Search engines have become trendy these days, and they have become more important than ever on various companies maintaining their personal websites. Businesses however understand that not unless the website has traffic, they are just wasting costs. Therefore, there is the importance of establishing web presence. Basically, the more often a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. In order to make this happen, you will need SEO.

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to employ an SEO is a big conclusion that can potentially get better your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation.

Your reputation is an integral part of your industry. If your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is outstanding customer service, information that disputes that claim can be very damaging. Getting your reputation spoiled would mean a fall in rankings. And that is not a good response.

Whether the reputation risk is self inflicted by bad presentation or created by false or misleading information, it can have a caustic effect on your bottom line. It exposes the following:

- Corporate Image
- Regulatory problems
- Branding issues
- Stock Prices
- Revenue performance
- Product/service inferiority

The communicable information gets overlooked always as opposed to what to be paying attention on. The worst is that they consider product reviews, commentary, competitor's comments and blog/forum posts from unhappy customers as appropriate information. People likely will look for these things when getting to know about various corporation products and services. It cannot be set aside, because these are obviously part of a company's identity. Protest sites are becoming increasingly popular because if they are set up properly, as stated above, they can have an effect on your production. The best way to avoid these is to implement a management system.

You might need some backup, and something to do that job is SERM or Search Engine Reputation Management. Search engine reputation management is one way of defensive one company's brand or reputation from damaging content through search engine services. They are often employed by companies, in attempts to minimize hurt caused by flame websites, competitors, or even consumers. This includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Online Content management. Since search engines are in constant change and modifications, it is essential that current and future results are strictly monitored.

As an overview, the use of search engine reputation management minimizes risk of disclosure by uncovering any damaging content, neutering the content by pushing it down in search results or correct any misinformation, and going back to doing what you do best which is running your industry.

Source: EzineArticles.com

9 Essential SEO Tips for Small Business in 2011 ->

1. Keyword Phrases. One word phrases are a thing of the past time. Yes, it is important to have fixed or specific keywords targeted as they relate to your brand and overall business industry however we have to keep an eye on what phrases people are querying to find us. Delving into your analytics and analyzing how people are finding you and comparing that to what you wish to be found for will help to secure your ranking in the SERP's.

2. Content. The content play most important roll that you are creating. It is not only built around keywords, it is built from what people are going to find useful, has a high propensity to be shared and also to be created from what people would want to link to. The content when we think in the different ways it will be viewed enhances how it is created.

3. Mobile Friendly. As per SEO point of view if a site that is not mobile friendly is losing visitors. We have become a mobile dependent society and adapting your site to mobile devices is not only increasing your chances of searchers having the ability to view your site, it is also securing the trust with them as ultimately when we are searching, we want results. The results via a mobile device need to be more immediate and valuable.

4. Local Search. Local search is still a warm topic. Google Places becoming the default for many industry specific searches has changed the way that people are accepting the search results. This is where the major change has taken place. Users have had to embrace this search result change. They want results that they feel that they faith. Appearing in the results starts the faith.

5. Link Building. A link building tactic that encompasses internal and external linking through directories, reciprocal links as well as engaging in social media through commenting on blogs, creating content that is linked to as well as web pages that are a resource to be linked to is going to point to your site through the search engines as a point of reference and increase your rankings.

6. Canonical Pathway. Creating a clear and precise canonical pathway domain sets to avoid multiple page variations (ie http://www.yourwebsitepage vs http://yourwebsitepage and duplications. The search engine spiders crawl and are unable to determine which the preferred pathway for your site is. Establish one pathway.

7. Crawl Frequency. How often are your pages being crawled? Blogs are crawled and ranked very rapidly. Internal web pages that are not linked to or updated and have high visit volume are not crawled as regularly. Monitor through your cache how often your pages are being crawled to determine which pages need to be crawled more regularly and this also can give some insight as to when a new page or blog (for those that are not blogging every day) should be posted to ensure that the page is being crawled and indexed when the crawlers are crawling.

