SEO Blog - Asia SEO Blog

 Paid search placement can be used as part of your Internet marketing strategy to give your business an increased competitive advantage. This is because it gives you immediate control over your search engine rankings. This is one of the big differences between paying for rankings and rankings achieved through “organic” search engine optimization (SEO) where the results are achieved through a persistent and long term strategy. With paid search placement you pay to get immediate high rankings in specific search engines.

Paid search placement usually takes the form of Pay Per Click (PPC). This requires you to pay only when someone clicks through to your site. PPC can be an effective addition to your overall search engine strategy as it can get you off and running quickly.

The main PPC providers, Overture and Google Adwords use systems based on bidding. Whoever pays the most gets the highest ranking. Adwords differs from Overture in that they also use a click-through-rate which rewards high click through rates with better pricing.

As with “organic” SEO you will need to define the keywords that your audience will use to find your product. Your keywords are an important part of your sales message. Bear in mind that popular keywords will be more competitive and may have higher bids associated with them. This means that you will have to pay more if you use common keywords or phrases. Remember that if you use the wrong keywords you will get visitors that do not respond to your message.

The great thing about PPC is that you can get information and modify your campaign in real time. You can check the effectiveness of your PPC campaign by using the reporting tools that are offered by your PPC provider. This tells you how much business the campaign is bringing you. You can get immediate return on investment information. You can monitor your PPC ads and if they are not effective you can quickly change them. The key is to watch how much you spend and change the ads if they are not working.
Paid search placement can be an important part of your Internet marketing strategy. It is a great way to get it up and running very quickly. It also gives you a good insight into how effective your keywords are and an opportunity to try out different ones. “Organic” search engine optimization is much more cost effective in the long term. (3 months+) SEO also benefits you by giving your site exposure for a wide variety of keyword phrases across many directories and search engines.

If you use PPC with SEO you will find that 60% of your clicks will come from organic searches and 40% from PPC. Therefore neither option should be ignored especially in the field of e-commerce. The two systems can be used effectively together so that you can make full use of your Internet marketing options over a period of time. This will help your business maximize its online marketing efforts.

Author : James Peggie

t failed to acquire Yahoo’s search business — or at least that’s what Yahoo has said. So now Microsoft has to rely on its own resources to come up with a plan for moving forward in search; and to do that, it’s setting up a second laboratory.

This morning, Microsoft publicly announced it will be opening what it’s calling a “Search Technology Center” somewhere in Europe at some point next year. It did not say exactly when or exactly where, though with the company’s slate of acquisitions in the search space already hailing from all over the continent, there are several intriguing candidates.
Although Microsoft’s announcement was made this morning in Cannes, Oslo, Norway may be high on the company’s list. That’s where one of its most important acquisitions in the search space is located: Fast Search & Transfer, the manufacturer of a groundbreaking behavior-monitoring search platform for enterprises. That platform already enables big businesses that produce and manage a lot of text to use tracking data gleaned from employees to enhance the relevancy of documents retrieved during queries.

But that’s a product sold to businesses, not a query line served up through a public Web page like Windows Live Search. In a statement sent to BetaNews this morning, Microsoft said that its new tech center — wherever it ends up being located — will be partnering directly with the Live Search team to develop “a highly relevant, localized, and interactive search experience” for online users. If FAST’s behavioral algorithms are to play a role there, perhaps Oslo will be the center; but if FAST remains a professional platform, the new European STC might be running on a different track.
For the last two and a half years, Microsoft has already been operating an STC in Beijing. There, one of its key projects has been improved relevancy and experience for Live Search and the public Web, though some academic projects are also involved.

Back in February 2006, Microsoft acquired Paris-based mobile search technology provider MotionBridge. Since that time, the company has made some headway in building location-oriented search services for mobile handset users — not just Windows Mobile — although it’s struggled with the problem of branding these services. Then in a deal completed last January, Microsoft acquired geographical search provider Multimap, based in London. That deal could also play into the company’s expansion of mobile search services as well.

