Goodbye to ranking-focused SEO, Hello to Conversion-focused SEO.
SEOs are good at understanding the influence of links, content, keyword targeting and organic search engine rankings, but few are focused on transforming SEO traffic to leads and sales. Building an analytical-driven SEO process focused on growing profitability of organic search is a significant opportunity.

There has never been a better time to rethink SEO far beyond the ranking or click. The Google algorithm is also becoming increasingly efficient at detecting post-click user engagement and conversion metrics, via a variety of data collection sources. Better engaging websites will also improve rankings. SEO itself should be more about conversions that essentially convert to additional revenues from traffic.

Making SEO more conversion-centric also means that some current SEO strategies and processes need updating to focus on conversions.How to get your SEO focused on conversions. The following methods may help to get your SEO more focused on conversions:

1. Assign dollar value to conversions. Using your web analytics platform, assign conversion dollar values for different conversion types, and following data collection, evaluate for organic keywords and keyword categories. When using an internal tracking system to track referrals, do not limit it to advertising campaigns only — track referral URL traffic too. Proper SEO measurement and metrics are the basis for drilling down on SEO profitability at a deeper granularity level (keyword, landing page, SEO category, geo, etc. and combinations).

2. Evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of your SEO landing page in terms of its contribution as an initiator of a successful conversion funnel. Your SEO landing page may receive a lot of organic traffic but not necessarily spark conversions. Analyze the landing pages that do, and optimize.

3. Customize your value proposition for major target verticals. Your solution may appeal differently to various market segments. Identify main user segments and customize offerings according to the ‘reason why’ they are interested in your offer.
For example, a company that offers moving services may decide to tailor one value proposition for potential clients who are ‘price sensitive’ and another value proposition for those who are sensitive about moving company insurance coverage. You may want to have a separate SEO target page or a more comprehensive SEO ‘hub’ page per value proposition.

4. Test your page title and descriptions. These may appear in the SERP listing and may significantly affect how users click your organic listing. Past the click, a more focused snippet will lead to higher conversion rates.

5. Re-think internal linking structures (anchor and placement). Do not think about links only in terms of site structure or PageRank. Test performance of placed links in terms of appeal to users, call for action effectiveness, and conversion rates.

6. Build your keyword targeting strategy based on best converting keywords. Often using paid search to identify best converting keywords is instrumental in formulation of an ROI-driven keyword targeting plan.

7. SEO click stream analysis (first click or last click?). Many conversions have a “click stream to conversion”, meaning the same user arrived multiple times via different sources before conversion — from multiple keywords/sources. Most analytics systems assign 100% of the conversion credit to the last click. Be aware of the setting for your analytics system, and take into account the contribution of each click in the stream. Note that certain organic keyword queries should serve well for increasing awareness and building intent, while others, among them brand keywords, do a better job at driving the “last click” conversion and thus are fully credited for the conversion.

8. Scale
Within PPC activity, it is common to scale by identifying new niches, expanding the keyword bedded on, and optimizing a large number of micro segments and ad groups. When the performance of each micro segment is improved, overall performance can improve significantly, and is also where search marketing technology is essential.

As far as the scaling approach, advanced SEO within competitive markets should essentially be the same. By better segmenting SEO activity, as broken down into separate keyword groups and SEO target pages, and optimizing the conversions of each individual segment, accumulated results of SEO activity should significantly improve.

Time to rethink what SEO is all about:
SEO has changed and you must change with it to stay competitive. There has never been a better time to rethink SEO, taking action to transform it away from ‘rankings’ and ‘traffic’ and into more systematic, tested client acquisition activity. By establishing measurement and metrics, analyzing pages within the SEO conversion funnel, customizing value propositions for different verticals, testing SERP snippets, and re-thinking keyword targeting and linking strategies, you can scale your SEO results and discover new revenue potential.

Itai Levitan, CO-CEO of easynet search marketing.

