1. Create Content That Isn’t Time Sensitive
Putting good quality content on your website that won’t go out-of-date in a few weeks or months is an easy way to boost search engine optimization. By making the content you use useful now and in the future you won’t need to remove it and replace it over and over again – you can simply add to it on a regular basis. A website with very poor content or very little content is an SEO no-no if you want good search engine rankings so get your typing head on and create some content that people will be glad to read now and in 10 years’ time.

2. Think About Your Customer’s Needs
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the actual words they may type into the search box in order to find your website. Then check how popular these words are with an SEO keyword tool, such as the free one supplied by Google. One of the quickest and easiest ways to achieve good SEO is with good keyword selection. Then all you need to do is include your SEO keywords in your website content.

3. Do Some Guest Blogging
Google loves links so the more quality websites you can create guest blog posts for the better your SEO campaign will be. Make sure that the guest blogs all link back to your website and that they are relevant to the subject of your website. You should also make sure the content is top quality so that readers want to follow the link you provide.

4. Links, Links and more Links
As the above tip points out Google loves links – but only when the links are genuine and they link to and from other authoritative sites. You run the risk of blacklisting your website and ruining a good SEO campaign by either purchasing links or blogging on unrelated sites and linking back to your site. There are loads of other SEO techniques available so don’t go down this route.

5. Create an Informative Video
Informational videos with backlinks to your website are another great SEO tool. Businesses can make a short video explaining what they do, who they are etc. while vendors can demonstrate their products if appropriate. If you can, distribute your video over multiple platforms then watch as your Google rank increases.

6. Update Your Website on a Daily Basis
If you can add content to your website on a daily or bi-daily basis, Google and the other big search engines start to recognize your site as an authority in its niche. By changing your choice of SEO keywords on a regular basis as well you will begin to rank highly for a good selection of keywords and eventually the majority of keywords related to your site’s topic (or your business) will get your website noticed and ranked among the leading sites. If you don’t have time to create new SEO oriented blogs on a daily basis, hire a blog writer to do it for you. On-going content creation is one of the easiest SEO techniques to master and one that will improve your Google rank over time.

7. Concentrate on Your Article Titles
A simple SEO tip that many people forget, revolves around the wording of their content or article titles. A lot of search engine spiders/bots initially read the first few lines of a webpage to determine the topic of the content. If you can include your top-ranking keywords in the title of whatever you’re writing, it will help your site’s SEO no end.

8. Avoid Flash-based Websites
Flash websites look lovely and stylish and expensive, but they don’t sit well with Google or your SEO efforts. It takes a number of sophisticated tricks to make Google notice Flash websites and so it makes more sense to use another platform, if you want to improve your rankings.

9. Use Article Submission Sites
Article submission sites are a great SEO tool as they distribute a single article written by you to hundreds of article directories with the aim of getting it published and noticed. The articles you submit can be published for free but any websites that choose to publish it have to include your bio and a link back to your website. Most article submission sites do charge for the service, but they can cut months off your SEO campaign.

10. Hire a Professional SEO Agency
The nine SEO tips mentioned above are quite simple to put into place but they take time, effort and patience. Not everyone has an abundance of these qualities so it may be worth hiring a professional SEO agency to do the work for you. Of course this will cost you money but if it gets your business website onto page 1 of Google within a few weeks it’s definitely a price worth paying.
Fantastic tips from K Damian Qualter with SEO-News

Below is a list of compiled email address which can be entered into any email client and if properly formatted will be received by the other party via txt message on there phone or device.  There are other tricks and methods which I will elaborate on in future posts.

AT&T – cellnumber@txt.att.net
Verizon – cellnumber@vtext.com
T-Mobile – cellnumber@tmomail.net
Sprint PCS – cellnumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Virgin Mobile – cellnumber@vmobl.com
US Cellular – cellnumber@email.uscc.net
Nextel – cellnumber@messaging.nextel.com
Boost – cellnumber@myboostmobile.com
Alltel – cellnumber@message.alltel.com

Some things are right their but we are not paying attention. It’s actually about how much time do you have to make sure you can do it or just farm it out. Google has provided great tools and documents, like the attached, which will help you understand it’s importance.

Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.

Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”, we’d like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discuss below should apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we’d love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Webmaster Help Forum.

How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In the Next Several Years

Mobile payments has become a mainstream tech topic in the last couple of years, mirroring the rise of smartphones and application stores. E-commerce is becoming m-commerce. The focus point of the buzz has been the evolution near-field communications as related to smartphones. The thing is, nobody in the payments industry expects NFC to be a player in mobile payments for years, if ever. In that case, what does the mobile payments ecosystem look like in the short term?

The current mobile payments market centers around several cores: direct carrier billing, mobile wallets, online and offline sales, mobile credit card readers and application stores. During meetings with various mobile payments experts and executives at CTIA last week, the most uttered phrase was “this is not something I would use to buy a fridge.” Where are mobile payments going?

The Non-Promise of NFC
OK, let us get one thing straight: NFC may never be a widely used form of payments. There are so many reasons why it will not be. Foremost, the logistics of NFC are a nightmare. The actual technology is probably ready. The infrastructure around the technology is not. There are too many competing interests coming from above the retail market that creating a universal NFC reader between smartphones and financial services is not going to happen anytime soon. The closest thing to a widely used system would be Mastercard’s PayPass, but even as widespread as that is, it is no where near the type of market penetration that would create an inflection point for NFC to take off. Second, PayPass needs a software upgrade to offer any type of deals, something that will be important in the mobile payments world.

The second half of the NFC conundrum is that there are a lot of hands reaching for the supposed pile of money that NFC payments will enable. Look at Google’s announcement of the Wallet product. Or the ISIS partnership between Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Google is partnering with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (the NFC partner), Hypercom, Ingenico and NXP (another NFC partner). All of these large companies are going to want a slice of the pie.

Where does that leave the retailers? You know, the ones that are actually trying to make money with good and services? Sadly, on the outside of the circle. The carriers are the biggest culprits, wanting to take as much as 50% of transaction revenue because it is “going over there pipes.” The financial services companies will be happy taking their normal rates in the 1.75% to 3% range as long as there is a promise that more people will pay electronically (read: sans cash). Between retailers, partners and infrastructure, NFC has years to go before it will be viable for all parties involved.

What will happen in this time frame? Think about the so-called “4G” technology WiMax. The technology is already becoming antiquated with LTE and all the major carriers are working on the next version after that. Sprint is keeping a hybrid of WiMax and LTE going forward but overall it is a tech that died before it even matured. NFC may be the same. What if there are massive leaps in quantum teleportation in the next several years? Does NFC become the WiMax of the payment world?

Maturation Of Direct Carrier Billing
The “I do not see myself buying a fridge with this” line comes mostly from the direct carrier folks. Direct carrier billing is the perfect area for micro-payments and payments that stem from ease of use. Think of parking. If you could pay for your parking on the street with your phone, would that convenience be worth and extra couple of cents on the dollar to you?

The direct to carrier ecosystem has evolved to the point where it actually makes sense for offline and online use. Zong (acquired by eBay for PayPal integration), PaymentOne and Boku are the leaders in this space. PaymentOne has processed $5 billion in mobile payments and lets users pay with their phone numbers, validating transactions via text. Zong allows that capapability as well.

Payment One’s “One Care” features, announced last week at CTIA, makes direct to carrier billing safe and secure. Transparency is important in mobile commerce because consumers do not really trust their phones to handle their money quite yet.

The most important aspect of direct to carrier billing now is that the revenue mechanism has been flipped. It used to be that merchants only got some 40% or less of payments while the carriers and partners took the rest. Even with high margin transactions, that is unacceptable. Today, direct to carrier billing provides the merchants with more than 80% of the revenue, sometimes nearly 95%.

