New SEO Trends for 2009

There has been huge amount of speculation regarding the changes that 2009 is about to bring in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and methods for web marketing. This is probably the hottest topic of discussion across the web. Well, the economic recession has largely affected the online marketing and advertising industry in terms of reduction in overall budget. This financial downfall has left every Internet marketer wonder about the changes that the new year would bring on Search Engine Marketing, especially on paid search marketing.

Here are some of the factors that online marketers should consider while changing their SEO strategies in this year.

What’s Going to be more important – Ranking or Conversion?


According to the latest SEO trends conversion has taken over ranking - in terms of importance. Even though, getting high ranking assures better exposure and more publicity for a website on the Internet, ultimately it is the conversion rate that matters most, as it is the main purpose behind all of this publicity and promotion. The term conversion actually refers to the behavior of user that fully meets the objective of online marketing campaign. The behavior includes registration, purchase, lead and even a sale. While SEO mainly focuses on the strategies of ‘keyword density’, conversion is focused on a much lager aspect, which involves content creation, traffic generation and above all growth of Return In Investment or ROI. However, companies providing SEO services have now realized that to measure the success of their SEO campaign, they need to shift their focus on conversions.

Optimization or Marketing – which is more important?


Recently, SEO companies are trying to establish themselves as marketing companies indicating the changes that are about to occur. The companies are now more concentrating on doing things like developing contents, submitting web pages to different web directories and network management. This change has occurred mainly because of the importance web contents gained over the past few years. Gradually, the strategies that earlier focused on web designing are being replaced by Social Media Optimization and viral marketing programs. On the other hand some of the well-established SEO techniques like manipulation of HTML tags and sitemap creation are becoming less effective as less popular.

Even though, it is hard to predict what the scenario would be over the entire year, it is quite evident that online marketing is emerging as a creative process driven by new ideas and methods focusing on building strong lasting relation with customers, establishing online presence and maximizing revenue.

For further queries on SEO San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

All You Need to Know About Getting Backlinks

Getting quality backlinks to a website is perhaps one of the major concerns of every online business owner and so it is for SEO service providers as well. In this article I have discussed about the different ways of gaining more quality backlinks to a website. But, before going into that detail, you first need to understand the meaning of backlinks. Well, backlinks are basically the links on other web pages that redirects the visitors to your website when they click on it.  

Backlinks are of huge importance when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the ranking of a websites in search engines. So, you can understand that backlinks are extremely valuable for any kind of website. The more backlinks you have, the higher ranking your website will get in search engine results. However, it is the search engine algorithm determines your site ranking by the quality and ranking of the pages that link to your website and of course by the quality of your site content.  

Quick Backlink Gaining Strategies 

Well, here are few tips on how to gain more quality backlinks that you will surely find useful.  

Link exchange is undoubtedly the most popular backlink building strategies that you can apply. All you got to do is find out other web owners or webmasters who have sites relevant to your own and add their links to your site and in return get your site links added on their pages. However, there are few other methods of link exchange as well. 

 

Forum postings will also help you to get good backlinks. Since all the online forums allow signatures, it is a good practice for building backlinks. Make a post and add a link that leads to your website at the bottom, as a signature. 

 

Submitting your website link to a web directory is by far the easiest ways to get backlinks. You will find a lot of web directories on the Internet where you can submit your site link. This will help you in two ways – get good backlinks and attract more traffic. 

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketingbased in San Francisco, feel free to contact us

 

Find Out the Different Forms of Banner Advertisements

Even a few years back, banner ads were speculated to be an extremely expensive online advertising medium with no return on investment and thus were termed as ‘a thing of the past’. In reality, banner ads have neither disappeared nor lost its popularity. They are now considered to be one of the most effective mediums that online business holders can utilize to promote their business to the world audience. Worldwide webmasters use banner ads for their SEO services to market an online business.  

Over the past few years this unique form of advertising has gone under several changes and modifications. The banner ads we see on the web nowadays did not even existed three years back. So, if you want to utilize banner ads to the fullest, you need to swim with the flow and honor the changes accordingly. In this article I have provided some useful information about banner ads that I think would help any new comer.  

