SEO Services * Free Search Engine Marketing

Maui Search Engine Optimization: Lesson #12

Zane Durant — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:02:00 GMT

I know search engines ignore stop words in meta tags and title tags. Do search engines ignore stop or common words in domain names?

Answer: Yes, to the degree in which the keywords have any effect the more common words within a domain name would be ignored. It is, however, important to keep in mind that search engines only place a limited amount of weight on keywords in a domain name. In my opinion the only time where a site keyword within a domain name wins a ranking war is when all other elements are equal between you and near-ranked competitor

Question 2) “ One of my clients has expanded their business into another state with a different name, but it is ultimately the same business. In order to develop a Web presence for this new, duplicate company in a new area, we created a second Website that has its own unique design, etc, but is ultimately a take off on the original site, using the same content, just minor differences to allow for the new name, geographic area, etc. The original site is optimized and of course contains the original content. The duplicate site is not optimized. In no way is our intention to "dupe" anything, but will this cause problems with the engines? We are not trying to get mileage off of the content by duplicating it... this is simply a second company that offers the same services, just in a different state. Each site is in its own domain and has its own URL. Your input? Your suggestions for a different solution? Thanks for your time."

Answer: Simply put if you are truly not looking to get any mileage out of the content then you do not want rankings for it which implies that the site should be blocked to the search engines. I would recommend using your robots.txt file to block the spiders entirely to that website so you do not negatively affect your rankings on the original site. The fact is that duplicate content, good intentions or not, is frowned upon by the search engines and you are gambling by having the site available for spidering.

If, however, you do want the search engines to spider the content then you must rewrite it to avoid duplicate content penalties.

As a final note I would like to pose a question; did your client absolutely have to create a secondary website? In many cases I find that a client need not have created a second site; they just needed to add a new section to their site to manage the new target marketplace. The other option, which may have been appropriate in this case, is to add a subdomain to enjoy the benefits of a secondary home page on a pre-branded domain and fresh marketable URL; nearly the same benefits of having a secondary domain without the headache of marketing an entirely new website. Even in this case, however, you would not be able to use duplicate content so you would be faced with the same issues; either rewrite the content or block it from spiders.

Question 3) " I have been writing articles for article directories in the hopes of receiving quality backlinks. Recently I came across a site mypagerank.net, which I decided to check on my link popularity. The result indicated that I only had 18 backlinks. What can I do to increase the number of backlinks I am getting? I would have expected more as I have written many more articles and submitted my URL to many directories. Thanks, enjoy reading your articles" - Peter

Answer: First, good work making the effort to write articles, they are an excellent medium for promotion and I commend you for dedicating the time to writing. I certainly understand the significant commitment to time and research required to write usable content. Fortunately, there are a few techniques that may help you squeeze some extra benefits from your hard work:

Be Clear - Request Credit
Are you being very clear to those republishing your content that you expect a linked credit for the copy? Simply stating that you allow syndication but request credit laid out in a particular linked format will do wonders. At StepForth we clearly request credit and we occasionally troll Google looking for those who have republished our content without credit; it is usually a simple matter to have the content removed or the appropriate link added.

Pick a Powerful, Timely Topic
Have you noticed a topic coming up regularly in forums? Perhaps a question that appears to be asked regularly? This is usually a good indication that an article discussing the topic would do well. Remember that many of the syndication networks online are looking for topics that will get readers and ultimately provide impressions for their advertisers. As a result, picking a hot topic will make a world of difference in how widely your article will get picked up.

Optimize the Title
The title of your article needs to clearly relay the topic and should engage readers and editors alike. The title can make or break a story if it is too vague or boring.

Refer to Your Own Content
It helps to provide inline links from your article to relevant previous articles or pages on your website. With practice and once you have built up a healthy reservoir of linkable articles it will soon be second nature to refer to links in a manner that is crucial to the article; so that editors note that the backlinks are relevant and play a legitimate role in the purpose of the article. Legitimacy of backlinks is crucial to make the ‘cut' because editors are more likely to remove a link than keep one if it appears merely promotional.

Give Praise Where it is Due
Within an article don't be afraid to link to other sources where you have noted particularly good information, particularly other small business blogs. The fact is that some bloggers take a real shine to those who syndicate or give credit to their content and may just link back to you in thanks.

Put RSS On Your Side
If you have not already done so ensure that your articles are syndicated on your website in RSS format as well. This can be easily accomplished by using a blog to publish your articles because most blog systems include automated feed creation. Many of the article syndication networks use articles solely through RSS. So as soon as you get a RSS feed you should go out and tell the world about it.

Maui SEO: Google Changes Search

Zane Durant — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:08:00 GMT

Have you ever become overwhelmed by the number of documents accessible via a search engine? If you're like most people, then you probably have. There are often millions of results and not every result is likely to be of equal importance to you.

In addition to that, there is also ambiguity of language. Words often have multiple meanings and people can have different interpretations of the same word. How does a search engine know the difference? Well, at this point, they don't.

They certainly can't read your mind so the only other alternative is to track your online activities in order to custom tailor your search results based on your recorded preferences.

Google is one of the first major search engines to test this new technology. They have released a total of 15 new patent applications this month in relation to this very endeavor.

Actually, I'm not too surprised that Google is taking a closer look at personalization. Google has already begun testing many of these new search features in Google's personalized search http://www.google.com/psearch, which is currently in beta.

Traditional algorithmic search engines have reached their peak. Personalized search is a natural and necessary progression for Google and other search engines as well. Some alternative search engines have already taken the lead in this endeavor. Eurekster http://www.eurekster.comis one of the main ones that comes to mind, using a searchers history to bring them more relevant results.

Here is an abstract from one of the Google patents entitled, Systems and methods for analyzing a user's web history http://tinyurl.com/ycdhxl:

A user's prior searching and browsing activities are recorded for subsequent use. A user may examine the user's prior searching and browsing activities in a number of different ways, including indications of the user's prior activities related to advertisements. A set of search results may be modified in accordance with the user's historical activities. The user's activities may be examined to identify a set of preferred locations. The user's set of activities may be shared with one or more other users. The set of preferred locations presented to the user may be enhanced to include the preferred locations of one or more other users. A user's browsing activities may be monitored from one or more different client devices or client application. A user's browsing volume may be graphically displayed.

Now, let's talk about all of that in English. Over time, we develop a history of search queries, selected results that were clicked on, advertisements that were clicked on, and a multitude of other browsing activities. Each of these actions reflect our preferences and interests. Other examples of user activity Google may begin tracking include instant messaging, word processing, participation in chat rooms, and internet phone calls.

Talk about an invasion of privacy. Unfortunately, we don't have enough time to get into that issue.

Within the proposed system, users are able to access their past searching and/or browsing activities to enhance their experience. Each of their online activities gives clues to what they might ultimately be looking for or related areas of interests.

In addition, users can also modify their profile information to better represent their interests. For example, a user may delete a search query from his/her history or he/she could also provide updated information as to new areas of interest.

One of the most interesting aspects of the patent filings involves the re-ranking of search results according to the user's preferences.

After a query is made and the results are received, they are then adjusted based upon information from the user's history.

The order of the search results can be adjusted in accordance with a history score and/or any user modified result score.

Search results can also be ordered based upon the combined search result score and the history score to come up with optimal results.

A searcher may also be shown an indication of previously visited pages among the SERPs, including information such as the date and time a page was previously visited and the number of times that the user has visited the site within a certain period of time.

A certain number of the most highly ranked results that the user has previously visited may be displayed in a region above the search results for easy access (kind of like memorized favorites). They could also be displayed in another section of the page, or even in a separate window.

These previously visited pages may be ordered based upon a number of different ranking criteria, including the history score, pagerank, time of last access, number of accesses, etc.

A user's browsing activities may also play a part in the ranking of search results. For example, if a website was previously visited by the user, it could have its score boosted based upon the number of times the user has visited that particular website. Google may also track how long a visitor stays at any given website. A site that is bookmarked and visited frequently will almost always rank higher.

On the other hand, search results that were previously presented to searchers but not clicked through could be lowered in the results.

What does this mean for you as a webmaster and SEO? It means that your focus should be on quality. In creating your website, you must emphasize visitor optimization and content optimization over search engine optimization.

The visitor always comes first and you must create a valuable experience for them. Allow them to quickly and easily bookmark your website. Give them a reason to hang out for a while, whether it be a forum, lots of great content, or fun quizzes.

The future of SEO is about creating quality, authority sites. Let Maui SEO help you build one.

Maui SEO Tutorial: Web Design & SEO

Zane Durant — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:11:00 GMT

Each day at Maui SEO we view dozens of websites that request a SEO Review and a vast majority of these sites have fundamental usability problems. Often times neglecting this important element of a website can lead online visitors to become lost, frustrated and/or confused. All it takes for a visitor to decide to stay, explore or leave a site is 0.4 of a second.

Attracting visitors to your website is a formidable challenge; it is yet another to build a fast connection with them and keep them there. With this in mind, here are some simple measures that can be taken to remedy these mistakes and help promote your online conversions.

Having great search engine placements is one thing but to create a usable website environment is just as important. What good can come from "being found" if users quickly exit your site? A solid search engine friendly and usable website should be your answer to both of these major components for your online success.

There are a variety of standards still in place when it comes to designing a usable website. This is not to say that the uniqueness and creativity of your website has to suffer, rather by following some simple guidelines visitors know where to go to find the information they need.

The process of developing a usable interface can be a balancing act. Some core elements need to be assessed prior to any actual design work being done. Attention to content creation, search engine friendly design tactics, and the face you put on your design each have to be blended into this usable environment.

