There are two strategies you can use to develop content for your site. One is to create your own and the other is to acquire content.

If you were to open a store on Oxford St, the necessary ingredients for success are clearly established. It’s been said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. But when your door is a file on a server, it takes more than a road sign to direct traffic. What it takes, in a word is… more words.
In regards to website traffic, always be aware that the words on your site are sifted through increasingly sophisticated software programs. These programs send out an army of virtual site reviewers, known as “spiders”. Words are the food those spider bots love to gobble. It is impossible to over estimate the importance of relevant textual content in getting highly ranked. Without relevent words, you cannot achieve rankings.
So how do you develop your own word-based site content? The most important thing to remember is that the words must be relevant to your site. It’s not so hard really, just a mental exercise. A little creativity can yield a lot of good words.
Strategy 1: Creating Your Own Content

Exercise a: Write an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page.
This one is easy. Review the questions you get from your site visitors over and over. What are the same things they are asking you about in 90% of the emails you receive? Do yourself, your customers, and your site a favor. Make a list, and answer each question. And use this opportunity to provide descriptive responses peppered with your key phrases. Let’s say you often receive emails asking how long it takes for your special ordered doorknockers to ship. One question in your FAQ might read:
Q: How long does it take for your custom door knockers to ship?
A: Our personalized, engraved door knockers ship within 3 weeks of order.
Make the page look good… neat, orderly, and professional. Go ahead and add a few of your product photos in a column along the text.
Exercise b: Getting into the psyche of your site’s visitors
Take a little time to think about your customer’s related needs. The best way to illustrate this strategy is with an example. Let’s say you’re an independent estate agent. If your site visitors are looking for available houses and prices in your area, they might also want be interested in a layman’s breakdown of the various neighborhoods, suburbs or towns in the area. How close are they to the highway and local shops? What are the local public schools like? On another page, you could discuss how to price your home for sale, as well as tips on selling a home quickly. Even a simple glossary of estate agent terms provides not only relevant, useful information, but also food for those hungry spiders.
Strategy 2: Acquiring Your Content
Exercise a: Raid your wholesalers
If you have a product-based site, your suppliers can be a terrific source of content. One e-retailer who sold hand woven rugs received permission reprint promotional material provided by the rug maker on the details of weaving and hooking the rugs. This content was beautiful written by a professional copywriter and was naturally loaded with pertinent keywords. Additionally, it was supplied in digital format so adding to the site was a snap. A few product photos were placed along side the content, and it didn’t take long before the site was ranking highly for handmade rugs, hand woven rugs braided rugs, rag rugs, and hooked rugs.
Exercise b: Lazy SEO method for adding more words to your site
The reason this is a great “secret” is because everyone wins. And that’s my favorite method of doing business. Bear in mind, authorities and experts in a given field are often seeking collateral exposure, which you can provide them. The exercise is to find an article published online that contains content related to your industry and ask for permission to “reprint” it on your site. The trick is to identify complimentary, not competing materials. And it’s out there.
Let’s go back to the estate agent example. There are numerous associated trades that go hand in hand with selling homes (i.e. home appraisals, financing, etc.). So get on the web and do your homework. Find a really good article that has something useful to say about the associated subject. If you are a regionally based business, it would be even better if you can find something from the site of another local business. When you find it, send a gracious email requesting permission to reprint their article on your site. Mention how helpful and informative their article is and how valuable it will be to your site’s visitors. Naturally you will give appropriate credit to the author as well as a link back to their site. This provides them with additional credibility and exposure, as well as a nice reciprocal link. So… what if they ignore your request, or even say no? Just keep looking. The beauty of this process is that the information is readily available. Trust me, it won’t take long before someone says yes. And voila… you have content. Juicy, relevant, wordy content. And all you had to do was a little surfing and a little sweet-talking.
Creating or finding content for your site is not rocket science. Think about it. Every product or service solves a problem for the consumer. Identify that problem, and in theory, you’re an expert on it. So, write about what you know, or find related content that someone else has already written. Just get those words on your site. By doing your homework, providing pertinent content, and supplying your customers with a wealth of resources, you are building not only business, but also relationships. And there’s only one word for that – Website success and improved Seo!

