This handy video offers some small – but highly useful – tips for making the most of your SEO-based online marketing. As the host explains, small tweaks aimed at improving your SEO efficiency can be almost as useful as paying attention to the bigger strategies, since much of SEO revolves around competing with all the other sites out there desperate to clamber up the Google rankings. With large companies hard at work on the big picture, there is a lot of scope for sneaking through their defences with cunning improvements of your own. Let’s take a look at the five tips:

1. Include images – Try and ensure all images that you use work for your SEO strategy. To this end, when uploading copyright-free shared pics, change the filename, title and alternate text to match your SEO keywords. Doing this makes Google realise that the picture in question is relevant to the search strategy and helps it to show up on Google Images.

2. Decrease the number of the words in your permalink – by condensing the URL for your post and increasing its keyword density you will gain an edge over the competition, since your URL will be more SEO-optimised, and also easier to remember!

3. Consider a Google+ page for your website. Facebook fan pages are increasingly being seen as the excellent opportunity for online marketing that they are, but SEO-orientated marketers should also consider creating a Google+ page. Not only is this the premier search engine’s own social media page – and social media and sharing is becoming ever more important – but it is relatively new, and thus represents an excellent opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

4. Create a YouTube channel for your site. Videos, such as the one above, are good for SEO in their own right, but by creating a YouTube channel you can showcase your favourite videos and add links back to your own commercial site, making it all the more attractive to Google and other social media.

5. Tweak any affiliate links on your site. Ensure that these are ‘no-follow’ links, which tells Google, while crawling through your page, not to count these links when assessing the site for its algorithm. This keeps your SEO “juice” focused and sharp, and should push you a little further up the rankings.

When seeking a new niche for SEO-based online marketing, it pays to follow a few simple guidelines, in order to avoid the SEO deserts and truly make the most of your monetisation. Here’s three to bear in mind…

1. Avoid the “obvious”. Although a niche may have a lot of traffic volume surrounding its keywords, it may still not be the right one for you. See if it can genuinely be monetised by Google-searching the major keywords and seeing if there is much PPC advertising there. If not, it’s likely to be a sign that it’s a desert when it comes to revenue.
2. See which players are involved with the major keywords. If your Google search shows that it is only large corporate brands that are associated with the keywords, then you will have your work cut out to match resources with them – you will need the services of a top online marketing company with a great site strategy, and you will need to be prepared to make a lot of effort.
3. Check out the competition. If it is not all big brands in the niche, then take some time to see exactly who it is you’ll be competing with. There are various backlinks tools which can tell you exactly who is involved with the top search results associated with the keywords, and what kind of links you will require to compete with them. Again, a good internet marketing company will provide this service and bring a level of expertise to it that maybe you cannot.

No one will ever dispute the fact that search engine optimization is paramount in obtaining excellent traffic numbers, especially organically.  Once the potential customer arrives at your site, however, you have to be prepared to win them over with well-written content, offers that don’t seem pushy and a smooth navigation around your website.  Having said this, we’ll concentrate on keeping content current and fresh today, a facet that is perhaps more important that what you are selling as if your writings are of little interest, chances are your products will not get many looks either.  Concentration on solid website content is an absolute must if you wish to convert your readers into subscribers or product purchasers.

Keeping your website current with trends that are happening in your niche is perhaps the first key that needs to be addressed in your content.  Are you writing for today and tomorrow, or are you rehashing things already covered yesterday? People get tired of whimsically racing around websites attempting to stay in-step with current news; providing well-researched content is important for your organic search rankings and in doing so, you’ll draw a larger interest from a wider spectrum of readers as you’ll be well ahead of the written curve in your niche, and customers bank on this to make informed decisions such as purchases.  Watch local news, read authoritative newspapers or even browse through magazines to generate your content in your own personal, professional opinion based on how your niche is trending at the moment.

Grammatically correct content is also a huge key to having a successful readership; people want to read articles that are of sound native tongue and flow naturally when reading.  Using difficult jargon to express an opinion or feeling is not going to help your viewing audience; you should always write at the internationally accepted reading level of 8-9 grade, making it easy to understand across the board.  Your content should insult a college professor or make the uneducated feel uncomfortable; therefore, write at a grade level appeasing to the masses and understood by the same.

Finally, avoid writing 1000 word posts as often as you can; should you wish to captivate an audience with any points and close the article out with a call to action, it is important to be as thorough as possible within 600 words.  You can make opening arguments, explain your position, and any final thoughts well within that word count while entertaining your audience enough to take an action of purchasing or contacting you.  The goal is to keep your visitors on as many pages as possible for hours, if possible.  You’ll lose interest fast if there is 10 useless paragraphs sandwiched in between three great ones; condense your content to open strong and finish stronger, assuring the reader you have the answers to any open questions or can leave their commentary on your content.  Allowing this open dialogue can add to your content, which is all the better reason to make your opinion count in as short of space as possible, considering dialogue will grow if the subject is interesting enough to sound off on.

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a background checks website Easy Background Checks as well as a marriage records website Genealinks.

The newcomer and your expert internet marketers all share one common interest: Trying to get their websites indexed through the top three major search engines quickly. For larger websites the task is even more daunting, and there are a few small but effective techniques that can assist in the indexing process. Patience is a virtue and in today’s internet marketing world patience and planning is a key element of success in getting your content and websites correctly indexed into the search giants.