This is a timely subject for us at Maui SEO as we are in the early stages of revamping our own websites based on customer / client feedback, recent trends in the design world, and our ever increasing need to develop a scalable website solution. Needless to say we will be following the same guidelines outlined below to ensure we have a website that "works".

I would highly recommend referring to the related links located at the bottom of this article for more details on this subject.

Here is a snap shot of the most common design mistakes we see with websites.

Content

Formatting Linking Text

Frequently we see designers underline body text or even text in images that is not directing users to another part of the website. Underlining on non-linking text is a huge problem especially if you have other links on the site that use the underline to illustrate a clickable path to follow.

A current trend is to have links displayed in body text without the underline text decoration (as defined in the website's CSS ) yet this may still cause unnecessary confusion with users. Try using other methods to highlight a message you want to stand out from the rest of the page content when it is not intended to be a hyperlink.

The same rules apply with the actual colour scheme you choose for your text. Avoid the use of the standard link colour blue (RGB colour #0000FF) for non-linking text as well. This will stop users from becoming frustrated when they attempt to clíck on text that will take them nowhere.

High Contrast Body Text

Another poor design trend we are seeing more of is the presentation of grey body text on a white background. This has no value what so ever as it immediately excludes a vast majority of users that cannot even read what is displayed. This is definitely one case where usability outweighs the need for attractive page aesthetics.

If clarity is your goal for your website, then advocate high contrast body text. This rule also applies to text on images; it is best to avoid fonts and styles that are hard to read.

Page Scanning

The old saying "first impressions are important" holds true when it comes to a visit to a website. There is a fine balance when it comes to how much text to include on any give page or subject. Remember time is precious before a user determines if they are in the right location on your website or not. Keep your initial message brief and informative and offer related pathways if the user wants to learn more. Most users have the habit of quickly scanning a couple of paragraphs before they either decide to learn more or look elsewhere.

Site Structure and Page Organization

Promoting a site structure that builds a level of user confidence is critical to a website's success. Will visitors find the information they are looking for or can they clearly understand your message? Solidifying a clear and organized site structure from the top down will help with this.

Logical Site Structure

Depending on the scale of the website this task can be fairly easily implemented. Unfortunately a common mistake is to try to cram as much information on a page as possible. Each topic should have its own page and any additional related material to that content should be the only linked content present (other than the main site wide navigation). To help clarify this, here is an example:

Perhaps you are selling musical instruments online and the page in question is a guitar you are trying to promote. Included on this page should be the standard image(s) of the product, and the description of the product in detail. If users wish to learn more about the product such as technical specifications or an online downloadable manual they should be (logically) linked on the page as well, along with any other relevant material directly related to that product.

It is very easy (and common) to want to point to other unrelated content that you think a user might want to know about. Do not offer opportunities for them to be led astray by cluttering the page with other products. Chances are potential customers arrived to that particular page because they wanted to. Cluttering a page with additional information about the latest flute in stöck is not going to help conversions.

Perhaps the reason that web designers fall into this trap is most likely because they try to employ tactics used in print advertising. With print advertising you are given a certain amount of ad space to illustrate your product. Sometimes the designers forget that websites are dynamic and can grow beyond that page.

Splash Page

Visitors are coming to your website to find the information they are looking for and often the first thing they see is a splash page. The majority of the time these intro pages offer nothing useful to the user and fall outside any consistent look and feel of the rest of the website. Generally speaking, the sole purpose of a splash page is to add a "cool" factor to the entryway to the site. Each and every page on your site including the homepage should be informative and consistent in look and feel. Let Maui SEO help.

SEO Marketing | SEO Design | HEX Numbers

Zane Durant — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 14:19:00 GMT

When I help people with SEO and their web pages, I encourage them to edit the HTML directly and not rely on programs like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe GoLive to layout their pages. Remember "less code is best" and those stupid design programs load your page with garbage code. Today I want to talk about color codes and hex numbers...One of the things that most people have a hard time grasping is what HTML Color Codes mean and how they work.

HTML Color Codes are 6 characters wide and look like "#80FF12". This is really made up of 3 2-digit hex numbers that represent Red, Green, and Blue. I probably just lost a good portion of the readers, didn't I? It's okay... Let me back up and explain some things about hex values and color.

How to describe a color using numbers? There are a lot of ways to specify a particular color, but one of the ways that's used with computers is to specify the values of Red, Green, and Blue to mix together to achieve the desired color. As we vary the amounts of Red, Green, and Blue we can create most any color you desire.

Why does this relate to computers? Computer displays, TVs, LCDs, and other "projected light" display devices use pixels to display what you see on the screen. The color value for those pixels is specified in a RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) value. For example, if your PC monitor is set to 1024 x 768 resolution, then there are 768 lines (going across your screen from top to bottom) on your screen, each line has 1024 pixels or little dots in it. Each of those pixels or little dots is actually made up of three smaller dots or light sources: a red one, a green one, and a blue one.

Ink is different. Printers that you use with your computer generally specify color as a four (or more) color "reflective" ink value made up of Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, and Black which is abbreviated as YMCK. Your computer uses formulas to convert the RGB values to CMYK values so that you can print what you see on your screen accurately.

How does the computer represent a RGB color value? As 3 separate values (one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue) and each one ranges between 0 and 255. If you count the 0 as a value, that's a total of 256 possible values. When you put the Red, Green, and Blue values together to represent a color, you get a possibility of 16.7 million colors (256 x 256 x 256). That's a lot of colors and most people consider this to be "true" color because it can represent most photographs and images.

OK then, what is a Hex value? I'm glad you asked! Your computer stores information as single ones and zeros. Each of these tiny single values is called a "bit". We then combine 8 of these "bits" to make a "byte". So a byte is 8 bits. If you recall from high school math, you can count in various "bases". We normally use base 10 or "decimal", which uses 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 to represent a number. Likewise, if we use the ones and zeros I just mentioned, we're talking about just two possible values for each digit, 0 or 1, and this is called base 2 or "binary". However, in computers, we also use base 16, or hexadecimal (hex for short) because it packs more values into a single space. Hex uses the following digits to represent a number: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. To represent the number 128 in decimal or base 10 takes 3 digits (128), in binary it takes 8 digits (10000000), and in hex or base 16 it takes just 2 digits (80). So by using hex values we save storage space and gain efficiency.

OK, my head hurts now, how does this relate to HTML color codes? HTML colors codes are made up of 3 sets of hex numbers, one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue.

For example:
000000 is black (0's for all three colors)
FFFFFF is white (255's for all three colors)
FF0000 is all RED (255 for Red, 0 green, 0 blue)
00FF00 is all GREEN (0 Red, 255 green, 0 blue)
0000FF is all Blue (0 red, 0 green, 255 blue)
FFFF00 is Yellow (255 red, 255 green, and 0 blue)
808080 is a gray (128 red, 128 green, and 125 blue)

Generally in HTML, you also put a "#" in front of the color code, but this is not necessary when you specify all 6 digits. If you make profiles for mySpace.com, leave off the "#" too because they filter them and it won't display the color correctly if you use the "#".

You can use the calculator that comes with Microsoft Windows to convert between Decimal and Hex values. Open the calculator and select View and then Scientific. Once you do this, you'll see more buttons and controls on the calculator. Clíck "Dec" and the key in a number. Now clíck "Hex" and it'll convert the number to hex. To convert from Hex to Dec, clíck on "Hex", key in the number, and then clíck "Dec". Sometimes you'll get a color specification in Decimal, for example (128, 30, 80) and you can use this method to convert it to hex (80, 1E, 50) which would look like this for your HTML color #801E50.

I hope you understand more about HTML Color Codes and how colors are stored and specified in computers. If you want more info contact me at (808) 214-2032 -- MAUISEO

Maui SEO Secrets: Selecting Keywords

Zane Durant — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 14:26:00 GMT

When beginning a Search Engine Optimization campaign, there are a few basic steps that every SEO knows to take before they begin. The first is always to build a keyword list of which there are varying methods of doing so. The right methods will aid you in creating and supporting a site-wide SEO strategy. The wrong methods will run you in circles, wondering what went wrong.

It is the intent of this article to teach an effective method of keyword selection that will enable you to land more keywords on the first page with less work.

Getting Started: Know the Site

To create a great keyword list, you will need to know your website backwards and forwards. You should know what the site features, and just as importantly, you should know what it doesn't feature.

The first step is to brainstorm a list of somewhat generic keywords. For example, if you are a shoe store in Poughkeepsie, the temptation will arise to try and rank number 1 for the term "shoes." Well, that's a start, but ranking for the word "shoes" is probably aiming a little too high for a mom and pop shop in Upstate New York, which is why it's very important that you know the site well enough to come up with a good list of pseudo-generic "modifiers" for your keyword:

* Location (Poughkeepsie shoes, shoes upstate New York, shoes 12601)
* Price (cheap shoes, affordable shoes, quality shoes, comfortable shoes etc)
* Types (running shoes, walking shoes, jogging shoes etc)
* Industry specific (anti-pronation shoes)

Lengthening the List

At this point you should have a good list of pseudo-generic keywords. The next step is lengthening that list using your favorite Keyword tool (I will be using Overture in this example).

Each time you plug a keyword into your tool of choice, it will return the number of searches conducted for that term over a given period of time. It will also suggest keywords from the tool's database that are similar to the one you entered.

The basic idea now is to go through the list returned by the keyword tool and copy any and all similar terms as well as their corresponding search values, which relate directly to the site you're optimizing. Then, paste them to a spreadsheet program so that they can be further edited later.

