Some few years ago, everyone used to say ‘we have a blog’ and that sounded super cool as maintaining blogs during those times was considered as a great activity for both personal and professional purposes. It was a common mentality that when everyone has a blog then why are we sitting like this and this led to a movement where every person started his or her own blog either to boost the sales of the business or to share the experiences or personal stories. It was observed that some people could not enact the blog on site due to lack of time, resources and proper blog management, however others just posted wild content on their blogs to get the attention of the readers. You have to ensure that the blog method adopted by you should benefit your campaign and should not harm your search engine optimization efforts. For that you have to be really careful with your blog content and it is advisable to post keyword rich content as it will draw traffic to your website as these pages will rank well in search engine rankings page.

Your blog should be in connection with the overall keyword theme of your SEO campaign and should bring in enough traffic for your website. If the content of your blog is not engaging and does not contribute towards the inbound link to your website, then it will be of no use. If your blog is getting off the topic, then it will surely not interest the readers and by this your rankings will drastically drop and it will affect your search engine optimization and your online business. You can take help of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to ensure that your blogs are relevant and not going off the track.

You have to ensure that majority of your website content should talk about the keyword theme, because only if your blog talks about the keyword significance, then it might not lead to the desired website results. Make sure your blog talks about most of your site’s content as it will lead to overall keyword relevance. Look for the useful content for your readers. Do not offer them something which is not related to your business as it will affect your search engine rankings. For a successful business, we aim at good amount of incoming links to our website along with other deep links which flow hierarchically to the deeper site pages. If you emphasize more on your blog rather than your main pages, then you might experience your blogs getting more links as compared to your important pages in your website.

If you are getting good amount of links, you also have to ensure that those links should be relevant to your targeted keywords and should not be related to your blog post titles. You should access your goal conversion before choosing blog as a tool to boost your business tools, because ti can have negative impact on your SEO also.

Small business using search marketing looks a like a simple waste of time and money because small businesses cannot afford to take any sort of risk. When you launch any search campaign for your small business, then it might be a risky affair which can actually be a disaster for your website. You have to understand that running any search engine marketing campaign is not a joke; rather it is a serious business which needs to be done carefully in order to reap the desired results. There are many factors which needs to be taken care of to ensure a smooth and successful campaign like

Keywords

As an SEO expert, you must understand the importance of keywords in your campaign and if you fail to find the relevant list of keywords, you search marketing will dies its own death. You should have a good grasp of certain factors which are important for the keyword selection. The success and failure of the campaign depends only on the list of keywords prepared for you as part of the campaign. Before forming a list of keywords, you should know which keyword should be part of your campaign that best suits your business. Ask yourself whether the keywords chosen by you actually do justice to your traffic volume. Are you getting enough traffic for those keywords? If yes, then you can have a successful campaign, however with small businesses, you should not take such risks. Make sure that the keywords used by you cater to your niche and this holds true when you offer specialized financial services or high value commercial equipment.

You also have to make sure that the query raised through search is informational or commercial query. If the searcher types solar panel, then he might be interested to know about the technology and since it is most talked about in the media, it becomes a curiosity to know about that. Many words have multiple meaning and therefore should be used carefully and only if required necessarily. You have to ensure that the language used by you should be smartly and carefully used. Ideally you have to construct a keyword list, however before that understand your competition and what is their strategy to target the niche. You have to see who the top ranked players are in the market and see if you have that much budget to stay in power and grab the market share from them. By choosing search over any other form of marketing, you are actually increasing the financial burden on your small business which is yet to nurture.

Convonix Inc. is a dedicated Search Engine Optimization firm based in Mumbai, India. Launched in 2003, we offer comprehensive services in Search Engine Optimization. We are one of the leading providers of search engine marketing in India and provide values like quality, speed and accuracy.

You must have heard that for small business, use of social media can bring in new and improved results, however still search is given the priority. For your knowledge you must know that the thin line between search and social is almost vanished from the scene both in terms of technology and usage. You just have to ask yourself a simple question that can search engine marketing work for small business? Now you have to consider numerous factors before finding answer to this simple question. First know more about search in detail.

