In other words, the first thing that you need to do with SEO is to have a main, authoritative site. If you haven’t built one, that would be the first thing to do. From that point, you can create niche sites that link back and tie in to the main site. If you don’t create niche sites that are related to the main site, though, you might find that the SEO won’t do you much good. It’s also important to keep in mind that it takes time to build authority, even if you have a good site.

People have to be able to find you and they have to believe that you know what you’re talking about. That means that the site – or sites – that you create should have valid and interesting content on them along with the SEO targeted words and phrases. If the site content isn’t any good, the SEO won’t be nearly as effective as you had hoped.

There are several misconceptions about what SEO methods really work at achieving higher search engine rankings. Below we have listed some proven facts that are sure to help with your SEO efforts.

#1 – Manual submission is unnecessary: A few years ago, submitting your site to Yahoo or Google was beneficial in SEO. This is no longer necessary as search engine spiders are now configured to automatically find your site through relevant keywords and links.

#2 – When you’re, you’re in: Once your site is indexed into a search engine database, it will remain there unless you happen to get banned for one reason or another.

#3 – Link popularity works: Links are one of the most essential factors of SEO. Similar to keywords, links going to and from your site should be relevant to your content.

#4 – Title tags are important: Whenever possible, keywords should be fused into the title tags of your pages. This is what will be displayed in the results page of a search engine.

#5 – SEO isn’t everything: Some get so enthralled in SEO that they actually forget about the base of their business. During your campaign, continue to market your site and focus on making sales.

#1 – Once you reach the top, you can remain there permanently – there is no such thing as permanent ranking. Thousands of new pages are being added to the web every day, thus shifting the rankings frequently.

#2 – You can receive guaranteed positions – SEO experts can show you the results of past performance, but nothing is guaranteed. Anyone making such promises is someone you should avoid.

#3 – You can achieve instant link popularity – anyone promising instant link popularity plans to do so by spamming search engines. Genuine link building takes time and is far more rewarding.

#4 – Search engines are attracted to blogs – this is not true. A poorly optimized blog can be ignored, just like the poorly optimized e-commerce site.

#5 – Sub-domains can boost your rankings – while they can help, sub-domains will not automatically boost your rankings. You should always perform optimization on your primary domain, as it holds the bulk of your content.

The Big Three search engines continue to increase their percentage of total search volume. In August ’08 Google produced over 70% of all searches. This is over a 10% gain from the August ’07 figures.

Search Engine Aug 08 Aug 07

1. www.google.com 71.01% 64.03%
2. search.yahoo.com 18.26% 22.89%
3. search.msn.com 5.32% 7.98%
4. www.ask.com 3.45% 3.50%

Source Hitwise

Sure, you may already rank for “YourBusinessName.com” – but when it comes to attracting new customers you must rank well for the keywords your customers are using to search for information about your industry.

Everyday you delay working for a top 5 spot is another day your competition has to solidify their positions. As more and more customers turn to Google before any other source, you will be allowing your customers to develop a relationship with your competitors.If you need an SEO Company, BloomSEO is here to help.

As internet marketers we are in a position to shift our focus from market to market, nation to nation.  I’m not saying America is on a slippery slope, but if you have the ability to spread your risk, it’s time to move into the emerging markets of more stable economies around the world.

Do we need to learn Mandarin?  It couldn’t hurt!  It’s not required though – many English speaking nations are in a more stable position.  Canada and New Zealand come to mind.  Now is the time to globalize your business.  Too many webmasters have a narrow focus on just one country.  Use the medium to your advantage.  Diversify and grow!

Social bookmarking is the process of tagging and storing a website so it can be accessed at a later time. Instead of saving it to your browser like a traditional bookmark, you are saving it to the web. Because they are stored online, social bookmarks can be shared with friends and make great marketing tools as well.

For a website with abundant content, adding social bookmark invitations to pages and other media can lead to strategies that leverage volumes of traffic along with points of visitor contact. The momentum of thousands of web pages, each with an open invitation to share, has the ability to drive in links and traffic 24/7.

There are a number of social bookmarking tools strictly designed for online marketing. SocialPoster.com provides an environment where its easy to submit news and link submissions in various industries. They also use a frames option that is very helpful at submitting links faster and keeping your submissions unique.

Competitive research is, hands down, one of the most important processes in search engine optimization. It involves studying websites that are ranking for your targeted keywords in order to improving your rankings. When you begin an SEO project, you need to determine your goals in terms of content and links.

In order to beat the competition, you first need to be playing on the same field. As you work on optimizing your site, competitive analysis allows you retain your competitive edge and keep on top of your competitors. Getting to the top is only half the battle, staying there is much tougher.

You must understand why your competition ranks well and find out how your site matches up. This will help you set goals for coming up with additional content and your link campaign. Each keyword and industry can be extremely different so make sure to understand which sites are ranking well for your major keywords.

The most common mistake that those new to SEO make is assuming a site’s ranking is due to only one factor. There are literally over 100 components to Google’s algorithm; many different factors come into play when a site is ranking well. Several elements that otherwise would not carry much weight become tie-breakers.