Once you have copied and pasted, just go through the list row by row. Delete keywords that don't have to do with the website you're optimizing (which is why it's important to know what the site doesn't feature) and repeat with the next pseudo-generic keyword on your list. The idea is to identify as many keywords as possible.

Narrowing the List

So you have a long keyword list; it's time to narrow it down. I narrow my lists by deciding if the potential gain for a keyword is relative to the competition. In order to make that decision, I need to know three variables:

1. The number of searches on a particular keyword (already got those from Overture)

2. The Amount of Competition (I'll show you how to find your competition in this section.)

3. Will the keyword lead to conversions (this is up to you)

Below is a method for thoroughly determining competition for various keywords:

1. Do a search for one of your keywords

2. On the first SERP find the last listing with the keyword in the title tag that is either a homepage of any kind or is a sub-page which is not associated with a domain whose Pagerank is greater than 6. (This is the page you will need to beat, if one does not exist, ranking will generally be easier)

3. Find out how many unique links with the keyword in the anchor text whose linking page has a Pagerank of 1 or higher for the competitor (This is how many quality backlinks you'll need to acquire)

The aforementioned is a meticulous method for determining the competition for all of your keywords, and unless you're planning on building a tool that will automate this process, I would suggest taking a more general approach by using advanced search strings in the search engine of your choice.

The technique that I am about to demonstrate uses the following string:
intitle:"Keyword Phrase" inanchor:"Keyword Phrase"
This string will return the total number of pages with, largely, the two greatest factors contributing to ranking for a keyword:

* Having the keyword in the page title
* Having the keyword in anchor text pointing to the page

It's a down and dirty method for assessing competition. This is how it's done:

1. Go to http://www.startlaunch.com/research/.

2. Copy your list of keywords into the box, click "submit".

3. Click on each link.

4. Find and copy the number of pages that the search engine returns for this query from the top right of the SERPs to a new column next to the corresponding keyword in your keyword list spreadsheet (this is your competition).

5. In another new column, divide the number of competitors by the number of monthly searches for each keyword.

6. Sort the table from low to high (ascending) using that column.

What you have done is created a ratio of competitors to searches. When determining competition, you generally want the keyword to be searched on more times than there are competitors for that word. So the closer the ratio is to 0, the better the keyword.

These techniques will point out which terms have the most competition, but competition alone should not dictate which words make the final list.

Keyword Layout

Remember when selecting keywords: words on a higher competitive level should be placed on pages that will receive deep links in groups of 2 or 3 where all of the keywords are very similar like:

*Running shoes, Shoes for running and buy running shoes online
*Web design in Atlanta, Atlanta Georgia web design, Atlanta web site design

This way, you won't have to remove highly competitive, but potentially lucrative terms from your list, provided that you make a concerted effort to perform link-building for the pages on which those terms reside.

For smaller terms, in my opinion, the more the merrier. They can be given their own pages or be mentioned on other highly trusted pages of your site.

That's it. You should have all the information you need to select a strategically viable keyword list. Remember, keyword research is the cornerstone of a successful SEO campaign. Knowing the competition for your keywords will aid you in site layout, as well as focusing effort on SEO only where it is necessary. Ultimately, it will make your optimization process more efficient, allowing your sites to rank for more keywords with less work, which is a goal that all SEOs strive to attain.

RenoSEO Marketing: Search Engine Optimization

Zane Durant — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 14:30:00 GMT

One area that inevitably comes up when discussing Web site production is search engine optimization. This is an area of particular concern to Web hosts, because market saturation has made it nearly impossible to rank well for generic keywords such as "Web host," "Web hosting" "server" and the like.
In truth, going after rankings for these terms is a fool's errand, particularly if this is the first time you're introducing optimization to your site. You're much better off targeting a few more manageable areas before going after the broad terms ("Web host" returns 288 million responses, FYI).

Here's the first thing you need to know. The following principle applies to all aspects of SEO for all different types of sites: the key to good search engine optimization is to perform best possible human optimization. You see, search engine developers are constantly tweaking their search algorithms to produce results they think people want to see. They are attempting to emulate human thinking patterns as closely as possible. This means creating pages as human-friendly as possible will stand to gain the most reward in the long run from search engines.

In the spirit of human optimization, the first thing you can do to get better SE response is make sure your site is engineered optimally on the back end. No amount of pretty paint can make a house with a poor foundation more stable, so start by making sure your house is sturdy. I would suggest getting acquainted with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I linked to Wikipedia, because there are multiple guidelines in multiple stages, and there are criticisms of this documentation about which you should be aware as well. But the better optimized you are for human accessibility, the more search engines will reward you, and while you may never achieve a level of WCAG compliance, aspiring to do so will leave you in much better shape than ignoring the important principles contained in that documentation. When you're done, you'll have abandoned tables for layout purposes (if you haven't done so already), you'll be using good content heirarchy practices, you'll be emphasizing content that updates more frequently over content that does not, you'll be titling certain objects properly, providing alternative text for images and image links, and you'll be performing a whole assortment of optimization techniques on your site that will be deemed quite favorable by human visitors, and thus, by search engines as well.

I've found reengineering a poorly built site alone can sometimes lead to enough of a boost in SE rankings that no further optimization is required, but not in a market as saturated as hosting! From here, you need to concentrate on the quality of your content. Every business must be in motion, and it is your responsibility to your visitors to communicate that motion to them. Keep your content fresh and relevant, and by rewarding your visitors with new information, search engines will reward you too (optimize for the human audience, and...).

When you're producing your content, try targeting key words, phrases and ideas that are relevant to niche markets. Ranking well based on geography is not a bad strategy. Ranking well for "Web hosting" is hard. Ranking well for "Web hosting Sheboygan Wisconson" is not so hard. You might be surprised how many local businesses will search for hosts in their area, either to support local commerce or to fulfill a certain comfort factor that comes with dealing locally.

Back links are important, but I recommend keeping them honest. Link purchasing might get you to a certain point, but you'll end up spending a good bit of money for an uncertain result, when there are better ways to get links back to your site. Press releases through the right distribution channels are a great way to generate back links with high relevancy. Of course, if you're going to send press releases, you have to do something newsworthy. But hey - a productive business is always in motion, right? Tip: please have your press releases professionally written. Unless you're an expert in AP style and have a background in news journalism, leave this to professional writers. Directory listings are a good way to get quality links as well.

If you can cover these bases, you have a pretty good head start in the SEO game. Once you've built up a solid presence and gotten good response from more targeted efforts, this is the time to go after broader searches.

Build a solid base, keep your site (and ultimately your business) fresh, propagate yourself online organically and you stand a chance of getting the search engine attention you desire in the long run.

SEO Marketing Services: Optimizing Misspelled Words

Zane Durant — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:32:00 GMT

Optimizing a website for misspelled words is often recommended by many people within the search engine optimization SEO community.

The concept is to capture the searchers who enter incorrectly spelled words into the search engine's interface search box. The theory is based on creating the wrong spelling, and placing it deliberately on your blog or static website. Theoretically, the pseudo-word will rank at the top of the Google search results, and receive a bonus visitor.

I do not share this SEO opinion; nor do I recommend spelling words incorrectly on a website or blog. The practice does more harm than good. It should be avoided by website owners and bloggers who want to establish a reputation for trustworthiness and professionalism.

The reasons provided by some SEO professionals for utilizing, what could be euphimistically called alternative spellings, are usually presented with good intentions. Of course, as with so many other well intended ideas, the practice doesn't match the theory. In fact, the very reasons for using misspelled words in the first place, are the reasons I don't recommend them at all. They do much more damage to a website than can be countered by any perceived benefits.

SEO theory: Incorrect spellings

The reasons for misspelling words on websites seem reasonable on the surface. In fact, some boosts in traffic can be measured as a direct result of the intentional errors. As with many statistics, the visitor traffic log can be a misleading metric if used improperly. In the case of spelling errors, the visitor traffic might not be of any value at all. It might even be harmful to your company reputation.

Let's examine why incorrect spellings are given such serious consideration as search engine tools.

It's well known that people type wrong letters when making a search query in Google. Instead of the standard and expected spelling, letters are often reversed in a transposition error, letters omitted entirely, frequently misspelled words, or letters adjacent on the keyboard are substituted by mistake. The theory holds that these are searchers who could be captured by way of the spelling error. Instead of losing those people to other sites, say these experts, they arrive at your site from ranking highly for the spelling mistake.

Problems with SEO by spelling mistakes

Misspellings no longer have the value that is often attributed to them. The major search engines, when confronted by a spelling error, will offer an alternative word. Very often, their offered choice is usually the word spelled as nature intended; in effect, negating any alleged value attributed to the spelling oops. Instead of a click to the rearranged letter site, the visitor visits a website or blog where spelling is treated with more care.

Visitors clicking on a link to a site with incorrectly spelled words are not likely to be impressed with the site in general. While they may have entered the wrong letters in the search box, they do expect to visit a site where attention is given to detail. Perusing a web page, with words spelled in various disguises, is unlikely to generate faith in the company's products and services. While the visitor traffic logs might record an arrival, the exit may be quick and accompanied by a vow never to return in this lifetime.

Visitors who do arrive via incorrectly spelled words will experience the same disdain for what appears to be a sloppily proofread site. Instead of converting to customers and clients, the visitor will simply click their mouse to a competitor with a more professional appearance. Bad spelling does not generate customer goodwill and confidence. Indeed, the effect is usually the opposite.

