Many people see SEO as a way to generate free traffic, but in reality, to more experienced marketers, it is more of a long term, permanent strategy that is used for promotion. Many Internet marketers try to optimize their websites in a way that is obviously spamming and throwing massive amounts of worthless pages with links onto the Internet. This content is created to try and boost ranking quickly, but in many cases, this strategy does nothing.

Marketers assume that visitors do not notice that these pages offer no real information except of the link to the products. Unfortunately, many people are surfing through the Internet so quickly that they do not notice these poor quality sites unless they receive a virus or Trojan. Some visitors continue to buy the products, which enables the Internet marketer to continue this shady strategy.

SEO should be used as a long ranged plan for a website and should only be a portion of a larger marketing strategy. Many times certain marketers can’t afford more than a few hundred dollars for their budget and some can’t afford any budget at all. These marketers turn to SEO as the main or only marketing strategy they use in order to generate free traffic with link building and article marketing.

The problem with using SEO as your only strategy for generating traffic is that it is limited. There are only so many visitors that you can gather from search engines. Of course, there are many cases where it is the only source a website needs, but this is not something that should be expected.

In addition, SEO takes a long time to generate any real results. The age of a website is an important factor in its ranking. Using other marketing methods such as buying links, banner space, and other promotional strategies will accelerate your efforts to generate traffic.

Finally, SEO can only work to a certain extent. When building links and optimizing a website, many search engines stunt the amount of ranking a website can gain. Google and other search engines have built in systems that attempt to figure out if your site is gaining popularity naturally or through your SEO manipulation.

For these reasons and more, search engine optimization must be used in moderation in a consistent fashion. You can create a plan of action that can be used for building links and creating content, but remember the number one need for a search engine is to have the most relevant material on the top. Most people searching for information will be completely satisfied with the top 10 results that are given.

This is the reason why the require offsite and onsite SEO. It is your job to go beyond onsite SEO into link building and other offsite methods because all of your competitors who probably have similar onsite optimization.

One of the most important steps in search engine optimization is selecting the key phrases that you want to optimize for. Many SEO professionals call this keyword research but I like to refer to it as key phrase research because in this day and age of SEO, it is not realistic to try to rank for any one word.

Some things to look for when doing key phrase research:
The type of key phrases used in optimization should match the theme and popularity of the client’s website. For example, if the client is a real estate agent in Denver Colorado, it wouldn’t make sense to optimize for the phrase “real estate” as this phrase is much too broad and competitive relative to the theme of the client’s site. Because the client’s website is geographically specific to Denver the key phrases would need to be Denver specific accordingly. So a more relevant phrase would be “Denver Colorado real estate”.

Additionally, some industries are more competitive than others in the search engine world. A good example would be the real estate industry. Because there are so many realtors who have websites in every city and they all target the same key phrases, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to rank for the highest searched terms. It is important to use discretion when determining which key phrases the client’s site will have the best chance to rank for.

Deciding whether you can choose to optimize for really competitive phrases depends on at what level your website is.

Some things you should look for to help determine this would be:
~ Your page rank on Google
~ The age of your website
~ How many of the website’s pages are indexed in the search engines
~ How many back links your website has

Back links have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become the main building block to good SEO. Thus by exploring the anchor text of a site’s back links, you will get an idea of your competitors’ link building strategy, understand what people think of the site and also get help with your keyword research (webmasters usually focus on their most important keywords when building links).

SEO

Outside of SEO, the back links of a web page may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest. These links indicate who is paying attention and to what page. While it is also true that search engines do not punish you if you have back links from link farms or black hat sites (because you have no control over what bad guys link to), if you decide to enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts.

Another thing with the SEO gurus is that many of the so called SEO guru’s have been known to show a lack of understanding regarding where page rank comes from, and how internal and external links distribute page rank between pages. Make sure your SEO professional shows a clear understanding of page rank and the effect of your site rankings on Google based on the external and internal linkage of your site.

Page rank

In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of back links is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link. Google engineer Matt Cutts has publicly indicated that the Toolbar PageRank values are republished about once every three months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are historical rather than real-time values. If you have an internal architectural problem and your PageRank is spread across thousands of pages of duplicate content then some of your good content will end up in Google’s supplemental results, and won’t rank for much.

Rankings

Rankings are important, but not the whole story. SEO should be judged by bottom-line improvement, not arbitrary Google rankings. Every month when the Google bots start re-indexing your website looking for new content and keywords, it’s always a good idea to keep track of how your Google rankings are going. However, there is a school of thought that says that interlinking between sites, such as 100 or so sites, on one server or IP can lead to lower rankings in Google. Google generally identifies a network of interlinked sites on one server as a link-farm and may penalize you based on that fact alone, so be careful where you link and who you link to.