8. Photo Alt Tags. Alt tagging photos seems sometimes to be forgotten. The spiders cannot see the photo, but they can see the text that is associated with the photo. Creating alt tags that contain keywords are not only preventing the stop gap for the spiders, it is allowing an extra source for keyword density.

9. Site Speed. The speed in which your site downloads matters. Visitors will click off a site is taking too long to load. The faster the site loads the more time is spent on the site. This not only is beautiful to the user, but the speed of a site matters to the search engines. Of course, the content will outweigh the speed but if you have great content that is slow and people will not wait for it, the search engines will not rank it.

These tips are necessary to be ready for 2011. Search is only growing as we see users engage online for longer periods and having an ability to do so on the run. Mobile usage, desktop/laptop usage while at work and at home will continue to increase. People are online and trust the search engines to give them results. Can the search engines faith you to give them what they need to rank you?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most discussed and hot topics on the internet today. Also, it is one of the most misunderstood topics.

In its basic form, search engine optimization (SEO) is work of varying a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.

Now even this quick to the point explanation of search engine optimization (SEO) can lead to spirited debates about the meaning and purpose of SEO.

So the question can be asked, why is SEO such a popular and controversial topic that causes so much debate within the SEO community and the general internet population particularly website owners? In my humble opinion there are 6 reasons why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has the popularity that it currently enjoys.

1. Targeted Website Traffic - If you ask the huge majority of website owners and people within the SEO industry what is the most important factor to a successful website business and/or operation. A large percentage of the people will say website traffic and even more specifically targeted website traffic.

Currently on the internet, the largest resources for targeted website traffic on a continuous base are search engines. On a yearly base stats show that around 70% - 80% of all purchases made by individuals on the internet originally started as a result of a search at a search engine and the huge majority of people who visit websites usually come via way of a search engine. Numbers so dominate cannot be ignored even by the biggest opponents of search engine optimization. Moreover, because SEO is focused on optimizing websites for ranking victory related to search engines, it is only natural that people would be interested in the field and practice of search engine optimization (SEO).

2. SEO Controversy - Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the hottest topics concerning internet website operations. The proponents of SEO can say that it provides a viable method for websites to be seen in search engines which is important for any website desiring traffic on the internet today.

However, opponents disgusted with SEO can also say that many websites achieve high search engine visibility without the use of SEO work and that SEO professionals only provide guess work high cost services that provide no assurances for search engine ranking victory.

This situation, which has some merit concerning the arguments on both sides, generates heated debates between proponents of SEO and SEO opponents on a continuous bases which is fought out on a daily bases on forums, blogs, websites and newsletters across the internet along with exposure in magazines and on TV.

Simply put controversy produces attention and whether you like it or hate it, SEO really does provide a great deal of controversy. Moreover, as long as search engines play a leading role in generating targeted website traffic, SEO will continue to be a popular topic.

3. Money - Search engine optimization (SEO) is a multi million-dollar business. Search engines generate billions of dollars each year through advertising. Websites earn billions of dollars for their owners each year via using search engines either through paid advertisements or organic (free) listings in search results.

It is no doubt with billions of dollars on the table on a yearly bases that anything that can provide an individual or company a aggressive edge in the ultra high pace internet world will be a hot topic for discussion and question.

Moreover, through a combination of perception and reality that highlights search engine optimization (SEO) as a key to increasing internet sales, search engine optimization (SEO) is a extremely popular topic for decision makers within many companies which provides additional attention to search engine optimization (SEO) in the business world and outside.

4. Search Engines - Search engine optimization (SEO) was created as a by-product resulting from the development, utilization and reputation of search engines. Without search engines, there is no SEO industry in its current form and format.

As statistics on a yearly base confirm, the bulk of the targeted website traffic on the internet is generated directly or indirectly via search engines and a very high percentage of internet sales are directly linked to visitors coming from search engines looking for products and/or services.

With the dominant role that search engines play on the internet and the fact that the success of search engines depend on the ability to provide accurate and reliable search results to its visitors, successful search engines tend to develop an informal relationship with the SEO industry.