Any good seo consultant should know this, but sadly many are to lazy to impliment these time consuming techniques. Also this only works when you know that the search engines are able to read the content of your site, this is where Professional Seo specialists start earning there money.

In today’s competitive environment, many advertisers resort to using competitor trademark names as keywords in paid-search advertising. These trademark names appear in the search engine results pages for Google, Yahoo! and affiliates and partners when you buy Google AdWords or Overture Precision Match sponsored listings. Therefore, it’s possible for your competitors to drive substantial traffic to their web sites by virtue of your trademark name, using your reputation to attract visitors.

A fine example of this is the sticky situation with Google AdWords. In an Internetnews.com article titled “Google Adwords Under Further Trademark Scrutiny,” Google was quoted thusly:

“As stated in our Terms and Conditions, advertisers are responsible for the keywords and ad text that they choose to use. We encourage trademark owners to resolve their disputes directly with our advertisers, particularly because the advertisers may have similar advertisements on other sites.”

I can certainly understand Google’s position. Can you imagine what would happen if it were forced to reverse its policy allowing advertisers to buy keywords containing trademark terms belonging to others? This would severely impact Google’s revenue, and no doubt would require exhaustive efforts on their part to prevent such activities from occurring.

It’s interesting to note that originally, Google AdWords did not sell trademarked keywords. However, it currently sells trademarked keywords in the U.S. and Canada (but not internationally) with the proviso that the trademark name can’t be used in the ad copy itself.

The Best Defense is an Offense

Is there any way to protect yourself from competitors raiding your trademark? One way is to hire an SEO vendor to help identify your competitors and then research their search engine advertising activities. Your legal department can subsequently use the SEO research data to protect your trademark and reputation. This step will prove invaluable toward defending your future and ongoing business.

Most often, it will be the smaller, “wannabe” companies riding on your coat tails by using your trademark terms as keywords in their advertising. These companies will generally avoid the threat of legal action upon receipt of a cease and desist letter. Not only are you protecting your name and reputation, you are crushing the competitors that you don’t want representing your firm.

Building Your Marketing Network

Another benefit of mining this competitor data is to assist those whom you do want to benefit from using your trademark name. For instance, you may have affiliates, resellers, and a number of associates with whom you can negotiate on a recurring basis. These are the folks you trust with your trademark and reputation — your friends and family marketing network. There’s something in it for you when they profit from your success.

Knowing who is using your trademark in keyword search advertising or in the body text of their web site has a directly positive effect on managing your brand, your trademark, and your reputation. Make sure your SEO vendor covers this critical marketing aspect for your online success.

A Word of Caution

It goes without saying that you don’t want to use trademark names other than your own in keyword phrases. Profiting from the use of another company’s trademark or brand without relevance or permission is unacceptable and could even result in legal action against you.

Reviewing the above information on trademark term research while interviewing SEO vendors will help you to identify those vendors who provide added value to your search engine marketing and optimization campaign. —-

Paul J. Bruemmer is founder of trademarkSEO. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including ClickZ, MarketingProfs, Marketing Today, WebProNews, SitePoint, SEO Today, SEO Consultants, MarcommWise, Pandia, B2B Interactive and Search Engine Guide. TrademarkSEO is a search engine optimization firm based in Santa Ynez Valley, California and serves clients nationwide. His company provided search submission services to over 10,000 websites, including many of the most prominent names in American business.

1. Choosing the right keywords:-

There are a number of useful tools available that can tell you what search terms are being searched form, including Keyword Discovery and Google’s Traffic Estimator. There is little point in guessing what people may search for and you don’t want to appear for what you think people will search for without knowing that others are using those same phrases. For example, if you are an SEO company how do you know which search term is the most used? It could be any “Seo company“, “seo services“, “seo companies“, “online marketing company”, “internet marketing”, etc. Knowing which keywords are the most used is absolutely critical.

