Engage your readers. Empathize with them. They should feel your mood and gain your understanding through your words.

Test your readership. Share. Make it a two-way street. This is particularly important if you’re marketing. And remember – understand your traffic and reader-base. Let me say that again. Understand your traffic and reader-base. If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.

While it is certainly the case that blogging can be very fun, don’t forget to do your keyword research. Keywords are part of the fuel that powers your traffic.

Even though you can blog about whatever is on your mind as long as it relates to your niche topic, you do need to do some keyword research. This will not take much time once you get the hang of it — and doing so can definitely help you rank more highly in the search engines for each blog post you write!

You’ll want to do some preliminary keyword research before you set up the structure of your blog. This can help you with choosing a domain name and selecting a focus for your blog. Keep in mind that you have a few different options when it comes to your domain name.

Some people choose to purchase a keyword focused domain in hopes that it will help them rank more highly. Other people want their blog to be branded and will choose a unique name for their blog. The choice is truly yours, depending on whether you want the focus to be on SEO or branding.

You will also want to do some keyword research before writing your blog posts. For instance, if you’re going to blog about a certain product related to your niche, you can do some keyword research to determine which keyword related to that product is searched the most. Then, you can include the keyword in your title and have it sprinkled throughout your article. Make sure to include the keyword naturally and not just stuff it in!

You can also insert these keywords as tags with each post you publish. These tags can be picked up by the search engines to help establish relevancy and help you rank more highly for your desired terms.

Keyword research is also important if you’re going to be using a plug-in such as the All-in-One plugin or Platinum SEO plugin. These will automatically search engine optimize each post, and your entire blog, at setup for you. These plugins include places to enter your keywords, a title, and a description.

There are many different ways you can do this keyword research. There are free tools like the Google keyword research tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool will give you an idea of how many people search for each related keyword globally and locally. Be sure to select “exact match” from the drop down menu to determine the true figures. There are also paid tools, such as Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder, that can help you dig down and determine information such as competition levels and more.

Choosing the right keywords can mean the difference between hoping people are able to find your blog and your posts, and knowing that they definitely will because you rank so highly in the search engines. Take the time to do some keyword research before establishing your blog, and before you write each post, and you should start to see some great results!

But keep up you must, certainly if you want your blog or other website to prosper and do well.  Because if people can’t find it, it won’t do well.

So what is Instant Search?

It’s heralded as a revolutionary shift in the way we search online. And it should make the best search engine better.  Certainly that’s Google’s view.

Instant Search means that, instead of needing to hit ‘enter’ to see your search results, they start to appear just as you start to type.  In effect, the search results ‘stream’ to your in near real-time. As you type, the results will change.

Will it change SEO as we know it?

Quite a lot of people say, YES.

What is on the face of it a positive step, even a ‘small change’ for Google, many fear as the end of traditional SEO.

The reality is that there’s not such thing a ‘traditional search engine optimization’ – it’s always a changing game, and you as a blogger or a webmaster need to be live to that.  And, if you really get under the skin of what instant search is, whilst it impact on the ‘user interface’ – that is, the Google ‘box’ and the experience of using it – Google’s core search engine technology is really not changing.  Importantly, it’s not changing for delivering ‘relevant results’, which is what Google is built on and what we as bloggers and website owners are interested in.

Ok, that’s comforting But will the search engine experience impact on marketing?

Now this is what’s really intriguing.

Imagine typing in “where can I get a new Mac”.

Well, in the new Google, it will update the search results as you type the words.  So, instead of definitely ending up with the results of “where can I get a new Mac”, you’ll start to see results for  all sorts of thing related to “where can…”, “where can I….”, “where can I get…”.  So, the user could end up with “where can I get a new dog”, “where can I see a new car”, as as they type.  So, with the ‘need to press enter to get results’ removed from the process, a user may well get diverted to other points of interest which appear sooner in the chain of the text typed into the box.

So, this is something to consider.  It really is.

Long tail keywords will be impacted upon

In the example above, the ‘long tail’ keyword is therefore more vulnerable.

Many SEO experts and online marketers use the long-tail keywords to focus upon niche markets.  In this sense, Google Instant Search could be something of a game changer.

2. What good is having a web site if it is not being seen?
90% of Internet buyers are turning to search engines to find the products they want. Google alone conducts over 150 million searches a day. In fact, recent studies show that purchasers are about 12 times more likely to buy your products or services after finding your site through a search engine than all other traditional advertising methods combined (including trade shows, print ads, direct mail, radio, and even television)… at a fraction of the cost! Why? Simply put, when a consumer finds you through a search engine they are ready to buy. With traditional forms of media, you are broadcasting a message hoping to reach the right consumer at the right time.

