As an SEO consultant I can tell you that optimizing for conversion can be done through many strategies and tactics.  These can range from simple to difficult and the results also vary depending on the strategy used.  A website owner can do the task himself or can let a web professional do the job.  For increased conversion rates and website revenues, here are some simple steps to website optimization:

Increase Your Visibility.  Aim to have your website be more visible on cyberspace.  One way is to improve your search engine rankings so that potential customers can easily find your site.  To do this, you must optimize your site with keyword-rich, fresh, quality, and informative content.  Using meta tags, alt tags, and a site map would also help a lot in your aim to optimize your site to increase its conversion rates. Later, learn more sophisticated elements like silo building, synonym usage and LSI.

It would also be helpful if your contact information is displayed prominently in your site.  Giving the option for your website visitors to contact you for further information would also be a great way to build your credibility and to connect with your prospective clients.

Aim For Faster Load Times.  If your website is slow to load, having less conversions and high bounce rates are natural consequences.  Impatient visitors would tend to just leave your page while it is still loading.  To see if how fast or slow your website loads, test the time it takes your site to load using various connection speeds.  If you find out that it loads slowly, aim for faster load time.

You can do this by optimizing your CSS and HTML code and doing away with items that are unnecessary or redundant.  Ask yourself if your site would be okay with or without those items.  If yes, eliminate them by all means.  Another important thing is to compress your images as large images are some sometimes the reason web pages load slowly.

Make Site Navigation Easy And Simple.  Users and site visitors often-times get frustrated when sites are difficult to navigate.  Many of them just simply give up and this results in lower conversion rates.  To make site navigation easy and simple for them, group the content of your site accordingly.  If you are offering products or services, you would need to categorize them by price, brand, or other applicable groups so that your visitors can find what they are searching for easily and quickly.

Shortening the path to purchase is also an excellent idea if you want to improve your site’s conversion rate.  When your customers find they have to navigate through several pages just to place an order, there is a big probability that many of them will abandon their shopping cart mid-way through the process.  In order to avoid this happening, adjust your purchase path to enable them to make a purchase in just a few steps.

The Importance Of Multi-variante Testing.  To determine which combinations of your website elements translate to more conversions, multivariate testing is needed.  With this, not only one website element is tested but the different combinations of content, headlines, images, and pricing.  Identifying the combinations that result in high conversion rates is important so that you’ll know what strategy to maintain, what to focus on, what to strengthen, and what to do away with.

There are many ways to make a web page attract favorable ratings or rankings and to appear in the first pages of search results.  Companies that engage in internet marketing recognize the importance of being ranked favorably.  This would mean added traffic to a company website and, consequently, possible business deals.

Most businesses combine various SEO strategies for their internet marketing campaign.  However, there are certain tactics that needs to be avoided. Improper search engine optimization strategies are usually given penalties that range from light to serious penalties.   You may find your website plummet from its current ranking or you may be banned for a period of time.  This, needless to say, is bad for business.

To steer clear of search engine penalties, here are some of the things you need to remember.

• Keep Your Web Content Original.  Aside from avoiding search engine penalties, ensuring the originality of your web content is a big plus for viewers.  Keeping your content fresh and original will help you create your website’s identity and will help you build a following.

• Avoid plagiarism at all cost.  Plagiarism is a big no-no where you use another person’s work without giving credit or when you claim it as your own.  A penalty could result even with a single copied sentence from another source.  There are various online tools nowadays that can be used to check whether a particular work is plagiarized or not.

Also, be wary of duplicate content as you can get penalized too.  If you really can’t do away with it, if it is that necessary, you can add the tag “rel=canonical” to the site that contains duplicate content.  Many search engines give consideration for a “canonical” tag.

• Is Anything In There? Does your page have hidden content? Using hidden content is a technique used by some websites to get higher ranking for keywords.  This is usually done by using the same color or blending the text with the background.  This is one of the common reasons why a site gets penalized.  If you want to elevate, instead of sliding down, your ranking, avoid including hidden text in your site.

Also, stay away from cloaking.  It is a trick done where the content presented to search engines is different that what can be seen.  This also merits a penalty and your ranking is usually dropped if you are found guilty of this misdemeanor.