But if Microsoft’s intentions with this new STC are to provide more transparency to European regulators, who may be questioning the efficacy of these acquisitions, the company may want to consider Brussels as a home base.

Author:  Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

On the subject of popularity — we consider it vital to long-term ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, a link from Microsoft.com would be worth more than a link from personal homepage.

In essence, if enough quality sites link to you your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as the linking page in both directions. All other links are ignored. And do not bother to buy hundreds of URL’s and cross link them. The search engines can locate them and filter them out faster than you can submit them.

Keywords phrases within a Web page are among the most important issues to achieving top ranking on search engine . it needs to pay attention closely and chosen as much relevant to site business as possible ,while analyzing the issue that keywords phrases should bring high qualify visitors to site.

List the primary keywords that pertain to this page.
Put the most important words at the beginning of the tag.
If you don’t use your keywords within the viewable text of the page, then just adding them to the Meta keywords tag is very unlikely to help with rankings for those keywords. However, some use the Meta Keyword tag as a place to put alternatives or misspellings of their keywords even though they are not on the viewable text. It is not clear whether this helps or not, but it wont hurt.
Don’t use this tag to ?stuff? or repeat keywords. This doesn’t help and could hurt with some search engines. The optimal number of keywords should be between 7 and 48 words

Good quality in-bound links have become more and more important in how the search engines rank web pages yet many website owners still have misconceptions about building links for link popularity and how links figure in their search engine optimization efforts.

How the Search Engines View Linking

Link pop, link popularity, page rank, PR, inbound links etc. are all industry lingo for the same thing; but understanding the meaning and importance of links is essential to your website’s success.

Most people think that good quality in-bound links from other sites is what the search engines use to determine if your website is an authority site. In fact, in-bound links are only part of the equation.

The search engines actually look at three areas of website links equally to determine if your website is an “authority” within your industry;

1. Internal Linking
2. Out-bound links
3. In-bound links

Important Note: In organic search engine listing results, an authority website is considered an industry leader and that is why they are listed above the rest, at the top of the search engine listing results. The leader (or authority site) is a resource on a specific market or industry. A leader would be able to provide answers, news and information on specific topics. They would also share their knowledge in the industry as well as link to other sites who share additional or related resources about those topics.

An “authority” is not afraid to share, because whether it is a brick and mortar store or an on-line website, the leader is considered to be the most knowledgeable resource that customers remember; not just the one who pushed their sale the hardest.

For instance, when you want to make a purchase you usually have a lot of questions. You may visit three or four different places but the one who was most knowledgeable and gave you the comfort, security and trust you needed, is likely to be the one you make your purchase with.

Internal Links:

These are the links that you place from one page within your site, to another page within your site.  If done correctly this provides a “map” for the engines to follow and when they do they should be following and finding pages that are related to one another.

If all of your internal links are about one subject and use that subject as the link text (anchor text) it helps you create the thought that you are an “authority” on a specific subject.  You have to determine if you will be an authority on a keyword, a topic, or an overall theme. This can be done with the keyword phrases and with the pages you choose when linking from one page to another throughout your site.

Important Note:  Often times I will review the inbound links of a site with the special site:www.domain.com operator within the search engines. When I do this I may see 500 links as the total number of returned results.  What I find is that the site may have 5 good quality inbound links from quality sites; but then the remaining links that were counted came from their own internal linking structure. Some may ask how is that so? Well if you have 500 pages that have achieved their own page rank, what you are considering an internal link from one page within your site to another page within your site can also be considered an “in-bound” link from one page to another on a page to page level.

Outbound Links

Often times commercial sites are reluctant to place outbound links to other sites; they feel it may cost them sales and traffic; but having links that leave your site and point to sites that are relevant to your industry, as well as being considered industry leaders (or authorities) helps to build your website’s relevance as an industry leader.