The Dongle World: Smartphones As Credit Card Readers
Square, VeriSign and Intuit are pushing hard into the dongle department. Jumio is doing the same thing, just without the dongle. There is not much to be said about the dongle world that we have not already touched on at ReadWriteWeb outside of the notion that it is bringing easy credit card readers to the mobile masses.

The dongle competitors are not worried about what is happening in the ecosytem because it does not really touch their core business. For instance, PayPal does not see NFC or dongles infringing on its business in any way, shape or form. As Laura Chambers, PayPal’s head of mobile, said in a recent interview, “we are not worried about much in the ways of competition. There is a lot of white space in the industry for horizontal movement.”

What Is PayPal Really Doing
In the interview with Chambers, the first question I asked was, “why does it seem like PayPal has become a ‘me too’ operator in mobile payments?” It is a fair question, even if Chambers balked to acknowledge that PayPal has been in ‘me too’ mode for the last year or so. PayPal has ignored the dongle movement and NFC is not on its radar as a technology it feels it needs to integrate.

“What is the difference between a tap verse a swipe,” Chambers said. “We are working with what works in the current infrastructure … We have sat down with consumers and merchants to work with them on what they want.”

PayPal is growing sideways because there is not a ton of room right now to grow vertically.

PayPal will get into NFC solutions when the time is appropriate. Its strategy now is to create as much flexibility for consumers as possible through its mobile wallet program. PayPal’s stance is data driven – the company can track when and what consumers buy from mobile phones and tablets. Hence, PayPal is focusing on the shopping end of the spectrum, as opposed to a pure payments play.

“60% of people buy more and spend more on mobile,” Chambers said. “But, we see that people are not really buying different things on mobile … the No. 1 driver of growth in mobile payments is boredom.”

That fits in well with what PayPal sees as “couch commerce.” They released a study recently saying that mobile shopping is going to boom this holiday season. As such, PayPal is ready to deploy and end-to-end solution for merchants and consumers to reward loyalty, provide deals and offers along with digital receipts.

PayPal believes that it has a lot of room to grow in mobile through these types of horizontal movements. We are also seeing this on a non-mobile front with the eBay partnering with Facebook and the Open Graph API and the new X.Commerce initiative that consolidates the PayPal, Zong, Magento and RedLaser and Milo technologies. The company is calling it an “open commerce ecosystem.”

Future Of Mobile Payments
This article is the first in a series of the trends in mobile payments that ReadWriteWeb will be working on in the next several months. There are a lot of questions and the answers are just beginning to emerge. Who are the winners in the space? Are retail shops in danger of “becoming expensive fronts for online shopping,” as Chambers said in the interview? Does NFC really have potential to disrupt offline payments or is it just cool technology? These questions and more are what we will be tackling in the months to come.

Fantastic article by By D Rowinski of ReadWriteWeb. Thank you again.

Great article by Cynthia Boris of Marketing Pilgrim.

SEO isn’t about how pretty your website is, it’s about how good it looks to the search engines like Google. A lot of elements make up a truly optimized website. And if you spend some time on these free tools, you will get a feel for what the search engines are looking for – and what can help you reach the top!

1. Backlink Watch:
Type URL of your website to get complete detailed information about quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website. It will show you “anchor” text, pagerank, total outbound links on that page, and nofollow flag for each of your inbound link available.

2. Hubspot Website Grader:
How well is your website doing? Is it getting traffic? Does it have SEO problems? How popular is it in social media? Find out the answers for free. Just enter your website URL and click Generate Report.

3. Great SEO Tools:
Great range of SEO Tools to use for website search engine optimization, Internet tools and Google tools. Can help webmasters to build a successful website and Optimize for increased web traffic.

4. iWebTools:
Free web tools including webmaster tools – including Backlink Checker, Google PageRank Prediction, Keyword Density Checker, and many more!

5. Web Confs:
SEO Tools and Webmaster Utilities – including Similar Page Checker, Redirect Check, Domain Stats Tool, and many more!

