Answers to 7 Popular SEO Questions

By Jimsun Lui

More and more website owners realize the benefits of top search engine ranking. Therefore, they are willing to invest their time and money in search engine optimization. At the same time, many search engine optimization problems arise. I am trying to address some of them in this article.

Question 1. For the sake of time saving, I just scan our pamphlet as an image file and put it on our main site. Can you help me optimize the website for high ranking?

Your pamphlet may contain lots of text for visitors to read. Since you only scan it as an image file, search engines only recognize that you have a single image file in your webpage. Simply put, they just treat it like a photo or a graphic, and do not convert your image text for analysis and indexing. A solution is to add an alt attribute for the image. It is a bit better because a few HTML text are available for search engines to "understand" your webpage content. However, comparing with rich HTML text in a webpage, text in alt attribute is too few for search engines to analyze importance of your webpage.

Therefore, I do not recommend this approach although it may save you time in building a webpage.

Question 2. If I implement a seo campaign, does it mean that I can give up my pay per click search engines marketing (PPC marketing)?

SEO campaign and ppc marketing are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are complementary with each other. First, I suggest you implement both natural SEO and ppc marketing for high conversion keywords. You can get more exposure in the search result pages. Second, because of copywriting or marketing communications consideration, you may not be able to implement SEO for all useful keywords. Under this circumstance, why not use ppc marketing as an alternative? For example, the word "pay-per-click search marketing", "ppc marketing", "search engine marketing", "paid search" are more or less with the same meaning. However, it may be confusing to use all the terms interchangeably throughout your website.

Question 3. My boss wants to have a full flash website so that our company site is more visually appealing. Can you help me to optimize the website after we make a full flash website?

From experience, many search engines cannot "read" content from flash files. In many cases, search engines only treat flash file as if it is a single image file. They do not index the text or follow the navigation links to index content.

Matt Cutts, a Google representative, mentioned that Google has some improvements in reading textual content of a flash file by utilizing search engine SDK tool offered by Adobe/Macromedia. However, the tool has not been updated frequently and extract text out of a flash file correctly is difficult. To conclude, reading textual content from flash file is still at a preliminary stage.

It implies that a full flash website is unlikely to be well indexed by search engines. If natural top search engine ranking is very important to your success, it is not recommended to make a full flash website unless you have a large ppc marketing budget or very confident to create high link popularity over short period of time.

Question 4. Does a dedicated IP address help my search engine rankings?

Dedicated IP address is not an imperative to get top search engine ranking. Many websites with top search engine ranking are using shared web hosting plans. It means that they are sharing the same IP address with other webmasters with low search engine ranking.

However, if your IP address is shared with many search engine spammers, your site´s ranking can be adversely affected. Therefore, some search engine marketers prefer to get a dedicated IP address from their web hosts.

Question 5. If I have lots of content in a webpage, is it better to separate the content into 2 webpages?

I think it depends on search engines. For example, Google crawls only about the first 101 kilobytes of a webpage. If your content is more than 101Kb, you´d better separating the content into 2 webpages.

Question 6. Why does my site suddenly disappear in Google?

There are several reasons for Google to exclude your site. First, you must make sure that your site meets Google´s quality guideline, i.e. no spamming. For example, you do not put hidden text and links in your website. Second, your site is not hacked. Third, you should check whether your site has some malware. Last but not least, your site may be too new and Google is in the process of refreshing their index. During the process, Google may fall back to the old index version and hence your site suddenly disappears.

Question 7. How can I increase ranking of internal sub-pages?

Many webmasters found that sub-pages of their sites have poor search engine ranking and want to improve rankings of sub-pages. To solve the problem, you should ensure the sub-pages are not buried too deep within a site. Important sub-pages should get more internal links via cross linking related pages. In addition, you should try to get some external site links to your specific sub-pages.

Source : americanchronicle.com

SEO: Objectives, Process, Tips and Tools

Get a head start on SEO process and techniques

By: Rahul Kumar Gupta

The web is expanding at an exponential rate where every kind of application B2B, B2C, or C2C is looking for an online web presence for increasing revenue, profits, customer base and getting global.