2. Website Structure and Script:-

I cannot stress th importance of this as it is a pointless exercise doing Seo when your website is not formatted to being seo friendly. Understanding how to make your webpages relevent and building strength within the site to achieve high postitions for targeted keywords.
3. Competition Analysis:-

Using your keyword analysis the next step is to check the level of competition for each of the phrases. Here you need to know the number of competing pages which is shown at the top of the results page on Google. Generally the higher the number of results for a search term, the more difficult it will be to appear towards the top of the listings. Then you can use a back links analyzer to see how many inbound links each of the top 10 search results have to their site. This will give you an idea about how many links you will need to build in order to obtain a top 10 placement for that search phrase. Here you need to be realistic about your goals. For example, it may be that “seo services” will require about 1000 links in order to obtain a first page listing on Google, whilst “lancashire seo services” may only require about 150 links. But always remember the quality of the inbound links makes a vast difference. also the links do have to come from relevent pages or sites with anchor text ( such as web development ) relating to the search term you desire for your website or page.

4. Site Optimisation:-

Having determined the most used keywords and analyzed the competition levels you should now have a prioritized shortlist of search terms under which you would like to position your website. Now we need to build these phrases into your site content. These terms need to appear in your page title, description, keywords, around three times within the descriptive text on the page and should also be within your site’s link anchor text.

5. Link Building:-

Once you have optimized your site it is time to begin the link building work. Some directories are ideal for this type of work.  Recipical links are not what they used to be and you have also the chance of linking to a bad site which will damage your own chances of success. Forums and blogs are also useful tools. Link building does not improve your site’s placement overnight, but it is an ideal medium - Long term strategy for ensuring a high placement on Google.

There are many unique factors wy you website will perform better and using your specialist knowledge of your product or service will make the web development  and Search engine optimisation  process more succesful.

Now that the tech industry has had a few days to digest the blockbuster ad deal that Yahoo signed with Google, numerous commentators have declared it a death knell for Yahoo’s search-ad business.

The charge was that by giving Google a portion of its search ads, Yahoo was essentially admitting defeat, heading down a slippery slope that would see Google increasingly overtake its business.

But some say Google had already won the search game. Jim Lanzone, the former chief executive of Ask.com, argued that no industry realignment could break Google’s commanding hold on the search market — so this deal doesn’t do much to tilt the balance in its favor.

Instead, he thinks that this deal will give Yahoo some extra money to focus on building its audience without significantly eroding its own advertising business.
“The fears of mass loss of advertising by Yahoo is a little fear mongering,” Lanzone said on a conference with J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan. “Sure, some advertisers will migrate away, but the ones that they have are there for a reason to start with.”

Those are the advertisers with deep pockets, who Lanzone said will continue to make independent buys on the search pages of Google and Yahoo.

“Yahoo does very well with those advertisers,” he said. “It’s worth it to them to set up a campaign on both Yahoo and Google.”

According to Lanzone, the real value of the deal for Yahoo is that it can still sell its own ads through the Panama platform, but then turn to Google for higher-yield ads or to backfill unsold inventory.
J.P. Morgan estimates Google’s revenue per search is 79 percent higher than Yahoo’s.

Yahoo expects the deal to produce $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow in the first year.

“This to me is free money to Yahoo,” Lanzone said.

On the publisher side, Lanzone declared there was a “zero percent chance” of the deal eroding the network of sites where Yahoo syndicates ads.

“I don’t see this giving Google that much more power than it already has,” he said.

In search advertising, volume is the differentiator. More advertisers vying for the same keywords drives up the bidding auctions, and Lanzone estimated that Google’s network contained “a number in the hundreds of thousands” more than Yahoo’s.

Yahoo’s search engine, which comScore credits with a 20.4 percent market share, is driven largely by what Lanzone called “convenience search” because Yahoo places its search box at the top each of its content pages.

Google, without the benefit of a content portal like Yahoo’s, has 61.6 percent of the search market, according to comScore.

Lanzone said that the extra money Yahoo gains from the deal would be well spent building out its content network to increase its audience. Then, because of the deal’s flexible structure, it will be able to shift its ad sales back to its own network if the numbers looked right.

“Yahoo gives up almost nothing,” he said.

So to Lanzone, Yahoo is sitting pretty with a flexible ad deal that will provide it the extra money to build out its content network, which in turn could help strengthen its own search ad business.

But what about its former suitor, Microsoft, which had sought to beef up its own search ad prospects through a full or partial purchase of Yahoo?

“This is all about query volume, and they [Microsoft] don’t have it,” Lanzone said, calling Microsoft’s road to a competitive search business “exponentially harder” than Yahoo’s.

