizza every Friday, and has a relaxed dress code that includes jeans, flip flops, and baseball caps. Also noted was that on any day of the week, Roxy, a two-year old English Bulldog, can be found running around the office playing with or begging for a treat from any of Pepperjam’s 80-plus employees.

Happenings Magazine, published since 1969, chronicals local and regional history, tourism, and events in Northeastern, Pennsylvania. The publication is free and has been one of the most read magazines in Pennsylvania for over 38 years.

Now, why do you need to go home, if they also allow bunk beds....... talk about professionalising working from home !!