[tags]seo, conversion-driven seo, conversion marketing, search engine optimization, conversion rate seo[/tags]

As an online entrepreneur, you spend a good part of your time trying to get a high search engine results page position, because that position is critical to your success. The closer you are to page one, result one, the more traffic you get to your site and the more likely you are to sell your products.

If you have been doing your website owner due diligence, you will have read many articles that tell you how to optimise your sites pages for Google results success. The primary approaches that have been identified include:

- Lots of fresh new content

- Relevant information

- Keyword phrases that are relevant together in the context of your site

- Links to other relevant sites

If Elance’s marketplace is any indication, most web owners are working hard to add fresh content to their site using articles and blogs Elance generally has three hundred to four hundred requests for writers of web content and web articles at any time. Many of those requests are for one hundred or more articles at a time.

Of course, it is not always easy to know for sure what Google or any other search engine is looking for because their search algorithms are proprietary.

Recently, a company called the Internet Marketing Blueprint conducted a study of Google page rank using over 200 websites. Why page rank? Because page rank, Google’s scoring system for ranking a page from one to ten based on relevance, is the key to high search engine results page ranking. Plus, page rank confers value to links within those pages. That means that if you link to a page with a page rank of three, that link may be worth 300 links to pages with a page rank of two.

Marketing Blueprint tested all of the conventional wisdom about how to increase Google page rank and discovered something very revealing: the only thing that mattered in their analysis is linking!

- Freshness: They found that sites with no fresh content for years retained the same page ranking.

- Quality: They looked at pages along a continuum of ‘quality’ and found no correlation between quality and page rank

- Duplicate content: The study group found no effect on page rank when duplicate content was identified.

- Domain ownership and hosting changes: Page rank dropped then returned.

However, links and link quality mattered for almost every site consistently.

What does this mean for you and your site? Well, it is one study and there are certainly plenty of studies out there that have come to different conclusions. So we do not recommend that you stop adding content or let the quality slip. Remember, in the end, you are serving your customers, not a search engine.

However, you should absolutely positively take a good look at your link strategy. This study certainly suggests that link strategy is incredibly important to page rank success.

Source verified wholesale, distributors, dropshippers and dropshipping wholesale suppliers. Browse wholesale UK dropshippers by country: Wholesale UK, Wholesale China and more.

[tags]search engine optimisation,marketing,web content,links,page rank,website,link building,seo[/tags]

Few months ago, Microsoft launched their new search engine: Bing. Since its launch, there are many discussions and debates about whether Bing will overtake Yahoo and Google. Although it is still very early to talk about Bing disposing the big 2, the future seems good after several good reviews about Bing.

It does not matter whether Bing is going to be the new number 1 or number 2. The fact is, Bing is definitely going to capture a bigger market share compared to its predecessor MSN Live. So it is important that you know how to optimize your website for Bing. Now, let me share with you a few tips to get your website to rank high on Bing.

1. Name your HTML pages properly. If a page is talking about cleaning services, you should name your file as “cleaning-services.html”, using hyphen to separate each word. Using important keywords to name your files will definitely help in Bing optimization.

2. Make sure the title is relevant to the content of the page. Title tag optimization is very important when it comes to Bing optimization. Place important keywords at the start of the Title and make sure that the keywords you use are relevant to the content of the page.

3. Register your domain name early and don’t change it unnecessarily. The age of a domain plays a part when it comes to SEO. Bing tends to like older domain names. So you choose the right domain name from the beginning so that you don’t need to change it after a year.

4. Add more content to your website. Search engines love content, especially Google and Bing. So if you have articles, post them onto your websites. If not, add a blog to your site and update it regularly.

5. Keep your URL simple and static. URLs that change frequently are difficult to index. So make your URL static and keep it as simple as possible. Remember to place keywords in your URL.

6. Build links. Link building is an important process of SEO. If you want to rank high on Bing, get other sites to link back to your website. Bing will see your site as popular and reward you with high rankings.

