cooltexterseo-blog

[cooltexterseo-blog]

Do You Really Need SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around since the mid 90's. In the last five years it has increased in popularity. Why? It places a website in a position to be seen by more people, thus potentially leading to more success (i.e. online sales, exposure, etc). We could conclude this article right now and it would be quite obvious that SEO is important and should be implemented by anyone and everyone. Don't get ahead of yourself just yet. Let's look a little a more in depth at SEO. SEO Defined SEO is the process of optimizing a website in order to increase its overall page ranking with search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, MSN, and so on. The goal is to increase quality traffic to a website based on keywords (search terms). Let's use a landscaping company for an example. We'll call the company ABC Landscaping. ABC Landscaping is located in Houston, TX. This is just a guess but I would imagine that there are 1000's of landscaping services in Houston, TX. In fact, Google retrieved 261,000 results when I searched for "landscaping services Houston TX". In this case, the goal of SEO would be to improve the placement of ABC Landscaping when a user searched for specific keywords, like "landscaping services Houston TX". The perfect situation would be if ABC Landscaping was the very first result, or, at the very least, was on the first page of results. Is this possible? Well, it depends. Let's look a little deeper into SEO. SEO Methods SEO is performed using several methods. Cross linking between pages of the same website Inbound linking from external websites Adding relevant keywords to a website's meta tags Content, content, content... Now don't get SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) confused with each other. SEO utilizes unpaid, or organic, practices. SEM utilizes paid practices like Google AdWords. We'll discuss SEM in another article but let's get back to SEO for now. I'm sure you noticed the emphasis placed on content in the above mentioned SEO Methods. Content is the absolute most important area when dealing with SEO. Search engines look for relevant and fresh content. Therefore, it is important to keep your website updated with content that is relevant and very specific to the keywords people may enter when they are searching for your services. It's great to optimize a website but content is king and a web developer can only do so much. This is where I believe there is a lot of confusion. SEO Lies (myths) It is EXTREMELY important to exercise caution if a developer promises you a top five or first page Google ranking. There are no guarantees with SEO. Let's pretend some more. You are ABC Landscaping, again. I mentioned earlier that Google retrieved 261,000 results when I performed a search for "landscaping services Houston TX". Well, ABC Landscaping may be on page 33 or even the last page when this search is performed. What if I searched for "ABC Landscaping services Houston TX"? Just maybe ABC Landscaping would find itself on the first page of Google in this case. Why? Because I was more specific with my search by placing the name of the company within the search terms. Is this acceptable? Maybe. Maybe not. It is imperative that you ask a developer how they will optimize your website and what keywords will they optimize for. Always put yourself in the mind of your potential customers. How will they find you on the web? What are they most likely to search for? In most cases people are general with their searches so you will need to optimize your website to include general and specific terms. Another key point to keep in mind is that we, developers, have no control over Google or other search engines. You may spend a lot of time and money attempting to achieve high rankings and actually realize some success. However, Google may decide tomorrow to change their ranking algorithm. They have been known to do this. Where does that leave you? It may not affect you at all but it could. There are no guarantees. So, why should you engage in SEO if there are no guarantees? Because everyone else is doing it. You don't like that answer? Okay, let's see if we can do better. Do you really need SEO? You should engage in SEO because there is no harm in it, only benefits. The most important advice we can give is you have to determine how much is too much. I'm referring to money here. How much do you want to invest in SEO? In the long run will it be worth it? For example, if you are a company competing with Wal-Mart then you have no shot at first page ranking. Let's just call it like it is. It is extremely difficult to knock the big dogs out of their search engine nest. It would take a lot of time and money to get on the same playing field with these guys. Don't let this discourage you too much. Utilize SEO even if you are in a competitive market. Not everyone is a fan of Wal-Mart. So, why not do everything you can to place yourself in a position to be next in line behind Wal-Mart? If you are in a smaller market and are localized (i.e. ABC Landscaping) then get on the SEO bandwagon as fast as you can. When done properly, you could see remarkable results in a short amount of time. Below are a few suggestions we believe will help you plan and implement your SEO practices:

[cooltexterseo-blog]