• Don’t Overdo It.  Keyword-rich content is a good thing if you aspire for higher page rankings.   When correctly used, the use of relevant keywords in your site helps not only search engines but also users in determining the value of your web page.  A penalty usually results when you forget to rein in your site’s keyword density.

This excessive use and repetition of keywords is a tactic used to mislead the crawlers of search engines in the effort to improve ranking.  There will be web site owners who are not aware that too much keyword density is something that they could get penalized for.  Always bear in mind that to avoid penalties and to help your page climb up the search ladder, ensure that your keywords comprise 5%, at the most, of your content.

• A Few Links At A Time.  Avoid including a lot of links in your site as it can be considered a link farm and be penalized for it.  This is especially true if the influx of links is sudden.  You could get flagged, and ultimately, penalized.

Link building is a cornerstone of the principle of search engine optimization but this process should be organic and gradual.  Search engine companies have ways of knowing whether the links in your sites were artificially generated or not.

You should also avoid linking to banned websites.  Aside from search engines reducing the importance of your site, being linked to a banned site may also not sit well with the people who visits your site.

A large majority (I said majority) have invested significant funds on designing and uploading their websites. Unfortunately, most of these sites sit there doing nothing. Some don’t even see the light of day. Mostly because they’re not optimised to be easily found by searchers.

This is where SEO (search engine optimisation) consultants come to the rescue. Research indicates the first three positons in the SERPS (search engine results pages) absorb most of the click activity. They are also the people who normally buy quicker and are less likely to continue searching through the balance of pages. Accordingly, the amount of searches undertaken on page two and three etc. are minimal in comparison. So forget about it if you’re on page four or further on.

Search engine facts

The majority of traffic comes from search engines. That includes Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and others.

• People tend to trust the organic results of their search before a commercial advertisement commonly found in the right hand column.

• PPC does not return the same amount of targeted visitors compared to search engine results.

• Although SEO requires on-going maintenance, PPC requires payment on every click. I said EVERY click.

• NPD Group concluded in its study that, “almost 92% of online users making a purchase over the net use search engines to find the relevant website.”

• Search engines are the busiest and most used vehicles on the net, according to Media Metrix studies.

Search Engine Traffic Builds Reputation

As affirmed by the NPD Group study, “more than twice as many of those asked could recognize the names of the companies in the top three placements of the search engines compared to those who could recognize the names of companies which used banners.”

Search Engine Traffic Means Money

If you don’t yet believe that search engine traffic is critical to the future of your business you soon will. Let’s hope you don’t come to the realization too late. The internet is a fast-paced changing environment, and everyday solutions are formulated and techniques are implemented to increase web traffic. Some of these changes are of course being undertaken by your competitors as we speak.

The money is in the traffic and conversion of that traffic to sales. The more people who visit your website with an already identified interest in your product or service, the more sales you’ll achieve.

The best way to online business success is not just by spending a lot of money on conventional advertising. Indeed, you would do far worse at this point than speak to an SEO or Internet Marketing Consultant in Australia or abroad.

…I hope this has been of some help.

Ray Baker

Site Speed Importance

I have included some links below to quote some noted urgent references which confirm my above statement about site opening speed and it’s relevance to rankings.

Here’s a highly relevant piece by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts at the webmaster central.

Here’s another reference directly from Matt Cutts (Google) blog.

What can you learn from this and what can you do about it?

There are already complaints about the fairness of this speed index but I hasten to point out that the customer will always reign supreme. If the customer is enjoying themselves surfing or searching the web with sites opening quickly and churning pages quickly, what happens when they come a cross a slow poke website? Disappointment! That’s what. The tendancy is (in general) to get away from this (slow) site because it’s frustrating and could keep me waiting more and more when I could easily find another site that works faster.

You will see in one of the references that content is still more valuable than site speed but it all adds up. Remember that!

If you are in position ten on the first page of Google and your site is slow, there may well be twenty other sites who are much faster with just marginal ranking differences keeping them below your site.

Get a fast host sooner rather than later. If you have to pay a few extra dollars a month, it’s going to be well worth it. Should I dare mention that worn out cliche ‘you get what you pay for?’ Well here’s one person who’s learned that the cliche reflects what is more often the case.

