As an SEO expert, you should know that there is a big difference between PPC and SEO and for the benefit of the business; these two concepts should not be intermingled. You should not mix both the concepts for effective marketing. SEO is not an advertising model; however it is a process of tweaking and monitoring your website in order to get higher search engine rankings. Do you think that PPC and SEO deliver the same results? If so, then you need to think once again because both of them are marketing models and hence have different benefits to your business. You have to understand that search engine optimization is not an advertising campaign; rather it is a process which helps you gain good ranks through various search engines.

Are you deeply into PPC advertising for your business? If so, then you have to keep one thing in mind that you have to give priority to your SEO goals over any other advertising goal. Your business will grow only if you get good ranks through search engine rankings page. You have to be little patient with your SEO program since it is slow and tedious process as compared to PPC advertising campaign. If you are looking for quick promotion of your website, then nothing can beat the effectiveness of SEO process wherein you just have to select and optimize the right keywords and soon your site will get indexed by search engines, hence generating great amount of traffic. When user search for a particular phrase or a keyword, your site will appear as the top results and this will automatically promote your website in the vast cyber world.

Are you looking forward to long term cost effectiveness? Then SEO will always score over PPC advertising campaign. In the beginning you might feel that it is a slow and cumbersome task, however it will help you place your website among the search engines which is the primary motive of any business. For better results, you can always start with PPC campaign and then after getting enough visibility and traffic, you can switch to SEO which is a cheap and long term beneficial process. To enjoy longer stay on the search engine pages, SEO will help you in the best possible way as PPC will get you the traffic for a short span of time only. Now which way to go depends on you and your budget, however if both PPC and SEO are used simultaneously, it can generate tremendous results for the business.

If you think that link building is a tough task and that is why you usually keep it out of your search engine marketing plan, then it is high time you should change your thinking because this practice is a lot easier than you think. You have to realize the potential of link building in delivering you with effective search engine optimization results. You might not be including link building in your SEO plan just because you think it is a time consuming exercise, however you need to understand its importance and little efforts from your end can make a difference with some of the amazing backlinks. If you are aiming at higher search engine marketing results, then you must include link building campaign in your SEO plan. You have to adept yourself with all the new and innovative link building strategies so that you can improve your search engine optimization results.

You just need a little guidance and then nothing can stop you from improving your search engine marketing results with effective link building. If you get some high quality links to your website, then you can improve the credibility of your website and this will help you earn greater SEO benefits. When you get high quality backlinks, you can enjoy better SEO which is beneficial for your business. You have to be very smart with your search engine marketing and you should focus on building links because these links will help you get maximum results from your search engine optimization efforts. When you get hang of this practice of building links, then you will find it the most appropriate way of maximizing your search engine marketing results. You should start your link building activity as soon as possible so that you can get good amount of links in a shorter time span.

You should start by building internal links because this is the most ignored part; however this is one of the major factors responsible for your search engine marketing. So if you are looking forward to optimize your SEO value, then you have to focus on building your internal links which is usually overlooked factor. If you place your anchor text links strategically, then you will get increased link juice to your website which will improve your search engine marketing results. You can also get high rankings from your internal links and this will automatically strengthen your search engine optimization plan. If people are getting linked to certain pages of your website which no longer exist, then you can use that link juice for some important pages of your website.

When you approach your search engine optimization, then you have to ensure that it will also help you build links which will be useful for your SEO results. If you are aiming at high quality link building, then you have to take help of social media sites like Twitter which will help you come up with effective social media optimization. You should know what is most popular and in a particular industry and once you know this you can launch a useful search engine optimization campaign. If you are not aware of what’s new in the market or what the fashion of today is, then you can get to know that through Twitter search which will help you know about the latest in any niche. You can enjoy higher SEO profits if you take help of the social media. You have to understand the importance of social media in link building and once you know this, you can attract maximum number of people interested to link with you. When you are comfortable with using Twitter as a platform to build links, you can also enjoy effective social media optimization.

You can start with searching few keywords and then figure out who are the top tweeters in that particular industry. If you know more about a particular niche, then more chances you will get for effective link building. When you know about the trends and popular in a particular niche, you can improve on your search engine optimization. You need to have complete information about a particular niche which will help you chalk out an effective search engine optimization plan. Ideally, you should search for various opportunities to build quality links for your website and for that it is important for you to learn new and popular in any particular niche. As an SEO expert, you have to tap the potential of the websites which will help you with building high quality links.

When you use twitter for link building, then you have a chance to strengthen your social media optimization along with your search engine optimization. If you want to get more benefits of manual link building, then you can achieve this with tweets. You can good amount of backlinks if you build PR of your twitter profile and utilize your connections. You can strengthen your search engine optimization by this as search engines can see individual tweets. If you want your SEO to be really effective, then you have to optimize your tweets as well which will further help you reap benefits in the form of social media optimization. If your tweet is visible to others, then they can blog about your site and this will lead to link building also.