Different Forms of Banner Ads 

First let us take a look at some of the newest and improved forms of banner ad. Banner ads are now everywhere in the form of pop-up and pop-under windows. These ads might seem extremely annoying to the users, but they certainly draw their attention. People are actually buying spaces to promote their products or services through these pop-up or pop-under ads. Well, I am not quite sure about the effectiveness of this banner ad for, but it’s surely becoming popular day by day.  

Ever wonder how banner ads seem to be psychically able to follow your train of thought? Google AdWords and other similar "little box" ads are cropping up all over the place; creepy but clever, the advertisements are tailored to the viewer's input. They are triggered to appear when relevant keywords, chosen by the advertiser, are typed in. This is however another very popular form of banner ad.  

Another form of banner ad is very tactfully disguised as simple text links. Some ads clearly states that they are “sponsored” links, while others appear near the top of listing with a hard to see disclaimer placed underneath saying the links are supplied by so and so. These spaces can be bought outright or advertisers can bid for it like an auction in order to get the best and highest placement. Even though it is quite expensive, this form of banner ad is perhaps the best way to bring in targeted traffic to a website.  

However, with my so many years of experience as a SEO San Francisco, I certainly believe that if you can utilize it properly banner ads can become one of the best marketing techniques that you could ever think of. So, go ahead and find out the ways to best utilize your banner ads to promote your business across the Internet.

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us

Twitter in Respect to Search Engine Marketing

Over the past couple of years Twitter, the micro-blogging site has taken over the web by storm and thus today, it ranks third after MySpace.com and Facebook.com in respect to its membership. Even though it doesn’t help in search engine optimization of a website, Twitter has a huge impact on search engine marketing (SEM). If utilized perfectly, Twitter can become one of the biggest platforms for promoting online businesses.


With my long-term experience as a SEO, San Francisco, in this article I have provided an overall idea about Twitter and its importance in search engine marketing or SEM. But before going into detail, first let me define what Twitter is about. Even today, when it has already captured the web by storm, many people still have a very vague idea about this new technology.

What is Twitter?


Twitter is basically a micro-blogging site, which can be utilized for marketing purpose. By creating an account at Twitter.com, you basically create a micro-blog for your company. The significant difference between a regular blog site and a micro-blog is that while a regular site allows users to create posts of more than thousand words, Twitter prefers to keep it short by allowing a maximum 140 characters post. Even though the number seems insufficient for writing something meaningful, there are ways through which you can exchange meaningful information over Twitter.


Twitter can turn out to be extremely beneficial for certain online marketers as it provides ample opportunity to build up a very close relationship with people who take interest in your company products or services, which caters to a specific audience. This will undoubtedly make it easier for marketers to market their products or services to interested audience and turn them into potential customers.


But for the people who are interested only on creating links and getting higher ranks in search results, Twitter will be of very little use. First of all Twitter links are NoFollowed and secondly the URLs longer than 30 characters are generally compressed to fit in, which means your keywords might not be visible to search engines. So, if are looking forward to build links and receiving link juice, then Twitter is definitely not for you.

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

Video Marketing: Is It Worth the Effort?

Video marketing is undoubtedly the hottest, fastest and the newest forms of online or Internet marketing that would help your website to get ranked high in search engine results within a very short period of time. If you wish to see your website rank high in Google for your targeted keywords then this unique marketing method is probably the right choice for you. Today, worldwide webmasters and Internet marketers are widely using this method for their SEO services.


But to do video marketing effectively, first you need to know what exactly video marketing is. Video marketing is basically like a commercial that comes on television, except that it is much more effective and powerful. Through video marketing, you get a chance to demonstrate your company products or services and attract visitors to your company website by adding your website link to it.

The Benefits of Video Marketing


There are however, several benefits of video marketing. It has been proved that web surfers and Internet users are much more attracted to video contents rather than text contents. Moreover, it leaves a deeper impact on the viewers and encourages them to know more about the product or service that the video talks about. The best part of video promotion is that you can do it for absolutely free.


Even though some people still refuse to accept the advantages and effectiveness of this marketing technique, most Internet marketers find video marketing to be the coolest and easiest way to promote a business online. The technique works perfectly because it’s very simple and convenient. The viewers would not need to do anything else apart from sitting back and enjoying the video. However, the most significant advantage of video marketing is its visibility. You can upload your video to a lot of different free video sharing websites and spread it across the web through other networks as well. You can have it on your website, get it bookmarked on different social bookmarking sites and share it on free video sharing websites in order to generate free traffic to your website.


