Rank your site in the Search Engines using Free Blogs

If you are inexperienced in SEO than you may not understand how to rank your site in the search engines using free blogs and other web 2.0 properties. This method works very well because you are able to generate your own related content and place a hyperlink to your site using the url in the anchor text for the keyword you’re trying to rank for in the search engines.

1. Anchor Text
anchor text -> niche marketing
url -> http://nichetitans.com
This would be an example of anchor text used in a link to help rank this site http://nichetitans.com for ‘niche marketing’ in the search engines.
2. Related Content

It is best to create related content to the keyword you are trying to rank for in the search engines. For example, if you’re trying to rank for the keyword ‘marketing examples’ then you want to create a blog post or article that focuses on examples of marketing or a related topic that mentions the keyword you want to rank your site for in the search engines.

3. Free Blogs

Essentially any respected web 2.0 property such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, squidoo.com and other free blogs can be used to rank your site in the search engines. These sites allow you to register and create your own content and host it on their site.

How often should you update your blog for SEO

This isn’t a new question, webmasters continue to ask how often should you update your blog for seo to increase your rankings in the search engines. Most niche marketers would probably agree that the more you update your blog with fresh relative content, the more frequently you’ll be indexed by major search engines and they may increase your ranking accordingly. Also the more you update your blog the more content you’ll have on your niche site – which means more pages to be indexed, more content for your visitors and more ways for you to be ranked.

Now even blogs that are full of computer generated content such as autoblogs, niche article feeds, and spun content will get traffic eventually. If you generate your content you’ll have more pages indexed and a lot more content but to the search engines it won’t appear to be high quality content or at least it shouldn’t according to them. Usually the more often you update your blog the more SEO benefits your website will receive in time.

Some things to consider when updating your blog

- Do it as frequently as you have time.
- If you don’t have time, consider hiring cheap labor to do it for you.

- Quality is better than quantity, I have sites with 10 pages that rank at the top spot for multiple keywords.

- Try to create your own unique content and make it relevant to your niche market.
- Once you’ve updated your blog with new content, build links for SEO benefits.

If you don’t update your blog, will you still gain an seo benefit?

The answer to this question is most definitely yes, all the major search engines take in to consideration how long your sit has been indexed and factor this in their SEO algorithm. It’s better to have your site hosted and indexed on the web, even if you’re not actively building links for seo for this reason alone. Getting your site setup, creating your first content and backlinks is the single most important thing you can do in niche marketing.

Update your blog for SEO and relative content: So the more you update, the more chances you have to rank on Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and the more relative content you’ll have on your site related to your niche. I hope this answers your question on how often to update your blog for seo because I’m ready for bed but I wanted to get another update on this blog – if you know what I mean!

Do You know the Importance of Updating your Blog Regularly?

Blogging can be a productive part of any search engine optimisation campaign. It has many advantages including helping businesses to communicate with their target audiences more effectively and driving targeted traffic to websites.

There are many different factors to consider when using a blog within an SEO campaign and how often you update your blog with new content is one of the most important for consideration.

Blog readers expect blogs to be fresh and regularly updated as a blog is supposed to have new content added to its pages on a regular basis. This is so over a period of time, more and more information is added and the blog developed. This is the basis of blogging and is important. Blogs are supposed to be up to date and recent and the only way to keep this being the case is to regularly create new blog posts.

If you regularly update your blog with relevant content related to your business subject, this will keep your readers returning. If you don’t create new content, there will be nothing new for them to read and so they will visit an updated blog instead. Encouraging your readers to return is of great importance and will help relationships with your potential customers to develop. The more they visit your blog and read what you have written, the more they will know about your company and what you offer.

Updating your blog regularly is also hugely importance when trying to gain exposure for your business through high rankings. The search engines are constantly looking for new content available online. The search engines have a responsibility to provide their users with the most up to date and relevant information as possible. Therefore, they must remain informed of as much new content as they can so they are able to offer their searchers the best results. The web crawlers look for new online content and will visit pages featuring new information regularly.

If you can get the web crawlers to keep returning to your blog and exploring your content, you will be more likely to have your content ranked highly in the search results. This could mean more traffic to your blog and to your website too.

If your blog is correctly linked to the website of your business, this will also encourage the web crawlers to visit these pages. This will increase the potential for other high rankings in the search results too.

Updating your blog regularly is of utmost in search engine optimisation and is something all the most successful bloggers do. You need to be creating new content continuously for your blog if it is going to be effective within your campaign.

