Pitching clients as an SEO firm inevitably generates a lot of questions, mostly because the industry is still so young. The most common question is always the one question that there is no real answer to: “How much will this work increase my website’s traffic?”

Gauging traffic increases is a noble ambition but efforts generally lead into the proverbial “wild goose chase”. Clients are usually a bit on edge when it comes to SEO proposals because there is no educated guess or traffic prediction equation that can give them an idea of what the end product will be.

The reasons behind these failed attempts at finding a solution to this question can be narrowed down to four roadblocks: click measurements by ranking, social media, and implementation by clients.

Clicking Through by Ranking

Engines don’t publish the click-through percentages of top search results. Your brand may rank at position 13 for a given keyword and through SEO efforts, that position may become number 5. However, there is no way to measure how much that increase in ranking will affect your traffic.

Adding Social Media to the Mix

Lastly, it’s impossible to determine how social traffic will factor into the metric. Del.icio.us users may tag an article, but traffic after the initial spike would be impossible to determine. How much of an impact will it have on SERPs and how long will that impact last?

Client Execution of Proposed Changes

SEO firms can provide clients with a full list of actions that need to happen to optimize their webpage, but implementation of these line items is in the client’s hands. If a forum section is set up, but the client doesn’t moderate or respond to posts, the forum’s potential won’t be reached. If not all recommendations were implemented, a prediction of traffic increases would be meaningless.

Catching the Wild Goose

As you can see, an accurate estimation by SEO firms at this time is impossible. However, if search engines continue to release more and more information and statistics and SEO firms continue to strive for new ways to add legitimacy to their proposals, the dream of answering this question may still live and one day be realized.

Content is king. That’s not just our slogan here at CKMG but the most important part of our operations for developing internet brands. It’s about time that we’ve sat down and reviewed what new and unique content can offer different types of websites.

Developing Content by Site Type

Affiliate sites and e-commerce sites need a heavy amount of content to differentiate themselves from their competitors. These sites typically add content generated by the distributor and find themselves using duplicate content found elsewhere on the web.

In order to stand out from the pack and add some sort of value to their visitor’s experience, these sites can use content to provide extra information, tips and advice that is unique to that site only.

Sites that are heavy in graphics and flash images but light on content should look to developing content options for visitors requiring a screen-reading program to view.

Using Content for SEO

Instead of basing your entire SEO campaign on manipulating search engines to achieve the desired results, consider going back to the basics and developing content that will not only help with SEO but will also enhance the user-friendliness of a website and offer something compelling to outstrip your competitors.  

Remember that there are many varieties of content available for production – news, guides, contests, services, videos, etc. It’s vital to keep any sort of content you post interesting so it not only keeps readers attention but allows an opportunity to be linked to by those that find it useful.  

SEO Firms Using Advertisemens to Lay Claims as Best

The Olympics come once every four years, bringing the world’s best athletes and a highly competitive, nationalistic spirit into one arena. Overall, these athletes are finely honed machines, flexing each muscle and straining every limit of their body as they smash records, defy gravity and tear through the finish lines.

Then, there are those that think, “Sure, why not cheat just a little?”

These sorry excuses for athletes sadly walk among all fields of sports such as cycling, baseball and track and field. Even though drug testing has become even more stringent, athletes and science are still managing to find ways around it.

A similar predicament goes for SEO and Internet marketing. There are those of us who use customer testimonials and sheer hard work to distinguish ourselves from our competitors.

Then there are those SEO firms that pay for the honor of being named a dependable search engine marketing firm. This may not seem like a big deal, since they are just wasting their money. However, paying over $5,000 to be called one of the best in your industry is just downright deceiving. Plenty of clients walk through our doors without a clue as to how SEO and SEM work. We patiently explain the basics of SEO and provide customizable service that fits their needs. When you pay for a title that was never awarded by industry peers or an objective judge, you give the client a skewed outlook, convincing them that your advertising space is something award-worthy.

If you earn an award from someone else, then by all means, tout it around like a gold medal. Those SEO companies out there who are masquerading advertisements as awards need to stop. Otherwise, Internet marketing will end up as tainted as sports has become, where anyone who succeeds is doubted. Give the client and your company more respect and do the job right instead of trying to trick clients into thinking you are a “top SEO firm.”

Google has just launched a new metric tool, known as Google Insights for Search. The new tool is similar in purpose to Google Trends but offers a plethora of new features to modify your results.

Basically, the tool works by typing in a keyword or phrase you would like detailed search information on. The breakdown provides the top related searches to the term(s) provided and recent “rising searches”, or related searches that have increased in popularity more dramatically on a more recent time scale.