That said, I have included a couple of hosting sites below I’ve had good experiences with. I’ve separated them based on the category in which I use them. I’ve also cleverly disguised my affiliate links so you wouldn’t think I was just a normal person trying to make a living from this exceptional post.

More seriously though. These are hosting services I use and that’s why they’re on this page for you to check out. I have been down the road of horrible hosting too and that really sucks.

Fast hosting services I use

1. My best all round experience with what I refer to as a general hosting service with great speed and equally important, reliability for the dollar you pay is this one. They also have an SEO hosting service (uses C class servers) but you’ll need to hunt around on their site to find it.

2. This one has a good reputation and is unusually effective with wordpress AND it is probably one of the easiest hosts to use no matter what level you’re at.

3. My favourite. At the time of writing this host is like the new kid on the block but Oh boy …they really know their stuff! This is a really special service and can be useful if you get or expect bursts of traffic or you simply want a smoother operation, speed with flexibility. I’m in the process of sending more of my sites here as I type this because I am so impressed with this mob.

* Reliability in this post refers to up-time.

Here’s an old video where I provide few (very basic) tips on website traffic but it also mentions the importance of site speed. You can play air guitar while you watch and tap your feet a bit…

Anyway, I hope you can see the light with this article. Site speed IS important. BTW – if you like this article feel free to bookmark it below or if you appreciate the effort, you could leave a comment in the box below the bookmarks. …that would be a nice thing to do

Search engine image

When it comes to optimizing a website or blog so that it gets a lot of attention from Google and the other search engines, there are a lot of things to think about.  Some of these things are really obvious, and others are obscure but nonetheless very helpful for good search engine rankings.

Here are ten tips that will help move your site up the charts:

Bold your keywords Use the bold tags around some of your target keywords on each page of the site. You do not need to use them every single time, but do use them consistently. There is a theory that bold keywords get more attention from search engines, and they also draw the visitor’s view directly, so it’s a good idea to use them for emphasis.

Link deeply.   Getting links to your site is great, but getting links coming in to a bunch of different pages on your site is 100% better. It tells the search engines that you have a lot of valuable content on your website, and it’s not all on the home page.  When all of your incoming links go to your home page, it looks as if they’re automatically generated or that your site is shallow. In order to get deep links, you should put relevant, worthwhile content on your internal pages. Articles, services, and online tools will draw people to your site, and have them link back to it from their websites.

SEO directory sites.  In the United Kingdom and in Canada, there are lots of directories for company websites based in those specific countries. If you can secure a business address in one of those companies, you can also be included on the SEO directory.

Social bookmarking.  If visitors like your page and want to be able to return to it easily, clicking on a social bookmarking link not only helps them do that, it also helps with your search engine rankings.  You’ll want to take advantage of a widget that you can add to your page or blog so it’s easy for visitors to bookmark you.  These are some of the most popular social bookmarking sites:  Digg, StumbleUPon, Reddit, Squidoo, Blinklist, and Blogmarks.net.  There are literally hundreds more.

Newsletters and articles for ezines.  Ezine publishers sometimes archive their ezines, and the links to your site might remain active and feeding your site traffic for many years.

Text links should always be first in the source code for any pages on your website. Sometimes websites will have image links in the navigation bar, but there should always be text links first as the search engines will only follow the first link they hit on for each page.   Also make sure that those text links are relevant and valuable to your site.

Multiplicity.  If you have one website, why not two?  If you have a number of different topics that could each fill up an entire site on its own, it might make sense for you to have more than one domain.  Wouldn’t it be great to come up first AND second on a search for your particular product or service?  Plus, you can list both of your sites on the directories for more traffic.

Exchanges.  No, not the tired and pretty much worthless link exchanges, but rather exchanging articles with another site. You can publish an article on your site that is relevant and worthwhile to your readers, with a link back to the other site.  They will also post your article on their site with links back to you.  Fresh content for both sites, and high quality links for both sites- a win/win situation for you both!

Title your links.  This helps readers to know where you are sending them, and also is figured into the page relevancy by some search engines.

