Google Changes and the Future of SEO

The imminent death of SEO has been a hot topic amongst SEO professionals for quite some time now. Some SEO professionals worry that their careers are in jeopardy since search engines are continually making improvements to their technologies. Search engines are in the process of completely revamping their ranking strategies to fight spammers and improve user experience. For example, Google is currently improving intent and behavior based search in order to provide more relevant search results. So what does this all mean for the future of SEO? Is the death of SEO an inevitable outcome of the advancement of search engines?

People have been predicting the end of SEO since the very beginning. While it’s certain that things on the SEO front are always changing and that search engines are getting smarter, SEOs will continually adapt to these changes just as they have in the past. As long as search engines list websites without requiring the websites to pay a fee, SEO will exist.

Google’s Improvements and What They Mean for the Future of SEO

In the quest to fight spam and improve user experience, Google is in the process of implementing a series of changes in behavior and intent based search. Every person who conducts a search for a particular term will have different results based on their location and search history. As a result of these changes, search engine optimization have to switch from only targeting keywords to focus more on increasing traffic and conversions. A possibility is that link building will become far less important in the future of SEO because Google will determine the value of a website based on how visitors engage with it. The ultimate goal of websites will be to provide compelling content that entices visitors to read, share, bookmark, and so on.

Social input through voting is another feature that search engines are tinkering with in order to provide user controlled rankings. Search engine users might have the chance to vote for sites they like and sites will get ranked based on such votes. The model will be similar what’s seen on social voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Of course, search engines will have to find a way to ensure that votes are made naturally in order to prevent black hat SEOs from fooling the search engine bots.

Google and other search engines are raising the bar in SEO. Initially, this will make it harder for SEO professionals to do their job but the end result is positive. Spammers and black hat SEOs will have more difficulty succeeding in their unscrupulous efforts and search engine users will be provided with content that is more relevant.

Humans, Not Machines

As always, the aim of webmasters and SEO professionals should be to appeal to humans. People spend so much time trying to trick the search engines that they forget who they are ultimately serving: people! Your site should be optimized but your priority should always be to fulfill needs and provide solutions. Considering the direction that SEO is going, human actions and behavior will ultimately determine rankings. Your SEO success depends on your ability to engage people through great content and social media marketing.

Article Source: ActiveAuthors.com

How to Choose a Pay-Per-Click Firm That Turns Clicks into Clients

There are two paths that you can take when it comes to managing your pay-per-click advertising campaign online. You can learn it yourself and make Google’s stock rise higher while you figure out the learning curve, then spend a lot of time keeping it running smoothly. Or, you can hire a professional pay-per-click firm to handle it for you.

I did both.

See, I know the position you’re in right now. I’ve been there. I’ve hired and fired 2 pay-per-click management companies. I was forced to learn on my own and spend tens of thousands of dollars.

My Experiences with Outsourcing My Pay-Per-Click Needs

The first pay-per-click management company that I hired kept raising my budget and jacking up my costs-per-click. Yet, I wasn’t getting any conversions!

So I decided to fire that PPC firm and manage my own pay-per-click campaigns. I studied under the top gurus like Perry Marshall. I bought all the ebooks and coaching programs. And, I spent more than $10,000.00 figuring everything out on my own until I grew a no name business into $50k per month in sales all from pay-per-click advertising.

But, I worked day and night on my pay-per-click campaigns. I spent a ton of time, money and effort on it. I couldn’t handle it anymore so I hired another pay-per-click firm to take over the accounts again. They did a nice job and are still around today, but I saw some holes in their approach.

Now, I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did. I want to help you choose a pay-per-click management company that’s actually going to help you turn clicks into clients.

Here are 7 Questions You Need to Ask Before You Hire a Pay-Per-Click Management Company:

1. This is going to piss people off: How many accounts does an account manager handle? Just because you have a “dedicated” account manager doesn’t mean he/she isn’t dedicated to 50 other accounts. This is not uncommon in some of the larger pay-per-click firms out there. If they work 40 hours per week that’s less than 1 hour/week they are spending on your account, provided they do nothing but work on accounts every minute of the day.