7. Rank well on Google. If your site ranks well on Google, most probably you will rank well on Bing.

So start optimizing your website for Bing today if you want to get more traffic to your website in the near future.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO service.

Speak to our SEO consultant at OOm Singapore now.

[tags]seo service, seo, search engine optimization, seo singapore[/tags]

Link building is the bedrock of SEO. Every successful SEO campaign is a result of effective link building. In order to rank high on search engines like Google, you need to get other sites to link back to you. By doing this, Google will see your site as popular and reward you with high rankings.

In this article, let me share with you some tips to get tons of back links for your site and boost its rankings on Google:

1. Article submission. You can write articles about what the product or service that you provide and submit your articles to popular directories like EzineArticles. Once your articles get approved and published, you will get back links and traffic. If your articles are well-written, other websites may pick up your articles and publish them on their web pages. This will further increase the number of back links you to your website.

2. Press release submission. Write a professional press release and submit it to PR directories like PRWeb. Your press release will be syndicated and published on a number of other press release directories, increasing the number of back links to your site.

3. Comment on blogs. Visit blogs and comment on the posts that you find interesting. You should never spam the blogs by posting unconstructive comments. Respects the owners of the blogs and post something useful. This will also help to get your comments approved and published.

4. Post in forums. Join some forums that are related to your industry and participate actively. Post replies in thread and contribute to the community. This will get you more back links, as well as traffic too.

5. Social book marking. Submit your web pages to popular social book marking sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. If your story is interesting, you will get tons of traffic too.

6. Place your website URL under the profile of your social networking sites. Social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace and Friendster have high PageRank which will increase the link popularity of your website.

7. Place your website URL on the Twitter profile page. Unless you are living in a cave, you should have heard of Twitter. If you don’t have a Twitter account, I strongly advise you to create one now.

8. Submit your website to directories. Some popular directories are DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, BOTW, etc. You should submit your website to a list of search engine friendly directories to gain more back links.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO service.

Speak to our SEO consultant at OOm Singapore now.

[tags]seo service, seo, search engine optimization, seo singapore[/tags]

Each page on a website has the potential to act as a landing page because it has its own ranking potential. This makes it important to optimize each page on a website for a phrase or a series of related phrases. This process is called SEO copywriting and is an important part of marketing your content online. To help you effectively optimize your page copy, here are 6 tips for content SEO.

Keyword Density is a Waste

Keyword density is a misguided metric for success. Repeating a keyword many times does not make a page more relevant. In fact, too much can make a page less relevant. To prevent this, avoid basic metrics like keyword density.

Write content with keywords in mind, but write naturally. By writing naturally, you correctly enforce a page’s topic by using semantically related terms. In addition, you’re able to mention phrases and words that can pull in unexpected long-tail searches.

Use Keywords in Headings

Heading tags in HTML carry semantic value. These tags help define the main topic of a page. This is a great place to put keywords, which helps enforce the theme of the page.

I recommend using only one H1 per page and making it unique for that page. In addition, there is some evidence that setting your headings to be different from your title may be useful.

Put the Keywords in the Right Place

There is no perfect keyword placement, but you can increase the prominence of a keyword by placing it in several important places. Include the keyword early and often in your page copy. I like to use the keyword in the first 100 words and the last 100 words. It is also great to use it in elements like bold, images, and lists.

Don’t Focus on One Phrase

I recommend using variations of your primary keyword. Be sure to use both singular and plural versions. In addition, use stemming to create more variation. If you can apply a modifier to your keyword, do that as well. Not only is this a natural way to write, but also it helps you target more keywords.

Spread Your Keywords Out

Although keyword density is unimportant, keyword disbursement is very important. When writing naturally, keywords are often spread out. Do not clump all your keywords together, but spread them throughout your copy.

Write Good Online Copy

One of the most important things to learn in online marketing is how people read online. People generally scan pages looking at elements like headings, bolds, images, and lists. They look for interesting items and then stop to read. Then they return to the scanning behavior. By making a page easy to scan and digest easily, you create a piece of content that is well received. Popular articles and pages perform well in search because they naturally attract links.

