Here is a bit of search engine optimization news that is interesting but not all that exciting. People are now, on average, entering in four keywords for their search terms. What does this mean for search engine optimization? It means that our customers are getting more creative and dare I say it, more specific. The industry heavy hitters will be already onto this fact and pulling out marketing content to capitalize on it. According to an article on Web Pro News:

Brian Ussery, an Atlanta SEOer and blogger, reported last week that Google searchers have broken the three-word search term barrier as of the fourth quarter of 2007. The average query is now four words.
That means a lot to SEOers targeting that long tail of search. It also means (maybe) that, collectively, searchers are becoming a bit more sophisticated in their searching, or at least more specific.

It is definitely time to get creative with the keyword rich content that we use for search engine optimization. There was a time when one or two word terms would have achieved the desired effect; not anymore. We need to start gearing our keyword rich content towards longer search queries. It will take time, it will cost money but in the end, search engine optimization tends to pay for itself.

If you are still not sure whether or not you want to invest in some serious website search engine optimization, take a look at the following passage which appeared on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim today:

While paid search is still the top tactic for internet marketers, more competition and higher costs has dampened enthusiasm. However, SEO (search engine optimization) is more popular with marketers because of its lower cost and high returns.
“SEO continues to increase in popularity. Its low costs and high returns make it a leader among more than half (57%) of the marketers surveyed. Those numbers were 45% in 2006 and 33% in 2005.”

Why is Website Search Engine Optimization so Effective?

• Website Search Engine Optimization is relatively cheap and it is possible to supplement material that you produce yourself with outsourced material to great effect.
• Website search engine optimization has an ongoing effect. The changes that you make to your site for website search engine optimization will last as long as your website. Any articles on your website will see benefits conferred for as long as they are there.
• You can do it yourself. While a professional will probably be able to do a better job, there are still some aspects of website search engine optimization that even a novice can manage.

It is hard to know the exact effect that website search engine optimization efforts are going to have on any given site, but if you combine techniques like SEO with social bookmarking, you can see some amazing results relatively quickly.

Keywords are at the heart of keyword rich content and play a big part in website search engine optimization. Choosing the right keywords for your keyword rich content can mean the difference between success and failure in your organic marketing. How does one go about choosing keywords for his or her site and then make use of them in producing keyword rich content? This is the question that we are going to look at today.

Choosing Keywords for Website Search Engine Optimization
Any site can use more keyword rich content. Content writing is not something that is every going to be complete. You are always going to want to cover more keywords and were your keywords ever to be completely covered, you would want to create fresh content for your original keywords anyway. Website Search Engine Optimization is a never ending process thanks largely to the fact that fresher content usually translates into higher search relevance.

• The first step to choosing keywords for website search engine optimization is always to brainstorm. Start thinking of the terms that you would be likely to use to find a website like yours. Type them into your favorite search engine and see if some of your competitors come up. Make a big list of search terms and write them all down.
• Hit up competitors sites and browse their content for keywords that they are using for website search engine optimization. Include any that you do not have on your list.
• Use a keyword research tool like Word Tracker to pick up still more ideas.
• Go through your list and sort it into core and non-core keywords. What I would consider core keywords are the simplest and most obvious searches. These are often the shorter key phrases and one word search terms.
• Now pick a few keywords related to your brand. Such keywords would more likely be business name related rather than topic related.

You should now have a fairly long list of keywords and it is time to start writing. The next stage is to actually write the content that you are going to use for the website search engine optimization of your site. Our next Website Search Engine Optimization Basics article is going to be about that very topic.

We are going to go right back to basics on website search engine optimization here. If you are a seasoned website search engine optimization veteran, you might wish to weigh in with a few of your own ideas.

What is website search engine optimization? The term, “website search engine optimization,” or SEO as it is also known gives you a pretty good clue about what is involved. Website search engine optimization is all about optimizing a website so that it performs better in searches. In order to understand the concept of website search engine optimization, you first need to understand how a website search works.

