Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Internet and Businesses Online - SEO

Web design, like all of modern marketing, is an evolving business. There's much more to building a great website than excellent graphic design or search engine optimized (SEO) content. Truly outstanding web design is balanced, effectively blending and prioritizing branding activities, visitor usability, and search engine friendliness all into one well-oiled virtual machine.
Branding in Web Design
Web design and development cannot occur in a marketing vacuum. A website must blend seamlessly with a company's entire web presence and all of its online and traditional marketing materials. For example, at the most basic level of branding there's your logo. If you have an existing logo and develop a new one during a web design project, you must update that logo everywhere. Otherwise, how are online visitors to know that the store they saw a billboard for is the same one they're locating now online? If your company has a mascot, primary-color-heavy marketing materials, or a tongue-in-cheek voice, those things have to be consistent both on paper and online. Whether your website sets the tone or simply matches what's already there is irrelevant: the important thing to accomplish is consistency.
Usability in Web Design
When writing marketing materials, it's important for your content provider to use language that the majority of your target audience will understand and relate to. It's the same in web design. Sure, it's nice to have a designer who can build the most complex of websites, but if your target demographic does not consist of computer engineers who understand the back workings of Linux, there's not only no benefit to having a highly complex website, it's actually a major deterrent to your consumers.
Finding and maintaining this balance in a web design project can be particularly difficult for companies such as IT firms, whose work is highly technical but whose audience isn't necessarily well-versed in the latest technological advances. Thus, ensuring that the site appears and is very user friendly, while emphasizing the company's outstanding technical knowledge base, is essential. Even with the most simple of information or sales sites, those with no technical information, it's still massively important that the site be usable (no broken links, easily navigable interface, clear instructions, intuitive design) or customers will simply click away to the next option: your competitor. Keeping a website simple, accessible, and usable for its intended consumer base is just as important as maintaining branding through aesthetics, tone, and style. Finding that balance, however, is a skill that takes experience and a finely trained eye.
Search Engine Friendliness in Web Design
Search engine friendliness is the third component of web design, after usability and branding, that creates that virtual hat trick of a successful website design project. By "search engine friendliness," we mean keeping URLs short and neat so they are easy to share and decipher and so they can contribute to SEO and SEM campaigns. If your URLs are little more than a string of letters, numbers, and dashes, they're nearly impossible to remember and don't hold any keywords. But if they're intentionally shortened and organized, search engines and consumers alike will find your site easier to use, and that, coupled with great usability and consistent branding, is what keeps 'em coming back for more.
Larry is the author of this article about search engine optimization in web design. He currently resides in Boston and has helped business market smarter. He has given them tips on how to make their websites SEO friendly and create a better user experience. In his free time he enjoys spending time with his family and traveling around the world.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7417264

Video SEO - The Best Online Video Marketing

Making use of videos is a superb way to boost marketing campaign online. However, it is very crucial that it reaches the target audience.Video SEO is the best way to ensure this. The video that you use for advertising purposes should become visible and accessible to the audience and create a buzz. People have started making use of video optimization through which they make use of tools and techniques to promote a video and improves its ranking. When you search for a thing on a search engine, it provides you with thousands of website links that contains the entered phrase. Generally, the search engine cannot read the video format and that is why, it is necessary to provide our videos with some keywords for better ranking.
Well, the video SEO is nothing but written SEO; the thing is we apply it to the web videos. Note that the audience normally switches to another video if your video exceeds the time limit of 5-8 minutes. If you are planning to use YouTube for videos, make sure you keep some things in mind. First, it will serve you in making your video go viral. You must allow comments on your video without worrying about negative feedbacks. This will help you in understanding about the trend and the response to the video. On the other hand, the positive comments will help enhance your business or site and better the things. If you are not sure whether it will work or not, you can monitor and choose what to keep and what not. This will improve the accessibility of your video.
If you are looking ahead to draw attention to your website by attracting traffic through video and for this, you submit the video to another website, you will be able to make very little or no profit. When we search for something online, we are more likely to select a popular website from search results. Even if someone will watch your video on some other website, it will not help you. Thus you must upload videos on your sites and not on some other website. No matter where you upload your videos, the video marketing will serve you tremendously if your video is well recorded, edited, and commented. Proper keyword research and selection are very important. You must cover all of them and also include some regional references if you are willing to target the local audience. Moreover, you should insert the keywords creatively in the title. The titles should be catchy and describe something appealing about the video. The comments and location tags also play their part in improving the video visibility. You must also include a brief description and provide a back link. Adding a transcript and subtitles can also prove beneficial as when someone launches a search, the search engine also scans them. This may serve in achieving better rankings.
Several video submission tools are available that can help you a lot in achieving top ranking. You may require some time to set your hands on them. You may also take help from your friend or SEO expert. Thus go ahead and make use of video SEO to attain positive results.
We serve you in the field of Digital Marketing by providing latest updates related to trends in Web Services and Internet Promotion. You can make use of them to advertise your products efficiently online.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7418311

Why Conduct SEO Analysis?