Overdoing the anchor text is not a good thing, because it looks like it’s automated. You should change it up; use the company name, what your product is, sometimes your URL.  The key is to keep it changing consistently.  Your anchor text should be something descriptive of your site, or your company name or website address.

Use a site map if your site is big; link to it from every single page on the site. Search engine robots can then find all of your pages quickly and easily for indexing. Even smaller sites need a miniature site map, the navigation bar, for search engine reasons.

For more information on optimizing your site, check out your seo marketing checklist.

Computer screen

If you have a website, you need it to rank high in the search engines.  If your site ranks high with Google and Yahoo it means you have lots of traffic coming to your site, and more sales or advertising revenue.

Think first of the phrase you want to rank well for; if there are only a few other sites using that phrase, it is relatively simple getting good placement with the search engines.  The trick is to be sure the exact phrase you want to rank for is in the <title></title> tag and in at least one other area on that page.   Not everyone catches on to this simple tip, and in fact many times when looking at someone’s page the keyword phrase is not included anywhere.  Be sure to include your phrase on your page, and also make sure it’s not included in a graphic of any kind- such as a logo.  Google does not read graphics and doesn’t know what words are contained in any graphics included.  Be sure to change the <title> tags on your page as well; you don’t want it just to say “Home” unless “Home” is your keyword phrase.

For more competitive phrases, you’re going to have to do considerably more work.  Here are some things that will help raise your rankings:

• Write a distinct <Title></Title> tag for every page, precisely describing that page.  Your title should be relatively short and definitely not more than eight to ten words.
• Add content, and pages, regularly. Shoot for two new pages a week to keep the content fresh. One page each week is okay, two is great, any less than that are you are not helping yourself.
• New pages should be compelling, unique, and a source of reliable information. If you want your site to rank high for alcoholic beverage recipes, then make it the absolute best resource for drink recipes out there on the web.
• Be sure to make your pages available through normal <A HREF> links.  Don’t use Flash links or JavaScript only
• Link to good quality sites which have content that is relevant to the readers of your site.  Ask, nicely, for a reciprocal link, but don’t demand it.
• Make your website design as user-friendly as possible. It should look good, give great information, and not have any annoying little ticks.
• Stop trying to trick the search engines into ranking you high.  If you build informative, high quality pages for visitors the rankings will naturally rise and stay that way.  Focus on quality and bringing the readers of your page excellent, compelling content.  Ultimately, your rankings and the money will follow.  Your site will not rank well if you don’t spend the time it takes to build a quality site; tricks might work temporarily but will not last.  Make sure that your site is better than all of your competition and eventually it will rank number one.  Google’s secret algorithm, which defines how sites are ranked, is a rapidly moving target.  Some tricksters think they can get shallow and shabby sites to rank high, and often they can on a short-term basis.  Google quickly figures these games out and weeds out the bad sites from the top rankings- after all; it’s their reputation on the line.

What constitutes a “quality” page to a search engine?  The same kind of things we look for: relevance to what we are looking for and the page is an authority on its topic.   If you do a search for types of bananas and get results for pages that sell jewelry—how happy will you be?  Likewise, if you do find a page about types of bananas, but the content doesn’t really tell you much- how useful is it?  Useful information is imperative!  Hopefully, your banana page will also be part of a larger site with lots of information about related items- maybe other fruits in this example.  It also is helpful if the page has been around for some time, loads quickly, and is free of broken links and cheap keywords.

Another article that might be of interest: Search Engine Optimization: The Weakest Link for Most Web Sites

Photo courtesy of Facebook.

Facebook Fan Pages are now being used by many businesses to advertise, often to the extent that it’s used as the company’s home Page, or to point users to the company website. This sort of strategy works well for small or local businesses, or those that cater to a niche market.  Facebook has made some recent changes that help companies gain search engine (SEO) traffic.

Another method of getting the message out to potential customers is through Status Feeds, invitations, and messages, which are considered the “viral channels.” Using SEO tactics on your Page can help your Page reach lots more potential “fans” for your business, including those that you have no direct connections to.

