Understanding Your Search Engine Ranking

If you’ve been checking your keyword rankings over the last few months or years, you may have noticed some changes in the results that are coming up. Keyword search results have evolved. You will need to adjust your strategy to keep up.
You may expect that your site should come up with your competitors’ sites. This may not necessarily be the case. Think about it from the search engine’s perspective. When someone searches, for example, lawn mowers, do you just want to bring up companies that sell lawn mowers? Not necessarily. Your results pool would be saturated with company names, when that may not be what the user was looking for at all.
Search engines have become more and more sophisticated over time. They are not looking to help anyone sell anything. Therefore, the search results, you’ll notice, now include a lot of blog discussions, books, videos and web casts, customer comments and articles about the keyword that you enter. This gives a more rich, diverse result for the search engine users.
Companies that sell are not excluded, but they are no longer the primary ranking holders that they used to be. Furthermore, sites that incorporate all of these other aspects of social media will be the companies that end up ranking higher and higher in the search. For example, you may have a wonderful, user friendly, search engine friendly site about lawn mowers. You may offer more and give better prices and customer service than your competitor. But, your competitor that has kept a current blog, released relevant information about lawn mowers, and sparked discussions and bookmarking among the public will rank higher than you anyway.
This gives everyone a fair advantage. It gives users a more complex picture of the rankings. I know that when I click on those first page results, I am going to get up to date information from companies and consumers like myself, not just the site of the company that pays the most for advertising and sells the most merchandise.
This gives smaller sites the unique ability to get visibility over the huge billion dollar budget companies. That is, if you play your cards wisely. Keeping your online reputation current, your visibility high and keeping up with the changes in the search engine world will require you to work with a world class search engine optimization company. Long gone are the days where spending the most money on advertising gets you the most customers. Money is probably better spent on Search Engine Optimization.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

SEO vs. Paid AdWords

Google has been aggressively advertising the sale of their AdWords. So, a lot of people are wondering if this could be an option for them. After all, AdWords lets you basically pay to come up when someone searches for your keyword. Can buying up enough AdWords take the place of your SEO efforts? Not likely, according to the research.
AdWords can be purchased through Google and your advertisement will come up under a “Paid Advertisers” section when someone searches for your keyword. You can choose to pay per click or pay per impression. Google has improved this system a little by placing advertisements at the top of the search page instead of down the right side where it is seldom seen. The problem is, it still looks like an ad, even appearing at the top in that fancy blue box, and most people searching are looking for popular search results, not paid advertisements.
Not to say that AdWords are useless, to the contrary. They can drive some traffic to your website, but they aren’t likely to take the place of organic search results. Search Engine Optimization, when done correctly, creates a true interest in your site. It builds your online reputation and gives you a real standing when it comes to social media.
Long term, lasting results have proven to be extremely effective in building your reputation and consistently getting those high rankings that you dream of. It’s not just your reputation, but your actual site that is affected by SEO efforts. When you hire an SEO company, they work with you on getting your site to a search engine friendly state. This can immediately get you ranking higher on all the top search engines.
Some newer search engines are using social media to rank web sites. This seems to be the new trend in search engine rankings and no amount of paid advertisement can compete. SEO is not considered advertising at all. It is the realistic “organic” way to prove yourself to the masses, thus leading to higher rankings over time.
AdWords can give you some short-term gains and some people choose to buy some ad space in addition to their SEO efforts. But, it is pretty much universally accepted that AdWords will not be replacing SEO. With social media being heavily weighted in the search engines and beyond, AdWords simply can’t compete. If you use AdWords as part of your marketing plan, you may need to consider them solely as a sideline objective, not your main plan of action.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

How to Get Efficiently Indexed

When you start out with a search engine optimization company, you will need to adjust your web pages so that they can be properly indexed by the search engines. This includes a few key steps.
First, your SEO company will do some research and give you a list of competitive keywords. You will need to use these keywords in moderation throughout the text of your site, in the headers, in the page titles, and in the metatags.
Using your keywords in moderation ensures that you do not overdo it. Search engines may rank you lower because of keyword abuse and you could incur penalties if you are not careful. You want your keywords to make logical sense in relation to the context around them. You may even decide to narrow down your keywords by page.
For example, if you sell all types of lawn care equipment and you want to optimize your page about weed eaters for the keywords weedeater,weed wacker and lawn equipment. You could use text on that specific page of your site to draw people looking for these items directly to that page, instead of making them search for what they want from your homepage.
You also want your page headers to be labeled with page corresponding keywords. Use your most important keyword for a page as the h1 header. You can add additional keywords under the h2, h3 headers, and so on. All of these keywords should be related to each other and support the information provided on the page.
Page titles are also important for efficient indexing. Create a title that ideally includes your most important keyword or keywords. Do not overdo it; once again, use your keywords in moderation. The title should very accurately summarize the content of the page.
Metatags are a means for your website to allow search engines to easily identify your keywords. Do not ever use keywords that are unrelated to the information on your site or you could be quickly penalized by the search engines. Be specific, descriptive and brief in your metatag creation.
Combining these page design basics can help your search engine marketing company get your site quickly indexed and on your way to favorable placement on the SERPs.

