South Mississippi SEO

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A well-organized marketing strategy is a central component to any business plan and is essential to the success of every venture. Whether your business is solely online, or is a brick and mortar enterprise, every company must include a well-designed, search engine optimized website in their marketing plan. This key ingredient to your success is vital as the age of using yellow pages to determine where to find the products and services we need has come to a conclusive end.

Creating a functional, user-friendly website with well-written search engine optimized content is a natural component to any marketing plan and should be the cornerstone of your promotional efforts. Search engine optimization (SEO) is both effective and cost-effective as a marketing tool and offers the possibility of a return that is far greater than the initial investment.

Traditional media marketing, although still popular, is exorbitantly expensive and can be cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses or newly established companies. However, over the past several years, smart entrepreneurs have changed the way that businesses look at marketing by showing the effectiveness of search engine optimization as an inexpensive, highly successful marketing tool that outpaces traditional media marketing at every turn.

Affordable, effective search engine optimization naturally targets your potential customers and clients, which draws your ideal audience to your virtual storefront. Because search engine optimization will provide improved page ranking in major search engines – the search engines that your target audience is using – there is no significant risk when investing in this form of marketing. This is not the case with traditional media marketing, which comes with a significantly higher price tag and no guarantee of a return.

Therefore, using search engine optimization as a central component of your marketing strategy, will allow you to reduce your reliance on other forms of marketing and trim down your overall marketing budget. SEO provides for streamlined marketing efforts that are far less costly than other advertising methods and allows business owners to take full advantage of search engines, allowing them to do much of their website’s marketing for them.

Essentially, you can throw a bunch of money at conventional marketing methods and take a wait-and-see approach to determine their effectiveness, or you can dedicate your marketing dollars to search engine optimization, which is guaranteed to increase traffic -and the right traffic – to your website. Optimizing your website with the keywords and search terms that your customers use when conducting online searches for the products or services that you provide will undoubtedly bring your target audience directly to your website, which will naturally improve your conversion rate and increase your customer base.

Take control of your marketing efforts, and your marketing budget, and position yourself to experience an immediate increase in traffic to your website. Take advantage of the benefits that search engine optimization provides as a cost-effective marketing tool and enjoy a higher rate of return on a smaller initial investment.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Reasa

Jon Reasa – EzineArticles Expert Author

Why You Should Search Engine Optimise For Local Searches
By Craig Edmonds

While online businesses do not discriminate on the basis of geography, some users are more comfortable doing business with a company close to where they live. This gives them a sense of security, confidence, and personal connection to the business.

It is also practical for them, as any problem that cannot be resolved over the phone or online will just take a few minutes’ drive and a face-to-face appointment to settle. This works best for big companies with nationwide or even global operations; it is even more important for businesses that cater to a specific locality, like a state, county, or region.

The Advent of Local Search Engine Optimisation

At the top of its search results, Google has introduced a geographic box that goes into work when someone enters a geographic modifier into the search field. Working hand in hand with its mapping feature, Google displays 10 local results plus a map that details the location. Yahoo! and MSN also display local results on top of the general results. This feature proved to be a hit among their users.

If you want to optimise your website, you have to take local search engine optimisation in mind. When your website is optimised for local searches, the users who land in your site through search engines are more likely to be on the right place.

Indicate your Business Address

The first thing to ensure is that you have the most basic information on your site. Display your full address and a regional phone number with the same area code as the location. Doing this will ensure that the search engine recognises that you are targeting a particular location.

While you’re at it, be sure to include driving directions to your physical address. Use a mapping service to illustrate this. Google already incorporates this service in their localised search. It is also helpful to put up pictures of your office alongside any easily recognisable landmark that may help them find you. Be sure to have your business listed in any online regional directory.

Add Your Location to Web Content

Now should your site, for whatever reason, fail to make it among the top 10 regional search results, remember to include an optimal number of keywords in your content. Include your location in the keywords, page titles, and site descriptions.

Be a Google Local Business Center

If you are up for a long-term investment, you may create a Google local business center account to make sure that your site will be displayed on a localised search. Google will send a postcard to verify the business address that you gave. You need to log in with the verification pin on the postcard, and then wait 4 to 6 months for Google to display your site.

On the other hand, you can just wait a few months. If you have your business address and phone number on your website, Google will display your site eventually.

Craig Edmonds is an experienced internet marketing professional offering search engine marketing and search engine optimisation services to clients across Europe from his base in Marbella, Spain.

This Articles is Copyright 2009 Craig Edmonds

Please visit Craigs Business Site at http://www.123marbella.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Craig_Edmonds
http://EzineArticles.com/?Why-You-Should-Search-Engine-Optimise-For-Local-Searches&id=1949642

First you need to know what SEO is. It is search engine optimization and this will be the first definition I provide the rest will be in alphabetical order.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – This is using various methods to get your website

to turn up in the search engines when people search for specific words. In other words, if you want to be the first result that people see on Google or Yahoo! when they search the term, “starting steps” you need to make sure that your website is optimized for the keyword “starting steps”

Anchor Text – this is the text that you see when a text link is created. For example Blogging Beginners is a link and the anchor text for that link is Blogging Beginners.

Backlinks – are links on the internet that are not on your site but do link directly to your site. (also see reciprocal links, three way links and one way links)

Black Hat SEO – this is a term that is used for questionable or outright disallowed methods of search engine optimization. These methods might work in the short term but usually end up getting you so far back in the search engine rankings that your site will never see the light of day. Once you get flagged by the search engines for your website for using Black Hat techniques it is almost impossible to get good rankings.