6. Alexa:
Possibly one of the most famous website evaluators. Free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for websites…

When you’re looking at the map and figuring out how to split up sales territories, how do you decide which salesperson to send to drive all up and down North Dakota and which one gets to just walk a few blocks around downtown Manhattan?

Deciding how to divide sales territories create the most efficient environment for your sales team is more difficult than just drawing lines on a map. The process requires a good dose of foresight that’s needed to make sure you allow room for the company to grow.

Poorly aligned sales territories can cause low employee morale, lost clients and squandered resources. Experts from the fields of sales management and data analytics share these tips for setting up the best sales territories.

Keep Your Ultimate Goal in Mind When Establishing Sales Territories

Before you start carving up the map and sending your sales team out into the world, take some time to think about what you’re trying to accomplish.

“Start at the top: what is the target revenue, the overall revenue goal?” says Marie Warner, president of Warner Professional Sales. “Given that goal, what are my targets? Once I have those targets, how am I going to sell to them?”

If you’re a start-up, you can’t come right out of the gate hiring a huge sales force. You have to start strategically by meeting revenue goals in small areas and then gradually growing the territories.

“It’s like a chess game,” she says. “Do not do point to point; try to think moves ahead.”

By the time you’ve built up a base with a sales team and some clients, you can start thinking about how to allocate the sales staff.

“When you’ve got 10, 25, 50 salespeople in the field, that’s when you start to look at how to create balanced territories that are matching your investment in salespeople,” says Ralph Rothfelder, president of Mapping Analytics.

Doing some preliminary planning will help you identify the qualities that will help you set up all your sales territories in the future: what kind of clients you’re going after, where they’re located, and how much resources it will take to reach them.

Collect Lots of Data

Many companies these days use some form of analytics software to figure out the best way to establish their sales territories. But experts say the quality of the outcome is only as good as the data you can feed into it.

Most pros say they start by ranking customers or clients into different categories based on the percentage of revenue they generate vs. the time spent servicing them. The “A” clients might be the most reliable ones, the “Bs” and “Cs” might be promising but work-intensive clients, while the rest are require a lot of effort for little return.

Basically, you want to be able to distinguish what makes one account different from another, says Alex Machinis, president CEO and founder of Empower Geographics. Does geography matter at all, or can you deal with clients without putting your sales team behind a windshield?

You should collect data about the location of the customer (whether physical or virtual), how much time a salesperson needs to spend on the phone with them and their order history. Analytics programs can spit out a model to show you what each hypothetical sales area would look like in terms of size and profitability.

“After that it’s a function of what data is important to you to look at with respect to making decisions relevant to territories,” Rothfelder says. “What makes a good territory for you?”

More than half of businesses still use nothing more complicated than an Excel spreadsheet to split up the sales load.

“If it’s complex at all, you really can’t do a good job,” he says. “It’s amazing how many companies, even large ones, are not taking advantage of the tools that are out there to do a much better job.”

Each company needs to decide for itself if it needs to hire an outside consultant to come in and establish the sales territories. But the option to do it in-house is easier than ever: sales territory alignment software used to cost up to $6,000 per company; now you can download it for $29, he says.

Review the Sales Territories Periodically and Gauge Results!

Sales managers make a common mistake of blaming the territory for a bad salesperson. While a certain member of the team may be better at locking down clients than another, you shouldn’t be messing with the territory boundaries to help the weaker employee.

“One of the biggest helps I convince people of is to try to get away from the quality of the sales reps,” says Phil Brennan, president of Analytics In Focus. “You can hire better sales reps. You want your territories to be balanced. Even if your sales rep isn’t cutting it, don’t give them a smaller territory; get a better sales rep for that territory.”

In addition to undermining your sales team, messing with the territories too often could hurt your relationship with customers in those territories.

“Clients and prospects do not like to see a continuing stream of new faces,” Warner says. “Looking ahead is so key. You have to monitor it but if you continually tweak it you are shooting yourself in the foot.”

You should, however, perform regular maintenance on the territories and you may have to tweak them to make sure they are functioning properly.

