This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Linkbaiting involves creating really great content to attract or “bait” links for improved search engine rankings. Increased exposure for your company and your website, as well as more branding opportunities, are obvious benefits. Linkbaiting content which enables a site to become a valuable information source for the industry community will lead to greater credibility and improved future standing. User accessibility enables your site to realize higher engine rankings.

Linkbaiting may be generally defined as developing really strong website content to essentially attract or “bait” links for search engine rankings. The term itself actually employs a fishing analogy to describe how sites position great content – the bait – to “reel in” these engines.

Although linkbaiting may not drive the same quality (i.e. qualified) traffic to your site that other more sophisticated SEO tools might, it is still a very valuable exercise. Increased exposure for your company and your site, as well as strong branding opportunities, are obvious benefits. Ensuring that your site’s very best content is picked up the engines and site viewers who can distribute it is the real key. That great content may make up only 5 to 10 per cent of your entire site content, but it is the type of information that will get your site noticed.

The first step in developing great site content for linkbaiting is to research and develop a concept or idea that hones in on your market audience. It should be an idea you can readily distribute them and that they find appealing, so they will be motivated to link to that special content on your site.

Successful linkbaiting often involves webmasters publishing their own content, on company site blogs or on sites such as Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Strong linkbaiting can be readily achieved by webmasters who develop interesting and original ideas, and from that develop well-written information which is both relevant and valuable to the industry community they belong to. Strong linkbaiting often means devising content that does not promote your company or site, but rather serves to inform people and significantly contributes to the community’s knowledge level. Self-promotion is frowned upon, and will often backfire and negatively impact on the reputation of the site and the company.

Really strong linkbaiting takes it a step further, and features content so thought-provoking that it can actually open up an online dialogue or discussion. With great linkbaiting you can ensure that you insightful content draws interest in your industry community, in the audience you really want to target, and that those people actually respond to it. Then these people can offer up their own opinions on the subject at hand, and a two-way conversation or multi-layered conversation is well underway. An informative conversation open to other points of view invariably encourages others to put their own two cents in.

Your linkbaiting efforts are definitely enhanced when you submit your content to sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Make sure that it is good content, however, because if your first submission(s) are below par you might not get a second chance! These sites have developed into strong information communities not only because great reading stuff is on them, but also because they have strong content filtering systems. What this means is that bad content may make it through the wringer once, but probably will not make it through a second time.

Make sure your linkbaiting efforts pay attention to local search and local markets; smaller websites looking to increase their local exposure and accessibility often do not take full advantage of the benefits of strong baiting.

To draw on the fishing analogy again, your linkbaiting “hooks” should focus on information, information and more information (as long as it is relevant). The most effective linkbaiting is that which posits itself as a valuable source of information to its industry community, lending itself to instant credibility, as well as improved standing when offering up future information. Ensuring easier access to your site for both visitors and spiders is one of the great benefits of linkbaiting, and that is a good thing.

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

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This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

More users increasingly employ local search, but many companies are not adequately budgeting for it and are opting to go with traditional, ineffective media. As more industry players enter the local search landscape, search engines need to promote it more and companies need to become better educated about it.

Local search has sharply increased over the past few years, but many local companies still do not appreciate what a powerful and cost-effective tool it can be. The numbers show lots of online users employing local search, but few businesses making room for it in their online marketing budgets. Many companies are still spending valuable effort and money on traditional, ineffective media, with less than desirable means of measuring campaigns.

Some analysts believe that companies need to be better educated on the potential of local search, while others claim that search engines need to more effectively promote it. Many business enterprises still perceive local search to be complicated and expensive, and think that there is a lack of adequate local expertise to devising effective search plans. The truth is that several knowledgeable and talented players have already entered the local search industry, so let’s consider some important ones:

* Major search engines: Leading engines such as Goggle and Yahoo have separate entities in individual countries for dealing with local search efforts (i.e. Google.ca, Yahoo.ca)
* Local directories sponsored by traditional media, such as local newspapers: companies usually appear in a listing with fellow competitors, and as such pay a higher cost-per-click. These companies should consider the top paid listings of these directories, allowing users to find them more quickly
* Other local directories, such as Citysearch and CityGuide: again, companies are advised to consider placements in the top paid listings
* Local, regional or national professional directories for various services (i.e. accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers, mortgage professionals, real estate agents): These directories gather leads, and then re-sell them to local service providers. Providers are receiving leads secondhand, however, and would increase their conversion rates by collecting their own prospects
* Local Search start-ups (i.e. ReachLocal, LocalLaunch.com), which offer local advertisers comprehensive local search marketing services. Campaign management, ranking reports and free template web pages are all provided, but at relatively high costs; the general web pages do not differentiate between each company’s individualized needs.

