SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website to rank well on the natural listings of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. As the industry becomes more educated on the topic of SEO, many companies are now engaging in the optimization process so as to get high rankings for their websites.

However, SEO is not always about ranking and position. You need to look at traffic and conversion too. When your site is being optimized, you need to track the amount of organic search engine traffic that comes to your website. For most web statistics tracking software, you will be able to know the exact keywords that searchers type to find your website. Tracking of organic traffic is very important as you can analyze the information and fine tune your optimization process.

Now that you know the amount of organic traffic that you are getting, it is time for you to calculate conversion rate. Before you can calculate conversion, you need to determine the goal of your website. In other words, what you wish to achieve from your website? Is your website an e-commerce store that generates direct online sales? Or are you intending to use your website to generate leads for your services or products, and close the deals offline? After you have determined the goal of your website, we will have a KPI or Key Performance Indicator to work on.

If you run an e-commerce site, your conversion calculation will be pretty straight-forward. You need to have a web statistic tracking software to track the path that visitors take when they reach your site. Then, use the number of sales resulted from organic traffic and divides it by the total organic traffic to your website. Then multiply it by 100. This will be your conversion rate for SEO.

If your business deals with offline sales and services, what you can do is to place an unique phone number on your website that is not use elsewhere. So whenever there is any enquiry to this phone number, you will know that it comes from your online marketing effort. Then, instruct your phone operator to always ask anyone who calls in on how he or she finds your website. When tracking conversion for offline sales and services, it is near impossible to get a 100% accurate number. But at least, you will have some numbers to work on.

Any marketing effort needs to be measured in order to produce good result. I know that it is very tedious to measure some of the online marketing campaign like SEO. You can choose to just look at keyword rankings and positions. But if you do not know the actual conversion rate and numbers from your SEO effort, you will never know how well your website fares in the optimization war.

What does ezine article submission has to do with SEO? Read the rest of this article and find out.

There are actually 2 components being explored here. The first component is article marketing, and the other is SEO. In order for you to see the link between the two, you have to have some basic understanding of both components. Let’s start with SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is the process of tweaking on-site and off-site factors of your website to ensure that you get higher rankings in the search engines. On-site optimization is easier to perform because you own the website, and you can easily implement the tweaks yourself. For example, you can add your target keyword phrase to all the title tags of your website. You can also create search engine friendly URLs on your own.

But when it comes to off-site optimization, it’s a little bit trickier. Off-site optimization is about link building – i.e. how to get others to link to you. And since you don’t own any of these sites, you have to think of ways to get others to link to you. Here is where article marketing comes in.

Article marketing and link building.

Article marketing is about content generation. If you don’t want to sit down and write articles, then you may have to hire someone else to do this for you. Otherwise, article marketing is probably won’t work well for you.

With every article that you write and distribute, you are allowed to include a couple of links back to your website. These links will count as relevant back links to your site. As you know, the search engines count each link as a “vote” for your site. The more back links you have, the better your rankings will be.

But note that not all back links are the same. You don’t want back links from sites that are irrelevant to your site. You also don’t want links that are coming from link farms. Links coming from well established article directories will do just fine.

When creating links for your articles, make sure that you use your target keywords as your anchor texts. Anchor texts are the words that you place within a link. For example, instead of using words like “click here”, you should be using keywords like “web hosting review” in your links.

The search engines use anchor texts to determine what your web page is about. When you have enough links out there that say, “web hosting review”, your website will eventually rank for that keyword.

Writing articles can be time consuming, but it can also be extremely rewarding. The more articles you have out there, the more traffic you are going to get.

As a business owner, you do not want to spend too much time on article writing. Try to increase the speed of your writing by planning in advance. What are you going to write about? What do you want to say? That way, you don’t have to pause when you actually sit down and begin typing.

The key to success is to make consistent effort. Submit a few articles each day and you will see your website moving up the search results.

The question, what is affordable search engine optimization, is asked by many people. There are many companies out there offering various optimization packages and all charging different amounts. But what is affordable SEO optimization or how much should you consider for SEO services?

Let me first start with a word of warning affordable search engine optimization has everything to do with you and your business and nothing to do with with the companies. What you should go for if considering optimization is a compromise between your advertising budget and quality SEO work.

I know for a fact there are companies offering dirt cheap optimization, for no more than 50 dollars a month, but ask yourself this, what do you really think you are getting for your money. I will tell you, you will get a company who optimizes your pages and may send to odd link your way. Good return on investment, nope.