Good SEO is also good visitor experience

Proper SEO practice is not only about high search engine rankings and visitor traffic counts. Those elements are important, but they are not the entire story in and of themselves. A well designed site is also attractive, looks professional and trustworthy, and results in conversions from visitor to real life customer and client.

Instead of worrying about losing potential visitor traffic due to misspelled word searches, concentrate on improving your site. Add fresh informative content that will rank well for other keyword phrases entirely. Attract search engine traffic for the right reasons and your online business will achieve success. You will also build a solid reputation for professionalism, and for attention to the needs of the customer.

Maui SEO: Marketing Idea: SEO

Zane Durant — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:36:00 GMT

There are many techniques used by search engine optimization companies to aid webmasters in the strategy of building and maintaining a successful search campaign.

A vital technique, which is somewhat underestimated yet easy to implement, is the use of site statistics. Measuring the behaviour of your visitors and search engine spiders should be a critical part of your SEO effort.

There are many other influences in a successful organic search campaign, offsite and onsite, but what happens after you have attracted visitors to your site? Can you use the knowledge of these visitor trends to maximise traffic further?

Measuring and tracking the onsite behaviour of visitors and spiders is essential SEO. Doing so will allow you to estimate how well your on-page optimisation has been.

There are various site statistic programs available today, and you may already have one implemented by your web hosting company. A select few are:

Page Views
A page view is when a visitor lands on a page. To view this page, the browser must download all the elements on the page - for example, images and stylesheets. Checking and understanding how many visits a page has had is important because it can show how well a page has been optimised and the importance of this page to visitors. For example, if you realise that there have been a large number of page views for a specific product on a shopping website, this indicates a popular product and should be highly visible to users and well optimised to attract organic searchers.

Referrals
Referrals are the source from which the user originates to gain access to your website. By checking your search engine referrals, you will be able to see which search engines are producing what results for your target keywords. This is a good way to check what keywords are important to target: for example, if you notice that you are receiving many referrals from a keyword, you can try to further optimise that page, to maximise exposure and traffic.

Visits
Visits are a series of actions that start when a visitor views their first page on your site, to the last page when a visitor leaves your site. Measuring visit trends over time can give a comprehensive overview of how well your site has been optimised. Monitoring user visits is especially effective for sites that are selling a product because you will be able to tell if the keywords you are targeting are converting visits into sales. A way to monitor trends in your visits is to consider navigation elements on your site. If you have a search feature for example, you might notice that a product - which might be hard to find in a deep level location - is searched for on a regular basis and should have improved navigational options added for better site integration and user experience.

Stats are a useful tool in the webmaster's arsenal and should never be overlooked!

Maui SEO: December 5, 2006

Zane Durant — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:38:00 GMT

For online businesses getting that all-important top — or top three — ranking on the major search engines often feels like the quest for the Holy Grail. But Internet marketing expert Jason Baer, senior director at Mighty Interactive, which just re-launched its Web site to make it more search engine friendly, says to succeed you just need to follow four simple rules.

Rule #1: Pick Specific Search Terms
First and foremost says Baer, you need to be realistic and judicious about which search terms you're going to optimize for. "You're not going to be number one for 'Internet marketing' or number one for 'Web site design'. There are literally millions of Web pages that come up when you search for something that broad, and the chances of you being on the first page of Google for something that broad is, for the most part, zero," he says. "So you've got to think a little more strategically about what search terms really make sense for your business."

There's been a lot of research done to show that the more specific the search term, the greater likelihood of somebody actually converting to be a customer, says Baer. "If somebody searches for 'digital camera,' they're probably just kicking the tires. But if somebody searches for 'Canon PowerShot SD600 digital camera,' he or she is probably much closer to buying." So try using longer, more specific search terms that will attract serious customers to your site and/or products or services.

Once you've decided on your search terms, make sure you place them in your page titles, because that's where those search engine spiders look to determine what the page is about. And, says Baer, have different page titles for every page on your site.

Rule #2: Minimize Flash and Graphics
Graphics are invisible to search engines, so make sure all of the links on your site are text links, not graphics, says Baer.

Similarly, don't turn text into a graphic. It may look nicer, he says, "but then it's invisible to search engines."

Baer also suggests avoiding Flash as much as possible. "It's very difficult for search engines to read and index Flash," he explains, "so typically most content that's included in Flash is invisible.

Maximize Your Site Map
Another good way of getting your site noticed is by including a site map.

"You definitely want to have a site map that has a text link to it and links to every page on the site," says Baer, "because search engine spiders will come and hit that site map page and then they'll click on every link. That way the search engines find all the pages on your site, not just the top level pages. So even if you're site is not very big, you definitely want to have a site map."

Rule #3: Write Great Copy With Relevant Search Terms
"Copy is king to search engines," says Baer. So, once you've got your search terms programmed, minimized the amount of graphics on your site, and gotten rid of all that Flash, "then it really becomes a copywriting contest."

That's because search engines read every page of copy. "They determine what words are on the page, what words are important and how frequently each word is mentioned [what is known as key word density]," explains Baer. "And they use that to help determine whether that page should come up first or last for a particular search term."

So if, for example, you want to be ranked for 'Delaware Web design firm,' "you need to have a page on your Web site that says 'Delaware Web design firm,' and says it in an artful way a few different times," says Baer. And you have to use exactly that phrase, not something like it, because otherwise the spiders won't count it.

You also need to liberally sprinkle those key search terms on appropriate pages throughout your site, as key word density determines rankings. So, for example, if one of your search terms is 'e-mail marketing,' "if you have 300 words on the page and 30 of those words are 'e-mail marketing,' your key word density would be 10 percent," explains Baer.

Although key word density varies from search engine to search engine, typically you want to be in the 4 - 6 percent rage.

Another copy tip: the more frequently you add new content to your site, the more search engines will come back to your site. "And that typically gives you a little extra credit," says Baer.

Rule #4: Reciprocity Rules, Get Links
"If you don't have links to your site, you're never going to get ranked, because that is the element of the equation that the search engines put the most emphasis on, because it's the toughest to fake," says Baer. "I can write good copy, even if my site's terrible. But most likely I can't get a bunch of links from good sites if my site's terrible. And Google and Yahoo! and MSN recognize that. So that's why they treat links so much more valuably than they do anything else."

So whether you are building or updating or re-launching your site, "you want to make sure that all your clients link to you," says Baer. "You want to make sure that you're listed in all of the online directories that might relate to your business," as well as post comments on blogs and discussion boards with links to your site. And every time you do a press release, "make sure you put it on PRWeb or one of the other online news distribution services," he adds, "because those then get picked up by Web sites, and that creates more links to your site."

Who links to you also matters. "A link from a .edu gives you huge credit in search engines, because they know it's difficult to get," explains Baer. "And links from big sites count more than links from little sites. So a link from the New York Times to your Web site is going to count a lot more than a link from Mighty Interactive." That's why a big part of Mighty Interactive's client work involves going out and getting them links.

Learn To Play Geek Chess
If these rules are new or intimidating to you, don't feel overwhelmed. "Part of the evolution of search engines is that they have made their algorithms, the formulas they use to determine rankings, massively more complicated and nuanced in the last five years. It used to be the content was pretty much all that mattered. Then they introduced links and made other changes," which raised the bar, says Baer.

"It's really just geek chess," he says. "Google's geeks do something and then my geeks have to react. And then once we figure out the formula then Google's geeks make other changes and then my geeks have to react. And it keeps going around like that." But, says Baer, who has helped dozens of company's of all sizes with search engine optimization, if you follow these four simple rules, you can play chess with the big boys, get noticed online and drive more — and better — traffic to your site.

Maui SEO Tutorials: Keyword Advice

Zane Durant — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:53:00 GMT

Search Engine Marketing Lesson

Maui INTERNET MARKETING * A MAUI HAWAI'I SEO

Internet Marketing or "SEO"[Search Engine Marketing] requires hours of research. There are color and design options not to mention all the research to find the most popular keywords for the business... Then you have to check the competition to see what works now, figure out why, and how to counter it. The next step involves writing copy that not only contains your "keywords" it also has to actually SELL!

Here's a great tip for anyone designing a web site. When writing copy for your web page make sure your web copy includes all your best keywords in the first paragraph for best search engine results. That is the best search engine marketing advise I can give you. In today's tutorial, we will take a closer look into keyword copywriting using my SEO business as an example.

I have an SEO firm in Maui, Hawai'i, and I really want to add the words Lahaina, Hawaii, SEO, Services, Solutions, and especially Search Engine Marketing into this web page. The more times I can use the phrases SEO Services, Search Engine Marketing or Maui SEO in this page - the better - but I have to be careful; if I use the phrase "Maui SEO" too much I may have a problem. To get by this, try to work in your keywords naturally. Just watch how I work my "SEO Services" keywords into this copy below-->

By now you know my "SEO keyword": Maui SEO or - "Search Engine Marketing" must be all over this paragraph, just like you should fill your front page with all your best key phrases at just the right intervals. Watch this keyword placement:: "We can help you with your SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING! MauiSEO Services - Maui, Hawai'i!"

Here's another example, let's say you have a seo web design company in Maui, Hawaii - your main keywords "Maui, Hi.", and your secondary keyword, "Lahaina or Maui SEO Web Design" must be all over your Maui SEO Web Design web site. WARNING: If you repeat your keywords too often on your page; like writing SEO-SEO in bold print (like I did just did in that textbook example); then, as I said, you run the risk of being ignored by the search engines, which is bad, mmmkay? You can get away with things like that with search engine robots only once. Write copy like:: Our Internet Marketing Campaign made MauiSEO #1 on Yahoo for the term MAUI SEO.