Justin Briggs works at an online marketing company in Nashville, TN, you can read more at his online marketing blog

[tags]seo copywriting, seo, online marketing, search engine optimization[/tags]

As the internet has become increasingly sophisticated, the various professional fields in the internet marketplace have become more and more specialized. In each area there have been massive leaps in complexity, usability, design and technology.

Even just a few years back, there were relatively few separate specialties for people who work within the arena of the internet. These days there is a vast multitude of ways in which people can specialize online. These professionals include:
Web designers, information architects, Google Adwords campaign managers, various types of program and software developers and last but not least, search engine optimization.

In my experience, most web designers these days don’t even know how to include search engine optimization in the sites that they design and build. There is ample proof of this; it is visible easily every day by just taking a look at what is out there. Websites that have either no or empty Meta tags no headline tags and in some cases no title tags! What is frustrating about this is that all of these are extremely easy to include.

So where does that leave the buyer? It leaves them with a website that will no doubt look fantastic; however the chances are that few will ever see it. Let alone become customers of whatever service or product the site is offering. This seems to be particularly true in the case of websites that contain a lot of flash, it looks great, but it is heavy in the browser and as it is purely images, the search engines cannot read it, even if there are words as the words themselves are rendered as images not text.

Therefore, when shopping for a website designer, be aware that though most will have the words ‘SEO’ or ‘Search Engine Optimization’ somewhere within their marketing or sales material. Take the precaution of checking that they actually know what that means, many don’t. The way to check it out is to look at sites they have already completed - particularly their own. Check to see if it has Meta tags such as the keyword and description meta tag, check to see if their title tags actually have something useful in them not just ‘welcome to company XYZ website’.

These things are very easy to check. The title tag is easily visible to you as you open the site in your browser, you will see it on the very top of your screen. To check the other parts you will need to look at the source code, you can do this in Firefox by clicking on ‘View’ then on ‘Page Source’. This will show you all the code of the site, the meta tags should be near the top just after the the title tags.

Lastly, check to see if the site has headline tags. Between them should be the main title of the page, including the keywords that you want people to find your site with.

Do you want help from an SEO services expert? IF you want a website that will be found by your customers, or you need to transform your existing site into a search engine friendly site, visit the search engine optimisation experts at LinxHurricane today.

[tags]SEO, web design, search engine optimization, search engine optimisation[/tags]

SEO is the bedrock of internet marketing. If you intend to increase traffic to your website and get conversions, you need SEO. SEO is a time consuming process and it is not a do-and-forget job. To see results from optimization, you need to do it consistently. This is why some companies decide to outsource SEO to a professional agency.

In this article, let me share with you some of the things you can expect from a professional SEO service:

1. Website auditing. Before an agency can start optimizing your website, they will audit your website to identify existing problems and current SEO strategy. After the audit, they should point out the areas that need to be addressed. Some agencies will also study what your competitors did so as to give you an edge over them.

2. Search engine friendly web design. In order for a SEO campaign to be effective, the web design must be search engine friendly. Therefore, the agency should analyze the design of your site and recommend a revamp if it is deem unsuitable for optimization.

3. Onsite optimization. Once your website is ready for optimization, the agency will place important keywords on every page of your website. Keywords will be placed in important areas of a page, such as Title, Meta, H1 and Alt tags. The keywords should be relevant to the content of the page.

4. Content creation. The content of your website is the key to SEO success. As your SEO strategy is focused on certain keywords to rank highly on, the agency will make sure your website focuses on these keywords properly in the content. The content should be relevant for both human and search engines.

5. Link building campaign. Once they finish with onsite optimization, they should develop a linking strategy to build back links to your site. In order to obtain high page rankings, you need an efficient and effective link building campaign. Some link building strategies are: article marketing, commenting on blogs, directory submission, forum posting, social book marking, etc.