As searchers generally only explore the first two pages in the search results, achieving high rankings on the search engines will make an enormous difference in the amount of visitor traffic your site receives.

3. Why doesn’t my web site rank very well in the search engines?
Having your web site rank high in the search engines is a science and the rules for search engine optimisation (SEO) are always changing.

Here are some reasons why you may be having poor ranking:

Incorrect usage of the TITLE tag or no TITLE tag content.
Too many occurrences of the same word in a page (spamming).
Missing H1 and H2 heading tag content.
Missing ALT tag content in your graphic links.
No meaningful content in the first 250 characters on each page.
Less than 200 words per page.
Very few pages on your website.
No links from other web sites to your web site (link popularity).

4. How does the Search Engine find websites?
There are two ways a search engine can find a website to add to its database. The first and most direct method is to accept submissions from web site designers and optimisers. Most search engines have a “submit your URL” section inviting submissions from Internet users.

The second, and least obvious method of finding websites is to send a “spider” to follow each and every link on, off, and through a website. New URLs encountered by the spider will be added to the database. In this way, some search engines will grow very rapidly.

5. How long does it take for SEO results to kick in?
The amount of time required to see results of search engine optimisation work range anywhere from 2 weeks to a few months. This is dependent on how often search engines update their index and subsequently re-rank sites. The Google Dance for example is almost a spectator sport among the SEO community.

6. What is my site ranking dependent on?
Site ranking tends to be “cumulative” and is dependent on the following factors:

The specific keyword phrases (search terms) that have been targeted
The overall competitiveness of your industry – how many players are there
Whether you are targeting a regional, national, or international market
How well ranking is monitored and the site tweaked over time for SEO improvement
The progress of your inbound linking campaign
Number of competitor sites achieving new ranking themselves.

7. Why might I need to have extra elements added to my website?
A search engine spider is an automated program that electronically probes every URL submitted to its database. As the spider is a computer program, it is designed to look for and rank very specific items on each page it probes. If those elements are present, the spider computes a higher ranking than it would if those elements were not present.

8. If these elements are so important, why didn’t they get added when my site was originally designed?
Most website designers haven’t learned the importance of search engine friendly design. In almost every case we’ve encountered, the site designer is a highly skilled and creative person whose job is to put your ideas on the web. More often than not, the designers have not received any training in search engine optimisation and don’t think about it while pursuing a cool looking design.

Search engines are also constantly changing their ranking criteria. They do this to prevent gross manipulation of their search tools. Often, website designers are not fully up to date with changes at search engines.

9. Does every page of my website really need to be optimised?
In a word – yes. Every page of a website can be a potential entry point or ‘landing page’ for visitors. You can’t predict which page or pages will be ranked the best for specific keywords. As such, each page must be individually optimised too for optimal ranking. Collectively, all pages of your web site reinforce the common “theme” of the site, which also can help boost ranking. Don’t assume that your home page is the only important page on your site.

10. Isn’t This Something We Can Do Ourselves?
Large amounts of time, attention and expertise are needed to achieve the desired results in such a constantly changing niche industry. The expense of adding personnel and necessary resources alone would quickly outweigh the cost of hiring our company, which is why outsourcing SEO is by far the most popular method. Remember, an SEO company has already established strong, ongoing relationships with all the top search engines, and has experienced professionals who are constantly researching the changes and trends in this dynamic field.

11. Can you guarantee a number #1 position in the search engines?
Nobody can guarantee a number #1 position or specific ranking for your site for a given keyword phrase in the organic search engine results. There are simply too many factors beyond anyone’s control – the search engines changing their ranking algorithms, efforts made by competitors, and new sites being added to the Web.

Obtaining a specific ranking is analogous to managing a portfolio. Your financial advisor will do their best to monitor the stock market and other indicators and to make sure your portfolio is managed to the best of their abilities. However, your advisor cannot guarantee that your portfolio will be at a specific value or even that the amount will be up at all by a given date.

12. It’s been several months and my website finally shows up in Google but it’s ranked in the hundreds. Why is that?
It’s not always easy to get better search engine rankings. In fact, search engine optimisation is part science and part art. Search engines continually change their algorithms and tweak their rules for ranking. It is possible that Google does not fully read your page due to structural issues, your web site (or at least individual web pages) could be lacking in meaningful content, no significant web sites link to you, your web site is too small to be of any value to people searching for your topic, or any other range of problems.