There are other companies that you should avoid like the plague, these are the companies that guarantee you a top ranking for your keywords for a small monthly fee. First of all, a guaranteed position is simply not possible, ask any professional SEO. Secondly the only way they are going to get you to the top for a small amount of money is by using spamming software to spam every site and directory on the web. Your site may go number, but only for a month max, after that your site will be permanently banned from most search engines.

So what is affordable SEO work. I would imagine if you are paying somewhere between 500 and 2000 dollars a month you are probably getting good quality SEO work done. Obviously any price will depend on the size of your campaign and the needs of your business. A good affordable search engine optimizer should be spending at least 10 to 20 hours a week working with your site on and off page. They should be optimizing your pages, correcting faults on your pages, managing your linking structure, building respectable links and creating link partnerships. An advanced search marketer will also be able to create pay per click campaigns for you which will attract traffic and sales but cost you more in management fees.

Affordable search engine optimization is a great long term investment in your business and will save you many hours of trial and error. Always ensure the company or consultant has certification and if it sounds too cheap to be true it probably is.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a range of techniques that make any particular website rank well in search engines; it would be more accurate to call SEO, website optimization, but whatever you call it, SEO is worth doing, and even a little SEO is better than no SEO.

What you are actually doing when you decide to SEO your website or hire a consultant: compare it with hiring a marketing specialist to advertise and sell your web based business or service.  As you know they don’t come cheap and why should they when you think about it, they will assist you in making your online business successful, to make you the money you had hoped you would make by having a website.

Without them you will no doubt make the odd sale; yet with their help and expertise you will make many sales a month or even many sales per day. They are saving you hundreds of hours of trial and error, and those hundreds of hours (which they no doubt didn’t save, because they tried out all the techniques, tricks and hard work under the sun) it would take to find out what works the best.

Just saving you hundreds of hours is worth paying for; you will be making sales when you still would have been making mistakes. So the hours spent not making mistakes you will spend earning money which will more than pay for the skills you will also learn. It really is a win-win situation.

SEO correctly done will amaze you, how well your website can rank in search engines like Google and the sales you will receive as a consequence.

If you really want to compete in today’s cutthroat internet market, you are going to need to either pay a lot of money to have a good SEO do the work for you, or find a consultant, that will tell you exactly what to do.

Good SEO is a LOT of work, which is why to hire someone to do your SEO is so expensive. Sure offshore SEO companies will do SEO for you, but in my experience, you often get what you pay for; you pay peanuts you get monkeys.  Indian SEO’s in particular are very good at attracting Indian Visitors which may be good for some online businesses but not most. Many a website has to be “fixed up” in order to attract visitors from desired counties. Often the way something is phrased, can make a massive difference to how a site ranks in local and global search engines.

If you have decided to use an SEO consultant, a couple of things you must understand, you have to do the work. You have to understand at least the basic of how your site works, and understand very, very basic html. You need to know how to do most things once it’s explained what needs to be done.

So you have built your own website, you know the basics of how a webpage goes together, you know if you add code that makes the page work in a browser you have to enclose that code in tags. You have sold a couple of things on eBay and know how to fill out a form online. You’ve done a few searches in search engines, and know basically how they work… ok, you’re ready to optimize your own website. You just need to know how to optimize it.

Sure there are countless millions of SEO tutorials and forums online, and if you want to spend the countless hours sorting out the wheat from the straw, then go for it.

The problem with looking online is there is a heck of a lot of misinformation out there.  There are also a lot of borderline blackhat SEO tricks… and if Google catches you using will get your website banned from search engines.

The main issue with having an SEO consultant is that you have to be honest with them. If you plan to use the techniques learned on more than one site, tell them, work out a reduced price on the other sites. The Search Engine Optimization consultant will tell you how to optimize the website you asked them to work with you on, and while some SEO techniques are universal, many techniques used will only work on one site, or I should say only work well on one site.

So if you have 2 or more websites that have the same theme using the exact same techniques on both sites, could cause both or multiple sites to lose rank.

After being recently asked how much a client saved by doing their own SEO and looking at the latest statistics, a conservative estimate would be about $15k. Since the client now has many learned skills, they will continue on to save themselves thousands more in the future.

So save your thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours in time searching for online SEO tips, and in forums, and then thousands of hours and days or months waiting to find out that what you tried hasn’t worked. Hire a good SEO consultant, and get working on making your website make money.

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Search engine optimization can make or break your website and therefore your online business will do little to nothing in the earning money aspect of internet marketing. Time spent learning proper SEO strategies will be time well spent and your time is valuable so don’t waste it.

