By Matt Jackson

While written with search engines in mind, SEO content should also consider the end users of your website; your potential customers. Attracting masses of traffic, regardless of how targeted that traffic, is only a portion of the battle.

If the content you’ve used is next to meaningless or smacks of being written solely to rank well in the search engines then your website will under perform and your online business efforts will suffer as a consequence.

Finding the perfect blend between search optimised content and offering an enhanced user experience is critical to better website performance.

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By Jeremy Gislason

Owning any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this ‘expert’ advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing.

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By Jack Strawman

A few weeks ago I found myself in the subway of New York City. Posters and billboards from a prominent bank promoted credit card decaled the underground landscape.

These well-crafted advertisements promised ten dollars back for every $100 spent on subway fares. It gave the current economic crisis and recession as the explanation for their incredible generosity and compassion.

Everybody around me seemed thoroughly impressed by this overwhelming gesture of selfless charity; many discussed in earnest how they were planning to sign up for this card to enjoy these charitable savings. It seemed I was the only one, the Christmas Grinch of the crowd, who perceived this advertisement strategy as more cunning and brilliant than selfless and generous. What an ideal time to hook people on yet another credit card, especially with the holiday season already upon us. Obviously the long-term interest this credit card company was anticipating far overshadowed their likely short-term promotional costs.

Indeed it was a cunning and brilliant strategy, much the same, I thought to myself, as Google’s page rank system.

At first glance it seems a very wise, fair and indeed brilliant system for determining positioning within the search ranks. On closer inspection, however, it is even more brilliant and cunning than most are giving it credit.

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By Lawrence Roth

“I am an artist,” the man proudly proclaimed. “I don’t care,” the critic proudly responded. “ The frame is too large, the colors are dark and it will not match my furniture,” the critic further explained.

Many times web developers experience a similar scorn but not always from humans. A site has been designed with an interface that pops with beautiful GIFs and JPEGs, dazzles with Flash and functions like a charm with JavaScript. The search engines do not care. The content, the keywords and the tags do not correspond with the criteria of the search engines. Therefore, you are ignored.

It is a struggle between art and science that frustrates many. The responsibilities of web developing — the art — clash with the role of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — the science. That is why some companies and development firms are designating web developer and optimizer as two distinctive jobs.

Yet many smaller companies and shops still have the web developer fulfilling both roles. The problem is that optimization is becoming challenging and competitive. So here is some information to help start the optimization before, after or during the developing.

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By Terry Detty

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is performed on the internet through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is completed by submitting your website to a search engine.

No amount of press releases, newspaper or radio ads, banner ads, spam emails or newsletters will achieve the same results, although it may be effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise an automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are most times nothing more than false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

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By Charlie Hearns

What is a keyword?

It’s anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes anticipating those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.

Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn’t do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.

We would ideally want a few visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, we want to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to our website.

If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.

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