We often face a situation, where a person or company decides to build a website, thinking that once online, it will immediately receive thousands of hits per day and sales jump up.

Unfortunately, the situation is not like that. You can have a fantastic website, but if people do not know about it, nobody will come to see it.

When a company decides to build a website, and they reserve a budget for that, few are those who reserve part of that website budget for proper search engine optimisation and On-line marketing.
It is far more better to have a smaller website that generates traffic (and revenue) than a big nice website that nobody knows about.

Read more! »

In SEO, along with various other forms of Internet marketing, a lot of mention is made of keywords and keyword research. They do all play an important part in any SEO campaign, and it is important to understand exactly what they are and where their importance lies.

Literally speaking, a keyword is a word within a body of text that is most relevant to the topic of that text. In web content development and SEO, the term keyword is typically used to mean either keyword or keyphrase. A keyword is the word or phrase that an Internet surfer uses when searching for relevant pages or websites. If your page is deemed to be relevant and useful to that word or phrase then it will show up in the search engine results.

Choosing keywords for your pages that match the phrases that surfers use can help to increase traffic. Typically, though, the keywords and phrases are more competitive in terms of the number of pages that are competing for the coveted top spots in the search engine results.

Keyword research, typically involving the use of online or offline software, identifies the keywords that surfers use. Keyword research also indicates the number of sites that are competing for that term. It consequently identifies the best keywords for you to target, whether they be niche keywords with fewer competing sites but fewer monthly searches, or more generic keywords with lots of potential traffic but a lot of competition.

On-page optimization is a major aspect of SEO. Once the search engine spiders crawl your website and index the pages they will determine the keywords that that your pages should be listed for. As such, your textual content is vital.

Conducting keyword research should throw up some good keywords. For the majority of sites, the best approach is to start with less competitive keywords and progress to the higher-traffic, but more competitive keywords, in time.

Keyword density is not as rigid as it once was. In fact, Google and other major search engines prefer to see more organic content. Pages that include keyword stemming and keyword variants tend to perform better than the more traditional approach of keyword crammed pages.

One final note, an SEO campaign should treat every page as being independent. Each page needs its own keywords and should be promoted separately.

In its most simplistic form there are essentially two sections to an SEO campaign – on-page and off-page optimization.

• On-page optimization helps to ensure that the search engine spiders can effectively (crawl) navigate around your site, index each page, and determine the relevant keywords for each.
• Off-page optimization improves how well your pages perform when searches are conducted for your keywords.

An effective SEO campaign will concentrate on both on-page and off-page optimization and should be an ongoing program. Even in a niche market, your pages will be competing with numerous other sites to gain that coveted top spot – as soon as you let up the pressure, there is a very real chance that another page is waiting in the wings to overtake you.

Once you do a website, and are happy with it, you want that people actually visit your site. There starts the challenge of bringing traffic to your website. Many people think that by simply doing a website sales will boost, everybody on the internet will come to their website, and loads more. Well, that’s not the real life situation. Once you do a website, without any promotion potential visitors will not even know that it exists.

Read more! »