What does an internet marketing need to know for proper search engine optimization? Well to me you need to know more or at least apply more SEO knowledge than those site owners you want to pass in the search engines. It’s that straight forward.

You can pay me or others to have your web pages optimized to give you the best bang for your buck in the search engines and that will get you listed higher which gives you a better chance at making a sale. Of course even if you get visitors it doesn’t mean you sales copy will sell them, but that’s for another day and another article, isn’t it.

I always enjoy being paid but at the same time the teacher in me wants you to learn to do this for yourself so keep your money and read on…

Search Engine Optimization Strategy One:

Learn what others are doing to make their web page land on the first search engine results page. Discover all you can about each site that gets listing on the first two pages of results. At least the first two pages so you get an understanding and you will also find more than one strategy being used, so pay close attention.

How do you find those sites, well you have to use the keywords that represent your product to your target group. You will even learn of new keywords and phrases as you start to dissect your competitors web pages.

Example: If you are promoting ‘car care products’ then you go to Google and do a search for this term. Do two searches on this phrase and any other phrases you are using. One without quotes and one with quotes.

Doing two searches this way will let you know how many sites are out there promoting based on the exact same keyword phrase your are using.

Google: “car care products” = 606,000

Google: car care products = 38,200,000

From this you can see that there are 600 thousand pages out there about car care products and that means you would have a lot of competition.

Once you have your search engine results page for your search term in quotes start looking through the results and take notes.

What are you looking for?

1. You want to learn how they use the search term or keyword phrase on their page.

This means that you need to look at the headings and paragraphs to see how many times that phrase was used and the exact location it was used.

Was the phrase bolded or italized, is it in a header one, is the phrase a hyper link anywhere on the page?

Learn all you can from the browser page.

2. Open the source code for the web page you are researching and see what other keywords and phrases they use.

What are the other keywords? You will later do the same research on the new keywords you find.

If you do this and use the same strategies for keywords and phrase placement you will increase your own page ranking. Do this consistently and you will be able to pass those that are ranked ahead of you.

Look for other strategies from us on search engine optimization strategies that work.

Google has become the largest search engine worldwide. In fact, approximately one-half of all search engine searches take place on this popular site. The company utilizes a special algorithm to evaluate and rank websites and position them according to the particular keywords they choose to include. Search engine optimization is a process that involves modifying your website so that it ranks higher in the search engine listings. Your goal is to achieve the highest ranking possible for large search engines such as Google. This is by no means an easy task, but there are some ways to help you improve your ranking.

Here are 12 important search engine optimization tips that can help you rank higher quickly and easily:

1. Add relevant keywords to the HTML meta tags of your site. Include keywords in the beginning of your Meta Title Tag, Meta Description Tag and Meta Keywords Tag.

2. Include a relevant keyword in the URL of your home page and subpages.

3. Use headings or bold type to emphasize your keywords.

4.Include at least one relevant keyword in your domain name if at all possible.

5. Include links to websites that rank highly for your main keyword(s).

6. Use H1 and H2 tags for your headlines and include your keywords in each

7. Include links to other professional websites that already rank highly in Google.

8. Obtain as many RELEVANT links as possible to include on your website.

9. When other websites link to you, ensure they include your main keyword in their anchor text.

10. Increase your PageRank or PR by obtaining more links, controlling outbound links and creating additional content and pages for your website.

11. Your site will typically rank higher over time; new domains may not rank as highly.

12. Frequently add consistently high-quality, informative content to your website – consistency is key.

If you follow the above advice, your website should end up ranking much higher in Google. This is very important as a higher ranking will also increase the amount of online traffic to your site.

Good luck!

Improving your rankings on search results on different search engines depends entirely on how you want to organize your marketing attempts. You can make the most vital difference to it only through search engine optimization though. For those who have experimented with search engine optimization would know how important the basics are. And the basics involve both on page and off page. Question is how different are these two from one another and how they team up to get your site right up there.

Making it simple, on page SEO deals with making your web pages easily readable to the ‘spiders’ that crawl through them. Optimizing your sites by providing good content, excellent keywords, the right tags and an easy sitemap are a few things on page SEO actively deals with. Off page SEO on the other hand revolves around activities that a webmaster needs to concentrate on before he launches his site. Experimenting and zeroing in on the right keywords, incorporating keywords into important links are typically off page tactics.