6. Result monitoring and report generation. The agency should track the results of the SEO campaign to ensure that everything is heading towards the right track. They will track the rankings of some important keywords, the percentage increased in overall organic traffic and conversions. Every month, they should generate a report for you.

By hiring a SEO agency to optimize your website, you can save a lot of time and do the things that you do best to grow the business.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO services.

Find out more about SEO at OOm Singapore.

[tags]seo service, seo, search engine optimization, seo singapore[/tags]

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving or increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website via search engine organic result listings. This means that the higher your site ranks on the organic search results, the more traffic you will get from search engines.

Out of all search engines, Google has the biggest market share. This explains why many webmasters and business owners want their websites to rank high on Google. To achieve high rankings on Google is not impossible - you just need to know how to optimize your website. In this article, let me share with you some tips to achieve high rankings on Google through SEO.

1. Optimize your websites for short and long tail keywords. If you are offering cleaning services in Chicago, you may want to optimize keywords like “cleaning services Chicago” and “office cleaning Chicago”. This will attract the right people to visit your website and increase your conversion rate. Google optimization is all about relevancy. So just make sure that the keywords you optimize is relevant to the content of your website.

2. Purchase a domain name early. The age of your domain name plays an important role when it comes to Google optimization. The longer the domain name has been around, the more Google is going to like you. So choose a domain name properly to ensure you don’t change it after a year. If not, all the optimization effort will go down the drains.

3. Make sure that your website is search engine friendly. Don’t use frames or flash to build your website. Go for simple HTML or PHP sites with cleaning coding. If your website has a lot of pages, make sure you include a sitemap.xml so that GoogleBot can index all pages on your website.

4. Place important keywords within your content and your Title tag. It is extremely important to place important keywords in Title tag. The Title tag is like the Title of a book. If you come across a book without a proper title, you will not understand what it is about. This is the same for search engines. If you want Google to index your site and rank it high for important keywords, you must first ensure that Google knows what your site is about. You can do it by writing proper titles for every page of your website.

5. Build links. It is important to get other sites to link back to your website if you want to achieve high rankings on Google. With more back links, Google will see your site as popular and reward you with high rankings. Some of ways to get back links are article submission, directory submission, social book marking, commenting on blogs and forum posting.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO services.

Find out more about SEO at OOm Singapore.

[tags]seo service, seo, search engine optimization, seo singapore[/tags]

Lets address what this really means. First off this is by no means focusing on keyword optimisation or keyword usage. Here we are focusing efforts on the presentation and architecture of the text,image and multimedia content on the webpage with the seach engines in mind.

Site Content
Think carefully when creating the pages of your website, inserting lots of images can make the page look clumsy and take a long time to load.

Images
If you use any images always make sure to give them a description using the ‘ALT’ value. ALT means ‘Alternate Text’ and is very important for the search engines to understand what the image relates to, so for example for your websites logo the source code would look like;
img src=mycompany_logo.gif width=100px height=25px alt=My Company Logo
Note also the name of the image ‘mycompany_logo.gif’ gives an idea of what it is there to describe.

Links
Any links whether they are internal or external, from text or from an image, should have a description or ‘title’ value. This helps in two ways, firstly by telling the search engine more information about what it will find and also for adding valuable text and keywords into your page.

A picture speaks a thousand words, or does it??? Not to a search engine!

Textual Content
Having plenty of relevant text is essential, though ‘RELEVANT’ is the key word here! Pages and pages of text are going to bore your visitors just as lots of images will confuse them. If you are not sure about where to start the best thing to do is look at your competition. Do a search in Google for the keywords you want to get high rankings for and look in detail at the first ten results for the following things:
1) Title: In the top of your browser
2) Use of the keyword(s) within their pages
3) How long their product descriptions are
4) Are they using external content such as linking or embedding Wiki articles or user reviews

This may sound simple but at the end of the day if they are in the Top 10 results their websites are working for them!!