What is search?

Search is seen as the cornerstone of any online marketing and businesses use of certain keywords, you allow your users to type a certain phrase and get the desired search results. With this business expect a good search ranking which is important for the business growth. These rankings improve the visibility of the website and promote it in the online world. Though it is a time taking task, however it offers great results in the long run which helps the business grow.

Why Search?

Whether you have opted for pay per click advertising or search engine optimization, you should understand that both are important aspects of any online marketing campaign. Ideally you are offering people what they actually want without disturbing or interrupting the people. Through search, you are giving them what they are actually looking for at that particular moment. You will come across many ways to approach search, however you have to be careful in terms of small business and learn of it is the feasible and right method for it.

Now you must be thinking that how great this sounds, however running a search engine optimization campaign for small businesses has to be done very carefully or else it will spoil the whole show. You just cannot get on with the things which sounds or looks great to you. Unless it is not practically proven, you cannot kick start with it for small businesses. If you think that SEO is a simple approach, then you have to update yourself because with tight budgets and time, you might come across many problems. You just have to think logically and practically, so that no wrong step is taken which can actually prove fatal for your website. For many business, search marketing works wonders for small businesses as it is the single best to market your products and services. Still you have to know about it in detail before just plunging into it , because with small business you just cannot take risk.

Would you like to spend money for the thing which could be done through a little bit of efforts? Ideally not, however ,many business who have set high budgets for their search engine marketing often use pay per click over SEO to get in improved results. Site owners should think wisely before making any choice and choosing pay per click advertising over search engine optimization looks little amateur on their part. Usually it has been observed that the site owners shell out huge amount of money for PPC advertising, only some part of which can be used to have a professional SEO campaign which will take your website to new heights. It is still a mystery that why website owners pay out for pay per click advertising every month instead of paying small amount for the long running SEO which will prove more beneficial in the future.

In order to have good organic rankings, site owners have two choices, either to opt for expensive pay per click advertising or to choose cheap and result oriented search engine optimization. even after so long, it is really tough to analyze whether SEO and PPC are arch rivals or the loving cousins and till the time marketers do not understand this, it is tough to get good organic rankings to have more and improved customers. If you have hired someone who is your friend or someone whom you trust for your SEO operations, then in that case it becomes almost a compulsion to listen to what he says and proceed accordingly. You might have to, out of compulsion pay out for Google AdWords to get the traffic to your website which otherwise could have easily done through a bit of tweaking of title tags. Some site owners are actually afraid of their designers and feel that whatever they say is the best for their website. You must have observed that in case of a web designer, who is one of your relatives, you feel offended to say no to them.

Ideally, you should not business with the person who is not open to various options which might be beneficial for your business. In this competitive world, you must also be thinking to stay ahead of your competitors and this spirit sometimes makes you commit serious mistakes. So the site owners might opt for pay per click advertising just because others are doing it. You have to be very careful with your internet marketing. You just cannot do anything what your competitors doing blindfolded, because that might not be beneficial for your business. Competitors are doing right is the wrong notion and can always mislead the site owners.

Do you measure your SEO success? If no, then you must understand that if you want to grow in the business, then you should prove the SEO value with adequate data and numbers. Each and every aspect of the SEO has to be properly measured and showing to others what actually you have achieved will help you grow in the business because people believe only what they see. When your SEO value is proved only then the efforts made by you will be considered worth and for that you should prepare a report which can be presented to all showing the worth of your SEO exercise. Apart from proving the SEO value and highlighting your win, you have to focus on various other important points which are mentioned below.

• · Know when to say when – always remember to mention the things which are of the highest priority because if you keep on including things which are less important, then it’s going to affect your reputation in the online business world. It is a common mistake which is done by most of the marketers and then the company has to suffer due to this. If you are lacking somewhere, then fight those battles with the data you have presented in the report. Sometimes you might appear as a sheer nuisance and annoying in the business world and people would not like to see you with the search engine optimization activities. When you know that you are not the sole decision maker, then simply present your findings through gathering data and adequate research which will help others know about the positive and negative impacts on rankings, revenue, traffic and the entire SEO health. If for your company, SEO is a nig traffic source, then it is important to mention this in the report and this could probably a hit you are looking for from a long time. Your main aim is to present the data and leave the decision on the other party and also ensure that you could provide every possible insight required by them. Step back and let the business owners take their own decision taking cues from the report.

