SEOTops

In an Internet savvy world, acronyms have taken the place of the written word in many cases. As a webmaster you understand the language of acronyms that many may not. But do you fully understand SEO, SEM and SMO and their effects on your Web site’s traffic? A successful webmaster knows and understands the importance of META tags in the header section of their Web site’s html. This area is where browsers and search engines look for the key words that are used to index and rank your Web site on search engines. Properly used META tags and keywords can mean the difference between effectively or poorly indexed Web sites.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the utilization of precise keywords configured on your Web site in such a way that they will be easily found, read and indexed by search engines in a manner that will drive traffic to your Web site. The key words used in your META tag should be used appropriately in the text on your Web site. If you are unfamiliar with indexing and ranking, you may consider hiring a professional to write content for you. Individual pages of your Web site must target key words and phrases in order to be indexed and ranked properly.

SEM, or search engine marketing, includes researching, submitting and marketing the Web site to achieve maximum exposure and traffic. SEM usually includes banner ads, link building campaigns, affiliate programs and article marketing. Well-planned and well-placed banner ads will help draw attention to your Web site. Affiliate programs also can be very beneficial for all parties involved. Link building is the act of placing links to your Web site in strategic places on forums, blogs and other related Web sites.

SMO, or social media optimization, is a set of methods used for generating traffic through social and community Web sites. The utilization of social networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Yuwie and others could give you the edge you need. With hundreds of thousands of visitors per day to some social networking sites, your Web site could get a very large boost in traffic if properly optimized.

If your site is not performing as well as you had expected, maybe you need to work on your SEO, SEM or SMO. You may do the work yourself or hire professionals to do it for you.

SEO might be better achieved by someone who is familiar with HTML, PHP and writing content for Web sites. SEM could be the trickier. How many keywords should you have on your Web site? What would be considered SPAM? If you copy someone else’s work could you get in trouble for plagiarism or be penalized by search engines? Can you write appropriate content to draw traffic to your site? If you aren’t 100 percent sure you can provide what your Web site needs, it is highly recommended that you hire someone. Many small writing businesses and freelance professionals have emerged over the last few years. Hiring someone to write for you could be the best move you could make. Some writers and businesses will include search engine or article submission with their price. Shop around until you find the best deal to suit your needs.

SMO is the newest of optimization opportunities, but is quite possibly the best for burst traffic. As social networks take off, potential for free advertising soars along with it. Social networks have become a virtual necessity for webmasters around the Web. SMO is potentially the easiest form of marketing, simply because all that is required of you is to join a wide variety of friends’ lists and comment on friends’ blogs from time to time. The more active you are in the social networks, the more links there will be to your Web site. The more links you establish, the greater the potential for visitors to view your site and take advantage of your product or service.

In my time doing SEO, I’ve come across many characters who believe they’ve got the basics of SEO down and one of the greatest advice these people hear is ANCHOR TEXT, put your link under anchor text to help you rank higher for those words in the search engines- that’s pretty basic info you think how could someone mess that up right? WRONG! Now I’ve had clients with keywords like handbags,shoes, purses and watches all in one link which begs the question- Does anyone actually search for that except you? Who in thier right mind goes to google and types in handbags, shoes,purses and watches and then heads over to the keyboard and presses ENTER- that’s right noone.

Basic lesson- This is a sentence- Handbags,purses, lipstick, bags,bentley, shoes and watches.
This is a keyword- Handbags or Gucci Handbags maybe even Brown Gucci Handbags you know words that actual living human beings search for not aliens.

Lesson of the day- Before you start link building please for your sake and mine do keyword research, find out what people are truly searching for before you waste 10,000 links with the anchor text,bags,shoes,purses,lipstick,hotdog,fries,bentley and watches.

Why is Keyword Research so important?
If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, your customers may never find you, resulting in lost income and meaningless rankings, How many people spend 2 months building great links for some words that noone actually searches for, they get to the top of the search engine and can’t understand why their traffic levels haven’t improved. With keyword tools so readily available, there should be no reason why anyone should be in competition crazy keywords but everyday people are fighting each other off to get to the top of some crazy keywords that only they would search for.

Dmoz the worlds greatest and largest human edited directory has been a debatable subject on all terms in our community but what really are the SEO effects of getting listed in one of the worlds most reliable directories.

Well to begin with if you dont already know DMOZ is a human edited directory meaning that the editors will only accept top quality sites related to there industry, this has caused not only caused a lot of knit picking but it feels as though somewhat alot of favouristism has been awarded to say for example “editors friends”. Lets just put it this way if you are looking to get listed in a freelance area of the directory and the editor also owns a freelance site and may see you as competition then there is no way they will accept you. We feel that although DMOZ can create could quality links as alot of directories extract listing from there, including google. Dmoz has nowaday become somewhat of a black market whereas if you know the right people or have the right funds your going to get listed just CLICK HERE and take a look at this its terrible.

Our conclusion is that Dmoz a few years ago was well worth every effort and can still get you a heck of alot of backlinks, but you should not become obsessed with getting listed instead concentrate more on your link building campaigns and overall if you stick at it you wont feel you need DMOZ at all.

Remember if you want to rank well, getting listed in one site wont do this for you so:

D = Do,

M = More,

O = Optimization

Z = Zestfully

Hey as you know we are kicking off a new blog to give advice, updates and news on any thing related to Search engine optimization - we will also be throwing in freebies now and again for our loyal visitors.

To start off with we will be discussing the basic SEO principles that should be performed

 1. Do your keyword research before you even create your website or online business, try to find the most relevant searched keywords for your business - look at how many searches that keyword gets and most importantly look at the competition. There is no point trying obtain keywords such as “Dating” in the first year of your site as this is near to impossible to be achieved due to the mass amount of competition. A good free keyword tool to get you started is located at Free Keyword Tracker. Then go to register your domain, try obtaining a domain that is specific to your chosen keyword and register yor domain for atleast 3 years this way you will build up more trust than a yearly registered domain

2. Once you have chosen your keywords, then comes the design and implementation process - this is where you can carefully make the site SE friendly and write your initial unique content - although onsite optimization is not considered very important anymore we still believe it plays a major part in the overall ranking of a site so complete your meta tags, description and keywords. Once your site is complete make sure is is fully validated by using the W3 Validator.

 3. Now comes the process of getting your rankings so you will need to get plenty of links back to your site, the way to do this is to write unique content that webmasters will link back to, try to get links from relevant sites so if you have a dating site obviously get links from related sites. Although directory submissions have lost weight we still feel these are important in non paid directories - try to slow down the link process, do not be in a rush as you may get penalised if you try to get rankings within a month - SEO is a long and hard process and if done correctly is very rewarding. The main aim to concentrate on is to write unique content take park in discussions in forums etc - try to submit your site to the social media sites (this will be discussed at another time).

Good Luck on all you SEO efforts

P.S For all visitors we thought we would chuck in a freebie on the first post, so we have got our hands on a powerful freelancer script so just download upload and configure your mysql Powerful Freelancer Script