Smaller one or two page websites, also known as sales pages, are the easiest and quickest to get indexed in the three major search engines almost anyone can generally succeed by just manually submitting through each search engines submission process. Websites with a considerable number of pages will often only immediately get their first page indexed which therefore requires small effective planning strategies and a little bit of patience to become completely indexed and incrementally found in organic search results.

Key Strategies Necessary:

- Prior to submitting your websites to the search engines or establishing link partners which will cause the search engines to start indexing in your website. Start planning out the basic website structure so that search engines robots can easily flow through your website and index each page.

(a) Have an sitemap linked from you main index page that thinks through out your website.

(b) If possible, ensure that each page is linked together, not just back to the main index page. This is not possible depending on what type of website you have, the number of pages, or your website design and structure. But this has been a successful technique in the past.

(c) Build and submit a Google Sitemap.

- Test your websites design and structure using Google Sitemap Software such as SOFTplus GSiteCrawler (Freeware) that will try and index your entire website. If your unsuccessful building a index of your entire website, then further planning and design changes maybe in order to index your entire website. If the software can not index your entire website, how will the search engine robots index your entire website?

- Instead of manually submitting your websites, submit your website through directories and establish link partnerships. This will improve how often your website is crawled by the search engines and how fast your website is indexed. Also, when establishing link partnership and directories higher the Google Page Rank, the quicker your website will be indexed and how often your website is crawled.

- Patience. The process the search engine will go through while indexing your website is: First, the search engine will have to find your website (Hence, establishing partnerships with high Google Page Rank), then crawling through your website and absorbing all the information contained, then ranking each individual page and finally your website will appear in the search engine result pages.

This type of patience and dedication in getting the website prepared and eventually indexed can be perplexing yet exciting at the same time.  Keep all of the steps you took to get indexed written down for the next time you need a quick reference in indexing your site or the sites of others. Always raise your patience high and keep your goals reachable in any search engine endeavor; keep current with trends and proper principles by reading other good articles such as those found on this site written by professionals in the industry.

About The Guest Author

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a criminal records site PeopleSearchPro.com, and a marriage records site Genealinks.com.

photo credit: rockbadger

Businesses have been urged this week to start preparing their Christmas online marketing campaigns, as shoppers begin thinking about possible gifts and researching products.

Next month is the time that online businesses need to really start shaping up their paid search advertising in particular, experts advise, with Dzine IT vice-president Peter Crisafi noting that “internet search terms used to find products can be both specific and vague at the same time.”

To this end, SEO content needs to be calibrated for “both broad category-based terms as well as specific product names,” he added.

Other experts have urged firms to keep their online marketing campaigns simple and not to spread themselves too thinly, with a few good-quality promotions launched at intervals throughout the run-up to Christmas, rather than a new promotion each day in a paid search advert. Businesses also need to be constantly aware of the rise of mobile advertising, as more and more customers will be using mobile devices to do their online Christmas shopping.

photo credit: stoneysteiner

Online marketing professionals should take note of recent guidance on how to optimise a business’s on-site search and navigation to drive up sales and increase customer satisfaction – pointing out that there are various ways that retailers can improve this.

Fact-Finder head of UK operations Mathias Duda said that improved search and navigation on websites “can drive sales through personalised merchandising, increase a user’s experience of a brand and help retailers get a better understanding of their customers and how they behave on their website” – adding that too many retailers neglect site optimisation as part of their online marketing strategy.

One major improvement that can be made is changing the search function so that it understands misspellings and synonyms – up to 40 per cent of queries are spelt differently to actual product names, so this would clearly increase sales.

A general point also worth considering is that improved knowledge of what customers are seeking on a site will in turn improve online marketing by improving the efficiency of AdWords and SEO choices.

photo credit: David Boyle

One online marketing expert has made his predictions for the major areas of interest in the sector set to dominate the New Year.

Hit Search founder Andrew Redfern said that copywriting skills will become “more important than ever” in 2011 as quality of content starts to be the decider in many online advertising campaigns.

He said that marketing teams will have to raise the bar when it comes to their knowledge skills, as they respond to the increasingly fragmented nature of the online marketing arena.

A third area in which online marketing is due to develop is in terms of planning, he went on. The new ability on search engines such as Google to carry out localised searches and focus on cross-platform resources, ­­­means that online advertising campaigns will need to be better integrated over the next 12 months if they are to be successful.

The final major area of development in the world of online marketing in 2011 will be cross-platform marketing, as previously alluded to. Mr Redfern stressed that “HTML5 will allow for a more strategic view to function over multiple platforms.”

When it comes to SEO marketing, he said that the localisation of Google would have a significant effect over the next 12 months, with more complex systems of management and delivery required. The year will see the “blurred lines” between SEO and social media such as Facebook and Twitter becoming even more so, especially as local additions are placed on Google and other search engines.

Google itself is likely to remain the number one search engine, although as the year progresses the likes of Bing and Yahoo will be clawing back a small amount of the market, Mr Redfern predicted.

However, Facebook is also set to launch its own search listings in 2011, again with the focus on localisation.