Tracking Search Popularity Over Time

A chart is also provided showing the popularity of that search term over time. You can also enter multiple search queries to compare the popularities of two or more search terms over that a time period.

Tracking Search Popularity Across Regions

Another potentially useful feature is incorporation of regional interest into the analysis. You can narrow down your results to only searches by country or even further into subregions of that country.

Search Headlines & More!

News headlines that are related to the search term are also included. These articles contain the search term and related terms or phrases and are most likely imported from the Search Engine’s News Search Tool.

This tool is a great step forward for search engine analysis, with Google sharing more detailed search data with users. While this tool mostly consolidates a lot of current Google tools, with the new features and easy to use/understand interface, the tool should become quite useful for search engine analysis. Go try it for yourself!

Wikipedia gets a lot of attention. From users of the internet scowering its pages and absorbing the content as if it were a credible encyclopedia, to the search engine spiders coming across so many wikipedia entries because of the sites huge amount of links, Wikipedia comes up a lot in regards to the web. Its popularity makes sense in that Wikipedia has much to offer in both its appeal to users and to search engines, but should this site be so overwhelmingly favored by search engines considering what else out there on the web that Wikipedia greatly overshadows.

Because Wikipedia is a user updated, and the content user's ad is virtually all text, Wikipedia has grown into the 13th most popular website in the world. A bulk of the added content includes links to outside websites, and because of the amount added, Wikipedia is considered one of the heaviest site in terms of links. A search engine like Google gives rank to sites that have the greatest link weight, this considered, it's no surprise that Wikipedia gets 70 percent of all its traffic only from search engines. In many regards, Wikipedia is, by nature, one of best optimized sites to get traffic organically from search engines.

So naturally, Wikipedia will come up ranked usually within the first couple of pages for any topic included, if not as one of the first few results, but does this page deserve such a high rank considering the pages content? Wikipedia is a site that relies on the "wisdom of the crowds", and is an open forum where anyone can post any content on any topic. The content will get edited if its disputable, but because anyone can add content, its credibility comes into question. Just because the site is used widely and is immense, does not mean that the content is well informed, well written, or even necessarily true.

If you ask me, the fact that there is no amount of credible authority in most Wikipedia's pages is valid criticism, but it isn't doing the site justice for how great of a web resource the site has become. There is something truly valuable about a public forum where any one can voice their account. I would actually rather trust a group individuals who constantly evaluate one another rather than one appointed authority. Doesn't this sound more democratic anyways? Nowadays, I often find myself doing web searches just so I can find a wikipedia page and this is because the write ups are usually pretty damn well written and informative. Even though these are 'everday' people writing here, it seems that the quality of writing is usually above par.

I think because Wikipedia has become a valuable site to people, where for the most part people care about what they write about it really deserves all the attention it gets.

AOL Anticipation Over Sale of Units

Remember ye olde days of the Internet? Ah, the days when page counters were the greatest thing to slap onto a website. The whrrriinngg noise the modem would make when you would start to connect to the phone line. And, of course, the *ding* of AOL announcing that You’ve Got Mail! (not email, but mail, as if it were actually a member of the U.S. Postal Service).

So how’s that giant Internet conglomerate holding up nowadays?

AOL and Yahoo Talking About Selling 

In recent months, there’s been quite a bit of talk regarding the sale of AOL. The Internet company decided some time ago to separate the ISP business, which still has 8.7 million subscribers, from the advertising and content side of business. The talks have included some conversations with Yahoo, and the union of AOL with someone else is sure to bring up the market value of Time Warner. Most of the dividing of assets and liabilities has been finished, according to the Wall Street Journal. AOL is worth around $7 billion, but Time Warner will be looking for a higher bid.

So which side is going to sell? Who will own AOL now? The details have yet to be determined, but so far, the outlook for the once mighty Internet service provider looks grim. Let’s hope AOL has a brighter, more profitable future ahead.

A month ago, I wrote a post about how press releases are a crucial aspect to getting the word out about your online business. But did you know that in addition to spreading the news, you can apply SEO techniques, thereby increasing your visibility?

Press Releases -- Traditional Media Vs. Digital Media

The traditional purpose of a press release was to appeal to a media audience. You would create a catchy headline followed by some punchy introductory statements and concise copy, omitting any hyperbolic narrative in the hopes that the story would sell itself.

Digital media bears its similarities with the traditional media. You still need to tailor the news release to target a journalistic audience. However, in addition to the media, you can appeal to a wider audience of Internet users with a few optimization techniques.

Optimize Your Press Release With Keywords, Links and Tags

Start by writing your news release the same way you would under a traditional setting. But don't stop there. Sprinkle it with relevant keywords throughout the copy. Include links to specific URLs on your site that enhance the information in the press release and engage the reader. Don't forget to tag your press release with appropriate keywords. 