Here are a few ideas for Facebook Page advertising:

1. Pick a great name for your Page.

While the temptation is there to stuff it with keywords- DON’T! Titles that look like spam will hurt your Page’s natural (AKA “viral”) growth rate, whereby your fans pass on information about your business and your Page to their friends, and so on.  If it looks spammy, people won’t share it with their friends and will be likely to hide updates from their News Feed.

Likewise, really generic names, like “real estate” or “travel” will have a negative effect, because Facebook has caught on to these generically named Pages, and has started disabling the updates on them, effectively putting these Pages out of business.

The best strategy is to use the business’s real name and not to change it.  Changing the name later on will cost you SEO points and a Google penalty, so pick a name and stick to it.

2. Pick a great URL

Once your Page has more than 100 fans, you have the ability to pick a vanity URL. (Facebook calls it a Facebook username.)  This is a relatively recent improvement, and offers a good SEO opportunity because you can incorporate more generic keywords for SEO purposes.  By combining the company’s actual name with generic keywords, you can help drive traffic to your Page.

Be careful picking your URL/FB username, because it can’t ever be changed.  Make sure the name you pick will work for your business now and in the future.

3. Add your Keywords

Near the top of your new Facebook Page is an “About” box where you can add information about the business.  This is where you’ll want to load up your keywords.  Keyword-dense writing near the top of your Facebook Page is very SEO-friendly.  Facebook limits where you can put lots of information, and this area is highest in the CSS structure on the Page where you can add text.

To add text here, click the box under your profile picture on your Page, where it says “Write something….”  The character limit is 250, so be sure to use the best, most relevant keywords while choosing your message wisely.

4. Add text and links on the “Info” tab

Every Facebook Page also has an “Info” tab that has metadata about the business and the Page. Filling this information out completely will increase the content score of your Page for lots of Google searches. For instance, the address, city, and zip code are important when someone does a local search.  Company overview and products are important for product-specific searches.  The websites field allows you to add direct links to your site or to other important sites.  If this information is displayed on your Facebook Page, it makes it easier for potential customers to find you both on and off the site.

5. Add photos with captions and events with descriptions

Just like blog postings, the more often your content is updated and refreshed, the better your page will rank.  It is vitally important to constantly update your page with interesting and relevant information. When you share a photo, be sure to use the caption field to add a description of it, and use keyword-dense text.  When adding events, make sure you use keywords in the description field to help you rank higher.  Also, adding a discussion forum can help you to naturally rank higher for your specific keywords.  Content shared on Facebook Pages is indexable by search engines, so use that capability to your advantage.

For more information about SEO and Social Media, check out this article about Twitter followers

Internet marketing global network

This is not a typical low-key ebook. Make sure you take advantage of what you learn and join the article directory (search engine friendly) if you still can. The only reason this bonus content report is here, is because I signed up and was extremely impressed with the results it has achieved in such a short space of time. I say extremely because it’s way above anything else I know.
Anyway, see for yourself at the link below.

Unique Content Traffic (search engine friendly)

It’s a PDF file so it may take a few seconds to open…

Here’s a light hearted look at Google.

Give me a break! Forget placing Google on a pedastol and following it’s algorithmically led army of self centered robots and self glorified spiders! It’s a search engine with some clip on services (all be it some good services). But that’s it. It doesn’t own or run the internet. We do! Yes… the people who buy through it. The people who research through it. Communicate through it. Be it artistically or via a message etc. In most cases you’re really seeking traffic for your site if you own one. So focus on that. Google is just one of thousands of sources of traffic. Besides, people most often only search through Google.

Web 2.0 is here. This essentialy means people are back in control of what is perceived as quality again. Not unlike how things became popular before the introduction of the internet. People’s votes will always override algorithms. At least they will for a long while anyway. Your site might get pulled down for saturating the content with too many keywords (like the word Google in my first paragraph). Don’t get hung up on whether the search engines will slap you or tickle you for this or that. Try your best to contribute good, quality, original and relevant content over and over and as we say in Australia – she’ll be right mate! In the end, your audience the readers will make the decision.

Some actions result in more traffic than others. Recently the famed John Reece (blatant affiliate link) re introduced to his subcribers the old 80/20 rule. Which some people just don’t get and I’m not going to explain it here. However, it’s a rule that you should look at and ponder over. If you’re putting a lot of work into any one thing, it best be reliable, transparent, constant and worth the time. i.e. Should you place ALL your time trying to rank well with Google?