• · When things go wrong – There will be times when nothing will go according to the plan and they will fall absolutely flat. Be prepared for such situations and understand the reason why such situation arose and then how to rectify it. It is important to learn from your mistakes and when you know this, you can always recover from the falls. In your report, it is important to be correct and for that if you come across any technology which is not beneficial for the business, then warn the business owners so that those strategies can be done away with, without any negative impact on the business.

• · It’s all about numbers – At the end of the day you have to prove your SEO value so that you can help the business owners take a right business decision

Are you a newbee in the world of SEO or you are looking to revive the performance of your existing website? Whatever the situation may be, you have to develop hands on knowledge about link building as this practice drives your SEO in a big way. If you want to get good rankings on search engine, then you have to add the element of relevance in your site which is through effective link building. Ideally you should focus on inbound links to make your website relevant and remember that Google always favors a slow and steady increase in the links. Visibility equates to visits, but any amount of traffic will be useless unless you have relevant content on your website pages. If you use the following ideas to formulate link building strategies, then your SEO will be successful.

• Relevancy – Relevancy is a very important factor to consider while acquiring links for your website. Make sure that you take links from relevant websites only which will help increase your website’s credibility and authority.
• Anchor Text – If you want to achieve high search engine rankings, then using anchor text is extremely important for you and your SEO business. When building links to your website, try and use as many variations of anchor text as possible. This will save your site from getting spammed and search engines will trust you completely.
• Deep Linking – having deep links to the internal pages of your website is crucial for your SEO success. If you think that focusing all your links building efforts to the homepage is the only thing, then you need to understand the new age ideas of link building which calls for deep linking to internal pages. Ideally, you should get a minimum of 5-15 links to every page of your website.
• Authority – To achieving top search engine rankings, having authority to your website is important. You have to ensure that you take links only from the quality websites so as to get great visibility and hence the rankings.

If you are new to the world of link building and search engine optimization, you have to be little patient with the results as Google will take at least six months to show the results of link building efforts. You should focus on maximizing your links as soon as possible because with age, links deliver higher SEO results. After some time you can slow down a bit and continue with normal link building efforts and the old links will work for your business success in the meantime.

Measuring success is search engine optimization is important because seeing is believing. You must understand that SEO is a quantitative terms and till the time the results are not measured or visualized, all your efforts will be worthless. If you can’t provide data in the form of report which proves the value of your SEO, then it is just the waste of time and money along with making fool of your ownselves. Ideally you should undertake measurement of each and every aspect of SEO including

• Indexation Measurement
• Backlink Measurement
• Rankings Measurement
• Traffic and Revenue Measurement

Showing hard facts can attract many eyes and this will prove beneficial for your business. Get going with measuring your SEO success with the following points and this will help you know your business better. You will also come to know whether your business is going in the direction you want or not.

• Proving the value – If you ever come across a situation where you are asked to prove your SEO value, then you know how to do it. The SEO campaign launched by you has to be measurable right from its inception stage because without the data and the metrics, it will not lead to the desired results. Remember, a lot of research and analysis goes into proving the success of your SEO and to back your case well, focus on opportunity analysis, costs, issues and the risks involved. Do your own research on the topic and leverage data from keyword research tools and articles as per your requirement. Consider all the angles while preparing a report on the analysis and the data, proving the worth of your SEO. In reviewing the performance of your search engine marketing campaign, ask certain questions to yourself like does my content provide the information users seek? Are expected keyword terms missing from the final list? If you are trying to prove that certain strategy went wrong, then it is important to support your statement with relevant data and figures.

• Highlight your wins – It is important for you to highlight the areas where you have achieved exceptionally well because it will let others know about your positive points. Constantly talk about your achievements to make sure that you know what you are analyzing and the goals which you wish to achieve. Identify number of pages indexed, unique visitors, page views, time spent on site and bounce rate to know where you stand in terms of SEO. Through periodic mails and announcements at staff meetings, you can send this data across the organization which will help you achieve the overall goals of your business.