Browser – a browser is a software program that lets you view websites on the internet. There are numerous browsers that include; Internet Explorer, Flock, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and a few others. The title tag of a web page

Cascading Style Sheets – CSS – like the name implies these are style sheets that control the appearance of your webpage (I am not sure where the cascading comes from). The main advantage to these is that they can be put in an external file and clean up the code on your page. The cleaner the code the more the search engines like it.

Content – this is basically anything people can see on your website, images, text, video, etc. but is most commonly referring to the text that people read.

H Tags – these are heading tags. They are used to make words the heading of a topic, paragraph or page stand out by varying the sizes and making them bold. These carry more weight with the search engines (unless you over use them) the lower the number the larger it makes the text and the more weight it carries with the search engines. They go from H1 to H6 with H1 being the largest and most important. The appearance of these can be changed through CSS style sheets while still keeping the relevance of the H tag for the search engines.

Keyword or Keyword Phrase – this is the specific word or word phrase that you are using to describe your website, business or service that you want to show up in the search engines. Ideally these are terms that your potential customers will search for to find you.

Keyword Density – this is actually a percentage for the number of appearances of your keyword. You take the number of words in a page and divide it by the number of times your keyword shows up. This used to carry a lot of weight with the search engines but with the use of latent semantic indexing it more often hurts your ranking for having your keyword too often instead of helping you. Your keyword should be included in your page and in your title but if you hear anyone tell you to use it X% of the time run.

Keyword Research – finding what keywords are being searched for your business and defining which are most likely to bring people to your website. This is usually done with the aid of a software program or by extensive manual research. The manual research (if done properly) usually provides the best results while the software programs give you a good place to start. Using the right keywords can make the difference between success and failure of a web site.

Keyword Stuffing – this is where you repeat your keyword numerous times in a title, anchor text, alt tag, description or almost anywhere else to try to help your placement in the search engines. This technique worked when I first started doing SEO (1997) but it doesn’t work any more and if you abuse it you will actually be penalized. Do not put your keyword anywhere, other than you main content, more than twice and in some places no more than once.

Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI – this is just a fancy term for similar terms. The search engines have learned to expect similar terms when ever you talk about a specific topic and these terms can help your website rank higher. For example: if a webpage is about a car the term horse power, power steering and custom paint are all similar terms and work well in a promotion for a type of car; in a different way airplane, train and bus are similar terms and would work well with a keyword phrase about transportation. The more related your key terms are the higher you will rank in the search engines.

Long Tail Keywords – this is a keyword phrase that consists of three or more keywords that are used to describe your business. These are usually the easiest to rank highly in the search engines.

Meta Tags – These are little snippets of code that go into your webpage but aren’t shown on the webpage itself. They are designed to be read by spiders and robots used by the search engines and directory services to collect information. The only two you need to worry about for SEO are description and keyword meta tags. Any others won’t hurt but they won’t help either.

Natural Results – when talking about search engine results these results that you don’t pay for. Most search engines have sponsored results on the pages when you do a search. These are usually marked as sponsored results and most of the time they have a different colored background. The sponsored results are paid for and can be quite effective but they can also be quite costly if you aren’t careful.

On Site Optimization – this is optimizing your site pages themselves to turn up in the search engines using the other terms used here, such as title tags, meta tags, H tags and other methods.

One Way Links – these are backlinks that come directly to your site with out you reciprocating in any way. This is the most valuable of the backlinks as far as the search engines are concerned.

Off Site Optimization – this is a method of building your search engine ranking by developing backlinks preferably with targeted anchor text.

Organic Results – another term for natural results

Reciprocal Links – these are backlinks where you enter into an agreement with another website where you put a link to their site and they put a link to your site. These don’t carry as much weight with the search engines as one way links.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – This is using various methods to get your website to turn up in the search engines when people search for specific words. In other words, if you want to be the first result that people see on Google or Yahoo! when they search the term, “starting steps” you need to make sure that your website is optimized for the keyword “starting steps”

Search Engine Response Pages – SERP’s – this is the number of pages that turn up in the search engine when you search a specific term. It is usually listed at the top of search engine page and says something like “Showing 1 – 10 of 2,384,000.

Three Way Links – these are backlinks a lot like reciprocal links where you enter an agreement with numerous other websites and you point your links at one website but they don’t necessarily point a link back at your site. For example if you have three sites (hence the name) Site A links to Site B. Site B links to Site C and Site C links to Site A this gives the appearance of one way links which the search engines prefer.

Title Tag – While this is often considered a meta tag it is actually a HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) tag that puts the title of the page in the top of your browser. This is a very important tag for search engine optimization because, if used properly, it defines the topic of your page.

White Hat SEO – this is the term for using current commonly acceptable methods of search engine optimization. The reason I use the term current is because search engine change their algorithm and their rules when they catch anyone using Black Hat methods and unfortunately this can affect people that are doing everything the right way. White Hat SEO techniques are usually more work and more time consuming but if done properly will get your site to the top of the search engines and it should stay there for a long time.

XML SiteMap – this is a file that is for the search engines that provides them with information on when your site is updated and how important you think your information is. This is a good way to let the search engines know you have new content.

This post courtesy of Randy our Lead Technician please visit his site http://stthomasseo.com/

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