Search engine optimization is the backbone of all marketing efforts online. You should invest in SEO if you run a business and have a website. It is impossible to rank and gather good traffic without employing SEO strategies. You also have to be aware of your competitors when employing such strategies. It is impossible to devise an effective strategy if you do not know what the rest are doing. You have to check and see what your competitors are doing to come up with something better. You have to carry out an SEO analysis to understand what SEO techniques they are using. When doing it for the first time, you can always just get an SEO analysis for free. Some see it as tedious, but it is inevitable for success. In fact, you might want to conduct an in-depth and funded analysis once you see the benefits it can give you. Read on to find out more about SEO analysis.
Prior to SEO Analysis
You have to remember several important things when agreeing to an SEO analysis. You have to organize the analytics to monitor your own website properly. You cannot check and evaluate the SEO metrics of your competitors if you cannot measure your own. Setting your website's analytics gives you a great opportunity to set the standards. Some important information or factors you should track include:
- Visits per month
- Authentic visit-to-inquiry conversion rates
- Visits as a result of non-branded organic search
- Page by page keyword densities and word counts
- Inbound links - number and quality
Many SEO experts also recommend setting up or carrying out a keyword research campaign before analysing any competitor pages. The basis of SEO is keywords. They are fundamental building blocks. You have to choose the right keywords for your strategy to work. This does not mean you have to use the keywords you see automatically. Having an idea what your competitors use is a great basis for your own keyword research.
Who to Compare To
You have to choose competitors to conduct a competitor analysis and a reliable free SEO analysis. Some businesses find this easy to do while others do not, especially if they offer a wide range of products or services. People interpret the word "competitor" differently. Some think their direct competition is those companies or businesses within their area. This is not entirely wrong, but it is best to go looking for your rivals in your industry rather than your geographic location.
Specifically, your greatest "opponents" are those ranking in the first page of search engines when you search for terms related to what you offer. They are the ones you should observe and take notes from. Geographic locations have impact once people start looking for products or services specific to your location. That is when you have to think about those within your area of operations. Other factors you should look into include the age of the website, the effectiveness of their brand online and their market reach.
You should study pages like roarsearchmarketing.com.au for more information on SEO analysis and techniques.
Michael Bray has been a web developer for five years and has worked with SEO specialists and recommends excellent websites on online marketing like (roarsearchmarketing.com.au.)

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7421197

How to Choose the Best SEO Training Course and Trainer?

So you've decided to learn SEO and now you're looking for an SEO training course and you're confused with lots of SEO training programs and want to know which would be the best for you.
I cannot tell you which one is the best, but would certainly point out a number of things to consider so that you could make your own best decision.
1. Answer yourself, why do you want to learn SEO? What is your end goal?
There are different reasons for different people to learn SEO viz.
a. To promote your own website
b. To add an extra skill into your resume
c. To prepare a job interview
d. To start a career as an SEO
e. To start your own SEO firm
If your goal is just to get an idea about Search Engine Optimization, what is it, how it works... Then there are tons of information available on the internet to learn... You can read articles, find blogs, go to YouTube etc. All these methods can give you an instant basic information about SEO (I do not mean that you can't be an expert by your own, actually you would be required to follow this path throughout your SEO life)
But if you are serious about SEO, this can be a time consuming and tiring effort. A good SEO training can give you a good start in less than 5 weeks of training (some claims in a week timing) which cannot be achieved in months from reading, reading and reading. There are numerous online resources but I would advocate the one-on-one SEO training if you don't have enough time and want to shorten the journey.
2. What do you want to learn about SEO?
a. Just the general principles behind SEO as the part of internet marketing?
b. Practical skills as On-Page optimization, Off-Page optimization, link building etc.
c. Latest SEO trends, what works and what now.
Basic SEO practices can be learnt from the internet.
The challenge behind learning from internet is that since SEO is an ever changing skill, (Google algorithm updates change the game) you can be tied with old age SEO ideas which may be useless now.
3. How do you want to learn SEO skills?
Everybody is comfortable with different way learning. Some might get it exciting learning by reading, some need somebody for discussions, some might like to join large groups, some might like to learn individually.
4. Who is the trainer (NOT the institute)?
The trainer is, who interacts with you. So don't take the decision on the name of the institute, but do some investigation about trainer. Big brands may have thin trainers.
While knowing about trainer, try to find out -
a. How long has the trainer been in the SEO field?
b. Does the trainer have SEO working experience himself?
5. Do learn basic SEO first.
Even you've decided to join the SEO training program, learn some basic SEO practices form internet (blogs, articles, tutorials), so that you could judge and ask what you're going to learn in SEO course.
6. Go for a short interview of the trainer.
If possible, fix an appointment with a trainer and talk SEO with them for 10-15 min. You need to present yourself as if you Know SEO. And try to judge would you get in-depth SEO knowledge? (Sometime you'll save yourself form SEO Training SCAM)
7. Visit their sites and see how do they treat their business?
Compare the websites and figure out how these websites are performing. Are they themselves serious about their sites?
a. Professionally designed
b. Quality of content
c. Website speed
d. Ranking in search engines for their primary key words like (SEO training in location)
8. Last, Do they themselves do, what they're going to teach?
Are the training people themselves involved in the SEO business, how many clients', websites they handle and what is the performance of those websites.
9. Costs
Be clear about costs; never join the long course at once. First join the basic SEO for small amount. It can save you from bigger financial losses (sometimes).
If you're looking for a professional SEO training course, visit SEO Training Jaipur, You can join a classroom course or can contact for Online SEO Training also.
Parmveer Singh is Web designer, Developer, SEO and Internet marketer, and Trainer.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7383859

