By Donovan Baldwin

Search engine optimization is primarily about getting your website tuned up to optimum effectiveness as far as search engines are concerned. However, the intent is to get a good search engine placement so that more humans will be exposed to the “opportunity” to visit your website. If done properly, the steps you take to optimize your website for search engines can also often be used to optimize your site to get website traffíc. After all, it accomplishes little to get a good ranking by a search engine and yet be passed over by the human viewing the search engine results.

An appealing design will pull people into your web site, but it’s the content that will make them stick and become buyers. In other words: Pictures tell, but words sell. That’s why your content is one of the most important elements of your web site.

Outlining a clear strategy for your content is the initial step to creating effective content for your web site. First, identify what you want to accomplish, what information it will include and how the content will be organized.

Correctly choosing the keywords that your website wishes to compete on is the single most important aspect of a search engine optimization campaign. Proper keyword selection can provide your business with an extremely solid foundation to build.

However, the opposite can be said for websites that make mistakes at this point. If your website dives straight into a competitive keyword selection there is a good chance of drowning in the oblivion of search engine results. Choosing keywords for your website requires a fine balance of research and modesty.

By Kim Roach (c) 2006

Search engine marketing has come a long ways since its early days of pioneering entrepreneurs. This was made evident at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.
You can see the changes on the faces of representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Fortune 100 companies. You can hear the changes when talking to the swarms of SEM consultants, agencies, and software vendors. Indeed, if there was any one place where you could feel the excitement of the SEO industry, it would be at Search Engine Strategies.
The growth of this conference alone indicates the maturing of an exciting industry. This year’s conference hosted over 4,000 attendees.

By Karon Thackston (c) 2006, All Rights Reserved

Automation is an odd creature. It usually seems, at first glance, that automating a process can make things easier, simpler and faster. But oftentimes, once an automated process is in place, trouble spots pop up. This is sometimes the case when looking at the copywriting aspect of Google’s dynamic keyword insertion tool.

In case you’re unfamiliar with dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), it’s a feature of Google’s AdWords program. It is often used for large campaigns in order to automatically insert the keyword into the headline of an ad. Truly, it’s a lifesaver for many pay-per-click (PPC) ad managers who have to stay on top of thousands of ads every day. It’s all done with a simple syntax command: {keyword:_______}.

Search engine optimization is all about taking your site to the top of search engine rankings. Everyone wants and has an online site about any goods or service they are offering. If you want to sell something to the public, you must have a website. Everybody is busy these days, and consequently does not have the time to actually go to stores to check out and buy any goods that they need. The internet has become the market place to sell anything. Quick and easy accessibility is what people look for in the internet. Internet is the best source for you to sell your goods and services.

Making sure that your websites are fully crawlable is a key component for any search strategy, especially if you want your sites to rank well for multiple related keyword phrases or different products.

One of the ways that you can insure that a search engine spider crawls your site deeply is to provide it a road map of your site. This road map, called a “site map” is a very simple page (from a design standpoint) that only serves one purpose from a search engine optimizers point of view, to get those interior pages into a search engine’s index.

Search Engine Rankings. Everyone wants to be number one, and there are millions of web sites out there. So how do you become number one and stay there consistently? Consistently is the key word here. Sure, you may apply the newest, best trick in the book today, but when someone else comes out with a better one tomorrow, you will be scrambling to get to the top again.

I was watching the news on TV the other day and I couldn’t help but notice the amount of times the newsreaders and reporters repeated the same things over and over again.

First of all there was the announcement of the main headline accompanied by dramatic music: “Today’s main headline: a dramatic event happened today”. This was followed by one of the newsreaders telling us again that ‘a dramatic event happened today’ and then his fellow newsreader telling us that they would be bringing us all the reaction from five different continents to the ‘dramatic event that happened today’ as well as trying to gauge the ‘mood on the street’ where the ‘actual’ dramatic event ‘actually’ took place.

By Scott Buresh (c) 2006

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 limited to what shows up in the “natural” search engine results - it includes the methodologies used to achieve such rankings.