Whereby a certain amount of SEO job on websites tends to help search engines provide what its visitors are looking for which is top-notch search results.

For this reason, sometimes search engines will provide SEO information and SEO recommendations to its visitors directly on the search engines. This helps the SEO industry tremendously by placing the industry in the forefront of the main people that are interested in organic (free) search results which are the search engine users looking for something specific and the website owners who want to be found in the search engine results.

5. No Standard SEO Rules or Regulations - Search engine optimization (SEO) can be described as a recent version of the Wild West. Basically almost anything can be said or done because there are no formal set standards for the industry as a whole.

Therefore, in a true sense, no one is really right or wrong concerning any thoughts, comments or decisions concerning SEO techniques and/or methods. Right or wrong is replaced by what is considered fair by individuals and everyone has a unique set of ethics. What one person might consider unethical someone else might consider completely honest, well intended assistance. This is why you have labels such as white hat and black hat SEO within the SEO industry.

6. SEO Mystery - Almost no SEO professionals will explain what they do regarding SEO work in detail. Some will provide a little SEO information, which is mainly done as marketing efforts for the SEO professionals in forums, blogs and newsletters. Even the e-books and books that are sold only explain SEO in a general nature. Search engine optimization (SEO) is truly a mystery to the average website owner and/or people interested in organic search engine rankings.

This mystery produces a high level of interest regarding the SEO industry and helps feed the popularity of search engine optimization (SEO).

By: Ezine Articles

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Now a days, SEO services have been a very important phenomenon on the Internet industry. The term might be unfamiliar to many daily visitors of the Internet, but someone who is even slightly involved with online marketing will definitely know what SEO or Search Engine Optimization means.

This technique is cited as being useful for getting your company across the web to many people on the Internet industry. Be it an upstart business or a well positioned company, SEO techniques promise to help the organization reach across various corners of the Internet to a large audience and potential customers.

There are many factors why people might use SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ). However, all of them boil down to marketing almost all of the time.

SEO services have been gathering a strong following on the Internet over the past few years. Recent reports have shown how experts have been able to understand the way search engines work. Popular search engines on the Internet industry have various algorithms that calculate the important of a web page and its relevance to the keywords that the user searches for. These algorithms are carefully studied by the experts to understand how they can modify web pages to rank higher for the intended search keywords. The higher a particular website ranks on SERPS the more traffic it gets. This eventually would lead to more customers and visitors on the website.

Most SEO experts have been known to work through the submission of carefully written articles, blogs, press releases (PR), etc. This helps in putting forward information that is relevant to the keywords in question that a target consumer is most likely to use when using search engines. The services also include a detailed study of the content and other factors of a website and carefully tailoring its wordings to make the content most relevant when it comes to the principles of SEO.

Internet giant Google has once again announced a number of new update additions to its search strategy, including a real-time update features which include updates from social networks Twitter and Facebook (SMO).

But the updates could affect the methods businesses use search engine marketing (SEM) to push their sites to the top of serps.

Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer at search engine marketing (SEM) group Greenlight, said in a statement

the new "web history" feature introduced by Google will make it harder for people to get on the first page of serps.

The history tracks what searches a user makes and when, and then tailors future searches to use information gathered during those tracking sessions on what sites users visit.

By tracking this information, Google can change future search results pages to boost a user's preferred websites to the top of the page, rather than the bottom. Thomas says this personalisation is affecting how search engine marketing (SEM) companies will work with their clients.

"This adds a further dimension to how Google ranks sites and pages, which had historically focussed largely on analysing on-page relevancy and third party links pointing into a website," Pouros said.

"For example, in the case of the enterprise, new entrants online will find it more difficult to break into Google page one results if the sites a user has visited before have been given a preferential boost."

Chris Thomas, chief executive of SEO firm Reseo, says Google's new features will have an impact on how businesses approach their search engine marketing (SEM) strategies.