Are Search Engines Going Social?

Search Engine Optimization companies have been focusing a lot of effort towards social media marketing. There are already lots of social sites out there where people can search for popularity-controlled results. These sites allow the masses to rank and comment on their favorite sites and articles. SEO companies use these sites to increase their clients’ sites’ visibility on the search engine results page.


One example of the social media explosion Me.dium Search released by Yahoo. Me.dium basically gives you a search basing results on the real-time activity of the searching masses. Basically, you get results based on what everyone else is looking at and ranking. SEO companies are constantly changing their strategies and practices to keep up with the ever-changing world of search engine marketing, so they are ready to step it up as the search engines have already started to lean more in the social direction.


SEO companies already heavily weigh your online social reputation when coming up with a marketing strategy. Social media efforts can help create a network of inbound links to your site, thus improving socially charged rankings on the big search engines. As social media sites become more and more powerful influencers in the major search engines, your efforts in SEO can really begin to escalate to a new level.


Powerful social media domains such as Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and YouTube have proven to be great forums for launching ideas, getting votes and showing up in the rankings. These along with other social sites give us a platform for reputation management services and social marketing efforts.


Social innovations still to come will ensure that SEO continues to evolve. Search engine results will be targeted to a more defined group of visitors and therefore create more personalized results for the public. Social media is a part of your advertising and marketing approach that you and your search engine marketing company soon won’t be able to ignore.

How Do I Promote My Web Site?

Web site promotion is a part of an effective search engine optimization strategy. Many clients assume that promoting a web site consists of banner ads and paid placement ads in the search engines. There is actually a lot more to it.
When initializing web site promotion, many things are considered. The bottom line is not necessarily getting a flood of site visitors, but getting quality site visitors. The search engines do not just look at how many people visit your page. If they did, search engine optimization would consist of paying people to sit around visiting your site and clicking on your links thousands of times a day.
-So, what is a quality visitor? A quality visitor is someone who is actively seeking out your products or services. This doesn’t include people who accidentally stumble upon your site when searching for your keywords. Search engines look at the quality of the visitor when determining if their visit will improve your rankings.
-How do you target quality visitors? By researching which key phrases are going to be most effective. If your key phrases are completely relevant to your site content and the quality of information and services provided is very high, then your quality site traffic should increase, resulting in more consistent sales. Search engines will rate the quality of your site, how user friendly it is and how closely your content matches the selected key phrase that was used to find you.
-How do you increase visibility to these types of visitors? By determining your target audience, you can research what typical key phrases they are using to look for your services. Your site should be user-friendly and customers should have no problem navigating around your site. Different key phrases should take them to different pages of your site. This will help ease their transition from the search engine results to the product that they are looking for. You should consider directing people to other pages on your site other than your home page, for this reason.
-How is all of this relevant to my key phrases? By manipulating your site to closely match the relevancy of the key phrases, you can increase visibility and narrow down your target audience. Each page should ideally match the key phrase that you are optimizing for. This will help raise the quality of your site in the eyes of the search engines and your consumers.
Web site promotion is a tedious, necessary step that should be taken by your search engine marketing company. Done correctly and diligently, you could increase the quality of your traffic, visibility of your site, and in turn, your sales.

Search Engine Internet Marketing

Internet marketing

Search engine Internet marketing is the promotion of websites through increased visibility on search engines for specific keyword searches. Keyphrases closely related to your business can produce valuable traffic to your website if you appear in search engine results for those terms. Internet marketing can be the means to help you achieve this goal.
Many companies choose a combination of strategies to increase visibility of their website on search engines. Paying for ad placement on search engine sites is often one part of the strategy. Known as Pay Per Click Advertising, this will provide a link to your website in a sponsored section of the search engine’s website. In this case, you will pay for every visitor that comes to your website through this ad until your designated budget is exhausted for the month.
Another increasingly popular strategy, and often more effective, is to seek high rankings in the natural listings of the search engines. People trust sites like Google to tell them the truth. If a web site is coming up high on the first page when user searches a specific keyword, then they believe that site to rank well for a reason. Perhaps they would suspect that they have a lot of satisfied customers or that they do business in a timely manner. Perhaps their site is easy to use and packed with information relevant to that search.
Using search engine optimization (SEO) services for your website can help you not only to tweak your pages to be more easily accessible for indexing, but it can also help you make the information on your site more accessible.
SEO should also utilize social media to increase visibility, and is a great way to get the ball rolling. Search engines not only look at your site and your content, but they also weigh the amount of online participation. If people are talking about your site, bookmarking pages, reading and commenting on your blog, and sending video or links to their friends, search engines will likely see your sight as a high quality information source.
The ranking system is very complex for search engine giants such as Google, requiring search engine optimization companies to constantly research changes and keep on top. The right SEO can meticulously build links and work on site changes so that you are more highly regarded by the search engines. Internet marketing consists of a lot more than buying a paid placement ad or putting a banner on someone’s site, so don’t hesitate to pay the professionals when it comes to promoting your business online.

