Considering the global financial crisis that we are experiencing, it wouldn’t be wrong to question whether it’s a smart move to capitalize on an internet marketing campaign, right. At the end of the day, marketing is still marketing, it does not matter what media it uses. It is costly to promote your business.  But does that mean we should stop promoting our businesses just because there is a financial crunch?

Well if you take my opinion, no way!

The global recession certainly has made a huge impact on the businesses all over the world. The aftermath of the shock waves has certainly damaged various companies all over the world.

Now, in these difficult moments it looks quite impractical to spend on promotional campaigns when there is a need to cut back on expenses. However, with the urgency to improve upon your sales you need promotion any ways, so there is a need to find out a reliable web marketing tool.

Internet marketing could play an important role in promoting your business, and SEO is the most popular way to promote your business online. When it comes to promoting a web based company online, SEO can be the technique to be trusted as it has given many businesses value for their money.

From web design, to content optimization, syndication and others; SEO covers every aspect of an online business.  Compared to paid advertisements, SEO provides longer lasting positive effects and is also more affordable.

SEO can position you where you will be seen by every body, and this advantage will certainly multiply you revenue.

Search engine optimization will enhance your online presence. With this presence, you are more likely to attract visitors. SEO does not need huge investments but it certainly assures huge revenues.

SEO companies can guide you through the activities required to get your web site SEO friendly, there are various companies in India which can help you, and they can also offer you a cost advantage over the other counties.

SEO and SMO are two of the bigger concerns for webmasters and Bloggers, as they can both have substantial impacts on the amount of traffic a website or blog receives.

SEO has been a common activity of website owners for years now. It is no doubt effective. Search Engines sends tons of free traffic to those with the high rankings for popular search terms.

While Social media optimization has only become popular in the past few years as the use of social networking sites has exploded. When compared with successful SEO, social media traffic is less steady. Those who use social media effectively can consistently draw traffic with new content.

One of the biggest differences between SEO and SMO is the networking aspect. SMO is heavily-reliant on networking and strong profiles, while SEO can be done without this.

Success can be accomplished from day one of a new website or blog. There’s no need to wait to become a trusted domain. While in SEO, one has to wait for a longer period of time to get rankings so that you can get relevant traffic to the website.

The structure of your website isn’t really important like it is with SEO.

Some Comparisons and Similarities of SEO and SMO:

Link Building:

SEO – Inbound links are a large determining factor in rankings.

SMO – Links are a result of success, which means that SEO benefits from good SMO.

On Page Elements:

SEO – Title tags, headers, image title, bold text and use of keywords are all influential on search engine rankings.

SMO – Coding and tags are not so important, while visual attention grabbers make a bigger impact.

Titles:

SEO – The title tag of a page tells the search engines what a page is about and carries a lot of weight in the rankings.

SMO – Titles and headlines are extremely important for grabbing attention and getting users to click-through.

Content:

SEO – Quality content is important in order to rank well.

SMO – Quality content is important in order to hold the readers’ attention and win their approval.

Analysis:

SEO – Analysis is necessary in order to know which changes have made an impact (positive or negative) on the site’s rankings.

SMO – Analysis is necessary to know what types of content draws interest.

Predictability / the Benefit of Experience:

SEO – Experts are able to reproduce success with new sites (although it’s not as easy as it sounds), as the same elements can be applied.

SMO – Those who know the social media audience can recreate success by publishing posts and headlines specifically for this purpose.

Success Breeds More Success:

SEO – Trusted domains will have a positive effect on all pages, including new pages.

SMO – Power profiles on sites like Digg can keep traffic flowing with new submissions.

I believe that SMO is the best way for new websites and blogs to draw visitors. This early success with social media can have long-lasting effects on search engine rankings as well.

Blogs are the most important mode of information on Internet. Search Engines consider blogs as daily snippets of information that are updated on a frequent basis, they get a lot of preference in the search results.

So the question arises how could you optimize your blogs?

There are some basics that apply in order to optimize your blogs in a best possible manner. WordPress and Blogger are the two most popular web sites that you can choose to create blogs. If you create a bolg on blogger, you will get an added advantage as it is owned by Google and hence you will be indexed quite quicker & frequently.