"There is all this personalisation coming into search, and not only that but in real-time search the results you have decay over time. The bright lights really shine on just the newest results. It is going to open up interesting issues on how Google deals with spam. I am sure they have thought of that, but one way of getting through the search results would be automating something."

The update will be made available shortly on iPhones and handsets using the Android operating system, and is an attempt to catch up on the latest trends in search marketing pioneered by social network Twitter (SMO).

At a news event in the US, Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra announced a variety of new features for both mobiles and desktop-based searches, including customised search based on location.

Gundotra said the location-based technology would be "a 1st class component of all the products" Google produces. Searches can now be customised by location, incorporation product searches used through mobile technology to obtain information from local shops.

For example, a user searching for a camera in their local area would be able to combine the product and location functions to find a product in a store closest to them.

One feature which surprised analysts is the introduction of "Google Goggles", which is essentially a picture-based search method. The Goggles use logos and character identification to identify whatever product or landmark is being targeted.

Tech bloggers have suggested the new feature, which is now in a testing period, could be expanded to include barcode identification.

However, the biggest reveal of the day was the real-time search function. Gundotra said the company would index over one billion documents per day, including tweets, blog posts, and pages from social network giants MySpace and Facebook.

The development comes after Twitter has gained notoriety for using a similar type of search, which enables users to view the most recent tweets, along with the ability to view how many new search results have been indexed since the original search was made.

"Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and Friend Feed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before," the company said on its blog.

After a user searches for a topic, they click on the "Latest Results" tag on the options menu to filter their results. Additionally, users can elect to only see updates from blogs and social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed.

Taking note from Twitter, Google has also published a "hot topics" feature to Google Trends which displays the most common topics people are publishing on the internet.

"Ideally you'd want to be creating content constantly and updating your website," Thomas says. "But then again, it just creates a huge amount of work for you, and I think that's where social media comes in to the topic, how you do it and how you sell."

"There's always going to be a place for standard search results, and there's a place for real-time results where things are current and trending."

By: Patrick Stafford

Google has Today announced some major Infrastructure changes to improve indexing capability, Speed & accuracy of the search results. Unlike other updates which suddenly appear without warning Google has provided a Preview of the new search results at www2.sandbox.google.com. The results are for the US but you can add &gl=uk to the end of the query string to get UK specific Results.

From the announcement:

For the Last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation Architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness & other dimensions.

It’s important to note that this is a rewriting of the core infrastructure & not an algorithm change intended to alter the rankings. Having said that it’s highly Likely that some rankings will change as a result of factors such as:

* Google indexing more pages and therefore more links
* The ability to add more factors into the authority algorithm in the future
* Faster re-indexing of Pages

This final factor is probably based on the speed of re-spidering old pages rather than indexing new pages – Google is Pretty fast at that already. There will probably be some improvements in the few minutes it takes from hitting Publish on a new Article to that article actually ranking as well as hopefully some better real time PageRank calculations rather than the current reliance on Authority and freshness for breaking news stories.

Thanks to the current instability of the search results in Google there seems to be little point testing the new System because you will get different rankings every few hours.

Also extra features such as query deserves freshness have not been Layered on to the new system yet so you won’t see any breaking news stories given the same boost as in the normal Google (Try searching for some celebrity names to see this in action).

Most people are Reporting very similar results although a few brand sites are not doing quite as well as after the brand update and price comparison portals in the Finance/Insurance industry seem to be doing quite well.

Source : Patrick Altoft

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View of Larry Dignan :

At the Revenue Bootcamp Conference in Mountain View, Calif., panelists discussed the best ways to drive traffic to your Site. Dion Lim, COO of SimplyHired.com, stresses his company’s success with partnerships–if you make people money, he says, they’ll be your friends for life. Neil Patel, a Quick Sprout Blogger, says to develop relationships with bloggers to generate buzz, and Anita Cohen-Williams, founder of MySearchGuru, claims that organic SEO is not dead–rather, it’s still very important. The panel was moderated by Charlene Li, founder of The Altimeter Group.