Machinis says most companies shouldn’t expect to get it right on the first try and should review territories once a year.

“It takes time to do it right,” he says.

Brennan says when a company is first starting out, its goal should be to create sales territories that stay valid for about a year. Once established, you can go three to five years without having to touch the territories. But the key is planning ahead so that even if you can’t start with the full sales staff you want, you are prepared for growth.

“It’s better to design a year ahead and not fill them until you can afford to than to be realigning every three months,” he says.

Great Article by By Tim Donnelly of INC Magazine.

Of course in real life, businesses can’t flip the switch on a Triple-Sling Jigger to instantly produce prospects. But what if you could create a kind of machine for lead generation on your own company blog, allowing it to help you continuously fill that sales funnel?

Blogs are a great way to increase your digital presence, making you more visible and “findable” via Google, Bing and the like. They can also be a great way to generate leads. Your blog can function as a kind of triage for your sales team, fielding and answering questions organically via the content you produce there. However, it can perform that function only if you effectively create momentum with visitors who are likely to buy, turning them from mere passersby into something more.

Here’s a 10-step prescription to increase your visibility and attract more qualified folks to your site. It may not shoot cherry pits, but it will help you convert your traffic into leads.

1. Make your blog an extension of your main website. A visitor’s first experience with your company might be through a blog page. He or she might never land on your main site’s homepage, so link your blog visually (mirroring the navigation and design of your main site) as well as technically. Maintain the blog as a subdomain of your main domain (something like blog.website.com) versus putting it on a separate domain entirely. Blogging on the same domain that hosts your company site ensures that all inbound links to blog pages also juice up the search mojo of your main site.

2. Solve or share, don’t shill. Your blog should focus on your customers. It should either solve their problems or share your resources. Don’t shill your stuff. This may sound obvious, but too many business blogs seem to be a repository for press releases, regurgitated marketing-speak and other pablum. News about your company and its products and services might be fascinating to you, but it’s not what will ultimately attract and engage prospects. Write about what they care about.

How can you determine what to write about? Use inquires or “Frequently Asked Questions” as fuel for blog posts. Ask your frontline folks: What problems do our customers ask about? What advice do they need? What problems do our products or services solve? Also, check your search logs: See what keywords people use when they land on your site to get a sense of what problems they have and what words they use to describe them. (Of course, questions your customers don’t ask but you wish they did–or Frequently Unasked Questions–also are great blog post fodder!)

3. Show up. Half of blogging is consistency, or just showing up on a regular basis. (Naturally, the other half is producing great stuff!) You don’t have to blog every day, but you do have to create a schedule that’s sustainable for you. Hiring a freelancer or a staff writer or editor can help keep you on track with regular content, especially if you are a reluctant writer. But if you can’t afford that, use an editorial calendar to plan a posting schedule (and stick to it). An editorial calendar, by the way, is simply that: a calendar on which you plan what post will be published when.

Showing up also applies to the ongoing care and feeding of the community you’re creating through your blog. Encourage conversation and engagement by responding to comments (even negative ones). Be part of the conversation, not above it.

4. Avoid War and Peace posts. The best blog posts are punchy and concise, focusing on a single idea. Think short paragraphs or bullet points. And don’t bury the important information. Open with a declarative sentence that sets up the key idea. Framing blog posts this way not only respects your reader’s busy schedule, but also helps address the anxiety a lot of us feel about writing. A blog post can also be a graphic, image, video or even an embedded PowerPoint presentation.

5. Pen a killer headline. I sometimes spend more time writing a headline for a blog post than I do writing the entire post. Why? Because every blog post creates a new page on your site, and every new page creates another opportunity to boost your ranking for one of your targeted keyword phrases in Google or Bing or other search engines. Your blog post title becomes your web page title, so titles matter!

An intriguing headline, or title, is also critical to attracting actual humans to read your post. The title of an article is not merely a promise to the reader (an idea of what’s in store), it’s also the pitchman for the entire post: It entices people to either click or … not.