You may ask "How often can I use my SEO or search engine marketing keywords? Well, right now that pesky little robot from Yahoo or Google is considering my tutorial piece here might be a piece of "ad spam". So I will move onto another piece of SEO Magic...bold headings. Add at least three bold headings to your web page. Watch what I do with these SEO keywords:

Ecommerce Solutions!
Maui Ecommerce Consultants
Advertising & Marketing Consultants
Lahaina * Kahului * Kaanapali, Hana, Hawai'i
Advertising & Marketing Hawai'i since 1980

Maui Hawaii Search Engine Information: After SEO

Zane Durant — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 15:57:00 GMT

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most highly talked about topics between Webmasters and marketers. It is probably also the single topic that more webmasters obsess over than any other (in terms of their website anyway!). However, while SEO can be an excellent resource for targeted traffic, all website owners should concentrate their efforts on more than trying to squeeze one more percent out of keyword density, or beg one more PR5 link from an authoritative site. As well as sapping energy, causing breakdowns in family relationships, and being responsible for the onset of male pattern baldness it also causes us to lose sight of our ultimate goal.

You Mean There's More To Online Life Than SEO?

The ultimate goal for the vast majority of websites is to either make money or promote a service that makes money. How the site goes about it is entirely up to the Webmaster. Whether you choose to make money through affiliate links, PPC advertising, product sales, dropshipping, or any other method the single most important aspect of your website is your visitor. Visitors are those people that you attempt to attract to your site and they are the ones that will essentially make you some cash.

Don't Forget The Real People

The biggest problem with concentrating on SEO is that while the search engine spiders might be difficult to please they are a walk in the park, a piece of cake, and an absolute breeze when compared to real-life, living, breathing, walking, talking visitors. Search engines rely on mathematical algorithms to determine the quality of your site whereas the visitor relies solely on personal opinion. The next time you're attempting to inject 2 or 3 more instances of key phrases like "California Mesothelioma lawyer attorney" into your content try to remember that some poor soul might actually have to try and make sense of what you're writing.

Some Search Engines Are Complying

Fortunately for you and I, of course, some of the mathematical search engines are also coming round to this way of thinking. Google, in particular, want to offer users natural search results. They want to promote natural web pages, with natural content, using natural keywords, gaining natural links. This means that Webmasters are able to start obsessing over a number of other factors now instead:

Optimizing Your Content For Conversions

Conversion rates are not a part of SEO but should be a part of your business strategy. Consider how many people visit your site and the percentage of those people that either click through the links on your page or purchase a product. It is virtually impossible to predict with any certainty what your conversion rate SHOULD be but you should always strive to improve it. Your content should convert, your newsletter should convert, your mailing list should convert, and your emails should convert.

Improving Customer Retention Rates

Customer retention is also important. Once you sell a product or provide a service, even if you persuade a visitor to click a link and make a purchase you should do everything you can to ensure that you retain your customer base and they return to make purchases again. A big part of every successful business is repeat custom and without it you will always be fighting an uphill struggle to generate new leads and convert those leads into customers.

Ensuring that you offer the best service, the best prices, the best results, or the best information and help can generate good customer retention. However this isn't all of it. Company or website branding also plays a part, and following up with after sale emails and contact is also vital if you have the relevant information to hand. Use business cards and compliment slips whenever possible and always ensure that you include a company signature in all your email communications.

Generating Sales And Marketing Methods

Sales are obviously vital and without sales you will never achieve customer retention. In order to make sales it is important to acquire or generate leads. SEO is obviously a very beneficial way of generating leads but it isn't the only way. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, advertising is a good way to instantly drive traffic to your site. SEO can take months to begin to generate results whereas you can truly hit the ground running with an effective PPC campaign. Ensure that you have a compelling advertisement lined up and also ensure that your website content is geared toward the conversion of any visitors you do receive.

Banners And Text Ads

Banner advertising and text advertising (I'm trying to ignore the temptation to mention their use in SEO) have taken a back seat to SEO and PPC, but for some sites they still have their uses. Find websites or newsletters that offer information relevant to your product or your service and then try out a small advertising campaign before you inject large amounts of money in a campaign that may not bear any fruit whatsoever.

Offline Advertising Methods

Offline advertising is also an option, though it can prove costly. For geographically targeted campaigns it may [rove particularly beneficial. Local radio stations, local newspapers, and even billboards are options that do still generate results. These can cost money though. Bear in mind that some websites have been known to take this a step further with skywriting and other unusual tactics. These are best left to the behemoth sites like Ebay in all honesty.

Conclusion

SEO is not the be-all and end-all of a website. It is a powerful online marketing technique that can in time generate large amounts of targeted traffic. However, it is important to remember that once that traffic arrives your site must be optimized for conversions and sales. You should also consider using other forms of advertising in order to gain more site visitors and a more diverse range of traffic.

Web Design SEO Standards: What to Add

Zane Durant — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:06:00 GMT

Taking web standards into account when designing a website may not be a primary concern for many site owners, but when it comes to finding an extra edge to improve their business, they are more than willing to do anything required to increase revenues. Let's see how complying with Web standards can help a business website.
What are the Standards?

On the Web, the main standards are the languages used when creating websites. The most wide-spread ones are HTML, XHTML and CSS. HTML or XHTML are used to create the backbone of websites - the structure. (The difference between HTML and XHTML is that XHTML was formed from XML and is forward compatible.) CSS, in turn, is used to style, format and position the structure and content.

What is Web Standards Compliance?

Put simply, web standards compliance is using web languages correctly. This involves using HTML tags properly and the way they were and are intended to be used. For instance, one of the most common felonies against the web standards is using table tags for layout, while the correct usage is to use them only for tabular data (information to be put in tables).

Benefits of Standards Compliance

Creating quality, standards compliant code has a number of benefits:

website forward compatibility
increased site download speed
browser compatibility
easier site maintenance
broader target audience
How Can This Help Business?

Perhaps every entrepreneur is asking himself right now, "And where is the monëy here?" Probably every benefit can either increase revenues or save expenses. Let's look at them in detail.

Site Forward Compatibility

Web standards, such as XHTML and CSS, are designed to work forever. They will also be supported for an almost unlímited period of time. Designing a site according to web standards will ensure the website backbone will not need to be redone any time soon, which reduces the amount of work on the site and the expenses of the site owner.

Increased Download Speed

When using XHTML for content and structure and CSS for styling and formating, page size is reduced when compared to a page, designed with tables for layout. For instance, a site with a relatively small number of images is 50% smaller than a table-based website. Because users enjoy fast-loading websites (they start leaving after eight (8) seconds beyond clicking on a link), they will be more likely to become a clients of a web standards compliant website.

Browser Compatibility

A web standards compliant site is displayed correctly (and looks the same) in all standards compliant browsers. Adjusting the site to suit a less helpful browser (Internet Explorer, for instance) is much easier with CSS than with tables. This saves enormous amounts of time for a web designer.

Easier Site Maintenance

When separating content and styling with XHTML and CSS, it is much easier to edit any of those, because they are located in different files. Should one need to adjust the look of the main page heading (), he/she will just need to change a line or two in a style sheet to change the appearance of all headings on the website. Editing content is easier as well, because no styling and formatting is in the way and it is easy to spot the content in clean and semantically correct code markup.

Broader Target Audience

Furthermore, web standards are used not only on computers, but also by PDAs (hand held devices, palm computers), phones and other devices. A site, adhering to web standards, will be displayed correctly either without editing or will require very little work to be displayed correctly on a platform other than a computer. Such easy availability will make the company site easily accessible for a wider range of potential customers, increasing the chances of business success as well.

So What To Do?

Naturally, there may be several choices for a business site owner:

Do nothing and wait till something more noticeable becomes obvious about the web standards.

Wait, research the topic, get more proof and then redesign with web standards and visitors in mind.

Redesign the site right now, either with the help of an in-house web designer or a professional, specialized company.
Any of the choices above solely depend on the situation of the business site. Most probably, making a site web standards compliant will be most beneficial to starting or young websites, which will reduce the amount of work needed in the future. Mature websites can consider adjusting their websites to improve the quality of their visitor experience. Those, whose sites are barely important can live as they are, provided the site works. Thus, it all depends on the site owner and the situation the business is in.

Hawaiian Web Design: SEO Marketing

Zane Durant — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 16:02:00 GMT

We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio, but we experience the Web; this is what makes 'The Website' one of the most powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing executives. Unfortunately conventional wisdom has stifled the 'experience factor' on most website presentations.

Traditional circulation based advertising biases and pitch-mandated direct mail practices from metric-minded agencies have limited businesses' ability to take advantage of the Web's capacity to provide a more active, creative, and penetrating sensory experience aimed at furthering marketing objectives.

As consumers of information we all filter what our mind considers irrelevant. When we go to a website we quickly recognize where banner and text advertisements have been placed and proceed to ignore them for the rest of our visit. Even television ads are becoming increasingly less effective, even as their cost increases. Yet people will watch and even look forward to creative, entertaining advertisements that capture our imagination and inform our ability to make better decisions about what we buy and who we buy from.

Does Anybody Really Know What Works?

It is easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected head-numbing statistics to justify how marketing campaigns are constructed rather than on the less predictable but more relevant elements of psychology and human nature. But do numbers really tell the true story, or are they just protect-your-butt justification designed to ease everyone's mind when it comes time to commit to a budget?

Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry that can tell you how many people watched a particular television show on a per minute basis. So, if these and the other cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are so telling, why do networks have such a hard time delivering programs that people will watch; or do they yank new potentially successful shows off-the-air based on their initial numbers before they ever have a chance to find an audience?

Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely on seemingly safe, tried, hackneyed old formulas, knowing that it is easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there is little chance of it working again. The fact is nobody really knows what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers is going to capture the publics' imagination.

So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless your Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is no reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Sensory and Experience Design Concepts

The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative story telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few years two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the tires, run their hands along the shinny new paint, smell the leather interior, and take that sucker for a test drive to see how she handles. It's all about experiencing the product through our senses - it's that sensory experience that becomes embedded in our memory.

To date most companies have lagged in their efforts to implement these new SenEx marketing communication approaches on their websites due to their obsession with search engine optimization issues that focus on the volume of traffíc rather than the quality of the marketing message. Business seems to be stuck in a circulation-based advertising and mass-market mindset that runs contrary to the Web's niche market 'Long Tail' nature and its ability to communicate by presenting information that appeals to a variety of senses.

Search Engine Optimization Issues

No one will argue with the desire of website owners to attract large numbers of viewers to their sites. But this desire has spawned an entire industry of people claiming to be able to provide website owners with the holy grail of search engine optimization: making it to the top spot in an organic search on your favorite search engine.

Not everyone willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize his or her site can be number one in an organic search. And of course there is the issue of paid search placement that trumps organic searches.

As fast as search engine optimization experts develop ways to beat the search engines, the experts at the search engines change their algorithms, and my monëy is on the guys at Google.

When it comes to search engine optimization consider the following important issues and questíons:

1. Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade, obscure, or in some way diminish the ability of your website visitors to quickly find the information they want?

2. Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that attracts attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and embeds your message in your visitors' memories?

3. Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline body-text links send people away from your site when you want them to stick around and hear what you have to say?

4. Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site aimed at being indexed by search engines rather than read by people for clear concise understanding?

5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a series of bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify?

6. Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of traffíc rather than the quality?

7. Is the traffíc you're attracting leaving your site as fast as it's arriving?

The lesson we should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that websites need to be designed for people not search engines. Delivering a clearly understandable marketing message is achieved by tapping into the psychological and emotional responses triggered by sensory experiences. That is how you need to communicate to an audience separated from you by the vast expanse of the Internet.

SenEx Web Design Using Audio and Video Techniques

People are hungry for information. In today's fast-paced world the average person needs to constantly upgrade their knowledge of ever changing and more complex products and services. Things that were good for you yesterday today are harmful; products that don't exist today will exist tomorrow. So it doesn't matter if you are a homemaker, retiree, or a buyer for an international corporation, the need-to-know is constantly with us and it creates what Richard Saul Wurman have described as "Information Anxiety".

We just don't have the time to study everything we need-to-know or want-to-know that affects our business and personal lives. We need the information fast and in an easily digestible format. And we need that information presented in a way that will make it easy for us to retain it.

The power of Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit experiences by presenting information in a linear narrative that appeals to the senses of sound and sight. This ability attracts and focuses an audience's attention on the material you want highlighted; it presents that material in an easily digestible format; it clarifies the meaning and significance of critical details; and it penetrates viewers' consciousness so that the information is retained.

The following types of audio and video SenEx Web-presentations can be used to deliver a variety of material:

1. Web-commercials and Email Campaigns
2. Special Promotions and Product Offerings
3. Product Descriptions and Overviews
4. Testimoníals and Reviews
5. How To Instructions and Tutorials
6. Frequently Asked Questíons and Q&As
7. Expert Lectures, Analysis and Opinion
8. Background and History
9. Personality, Staff, and Business Profiles

Wrap Up

We all have something we want to sell: a product, a service, a plan, an idea, or even ourselves. And anyone who has ever run a sales department will tell you the best way to sell is through human interaction and the best way to emulate that on a website is with Web-audio and video that uses Sensory and Experience Design techniques to deliver the message.

SEO MAUI: Web Design Tips

Zane Durant — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:59:00 GMT

You are about to embark on a journey into SEO hell. I have tried my best to keep this as simple as I can but it is about to get confusing. We'll try to cover three major points today. Enjoy the reading!

* Your Menu System

Forget the Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and ASP stuff you have gone out to learn to create flashy drop down or glittering menus or image swaps. That's far too much coding. We want to keep the page's code down to a minimum. Beside you could create most of that with CSS.

A great webpage will have an easy and simple menu system. Make sure you link your pages to and from your main index page. and don't forget about linking to and from your sitemap page. Expert web designers usually put all their main links on their site at the top or the bottom of all their web pages, so that a visitor can freely move around and find what they're looking for. Sidebar menu systems are passé. Besides that space can be used for something else, like more good content.

Ok now this point we can't stress enough, CHEACK THAT ALL YOUR LINKS WORK! Check every single page, especially if you link out to other sites. Search Engines hate broken links, so do your visitors, and it gives off the appearance that you are a Mickey Mouse operation.

Verify if all images on your page display properly. Nothing brings down the quality of a site faster than images that don't load. or images that come out blank.

* Code vs Content

Whenever we get a client who is having a problem getting ranked, the first thing we check is the ration between code and content. Search Engines truly despise code heavy sites. Their spiders have to dig too deep and they waste too much CPU power. After a while and nothing to show for it the spider pulls away. Expect a drop in ranking or worse be accused of being a spammer. So go back to basics write simple HTML code. Use an externally linked style sheet. Don't add to many tables in tables in tables...That's just too much code. Get online instead and learn good CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets are an excellent way to create some WOW factor. Learn the ways of the Pros. Your content to code ratio should be better than 30% text. Shoot for 50%. Never accept 10-25%. If you find yourself close to that 30% mark but can't cut any more code out, add text silly. But don't add junk text, add good enjoyable reading. If you have run out of ideas for content and now I'm going to share something with you that I shouldn't, get an RSS feed on the topic of your site. I will tell you a lot more about that in my final chapter, but RSS Feeds are a great way to add fresh content to your site, and balance that code vs text ratio.

* The WOW Factor

We have been asked about this so many times that i think most people just don't get the point. Using intense graphics and Flash animations is great if you are IBM and or have a billion dollar ad budget. To be perfectly honest I used to design sites all in Flash at one time. The looks awesome and soon my reputation as a web designer sky rocketed. Thing is sites like those are not Search Engine friendly.

So how do you create a WOW factor when you can't use fancy menu's and super flashy graphics? It is all in the layout. Good planning and careful programming can render some pretty impressive layouts. Add to that an easy to use menu system and incredible content and voila you have a WOW factor. The real professional look is simply awesome. Choose a neutral color scheme. Or if you are flamboyant choose a scheme which at least is easy on the eyes. Stick to browser safe colors. And most of all check the scheme out on several monitors. Not all are calibrated the same.

Our experience shows that almost 70% of our clients go with earth tones. Simple and clean with lots of white space. For text Black on white is still popular but we like dark grey on off-white. It is a lot easier on the eyes. A little known fact is that the average visitor reads less on the net and usually chooses to print out a long article. It is just a simple case of it being to hard on the eyes. So make your content printable too.

Professional websites are easily bookmarked. If your site contains useful information and keeps fresh content visitors will want to bookmark it or add it to their favorites. Using a small bookmark script and a favicon (a small logo you place on your site and it will be automatically picked up and displayed in your visitor's bookmarks), usually helps visitors add tour site to there bookmarks. Remember every little edge you can take is useful.

One more wow factor before I call it a day. Make sure you validate your site. Check the coding carefully. Broken code usually displays the stuff on the page poorly and you don't want that. At the same time badly coded pages are ignored by Search Engine Robots. Also when you have validated your site take the gif file from W3C to show everyone you are using Valid HTML code. It is a sign of professionalism and is highly regarded.

So next time I'll share with you some little known secrets. Maybe a snippet of code here and a little there just to get you on your way. See you next time.

Search Engine Marketing For Beginners

Zane Durant — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:05:00 GMT

MAUI HAWAI'I SEO TIP:

Question: Navigation is based on images, again if these are images of text? Answer: Search engines obtain links very considerable and only read text. they like to match the topic of the target page to the text in the link that pointed to the page. Avoid Javascript. what to do: Use text only navigation. the text and containing elements can by styles with CSS to set up them look like images, give a background image, or at least rearrange them look a little fancier. The optional is to ensure that there is some text based navigation elsewhere on the page. Gains: Search engines will be able to match the topic of the target page with the reputation (link text). A higher relevancy is better. Ensuring there is text on the page will also help the visually impaired who use text only browsers in conjunction with braile output devices or text to speach software.

Links, and Link Relevancy

Question: You want lots of links to your website? Answer: Although links may be great for visitors and search engine spiders, the true appraise of the link may not be fully clear to you. Visitors are unlikely to click on irrelevant links and search engines hate them. Reciprocal links (you link to me, and I'll link to you) can be of use when associated, but carry less weight in the search engines than one way inbound links. what to do: Avoid link farms (pages of links, for the sake of links), treat reciprocal link requests with anticipation and stay associated. Gains: Spending time and thought on your link profile will ensure natural growth of links. Search engines hate anything that looks artificial, or anything that could be interpreted as 'Search engine Trick'.