What Are Search Engines?

Search Engines make the web convenient and enjoyable. Without them, people might have difficulty online obtaining the info they're seeking because there are vast sums of webpages available, but many of them are just titled based on the whim of the author and the majority of them are sitting on servers with cryptic names.
When most people discuss searching on the internet, they are really referring to Internet Search Engines.
Early Search Engines held an index of a couple of hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe a couple of thousand inquiries every day. Today, a major internet search engine will process vast sums of webpages, and react to millions of search queries daily. In this chapter, we'll let you know how these major tasks are performed, and how the search engines put everything together to enable you to discover all the information you need on line.
When most people discuss searching on the internet, they are really referring to Internet Search Engines. Prior to the Web becoming the most visible aspect of the Internet, there were already Search Engines in position to greatly help users locate info online. Programs with names like 'Archie' and 'Gopher' kept the indexes of the files saved on servers attached to the web and significantly reduced the quantity of time necessary to find pages and documents. In the late eighties, getting proper value out of the web meant understanding how to make use of Archie, gopher, Veronica and others.
Today, most Online users confine their searching to world wide websites, so we'll limit this chapter to discussing the engines that concentrate on the contents of Webpages. Before the search engines can let you know the place where a file or document is, it has to be found. To locate info from the vast sums of Webpages which exist, the search engines employ special computer software robots, called spiders, to construct lists of what is available on Websites. Whenever a spider is building its lists, the procedure is known as Web crawling. To be able to construct and keep maintaining a good listing of words, the spiders of a search engine have to check out a great deal of pages.
So how exactly does a spider begin its travels within the Web? The usual starting place are the lists of well used pages and servers. The spider begins with a well known site, indexing what is on its webpages and following each link located in the site. This way, the spider system begins to visit and spread out over the most favored portions of the net very fast.
Google initially was an academic internet search engine. The paper that described the way the system was built (written by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin) gave a good account of how fast their spiders could conceivably work. They built the first system to make use of multiple spiders, frequently three at a time. Each spider will keep about 300 connections to Webpages open at any given time. At its peak capability, using 4 spiders, their system was able to scan over one hundred pages every second, creating about six hundred data kilobytes.
Keeping every thing running quickly meant creating a system to feed necessary data to the spiders. The first Google system had a server focused on providing URLs to the spiders. Instead of using an Online site provider for a domain name server which translates a server name in to a web address, Google obtained its own D.N.S., so that delays were minimized.
Whenever a Google spider scanned over an H.T.M.L. webpage, it made note of a couple of things:
What was on the webpage
Where the particular key words were located.
Words appearing in subtitles, titles, meta-tags along with other important positions were recorded for preferential consideration after a user actioned a search. The Google spiders were created to index each significant phrase on a full page, leaving out the articles "a, " "an" and "the. " Other spiders just take different approaches.
These different approaches are an attempt to help make the spider operate faster and allow users to find their info more proficiently. For instance, some spiders will keep an eye on what is in the titles, sub-headings and links, combined with the 100 most often used words on the page and each word in the very first 20 lines of text. Lycos is believed to make use of this method of spidering the net.
Other systems, for example AltaVista, go in another direction, indexing each and every word on a full page, including "a, " "an, " "the" along with other "insignificant" words. The comprehensive aspect of this method is matched by other systems in the interest they direct at the unseen part of the net page, the meta tags.
With the major engines (Google, Yahoo, and so on. ) accounting for over 95% of searches done on line, they've developed into a true marketing powerhouse for anybody who understands how they work and how they may be utilized.
About Icon Digital Media Marketing
Icon Digital Media Marketing, an email marketing and digital media group with a head office in Atlanta, GA. Icon specializes in full service opt-in email marketing, email data rental, email database management, social media consultancy and management as well as Search Engine Optimization and Mobile Marketing. We provide cutting edge digital marketing and advertising solutions for our clients locally and abroad. Contact us today for digital marketing success http://www.icondigitalmediamarketing.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7426580