“They have a tough fight — a very, very tough fight,” he added.

Search Engine Optimisation  Seo Specialist’s Norwich

Just a few weeks ago, people started noticing that the Yahoo Directory lost Google PageRank. Well, not the home page of the Yahoo Directory, but the inside directory listing pages. The pages that link to your site and, in the past, past PageRank and link juice.

Skimming through the pages, even the pages closest to the top of the directory are showing nothing in terms of Google PageRank. For example, the arts section or the internet consultants section.

Did Google penalize the directory? Is it something Yahoo did?

One Webmaster said in a thread it might be due to how the URLs are set up.

It seems to me that the Yahoo directory is grey barred because its got no pagerank, because the links from the home page http://dir.yahoo.com/ are all via non-search engine friendly redirects like: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dir/home/cats/*http://dir.yahoo.com/Recreation/Travel/

 Some of those pages should have PageRank, shouldn’t they?

So is the Yahoo Directory still passing value? I assume many would say yes. What is up with the zero PageRank score for all the internal pages?

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, gave an interview last week that was published by the Washington Post. He touched on a variety of factors; the attempt to merge with Yahoo, the constant chase after Google - but the focal point of his words was the future.

Not just the future of advertising, or the future of the media. Not even merely the future of search itself, but the concept that in 10 years, in his opinion, we are going to see paper newspapers, magazines, etc. disappear - to be replaced by an completely electronic delivery system.

Ballmer believes that we are on the brink of a complete merging between search, advertising, media and communications that will coalesce as the different elements become more and more entwined.

Steve, with characteristic gestures and hand motions, explained his concept of how the world of consumerism will change, as “advertising, commerce, community and content all blend.”

The CEO went on to define advertising as the ‘grease’ that runs the engine, and commented that even the line between advertising and content is becoming blurred, as advertising is a form of content in and of itself. Much content, in turn, is loosely used as advertising.

“In this world, ” Ballmer continued, “there are these incredible pieces of software that know all about the publishers who want to sell ads, the advertisers who want to buy ads, and the users who want to consume the content and advertising .”

He put forth the idea that as the engines collect more and more data about behavioral patterns of users, advertisers and publishers, they will get “smarter and smarter about delivering the right ad at the right time.”

Steve’s concept is sweeping, really; he envisions a world where he can aim his remote at the screen while watching a golf tournament, click on Tiger Woods’ golf ball, and be greeted with a pop up advertisement offering Nike Elite golf balls for sale.

The media provides the publisher with the venue to sell ads to the advertisers, who promote the products to the consumer, who feeds on the advertising, the content, the product and the media. And the cycle continues, interwoven to the point where each component is almost indistinguishable from the next.

Ballmer ties it all together with the idea of search, interconnected with the ad platform that supports not only search itself but all content. Search is the future, supported by advertising, aided by content and powered by the ability to provide the user with information, products and communication.

“We are number three,” he said. “We probably have, really, the long term best prospect of putting competition to Google, who is clearly number one.” Ballmer went on to touch on the whole deal with Yahoo, though he painted it more as a friendly “lets get together and do this” proposal than the hostile takeover many perceived it to be.

Microsoft has launched so many new plans and applications over the last month that most people would view them as unconcerned about the failed deal with Yahoo, but there is no doubt that they are gearing up for a strong push to overtake Google as king of search land.

For anyone in the seo world this is like watching the latest saga in a sitcom.

It’s worse than a soap opera. Software giant finds search engine partner, software giant loses search engine partner, search engine partner finds search engine giant, search engine partner reconsiders software giant offer, search engine giant and search engine partner forge close ties in preparation for the walk into the sunset.

The Microsoft-Yahoo! on-again, off-again talks have been analysed here before so this is now the latest twist to the evolving tale. Following their limited trials of partnering their online search results so that they displayed Google ads the two search companies have now announced that they are ready to take their mating dance to the next level. No, not quite kids, a dog and domestic bliss but Yahoo! has given up the fight for online ads following the lacklustre show of their Panama system and will now display Google Ads alongside their search results.