2. Can I peek in and have access to my Google & Yahoo accounts? There’s a new breed of PPC management that keeps everything secret. They are basically buying a click for $1.00 then charging you an undisclosed markup on the click. That’s why their setup & management fees are low. They’re making money on marking up your clicks.

3. What constitutes an improvement? You need to put in your order with the pay-per-click firm just like you would order a steak medium rare with a side of truffle fries to a waiter. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and don’t be afraid to speak up. For example: I want to increase sales while keeping my cost-per-sale under $50.

4. Do you track phone calls? If you are doing any part of the business offline then your pay-per-click management company should offer a way to track where your calls are coming from. Tracking calls back to specific keywords helps eliminate waste and will reveal high response terms you’ll want to dominate

5. What are your prices? Now, don’t be cheap. There is no such thing as a Mercedes Benz for Honda prices. I’ll admit some people don’t need the Mercedes, but if you are spending $2,000/month or more, chances are you at least need a certified, pre-owned BMW.

6. What is your experience? I’m all for giving the new guy a try. I was the new guy at one point. Nothing, I repeat nothing can replace experience. Experience comes from long hours of hard work. There are no magic formulas. Good solid basics and some creativity will always win in the end.

7. Will you involve me in the project? No one knows your business as well as you. Get specific on how often you’ll meet to review the results and plan next steps. A good pay-per-click firm will welcome your input. It is invaluable.

Now, it’s up to you. But, if you fail to ask the above questions, then you’re risking hiring and firing new pay-per-click management companies when things go south or spending tens of thousands of dollars learning how to do it yourself like I did. Learn from my pay-per-click outsourcing experiences.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleBiz.com

Learn How to Optimise Images for Improved Image Search Results

One area that is often overlooked when promoting a website online is the traffic that can be generated through image searches. Websites like Google offer searchers the ability to search specifically for images and, depending on the site that is being optimised, putting a little effort into ranking highly in an image search can be less competitive yet still yield excellent boosts in traffic. This article is going to look at a few simple techniques that can be applied to images in order to help them rank as highly as possible in image searches.

Much like when performing traditional search engine optimisation content is by far the most important element to get right. It is vital first to make sure that the image and the keyword that you are optimising for are related. In addition to this search engines have a tendency to rank larger, high quality images higher when compared to small and/or lower quality images.

Once the image and keyword have been chosen the next step is to ensure it is labelled properly. First, ensure that the filename is appropriate; use the keyword/phrase in the filename rather than meaningless strings of characters. Search engines much prefer Keyphrase.jpg over DSC013342.jpg. In addition to this make sure that the image tags are all being used to their full potential. Both title and alt tags should be used to accurately state what the image is of (ideally by using a keyphrase) in order to both help the image rank higher and to enhance the pages usability for users that might be unable to display images.

Finally it is extremely important when optimising an image to remember that it is equally important to optimise the page that the website is located on as well. In general the stronger the page that the image is located on the higher the image will be able to rank. As such it is vital to employ solid SEO to the page; ensure that title/header/meta tags are all correctly used and that the keyword density is effective throughout the text. In much the same way that search engines lend extra weight to links that are located within the pages text (provided of course that the text and link are appropriately related to one another) so to does the text around an image impact positively or negatively on its rankings. By providing meaningful and keyword appropriate text alongside the image will help the images ranking in search engines. The content is also important in trying to ensure users look around the whole site. If someone finds an image and deems the rest of the page to be irrelevant they will most likely bounce straight back out of the site.