Most webmasters find it difficult to ascertain which one of the two SEO tools they should use. Would on page optimization work better than off page optimization or vice versa? Well it depends much on the age of your site. In case your site is absolutely new, you need to find ways and means to optimize your site undertaking on page techniques. The situation reverses for sites that have been around for some time. Such sites are expected to have a decent standard as far as content and site structure goes. Since basics are taken care of on older sites, they could go a long way armed with off page SEO.

Launching a new site and making it popular can be difficult. The most basic on page SEO technique is to provide good content. This should be something that not only your readers would find informative but also search engine spiders. This would make it easier for the latter to index your site. Include FAQ’s and incorporate forums and blogs into your content building exercise. Once you’re done with this, concentrate on off page by increasing external links. The best way to do this is by making your site a part of the major directories.

Your site may not necessarily be a new one. If it’s already a few years old you can take it for granted that basics of on page have been fulfilled. Now is your time to concentrate on off page SEO. You need to make sure other sites find yours useful and hence link their site to yours. Remember inbound linking does not mean you need to link to their sites as well. Another good way of optimizing off site is to submit articles in the right directories. All directories bless authors with a resource box. Over here not only can you display your name but also give a link to your site.

In most cases on page and off page SEO tools come to use singularly but then if you opt for a combination of the two you can always hope to be in a win- win situation.
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Dynamic database-driven sites have become very popular, and relatively easy to set up and administer, through the use of Content Management Systems (CMS) and PHP server-side scripting. It’s also possible to create a fancy-looking site with little actual content, or automatically generated code that can harm your SEO, such as multiple URLs that display identical content.

Search engines are constantly evolving and adapting in response to changes in the way information is presented on the web. Strategies that were once necessary to ensure inclusion of PHP pages are no longer required.

It was once helpful to generate a static HTML version of a PHP page so that all the “includes” could be indexed. Now search spiders “see” all the content on a PHP page, the same way it is viewed in a browser.

It used to be prudent to avoid dynamic URLs containing “? & =” – now, the search engines list URLs with the dynamic variables. However, it is best to compose them with no more than three variables. Some variable-laden URLs may be listed, but without any accompanying content/description, in the search results… Stay tuned for further developments as the search engines refine their methods.

With many hosts running the popular Apache server, developers are expanding the use of PHP by modifying the .htaccess file to allow PHP code processing within HTML documents, and enabling shorter URLs with fewer variables by configuring httpd.conf. Your web hosting provider’s support team should be able to tell you if these features are available for your site.

Implementing a common-sense approach to SEO for your PHP site requires cooperation and coordination among the developer, webmaster, and web host. Beware of “SEO Experts” with “secret methods” and “guaranteed results” – gimmicks that kludge the search spider today might hurt your ranking tomorrow.

A descriptive and catchy page title is one of the key elements of SEO – whether or not your site uses PHP – since it becomes the linked title of your search engine listing. Use the name of your site in the title to encourage branding, along with a brief capsule about the specific page. Remember that the title displays at the top of the browser window and in the menu bar, so keep it brief, less than 160 characters. Avoid using identical titles on multiple pages (this can easily happen with dynamically generated titles) because they may not be listed individually, and if they are listed separately, it’s confusing. Meta tags for description and keywords have become less crucial to SEO – but that doesn’t mean you should forget about them.

The basic principles of SEO that apply to static HTML sites also apply to dynamic PHP sites:

Provide engaging and valuable content presented in an attractive design. Code should be error-free and standards-compliant. Use keywords appropriate to your subject matter – don’t be tempted to use “tricks” that might end up hurting your search engine listing. Encourage repeat visits with frequent updates, interactive features, membership sign-up, opt-in newsletters and, if appropriate, “freebies” – contests, giveaways, downloads and other resources. Encourage linking to your site with copy & paste code. Reciprocal links build partnerships and enhance page rank, but avoid hosting bulky “link farms” and other venues for worthless web site spam. Make use of tools provided by the search engines, such as creating a sitemap. Educate yourself by reading the search engine faqs, as well as by perusing some independent forums for SEO tips and methods.
Here are a few resources for further information:

Optimizing Dynamic Content

http://www.highrankings.com/issue065.htm#seo

Building Dynamic Pages With Search Engines in Mind

http://phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3

High Rankings(r) Search Engine Optimization Forum > Technobabble > Dynamically Generated Site Issues

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?s=c5e371a3bec60ac7e650447c430abfd4&showforum=25

Digital Point Forums > Marketing > Search Engine Optimization > PHP, HTML does it matter?

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=53280

Parsing PHP in .html Files

http://www.desilva.biz/php/phpinhtml.html
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