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

Effective Web Analytics goes beyond reporting on and measuring a site’s business and sales performance, to include predictions of future market trends. Good Analytics holds marketing strategies accountable, embracing what works well while discarding what has proven ineffective. Good Analytics aspires to a more holistic approach, and considers a company’s entire marketing efforts.

Search engine optimization and marketing empowers companies to present their website information in a more user-friendly and spider-friendly fashion, thus leading to better site visibility and, consequently, increased online business and sales.

Web Analytics is an important aspect of SEM. Analytics enables companies to effectively measure the advertising and marketing campaigns and tactics employed to increase online business. Analytics invariably involves at least two major considerations: what type of activity is happening on the site and how well are current marketing strategies faring?

The Web Analytics Association defines web analytics as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and marketing initiatives”. Web Analytics empowers companies developing their site business to better comprehend site visitors and how they react with that site, trends in site traffic, marketing campaigns, and conversion dynamics, among other important factors.

Web Analytics allows companies to determine the factors preventing site visitors from following through on their conversion objectives. It enables companies to identify different types of site visitors, so that they can discover who their best customers are and which markets are most lucrative. Web Analytics allows companies to find out how the site operates, and to specifically target optimum search marketing campaigns and/or strategies (i.e. Pay-For-Calls and Pay-Per-Click Advertising, SEO). Ongoing improvement in site performance should be a central objective of Analytics; this valuable information should be shared with pertinent company personnel (i.e. Sales and Marketing) so that Website and Marketing Campaigns can be fine-tuned.

Understanding Web Analytics results is significantly enhanced when a company sets up an Ongoing Improvement Program based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs should be rooted in a company’s overriding business goals and the website’s role in meeting those goals. KPIs should be company-specific, easily measurable, in line with long-term objectives, and agreed upon by all relevant personnel, specifically management. Two important KPIs worth measuring, for example, are cost per action and return on advertising spending.

Several very good analytics solution packages currently available on the market can be employed to measure KPIs (i.e. Coremetrics, Omniture, WebSide Story, WebTrends). Advanced analytics thought is also moving towards people, process and organization; as such, analytics is starting to embrace the entire marketing approach practiced by companies, so that the next step is towards developing a science of holistic analytics, not just web analytics.

Effective web analytics, then, involves more than just good reporting and measuring and marketing predictions; it entails making a company’s online marketing efforts accountable and discarding the ineffective strategies while embracing the effective ones. Effective web analytics involves taking decisive action sooner rather than latter. Finally, effective web analytics aspires to be part of a greater whole, and to assess a company’s marketing efforts as a whole and take action from there.

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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Buying text links means that you are purchasing ads on an external website that links back to your own site. It leads to increased site traffic, link popularity, and engine and website page rankings. Promoting your site on reputable, popular websites catrering to your target market is essential. Search Engines do not penalize you for buying text link ads.

Simply put, buying text links means that you are purchasing ads on an external website that links back to your own site. Buying the right text links could turn out to be an astute marketing move, since it could increase targeted site traffic, link popularity and, consequently, engine and page rankings. Advertising your site is smart, but promoting it on reputable, popular sites catering to your target market is even smarter. Search engines do not penalize your site for buying text link ads on ineffective sites, so you do not have to really worry about that; in that case, all you have to fret about is money badly spent.

For several years companies have searched for cost-effective ways to improve their site’s popularity, because having your ad on a “happening” site can really improve your link popularity and thus engine rankings. Many companies actually buy ads on sites not for the targeted audience they will attract, but to try to inflate site popularity.

Search engines know all about the practice of artificially “pumping” up a site’s popularity through linking, but that is not what they really envision when they think about links. Engines consider good links to be those leading to useful sites, which can contribute to the overall knowledge of a particular information community. For some time a link that really amounts to a trade between two sites has been frowned upon by engines, but until recently engines could not really tell the difference between those links that honestly referred a site and those that simply advertised it. To add to the dilemma, the engines could not tell people on which sites to advertise, and still can’t, since they also provide such services.