Microsoft recently launched a new search engine by the name “BING”. It is said to be an up gradation of the live search which Microsoft had earlier. It has gained a lot of popularity since its launch and has been compared to “Google”. But there are a few things that I experienced while using both the search engines and would like to share them with you’ll:

Starting with Bing, must say that it is better than Live search. It has a great user environment as compared to Google. It has a simple white background, which makes it more appealing. As far as search goes, Bing categorizes search results as Videos, News etc. and displays these options as a part of the left navigation, which helps users to directly jump on the desired category result for which search query was made. It tries to include almost all features that Google has, like image search and videos etc. the video search is more fun as the video actually starts playing when you hover your mouse over it. Technically speaking, it has a very good design and a great combination of plug-ins and modules put together – All in all a great user experience.

But I still feel that Google is much better than Bing. The reason being, Google provides more search results as compared to Bing, in fact more than double. Bing includes spell check, where it rectifies the spelling mistakes without user confirmation, where as Google asks the user for confirmation. Speaking from a brand perspective, Google is a much trusted brand than any other search engine. Only a Google logo or a “result provided by Google” tag makes it more trusted by the user. Google has been in this industry for a long time and people trust Google for everything, as said by some – “if you have any doubt, ask Google”.

Bing is a good search engine with lots of potential which would probably grow with time, and could be said, a very good step forward by Microsoft in the search market.

Google’s old keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Original Google keyword suggestion dropdown box

Google’s new keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Another example of A/B testing .

A recent Reuters’ article states that “Microsoft Corp is testing a new version of its online search service internally under the code name Kumo.com.”

The article also states that “The new service was unveiled in an internal memo sent by the head of research at the company’s online services division on Monday.”

The Microsoft memo stated that they believe that the new engine will help improve the quality of results thrown back at a user. It also stated that an explorer pane on the left side of results pages will give access to tools that will help users with their tasks.

Let’s see how this one pans out for Microsoft. Stay tuned for more updates…

Search Engines play a vital role in website promotion. They are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services and products online. Therefore, it is necessary that your website surfaces quickly in search results.

There are number of search engines on the internet, some of which offer a service called “Paid Inclusion”.
Paid URL Inclusion is a search engine marketing technique where you need to pay a specific amount to search engine as an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

The question now is, why pay, when most search engines have automated programs called ’spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ that index all the pages on the web for free?
It is true that search engines will find your page and index them with no cost but WHEN? It could take at least couple of months for search engines to finally index the entire website. This is where paid URL inclusion beats Free Inclusion – Speed. It offers faster indexing of your web pages.

Search engines that provide paid URL inclusion services, use an additional spider that goes out and indexes specific pages that have been paid for. Free spiders will find a site, follow the links and index the pages, but it will take some time and you could lose out on valuable traffic but a paid spider will index the pages that have been paid for, almost immediately.

Advantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Quick Inclusion – after the payment is made, the website is indexed by the spider instantaneously.
Rapid re-indexing – the spider will return to the website very often, sometimes even daily!

Disadvantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Cost – The biggest disadvantage is the charge. The annual cost for a ten page website ranges from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for AltaVista.
Reach – Another disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL do not offer paid inclusion. This implies that Paid URL inclusion will amount to only a small fraction of the daily traffic to the website.

In the end, the fact remains that search engines will still index websites whether they are paid inclusions or not. But if you want immediate indexing for your website on AltaVista, Lycos etc then you could opt for paid URL inclusion.

Google has introduced Quotes on the Google News result pages. Searching for a person on Google news now results in a quote attributed to him/her popping up at the top of the search result page.

Some webmasters recently experienced a delisting from the search engines without any good reason. The webmasters had not done anything wrong and their web sites were optimized for search engines. Nevertheless, the web sites had been removed from search engines.

Poorly configured firewalls can block search engine spiders

It turned out that the delisted web sites were all hosted by the same hosting company. More precisely, the web sites were all hosted by a hosting company that used a special firewall software by SonicWALL Inc.

That firewall stopped the search engine spiders from accessing their web sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN and all other search engines that request the robots.txt file couldn’t index the web site anymore because the firewall didn’t allow that:

“An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.

The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server.” (source)

This is the standard security settings of the SonicWALL firewall and it basically means that your web site won’t be spidered by search engines if you use this firewall without customizing it.

A firewall with these settings will drop the connection to anyone requesting the robots.txt file so that it looks as if the web site is offline. From an SEO point of view, this is very bad for your web site because all good search engine spiders request the robots.txt file before indexing your web site.

What does this mean to you?

If your web site is not listed on search engines although it has many good incoming links and optimized web page content, you should ask your web host if their firewall blocks search engines that request the robots.txt file. Your web host might not be aware of the problem.

I wonder how serious Yahoo was when they re-initiated partnership talks with Microsoft… cause just hours after the official calling off of talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced a partnership with Google to host and display Google’s Adwords ads on its search engine result pages.

Is that good? Well, for Yahoo it is. Cause Google Adwords is much more popular than Yahoo’s search marketing program. Google Adwords Ads are also more expensive per click than Yahoo ads were. This means that Yahoo may get more revenue per click than their own program was able to generate.

For advertisers, the positive is that Adwords will now be able to give them a much wider audience. On the flip side, the deal makes Google a virtual monopoly in the paid search advertising (popularly known as pay per click) arena.

Again… I think this hasn’t ended and there is more to come! Stay tuned…