Many small business people face a big problem when it comes time to choose a professional and ethical SEO firm. And who can blame them?

A simple search on Google produces millions of results for the term.

On the other hand, you don’t have to chose a big company when it comes to choosing an SEO firm. A qualified professional SEO consultant will do just fine for you and for your budget.

And just like a big SEO firm does, a qualified professional basically helps small businesses and entrepreneurs achieve higher rankings for their web sites and businesses on search engines like Google and Yahoo!.

It’s really simple as that. Most people tend to make it more complicated than it really is, giving you all the bells and whistles of SEO or what they are going to do for your business and make it seem really hard but at the end of the day, what matters are the results.

Is your business on page one of Google? It would be better, of course, if it was a number one listing, but page one is definitely better than page two.

And let’s be honest…Google is the world’s search leader. Yahoo! is a very distant second.

If you want to make money online, you want to be on page one of Google for your keyword.

Website Breakthrough can help you achieve your business goals. We adhere to a strict and ethical SEO code of conduct that guarantees you a top ranking on Google.

So what exactly is an ethical SEO firm?

Just like any other industry, there are SEO companies and individuals that employ unethical methods in order to obtain high rankings on the search engines for their clients.

While there is nothing wrong in trying to achieve your client’s goals, there is everything wrong with companies that use methods that are frowned upon and tarnish the name of the industry as a whole.

We are an ethical company that strictly adheres to Google’s guidelines when it comes to optimizing your site. We know it’s your business and we take your business seriously.

Black hat techniques lead to nothing but quick profit for a day or two and then your site getting banned or de-indexed from Google.

Once a site is banned, it’s generally very difficult, nay, almost impossible to get back in the good graces of Google.

So that’s why it’s extremely essential to choose an SEO firm that you feel can help you achieve your goals using ethical – also known as white hat – means.

Points to consider when hiring an ethical SEO firm:

“We guarantee you top placement”:

Beware of any SEO firm that promises you a number one spot on Google or Yahoo! Nobody can make make you number one on Google…unless you’re entering a brand new market with virtually no competition. In that case, you won’t be needing the services of an SEO firm or professional.

Google needs to provide information to the people who use it. If your site provides absolutely relevant information, then Google will give you the number one spot, no problem. They will know to do this from the “votes” you get when other sites start linking back to your site.

Page Rank:

As far as making money online is concerned, Page Rank means nothing. A good SEO firm shouldn’t even worry about achieving a good page rank for you. You don’t need Page Rank to get a good ranking on Google. All you need is timely, relevant information and the “votes”.

So if you’re looking for an ethical SEO firm, you’ve come to the right spot.

In order to have success with an online business, it is important to do everything you can to make sure your websites are being noticed. When beginning a business online, it can be very easy for your site to fall between the cracks and be overshadowed by the hundreds of other sites that are on the same topic. Some of the best ways of competing with these sites is by using social bookmarking and blogs.

The first step in social bookmarking is to write as many articles as you can. The articles themselves need to be the best they can. The key is to think like a reporter; try to think of titles that are captivating and will be noticed by search engines and customers. The title of the articles should have any key words that you are planning are using so the search engines can pick up on them easily. It is important to make sure the articles hold the attention of your audience for SEO success.

The next step in optimizing your website for search engines is to submit your articles to as many social bookmarking sites as possible; at least six or seven. Many of the services will save links to the sites that a user wants to remember or share among other users. By submitting your articles, you will be able to build links to your site as each person votes for your article on these social bookmarking sites. When the article reaches the first page of the book marking sites, you will begin to see traffic.

The final step for using social book marking is to simply repeat this process. This will take time and effort, but the more articles you have and the more social book marking sites you submit to, the more times your site will be linked to. Through this process, your website will be able to generate traffic and attract visitors daily. Writing amazing and original content can increase exposure of your articles and eventually people will start being interested in your articles as well as your blogs.

Once you have a good amount of exposure, you can begin using your blogs in combination with your already successful social bookmarking links. Blogs are a great way to increase traffic to your site as well as benefit from free content coming from comments from visitors. The more times you can link blogs or bookmarkings to your site, the better the chance you have of being noticed by search engines.

When beginning your online business, it is most important not to give up if you do not reach your goal as quickly as you thought. It may take time to start seeing traffic, but with persistence and effort social bookmarking and blogs can help raise your sites to the top of the search engines. Actually submitting all of your articles to a good number of social book marking sites will take up the most of your time, but it will be worth it in the end when you start seeing the traffic pouring in.