Search engines may be flooded with web sites on a given topic, making it more difficult to achieve higher rankings. As such, a good search engine optimiser will look for a niche to exploit. For example, consider whether your web site has greater appeal to a local, national, or international region.

13. My web site did not get accepted last time I submitted to the search engines… why?
Search Engine listings are not guaranteed to everyone who posts a web site to the Internet. Search engines are for-profit businesses and have the right to refuse to list any site for virtually any reason. We ensure all bases are covered and all necessary elements are present before submitting the finalised site to the search engines or directories.

14. Why Should I Choose to Outsource SEO?
To achieve a high ranking web site, you have to know exactly the most effective META tag design formula, best web copy writing techniques, keep track of current search engine ranking algorithms, know what format to submit the site in to every engine and how often to resubmit the site. You also need to know whether your site is technically compatible with search engine robots, what types of pages the engines will accept and which will be barriers to ranking, plus what sort of overall “relevancy score” your site will receive from each engine you submit to.

Not only that, but once you’re ranking highly, you have to monitor your progress and adjust your tags every now and then to ensure you stay up above your competitors on all engines for your major search phrases. These are all crucial steps to a high ranking, but very time consuming and not your core business!

15. How Do You Choose the Best Keywords?
The first step in our SEO campaign is to develop your Keyword Profile. Based on your initial input, we will use a combination of experience and software programs to generate a list of the most effective and well-searched keywords in your industry. We then work together to refine this list and compile the list of keywords and phrases that will be most beneficial to your product or services. You know your business and we know ours. We know how important it is to work together to generate the most effective Keyword Profile possible.

16. Will You Need to Access Our Web Server?
Yes, we will need access to your web server in order to upload and periodically update pages. We do our best to keep you informed every time we do an upload or make a change. It is vital that anyone else who may be making changes to your site stays current with the optimised pages we provide.

17. Do You Have to Make Changes to Our Site?
While many of the changes made to your site are done behind the scenes in the source code, it may be necessary to make certain minor changes to your site’s copy or layout. In most cases, these changes are minimal. We post all changes made to the front end of your site to our test server for your approval before we go live with the changes.

18. I found other services that do what you do much more cheaply: how do I choose?
Some companies take advantage of the uninitiated web site owner promising top rankings for £9.95 or something similar. Beware of such promises – if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. That £9.95 will typically buy an automated submission to 10,000 “engines” that nobody ever visits or possibly even result in a domain ban for over submitting. Once the £9.95 campaign is finished, so is your domain. There is no such thing as #1 rankings in all search engines or “it only takes 2 weeks and £9.95″.

More importantly, most of these services only include submission, not optimisation, as a part of their deal. Submitting an un-optimised site to the engines simply will not improve your rankings. If you don’t plan on optimising your site before submission then you shouldn’t bother submitting it at all.

19. What should I look for when choosing a SEO consultant?
The ideal Consultant is one that understands the dynamics of marketing, business, and technology – and employs the highest levels of integrity in their work. There are a number of unethical practices or short cuts that can be used in search engine optimisation, but the search engines themselves often times will not accept these questionable or “tricky” practices.

You should choose a company that doesn’t promote these practices to achieve short-term results for its clients. You should also expect to benefit from the research expertise, customised approached, management expertise, and on-going consultative process from a SEO firm.

20. What’s the right time for me to start a search engine marketing campaign and how long it last?
No time like the present! We usually establish 12-month campaigns. There is an enormous amount of education, research, analysis, technical programming, and testing performed in the first 3 months in particular.

21. How often will I receive search engine ranking reports?
We send out search engine ranking reports monthly to our clients.

22. How often do you resubmit my site to search engines?
If your site is search engine compatible and optimised correctly, regular resubmission to engines is generally unnecessary although we find that monthly submissions to some search engines assists in maintaining rankings. Our ranking reports and maintenance checks keep track of your site every four weeks. If your site is already ranking highly, there is no need to resubmit it. However if any engines have lowered or dropped your site altogether (as can happen from time to time), it will be resubmitted to those engines.

If an engine has dropped your rankings considerably since last report, it is time to tweak your META tags or check the optimised pages for any problems. This is included as part of your Monthly Site Ranking Management Service. Search engines will generally pick up the changes during their next edit and re-rank the site accordingly. Resubmission is usually only necessary if your site has undergone major content changes.

23. How will I know if my business increases as a result of top rankings?
There are numerous Web Analytics tools available in the market that can help you to track the effectiveness of your campaign. By the end of the first twelve months, you will get an analysis of your activity at the end of the campaign as compared to the baseline established at the beginning of the campaign.