When you perform a search, you go into Google, type in a keyword or key phrase hit enter and wait for the results. How does a search engine come by those results? Simply put, they index the keywords of many different websites and apply an algorithm. This algorithm determines the relevance of a website to a particular search. The higher the relevance, the higher the website will appear on a list of search terms. With website search engine optimization, you tweak your site to perform better in searches. One way of doing that is with keyword rich content.

Keyword rich content is simply content that is written with a certain keyword or key phrase used throughout. There is quite a large number of companies that make it their business to provide professionally written keyword rich content for the purposes of website search engine optimization. You can either outsource this part of the process, or you can write your own.

Our next Back to Basics article will help you make sense of the keyword selection process, come back tomorrow for more tips on website search engine optimization.

Writing articles to submit to various sites around the web is a great way to build links to a website and thus improve your search engine ranking. According to an article on SiteProNews:

Not only do you help build backlinks, but you contribute to your community, and make a name for yourself. Don’t write spammy articles, or try to advertise too hard. Make something useful that others will want as content on their own site.

If you are trying to build up a bit of recognition for your site, articles are a fantastic way to do it. In order to get those articles out and start boosting your search engine ranking, there are a few things that you need to do.

• Become a part of the community. The blog world is something of a community and while it is competitive, there still exists an atmosphere of camaraderie. Comment on other people’s blogs, link them to your own blog and send emails. Build your own social links and before too long you will be building those search engine ranking boosting web links that you crave so much.
• Start your own blog and publish regularly. How long does it take to write one or two short blog posts each day? If you get into the habit of it, you can pump them out in ten or fifteen minutes apiece. It helps you build a name and acts as a kind of portfolio for your work.
• Include interesting content. People will be more inclined to publish your work if your own site has interesting content. Building a name and a reputation will help you gain the recognition that you need to get those articles out there.
• Never oversell your product or service. Spammy articles are a real turn off to most people. It is not a good way to get your work published.

Building quality links will help you boost your search engine ranking, but you should be aware that it is a process that can take a great deal of time. You can get there eventually. With a lot of hard work and some careful strategizing, you can have a better search engine ranking.


Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

When it comes to website search engine optimization, protecting parts of your site from search engine spiders can be just as important as making sure that your pages are properly indexed. Why would anyone not want traffic to parts of their site? There are plenty of good reasons. The “noindex.nofollow” meta tag is particulary useful if you want to keep part of your site off the grid. As it also contains the “nofollow” tag, the spiders on the page will not follow any links from that page. If you have a site that is well laid out, this is not really an issue as long as the search engine spider can access all of your other pages from other pages, your hidden content will not have a negative impact on your level of website search engine optimization.

• To protect information that you would prefer to be private or semi-private.
• To keep test pages from being indexed.
• To allow legitimate duplicate content to exist without being penalized.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex.nofollow”>

The following passage is taken from an article on SiteProNews, I think they give a very good explanation of this powerful set of tags and the full article is worth a read if you have time:

Obviously, noindex and nofollow are powerful tags – and in combination, they can make a page and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to nearly all search engines. This combination command tells search engine spiders, “Do not read this page; do not follow any of the links on this page; do not include this page in your index.”
This command has its beneficial uses. For example, it can be placed on pages on a site that have duplicate content for legitimate reasons. A website might have both a page for the United States and a page for England that cover the same product with exactly the same content. However, nearly all search engines would see this as duplicate content and could devalue both pages. So placing this command on one of them means that search engine spiders will walk on by and you won’t be penalized.

Remember, search engine spiders can help or hurt you. Website search engine optimization is all about getting those spiders to do what you want and not do what you don’t want them to. All it takes is a few simple little tags for some great website search engine optimization fine tuning. Turning off the robots can be just as important as any other aspect of website search engine optimization, especially if you have a large website.