Web technology now allows search engines to better ascertain the actual intent of links, however, since text link ads and link-selling sites often leave decipherable “footprints” behind in the code. Engines can now more easily identify these ads and sites and can more accurately classify them as ads and not as honest site votes or referrals. These ads and sites are not being penalized; rather, they are simply not being allowed to count towards link popularity. A particular site’s engine rankings could really plummet if it depended somewhat on the link popularity of paid links. Google can now find and identify subsets of pages with similar paid link “footprints” and thus prohibit them from counting in the rankings, like they used to.

This discussion brings us back to the original question: should you be purchasing text links for your site? Given that search engines are moving quickly towards easier identification of paid text links, the short answer is: buyer beware! If you are obtaining paid links to truly increase site traffic or to give a short-term boost to your SEO campaign, then go ahead and good luck!

If you are purchasing them to improve link popularity, however, you should be warned that in the long-term paid links will not pay off. The wave of the future is that the engines will better ensure that paid links do not count towards link popularity, and those sites who now depend on this relationship will ultimately suffer. Other people who should watch out as well: link brokers whose bread and butter depends on selling text link ads!

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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The world of search has changed, and websites aspiring to rank highly across search engines on competitive keywords have to employ comprehensive Search Engine Optimization and Marketing tactics and strategies. Social Media Marketing is also essential to all website marketing efforts, since it empowers sites to gain valuable online exposure across Social Community Websites and Networks.

Social Media MarketingThe world of search and website marketing has really changed over just the past few years. For many in search, it seems like it was not too long ago that webmasters could have their sites ranking highly on search engines for certain keywords if they took care of the basic tags – meta and description.

Times have changed since then, of course, as there is so much competition in search that now webmasters have to apply extensive search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies on their sites, in order to get them to rank highly for their keywords across the engines. Video submissions to such venues as You Tube and Meta Café have recently become staples in all SEO and SEM work.

Social Media Marketing is a relatively new and powerful website marketing tool, and involves increasing a site’s online exposure, across the numerous Social Community Websites and Networks that are now out there. This increased exposure also involves getting people on these sites and networks to discuss that particular site, as well as its products and/or services, so that a dynamic viral marketing effect is created.

Social Media sites include such popular venues as Amazon, Craig’s List, Digg, Ebay, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Google, Live Journal, My Space, Orkut, Twitter and Yahoo. Adept webmasters or SEO people can access these social media communities, and collect relevant data on user behavior and interests, so that they can find out what customers really want.

Social Media Marketing involves several tactics and strategies, including the following:

1. Submission of the website to all major Social Media Networks and Websites
2. In-house production of promotional video for the site, and submission of the video to www.youtube.com. The video’s listing on You Tube is also optimized, and placed on top of the site’s ranking lists, thereby ensuring maximum exposure
3. Optimization of the video across major search engines, with frequent engine-indexing
4. Creation of community and friendship groups on Facebook, Friendster and Twitter, with subsequent recruitment of people from around the world who are interested in the Streaming Community
5. Participation in various forums on Community Networking, with the client site introduced to online visitors through Streaming Community Websites
6. Submissions of site articles, newsletters and press releases to several submissions websites
7. Submission of the site’s listing to Live Journal
8. Employment of MSN Messenger as a full-fledged website marketing tool, to inform the cyber world about the site
9. Strategic submission of site-related pictures to Flickr, so that visitors notice these submitted materials
10. Creation of relevant site blogs, with these blogs indexed by Google

Webmasters and SEO Consultants working on a site can effectively complement their SEO and SEM work with these types of Social Media Marketing strategies, further empowering that site to significantly increase its online presence, attract more relevant traffic, and ramp up online conversions.

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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Strong internal link structures promote more qualified external links to your website and lead improved search engine rankings. Employing descriptive internal links and strong text link navigation enhances your site’s internal linking mechanisms. Adding an informative sitelink map to your text link manu, limiting incoming and outgoing links to site-relevant ones and having your pages indexed in Google and Yahoo will make your internal links even more potent!