• Is it reliable? No! It changes its algorithms regularly which can and does affect the ranking and positioning of sites based on the finding of bots not humans. It has good reason to but the answer remains the same.
• Is it constant? No! For the same reasons mentioned above.
• Is it transparent? No! You only have to consider the Adsense payment program, or Matt Cutts video on Oop to answer that one.
  
• Is it worth the time? No! You should never place all your time on any one source. Things change. If you have been loyal only to Google despite being slapped and dropped from a great height into the pits of the SI – it’s time you gathered yourself & embraced the original goal of quality targeted traffic again.

Of course, if you have been a naughtly little boy or girl, you perhaps may have deserved your Google kick in the teeth. However, there are some questionable things occuring which may open yours eyes a little wider.

Recently, Oop (over-optimization) has been blamed by some as the reason many sites have been penalized and nudged off the park bench. To start with, anyone who uses a term like over-optimized should know that it’s a tautology. You can’t be over optimized because that means the same thing as not being optimized. It also sounds a bit like a license for Google to say any thing they like about events they can’t explain or don’t want to explain. Matt Cutts of Google fame makes an interesting comment on a video by basically dismissing any detailed information by saying something like ‘That’s about as much advice as I can give I’m afraid’ providing the broadest of reasons without having said anything explanatory or helpful at all as far as I could tell. No wonder webmasters, internet marketers and small business owners get frustrated and give up. The lack of distinct (distinct being the keyword here) guidelines, transparency and direction is disappointing and I think unprofessional.

Again, let me remind you that you are after targetted traffic. Read that last sentence again. It’s just a search engine – that’s it! It won’t be long before another search engine moves to higher ground. What will you do then? Swap allegiances and start all over again? You might have difficulty optimizing for every search engine out there but by using the 80/20 rule, at least cover your bets with MSN and Yahoo. Already the new search engine cuill.com is breaking new ground. Watch this space as they say!

I was recently approached by a subscriber who has worked hard for two years on producing quality, original content for her site. She tried to do everything right. She refused to buy in to any ‘black hat’ short cuts, produced hundreds of lengthy articles and advice for her readers. Her site was and still is extremely sticky. A reasonably large subscriber base lives in her server… and by the way she has few people unsubscribe. That alone tells you that she must be producing quality something. She has just one product for sale and it’s refund rate is a decimal measurement (hardly any refunds at all). Just before writing this, she was dropped from a page rank of 4 to zero. That’s not all, the whole site has been dumped in the waiting rooms of SI. For the record, she’s a single mom. She thought she’d done her share of struggling and now she’s back where she started. Needless to say I told her what I’m telling you here. Spread your traffic generation activity and you will survive and hopefully prosper. She doesn’t want to be mentioned for fear of retribution as she builds stock again. Think about that – she’s now in fear of a search engine. I think that’s another story on its own. Since this story, I have now heard two similar stories.

It’s of course wise to take stock of the fact that Google gets the lion’s share of the search market. But hey…that’s just the search market, not the referral market nor the social market nor the blog market, nor the affiliate market. advertising market, article marketing etc. must I go on…I’m sure you get my drift.

Then there was a previous slap where well known blogs and sites were being down-sized in rank and some had substantially reduced traffic. Word was, this was due to link-text advertising era. The jury is still out on whether it’s right or wrong. As I see it, it’s wrong if you are wooing Google because they don’t like it. Otherwise I can’t see anything wrong with it. One high-end player made humble mention about the down ranking and how he could see no cause for the penalty in a post on his site and within days that site was back up to where it was previously. Do you think it was the considerable power behind the readership consideration which helped that outcome? Hmmm!

Give people what they want. Use Web 2.0 properly and with care. If you’ve really got something to offer that’s worthy of the masses, work on getting traffic from people, not courting any one particular search engine and you will eventually see traffic – permanent traffic.

