Recently, the Academy of Web Specialists (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) had the good fortune of having Adam Soroca, a representative from Terra Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), attend a chat session to visit with our students. Mr. Soroca provided some excellent information about Terra Lycos as well as their plans for the future.
How Compatible is Your Site with Search Engines? Take Our Quiz:
Remember those little quizzes you used to see in magazines with headlines like: “How Compatible Are You and Your Partner?” or “Are You Dating Mr Wrong?”. Well, we thought it might be fun to create a 5 min quiz for you to test the compatibility of your site with search engines.
The Search For Seducible Moments
How do you let your users know about your site’s particular benefits? We get this question all of the time from designers. If you offer something that is unique to your organization, (and chances are that you do – that’s why you’re in business) then how do you make the users aware of these benefits?
A little while back, we had the chance to compare two web sites: Sears.com and Dell.com. Part of the objective of each site is to sell expensive products. In the case of Sears, they sell appliances, such as refrigerators and washers. Dell sells desktop PCs and laptops.
Search Term Guidelines for Overture Advertisers
When discussing pay per click advertising with Overture advertisers, they tend to say it’s an easy program to use to get to the top of search engines. While this is true, a well-optimized and carefully researched pay per click campaign can often deliver much more traffic to a site at a lower average cost per click. To bring your average cost per click down while increasing pay per click traffic, you need to get a high number of search terms approved for your site.
The Meta Search Engines: A Web Searcher’s Best Friends
I know what you’re thinking: Google gives you such accurate results that you don’t need any other search tool. Well, let’s see about that.
Search Engine Damage Control
Google and other search engines will boot anyone using spam tactics to get high rankings. Should marketers fear these threats? You better believe it. What can be done as damage control if you suspect you’ve been penalized?
Getting Honest With The Search Engines
I spend a lot of time reading newsletters and forum postings about search engine marketing. More often than not, people are asking about methods used to improve search engine rankings: what works, what doesn’t, and what will get you in trouble.
8 Strategies to Increase Search Engine Rankings
1. Page Link Names – place a primary keyword in your page link names. Rather than using a link in your navigation bar like "services", add a keyword to that page link. If you offer web hosting services, it could be "webhostingservices.htm"
Analyzing Search Engine Traffic to Improve ROI
It used to be that increasing Web site traffic exponentially was the mark of success in search engine marketing (SEM). Today, that isn’t enough. Advertisers want to see an increase in conversions, requiring more accountability from marketing campaigns.
Anatomy of a number 1 search result
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to optimize for search engines to achieve #1 rankings. Many sites have pages which are not fully optimized (in the sense that no thought has been given to writing appropriate title tags for different pages, etc.) which still do very well in search engines. How can this be? Simple: they’re relevant.