One can argue the virtues of robot commands in meta tags until they are blue in the face and still not be able to convince people that they remain useful in website search engine optimization today. It is a fact that the efficacy of these meta tags has diminished somewhat, web spiders index pages automatically now, but there are times that a well placed meta tag can be extremely useful; especially when you want to tell a robot not to do something.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Before I give you my analysis of this meta tag, I will give you the SiteProNews take on it:

The noindex command, the opposite of the index command, tells search engine spiders not to index the content of a page. It’s important to note however that search engine spiders will still follow the links on a page that uses only this command.

When not used for legitimate purposes, this tag can be dangerous because it can put you at risk for penalization by most, if not all search engines. This is because you can use a noindex tag to hide pages with multiple links that you don’t want visitors to see but that you do want all search engines to index.

There are however some legitimate uses for the noindex command. For example, if you have a dynamic site and you’ve created static pages to replace some of your dynamic pages, which can make them easier for search engine spiders to access, you could put a noindex tag on the dynamic version.

There are legitimate reasons why you might not like a particular web page indexed. If it contains personal information that you do not want to share with the entire web, you can shield it from indexing with the “noindex” tag. Part of website search engine optimization is keeping people on the right parts of your site and off the wrong parts. Not everything needs to be or should be searchable. It is often better to use this in combination with other robot commands in order to avoid penalization.

Web design projects can create time management issues. It takes a great deal of time to code a site if you are not doing it all the time. There once was a time that I would do all of my site designing myself in a bid to save a few extra bucks. It usually worked out well for me, but spending hundreds of hours in front of the computer screen designing websites is not my idea of fun. I prefer to be in the trenches making sales, promoting, producing content and that sort of thing. Time is money after all, and why not spend your time doing the things that you do best? Outsourcing website design can be a massive time saver and is not all that expensive with GetAFreelancer.com and Quote Catcher.

I use Quote Catcher for times that I want a site designed from the ground up. Quote Catcher will allow different designers to bid for your site. You will get up to five quotes, you choose the one that is the best offer from your point of view. The best offer does not have to be the cheapest one. It depends on your needs, if you want a slick looking website, then it is probably wise to go with whichever site designer has the most impressive portfolio. If it does not really matter, go with the cheapest.

When I have smaller or more technical jobs, I use GetAFreelancer.com. With GetAFreelancer.com you give a specific outline of the job that you require and freelance programmers will offer you bids. It is important to distinguish GetAFreelancer from Quote Catcher. The freelancers on GetAFreelancer.com are programmers, you use them for programming related jobs. If you need a shopping cart system, or would like to make some sort of site related improvement, this is the place to go.

Today’s news story is brief but potentially explosive. Yahoo! has been tweaking their search algorithm in ways that spell trouble for the SEO crowd. Word on the street is that enthusiast sites will be favored over website search engine optimization. Whether this will be successful or not remains to be seen.

Yahoo! has been tweaking their search interface a great deal lately. One of the things to be integrated has been a drop down AJAX box with a predictive search feature. It looks slick, but will it give them the edge and for those of us that depend on website search engine optimization for a living, will it make a difference?

What this will probably mean is that Wikipedia pages stay up the top and few of the bigger blogs and news sources push the retailers down a bit on informational searches. These days when people are looking to buy, they usually indicate that fact with purchasing related keywords. It would be foolish of Yahoo to downgrade purchase related keywords, so it is no doubt that retailers will retain firm positions on any phrases featuring the keyword “buy.” Words that are enthusiast related are likely to go to blogs. Things like “Cool, interesting, unusual…” will go to the blogs.

What does this mean if you are preparing for website search engine optimization? It means that you need to keep things relevant. Do not be greedy and try to cover enthusiast key phrases, covering the more commercial and generic terms have always tended to generate more leads. Advertising gets you to the front of the pack just as well and Yahoo! continues to be an attractive advertising provider.