Source : Larry Dignan


View of Michael Ferrantino :

I recently read a posting, where the poster was looking for an SEO specialist who could work with the metadata for a Specific product / asset. The reason the ad Struck me, is that they were looking for a "specialist" - but at the same time dictating the best methodology for accomplishing their SEO needs. If you're working in Corporate America in technology, you'll understand this posting to be a part of daily Life - a quite Dilbert-esque daily life.

Let's get some facts straight about SEO. Because best practices are changing daily, I suggest:

* Read up on the subject -daily
* View SEO in the proper perspective
* Assemble a small SEO team and meet at least once a week (this meeting should take 15 minutes or less)
* Monitor performance -daily

Viewing SEO in the Proper perspective means that SEO is not a stand alone effort. Like all marketing efforts, it should be part of a larger arsenal that includes, AdWords, viral efforts (blogging), advertising and PR. We've worked with clients that ignore PR but were heavy into advertising and vice versa. Without getting into the ongoing debate about PR vs. Advertising, the correct methodology is coordination & balance between all efforts. When your campaigns are running, your website needs to match what's in those campaigns.

Your SEO team should include a webmaster & marketing person (if possible, junior-level will suffice). What should be discussed during the weekly meeting is traffic analysis and if applicable - sales & competition.

At the beginning of this blog I talked about metadata. The current problem with metadata is that search engines are more commonly crawling what's on the pages of a site -rather than what's in the metadata. For example, our SpellBy.com site has a visually weighted home page. Given this information - we now have to switch our strategy to include more product descriptions, which is something we were always reluctant to do because we know that most consumer purchases are based on the strength of the product images. Here, SEO changes what was once a best practice for selling product --not because it doesn't work anymore once a customer gets to your page - but because of the necessity of getting the Customer to your page in the first place.

Source : Michael Ferrantino

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Social Media has grown like a weed on the consumer usage Front but when it comes to revenue, Social Media hasn't yet found enough Friends in the form of advertisers to cement its place as a Digital Marketing Staple.

According to Forrester Research, however, that will all change by 2014. As our own Meghan Keane detailed, spending on Social Media Marketing will grow to over $3bn by then, up from an Estimated $716m this year, Forrester predicts.

While that's impressive growth, Forrester's predictions also demonstrate why the anticipated growth in spending on Social Media is a red herring: by 2014, 59% of the total online ad spend will go to SEO and PPC. That represents $31.5bn of the total online ad spending pie, or more than 10 times the size of the social media slice..

This is an Important point that cannot be underestimated by Digital Marketers, entrepreneurs, executives and investors.

As great as Social Media is, here's the problem: while there's good reason to believe that social media has a bright future and a $3.1bn/year market is nothing to cough at, assuming Forrester's numbers are not going to be exceeded by a significant amount (say double or triple),, social media will represent a limited market.

$3.1bn may sound like a lot of Money but in the overall scheme of things, it isn't. Furthermore, and most importantly, given the structure of the Social Media Market, it's questionable as to how much of that will be available to smaller players. Already, today's most prolific social media revenue generators (Facebook and MySpace) already account for the vast majority of social media spend and in fact, if projections of their 2009 revenues are accurate, almost all of the $716m Forrester sees being spent on social media this year will be attributable to Facebook and MySpace.

Marc Andreessen, who is on the board of Facebook, has gone so far as to state that Facebook could pull in a Billion a year in Revenue if it pressed monetization. Whether you believe him or not, it's clear that Facebook alone is currently a primary beneficiary of a significant chunk of the social media spend.

The Key take-away from this for those Looking for the greatest Digital Marketing opportunities over the next 5 years is that unless social media finds some business model steroids and there is a sudden fragmentation in a market that is today dominated by a handful of players, the slice of the ad spending pie that belongs to social media has already been saved for someone else.

So while social media is here to stay and there is some opportunity, if you're looking for the biggest opportunities in Digital Marketing, chances are you're going to find them in search. That you can take to the bank.

Source : Patricio Robles