At SEO Consult, we know how to use blogs successfully as part of a search engine optimisation campaign. We can provide you with useful tips and assistance and our professional writers can even create high quality content suitable for your blog. Work with us if you would like to have a successful blog for your business.

Video - Fundamentals of SEO Copy Editing

I recently came across a great and simple video which outlines how to conduct SEO copy editing as opposed to SEO copywriting.

SEO copy editing allows you to fix the existing copy on your website pages to include more key phrases in the copy. This will make the website friendlier to the search engines and users.

SEO copywriting, on the other hand, is where you start from scratch with the copy of the page. You must create content geared towards the customer including calls to action, tone and feel of the site, while also throwing in keywords and keyphrases for the search engines.

The key is to know when to use copy editing as opposed to copywriting. In the video, the presenter suggests to only edit copy on pages of your site that aren’t crucial to the sales process (do not edit your home page – you are better off starting from scratch and completely re-writing the copy). Pages on your site that might benefit from some copy editing are information pages such as FAQ’s, press releases or blog posts. While these pages are likely to be performing well now, they may do even better with some additional key phrases.

The video is present by SEO copywriter, Heather Lloyd-Martin. So without further ado, here is the video for you to learn more.

Top Six SEO Myths – Believing Them Will Get You Nowhere

Every business owner wants Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to work for their site. However, the field is constantly changing, and it’s hard to know what advice is still valid.

Every day a new SEO myth is born and unfortunately, not all old SEO myths die off. To help you avoid some of the more common SEO and marketing pitfalls, here’s my list of the top 6 myths that you can safely steer clear of:

1. Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you : I think this idea comes from the conspiracy theorists who want you to believe Google is evil. Google has made numerous assurances that they aren’t using your traffic or conversion data. Mr Google himself, Matt Cutts, has gone on record to say his team doesn’t get access to Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics team doesn’t have access to their information. So they don’t use Google Analytics against anyone.

2. Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings : This is false. SEO expert Stephan Spencer suggests that Google won’t give a URL any more “juice” just because you include it in your sitemaps.xml, even if you assign a high priority level to it. Google will use your sitemaps file for discovery and potentially as a canonicalization hint if you have duplicate content.

3. Submitting your site to search engines increases your ranking : Submitting every page of your website in Google and Bing by using their submission forms will neither help you speed up the indexing nor improve your rankings. The search engines use web crawling technology that continually scans the Internet to find and rank pages.

4. PageRank determines ranking success: This is the most widespread myth in SEO. PageRank is a number which treats links like votes to determine how important a website is. However, it doesn’t have a direct correlation with search results, despite being calculated by several of the same signals.

Having a high PageRank is nice but it doesn’t automatically mean high rankings for everything, and it certainly doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to get tons of traffic and sales. More important is building a site which meets consumer needs. That means functionality, information, ease-of-use, and relevance.

5. No-follow links are useless: “No-follow” was introduced as a way of linking to something without passing any value onto the site. Although the traditional meaning of no-follow was that the search engine crawlers didn’t actually follow the link (ignore it and move on) that isn’t what actually happens.

The crawlers do follow no-follow links, and crawl the content, but they don’t always pass on value. This means that there is still value in the links, because they can increase crawl rate and indexation.

6. Keep a High Keyword Density : The search engines don’t care how long your pages are, there’s no specific number. The goes for keyword density. There is no magical number of keywords you should have on each page on your website, you have to use your judgment. Your copy should be persuasive, informative and punchy: you’ll only serve to limit your copy’s punch by simply stuffing keywords into the text.

There are plenty more myths that need to be debunked, and I’m sure our team will revisit this topic again in the future.

Eighteen SEO Fundamentals According to Bing

When there are too many versions of the same advice available, people often feel confused when it comes to deciding on which version is the right one. This applies especially to SEO. So the big question remains how can website owners crack the SEO code and make the most out of it?

The team at Bing has stepped up with a list of 18 SEO fundamentals for webmasters and website owners who want to optimize their sites for better rankings on Bing. This list includes some vital pieces of information that are useful, especially to all those who wish to set a firm foot in the SEO world and want to benefit from search marketing.

The list delves into some basic principles that will help anyone plan and put together a website from scratch or improvise an existing website, before actually marketing it on Bing.

Here is the full list:

The Do’s

Crawlability: Make sure your site is crawl able by using an XML sitemap, a robots.txt file, and well-structured on-site navigation.

Create an RSS feed.

Use schema.org markup.

Improve your site structure by using an HTML sitemap and linking to trusted sources both within your site and outside of it.