6. Link to other resources. Throughout a post, link specific words or phrases to other resources on your site. You can link keywords to resource pages you’ve built around those words, or you can link to specific landing pages where you’ve posted related offers, like the ability for visitors to sign up for a companion webinar, request a white paper or get a free trial.

7. Embed companion calls to action. In addition to linking within the post itself, remember the real estate around the post. There are a few areas prime for calls to action on any blog page, including the “leaderboard” spot at the top of your blog, the sidebar on either side of the post and the often-ignored space immediately following a blog post.

The first two spots are great for banners or buttons. But the space under the post is key: Assuming readers get through the entire post, they should always be given an opportunity to learn more with either a companion offer or related piece of content. (Hint: This is also a good place from which to link to landing pages that require e-mail registration.)

8. Offer subscription services. Allow your visitors to subscribe to get regular updates to your blog via e-mail and RSS. Essentially, every time you publish a post, a subscriber is notified to check it out. Plug-ins to allow subscription options are likely available for your blogging platform of choice (most e-mail marketing providers offer plug-ins that can be integrated into WordPress and other blogging platforms to turn your blog into a comprehensive list-building system). There are also a number of third-party services that can collect names and contact info for you. FeedBlitz and Google FeedBurner are both free services.

9. Trick out with social bling. The more traffic you attract, the more opportunities you’ll have for generating leads. So be sure to outfit your blog with social-sharing icons, particularly the big three: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Doing so subtly encourages your visitors to share your content and allows you to reach your network’s network, which is a key attribute of social media. Of course, this assumes that you are actively participating in social media, i.e., engaging in conversation, and not just broadcasting headlines.

10. Remember one final thing. Fundamentally, a blog is an opportunity: It’s a way to connect with customers in a real-time, accessible way. But your blog needs to be part of your business, and part of your lead-gen efforts. Talk it up in e-mail newsletters, in print collateral and on packaging materials. A blog won’t magically drive business without active and ongoing promotion and participation–no matter how much inspiration Dr. Seuss imparts.

A version of this article was originally published in the September 2011 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: The Customer Capture Contraption.

GREAT ARTICLE BY ANN HANDLEY:  entrepreneur.com

So what exactly is keyword misalignment? I’m tempted to quote from the cult classic movie “The Princess Bride.” When Westley, as the dread Pirate Roberts, continues to catch up with the trio of Vizzini, Fezzik, and Inigo (who have kidnapped Westley’s sweetheart Buttercup), Vizzini shouts “Inconceivable!” every time they see that Westley has overcome the latest obstacle placed in his path. Inigo, getting a bit fed up with this, finally says “That word…I do not think it means what you think it means.”  That is the essence of keyword misalignment. A word or phrase that you want to use for one particular purpose may already be in use for a different purpose.

A searcher using that key phrase, then, might be looking for something completely different from what you offer. When they see that their desires and your website don’t match, they’ll hit the back button and track down another site. In a situation like this, all of the effort you put into climbing the SERPs – even if you achieved the number one position – is wasted for that keyword.

As Christine Churchill explains on Search Engine Land, “One needs to be careful when selecting keywords to make sure that you select phrases that do not unintentionally conflict with unrelated industries.” In these days of fast-moving technology, frequent use of acronyms, and jargon proliferation, that happens more frequently than you might think.  Churchill offers an interesting example. Say you’re a company that sells advertising on billboards mounted on trailers pulled by trucks. It’s a surprisingly competitive business; some firms are nationwide, and offer billboards pulled by bikes, Segways, and more. Some even rent “walking” billboards – not sandwich boards, necessarily, but people wearing four-foot-tall, skinny billboards like backpacks that can be made to light up for evening events. These “walking” billboards can even distribute brochures and other giveaway items related to what they’re advertising.