Sure, we’ve been told over and over again by insightful SEO Advisors that your company’s website needs to link up to other reputable sites. Incoming links are essential to realizing better keyword rankings on the major search engines, including Google and Yahoo. How about your internal links? How important is it to create and cultivate a strong internal link structure? What type of role can be played by links leading to pages within your own website, in terms of enhancing that site’s Google PageRank value?

It turns out that proper internal link structuring is not only important, but actually essential to your website and to any SEO strategy. This is particularly so for those sites which are just getting off the ground or to domain names which have been recently bought and launched. A strong internal linking mechanism helps to bring in those incoming links from other sources and to “bleed” the Google PageRank (“link juice”, if you will) to the other pages within the site. Thus you can better realize high search engine rankings not only for your index or home page, but also for the pages of secondary importance containing valuable information.

In addition to enhancing SEO efforts and helping to achieve higher engine rankings, strong internal linking is also user-friendly. Good internal links make it much easier for site visitors to move around. If your site has a bunch of “click here” links to secondary pages, you are probably doing it an injustice; visitors are not only finding out next to nothing about the linked page – they are less inclined to click along and dig deeper into your site. Not only that, those “click here” links aren’t exactly spider-friendly; since they are so generic in description, they leave out relevant and important information for the search engine spiders when they do decide to crawl the site. The less information on your site that the spiders find, the lower your site’s ranking will be; this reality definitely applies to “click here” and other non-descriptive links.

Another way in which site set-up is problematic for internal linking concerns your site’s bells and whistles. These include the flash-based and image-based navigation tools which many sites employ as the main method for visitors to browse. Search engines still prefer simpler site designs, with keyword-rich text links allowing for easy spider indexing. If you do decide to stick with the flash and/or image navigation, then be sure to complement this with an additional text link navigation menu at the top or bottom of each website page, preferably the top. You also have to ensure that you correlate text links with keywords in the title pages of all linked pages. If the first words in the title page are Item ABC, all incoming test links to that page would also read Item ABC. This type of consistency enables both users and spiders know what each page is all about. Always keep in mind the needs of the site visitors when designing your text navigation; in other words, it should be as user-friendly as possible and try to make the visitor as satisfied as possible. Visitor satisfaction will lead to positive site referrals, and that only helps!

Adding a sitemap link to your text link navigation menu will also promote better internal linking. You do not always know where those visitors are coming from; make sure that, regardless of where they arrive from or how they get there, both visitors and spiders can crawl to every single one of those pages. Sitemaps should also be in line with both Google and Yahoo, so you would do well to confirm with both engines that they are indexing each of the pages. Having your pages indexed in Google and Yahoo does not necessarily mean you will get high keyword rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages, but at the very least it provides you with valuable information on the dynamics of your site’s internal links and which external website pages are linked to your internal pages..

Another way to ensure better internal linking is to actually restrict the number of incoming and outgoing links to only those relevant to your site, since too many of them can dilute the link value being spread to your own internal pages.

Employing descriptive internal links and strong text link navigation will enhance your site’s internal linking mechanisms. Adding an informative sitelink map to your text link menu, limiting incoming and outgoing links to site-relevant ones and having your pages indexed in Google and Yahoo will make your internal links even more potent! Good internal linking is really important, but the good news is that with some honest work it is not that hard to do!

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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Various measures need to be taken early on by a company looking to establish a baseline SEO budget, such as selecting and expanding on a list of search terms and calculating the revenues additional SEO traffic might bring in. When you have determined your budget using this information, you need to then treat SEO as an ongoing budget expense since the process itself is continual.

If you are a company looking to outsource your SEO services, you definitely need to educate yourself about site optimization first. Another immediate task is to determine your own baseline SEO budget, give or take a few dollars. If you have never done SEO before and do not have any test results to work with, then you probably need to do some research and talk to some industry folk before developing your own budget. It’s an inexact science, but here are some guidelines:

Step #1: Pick a list of search terms

Brainstorm a list of terms prospective visitors and potential customers might use to search for your site. (Big hint: If you’re already investing in paid search, don’t ignore the knowledge you gained there.) While you can include your brand name and company name on the list, it’s important to focus on words and phrases someone might use to describe you when they don’t use the brand name. A relatively small percentage of searchers use brand names when searching.