Companies doing lots of online business need to better appreciate how local search marketing might be more cost-effective and relevant than traditional venues. Once they fully understand the utility of local search, then the real challenge starts – finding an experienced, talented SEO provider who understands how to properly do it.

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

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This glossary of terms is provided by Yesup SEO, a leading SEO services.

Search Engine Marketing is still an emerging field, so you are likely to hear terms defined in different ways by different vendors. To make Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing more understandable, here is a glossary of industry terminology.

Algorithm: A set of mathematical rules that describe or determine a circumstance or action. In the case of search engines, unique algorithms determine the ranking of Web sites returned within search queries. Although some of the qualities used to determine ranking (for example, meta tags and number of referring sites) are known, the search engine companies closely guard the precise functioning of search engine algorithms to prevent the manipulation of the system.

Above the fold: The portion of a Web page visible without scrolling down. (Derived from the newspaper industry where the top stories appear just below the newspaper’s name and above the fold of the paper.)

Affiliates: Web sites that get a commission of some kind in exchange for sending sales or other predetermined conversion activity to merchants’ Web sites. Affiliates range from hobbyist sites to highly evolved commercial ventures with multiple merchant relationships.

Automated submission: Submitting a page or pages of a site to multiple search engines via software to automate the process. Most search engines frown upon auto submissions because they eat up unnecessary bandwidth. The exception may be when you have a prior relationship with the search engine, such as through a paid inclusion program or trusted feed relationship.

Black hat practices: Unethical practices. For example, loading your page with invisible text in order to “trick” the search engines into ranking your page highly is often considered black hat SEO.

Cache: Some search engines (most notably Google) show the page of a site as it existed when it was added to the engine’s database. If a page has been edited since it was added, the cached version will not be exactly the same version a user would see when visiting the page.

Cloaking: Showing the search engine one page and the end user a different page. Search engines (surprise!) frown upon this tactic.

Conversion: In search engine marketing, this usually refers to the number of visitors from the search engines who take the desired action when they reach the Web site. Conversions can include signing up for a newsletter, calling or emailing for more information, or making a purchase.

Crawl: What a search engine’s automated robot (also known as a spider or bot) does when following links from page to page on the Internet.

Direct feed/trusted feed: Paid partnership programs with some search engines that permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct XML feed to the search engine without the search engine crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN don’t accept direct feed.

Doorway pages: Pages that are created primarily to rank highly in the search engines and are not generally meant for human visitors to see. These are often hidden within a site (or perhaps hosted separately and link to a site) and cannot be navigated to through normal site navigation. Doorway Pages are also known as Gateway Pages.

Duplicate Content: Content which completely mirrors or is almost identical to another block of content. Duplicate content is usually unintentional (such as a standard Web page or print-friendly page) but sometimes it is by design, such as when sites recycle content to artificially increase its traffic. Various methods are used by search engines to limit duplicate content from appearing in search results, such as discarding these types of pages.

Dynamic URL: A Web page address that is created on the y at the server level from content contained within a database. Dynamic URLs often contain query strings such as question marks, ampersands, and equal signs. The search engines are hesitant to crawl dynamic URLs because they can lead to in nite loops that may trap their spider and cause a server crash. Dynamic URLs can often lead to duplicate content, which is another reason the search spiders are reluctant to crawl them.

Everflux: the frequent updating of search results at Google, almost on a daily basis. Everflux occurs between major updates, when individual pages are updated, added or removed from the engine’s index.

Gateway pages: See Doorway pages

Index: A database of Web pages the search engine has crawled and found useful and unique enough to include.

Invisible text: Using a font for page content that is the same or similar color as the page background so a search engine will read it but a human visitor will not. All search engines consider the use of invisible text to be a deceptive practice.

Keyword density: The number of times a keyword or phrase is used in relation to the number of words on the page in total, usually presented as a percentage. If the page has 100 words and 10 of those are keywords, then density is 10 percent. The idea is to make the site more relevant to engines by increasing the frequency of keywords on a page.

Keyword phrase/key phrase: The words a person uses when querying a search engine to find what they’re looking for. A keyword phrase is also what an SEO would optimize a given page to rank highly for.

Keyword prominence: The position of keyword phrases within the HTML code and copy of a Web page.

Keyword stuffing: Repeating keywords excessively or putting an inordinate number of keywords into the copy or HTML tags of a page. All search engines frown upon this practice.

Landing pages: The page a user lands at after clicking a link.

