By Mark Daoust

I am always amazëd at the response I receive from people when they find out what I do. When I explain that I own Site-Reference which publishes articles on marketing, website development, and search engine optimization, invariably they get a little gleam in their eye at search engine optimization and ask - “So you could get my website to the top of Google, right?”
Yeah, something like that.

Written by Halstatt Pires

Search engine optimization is a much-debated topic and there is a lot of different on the net. Let’s cut through the muck and discuss things you should and shouldn’t pursue to get high rankings.

Before blasting into the subject, we need to define optimization. It simply refers to the manipulation of a site to gain top rankings on the three search engines that dominate the search traffic on the net - Yahoo, Google and MSN. If you do a search on Google, the optimized listings are found in the large section on the left hand side of the page. These are often referred to as organic rankings since you don’t pay for placement. Of course, you manipulated the page for optimization, but we will stick with organic as a name.

By John Krycek

Are profitable, top search ranks possible without the help of an experienced search engine optimization company?
Can a software package or online miracle site touting testïmonials and grandeur guarantees of success elevate your online presence enough to really increase salës?

Unfortunately, unless the software or miracle website were able to research your market, find hidden niches within it, author intriguing, creative, relevant and keyword laden content, house it in a framework that meshes precisely with that content, dissect and analyze your ranking competition and apply that statistical data within the aforementioned tasks, you’ll be using that monëy back guarantëe.

Or - Generic vs Specific. Or - Quantity vs Quality.

There is often a misconception with people new to the world of search engine optimisation that you should be aiming to feature for the most generic phrase that garners the largest number of searches for your particular industry.

Although there is some logic to this thinking, nine times out of 10, it is simply not the right approach.

At WNW Design we try to educate our clients as to why it is better to get small numbers of visitors that have searched for more specific phrases, rather than to get a large number of visitors for the most generic phrase.

After General Motors made a call to television viewers to “Google” the Pontiac brand name, it didn’t take long for Mazda to launch a keyword counterattack. Sponsored search results carried the echo of Mazda marketing snickers as Pontiac searchers were invited to a side-by-side comparison under the link title “Pontiac vs. Mazda.”

The scenario denotes two important developments: the emerging of a new TV-to-Web advertising strategy as major companies are not only pointing to URLs, but also inviting viewers to do a search; and that bidding on competitor brand keywords can be an effective (albeit potentially expensive) strategy.

Written by Mark Daoust

Consider Yahoo the first major casualty of the search engine wars. Yahoo has admitted that they cannot reasonably expect to take away any significant amount of the search market share from Google, so they have chosen to be happy as the second most visited search engine on the Internet. On the surface, this may seem strange. Why would Yahoo ever publicly announce that they are ‘throwing in the towel’ in the search engine war? That would be similar to Pepsi recommending that people drink their product only if Coca-Cola is not available. From a business standpoint, it is absolutely ridiculous and makes absolutely no sense.

By Rok Hrastnik (c) 2005

Truth be told, most blogs aren’t really optimized for marketing effectiveness. Even more so, some blogs are absolute marketing machines, but they at the same time fail to fully capitalize on that fact by not being really optimized marketing-wise.
Blogs may be Web 2.0, but bloggers should not ignore some of the good old internet direct marketing tactics that have been working for marketers online almost for a decade or more.

Hëre are the absolute 101 basics you really shouldn’t ignore …

1. Don’t Forget E-Mail Delivery

Written by Joel Walsh and published in seo-news.com

How does web content really affect SEO? It’s often said that the answer is simply that content does not affect SEO very much – it’s all about more technical issues. Yet a website’s content still plays an enormous and fairly direct role in search engine ranking.
Of course, the whole goal of the search engines’ ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical issue, though admittedly an extremely important technical issue.

By Robert Fuess (c) 2006 Spiderweb Logic

Many of you have heard of submitting your website, but what does this really mean? What places should you really submit your website? What about submitting to thousands of search engines and directories through some website promotion service?

Waves of change have cascaded over the search marketing sector in the past year prompting changes in the methods, business and practice of search engine optimization.

Though many things have been altered, expanded or otherwise modified, the general search engine market share has not. Google remains the most popular search engine and continues to drive more traffic than the other search engines combined. Another thing that has not changed is the greater volume of site traffic generated by organic search placement over any other form on online advertising.