Be sure to truly review the site you intend to link out to, find a specific page that discusses what your pages is about and feel comfortable that you are helping your web page relevance as well as providing a resource for visitors to your site.

Inbound Links

A common misconception is that in-bound links are the key determining factor search engines use to rate and rank a web page within the top 10 listing results; this is simply not true.

All the factors listed above help to determine if you will rank well in the major search engines. When sites find success with creating large inbound links it is usually because they had to compensate for not providing outbound links, or having a good link structure within their own site; and the search engines had to rely on inbound link text to figure out what their site was really about.

Important Note:  Quality over quantity is the tone the search engines have set as of late. It is no longer a race to see how many links you can achieve, but how many you can achieve that are in your industry, that are related to the keyword phrase you are trying to rank for, how this site is considered as an industry leader, the other websites this particular website has chosen to link to and how relevant to your theme is the content that is shown on the page supplying the in-bound link.

Understanding this concept will save you a lot of time and make the links that you decide to go after more meaningful; as well as helping your site achieve the rankings you want.

Google, the greatest search engine, maintains an index of all the pages that it crawls in the database. This index is updated or reformed after a rough time interval of about one month however the exact dates fluctuate and are not disclosed. The update process of this mega search engine is popularity known as the “Google Dance”. Google also happens to be one of the very few search engines offering free submission, and that is why it is having over 3.4 billion pages in its database. SEO industry seems to revolve around this giant engine as nearly 77% search results on internet are powered by Google. So it becomes extremely important for a webmaster to understand the process of Google dance in order to plan optimization for a website.

Every dance starts with a deep crawl that entrails spidering the whole web from the start which ends up to many days. Google uses around 15000 servers spread all over the world at its data centers. Obviously an index update cannot be proceeded on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index. Servers used by Google are placed at data centers mainly located in US. It is possible for Google to record all queries centrally and then distribute them to the data centers but this would obviously be inefficient. During the Google Dance, the data centers do not receive the new index at the same time. One after the other the data centers receive the updated index. So if a user queries Google during the Google Dance, it is possible that he may get the results from a data center which still has the old index at one point of time and after a few minutes from a data center which has the new index because DNS is resolved to that latest data center.

Google Dance can be identified by querying the IP addresses of its data centers which are unique for every center. Generally all queries on the IP addresses of data centers are redirected to www.google.com but there are special domains by Google that resolve to these data centers individually. Those domain and IP addresses are

Domain IP Address
www-ex.google.com 216.239.33.100
www-fi.google.com 216.239.41.100
www-ab.google.com 216.239.51.100
www-in.google.com 216.239.53.100
www-zu.google.com 216.239.55.100
www-va.google.com 216.239.37.100
www-dc.google.com 216.239.39.100
www-cw.google.com 216.239.57.100

The process of updation of index can be seen by visiting these domains. The results at each center vary from one another which is a proof of the process going on. Also each domain mentioned above i.e www-xx.google.com has an additional domain www-xx2.google.com and the IP address of such a domain ends on .101 instead of .100. These pairs of domains belong to the same data center and hence search at these two pairs shows same results. Index updates at an individual data center seem be done at one point of time. Servers seem to update by one half first and during this first-half update time the remaining half of server becomes active and serves search results for queries. Once the half under progress completes it becomes active and serves the results and the other half undergoes the same process. Users are very unaware about the changes occurring behind Google and feel normal search experience.

Google has employed test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com that resolve to a fixed IP address. This fixed IP address is of the data center that updates the index at the earliest. As soon as the dance starts least of these domains is assigned the IP of the data center that receives the very first updated index. So you can check for future Google listings (listings after update) on these test domains. Webmasters are eager to view the changes in position of their listings at these test domains. If everything goes fine then its time to change the DNS records at Google, if no problems are found then Google’s DNS is resolved to the data center that is updated at the earliest. However if certain problems arise then the update at other data centers is cancelled, now the domain google.com will not resolve the IP of the malfunctioning data center but it will resolve the previous index and hence general users are unable to get what is happening behind the scene.