Create a solid content hierarchy by doing basic keyword research and avoiding placement of your content in rich media such as Silverlight and Flash.

Use a short meta title that has fewer than 65 characters and that’s unique to each page, and try to include the targeted keyword toward the beginning of that title.

Use a unique meta description tag.

Create quality content (following the guidelines Bing provided earlier).

When you build links, focus on keyword-relevant anchor tags that link back to quality content on your page.

Create a page that is user friendly. Page load time (PLT) is a crucial factor here as Bing states that website with PLT of ¼ second and above leads to loss of visitors.

Encourage social sharing with the use of social buttons.

The Dont’s

Don’t cloak your website.

Don’t use link farms.

Don’t engage in three-way linking.

Don’t duplicate content.

Don’t use auto-following on the social front.

Don’t use thin content.

Don’t buy links in bulk. Slow and steady link building is any time better than buying some hundreds of low quality back links.

Top Tips for Better Twitter Marketing

Perhaps now more than ever, it’s time for you to use Twitter to build your audience and promote your business.

The Twitter buzz has eased a bit with all the talk of Google + and Facebook, so those who are still using Twitter (and there’s millions of them) are a more captive audience.

For those of you wanting to know how to use twitter more effectively for your business, here’s my top tips for making it work!

Focus on Your Target Market - The first step is to understand who your target audience is. Communicating and engaging with the wrong people is a waste of time and effort.

Acquire Twitter followers - Now that you know who you want to be engaging with, you need to get out there and start acquiring followers. A good place to start is the people in your industry that have large spheres of influence. They’ll have large groups of followers that you can follow to start the engagement. The larger your audience, the more likely you’ll find potential clients from your twitter marketing efforts.

Engage with Your Twitter Followers - Effective Twitter marketing is all about engagement! NOT just broadcasting! The best way to cut through the clutter is to start discussions, ad value to conversations and share information. Just “pushing out” content alone will see you lose your captive audience.

Engagement takes on various forms; at the very least ensure you’re replying to your mentions, answering questions, using hostages, mentioning others in your messages.

Build Authority - One of the bets parts of Twitter is how quickly you can build your perceived authority in an industry. With some selective following and sharing and commenting on poignant industry information, you can quickly build your personal or business profile in the twitter sphere.

Be Captivating - You have got 75 characters to get your point across…so dig deep and make sure you’re using your most persuasive writing skills to capture your audience’s attention. You need to make sure your content stands out from the clutter.

Be consistent - More often than not, small business owners go at hyper speed for 2 weeks, twitting 100’s of times a day and then give up, because they don’t get immediate results. The key with twitter is to be persistent and measured. It’s rarely an instant ROI marketing channel – so take your time and keep focused on the long term bigger picture.

Twitter is not a set and forgets marketing strategy, so don’t think it’ll be a silver bullet to your marketing needs…but with a well planned and strategic approach, it can really help you build your business.

How to Check the Keyword Percentage of Your Website

Many of the things come in our mind when we talk about keyword selection for our website. we know that Keyword Density is a percentage of occurrence of keywords to the content in the rest of your website and should have a limit of keyword percentage in our content we write.

It’s very important for our main keywords to have in correct keyword density for getting good ranking in Search Engines. Because search engine work on keyword if we choose good keyword then they will found in first page of search engine. So the primary focus of our articles depends on keyword density these should have maximum 5% in our content word.

Type of keywords: There are two types of keywords in search engine first long tail keywords and short tail keyword. Everyone have confusion on Short tail vs. long tail keywords. They don’t know when they are preparing to optimize their own site on search engines.

Short tail keyword: This short tail keyword plays a vital role in search engine. Short tail depend on one or two word like ‘camera’ and ‘Sony camera’

Long tail keyword: Long tail keywords lead to higher conversions, easier to rank, more visitors to your website advantages of Long Tail Keywords.

How SEO and Social Media Add Up to Online Marketing Success

Social search, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.” Some marketers have claimed that social search is doing away with traditional search methods and that SEO is dead in the water because of it.

But social media and social search are not the magic bullet to online marketing needs. They are just one more piece in the growing arsenal of Internet marketing tools available to SEO professionals. SEO and social media should not exist in separate silos, vying for online dominance. In fact, SEO and social media marketing can be intertwined to create more online brand presence for companies than they could ever do alone.