Remember: the top ranking goes to the site that is least imperfect.

SEO Design Solutions has introduced the SEO Marketing 1.0 IE Toolbar. The Internet Explorer Add-on is a basic toolbar for internet explorer that allows you to stay tuned to the SEO, SEM, SMO and social media communities.

They put together their knowledge of software, SEO Tools and optimized templates, putting together a basic internet explorer toolbar with links to a variety of online resources, pit stops and blogs pertaining to SEO, SMO, SEM and Internet Marketing.

It features a bunch of links to top sites, useful social media sites and allows you to browse hundreds of RSS feeds while listening to music. They claim that this is “just a warm up,” promising real SEO tools in development for competitive analysis coming shortly.

No worries for Firefox users, as they’ve already noted that they “will have to do the same [for Firefox] and release a few add ons.”

Everyone is trying to brush up on their SEO skills in order to generate traffic for their website. While search engine optimization is very important in regard to ranking, that high-volume traffic you crave can be achieved in other ways. Whether it’s a blog post or landing page for your new product, that stampede of steady visitors can be achieved by creating a catchy title. Its all rather simple when you think about it.A title is the first thing your visitors will notice upon viewing your product or blog post. Either they’ll be intrigued enough to read on or take their surfing elsewhere.

Its important to know that conversion isn’t all about sales as each type of traffic is unique in its own way. The traffic you generate through a search engine may appear to have a higher rate of conversion as it could lead to sales from web surfers specifically looking for your products or services. However, traffic generated from someone who stumbled upon your blog from the intriguing title in an RSS feed or otherwise, can be just as prosperous in the long run.

Although you want well written content, the title is what will ignite a chain reaction of interest. It should be an instant attention grabber and summarize the content as well. If you can’t entice your visitors, acquiring subscriptions and generating revenue is out of the question. Connecting with your audience is the key to building traffic, and it all begins with your titles.

When blogging first caught on, a person could just blog about a topic that others were interested in and have a huge readership. Put a few links and ads on there, and you had yourself a great moneymaker for only a few minutes worth of work each day.

Now those days are over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be successful as a blogger, you just have to work at it a bit more.

Finding a good niche that people are interested in is the key, but there are so many blogs today that yours has to stand out. You need a plan for your blog, instead of just throwing it out there randomly.

Know what you’re going to talk about, have knowledge of your topic, and find out about your audience before you start posting and getting frustrated because no one is reading what you’ve got to say. It’s much more important for you, if you want to make money, to talk about something that you enjoy and that other readers can relate to.

If you don’t care about your topic and are only writing to make money, your readers will see that and go elsewhere to get their information.

Another advantage to having a blog, regardless of your industry, is a blogs ability to add weight to your organic position by utilizing long tail keywords. Ask us how having a blog can help you attract more business.

Twitter is all about social networking and about what each person is doing on an individual basis. If you aren’t willing to post once a day or more and talk about yourself, Twitter might not be the place for you. People can get to know you through the site and they often visit the links and other information that you put on there.

Be careful not to only post links, or you’ll look like you’re only using the site for spam, and that’s a real turnoff for a lot of people.

If you are open and honest and you really talk about yourself and your interests, and if you only put links in your posts that have some relevance to what you’re talking about, you’ll have a pretty good chance of sparking some interest on the site.

That can help you market both yourself as a competent person as well as project your business as a good company to deal with.

The following is a day-by-day example of the promotion in action. I’ve skipped the ‘creation of content’ step and moved directly to publishing and promoting.

	Day 1 Content published by 6 pm. Promotion through contacts begins. Pushing the content requires constant attention. It’s impossible to guarantee success but hard work and valuable contacts always help. It’s a long sleepless night with lots of caffeine.

	Day 2 Promotion of content through network continues until the early afternoon. By 3 pm all resources have been exhausted and the buzz / link baiting nature of the content is left to stand on it’s own. Visitors are compounding hourly. Finally time to take a break!

	Day 3 The content has been republished on social networks by complete strangers. Visitors per hour peaks around 5 pm. The campaign is a huge success. It’s not possible to predict how much traffic a campaign like this will generate, but we are always happy with anything over 5000 visitors. This campaign has already resulted in 30,000 visitors.

	Day 4 Direct visitors and search engine traffic now account for a large portion of the traffic. The site is ranking page 1 for all searches associated with the content.

	Day 5 Traffic is trending slightly up again. Mostly due to direct visitors. Likely cause: email to friends. Usually traffic tapers off by Day 5.

The traffic and links generated rarely have instant sales potential. For a concept to “go viral” it must appeal to a large audience and particularly to opinion makers and trendsetters. Trendsetters do not usually “buzz” about commercial products. The concept here is to give something away, and gain an audience.

The true value comes from attracting people and links to your site. Success results in a lasting flow of traffic and recognition from the search engines. It’s also been our experience that the search engines like to ‘follow a leader’ – once you’ve had a successful viral-buzz-baiting event, your content from that point forward gets unique attention.