Duplicate Content

Question: A webmaster copies content from another website, or sets up numerous sites which are identical, or very similar. Is this mechanism works? Answer: search engines apply echo content filters to the search results. Although the idea of increasing the market share is a bona fide idea, thousand similar sites is not the way to go about doing it. Efforts put into the secondary sites will be forfeited. what to do: endorse all of the pages on each of your sites are unique. Querying a search engine for an exact match of long strings of text will show you if the content is bring up elsewhere. If a webmaster does have facsimile pages and wishes to avoid any penalties or filters, the webmaster must choose one page to have the other identical pages redirect to. Redirects are covered later. You may also use random RSS Feeds that are mixed before show up on each page. The RSS have the ability that are always have fresh content but only if you mix 3 or more RSS feeds you will get a unique result and not what all the other sites have that are using the same RSS feeds. Gains: Your efforts are not wasted, time and money can be saved. Always Fresh content from the RSS Feeds.

Numerous Sites

Question: Following on from identical content, there are numerous sites. A single webmaster has a certain number closely themed sites, all inter-linked and hosted on the same IP address. Answer: This is seen as search engine Frame-up, the linking structure and numerous sites just isn't natural. Penalties can apply. what to do: Such site structures can work if set out properly. this means that each site must reside on it's own IP address where, at least, the C class is different. IP address are covered later. Gains: Increased market share, effectively linked and spiderable sites, no penalties applied.

Unfriendly URLs

Question: The URL (web address) of some of your sites pages look like domain dot com/product.php?id=2346&category=665&sid=f29a3483270cc10b3783706916216e3a Answer: Search engine spiders are getting better and following and indexing these form of URLs, bit not all of them. The spiders are scared of getting caught in an endless loop of identical pages with 1000s of different URLs. they are also off putting to your site visitors who could surely remember mydomain dot com/products/cars/boostvalves. what to do: Use Search Engine Friendly URLs. If you are running the Apache webserver on Linux enabled server use mod_rewrite to translate the URLs into something nicer Gains: Higher chance of being indexed by more of the search engines, keywords in your URL, higher chance of being clicked on in the SERPs

Redirects

There are two main redirects, based on the HTTP specification 301 - moved permanenty 302 - moved temporarily You should use 301 redirects where ever possible. this can be done in your server side scripting, eg

Code: php header("HTTP/1.1 301 Found"); header("Location: w w w newdomain dot com/"); redirects can also be set up in your .htaccess file, if you run the Apache web server

IP addresses (C class)

IP addresses are the numerical addresses of computers connected tot he internet. For ease of reading they are broken down into four parts, each called an octet as they contain 8 bits of data when written in binary form. An example my be 62.85.68.114. in this case the C class is 68 (and everything up to it), so if you have a few sites hosted on this IP they would all have identical IP addresses. If each had a single IP address that started 62.85.68. then they all share the same C-class IP address. As the allocation of IP addresses within a server involvement is usually configured so that each server has it's own C-class; this means that a search engine knows hat all sites on the same C-class IP address are all located on the same server

Your competitors might not be standing still; neither should you.

Maui Hawaii SEO: The New Web

Zane Durant — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 15:22:00 GMT

The first two weeks of November saw me traveling from the west coast to New York, and back to the coast before heading down to Las Vegas. I had the privilege of attending two of the most important annual search and Internet marketing conferences, ad:Tech NYC and Pubcon Las Vegas. As a writer in this space, my goal was to try to speak with as many people as possible in order to figure out where the industry is going in the coming years. Road-weary and exhausted as I am, I feel enlightened and exhilarated. The state of search marketing is stronger than ever. It is however, going to change radically in the coming year.

The first thing webmasters need to understand is how Web2.0 has raised the intensity of information sharing. The concept of using mass or micro-interest communities to basically inform themselves, has transformed the businesses of the smartest search marketers. An important facet of effective website optimization is the inclusion of RSS feeds and social networking tags to relevant documents housed in relation to the site. Similarly, new website marketing campaigns often include MySpace profiles, Flickr photosharing and blogcasts of some sort or another.

The days of the brochure website as an effective marketing tool are long over. While it is ok to carve a quaint niche in your own quiet location on the web, chances are that location will remain quiet unless you use social media tools to attract visitors along with the standard search listings and paid advertisements.

The second thing webmasters should concentrate on is the production of marketing materials that bring radio and video formats to the web. Online marketing is no longer confined to what has traditionally been considered the online space. Web enabled cell phones, iPods and handheld devices like Blackberries are as important today as desktop or laptop computers were in previous years.

Text and graphic based advertising preceded audio advertising as the radio preceded TV's promotion of video advertising. It's sort of like the circle of life in an electronic world repeating itself again. Video trumps text again. It's only natural after all.

The very first press conference at ad:Tech was held early Monday morning and I was one of four reporters to attend. That's too bad because many missed a good story that is based in common sense.

If video advertising works, as we all know it does, interactive video advertising likely works better. That's the bet many marketing professionals are making going into 2007 as the annual ad-spend on online video is projected to grow by 89% next year.

According to eMarketer CEO, Geoff Ramsey, the new online media is rapidly replacing traditional advertising channels as younger viewers search the Internet for entertainment. Ramsey suggests by the end of the decade, traditional advertising will be a third as effective as online advertising, citing a March 2006 American Marketing Association Study that says 78% percent of leading advertisers agree that effectiveness of TV ads has diminished in the last few years.

In other words, those expensive ads that drove the development of television are not working as well anymore. TV production values begin to slip and eventually the viewers look away. With YouTube, MySpace and the general history of user inspired mayhem of the web, more than a few generations are growing up looking online. The older medium is slowly starting to starve while a bountiful new media ad-spend eats TV's lunch for breakfast.

Money is now trickling down to the grassroots in the online advertising marketplace. While programs such as Google AdSense and Y!SM have provided modest incomes for webmasters for a few years, a very real sense of monetization is present for independent webmasters. There is simply not enough advertising space for the absurd inventory of willing advertisers out there.

Internet users should expect to see a change in the way independent webmasters relate to the products they create and offer for public consumption. Though there are a growing number of highly creative webmasters trying to produce interesting and stimulating content, the major monetization model of many independent webmasters is to make a number of made-for-(Google) AdSense sites and placing as many ads by Google as possible, or to create parked domain sites populated with paid-advertising.

Maui SEO Marketing: New Life Marketing

Zane Durant — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 15:26:00 GMT

FROM SEO MARKETING SERVICES: MAUI

Over 1 million people have traded in their real lives to explore an online world known as Second Life.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world built entirely by its residents. This new world was released in 2003, before blogs and user-generated content hit the mainstream. Needless to say, Second Life was way ahead of its time.

However, Second Life still shows a very close resemblance to real life. Within the buzzing online world, people are buying houses, buying clothes (one of Second Life's hottest industries), throwing parties, going to concerts, and taking their own pictures, and even opening up their own businesses.

American Apparel was the first "real world" company to open a store in the virtual world of Second Life. Their ultra-modern clothing store is located on a beach resort and has quickly become a hot-spot within Second Life. The launch of their new store has created a viral buzz that spread to Forbes, Business Week, and many other news outlets. The viral buzz has bolstered salës for their online and offline clothing.

A number of other real-world brands are getting involved as well. They include Intel, Nissan, Reuters, Sony BMG, Adidas, CNET, and Wired. Major marketers, advertising agencies, and news outfits are all starting to take part in Second Life.

And why not? Second Life recently hit one million members. Over $500,000 dollars is spent within Second Life every day. This is real money, not just the Linden dollar, the universal currency within Second Life. A couple hundred people are even making a full-time living on Second Life. With these kind of numbers, this is certainly a platform that businesses should be looking at as a potential marketing opportuníty. Second Life is a great way for businesses to reach consumers, test marketing strategies and release new product ideas with relatively little ínvestment.

Now, before you take your own business into this virtual world, you should first learn the marketing strategies that are required to successfully market your brand and products within Second Life. You will find that many of these tactics are quite similar to the search engine optimization strategies and online marketing tactics that you have been studying for years.

SEO, press, advertising, web design, alternative search engines, directory listings, link optimization, and classifieds can all be found within Second Life.

To begin, let's get started with some familiar search engine optimization strategies.

Title Tags:

When creating your own virtual real estate, you will need to include a few important keywords in the title, just like you would for your Web sites.

Remember to use terms that people would actually search for, not just your company name.

For example, if you are American Apparel and selling clothing, you might use the title, "American Apparel clothing and fashion". This would work well because it includes keywords that avatars within Second Life are likely to search for.

Descriptions:

You will also need a description for your virtual property, including more of your secondary keywords. Make sure it is enticing so that visitors will want to clíck through to your store when searching within Second Life.

Staying with our example of American Apparel, you might use the following description.

"Find the hottest styles and latest fashions for your avatar. Whether you are looking for shirts, skirts, pants, shorts, or tank tops, you'll find it all at American Apparel."

This description uses inviting copy as well as secondary keywords that people may be searching for.

Directory Listings:

Your next step is to get your company listed in the Second Life directory. Make sure your virtual real estate is listed for your targeted keywords. This will help ensure that your listing shows up when doing a Find in-world search.

Link Optimization:

Building inbound links within Second Life is a little bit different from what you would normally do for your traditional Web sites. However, you can certainly take advantage of cross-promotion within this massive virtual landscape. Simply offer teleportation between your online virtual roperties and your partners. It may sound far-fetched now, but partnerships and joint ventures could very easily become mainstream in Second Life. When it does, linking to others will be as easy as setting up a teleport.

Paid Advertising:

Your organic search campaign is very important within Second Life. However, you can also increase your exposure through paid advertising.

MetaAdverse, an advertising network for Second Life, has a database of properties in which marketers can post billboards. In fact, they even allow you to track your visitors based on the advertisements you place.