When people first begin marketing online, many do not know where to begin.  The key to many successful businesses is learning how to optimize your website for search engines. Once you have optimized you website, you can raise the quality and quantity of your traffic and reach the top of search engines. One of the best ways to optimize your website is by using logs
because they use all the things that search engines are looking for when choosing the most relevant articles such as, categories, titles and the URL.

When search engines choose which sites to place on top, they look for text, keywords and links that go to your site and blogs can help with all of these aspects. It is important that your blogs have original content because search engines will generally disregard sites with duplicate content. The more original the blog posts, the better chance there is for traffic to increase. You will want to make sure that every part of your blog is perfect, as this is a very important part when it comes to ranking on search engines.

The URL is one of the most important parts. This will contain the keywords you intend to target and the phrase that your site will match when searched for. You will want to choose a phrase that is searched for at least one thousand times a month in order to ensure that you will have steady traffic. More competitive words or phrases will effect how quickly you will rank on the search engines.

Most blogs contain a column of the categories of your site. These categories are text links that will link back to your site. Specific text links work best because search engines will know how to rank your site among the other keywords used. The more links you have, the better chance your site has of ranking high and thus, will increase the amount of traffic going to our
site from search engines. This is basically the whole idea of SEO.

The titles of your page are a large portion of how your site will rank. Low competition phrases should be targeted so you can rank well for every phrase you use. These titles are located on your blog’s main page and will link to the permanent page of your blog. This will allow others to see articles you have written rather than just blog posts.

All of these aspects are important when optimizing your website. Making sure the content in your blog is original and relevant can help push your site to the top of search engines, making sure it gets noticed by customers. Search engines look at the age of the site so, it is important to keep the blog up to date and add new information. If you are looking to rank well on search engines, blogs will greatly benefit SEO.

When thinking of SEO, many people are fixated on link building and optimization outside of the website. In actuality, the most important aspect of SEO starts on the webpage itself. Before any onsite SEO is considered, an important fact that needs to be acknowledged is that SEO is about individual web pages as well as entire websites. Every page is considered separate to every search engine. Therefore, it is important that each page receives equal attention when attempting to attain high ranking.

The first well known optimization strategy is key word density. Many search engine optimization specialists believe that there is importance placed on how many times a certain key phrase is sprinkled throughout a page of text. This aspect is important enough to become a sort of science in which a specific percentage of anywhere from 3 – 20% of the text must be the key phrase itself. Of course there are now real methods of knowing what the perfect amount is and logic in the idea that the key phrase must be placed a few times in the text to be considered relevant in the eyes of the search engines.

The next onsite optimization strategy is title tags and H1 tags. These are huge indicators of what a web page is about to a search engine. This of course is not the only factor; in fact, if this was the only strategy used on a web page with nonsense written, the page would not rank well at all. Along with a well optimized text with high key word density, creating titles containing the key phrases you want to optimize for will increase your page’s rank. Linking to other related websites is a logical and proven onsite SEO strategy. Not only do search engines recognize the topic of the websites pointing links to your site, they also know the topic of the websites you are linking out to. If these websites are not related to your website, it’s obvious that it will hurt ranking and it is well documented. When linking out to other websites, make sure to do so in moderation and use proper anchor text. Having links pointing to relevant websites is not as effective as having them link to you, but is a good indication to search engines that the topic of your website is relevant for a key word phrase.

Finally, make sure to add content to your site on a regular basis. Those who add a few pages to their website every day for a year will see huge success in their little 300 or so page website. If one adds 300 pages to a website once, they will never again watch their once popular site loose visitors due to stagnancy. Search engines will send traffic to a site that is not updated, but only for key phrases that are unpopular and not really worth ranking well for. Earlier it was mentioned that the web page is separate from the web site when it comes to many aspects, but that is not the entire case. The website is considered a whole in many aspects and updated content is one of the large indications that search engines do consider the website as a whole.

To visit any popular forum for webmasters or SEO enthusiasts and practitioners today, all you’ll see the webmasters talking about is “Yahoo! has 66 million links, how can I be like Yahoo!” or “I need 1,000 links for my site”. And then there’s the seller who posts “Thousand’s of backlinks for sale. Going today for only $7. PM me!”
The truth is, the numbers game doesn’t work anymore.

Nowadays, it’s more about quality than quantity. A link from the Los Angeles Times or New York Times to your site is worth more in Google juice than a link to a PR1 or PR2 link farm.

That is more fact than it is fiction.
Most people (“people” in this context refers to webmasters and internet marketers) look at search results for their competing keywords then proceed to check out the backlinks for the number one site and then scratch their heads and be like…”Now, how did that site get to the top of the SERP’s?”

They’re perplexed because the site in question may only have a few hundred links pointing to it compared to their own sites which have thousands of backlinks.