Frequency of blog postings is the most important thing that search engines consider. If you can post 3-4 postings per day, the search engines will make a note of it and will rank you at the top. You will be able to boost your blog in the rankings if it’s related to a hot topic on the Internet.

Now, For the actual optimization

Here are some of the most important rules to make your blog Search Engine Friendly:

• Make Use of  an interesting title: Also known as link baiting,  your title should captivate the user to read more

• Include Target Keywords in Title of the Bogs- while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant

• Make use of  H1 tags - All blog editors allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags

• Link With Other blogs - Find other related blogs that your readers might find interesting, and ask for a link in return

• Do not forget about your archives - You may post a topic that isn’t hot at the moment, but comes up later - make sure your readers can find that posting

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To keep your blog ranking at the top you need to be frequent in posting posts. You do not have to create a content piece every time just a paragraph of good suggestions or something on hot topics would be enough.

Search engines today have become an integral tool for information search. They efficiently synchronize the massive data making it user friendly. When a user enters his query into the search engine a list of relevant results called hits are displayed. The websites offering services relevant to the user queries want to be ranked on a priority above others.  Hence to bag that coveted position it’s necessary to have a search engine friendly site. What actually does a search engine friendly site mean? Is it just about having a content rich site and sacrificing on the aesthetic value? Or, is it just stuffing your web pages with an over dose of keywords? The answer is actually none of the above. Below are listed certain simple steps that ensure you have a search engine friendly site.

• It is necessary to ensure that your site is found by the search engine in the first place. A common myth many people have is that its sufficient to submit a new site through add URL forms or submission services. But following only these practices do not help your site show up in the search engines index. Rather what is important is to have a link from a site that is already there in the search engine’ index. Subsequently the search engine would find the link, visit your site and add to its index.
• Search engine crawlers crave for good content. Providing high quality content especially on the home page is very essential. This would attract visitors and lure web masters to link to your site. The content is to be formed keeping in mind the keywords users would type to find your pages. A general myth common among many is that the search engines like plain HTML text and not recognize the aesthetic beauty. Or in other words you should have all your content placed before the graphical component. But this is not true you can actually have best of both worlds. It doesn’t natter where your content is placed the search engines will eventually find it. The challenge lies in the fact that how creatively your information is presented.
• An important thing which the search engines look at is the title and the meta description tags of each page. Relevance of title tags and meta tags depends upon the search engines. The meta description tags might not appear in the result pages of Google but still they index it. But on the other hand Yahoo uses them as description to appear on the result page.
• Another important thing is to have site map for your web site. This is the best way to let the search engine crawler know about the pages on your site that it might not discover otherwise. A site map is the list of pages present on your website. Having a site map makes it simpler for the crawler to navigate on your site.
• Lastly you need to constantly monitor your site statistics to know your audience preference. This is important to find out which of your pages deliver best ROI. Once this is known you can channel your efforts towards those pages.

Other the keeping in mind the above mentioned factors one should ensure that the web site does not get penalized by the search engine. Do not resort to unethical means like stuffing your pages with key words or attempt to cloak pages. Having pages that are not for the end user may be considered deceptive by the search engine crawler and may completely ignore your site.

Nowadays, many business websites are dynamic means that their web pages are dynamically generated, pages that allow user interaction. Online shopping cart is one of the finest examples of dynamically generated web pages.

Therefore, it is necessary for search engine optimizers who have experience in doing SEO for a simple static websites to know about optimization strategies for a Dynamic Website!

Dynamic websites are those websites whose pages are usually built with a programming language such as ASP, PHP or JAVA.

Dynamic sites are database-driven, in such case the site content is stored in a database and then dynamic code “pulls” the content from that database.

It is very difficult to get dynamic web sites properly indexed by major search engines until they are professionally optimized.

Most search engines claim that they started indexing majority of dynamic web sites but still they are limited to a number of URLs. It is because the dynamic pages do not exist until a user actually goes through a query. Search engine spiders are generally not programmed to select any of query or variables.

In order to get your dynamic website indexed, just note down the following factors;

1. Use URL Rewriting Tools or Software -It is better to use these tools to convert a dynamic URL of your site to Static URL

2. Use CGI/Perl Scripts – CGI/Perl scripts is one of the easiest ways to get the dynamic sites indexed, here, Script Name is variable that contains the complete URL address.