So, by creating a video clip for your online business and optimizing it for your targeted keywords, you can actually get a much more positive response in terms of more traffic and more potential customers. With my experience as a SEO San Francisco, I have been experimenting with this technique for the past few years and finally arrived to this conclusion that video marketing will become one of best and the most effective online marketing techniques in near future.



For further queries on SEO San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

Download the original attachment Google PageRank - The Primary Concern of Every Internet Marketer

PageRank or PR is perhaps the most important concern of Internet marketers. Getting a higher PR is in fact one of the major aspects of SEO. PageRank is basically the system that Google follows to determine the importance of a web page by counting its link votes. By judging the PR of a web page along with few other aspects, Google decides upon the ranking of that page on its search results. On Google’s website on the Google Technology page it says:  


“The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.” 


What is PR? 


However, by this it is quite clear that PageRank is a vital part of search engine algorithm. While ranking a page in its search result, Google gives much importance to its incoming links, which is determined by the PR of that page. The more the links are, the more the page gets importance. The scale of a PR ranges from 0 to 10, where 0 is the minimum and 10 is the maximum limit.  


Well, having a PR 10 is very rare and only a few web pages have been able to achieve it so far. A web page with higher PR receives many incoming links from web pages with similar or even higher PR value, which in turn helps in increasing the PageRank of the original web page. A receiving web page’s PR value will automatically rise if its link page PR is high. So basically, the whole idea is that getting a link from a page of high importance will be more beneficial rather that having number of pages with low PageRank.  


The concept of PageRank was developed to evaluate the quality and importance of a web page. Initially, the PR of web pages was evaluated on the basis of the keywords in its text bodies and Meta tags. But eventually the concept expanded and it became clear that PR values not solely depend on this criterion but link exchange also affects PageRank to a great extent.  


Even though Google clearly stated that there are more than hundred different assessment criterions that it considers while ranking a page in its search results, the company has never denied the huge importance of PageRank.  


As an experienced SEO, San Francisco, I believe that by reading this article you can get a fair idea about the concept of Google PageRank and its importance, so that you can put your focus on it while doing search engine optimization for your website. 

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

A Quick Look at Anchor Text and Page Title

Creating anchor text is not as simple as it looks. Anchor text is basically used to provide the visitors useful information regarding the page content that you have linked to and also informs the search engines as well. If used correctly, anchor text can really boost your page ranking in search engines, especially in Google. In order to create anchor text successfully, you need to follow certain guidelines. It is extremely important for search engine optimizers to understand and follow these guidelines to get the best results.

As an SEO, San Francisco, I have in this article jotted down some of the basic things you should do to create effective anchor text:

* Use simple and easy to understand language
* Use conventional names for common features
* Use specified terminologies
* Make sure to use action oriented terms and front load user



In addition to all these basic things, you should also watch out for few other aspects as well. Like; it is a very common nature of human surfers to look at the top left of the pages on the Internet while browsing. So, make sure you place the action or benefits keywords in your link text at the top left of the pages.

In this respect, I would also like to mention that all of these advices equally applicable for page titles as well. It’s because when page titles shows up in the search engine result pages (SERPs), it is often treated as the link text of your web page. Possessing a good and attractive title for your page will surely help you to get a better start. There is also another very common belief in SEO professionals, that search engines give priority to the words at the beginning of a page title more than the words that are placed at the end.

To sum up with, here are few dos and don’ts for link text and page title that I would like you to take into consideration. First the dos – place the benefit of your page in the first 2 or 3 words of the page title and in the links to that particular page. Most importantly, make sure to keep it as simple as possible. As for the don’ts – don’t try to be too creative, use conventional words and terminologies. A new, extremely creative trademark keyword or phase would not help you in any way.

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

The Best Ways to Track Your Delayed Conversion

Internet is undoubtedly the biggest source of information, but when it comes to purchasing of products, people still prefer to visit their nearby stores. This is especially true in case of products and services that are characterized by a prolonged sales cycle and therefore get a delay in conversion. Using web analytics to measure online conversion maybe enough for some sites, but for multi channel business, tracking online conversion gives a myopic view of the situation and keeps them unaware of the actual picture.