SEO Methods

For the most part, SEO methods are branded into two distinct categories: black hat SEO or white hat SEO. Industry commentators use these terms to refer to techniques that abide by search-engine recommended strictures and those that don't adhere to search engine recommendations.

White Hat SEO Techniques

White hat is the former of the two techniques and produces better results that can increase growth of a website's "searchability" over time. White hat SEO design attempts to organically build SEO content that will be useful to users and instead of trying to trick web crawlers into ranking their page, will make information more accessible and applicable to the search.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black hat techniques, on the other hand usually involve design that is implemented with the full knowledge and intent of deceiving the search engine visitor, ignoring standards of SEO website design . Implementation is based on the certainty that the site will most likely be banned once the search engine uncovers what the black hat site is attempting.

Depending on the search engine, these black hat techniques may boost up the site's ratings temporarily but will ultimately fail. BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany were both removed by Google for deceptive operations in 2006 but were later reinstated after an apology and revisal of their design.

Some black hat techniques involve hidden text (text that is the same color as the background of a page) or text that is located off screen. Another more crafty method may be to present two different pages for cases where the website is located by a machine or a human.

Choosing the Right SEO Methods

Black hat SEO may be tempting to some businesses looking at acquiring some quick online traffic. However, for companies looking to grow over time and provide ethical service to their customers, white hat SEO is the only acceptable form of search engine optimization .

When any company initiates an SEO project, analyzing the competition is one of the first tasks to tackle. Proper search engine optimization is all about positioning yourself within a specific niche. You need to understand what's going on in the market place before you can come to dominate it. By taking the time to review who's doing what (and more importantly, who's succeeding and how) you'll carve out a path for success.

Positioning Your Company in a Specific Vertical

In order to develop into a leader in your niche, you need to have your stuff together. You need a recognizable brand that attracts attention and respect. You need to have a website that's highly placed in the SERPs. Your site must be informative and easy to navigate. You also need to express a clear message.

So how do you develop a clear brand message that briefly tells the world who you are and what you do? How to you enact an SEO strategy that will position your company at the top of your vertical? To answer these questions, you need to know your competition inside and out.

Review the Competition

Look at competing sites in your vertical. Figure out what you like and what you don't like about the designs, content and SEO fundamentals found on other websites in your vertical. Do a search for keyword phrases that you want to rank for. Look at the top links in the SERPs. Read the meta descriptions to see how these sites summarize their products and services.

Click on one of your competitors' sites. Take a look at how the site is arranged. What items appear on the top navigation bar? These categories are important to your competitor. Check out the title tag on the top of your web browser. What keywords do you see? If you're using Firefox, press Ctrl+U. This will bring up the HTML code. Scan for the keyword meta tags to see what the site views as its most important keyword phrases.

All of this is really just scratching the surface. You need to go through each of the sites in your vertical to see who's doing what to attract rankings and traffic. Put yourself in the place of a consumer looking to make a purchase. Figure out what you think works and what can be improved upon. Once you understand what the competition is doing to successfully, you'll be able to devise a strategy that will take your company to the next level.  

What Is Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a catch phrase and like most catch phrases, it gets misused and its meaning becomes more and more vague with each reference. A pretty solid definition of Web 2.0 can be thought of as this: the Web has evovled since the bubble burst in 2001, and now if you want to have a successful site, you must engage your visitors. In these terms, a site can be seen as successful if it is scalable, compatible amongst browsers/devices and allows users to control their own data.

In most common cases of the term Web 2.0 being used, it is in reference to the interactivity of a site. Good examples of this type of site are social networking sites, wikis, and blogs. These have for the most part replaced things like product reviews, comments and guest books and user groups.

SEO and Web 2.0 Go Together!

Web 2.0 sites succeed because they are naturally SEO friendly. Things like blogs are already textually rich, with many interlinking pages, rooted in html markup, and very often updated. They of course are very inticing for visitors to use, and give them a reason to come back and keep visiting. A web 2.0 site has to meet more standards, both SEO standards and the rising standards of the user.

When we speak of interactivity it not only refers to sites that allow for user maintained data, but also to interactive components like animations and other moving parts. Often times these components consist of flash elements or AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML). Everyone at this point has heard of Flash's problems with search engines, and those problems still remain (crawlers cannot extract content or links from .swf files).

A more SEO friendly interactive component is AJAX, although it still comes with some complications. AJAX is heavily used by google, and supported by their spiders (gmail is run on AJAX).  AJAX, however relies heavily on Javascript and a lot of these behind the scenes functions cannot be read by SE spiders. Still,
AJAX is more compatible for SEO.