When you will use CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of your dynamic URL is assigned a variable.

3. Manage your Web Servers-

Apache Server has a rewrite module that will enable you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. .

4. Link Static page to your dynamic Pages – Create a Static Page that is linked to all dynamic Pages. And then optimize static page for the search engine rankings.

If you are going to optimize a dynamic website in the above mentioned ways then you will not face any problem and you will surely have a great chance to grab top rankings on major search engines.

While launching any SEO campaign you always focus on getting results in future and than start with a site that ranks almost nowhere in any of the Search Engines. We build backlinks, do on page and off page activities with the expectations that a few months from now, our site will start getting recognized and we will get relevant traffic and rankings on Search Engines.

But the important question is, the Keyword terms chosen being worthwhile over time? Will we get enough search volumes? Are there any more Key terms we can target to get ample traffic? What will our market be interested in this time next year?

Given that search engine ranking has a long lead time, it pays to think about keyword trends well ahead of time.

It is difficult to predict future. However, spotting trends is somewhat easier, and gives us an insight into how our niche is likely to develop. Trends typically follow a gradual, predictable pattern.

Let’s take a look at a few tools you can use to find more industry relevant keywords.

Trend Spotting Tools

Ideally, you want to find keyword areas that show an increasing level of interest, or areas where there is significant, steady interest over time. Google Trends is a useful tool for predicting rising interest in keyword areas. Search on your keyword terms, and see if interest in your niche is rising or falling.

It also helps us to drill down into the data in a variety of ways, including by date, by region, by category and by source. The related terms section is particularly useful for getting new keyword ideas, and analyzing trends.

Twitter Search is also a good tool for trend spotting. Possibly the most useful aspect of Twitter, as far as the SEO is concerned, is the ease of which you can spot keyword trends in terms of everyday usage. Search for your keyword term and make a note of the words people use in conjunction with your keyword terms.

With various search engines like Google coming into picture, finding information has become a very easy task. All you have to do is enter your keyword and find a complete list of results from all over the web instantly. Ever wondered how does Google compile such huge data within few seconds? Its almost like searching a book with huge amount of data. Google follows three basic processes in delivering the desired search results for your query.

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Serving

Crawling: A large number of websites being created and updated regularly on the world wide web. Hence it becomes important for Google to keep a track and update them to its database. The job is performed by an automated web browser or crawler called the Googlebot. Its aim is to discover new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Number of sites to be crawled and with what frequency is determined by a computer generated algorithm. The process is initiated by gathering a list of web pages from previous crawl process. Next thing Googlebot does is visit each of these web sites to detect new links, dead links and updated sites. The information is then added to the list of pages to be crawled for updating the Google index. The frequency of a Google crawl is determined by the relative importance of your site. A quality website with good content is likely to attract the crawler more frequently. The crawler uses two metrics to measure the importance of a web site. The first one is the number of links pointing to your website. Google doesn’t give importance to your website unless there are quality links pointing to it. The other factor is the number of pages present within your web site. The crawl rate increases with large and constantly growing sites.

Indexing: Once crawling is done the next step is to compile an index of all the words it sees with their location on each page. Pages provided by the Googlebot are stored in the index data base. The main aim of compiling this database is to provide rapid access to documents containing the user queries. To improve the search speed common words called the stop words ( the, in, is etc) and some punctuations are ignored. Also the indexer concerts the letters into lower case to improve performance.

Serving: Once a keyword is entered in the search box the Google’s query processor comes into action. The processor looks into the index for matching pages and returns the relevant results within a fraction of seconds. The relevancy with which these results are displayed depends upon a number of factors. One such important factor which is considered is the page rank. It is the measure of the importance Google gives to a particular page. This is determined by the number of external links pointing to your web site.

The whole process a search engine follows can be summed in three simple steps. Once a query is entered by the user it is sent to the index server by the web server. The index server then retrieves the stored documents matching the user query. The relevant search results are then presented to the user within a fraction of a second.

You might be a proactive PPC manager but there could be elements of the account that may hurt your PPC performance.