Of course, it would be remiss for me not to say that all of this is simply my opinion… because of fear of retribution…LOL. If you’re not living in fear of retribution, leave a comment and spill your colorful disgust below. Alternatively, you can be polite and socially correct and leave something defensive of Googles search engine’s position too! Either way, try and make it a contribution… Cause’ you never know who might read your comment…right?

If you feel that you’ve been taken for a ride once too often because of believing and buying software and services from so called internet Gurus, that’s OK because I think nearly everyone has to some degree in this game. Don’t misunderstand me, there are the good folk out there too. However, they seem to be a minority when it comes to quality instruction and know-how relating to SEO and organic traffic generation. Often poor knowledge leads to desperation, frustration and an urge to try things that we ought not. You have probably been on the receiving end of statements like, “The search engines have done it again…changed their algorithms!” Well this has mostly all come about by people trying to cheat and you perhaps already know this. None the less, you can end up sitting in front of your computer each day wondering where to start today and every day. You’ve paid good money for software and eBooks on traffic advice only to learn that the results were temporary, or false or the algorithm change blew everything out of the water that you had worked so hard on. All of this stress, disappointment, lost faith and other countless negative elements can lead to you doing things you might not normally do. Later, this can and most likely will affect health, your relationship with your family and friends and definitely your future.

I mentioned family because of the valuable time I lost by working my rear end off each day reacting to problems and with no planning to assist or minimize errors, I was always on the edge. Making money sure but not what I was used to earning and certainly not enough to keep my family the way I would prefer. I was getting tired of the poor quality information that led me nowhere and it was stressful. I knew that was not a good path to continue along but it was hard to stop because there didn’t seem to be a good alternative.

When I mentioned the term future I was referring to my realization that I couldn’t keep this up forever and something needed to change and fast. It seemed to me that the Guru’s ‘short term magic in a bottle‘ was based on their above average selling ability compared with the low quality or in some cases, non existent solutions. At this stage there was no one who I believed knew anything about search engine traffic or page positioning. Getting on the first page with a competitive site seemed unattainable anywhere in the future never mind the foreseeable future.

Sleeping at night became difficult due to my mind racing through the days experience and new problems. You may have or are experiencing the same restless activity. If you have then you know how fatigued it leaves you the following day. I was always on the edge of buying yet another search engine eBook and I was on nearly everyones list which left me with little time to be constructive anyway.

To add to all this, I discovered my mentor of many months had little to no SEO knowledge (which he purported to have) but was an incredible marketeer. I realized that he was mostly successful getting traffic because of the many years he had been working on the net together with his marketing skills rather than his ability to attract clean, targeted new traffic. I still take note of his marketing advice but he’s way behind on SEO. Lesson here is be careful not to confuse the two. SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) are completely different activities. Few people are highly skilled in both. If you take anything away from this article, it should be that first and foremost.

How is it that we have so much false information?

Here’s a few of the main reasons this occurs…

- Because they too believe that all solutions are short term and so they do business on that basis

- To make money no matter what and couldn’t care less about who they hurt along the way

- Copy Cats – meaning someone sees everyone else doing it, so they copy the product and also put it out there not knowing or caring if it’s up to date or true

- Here’s the most common – old useless ineffective automated products or services that are still sitting up there on the net that haven’t been removed because some poor unsuspecting ‘newby’ comes along and still buys it not knowing any better.

The ‘black hat’ operators will tell you “Why remove it if it’s making money? There is a lot of this attitude on the net, so beware! As a result, people go away misinformed with old and outdated SEO knowledge and proceed to waste their precious time.

How do you rank well or get on the first page?

You may be surprised to know that ranking well in Google isn’t that difficult. I am only two years into this internet business arena, and two of my sites are on the first page of their preferred keyword and many other sub keywords. One of these sites has over 250 million competing sites.

Why have I mentioned this? Because I only learned several months back the correct method for search engine acceptance and ranking from a reliable source. I am going to give you these sources too! It is much less difficult than fighting to maintain an existing and poor income by buying products or services to stay in one spot and suffer the stress and frustration (not to mention wasted time) that comes with it. Hence me writing this article. The remarkable thing is that you end up with a quality website no matter what platform you use and one that you can be proud of if you follow the system. Googles motto of “Do no evil!” becomes more meaningful.

Why is this so?