But if they looked closely, they would realize that that number one site has backlinks from more relevant or more trusted authority sites.

Backlinks are crucial in the SEO game and there’s a lot of ways to play the SEO game. You can either go for a large volume of links or go for trusted links.

The single biggest problem of going for a large volume of links as opposed to quality, is that it never ends and you will always be out there in the webmaster forums hunting for even more and more links.

The problem with that is, in the hunt for those backlinks, you will come across some unscrupulous dealers who will try to sell you links from non-trusted or artificial link farms.

If you go ahead and deal with such individuals, you might as well write an email to Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) and tell him, “Hey Matt, look at my site. I’m an SEO and am trying to artificially inflate my backlinks by buying thousands and thousands of links from crappy sites”.

The number one site (your competitor) meanwhile has acquired maybe two or three more “endorsements” from other quality sites. Backlinks that will help solidify it’s status as the number one site for their keyword (and yours, for that matter).

It’s a never ending trap. One too many SEO’s, webmasters and internet marketer’s seem to fall into and never get out of. So if you really want to get back in the real SEO game, think “quality” not “quantity”.

Think, “How can I get the Los Angeles Times to mention my site?”

For novel business marketers, it can be very easy to make a mistake. The worst part is, one wrong move can severely decrease the amount of traffic going to your site. There is a lot of information available on how to improve your SEO skills, however, it is important to the success of your website to know the difference between helpful information and information
that can steer you in the wrong direction.

There are a few tips that can help make your site successful.

One of the most important tips for search engine optimizing is to have patience. All good things will come to those who wait and no matter what happens, you must not give up. Although it may seem difficult to wait, it is fairly common for marketers not to reach their goal when they expect to. The key is to keep trying new strategies until you find one that works.

Another important tip, is understanding how to use key words properly. Keywords should be used in the title of your articles or blogs so search engines can easily pick up on them. However, you will not want to use the same keywords in everything you write because pages with the same titles may not get indexed. One of the ways search engines determine which sites to add is by content and if your titles lack original content, they will not be noticed.

Many successful Internet marketers will take the time to submit the articles themselves. There is more of a chance of your websites being banned if you use submission services or software.

As with any business, it is important to take the time to make sure things are going as planned and you are reaching your goals to the best of your ability. Although it is online, it is still a business and needs time and effort.

As with any business, it is a good idea to branch out. Today, we are lucky to have Internet access, so this is much easier than it used to be. If you can, get business addresses in other countries such as Canada and the UK. These countries have many of the same directories and it can really help your search engine optimizing to advertise to customers on a global scale.

You will also want to create multiple domain names. It is more likely search engines will list more of your sites because they typically list one page for each domain name.

There are many tips available online that can give SEO tips. The best thing is to try different tips and see what works for you and your site. These are only some of the basic tips for SEO, but you must be careful which tips you choose to follow.

SEO can be difficult to be successful in, however, by following the right tips, you can learn the skills of the masters.

Article marketing is arguably one of the most important free off site SEO methods used today. It is an easy method of gaining countless links from many different article websites. In addition, these article sites have become so popular in recent years that they have become tools for increasing traffic to your website in the short term.

The first major benefit of submitting articles to article directories is the additional links being built to your website with appropriate anchor text. Amazingly, the pages you submit to article directories are built in a very search engine friendly manner without you having to do anything. These pages load quickly, they contain clean coding, and they have your key words in the title and throughout the body.

Most article directories allow at least 2 links from each article. This works towards your advantage because you can link to two sites, one being your main website, and the other being a separate, but similar site that you can then link to your main website to. In this manner you are able to increase your link popularity artificially while making it seem natural.

When writing the code for the links, make sure to include proper anchor text with your key word phrase and also a title to the link. Many people forget to place a title for their links. This is one indication that search engines still look at, but is widely forgotten or underestimated.

Another added bonus of article marketing comes from the article page itself. These directories are aged and are very well optimized for search engines with title tags and other factors. Do not be surprised if you see the article page itself rank in the top 10 of Google before your website even sees any ranking. This will bring needed traffic to your site as well as improve the links pointing to your site because that page is very relevant and it is pointing to your site.

Related to getting clicks from the article, try to write a biography that captures the attention of your visitors. Receiving traffic from your articles requires clever article marketing which will convince your readers to visit your website when looking for a solution to their problem or more information about the topic they are reading about.

Most importantly when it comes to article marketing, you have to submit articles on a regular basis. Consistency is key with most SEO and article marketing is no exception. Many people give up on article marketing after submitting a few articles deciding that it doesn’t work, but in many more competitive niches, heavy key word research and many articles must be written for good results.