Kath Dawson is head of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) team at Strategy Consulting Limited. We have a wealth of experience in delivering effective SEO to a wide range of clients. Contact us today to find out how our services could improve the results of your online business.

Author: Kath Dawson
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Guest blogger

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

You can do a little experiment to demonstrate the power of this Google feature. Set up a page on an obscure new domain, but don’t advertise it. Instead, put a single HTML file with a plain list of links to a group of similar sites. The first thing to note is how quickly the bots notice your website, and then how surprisingly high your Google page rank will be for a website with no incoming links or SEO content.

So how can you take advantage of this new SEO device? Be creative with it! No one is really sure exactly what does and doesn’t work yet, even more surprising results might be possible than have been discovered yet. A good place to start though is in considering how you want your website to be classified and linking out to similarly classified websites. This will help to re-enforce the purpose of your website, increasing goggles’ confidence in its content.

Then there’s the regional trick. If you are running a local book store, make sure Google knows that it’s a physical store, and its location. Now use lots of outbound links to websites like Amazon and even to national book retail franchises. When someone searches for a book store in your local area, Google will return yours with significantly more confidence in the quality and size of the store, because of its inferred association with the big retailers.

It’s a fun and simple SEO method, which might result in significant gains for particular websites . Let us know if you discover something amazing!

The first rule of making a free business is, open source software: The open source community has been around for as long as closed source development and open source products are comparable, if not better quality in some cases. Name a bit of software your business needs and it’s very likely that an open source version is available, in some cases making a choice to use open source software can save you thousands of dollars in licensing for single programs.

The second rule to free business on the net is: Cheap web hosting! There is simply no need to maintain or buy dedicated or virtual hosting if no one knows your website is there. Open a cheap account with a high quality service provider like godaddy and they will be very glad to quickly and painlessly upgrade your hosting as and when you need additional power, storage and bandwidth. There is simply no need to pay for a vastly overpowered service before it’s needed. A few adverts will bring in enough revenue to pay for your website hosting, making it free!

The final step to free business on the net is: Free promotion! Google the term ‘SEO’ and check our SEO blog category on the left. There is a wealth of free information available on this topic, which will teach you exactly how to configure and write your website to be search engine optimized. Custom SEO services are expensive because they usually come with guaranteed results, but these results are within your reach given enough time and understanding of the topic.

If you follow these three simple rules, you’ll get your business online for almost zero cost. Website builders and promotions agencies might try to sell your expensive packages and hosting services, but remember these basic rules and you’ll be fine.

Make sure that you choose a good, quality web host. Web hosting companies are not all created equal neither do they all offer you the same benefits. When considering web hosting companies, you will want to take a close look at the following things: Affordability, their billing schedule, whether or not it is WordPress friendly, control panel ease-of-use, customer service and available bonuses.

Affordability is very important. You don’t want to have a lot of overhead costs. One of the advantages of doing business online is that you tend to have far less costs then you would, if you attempted start a brick and mortar business. You can generally find a good web host for between $4-$9 a month. Unless you are getting a great deal of traffic or you need a lot of space, you will not need to pay more than that.

Also, be sure to consider how many domain names a hosting company will allow you to have. Some web hosting companies will allow you to host unlimited domain names. This means that you can purchase a domain name somewhere else and point it to your webhost. This allows you to host a large number of web sites, all with different domain names, for one low-price. Typically, web hosting companies that allow this, charge more for domain names. Therefore, you may want to go somewhere else to purchase your domain names.

Consider the payment terms. If you don’t have an unlimited budget, you may want to choose a wet host that allows you to pay monthly. You will end up paying a little bit more over the long haul, however, it will allow you to host your website quicker because you won’t have to save up the money for an annual fee. .If money is not an issue, you may want to pay for your hosting annually. However, if you have cash flow issues, you may want to go with a web hosting company that allows you to pay monthly.

For individuals that use WordPress a great deal, they will want to choose a host that makes working with WordPress easy. Several hosts offer this.

You will be required to use a control panel. Most web hosting companies will allow you to look at their control panel before you join them. Make sure that you take advantage of this because you want to make sure that you are comfortable with the control panel.

Next, consider what bonuses are offered. Some web hosting companies will offer you things like a free press release from PR web or free Google and Yahoo advertisement credits. Make sure that you compare these because they can offer you a lot of value.

Lastly, make sure that any company that you do business with has excellent customer service. You should be able to contact them either by phone, e-mail or instant message and get a response in an appropriate amount of time. Before you agree to work with a company, try the customer service out. Call them on the phone, IM them or email them and see how fast their response is.