When most people start out on the internet they are most often limited to computer keyboard knowledge and many don’t even have that. The first exposure they have is with adwords with well worded advertisements promising them an enviable lifestyle etc. They really haven’t yet learned that the search engines have a job to do and a worthwhile job at that. If they could first learn that the engines can be your friend and supporter, I’ll bet most would still be around today or at least making a decent income from internet marketing. Instead they are indoctrinated that they must beat the search engines because they will be their hurdle. This can and does create a mindset. I should also say here that some people are successful doing this but they most often sell their product to the people they convert or who have already been converted to working against the search engines. There are of course those who don’t even know they’re doing this because they are told that their service or product is search engine friendly.

Listen up! What you do with this information is up to you but do yourself a favour and at least think about it every time you take up a new venture or want to upload something new to the internet.

Everything that has been devised to be a shortcut or a method of cheating to getting to the first few positions on the relevant pages on the internet has been discovered, is being removed or has been removed. If it hasn’t yet, it will soon – everything! The search engines’ objective is not to hold you back but to deliver to surfers what they are searching for. If you help the search engines do just that, would the search engines want to keep you away – no, of course not. If you are delivering tightly focussed information to those who are seeking that information, wouldn’t the engines promote your site – yes they would and they do! Of course you must do other things such as on-page optimization (once only). Promote your site a little (not much, just a little). The search engines have a vested interest in giving searchers or surfers what they are searching for in the smallest amount of time. This is what keeps a search engine popular. No one continues to work with an engine that has a whole pile of junk and Spam turn up every time you do a search. I’m sure you’ve had that experience.

So what does this boil down to? – Quality, original content built around the theme and structured in what are often called silo themes. That’s it! You must make the content relevant and ‘reader rich’ – a term I use meaning that it contains theme based content or information first with good spelling and grammar. It must be worth reading. It must be sticky too! Google is now monitoring how sticky sites are, measuring of course the length of time surfers stay on a site. That one sentence tells you heaps.

Is there any longevity in planning for traffic?

If you want to build or rebuild your site once only, planning is paramount. If you want a position in the top 10 sites then planning is paramount! If you want user ‘stickiness‘, then planning is paramount. You might be thinking “Oh but planning takes time“. Of course it does but NOT much and if you want good and on-going returns, so what if it takes you an extra day or even a week – think about that! If you’re thinking that only a technocrat or a masters degree student can plan for that sort of thing, then you’re wrong. It just takes a bit of guidance and common sense. If you can make a shopping list, you can plan your website.

What are the best tools for search engine optimization and why?

1. Don’t buy anything that doesn’t have a successful history of achieving what they say they can do for you. I don’t mean ’scraped’ shots of clickbank statements or Ad sense statements either. Make sure you get to see the results of their work. Some testimonials are real, some aren’t. They are not that reliable a source of verification. I must admit that anything you buy on clickback has a guarantee which has been infallible for me. However, it’s still a waste of time if you don’t get what you’re looking for or worse, what’s been promised to you.

2. Also look for operators who are prepared to give you free short term trials or samples – that always says a lot. Most good SEO operators or experts offering a service, give you information as well. Granted, it might be to ‘wet your appetite’ but if it’s quality and it’s going to improve your knowledge and future, ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth‘. Read it and make a judgement – easy!

3. See if you can contact the owner of the site. That’s always a good test on customer service. The good ones deal with you personally and almost straight away (within 24 hours). The take a ticket scenario leaves most of us wanting though! I have learned that there are only a few honourable operators who have in-depth experience in SEO and also boast great customer relations and I have mentioned these on my site at http://the-seo-site.com under the sidebar heading, Reviews. In addition, if you think that you would like to know more on the finer steps of achieving a site that can be on the first page of Google without having to base it on some incredibly rare ‘long tail’ term that no one uses, you should look for SEO tutors or mentors who take pride in what they do and offer quality advice and training. That’s the safest way to medium and long term success in this slippery industry.

Author Ray Baker. Ray has provided more relevant instant access to details on understanding Themes including LSI (latent semantic indexing), Silos and relevant tools on his site at Latent Semantic Indexing, Themes, Silo & SEO Tools
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