What does it cost? From start to finish this internet marketing technique often requires close to 80 hours of work. In addition it is necessary to enlist the help of other internet marketers that will call in the favors in the future. Pricing will vary depending on the nature of the site being promoted and the ideal content for that site. At a minimum you’ll need a marketing budget of a few thousand dollars to implement this strategy.

The long term lasting effects of a successful viral-buzz-baiting campaign are a competitive advantage to your business. Once you have the ability to command an audience to your site, the web becomes a much friendlier place.

This technique is one of the many powerful SEO strategies the Bloom SEO Company can use to benefit your online marketing campaign.

How do you find relevant sites that will provide links?  Good question.  Do a search on the top search engines for your keyword, plus some of the most common terms found on link pages.  Here’s an example:  Insert Keyword Here “add site”

Besides “add site”, here are some other common terms:  add link, submit url, submit site, submit link, add website, add web site, suggest link, suggest site, suggest url, favorite sites, favorite links, favorite websites, reciprocal, link exchange, and many others.  This list should get your started.

Be sure to keep track of which sites you’ve contacted.  You don’t want to annoy or spam other site owners.  Stay organized.

2. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Whenever you think of a possible term someone in your market would type in, email it to yourself right away. Then add it to campaign later. Also… use the word to create new words. There are many paid tools… but Google also has a free built-in tool. Use any tools available to you.

Example: You may think, oh yeah… someone that might buy my product would be looking up the xxxxxxx regulation that applies to their industry/hobby. Add that to the keyword list.

3. Ideally every keyword would have it’s own custom ad. But, that is not realistic. You might end up with 20,000+ keywords. Some of which rarely get traffic, making an ad for each is too time consuming. So you will want to break them into categories and have custom ads for each category.

Example: You may decide basic users/buyers of your product will have concerns about ‘ease of use’ — so that would go into the ‘Easy to Use’ campaign. Some die-hard, serious hobbyists may be more interested in the xxxxx power feature — put that into a different campaign that pushes that specific point in the ad.

Keywords can get moved back and forth. Keywords can each have a custom bid attached to them. (some convert better than others and are worth more).

Let things run a while. You need 1000 impressions to make an informed judgement on ‘click through’ …plus a week of time.

You need at least 100 clicks on a keyword to gadge the value of it.

Be patient, but always take some time to go back to the campaigns and look at the numbers. Make small adjustments, don’t over correct. Little changes here and there will slowly develop a low cost, high conversion campaign that you can profit from.

I have been told that the only way to get site optimization is to get pay per clicks! I have been doing my own blogging but so far I have not seen much good. As well I was considering an autoresponder as well but I am told I need a list and purchasing lists I am told are not allowed to use. I am just working so hard on high site rankings. It is a lot of work that is for sure!

Just not so sure how long you have been working with SEO but felt I should write to see your insite on things. Take Care!

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Thanks for your question Christie!

Pay per click, or PPC is not Search Engine Optimization. SEO is considered ‘organic search engine marketing’ while PPC is paid search engine marketing.

SEO should start with keyword research. Here’s a great (Free) tool you can use to explore keywords: SEOBook Keyword Tool

Be imaginative. Think like your target market. For instance: If you owned a dog grooming company you’d first think of “Dogs” as a good keyword. You’d be right, but the competition for it will be severe. Instead, try adding in a geographical term – maybe “Dogs YourTown” — not only will this be an easier keyword to rank, but it’s also more likely to convert into sales. Keep working at this keyword list until you have at least 20 keywords in mind. 100+ is better.

Now, with your keyword list in hand start working on your site. Your index page (homepage) should discuss one keyword. Create a list of links on your index page. Each link will be a keyword that links directly to a new page that discusses that particular keyword. You following so far? So, if one link is “Poodle Shampoo” then that link would take visitors to the “Poodle Shampoo” page. On that page you’d discuss that topic. Be useful, be informative. Write your pages for humans, not for Search Engine Spiders. But at the same time, be sure to use the keyword and synonyms of the keyword often. On that page have the same links as on your homepage, but with 1 new one – the link back to your homepage which has “Dogs YourTown” as the text (assuming your homepage is about “Dogs YourTown”).

Once your site is operational and useful, it’s time to go link building. For maximum effect, you’ll want to concentrate on building links from related sources. Here’s the easy way to do that –> Search your favorite Search Engines for: “Dog Links”, “Grooming Links”, “YourTown Links”, and anything else you can think of. Go through the listings one at a time. Look for “add a link” buttons/links. Request a link. When you fill in link title or website title, add in some Keywords! So… if your site is YourTownGroomer.com then make the title: Dog Grooming by YourTownGroomer — always mix it up. You don’t want every site to have the same content about you.

This is simple SEO. But it works! It works very well. Don’t expect to rank for “Dogs” — but you are likely to rank very well for geographic terms and low-competition terms.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

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Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask share 40% of the total searches, while Google holds over 25% more market share than those 4 top search engines combined!