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There are many so called industry secrets when it comes to working out how search engine optimisation works to rank your website well.

The #1 secret behind search engine marketing is that there is no shortcuts. High quality, unique content that is actually interesting to other humans is the most effective way to get good search engine rankings.

That said there are always ways to optimise and improve what investments you are making into SEO.

Here is a few search engine placement rules to consider when trying to increase your page rank:

1. Make your site attractive to search engines / directories by including a human friendly plain text, meta / title tags and including h1, h2 and h3 tags on your web site, but be careful of over stuffing your website with fake content.

2. Select the right search engines / directories to submit your site to - if you submit your website to google, yahoo and msn live you have covered 90% of all internet searches. It's important to get a high profile on search engines that receive high volume traffic so we recommend not worrying to much about the other search engines.

3. Many search engines prioritise web sites based on how frequently they are updated and the number of other websites that are linking to them, So the more content you have on your site, the more likely you are to be higher up the list in the search engine rankings.

4. An easy way to increase your Search Engine Rankings is to get links from other contextually relevant websites such as industry association sites. Try to get inbound links from external sides that have as a high google page rank as possible.

If this is all to confusing, or your are looking to outsource your Search Engine Optimisation to a ream of professionals who do SEO everyday. Give us a Buzz at Shifted - we are friendly and want to talk to you.

Labels: search, search engine optimisation, search marketing, seo

Labels: Keyword Research, search, search marketing, sem, seo, Sydney Internet Marketing, Sydney Online Marketing

• 61 billion internet searches carried out around the world in August
• Google managed 37 billion internet searches were made with Google during the month, accounting for 60% of the total,
• 750 million people aged 15 or over, or 95% of the world's internet audience made searches in August, averaging out at 80 searches per user.
• The Asia-Pacific region made the most searches at 20.3 billion
• Europe made 18 billion searches
  
• North America made 16 billion searches
  
• Latin America made 4.7 billion searches
  
• Out of Google's 31 billion searches, five billion occurred through Google-owned YouTube.com
  
• Chinese language search site Baidu.com was the third most popular search engine with 3.2 billion searches or 5.3% of the worldwide total.
• Microsoft sites accounted for 3.5% of worldwide searches at 2.1 billion.

Labels: behaviour, consumer, demographics, search, seo, statistics

Labels: reputation, reputation management, search, seo

Labels: search, sem, seo, web 2.0

SEO is a combination of keyword research, onsite optimisation and offsite link building.

Keyword Research
Keyword research involves finding the right keywords to optimize for, in the context of SEO Budget and Keyword competition. For example "Resume Template" receives 10 times the search volume of "CV Template', thereby making it a more attractive keyword to rank for.

Onsite Optimisation
Onsite optimization requires tweaking the placement and density of specific keywords on your website, as well as ensuring page names, file names, internal links and alt tags are targeted to your chosen keywords.

Basically if you want to rank well for a keyword, eg "ipod fitness" you need to ensure that this phrase is in the page title for your website, and appears in with an appropriate "Keyword Density" throughout your website copy.

Link Building (Offsite Optimisation)
This process involves researching and building links from contextually relevant external websites that have as high a Google Page Rank as possible. It is often necessary to buy high quality inbound links to achieve rankings for competitive keywords.

Labels: reputation, search, sem, seo, web 2.0, websites

We recently came across a 'whitepaper' from Daryl Wilcox of Daryl Wilcox Publishing (associated with Sourcewire etc), which provided a very interesting overview of the future of traditional PR, which began with an interesting conjecture in 2017

However it soon returns to normality, and highlights what many PR organisations are starting to consider, namely whether to adapt to changing trends and behaviours as to how people read and gather news. To quote the whitepaper:

''The worst case scenario for PR, and this is real world and not fantasy, is that PR loses significant ground to an apparently more dynamic and imaginative profession - search marketing. The danger is this new discipline will take a bigger slice of the marketing budget at the expense of search marketing will start to take on communications roles which were previously part of the PR function''.

As the report goes onto state, there is already significant evidence of this. Many traditional offline publishers are now pouring money into online.

Search engines are also the weapon of choice when researching products or services, once the sole domain of offline publishers. Companies are getting wise to this, and the associated spend online is reflective of this trend. Added to this, is the ability of search marketing in order to drive traffic to the site.

Search marketing budgets are often similar to PR budgets nowadays - ranging from retainers for small clients of circa $500 per month to budgets of over circa $50000+ per month. However search marketing has one significant advantage over traditional PR in as far as it can demonstrate return on investment more effectively, easily and objectively. This is particularly important in many companies where every penny is accountable. As a result many search engine marketing companies are offering a range of online PR services such as PR syndication. This impacts PR as many organisations that would never have previously considered PR are now introduced to PR by search marketing agencies.

However the PR industry have been fairly slow in response. The report highlighted the CIPR conference in November 2006, where not one of the 14 sessions had any Online PR bias. As the report puts it - ''The transformation of the media by the Internet was not a revolution, it was a slow burn. Now it as a raging fire''

However we are in danger of singing the whitepapers praises too highly. Whilst we fully agree with much of the report (particularly with my SEM hat firmly on), the reference to PR professionals being potentially better at SEO than search marketeers seems slightly of the mark. SEO is not all about numbers, numbers is merely a part of the fully equation, and it is this attention to the numbers along with the terminology and phrasology, that allows us search marketeers to leverage this ROI from online.

However Daryl's document is written with the PR sector particularly in mind, and as such does an excellent job as such in advising PR of the potential of the Internet, whether or not they choose to utilise that information is another question. To be honest, there is no reason why Search Marketing and PR cannot cohabit side by side.

We am currently working with a well respected PR agency, who are wholly embracing Online PR and the opportunities it can offer, and we are sure they want be the last.

To PR agencies. If you haven’t embraced the Internet, call us for a quick chat.

Download the full whitepaper PDF

Labels: online, pr, search, sem, seo

Once you've optimised your website copy, you'll find that the most important part of optimisation happens off the page - where links from external sites back to yours play a vital role in telling Google and other search engines how important your site really is.

Link building works best when you have a one-way link from another quality site to your own. You can try all sorts of tricks to build up the number of links you have, but to maximise your results concentrate on obtaining links from quality sites.

Of course quality links are not that easy to get! But many companies have an under-used resource that could generate hundreds if not thousands of quality links. That resource is public relations.

Good public relations and the online practice of link building are natural bedfellows. First, because the dynamics of each is remarkably similar and second, because when used in tandem with important keywords in mind, they can produce spectacular results:

• Public relations is the process of building a company's reputation, largely through the use of positive media coverage.
  
  
• Link building is the process of building a web site's 'reputation' by getting links from relevant and respected web sites.

• Success cannot be guaranteed
• Relationships and industry knowledge are important
• You've got to give up some control
• Results can be spectacular

Labels: online, pr, search, sem, seo