A recent study revealed that more than 50 % online visitors convert to offline consumers. Well there are however quite a few reasons why it is happening. One of the reasons is the fact that most online businessmen are unable to justify their online marketing budget due to the absence of any tangible result. Thus, as the result of the fallout of online marketing effort, tracking offline conversion has taken the center stage.


But, it is not a reason for you to get disheartened. To get the maximum conversion from your website, you need to be more attentive and track down the causes of your delayed conversion. As an SEO, I believe that by adopting these following methods you can accurately keep track on the development of your site’s conversion.


Tracking Phone Number: set up individual phone numbers for each of the referring sources like websites, online campaigns and affiliates. This will help you to link the sale to its exact origin.
Using Reference Codes: one of the most effective ways to track the sale source is to create individual codes for each product and service in every campaign. It would further help you to assign desirable marketing budget for each of your campaigns depending on their individual performances.

Unique Price: for each of your online marketing campaign, offer unique prices. This will help you to find the source of your sale.

Offering Discount Coupons: this is perhaps the easiest and the most effective ways to attract visitors to purchase products. By offering printable discount coupons to your online visitors will successfully tie the sale to the particular campaign you target at. This will help you in figuring out the campaign which is driving most of the offline sales.

Offering Order Forms Online: give your customers the advantage of printing out the order forms from your website. This way you can again link sales to its exact source of origin.
Tagging Every Customer: the most sophisticated way to track delayed conversion is assigning a unique ID to each customer. Customer tagging will enable you to keep a record of their purchase activities.

Pay Per Call Services: together with your paid campaign, this service will surely help you to track the conversion performance of your website across the different search engines.
Adding a Call Me Back Feature: adding this feature to your website will help your customers to connect with your business directly. And the tracking codes will undoubtedly establish the elusive link more clearly.


However, you should never ignore the tracking of offline conversion as it is the evidence of your true ROI achievement that you received from your online marketing efforts.

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

Get the Maximum Benefit from Expired Domains

Lately, people are showing a lot of interest in purchasing expired domains and using it for their own websites. This trend is becoming popular among online business owners as the cost of expired domains are much less than buying new domains. But the problem is that, even if they purchase expired domains most people are not sure what they should do with it or how they can maximize its benefits. Well, there are actually few things that you can follow to get the best results.


As a SEO San Francisco, I have quite an experience in online marketing field. Based on my experience and using a little bit of common sense in this article, I have provided three different options for what you can do with the expired domain you purchased. You can choose any one of the three to get it work.


301 redirecting the expired domain to your existing site is perhaps the easiest and the least time consuming option you can get. This technique works best if both the sites have the same topic of concern and target the same set of keywords. However, there are few pros and cons to this option.


Pros:

This is the least time consuming option of all the three.


Cons:

An old branded anchor text that points at your new website will not help you as much as an anchor text rich with keyword will do.
Make sure that the old domain name you use is free of any penalty. If there is any penalty, then it would carry over to your new site.


Operating the expired domain name independently is probably the most time consuming option, but it has a lot of benefits. You can own two domains and run them simultaneously and successfully. Update the old domain contents and market the same products or services as your current site. If both your sites rank in the SERPs, then the possibility of your conversion rate and sale also increases.


Pros:

You can focus on ranking and conversion and do not need to work hard to brand the expired site.
Increase the chances of better conversion and sale.
Marketing an old site that already has a link pointing at it is much easier than working with a new site.


Cons:

Avoid getting into any duplicate content issue.

It is quite time consuming.


This option demands some extra attention and time. Turn the old site into a microsite for your current domain. This option works best when both the domains target the exact keywords and if the old domain ranks well in the SERPs for your targeted keyword.


Pros:

Helps cross promoting and cross-linking to your main site.

Increases the chances of your site getting good ranking, creating a brand name and getting more conversion.

You can do a lot of experiments with the microsite, which you wouldn’t dare to do on your main site.


Cons:

Time consuming.

Your main site does not inherit any link value of the old site.

Too much promotion and linking to your existing domain might look like spamming.


Well, finally the success of an expired domain completely depends on the time and effort one can put. If you can follow these strategies and devote some quality time and effort, then any old domain can become as successful and profitable as your new site.

For further queries on SEO San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.