By Lani and Allen Voivod (c) 2007

Now more than ever, if you want to be a successful business owner, you need a successful business website. Which means you have to make nice with the search engines. And the long-standing rule of search engine friendliness is to create inbound links — links from other sites pointing to your site.
Ten-ish years ago, when Google started the shift away from code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining “relevance,” the world changed. Immediately, businesses owners started scrambling, and begging, for every link they could get. Thank goodness that’s not the case anymore! But inbound links are still important. In many ways they’re more vital than ever.

This article was taken from WebProNews.com

The four-year experiment is over.

Webmasters can stop fretting about Google’s supplemental results – they’re not really there anymore. Google has lifted the veil between indices.

Though Google repeatedly said that webpages placed in the supplemental index were not placed there because of some kind of penalty, webmasters quickly realized how badly their search traffic suffered.

Though not an outright penalty, voices from inside Google suggested that pages in the supplemental index often had certain things in common: few or no quality backlinks, orphaned pages, URLs with too many parameters, low PageRank, duplicate content, et cetera.

By Dave Foster (c) 2007

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interaction on more and more sites and they will have an expectation of the same from your site too.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the social aspects of your site.

By Titus Hoskins (c) 2007

In order to create a successful website you must have traffíc or visitors to your site. Without traffíc your perfect site is useless; it might as well not even exist.
Moreover, because traffíc is an essential element of any successful site, many novice webmasters make the mistake of believing all traffíc is created equal.

Huge mistake.

By Gary Hughes

You’ve worked hard to design and develop a website that will promote your products and services to the world. You’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars to get your site online. But where are the visitors? I mean, you’ve always heard, “If you build it, they will come.”

Why Aren’t Customers Lining Up To buy?

That’s the largest problem faced by small businesses attempting to do business on the internet. Largër companies have the resources to pay for traffíc. They can advertise on the busiest sites on the net to attract potential customers. They can promote their sites through multiple channels including radio, television, and event sponsorships.

By Jerry Bader (c) 2007

Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you’re a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product or service. If that describes you, here’s eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but were afraid to believe.

1. Time To Be Heard
Your mother told you ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ but you’re not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you want to deliver a lot of content that people will remember, try letting your website do the talking.

When people refer to “organic SEO” (search engine optimization), they almost always use it as a blanket term to describe the unpaid, algorithm-driven results of any particular engine. However, a sophisticated search engine optimization company will often take the meaning of “organic” one step further. To such companies, the description of “organic SEO” is not to limited what shows up in the “natural” search engine results - it includes the methodologies used to achieve such rankings.

By Jerry Bader

In The Beginning There Was Marketing

Anyone in business who has any interest in using the Web to further his or her business is well aware of “search engine optimization.” Not a day goes by that my email in-box isn’t loaded with information on how to get the best search engine results, and not a week goes by that a client or potential client doesn’t request that their website be not just search friendly but search engine fanatical.

When a business owner decides to bring their business to the web, generally the last thing that they think about is search engine optimization. They assume that whomever they hire to do their web design will put up a site and then submit it to the search engines and the traffic will magically pour in. Unfortunately it takes more than that to drive search engine traffic to your site, and even more unfortunately most developers don’t program with SEO in mind, nor do they educate the client about the process involved in gaining traffic from search engines.

By Paul Jahn

There are many questions regarding “Local Search” marketing and how it relates to search engine marketing (SEM). Many think of Local Search as a subset of SEM. Optimize your site with geographical locations, run some PPC advertising designated to your area, get some decent site conversions, and you’ve done your job.

There’s a little more to it than that.

The opposite is actually true. SEM is a subset of Local Search marketing. The difference between the two lies at the core. Proper SEM brings targeted visitors to your Web site. Local Search brings people to your door.