Get Quality Website Traffic With More Clicks

Undeniably, getting quality website traffic is the most coveted goal of every affiliate. Aside from the benefit of becoming more popular over the internet, you can also get more chances of sales conversions thru the number of visitors that you site gets. Quality traffic pertains to the number of target customers visiting your site. There are web sites that get a good traffic but the people visiting the site are not exactly the target customers of a certain sales web page. In the end, it results to more clicks but less conversion. Having quality website traffic also means getting better page rankings on search engines.

The number of visits that you get will eventually push you up to the rankings. But, how does one get quality website traffic? Good traffic building schemes can truly help you out. There are several techniques on how to do it and one way is to get more links to your site. Affiliate marketers give special attention on their traffic building methods since this surely is one way to get quality website traffic. It is necessary to include your site or email address on your site’s pages or in sites where you have links. There are actually softwares that can help you build and create more links with other web sites.

It is for the convenience of affiliate marketers who want to save on the time they spend in honing their link building techniques. For those who submit articles to article directories, you need to include your web site address at the bottom of your article in case readers would be interested in knowing you more. It is actually a common thing that is being done in article submission. This method is considered as one of the most effective ways to generate more visits for a web site. This is one reason why many online marketers are striving to write articles and submit them to as many article directories as possible.

The more visibility you create in these sites, the more you can get chances of having quality website traffic. This is also a less costly search engine optimization method that is why many online marketers are taking advantage of this opportunity. Just keep in mind that you have to create quality write-ups, too. It is not just enough to write articles but it is more important to write good ones. People would still be critical in reading your work. If they are not satisfied with it, they won’t bother visiting your site anyway. Thus, you must know how to attract readers and how to make them come back to your web page.

On the other hand, you may opt to get reliable seo tools to optimize your pages. Making use of good keywords for your web pages can further contribute in making your page rank well in search engines. You may encounter search engine optimization tools that are equipped with features that will help you detect effective keywords being used by your competitors as well as give you quality keywords to use. Check out the latest tools in optimizing your site for it can alleviate the burden of doing all the jobs by yourself.

By: Menno Spijkstra

What Is Twitter All about?

Twitter is an online social media outlet that allows you to communicate with people that follow you in 140 characters or less. Twitter has more or less taken the Internet by storm. New users are are signing up by the thousands to use twitter every single day.

It has become a major source for information in a very short time. You can easily log on to twitter and get the scoop about almost anything going on in the world. Someone out there is twittering about it.

Most people do not understand twitter when they first began, and do not find the value in it. But, once you start to understand the power of twitter it can get very addictive fast.

In this article I want to talk a little bit about how you can get started with twitter. The first thing you want to do is sign up for a twitter account. It is very easy to sign up for account all you have to do is go to their website and follow the setup instructions. Before you know it you will have an account and be up and rocking.

Next, I would go and get an application called TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an awesome desktop application that will allow you to manage your twitter account. Once you start following many people it is hard to follow the stream online. So, if you can get an application like TweetDeck you can easily manage thousands upon thousands of followers.

Now, you need to go out and start getting followers. Twitter has a very helpful search tool you can use to simply search for conversations you would like to join. Then, you can follow the people that are talking about the things you want to talk about and join the conversation.

It is as easy as that. It is kind of like being in a crowded room and just walking up and shaking someone’s hand. But, in this instance you are behind a computer and really do not have to do it in person. So, it takes all of the nervousness out of introducing yourself.

This application is a great way to build relationships. If you’re starting a business, relationships are key. Henry Ford once said “a business that makes only money is a poor business.” And I believe that to be true. So, if you are out to use twitter just to make money you are going to be severely disappointed with your results.

But, if you are going to use twitter to build relationships, you’ll be surprised how the money actually follows. So, twitter is a fantastic way to communicate with many people at a time, on a large scale. It is a fantastic way to build relationships, drive traffic to your website and make money. That is if you use it correctly.

Twitter is a valuable resource for any business. That is why you see all the major companies jumping on the bandwagon. So, if it is good enough for multimillion dollar companies, is twitter good enough for your business?