For website owners active in PPC campaigns this means that they now have something like 87% - 90% of the online search world covered and for those who use Google Ads to monetize their websites the potential to earn more has now got much better with more ads and more choice for their website visitors than ever before (or at least that will be the case when the deal goes live in three months’ time).

How does this affect SEO efforts and the need for a website to perform well in the searches of all three major search engines? In terms of SEO the changes are minimal. Yahoo! may be able to throw more resources at its search engine algorithm and become capable of attracting a larger share of the online search pie in terms of numbers but, at odds with Google and its exotic nature, Yahoo! is firmly wedded to a business model that increases the number of people it attracts to its search engine through partnership deals with software manufacturers (which offer the Yahoo! toolbar) and a convergence between online media content and news as an attraction to its search engine portal.

Google will continue to do what Google does best: to offer the fastest, most relevant in terms of search results, most popular search engine on the planet. If you are running a website on a shoestring budget and are struggling with resources your priorities should be: optimise for Google first (your site’s survival depends on it) and then Yahoo! Don’t omit MSN in case they succeed in surprising us all (after all they do have the R & D budget for it) but don’t lose much sleep either. Figures from websites we have optimised to perform equally well on all three search engines show that even with keywords bringing website results in the first page of MSN, the MSN search engine delivers less than 4% of monthly traffic.

It’s worse than a soap opera. Software giant finds search engine partner, software giant loses search engine partner, search engine partner finds search engine giant, search engine partner reconsiders software giant offer, search engine giant and search engine partner forge close ties in preparation for the walk into the sunset.

The Microsoft-Yahoo! on-again, off-again talks have been analysed here before so this is now the latest twist to the evolving tale. Following their limited trials of partnering their online search results so that they displayed Google ads the two search companies have now announced that they are ready to take their mating dance to the next level. No, not quite kids, a dog and domestic bliss but Yahoo! has given up the fight for online ads following the lacklustre show of their Panama system and will now display Google Ads alongside their search results.

For website owners active in PPC campaigns this means that they now have something like 87% - 90% of the online search world covered and for those who use Google Ads to monetize their websites the potential to earn more has now got much better with more ads and more choice for their website visitors than ever before (or at least that will be the case when the deal goes live in three months’ time).

How does this affect SEO efforts and the need for a website to perform well in the searches of all three major search engines? In terms of SEO the changes are minimal. Yahoo! may be able to throw more resources at its search engine algorithm and become capable of attracting a larger share of the online search pie in terms of numbers but, at odds with Google and its exotic nature, Yahoo! is firmly wedded to a business model that increases the number of people it attracts to its search engine through partnership deals with software manufacturers (which offer the Yahoo! toolbar) and a convergence between online media content and news as an attraction to its search engine portal.

Google will continue to do what Google does best: to offer the fastest, most relevant in terms of search results, most popular search engine on the planet. If you are running a website on a shoestring budget and are struggling with resources your priorities should be: optimise for Google first (your site’s survival depends on it) and then Yahoo! Don’t omit MSN in case they succeed in surprising us all (after all they do have the R & D budget for it) but don’t lose much sleep either. Figures from websites we have optimised to perform equally well on all three search engines show that even with keywords bringing website results in the first page of MSN, the MSN search engine delivers less than 4% of monthly traffic.

The off again, on again deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft may get back on track again if billionaire investor Carl Icahn has his way at the upcoming Yahoo! AGM which will be held at the Fairmont hotel in downtown San Jose, which features a 1,000 person ballroom.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft merger may have the markets on tenterhooks in terms of the size of the deal and its potential on the shares of each company but in terms of search engine optimisation the outcome is both questionable and desirable.

Questionable because its impact on the quality of search engine outcomes is still to be determined. Microsoft and Yahoo! have had a less than perfect record in terms of the quality of their search results and a less than perfect record in terms of being able to index websites fast and there is no compelling evidence to suggest they will actually get better when they get together.

On the other hand a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger will unite a fragmented opposition to Google’s search dominance and provide a seemingly viable alternative which, provided the new search engine entity got its act together, might just about work.

At the moment of writing this everything is up to speculation but at least the battle lines are drawn and we know roughly what to expect. The fact is that something will need to happen, online search is a multi-billion dollar pie and it is too big for no one to do anything about it.
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