Link bursts: a rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing to a website. Unsubstantiated link bursts can be a red flag warning to search engines, but there are now ways to qualify the value of new incoming links (i.e. the quantity of traffic passed from the link source).

Link churn: a rapid decrease in the quantity of links pointing to a website.

Link farms: Subsets of sites where each member of the community must link to each other members’ sites. Because the links are required, the search engines generally place little value on these types of links.

Link popularity: The part of a search engine’s ranking criteria which considers and analyzes the quanityt and quality of external links a site has. Pages deemed to be popular are often given a boost in the search engine rankings for the keyword phrases related to it.

Machine-generated pages: Pages that are created automatically to blanket the search engines with low-quality, high keyword-density pages in an attempt to dominate the search engine results. All search engines frown upon these types of pages. They often go by many different names and are sometimes said to be a “proprietary” system for gaining high rankings.

Manual submission: Personally visiting a search engine’s “Add URL” form and pasting in the URL and other information asked for in order to let the search engine know about any given page.

Meta tags: HTML codes that are not visible to the average site visitor but that are intended for the search engines to help them better classify a site. The two tags important for search engine optimization include the Meta keyword tag and the Meta description tag.

Mirror pages: Duplicate pages intended to gain extra rankings in the search engines. Most search engines ignore all but one copy of any duplicate content.

Natural results: See organic listings.

NoFollow: A link attribute designed by Google to tell search engines not to follow a particular link. NoFollow practices have led to a lower volume of link spam on blogs, but some argue that it diminished the valuable conversation taking place between sites.

Organic listings: Search page results that are provided free and are based on the search algorithms of the search engine. A site might have a high organic ranking without paying the search engine anything at all. Conversely, a high-spending advertiser in a keyword category might not appear anywhere near the top organic results.

PPC: An acronym for Pay Per Click Advertising A term from general online advertising indicating that the advertiser will pay for the ad by the click it receives (as opposed to by the money it makes, the views it gets or the time period it’s displayed.) Many search engine advertisers use the term PPC to describe their campaigns, not realizing it has a broader meaning.

Paid inclusion: Paid partnership programs with some search engines permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct feed to the search engine without the search crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN do not accept paid
inclusions. Also known as trusted feed or direct feed.

Ranking: Where a page shows up in the search engine results of any given search query.

Reciprocal linking: Exchanging links with another site.

Relevancy: How a search engine determines where any given page’s ranking should be. Relevancy is based on a complicated mathematical formula called an algorithm, which takes hundreds of factors into consideration.

ROI: An acronym for Return On Investment. The amount of money made from a campaign (search engine marketing or otherwise), less the amount spent.

Robots.txt: A file located within a root directory of a website which offers instructions to search engines on which files to crawl or omit.

SEM: An acronym for Search Engine Marketing. Any form of marketing that includes the search engines. SEM encompasses paid search engine ads (PPC), as well as the optimization of pages in the organic search results (SEO).

SEO: An acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The process of altering a Web page’s copywriting and HTML coding to be relevant for specific, targeted keyword phrases that relate to the site in question.

Search engine optimization copywriting: Writing the visible text on pages so they use the targeted keyword phrases being optimized for in order to gain search engine visibility.

Search engine spam: Pages that make use of deceptive techniques in order to appear more relevant to a search engine query than they really are.

Search marketing: See Search engine marketing.

Spider: An automated robot that crawls through the Web via links on site pages.

Submission: Letting a search engine or directory know the URL of a page in order for the page to be included in the engine’s database. Can be done through an add-URL page at a search engine/directory or through a paid inclusion program.

Supplemental Results: A secondary index for Google which appears on-screen to the user when matching page is not shown in the main index. Documents with supplemental results are not as trustworthy, because of low link authority, complex URLs and duplicate content or some variation). Supplemental pages will rank lower than primary search index pages and are crawled less often, with their outbound links carrying far less value.

Title tag: An HTML tag used by search engines and browsers to help describe what the page is about. The information provided in this tag is assumed to be highly relevant to the page, and therefore it is generally given a lot of weight in the search engine ranking algorithms when determining relevancy.

Trusted feed: See paid inclusion.

URL: An acronym for Universal Resource Locator. This refers to the address system employed by the Internet to locate resources such as websites. URL information includes the type of resource accessed, the server address and the file location.

Vertical creep: When non-paid, non-organic listings appear in search engine results pages. For instance, the results may be news stories or maps the search engine deems relevant to a query.

Webmaster: a person who is responsible for creating, designing, revising and/or posting information on the worldwide web.

