Why do I need SEO and SEM ?

This is a question that’s big out there, bigger in Maine than a guy like me would like it to be. I do this for a living, I want there to be some stronger demand for my services.
Fortunately, it’s an easy question to answer. The way I start my answer is with another question- do you advertise in the Yellow Pages? Of course, most would answer. Well, 4.6 billions searches were conducted on the internet last month. How many folks do you suppose flipped through their coastal Maine yellow pages?

It is estimated that the average customer acquisition cost for the Yellow Pages is about $20 per landed customer. Internet advertising is roughly $8.50. And shrinking.

So for generations, businesses have thrown money into yellow page ads and radio spots and magazine ads, and to be blunt, they have ABSOLUTELY no idea whether the ads worked or not. At best, they have a little anecdotal evidence that people reacted to their ads, but nothing more.
So I can take one of these businesses and tell them to put $2000 this year into a balance of website redesign, optimization, organic site marketing and pay-per-click advertising, and at the end of the year, I can tell you EXACTLY what worked and what didn’t. By setting up a proper statistics system, I can tell you how many customers were gained through each type of marketing, and we can plan the next year to be even more efficient. Your business will grow, and your marketing budget as a percentage of your sales will shrink.
The next time the rep from the radio station calls, ask him if he can do that. Or if the yellow pages rep stops by, ask her what kind of reporting she will provide, and what type of recommendations she’ll make when she sees a slowdown in the number of customers your ad is generating.
The world each year steps closer and closer to a completely digital media. Print companies, and companies specializing in print advertising, are wilting fast. Internet advertising is the most efficient and cost-effective form of marketing on earth, and if you’re not doing it now, you will be doing it next year when you see your competitors controlling the market.

Linking Strategies for Better SEO

Most search engines, with Google being the most prominent, rely heavily on a site’s popularity with other sites to determine the page ranking that they assign to any given page. While sites that contain no inbound or outbound links can in fact have a decent page rank with Google, the rank will most likely remain very low and the pages will not do very well in the search results without a good linking strategy and keyword density. All pages should have at least one relevant inbound link from a site that has already obtained a page rank to be properly indexed by most of the major search engines.

As an example, before beginning any research into search engine optimization, this researcher designed a sight for a local community foundation. This site is not optimized whatsoever, contains no outbound or inbound links, but has a huge wealth of content. Based solely on the amount of content and the relevancy, the site is currently holding a Google page rank of between 2 and 3 and has around 25 to 35 pages indexed depending on the search engine. These results took nearly 6 months to achieve and had this researcher known about proper SEO techniques during the design phase, he most likely could have shortened that time frame considerably using the strategies researched in this report. After doing the research for this report, this researcher has all intentions of optimizing it with a good linking strategy and improved keyword density to see how the page rank changes.

The key to a good linking strategy is to provide good quality links that users of your site would be interested in following and that are relevant to your site. Subscribing to linking services is a good way of achieving this as long as it is done properly. Some less than honorable companies advertising SEO services on the web are doing nothing more than adding hundreds or thousands of links to a site in order to raise page rank, and while this might cause a temporary raise in page rank, eventually the search engines compile all of these links and realize most are irrelevant which causes a site to be greatly penalized. As quoted from Google’s webmaster tools website Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

There are also several other factors that effect the outcome of a good linking strategy. Link age, link depth, links per page, and location of links are all factors that help Google to determine the popularity of your site. By having inbound links that have been pointing to your site for a long time, Google sees your site as a source that other sites consider valuable enough to keep linking to you. All of your outbound links should be located on the page that you are optimizing for. For example, don’t include outbound links for web hosting related sites on pages that are being optimized for the keyword Domains. Although it is acceptable to design a links page containing all of your outbound links, the preferred method for using outbound links is to keep them all on the page being optimized. Using this method, the spiders will see this page as the most important part of the site and will not see the links page as just another attempt to gain popularity. Finally, try to keep the number of identical links to a minimum on each page. Google will penalize a page that has several identical outbound links on the same page.

As is the case in Keyword density, search engines are able to spot links that are added just for the sake of gaining links. The spiders can determine whether a site has gone to link farms or to paid-link sites to simply fool the search engines. By adding links that are not only relevant but are useful to the user, the search engines will consider a site to be a popular and valuable source of information and will assign a higher rank than a site with hundreds of pages of irrelevant useless links, even from other high page rank sites.