So if you’re a company that offers this unusual means of advertising in several different formats, and you want to rank high in the search engines for this competitive field, what key phrase would you use? A company owner’s first instinct might be “mobile advertising.” After all, it goes beyond just billboards, and the advertising is mobile, right?  Using that phrase, however, would be a huge mistake. There’s an entirely different field that’s heavily invested in the phrase “mobile advertising.” These are the companies that sell advertising on mobile devices, such as cell phones.

What’s more, that phrase is even more competitive than the next obvious phrase for our hypothetical company, which is “mobile billboards.” A cursory search on Google yields about 1.14 million results for mobile billboards – but 322 million results for mobile advertising.  What can you do to prevent this issue? Obviously, you need to be careful with the keywords you select. When examining your candidates, do a Google search on each one. If you don’t see many of your competitors showing up, ask yourself why.

Just as importantly, pay attention to what DOES show up – and in what quantities. As with the phrase “mobile advertising” above, there may already be a well-established industry using the key phrase you want. In that case, a user searching with that key phrase will expect to find sites in THAT field, not in yours.

There’s another reason to pay attention to what shows up with particular keywords. There’s a joke about the sheltered cat-loving great-granny whose first venture online is an image search on Google for…well, do I really need to complete that phrase? Seriously, though, you don’t want to be on the same page in the search results as something with which you wouldn’t want to be associated, if you can possibly avoid it. That’s why you need to be thorough when you do your keyword research.

There’s one other point I’d like to address on the topic of avoiding keyword misalignment. The keywords that people use for particular things change over time. Sometimes it’s a slow process, but other times it’s just a matter of months. From what little I could determine from searching online, for example, advertising on mobile devices and advertising on mobile billboards, as industries, started around the same time – about the year 2000. It’s entirely possible that a mobile billboard company could have started their website with the aim to corner the phrase “mobile advertising” in the search engines, and if they didn’t repeat their keyword research as time went on, not realized their mistake until much later.

So when you do your keyword research, be prepared to dig deeper – and repeat the process a few months later. Good luck!

Great article by Terri Wells and supported by Christine Churchhill.

To optimize SEO, there are certain elements that you must put into consideration when building your website. This information will also help you determine what is missing or what can be improved on. Knowing this basic vocabulary is smart so that you can know what someone is trying to sell you. These elements include:

Page title: The page title of your website is the most important element. The page title tag and the description tag should describe the content of different pages of your website. They should contain keywords used in good moderation to avoid keyword stuffing as this will actually cause the search engine to rank your website lower.

URL: The URL is probably the first thing that a surfer will see and should therefore give a good indication of what your website is about. It is important to ensure that the URL of your website gives an accurate description of the content of your website. The URL should contain keywords but remain short and simple. If your URL contains a lot of ID numbers which make it unfriendly, you should consider URL aliasing. URL aliasing will allow you to choose the words you want to appear on it instead of ID numbers that do not make sense to surfers. When you can updated your URL or Permalink – this is easy and also another way to optimize your URLS which the search engines read.

Keyword prominence: This refers to the placement of keywords on the website. The higher up a keyword is on the web page the more prominent it is. A search engine will give more preference to a website when keywords are located high up the web page. Therefore, the first paragraph should contain keywords and related keywords to maximize on keyword prominence. This concept also applies to header tags and title tags which should always start with the keywords.

Header Elements (Semantic Markups): This refers specifically to the H1, H2, H3, and H4 HTML elements on a web page. Ensure that your page title and subsections contain header tags. These header tags should contain codes that are descriptive and represents the content of your website.

Meta keywords: To achieve strong SEO, one must employ the proper use of meta keywords. It is important for meta keywords to appear several time in the website. However, avoid meta keyword stuffing. Most search engines no longer give good rankings to pages employing this technique.

Meta descriptions: When available and used correctly, Meta descriptions can be useful in directing people to click on your website. Meta descriptions should contain keywords, prominently places without stuffing.

It is important to remember that the goal of a website is for people to find relevant information and take specific action, which includes buying the products or services being promoted. You can have a beautiful website with great graphics but if you do not take into consideration SEO, you will never reach your target market.