When an account is performing well, then you should be most vigilant in searching for “Hidden killers”;

Killer 1: Incorrect Campaign Settings

When you launch numerous campaigns or if you keep adding campaigns frequently, campaign settings may get missed. It doesn’t mean that the campaign is broken but it may not be reaching to its full potential.

Pro actively, you should ensure that the settings have all the correct information related to your campaign’s goals like, bidding, budget, Ad targeting, location targeting etc..

Do a quick review of all your campaigns, If no errors then great! However, if you find even single setting that is incorrect then you can surely make great progress with few clicks :-)

Killer 2: Neglected Ad text split tests

If you are testing your PPC ad texts on regular basis then only you can have good click-through rate.

If your account is really performing well, then it is a good time to run an ad text report to check if there are any ads active which are under performing.

One should make sure that each Ad group has valid sample size in order to check the performance.

Killer 3: Poor Performing keywords that are hidden in Good Ad Groups

There are certain Keywords that hide in the better performing Ad group. Even though, your AD group is performing good then also there are certain keywords present that are generating traffic but few conversions.

Therefore, you must run a keyword report to delete such terms.

Killer 4: Irrelevant Search Queries

While using broad match or phrase there are certain Keywords/ phrases that are not at all relevant to your business, therefore, you should run a search query performance report in order to build your negative keyword list.

Killer 5: Poor converting sites on Content Network

Similar to poor performing keywords, your campaign is doing good in the content network but still there are a few sites that are not generating conversion/ potential clicks, therefore, these sites must be excluded from your list.

Always Remember “ If your account is doing Good – It can always do better!”

For maximizing return on investment, all PPC advertisers must have dedicated list of techniques that they follow on a regular basis. Negative keyword research has to be one of the most important to have maximum return on Ad spend.

Negative keywords help advertisers to refine their Ad copies that are served for target keywords in their PPC accounts.

There are various free tools available to know/ identify the unrelated search queries which could be added to your PPC accounts and would potentially save you dollars :-)

Google Adwords Keyword Tool:

It will not only help in identifying Keywords for your target campaign/ad group but also help in identifying various irrelevant keyword phrases.

Search Query Performance Reports:

It is one of the most important tools which would be used for a running campaign. The ‘Search Query Performance Report’ can be pulled from Adwords reports section which will provide in detail the performance data for majority of search queries that triggered to your Ad copies.

Google Analytics:

The Google Analytics advanced filter will provide the details of actual search query in Google Analytics.

Related Searches:

The Related Searches feature could be discovered by clicking on the ‘show options’ box in Google search results pages and then selecting “Related Searches “option. This will provide list in detail of various top performing keywords/ Key phrases related to specific search query.

The Wonder Wheel:

The Wonder Wheel is another feature which could be discovered by clicking on the ‘show options’ Google search results pages and then selecting the Wonder Wheel option.

The Wonder Wheel refines and identifies additional keywords/ Key phrases areas to target in your PPC account, including list of many related long-tail and niche keywords.

Above mentioned tools are helpful in identifying all the irrelevant keywords/ Key phrases that could be costing you a lot!

Basic thing like Budget Caps can make a real difference to your Ad performance and Return on your Investments.

If your campaigns are hitting their daily budgets and you are not getting good ROI (Return on your Investment) for your paid search campaigns then simply put budget caps.

Also, it is fruitful for those campaigns where monthly budgets are reached before the month is over.

But, you should not use it as a performance effective method of controlling your spend. It is often a sign of a lazy online marketer.

If you are putting budget caps, your ads will go offline i.e, when you reach your caps, you will miss out on conversion/ potential clicks.

This cap will surely make it a challenge when you’re advertising on engines like Superpages.com, as they don’t offer daily limits :-(

Therefore, you must plan your strategy from the starting of each month, just ensure that your spread dollars throughout the month to avoid any down time. Always monitor your campaigns on regular basis in order to get better ROI.

Budget caps surely prevent you from overspending. It should be used as a safety measure and not as a primary method to control your spend :-)

Budget caps are very helpful for those who are new to PPC, however, experts should know better and must be able to control the spend by reducing/ monitoring the cost per click (CPC) and not by using budget caps!!!