How SMO Interacts With SEO

Nowadays everyone is talking about Social media networking / social media optimization(SMO). Most of the people have joined these social networking communities. Recently I was reading an article: Companies planning to increase their social media spend. Having a profile in social networking websites is becoming necessity nowadays which also helps spreading word of mouth publicity about your brand... No doubt SMO is a great tool to spread brand awareness, seek advice and get noticed in the social media. But one thing which really bothers me is how SEO and SMO interact with each other. Let's find out what they are and how are they related: Search Engine optimization (SEO) is the process of analyzing a website and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site. Social media optimization (SMO) consists of a set of methods for generating traffic on any website through social networking websites, business networking websites, online communities and blogs (macro blogging as well as micro blogging). SEO and SMO both can be used to drive traffic to your website which in turn generate substantial leads your business

SMO is done to impress human being and SEO is done to impress search engine spiders. So in SMO we need to write impressive content to seek the attention of social media, whereas in SEO we write content for the website with proper usage of keywords grab the attention of search engine spiders. For SEO we need to change the titles, metas headers etc of a website so the website gets modified whereas for SMO we use social networking websites to spread the brand of our website.

SEO has been emerged long time back whereas SMO has come into existence recently after 2005.

Any person with a little bit of knowledge of internet can do SMO whereas quality SEO can only be performed by SEO expert. Google really gives importance to Search engine optimization as it is directly associated with the page rank, which demonstrates the importance of the webpage in search engines whereas SMO is not at all related to the importance of the webpage.

The structure of the website is not so important when doing SMO, which is an essential aspect of SEO.

There are certain rules (which keep changing by Google) to perform SEO (example title, meta description, meta keywords, headers, alt tags etc), whereas for SMO there are no rules laid as such. Only thing one should keep in mind while doing SMO is that SMO is done to interest human being so one should never use social networking websites to directly sell something rather it should be utilized to make relationships with the prospective clients. Make it personal and interesting for others so that people would like to connect to you. So the key point is while doing SMO "keep it human"

SMO costs you nothing or it costs you very less whereas to get effective SEO services requires a lot of in-depth study as well as hard work so one should be ready to pay a fairly good amount for SEO of their website. Even though there are many cheap SEO companies have appeared recently in the market who barely knows anything about SEO but they provide cheap SEO services. They would just write metas and title and metas for their client's website without doing any competitive analysis of keywords. Whereas expert SEO companies search out profitable keywords for the webpage. Profitable keywords are keywords that have a more amount of searches, but slight competition. This requires experience, lots of in-depth studies and analysis.

SEO is a long term strategy. Initially to get the results of SEO will take some time, but once you start getting visibility of set of keywords in the first page of search results, even after you stop taking the SEO services the results will stay there. Whereas SMO is an ongoing process you need to stay connected using social networking websites and keep doing macro blogging in order to be in search results.

Search engine gives you instant result on any query whereas if you are asking some question through Social networking websites it will take some time, so if your website is well optimized you will get noticed quickly through search engine which is an added advantage of doing SEO.

When to initiate SEO and SMO:

The basic aim of both SMO & SEO is to enhance traffic to the website which will help you grow your business. But the basic question which arises in one's mind is when to start what? The answer is simple. One should start SEO first to ensure the first page visibility and then slowly dig into SMO, so that when your SMO users start looking for you have strong web presence in the search engines. How to increase the web presence There are various methods to increase visibility in Social media websites (Linkedin, facebook) like one can join various groups of common interests and then part take Q and A and discussions board etc. Or you can start following other people in social networking websites like tweeter and regularly post the tweets. By doing this you can establish yourself as a brand and personalize their relationship with their prospective clients. What is important SMO or SEO In today's age search engine has become bare necessity to find information on products, services or any other information. Still common man generally goes to search engine to find information on anything and then further refer Social networking websites to get feedback from different people. So Social networking websites can be used for brand monitoring, you can use social networking websites to keep track of what has been said about your company and so you can respond those feedbacks to give a personal touch to your customers and their opinions could be further used for discussions in your company. Now we can say that the importance of SEO will remain there. Social networking websites can be used to as a backup to get opinions, spread contacts which can get converted into business in future. Basically using SMO you can create a personal feel which is otherwise very difficult for you to create using SEO alone. SMO gives you opportunity to personally talk to your prospective clients and solve their queries as human being, which is really essential to get business but at the same time strong visibility in search engines is also essential. Combine SEO and SMO to grow your online business So we can conclude that optimizing your social media presence can positively trigger organic/natural search engine listings as search engines are paying attention to social networking websites. But without doing SEO the webpage doesn't seek importance in search engine spiders. So my view is to combine SEO with SMO is the smarter way to grow your business. Do let me know your views, information about how SEO and SMO can be linked together in order to gain maximum output.

[cooltexterseo-blog]

SEO Infographic

[cooltexterseo-blog]

What to look for when hiring an SEO expert