However nobody can bet about the exact internal workings of Google but a technical overview like this one is all the way very necessary and helpful to plan an SEO campaign. Other than that it can also help webmasters and SEO experts in planning new developments & updates to be launched online by a certain date and time so as to be properly included in the search engine database. Now you know when and how to determine Google updates and do a lot to improve your rankings.

Google Operating System point out something interesting in Google’s algorithm recently: a preference in favoring recent content.

The example provided would seem to favor the conclusion; TCP/IP’s anniversary today has resulted in Google preferencing recent posts, including from Digg, over informative articles related to the search term such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position.

Indexing recent posts has been a strength for Google, to the point that at least for areas like Blog Search they’ve become the defacto standard as others such as Technorati have struggled to keep up. That Google would preference recent posts in its search results without the usual incoming authority links throws out the rules we’ve always known with Google, and I’m not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing. It would depend a lot on the results, but it would limit attempts to game Google results through incoming links. Perhaps it’s the first step towards Google embracing Web 3.0 with semantic search that learns as it goes, constantly updating its results to suit the user at the time they are searching, complete with contextual awareness as well.

You have probably heard of link popularity but ! what is the real value of content in the view of search engines ? if you would like to know then take a look at the title of this article CONTENT IS KING on search engine ranking ! there is nothing more valuable then content .

Content does not only bring you traffic but also encourage people to link to your site without asking for it ! that is the truth , if you have unique content then you are in the right track . regarding content you always have to remember never - ever brake the copy right issues as well as never using the dublicated content cause it is not going to help but hurts your site. avoid the “tricks” and go for legitimate content. Set your page up correctly and a few hundred words of solid content will do more than any secret techniques. Leave the tricks to the magicians ! you have to always watch your head that means never use doorway pages , These days, you might still get away with it for a while; however, there’s a good chance that you’ll eventually get caught. Once you do, your doorway domain as well as your main site stands a chance of being penalized or even banned. these sneaky doorway domain techniques have become so prevalent over the years that the search engines (especially Google) are really starting to crack down on it. It doesn’t matter if your doorway domain has totally different content from your main site. The content of an *extra* domain is not considered to be unique, and would be classified as spam by nearly every engine.

e-Marketing and SEO a major success @ CeBIT 2008

The e-Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation Expo at CeBIT Australia 2008 was a major success, with many of the industry’s key players in attendance the 35,173 Business Visitors received expert advice on how to generate more traffic to their website, convert that traffic into sales leads and get their website ranking higher on search engines.

The CeBIT Australia Team are already re-booking exhibitors for CeBIT Australia 2009, so contact our sales team now to discuss your exhibition and sponsorship options and take advantage of the Early Bird Discount. SAVE 15% off the cost of Exhibition Floor Space - Book NOW!

Contact:
Hannover Fairs Australia
Tel: +61 2 9280 3400
Email: sales@cebit.com.au

In fact, the number of visitors who nominated e-Marketing & SEO as a primary reason for attending CeBIT Australia was

Search Engine Visibility Book Review

• Author: Shari Thurow
• My rating: 3/5    
• Brief Review: A good introduction to SEO. It covers the basics well.
• Read Reviews of Search Engine Visibility book on Amazon UK.
• Read reviews of Search Engine Visibility book from Amazon.com for US and international readers.

Marketing Through Search Optimization

How to Be Found on the Web

• Author: Alex Michael
• My rating: 2/5    
• Brief Review: I cannot recommend this book apart for a introduction to SEO. It doesn’t give sufficient best practice on SEO.
• Read Reviews of Marketing Through Search Optimization book on Amazon UK.
• Read reviews of Marketing Through Search Optimization book from Amazon.com for US and international readers.