With expansion comes the real “need” for businesses to expose themselves to the potential customers in a way that is seemingly easy for the users to search/find them using some of the most common search engines. An effective web presence is required and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique that helps in making site and web-pages easily searchable over the internet which results in improving traffic by attracting new visitors

This article examines the SEO objectives, process, tips and offers a set of strategies that could be used to design websites that are more search-friendly. The primary audiences are developers and architects as well as online marketing professionals. The objective of this article to provide a head start for the SEO process and techniques and later professionals can look for more details and other available approaches.

SEO Objectives

Before taking up any project or activity the objective for the same should be clear and quantifiable which is applicable for SEO activity as well. Main and ultimate objective of SEO is “Increase in revenue and profits” for business, but this is an indirect objective and it is an outcome of the following basic objectives

Increase
a. The Online Search Engine presence – Searchable through most of widely used search engines.
b. Search Engine Rankings. – Getting our pages links as a part of first few links in search as result of search for relative keywords/phrase or domain on search engines.
c. The number of visitors on site or page – Increase in both quantity and quality of traffic on website or page results in increase in business and customer base.

Improve
a. The brand visibility and get the competitive advantage.

Reduce
a. The risk of being sidelined in the ever growing world of web.

SEO Process

Every company or individual wants their services, products or information pages to be easily available to the user when the user searches for relevant information over the internet. SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines search results. It is a continuous process and not a one-time event and it starts right from selecting the domain name and continues in development, site marketing and even in hosting. As SEO is continuous process so it has a starting point but it didn’t have any end point. It ends only when it is decided to end online presence.

For More .... Click Here

The Search Works strengthens its SEO team

The Search Works, the European leader in search marketing services for online advertisers, today announces that it has appointed Usman Patel, formerly SEO Supervisor at Vivid Lime, to the role of SEO Manager. In a related move, James Keehan has been promoted to Commercial Product Director. James, previously a Group Account Director in the Finance team, will take responsibility for the development of the SEO offering and the creation and rollout of new products and services.

Usman’s appointment and James’ role change are part of a strategy that will see The Search Works strengthen its offering and build on a list of SEO clients that includes VisitBritain, Teletext and easyJet.

Usman has 5 years of experience in search and has worked on a number of high profile clients such as Columbus Direct, Insure For All and Club Direct. In his new role at The Search Works, Usman will work in collaboration with teams across the company, including New Business, Implementation and Operations, to develop tailored SEO strategies for clients and maintain the agency's strong reputation in the industry.

Commenting on his new role, Usman said, “I’m delighted to be joining a company whose heritage in search is second-to-none. I look forward to working with James as we enhance our SEO offering and build on recent successes such as the company’s number one position in the NMA Marketing Services Guide 2007.”

About The Search Works :

Headquartered in London, England, The Search Works is the UK’s leading specialist search engine marketing services agency. Founded in 1999, the company provides pan-European search marketing campaigns using BidBuddy technology and the unparalleled knowledge and expertise of its client services team, enabling clients to achieve higher online visibility whilst measuring and maximising returns from online marketing spend. The Search Works continues to build on its success of the past eight years to deliver considered and highly-targeted search marketing solution services, first rate customer service and technological expertise on behalf of its broad range of blue chip clients including Asda, Comet, EasyJet, Estee Lauder, Eurostar, First Choice, Interflora and The Carphone Warehouse.

In the latest New Media Age Marketing Services Guide, The Search Works was named as the UK’s top search marketing agency with a turnover of £50.18m, nearly double that of its nearest rival. And in 2006, The Search Works was listed as Britain's highest-ranked search marketing company in The Sunday Times TechTrack Top 100.

For further information, please contact:
Tom Pearson / Nichola Waller
Firefly Communications
TheSearchWorksTeam@fireflycomms.com
+44 (0)20 7386 1544

Source : e-consultancy.com