White hat practices: Ethical SEO practices. While there is far from a consensus on what constitutes white hat and black hat practices, Google’s Webmaster pages (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters) lay out some “quality guidelines” as a basis practices it considers ethical.

If you have any questions about this glossary of terms, or wish to make a suggestion, please contact Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

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This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Several factors need to be considered when hiring an SEO firm. Costs can be substantial and results are not guaranteed, so it is always a good idea to start with an Analysis Report. Trust your SEO provider since they have access to your company’s internal systems and will set up their own portals. Find out how your SEO firm approaches doing work for competing companies, and also if it does Web Analytics.

There are several steps which probably should be taken when your company hires an SEO firm, with the basic one being to educate yourself. Other measures include obtaining objective information on potential SEO providers, discovering if an SEO firm is a good fit for your company goals, and then conducting interviews before choosing from among the candidates.

There are also several factors you should keep in mind when hiring an SEO firm. Here are some significant ones:

1. SEO can be expensive, since each website page requires optimization. Companies functioning in a big industry with lots of competition may pay even more, since more keywords will be involved.
2. Good SEO firms never guarantee that they can realize specific search engine rankings for your company, but will show a sincere commitment to improving your engine standings. Be leery of those providers that do guarantee engine results.
3. Experienced SEO firms usually charge a fee for developing a detailed Analysis Report of your website, often the first step towards site optimization. This report should be prepared before any contract is signed, and will enable your company to understand the type and scope of SEO work to be done. It will also help your company to better discover the strengths and limitations of your SEO provider.
4. Contact SEO firms which specialize in your company’s particular industry or field. Find out if they would do work on a competitors’ site, and how they would approach that issue.
5. An SEO provider optimizing your site will need to have access to your internal systems, particularly your website servers. It is important to hire SEO people that you really trust, but in any even find out how much access these people will have to your servers, and what they plan to do.
6. SEO providers often establish SEO portals on their servers. Ask your SEO people about these portals, and from the start find out who owns those pages – your company or the provider.
7. Many SEO firms include Web Analytics services at part their optimization services. Web Analytics may be defined as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and marketing initiatives”. Confirm that your provider offers analytics; if not, enquire about how this important aspect of SEO can be included in your package.
8. Many SEO firms include website design as part of their optimization services. Ask your SEO people if their company is handling this task directly, or if it will be outsourced to a third party. Find out if website design is part of the original contract, or if there are additional charges involved.

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

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This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Regular and relevant blogging can really add to your website SEO campaign, especially if the information is industry-relevant, original and compelling. Effective blogs can help develop the breadth and depth of your site content and enable your site to become a valuable source of information. Good blogs bring in more inbound links, attract more site visitors and help drive search engine rankings. Complement industry-relevant blogs with personal blogging to establish a personal connection to the person you are trying to sell!

Comapny website blogs and the personal touch

We have previously talked about the importance of regular and relevant blogging to your company’s website SEO campaign. We mentioned how effective blogs can enable you to develop the breadth and depth of your site content and become a valuable industry information source. We also talked about how good blogs can bring in more inbound links, achieve higher engine rankings, and attract more eyes to your site. Strong, industry-relevant blogs can do all this for and more.

Blogs, of course, do not always have to be about business. Establishing and cultivating personal relationships with fellow industry folk should also be a blog priority. I do emphasize personal relationships, since it is common knowledge that business (and sales) can flow more easily if you are also acquainted with that business associate on a more personal level. Sometimes effective blogging does not have to involve business or industry talk; it could simply be informal chit-chat that allows you to connect with industry people on a personal level.

It might be helpful to once in awhile view blogging in the same light as an industry chat-room, where you can get together with a couple of associates who happen to work in the same industry as you. Then your associates and you can better connect on a personal level, sharing information about individual interests, including hobbies, favourite sports or t.v. shows, or even the weather.

The type of relationships which emanate from this “personal blogging” can be compared to dynamics created when you invite a business associate out to lunch or for a game of golf in the afternoon, and then you end up talking about everything but work! Talking shop should certainly remain the main focus on your company blog, of course, since the industry information shared there is valuable and users and spiders will always be attracted to that. Not talking shop can also be a valuable business-development tool, however, since the conversation will then turn to other areas. As your business associate and you discover more about each other on a personal level, it helps to solidify the personal relationship, thereby enhancing the prospects of a business connection.

Small talk can be a very valuable business development tool, whether you are on the golf course or blogging. There are times for promoting your company and yourself to that business associate you are looking to develop a professional relationship with, but there are also times when idle chit-chat is called for. Either way, personal blogging can be good for business!

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

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