Here are 3 examples of how social media and SEO work together-

Social promotion of content generates natural links: According to Twitter, around 25% of all Tweets contain a URL. In March 2011, Twitter was seeing an average of 140 million Tweets per day. That’s 35 million Tweets every day with a link in them! Twitter has become a go-to source for breaking news and is a favorite social network among consumers for learning the latest about their favorite brands and companies. By publishing your content and promoting it on Twitter, you are encouraging your network to not only check out your content, but also pass the link along to their network in the form of a reTweet. The more times your content is shared, the better it looks in the eyes of the search engines.

When it comes to Facebook, many marketers will say that the more Likes your company page has, the better. While Likes are important, they are starting to be overshadowed by the number of Shares a piece of content has. Someone could like your Facebook page in order to get a promotional deal. Plenty of them will unlike your page just as fast and never bother to return. So what is a Like really worth? When someone Shares your content by posting it to their Facebook wall, they are broadcasting to their network (and the search engines) that this content is valuable in some way, whether it be informative or just interesting. The recent Facebook-Bing integration pulls this information into the search results when a user conducts a search and affects the SERP based on what that user’s social network has to say.

Social networks drive traffic: If you want to drive traffic to your company blog, posting snippets of each new post to your Facebook wall and to the LinkedIn groups you are a part of is a great way to do just that. But posting the first paragraph and not the whole thing, visitors have to leave your Facebook page for your blog in order to finish reading the post. You have a much better chance at converting a visitor once they are on your blog or main site than when they are just sitting on your social profile. A well-optimized social profile should encourage visitors to check out the main site for more information. Think of your social profiles as the gateway into your site. Someone who is checking out your social profile has already pre-qualified themselves as a well-targeted consumer. Driving them to your site is the next logical step in getting them to convert.

One of the main goals of SEO is to drive targeted traffic. Social networking is about connecting with your audience. When the two work together you’ll see a steady stream of well-targeted and engaged visitors coming to your site.

It has to be mentioned that social profiles should drive traffic back to the main site, not the other way around! Why would you want a potential customer to leave your site to like you on Facebook? Promoting your social profiles shouldn’t be a main goal of your site. Keep the “Connect with Us” buttons out of prime webpage real estate.

Social networking increases online brand presence: Search for your favorite company by name. Hopefully their company website ranks number one in the SERP, with popular internal pages filling out the first page. But chances are (if they are active in social media) their Facebook page and LinkedIn profile, along with other niche social networking sites, will also pepper the results. Just like any other business profile, social networking profiles can rank in the search engines, increasing your company’s online brand presence. Many searches will also show links that have been shared by that company’s Twitter profile or posted to their Facebook wall. The new Google +1 also shows who in your Google network recommends links.

Social media and SEO professionals shouldn’t be squabbling over whose authority and practice is more important. The two disciplines are more closely related than you might think. When you combine your SEO and social media marketing, you’ll create a much more powerful and comprehensive online marketing strategy.

Best of Pay Per Click Optimization and Search Engine Optimization

Pay Per Click is beneficial for driving immediate and relevant traffic to your website. A Pay Per click service would sustain traffic on an ongoing basis, or boost traffic during seasons relevant to your business. PPC is an Internet marketing strategy in which clients only pay for traffic they receive. Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy process of Improving the Traffic to a website from search engines by way of search result. Pay Per Click is basically an internet advertising tool used on search engines, advertising networks and content websites where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertiser’s website.

PPC Optimization ensures that a Pay Per Click campaign is feasible and efficient and a PPC optimization company will review all aspects of the campaign. These aspects include campaign structure, Keywords and ad text, biding strategy and landing pages. With PPC Optimization, you are able to control and manage PPC and ensure that it is set-up properly.

Search Marketing or Pay per click (PPC) allows businesses to bid on targeted keywords on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing in order to drive relevant traffic to their websites via click-through.

Search Engine Optimization, one is able to optimize your website for a number one search term but this is not of much use if traffic brought by a keyword is unable to convert. PPC allows you to find out which keywords convert before considering an SEO campaign. In addition, PPC optimization also makes finding which keywords work and which do not possible.

Another great advantage of combining PPC optimization and SEO is it offers greater speed. The combination also results in ones brand standing out on every search page and not just as the highest ranked increasing the exposure of a website. Effective pay per click campaigns begins with the account build, followed by landing page selection/creation and then the ongoing campaign optimization stage.

SEO is generally a free service, they require more time, effort and experience than a Pay Per Click campaign. Generating more traffic is the common goal of both campaigns and used together, a website can built a solid foundation on Search Engine Optimization and then incorporate pay per click advertising to target traffic towards it. The PPC optimization further enables successful conversion of traffic.