Don’t expect to find every term or every best term – that’s something you’ll pay your SEO firm to help you with. Your immediate goal is to make a quick list of obvious terms. Some marketers ask their customer service or sales department to help with this, by asking incoming callers what words they would use to describe the products or services. The results, invariably, surprise everyone.

Step #2: Use Wordtracker to supplement your initial list of terms

Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) is an independent service that has been around since 1999. You can take part in the free trial or for a nominal price sign up for short-term subscription (a day or even week).

After you input your search term list, Wordtracker will offer suggestions for more related search terms, together with an estimation of the amount of traffic each term gets over the course of an average day across the major search engines. It also will tell you roughly how competitive each term is (i.e. how many other sites are listed under it).

Make a rough estimation for yourself. If you were in the top 10 rankings for each of your search terms and achieved a moderate 1% clickthrough rate, how many visitors would you get? With that number in mind, it’s onto the third step.

Step 3: Do the math

Remember how we said you need to have a metrics system in place before investing in search marketing? Not only will it ultimately help you determine how effective your SEO efforts are, it will help you calculate how much to budget for.

Multiply the additional potential traffic you could receive by the average value of traffic you now get from search engines.

If you’d don’t know that value, consider that, in general, search engine traffic tends to convert fairly well into sales, compared to other online advertising such as banner ads. Higher conversions are related to the fact that searcher are generally further along the sales cycle thanthose who impulsively click a banner ad or other non-search promotional campaign.

Step #4: Create a budget

Treat the dollar value you arrive at for additional SEO traffic as a baseline for your projected budget. A good SEO firm should be able to return a much higher dollar value than this budget because:

* The firm will be able to find many more appropriate search terms for you to optimize for
* An SEO specialist will be able to significantly improve on your current rankings, which leads greater increased traffic per search term than you may have expected
* By rewriting your page’s title tags, your site description will be so much more compelling to search users that you’ll get more and better qualified traffic than you currently do – even for terms for which you rank well already
* The SEO firm may be able to offer you advice or services to improve your site’s conversion rate
* High-presence organic rankings can help you raise brand awareness, as well as the click rates of your other ads on the same page. These are benefits you can’t always count through direct links or immediate site traffic, but many SEO firms can present data proving these benefits exist

Once you’ve created a baseline budget, you can make sure it covers the costs of critical element of an SEO campaign. For details on this, please read an article I wrote, to be found in our Information Centre:

All great budgets are built from both the top down (what we can make) and from the bottom up (what are the detailed cost elements) to arrive at a final number.

If an SEO firm pitches far above or below your adjusted budget, be sure to ask why. They should be able to justify additional costs with estimated additional Return on Investment (ROI) or be able to explain why your site isn’t complex enough to require very many hours of SEO work.

Step #5: Consider the ongoing investment

If you’re budgeting for SEO investment, assume you’ll need at least an initial month’s outlay as the SEO team does intensive research, initial optimization work, training and submissions. Plus, you’ll probably also want to budget for monthly reporting on your rankings. You can use this for review to determine when it’s time to renew your optimization campaign.

Sites that feature just a few static pages and operate in a very targeted, small niche marketplace probably do not need as much SEO work and, as such, have limited budges.

More complex sites in larger marketplaces will require more ongoing SEO attention throughout the year in order to ramp up links campaigns, optimize changed pages, measure, tweak and add search terms, among other tasks. This is generally referred to as maintenance, which is misleading because there’s much more than that involved.

Just like PR and sales, optimization must be an ongoing budgeted item to be truly effective. Even if your Web site doesn’t change that much, other factors may require you to re-optimize including:

* Search engines change their ranking algorithms, which can cause rankings to rise and fall
* Search engine partnerships change, so if one feeds results to another they may not always do so
* The words people use to search by evolve. It wasn’t long ago that we all used laptop computers. Now they’re notebook computers. We used to have cell phones. Now they’re wireless devices. New products, names and category descriptions emerge and enter the vernacular all the time
* New site sections and sites emerge in your category that might be perfect for you to target for a links campaign

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