Every once in a while you read something so good that it is worth quoting and repeating again and again. This is without a doubt the most crystallized approach I have ever come across with regards to keyword choices for website search engine optimization. Read carefully, just about everything you need to know about using keywords is contained in just two short paragraphs. The author is Kevin Gold and you can find the article here at the Search Marketing Standard:

Think thoroughly about the keyword(s) you are targeting for a specific content page. Are the keywords related to an informational, evaluation or transactional search? If they are informational-related keywords (e.g. product care, maintenance, history) then your content’s objective is to educate. In this case, acknowledge that using sales conversion to measure the visitor quality landing on an informational content page is ineffective. Time spent on site may be a more realistic measure even opting into a newsletter, performing a deeper search or viewing some product pages are equally better measures.

Similarly for evaluation and transactional keywords (e.g. product name, brand name, specific product attribute, and buy product) you should fit the content (including product images, attributes and content) to the intention associated with the keyword. Make sure the product(s) being displayed above or alongside the targeted content is relevant to the targeted keywords. Don’t make people think whether it’s relevant; instead, suggest the relevance through matching product headings, link text and descriptions directly with the targeted keywords.

It seems common sense, but what the author is saying is do not try jimmy keywords into an article that do not fit. Your keywords need to fit your content, and while everyone desires to jam as many keywords as they can into each paragraph of every single article that they write, this can seriously diminish your credibility with your audience, turn people away from your site and potentially cost you business. With all the talk that bounces around in relation to website search engine optimization, one term you do not hear too often is customer optimization. If you can make a great looking site, with a fine balance between customer optimization and website search engine optimization, you are on the path to success.

Do not kill your aesthetics with website search engine optimization, keep it simple and it will pay dividends. If you are looking for professional website search engine optimization services or advice, please come to visit us at Brick Marketing. We know what it takes to make a website that will draw hits and keep customers interested. If you are looking for a few site tweaks, a new site or a whole redesign, we can have you up and running in no time at all.

Here is a quick list to improve your Website Marketing Content writing. This is by no means an exclusive list of things that you can do, but they are things that have helped me in the past.

Using these few, simple ideas will help you write better content, but if you ever find that you have more work than you can handle, feel free to contact us at Brick Marketing.

In a recent article on SEO Book, Aaron Wall was highly critical of Linkbaiting. Linkbaiting, is the name given to articles that are written intentionally to draw links from other sites. Linkbait articles tend to be controversial, for example a tech blog writer saying something negative about Apple or Sony is bound to create controversy and the article will receive a lot of hits, quotes and links from other sites. This is website search engine optimization by other means. Other types of link bait include new product releases, anyone that gets the information will get a ton of links. According to a November 10 post on SEO Book, which has really been doing the marketing rounds:

Given that Google hand edits some hyper-successful linkbaits, is it any surprise that they aim to minimize the upside potential of random one off linkbaits? A couple of my better friends who are a bit cynical went so far as stating that linkbait is only promoted by search engineers because it is so easy to detect and devalue. Linkbait is the new reciprocal links page.

Compare linkbait to developing a real brand. Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding. If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you. They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results. They can show at most a few ads before they list your site, or they degrade their user experience. And, as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases. Brand building is nothing they could ever really penalize, as they have no reason to want to penalize companies for creating real brands.

So there is a possibility that link bait will not help you with regards to building search engine traffic. Does that mean that link baiting is detrimental to your website search engine optimization efforts? It absolutely does not. While there is little point in producing a one off article, if you make an effort to regularly post high quality link bait, it will pay off in terms of traffic. If your site is seen as a source of interesting information, it will keep people coming back and get people subscribing to your site. If you want to use link bait as a tool for your Website Search Engine Optimization, remember that it will only do so if you are able to produce it continuously, not daily but perhaps as often as weekly.

In a sense, I agree with Aaron Wall, that it is not going to pay off a great deal in terms of search engine performance, but I do not think that it is quite as bad as being the new reciprocal links page. If you are able to post consistently, it will help.

If you have any questions about the latest website search engine optimization techniques, including link baiting, do not hesitate to contact us at Brick Marketing.