Google Penalties

Google can impose penalties on sites that try to abuse the system. This is why it is crucial to hire a professional, reputable, organically driven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company to optimize your site. Optimizing a site can take time. Rushing things could be detrimental to your success.
For example, SEO is built around building quality links that bring attention to your site. If you try to be tricky and just get a bunch of shotty links out there, you might just catch the eye of the Google-nators. Building a bunch of links really fast will send up a red flag and you could incur some penalties.
If you continue to abuse Google, you could be banned. This could mean a swift death for most companies. We depend so heavily on search engines to drive business to our sites that we really have to be careful.
Hiring the right people to optimize is key to avoiding penalty. Penalties are passed out freely by Google to those who violate their terms. Creating a bunch of links really fast to move up in the rankings could cause Google to push you down a few pages. Another thing that they penalize for is trying to hide text links on your page.
For example, I want people searching for “fuzzy kitties” to be directed to my site. I believe that I sell the best fuzzy kitties in the world. I can’t come up with a good way for fuzzy kitties to fit in the text of my home page, so I decide to make the text the same color as my homepage background. This way, I can type “fuzzy kitties” all over my site without anyone ever knowing the difference. Little tricks like this one can quickly bring on a penalty.
The same goes for using your keywords over and over again in the text copy of your pages. For example, “Fuzzy kitties are great. I love fuzzy kitties. Fuzzy kitties beget fuzzy kitties.” This type of action is not tolerated either. You do want to use your keywords early on in the text of your homepage, but it has to be naturally occurring. You can’t force it in and expect to be indexed for it. Google looks at all of your content. If it is totally relevant to have your keywords, even repeatedly, then you could be rewarded for it.
The bottom line is to follow the terms of service provided by Google. Hire a GOOD SEO company that utilizes organic social media to boost your ratings.

What is My Deep Link Ratio? (DLR)

A deep link is a link that points to a page on your site other than the homepage. When optimizing your site, you will be working with backlinks. Backlinks are links that point to your site from other web sites. As you progress and get deeper into your optimization, you may begin working with deep links.
Dividing deep links by your total number of backlinks will give you your Deep Link Ratio (DLR). This number is expressed as a percentage. You can have deep links on your actual site pointing to different pages on your site. You can also have external deep links that point to specific page topics. A high DLR percentage can be helpful in getting you good positioning on Google searches.
If you are interested in getting some deep links to compliment your efforts with your normal backlinks, make sure that you are not pushing links that are irrelevant or not directly related to the content. You need a natural progression of conversation or information leading up to and following the link.
For example, if you are selling furniture and would like to create a link that points to your page about dining room sets, then you will need to include the link in a relevant paragraph or article. If you put it in a list of other furniture, then Google may not see it as a link that is directly related to dining room sets. If you write about the different styles of dining room furniture and point it to your dining room page, then Google will see it as relevant. You cannot just throw a link into any random text and expect Google not to catch it. They analyze all of the information on the page before considering it relevant.
You do not want to add too many links too fast, either. A natural way for a website to grow is for links to be created over time. These links need to be included with quality content and should not appear to be a spam-o-rama of links that you threw out on the web. Google will ignore it if you do an onslaught of deep linking all at once.
Keep the keywords and links varied and allow nature to take its course. Do not get impatient and expect to see some great rankings right away. You are really building a case for your site to be ranked high when you are optimizing a site. Make sure that you hire a reputable organic Search Engine Optimization company that will not abuse links and you should see results slowly over time.