Keywords selection is one of the first steps in implementing a search engine optimization strategy. You have to be very careful with your keywords, it goes without saying that is you optimize wrong keywords, your overall marketing campaign will be worthless. Know about the best practices while selecting the right keywords which will help you make a right decision. Keyword selection is considered as the complicated procedure due to the diversity of factors. The keywords selected by you for your site may work for it today, however it may not deliver the relevant results in the future. For the continuous success of the campaign, services of the experts can be hired and these companies will also facilitate your understanding of the process. The three important points you have to bear in mind with the keyword selection are

• Keyword selection Process

- In keyword selection process you have to first come up with a list of relevant keywords deoending on the type and nature of your business.

- Include some long tail keywords as the users these days search with longer phrases.

- You can also be strategic by changing the word order or using alternative spellings.

• Tools to assist in keyword selection

If you are stuck and don’t know how to proceed with your keyword selection, then just don’t worry because now you have plenty of free and low cost tool which will assist you in keyword development stage

• Keyword placement strategy

After getting help from the keyword selection tool, now you have a final list of keywords. When you have that list, you should know the order to place those keywords so that higher ranks could be achieved. Below mentioned list will tell you about the order of preference for placing the keywords.

• Title Meta Tags (not more than 60 characters)
• Anchor Text (incoming and internal)
• Header Tag Content (i..e H1, H2, H3, H4, H5)
• Title Tag in Anchor Tags
• Bold/Italic Tag Content
• Body Text on top, middle and bottom of page
• Alt Tags in Pictures that are Links
• URL/Filenames
• Meta Keyword Description
• Alt Tags in Pictures that are not Links

If you have the expert’s advice in hand, you can always launch a successful SEO campaign as these professional will help you get out with the most relevant list of keywords along with its placement. You do not have to risk with your keywords because it can prove fatal for your business. Don’t consider keyword selection process as a complicated thing because all it needs is a professional advice and the right knowledge about the keywords.

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.

In today’s era, SEO has become the buzzword and all your business’s success will lay on the best SEO practices. To know that all the efforts introduced by you in your SEO campaign are successful, it is important to top your marketing game with best SEO practices. Your SEO campaign will begin with identifying the keywords that you want to target. A wrong selection of keyword can be fatal for your SEO campaign; therefore special attention should be given to keyword research to ensure incredible success. Not just this, you also have to ensure that the research you undertake has to be effective and step above the rest. Following five tips will help you with effective keyword research.

Know your business

No one knows your business better than you. You know what you want to sell and how much you want to sell through the marketing activities undertaken by you. Target your keywords based on your business ideas and make a list of words that best suit your business and can be a reference point for your visitors. Avoid including phrases which does not appeal to your clientele, or else your search engine optimization campaign will bomb. Be true to your readers and let your content speak the same so that they could relate with it. If you sell a particular, then add the most relevant keywords otherwise it will deviate the searcher from what he wants to search.

Revise your keywords

Revision is very important so that you do not miss out on vital keywords and also to judge if you have gone wrong at any place in your campaign. All the great stories we have heard in our lives took many revisions to take that great shape. Continuous polishing will help you come out with the refined product and this will also help you with your SEO success. There are vast number of websites in the cyber space, so if you are new to it, then focus on specific and relevant keywords. Make sure keywords are not overused and should make the job of searcher easy.

Assess your search volume

Make sure that your revised list of keywords is being searched by the people. You should know your customer base so that you know which items to market. Use Google Keyword Tool to assess what people are searching for and you can also get to know about potential keywords which can be included in your campaign for better SEO.

Know your competition value

Without know who your competition is and how strong they are, you cannot come up with effective keywords. The way to determine your competition value is to type the keyword in Google and the results you get is your competition. Look out for keywords which have high search volume and low competition value.

Get feedback from your client

Before moving ahead with optimization, get to know what your client think about your keyword research. Get the final keywords approved by the clients and then get going with your campaign.