Blogs are highly underutilized website marketing tools. Blog marketing is becoming very big business, because they provide such an easy way to drive traffic to a website. They are also a great way to improve your website search engine optimization and a means to build up regular traffic as opposed to people that just pass through.

Blogs one of the easiest website marketing tools to get up and running. You will need to ensure that it is easy to navigate from your site to your blog and from your blog to your site, that requires a lot of interlinking, which can be time consuming. You will want a well designed template and you will want to ensure that people can easily find the RSS feeds on your page, that will ensure that you get more regular readers. From then, you can work on producing the content. An article a day Monday to Saturday is a good way to start. Sundays are optional, many blogs do not update on Sunday, so if you cover it then there is a good chance that you will draw some links to your site.

Blogs are fantastic website marketing tools and a great outlet for your website marketing content, but you do need to be a little careful about how you use them. You will want a well designed template that matches the look of your site. You should try to avoid the hard sell in blogs as it will turn people off. They will think that you are only promoting your products. The blogosphere is extremely fickle, it is best to be moderate. Interlink as much as possible and don’t be afraid to quote other people or link to their sites. If you quote someone or source some information from someone, always include their URL; do it enough times and you will get a link exchange. Other blogs can help to market your own. Use website search engine optimization principals, but do not overdo the keywords. If it looks obvious, people will look elsewhere.

If you are hosting with Go Daddy, then incorporating a blog is a very simple process. Go Daddy set everything up for you, so all that you have to do is to click a link. You decide where on your site you want to have your blog and within a short period of time, it is set up. Come to Brick Marketing if you are interested in website marketing tools. We offer specialist advice on a range of options that can help your website see more traffic.

Once your website has been well established it is a chance to put your feet up, right? There is still a lot that you can do to improve your website search engine optimization. One thing that I cannot recommend enough, is expanding the keywords that you cover. When you have already covered the basics, it becomes time to focus on keywords that you might not have thought to cover; but how can you come up with keywords that you didn’t think of?

There are a few options around when it comes to keyword suggestion. Keyword Discovery is one of the most advanced and most popular with commercial webmasters. For a subscription fee, you have access to a powerful keyword analysis tool set. Keyword Discovery is great for researching a lot more than just keywords. It will let you analyze any website URL for relevant keywords and their densities. That will allow you to take a look at the keywords that your competitors are using, a great way to get ideas. It will provide related search terms, and do a whole lot more. It is almost a complete website search engine optimization analytics tool kit. Not convinced, they offer a free trial.

Finding better keywords and covering more keywords will help you to dominate more areas of search and that will help you do more business. The Keyword Discovery page tells us that “80% of online transactions begin with a keyword search.” Consider that for a moment and then think if there is anything more that you can do to enhance your website search engine optimization. If you need any ideas, please do not hesitate to contact us at Brick Marketing.

It’s often said that SEO begins with your domain name. Your domain name can be used for website search engine optimization or for website branding purposes. Either way, you want to have something catchy and simple. A lot of successful sites have great domain names, it is no coincidence. When it comes to choosing your domain you want something that either matches your brand or reflects your product and you do not want anything that is too long. A combination of two words is generally the best way to go, though at a stretch three is acceptable. When you are writing a long URL, you can differentiate between the words by capitalizing the first letter of every word in the URL.

The trouble with the Internet these days is that a lot of URLs have been taken. Most of the time it is impossible to find your first choice, so think of a few alternatives. A great place to go to register a domain name is Go Daddy. If you are not familiar with Go Daddy, they are a web hosting site with very reasonable prices and discounts for a lot of services. I have been using Go Daddy for years and have found it the easiest and cheapest place to go to register a domain. The best part about them is that they make multiple domain registration very, very easy and some great discounts apply to bulk orders. If you are in need of Website Search Engine Optimization or some Website Branding advice, come into Brick Marketing. We have provided our services to a wide range of clients.