Building Backlinks for SEO

When optimizing your site for Search Engine Optimization, you had better have Google in mind. Google is by far the most trusted and used Search Engine out there. We could go on for months about the algorithms that Google uses to rank your page, but usually it is best to start with the basics. Here we will talk about the importance of backlinks on your site.
Google is very good at detecting links that are irrelevant to your site content or that lead the clicker to a spam site. It is crucial that you go organic with your site building and your SEO efforts. You do not want to get into a manual audit by Google, or worse. Your links need to be natural and make sense. This is the bottom line when it comes to effective link building on your site.
Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important things to work on when optimizing a site. Backlinks are also known as inbound links. Inbound links or backlinks are simply links that lead people to your site. Google will see backlinks to your site and rate them. Google is able to determine if the links are relevant to your site. The number of links leading to your site can also be important, if you do not over do it.
Google wants to know if the links are relevant. Therefore, they will not only look at the link, but also analyze the content around the link. If the content is presented in a logical order, has no misspellings or grammatical errors, and is part of a discussion about something pertaining to your site, then Google will most likely see this as a quality link. Google also considers the quality of the site that has a link to your site on it. Get enough of these quality backlinks directing people to you, and you could be on your way to a highly ranking site.
You must be careful and never try to trick Google. Google will disregard non-quality links. This prevents people from simply creating web pages with inbound links to the site they want to optimize, or simply throwing a whole lot of links to their site all over the web. Google is very good at catching little tricky moves like this and they will not tolerate it. Try to trick Google and you will eventually get burned. Google will not hesitate to ban you from their searches and then you are a lot worse off than you originally were.
Google ranks higher for backlinks that are all naturally occurring on quality sites that are related to yours. Getting these links takes time. You have to be patient because Google is. If a lot of backlinks show up at once, they will simply be disregarded by Google. You have to have them slowly appear over time and they have to all be quality links.
The keywords used to link back to your site need to be varied so that it is not obvious that you are planting all of these links. The goal is to not "plant" all of the links yourself, but to provide readers with interesting content that will make them want to bookmark or forward the articles with the links to other people. This is where you get into the importance of social bookmarking, so we will stop here. Just remember that backlinking is the backbone of SEO and you need to keep it organic when getting your backlinks.

SEO for Beginners: Don’t get taken to the Cleaners

Misconceptions abound in the realm of search engine optimization, due in part to the fact that the industry is unregulated and widely misconstrued. Like the discipline of medicine or law, there are SEOs who remain firmly dedicated to providing genuine, ethical services, and there are inevitably those seeking to make a quick buck capitalizing on the naiveté of others. Gaining a practical understanding of what to expect from search engine optimization can help you make a better long term investment in your website by avoiding SEO firms that fall into the latter group.

True search engine optimization encompasses more than the presence of key phrases on your home page. It even extends beyond Meta tags, inbound links and quality content. To be included in search engine result pages, a site must exude the essence of what search engines and users alike are seeking—authoritative, intuitive, valuable and informative, meanwhile adhering to World Wide Web best practices and current navigability protocols. Effective search engine optimization involves at minimum ensuring that search engine spiders are able to fully index each page of a site and that they can identify the major theme or subject associated with each—signified by the inclusion of the most relevant key phrases. Some site owners are under the delusion that Google has some sort of obligation to find and deliver their site to users. Google, like other search engines and site owners, aims to deliver a top quality user experience, and that includes indexing and providing access to reputable web pages relevant to the topics for which its users are searching. In implementing an SEO strategy to improve a site’s search engine visibility, remember: you are the one who wants your site to appear in the search results generated by Google, not the other way around. Search engine visibility requires that a web page first and foremost be up to the quality standards the engines prefer, and that means having a navigable site structure and original, updated content. Websites should be structured such that they are navigable by search engines while preserving an emphasis on providing a positive user experience. Some code and content modifications to better comply with search engine preferences may be helpful to maximize a site’s search engine appeal.

Another misguided perception that will inevitably lead to disappointment is the expectation of instant gratification from search engine optimization efforts. Even with the benefits of having regularly updated, fresh content, establishing a site as a leader takes time, particularly if it has been launched in recent months. SEO involves a longer time investment to achieve results as compared to pay per click and other forms of advertising that provide fairly immediate exposure. In purchasing a television spot to promote your products, you are purchasing a concrete block of time during which to convey your message to your audience. But establishing your website as a premiere resource in your industry is not such a cut and dry undertaking. Search engine optimization is an art and a science influenced by many factors, and making a few simple changes to a site is not enough to affect significant improvement in search engine visibility. Many pertinent issues must be evaluated in determining the best course of action for a particular site, and the issues to be addressed vary from site to site.

It is important for site owners seeking SEO services to understand that the practice of search engine optimization is one characterized by constant change. Firms providing SEO services must remain actively engaged with a network of industry experts and stay up to date on changes in order to achieve and maintain results. In selecting an SEO firm, be wary of any company promising to boost rankings by making a few quick site modifications or pledging to “SEO” your site in one shot. Guaranteed top search engine placement and other over the top promises should signal a red flag. As the adage goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

About the Author: Pamela Westbrook is a Project Manager for a premiere search engine optimization firm based in Austin, Texas. Pamela is a graduate of the University of Alabama Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration with a degree in Consumer and Industrial Marketing. For more information about search marketing and PPC management, please visit http://www.arteworks.biz