Banner Blindness:

Unfortunately, paid advertising does have its' drawbacks. Banners and other in-your-face advertisements have lost much of their value due to banner blindness. Within Second Life, avatars are quickly doing the same thing: ignoring the mass of advertising that has surrounded their virtual cities.

To succeed in Second Life, you must bring your prospects true value through an engaged online experience. Build relationships and add content that adds to their online entertainment. If you are a band, then put on a free concert within this massive virtual world. If you are a politician, why not hold a public debate? If you are a fashion designer, get involved in one of the Second Life fashion shows.

Pontiac has created a great example of creating an exciting user experience within Second Life. They have set up Motorati island, a 96-acre plot of land in Second Life where they sell virtual versions of the Pontiac Solstice GXP and stage races on their very own race track.

You must create an experience that is fun and exciting. People don't come online to have the very same experiences they do offline.

Multiple Search Engines:

Much like the Internet, Second Life has one dominant search engine. It is located at the bottom of the screen within this virtual world and can be compared to Google in it's domination. However, there are outside efforts to improve the Second Life search engines with secondary offerings. An example is Second411. This alternative search engine allows Second Life store owners to list all of their items within a consolidated shopping search engine.

To get the most amount of exposure, you need to be present in the main search engine as well as any alternative search engines that are created.

Classifieds:

You should be running a classified ad every week within Second Life. Your classified listings come with basic statistics, so you'll know exactly how many people are coming to your shop through your classified listing. If you find that you aren't getting very good results, simply change your copy until you get it right.

Location is Key:

On the Web, it is very important to choose a good domain name. In Second Life, it's important to choose a good virtual location. Look for an area that already contains some established merchants. If you have some friends, you could also partner together and create your own shopping area. Either way, you will need to leverage the marketing and promotions of your neighbors.

If you want to spread your products even further, you may also want to consider getting your virtual products into malls and booths.

Business Networking:

Almost everything that can be accomplished in the offline world is made available in some form or fashion within your own virtual world, including business networking. Online and offline, it's still very much about who you know.

So, why not take your potential clients and partners out for lunch at the nearest virtual cafe?

Press:

Reuters is the first news bureau to set up shop in Second Life. However, there are a number of other news outlets and websites that are reporting on the daily events within Second Life.

If your business is doing something newsworthy within Second Life, then you certainly need to let these media outlets know. Good press is one of the keys to viral buzz.

Maui SEO Techniques - Tutorial #008

Zane Durant — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:57:00 GMT

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most highly talked about topics between Webmasters and marketers. It is probably also the single topic that more webmasters obsess over than any other (in terms of their website anyway!). However, while SEO can be an excellent resource for targeted traffic, all website owners should concentrate their efforts on more than trying to squeeze one more percent out of keyword density, or beg one more PR5 link from an authoritative site. As well as sapping energy, causing breakdowns in family relationships, and being responsible for the onset of male pattern baldness it also causes us to lose sight of our ultimate goal.

You Mean There's More To Online Life Than SEO?

Don't Forget The Real People

Some Search Engines Are Complying

Fortunately for you and I, of course, some of the mathematical search engines are also coming round to this way of thinking. Google, in particular, want to offer users natural search results. They want to promote natural web pages, with natural content, using natural keywords, gaining natural links. This means that Webmasters are able to start obsessing over a number of other factors now instead:

Optimizing Your Content For Conversions

Conversion rates are not a part of SEO but should be a part of your business strategy. Consider how many people visit your site and the percentage of those people that either click through the links on your page or purchase a product. It is virtually impossible to predict with any certainty what your conversion rate SHOULD be but you should always strive to improve it. Your content should convert, your newsletter should convert, your mailing list should convert, and your emails should convert.

Improving Customer Retention Rates

Generating Sales And Marketing Methods

Banners And Text Ads

Offline Advertising Methods

Conclusion

MAUI SEO - Zane Durant -- story by Matt Jackson

Maui Hawaii: SEO Affiliate Marketing

Zane Durant — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 16:12:00 GMT

AFFILIATE MARKETING

You may have heard quite a bit about affiliate marketing, may even have thought about signing up as an affiliate. If only you knew what it involved.

If you are thinking of signing up as an affiliate, you should be aware of some basic facts.

Quite simply, affiliate marketing systems have a product, or products, which they wish to distribute to as wide a market as possible. This is where you, the affiliate, come in. Basically, as an affiliate, you make a commission on any sales made through the affiliate link that is on your web site. If a product is selling on the Internet, then it is likely that there is an affiliate marketing system involved.

Affiliate Marketing

When people are trying to promote and sell a product or a service, they will often choose to go down the affiliate marketing route because this means that they will have a lot of people out there selling the product. This means that the product or service is promoted to a much wider audience - this is good for both the product owner and often good for the affiliate as well.

It is good for the product owner because they sell a lot more than they would if the product was only advertised on a single web site, or if the product owner had multiple web sites - it is cheaper to get affiliates to market the product because it saves the product owner a lot of money in advertising costs as the affiliate pays for his or her own advertising.

If you become an affiliate, you need to know something about how advertising works and how much the advertising will cost you compared to what you might be paid in commissions. It usually means, however, that because the product owners have limited their investment in advertising, they have more money to pay their affiliates' commissions. If you like the idea of having a home-based business then becoming an affiliate might be a way in and will provide unusual benefits for you.

Home-Based Business

Being an affiliate is like having your own business apart from the fact that you do not have to stock any of the products - and listen to this, neither do you have to take any orders or pay any shipping costs. Yes, you read that right - no orders or shipping costs. All you have to be able to do is to write good advertising copy, something that draws people's attention and keeps it.

Your advertisement should be aimed at promoting the product in such a way that people will want to buy it. On your web site you place a link to the parent web site - the product owner's. People who are interested in that type of product or service are then invited to click on that link, which will lead them to the product. If they buy the product then you are paid a commission on that sale, and that is about the extent of your responsibilities. You can, if you know what you are doing, make a good deal of money with an affiliate marketing system.

The Right Tools Are Vital

Having the right tools and knowing something about advertising costs, as well as search engine optimization, is vital if the affiliate is to make a success of his or her business. Reputable firms are recognizing this and are offering tools such as proven advertisements that generate click-throughs, a list of successful keywords, a good commission and assistance when you need it. Some affiliates rely on articles, their own or commissioned, as advertising, and while these are a useful tool, it helps to have things like banners, pop-ups, text links and e-mail promos. Help with knowing how, and in what way, to advertise is a vital aspect of an affiliate's success as most affiliates who fail in this area do so as the result of a lack of knowledge about how advertising works and what it costs.

Maui SEO Marketing by Zane Durant

The Definition of: SEO & SEM

Zane Durant — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:46:00 GMT

For many casual internet users, the terms" SEM and SEO " (Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization) rarely enter their minds when they are busy jumping from one website to another. However, it is these terms that determine much of what comes out on the results page whenever we type in a word in the search tab of any accessible search engine. These terms are also responsible for all those advertisements and pop-ups that link us to even more websites, whether they may be connected to our original search or not. So just what are SEM and SEO?

In the simplest way possible, SEM and SEO are tools which website creators, especially those who are promoting and selling a certain service or product, use in order to gain a lot of exposure and better ranking for their website. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, the simplicity ends there.

To make it a tad bit complex, SEM and SEO are not the same. As suggested by the names, SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, deals more with how a website is marketed to gain exposure in the different search engines available on the internet, while SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, deals with how the web creators develop and re-develop the content, quality and structure of their entire websites so that whenever an internet user types in a particular word in the search tab, their websites have a better chance of appearing on the first few search engine results pages (SERPS).

Now, to make it even more complex, although the functions of SEM and SEO seem different, they are more effective when used together. Since the main function of SEM is to gain more exposure for a website, the more common means for attraction are online advertisements, blogs, internet articles, partner and sponsored websites, and anything that can catch the eye of the internet user. SEM also makes use of PPC (pay-per-click) and paid inclusion to further push a website's visibility. Lastly, it is also an important process in SEM to submit the name and URL of a website to different search engines and web directories if only to inform them of the website's existence. All this is carried out to ensure the popularity of a website.

So how does SEO come together with SEM? Well, despite having all the advertisements provided by SEM, it is truly the SEO that allows the internet user to easily and conveniently find what he is looking for. Since the function of SEO is to gain a better ranking in the SERPS, the web creator has to constantly optimize his website in order to cater to the needs of the internet user and to make it easier for spiders or web crawlers to judge whether the website's content is relevant to the word/s being searched. Optimization is not a simple and easy task. It involves having to restructure the website regularly (by editing the html code and meta tags, changing content, reorganizing the site map, developing an easier navigational structure, etc.) so as to adapt to the rapidly changing demands of the internet user. Still, when done properly, not only does SEO help a website become more useful and therefore, more often visited by the internet user, it also helps gain more exposure since it increases the website's chances of gaining a better rank in the SERPS.

Both SEM and SEO success rely heavily on the words or context which Internet users type in whenever they search for something on the internet. Take PPC under SEM, for example. PPC is an ad that is triggered by a particular word or context used by an internet user. Once a particular word or context is searched, a corresponding PPC ad for a website comes out. SEO works in the same way. The web creator inputs a particular Meta tag (or keyword) in his html that he believes many internet users will use when searching for information, information which the web creator's website may contain.

Although all of these processes involving SEM and SEO are tedious and time-consuming, it all boils down to knowing and serving the target audience. A web creator must be discerning enough to know what the internet users need and want, and at the same time he must have the real passion to inform and provide the internet users with the right service and product.

Maui SEO - Zane Durant is available for consultation (808) 214- 2032