Navigation
Would you go on holiday and not take a map (or GPS!) if not and there were no street signs how would you know where to go?

This is exactly the same for your website if you have poor navigation your visitors will not hang around they will go to your competition. The same is true with the search engine spiders if they cannot crawl your website easily they will not bother. The XML sitemap is a good start but there are some simple things you do with the rest of the navigation for SEO purposes.

Firstly (taking into account the links section of this document) where possible use text links with CSS styling for your menus as opposed to images.

Have more than one menu, for example a top menu and a side menu. A common use of this would be to have the About Us and Contact Us type links in the top menu and product category type links in a side menu. The more direct links to your content pages the better.

If you have lots of links that you want to use in a single menu but are worried it is going to look a mess, consider using AJAX/Javascript to create a dynamic menu. You can also find readymade scripts on the web.

The Footer
The Footer of your web pages is a great place to add links as most visitors do not look at it. This is generally where you place legal notices such as copyright and company registration numbers.

This is also a good area to place discreet back links to other relevant websites and websites that require you to link back to them before they place a link to you such as some free business directories and forums.

You should also link to your XML sitemap file and if possible to a HTML (web page) version as well.

John E, Media Relations Adviser Easily.co.uk - Domain name registration, register your low cost domain name today! Search domain names quickly, all major extensions and no catches.

[tags]Internet,domains,online domain names,domain name registration[/tags]

Is it worth doing? Absolutely is the answer! This can be labour intensive, time consuming and even frustrating. Ultimately it is still one of the trump cards to higher ranking.

External Links & Content
Linking to external websites and specifically to similar or related content is a very useful tool for the search engines perception of the importance of your site. There are masses of freely available content you can use from YouTube videos through to product ratings, Wikipedia content and News Feeds.

Embedding External Content
There are many different ways you can embed external content within your website, for example some packages come with their own RSS Widgets to allow you to easily embed RSS feeds from anywhere. The most common ways to embed external content are:
1) RSS Feeds for news feeds and frequently updated content
2) Widgets: often used for embedding weather information and location maps
3) External Embed: Such as embedding Videos from YouTube where the content is hosted elsewhere or product reviews.

RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds or Really Simple Syndication is a structured in a very similar way to your XML sitemap. They are essentially the textual content from external web pages that can be ‘pulled’ into your website. There are a number of reasons why it is great to embed them;
1) The content in the Feed changes often which makes your website more alive to the search engines, very useful if you do not change the content regularly as the more frequently your website changes the more frequently the search engines will visit your website.
2) If you have space to fill on your site they can provide free relevant up to date content which looks professional and is informative for your visitors.

Sources for RSS feeds are everywhere from BBC News to Blogger just do a search for RSS & the topic e.g. RSS Technology or create your own. There are many free tools available to embed these feeds in your site too. Do a search for feedzilla and newsfeedmaker.

Widgets
Widgets are a great way to add content to your site; you might have noticed local weather or travel information on a local businesses website. There are millions of widgets available on the web; seach the web for widgetbox and bravenet.

External Embedding
Embedding external content is perhaps the easiest way to add someone else’s content to your website. You will notice on a lot of websites such as YouTube you will have a share this or embed area which will contain some code.

All you then need to do is paste this code into your webpage where you want it to appear. In this YouTube example which is embedding a Flash video you can also change the parameter param name=”movie” to whatever you like, this example is a Michael Jackson video so I might want to change this to param name=”My Favourite Michael Jackson Video” to tell the search engines why it is there.

External Links
Any other external links should always be relevant to your websites content and do not be scared to change the title value in an external link to something more relevant such as Free Business Directory you could change to Builders Directory or anything else you like. When signing up to Free Business Directories that require a link back to their site always try and link back to the page on their directory that contains your information.

John E, Media Relations Adviser Easily.co.uk - Domain name registration, register your low cost domain name today! Search domain names quickly, all major extensions and no catches.

[tags]Internet,domains,online domain names,domain name registration[/tags]