SEO White Hats » Strategy

Effective Article Submission Tips

seowhitehats — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:49:01 +0000

Submitting articles to article directories is very important for anyone who wants to have a good online business and wants to promote his or her services and products. One well written and researched article is enough to drive huge traffic to your website. There are many people who submit articles on article directories. Most of them have websites, but there are also people promoting their offline services using article submission.

Article submission seems very easy, but here are some critical points you should keep in mind while submitting an article.

First, Read the Terms of Service of the Article Directory Before Submitting Your Article. You should make sure that you are following all the rules because, if you break one your article will be removed. It hardly takes 5 minutes to read the rules and then you can submit the article in a form that will drive maximum traffic and will never be removed. Their can be rules like you cannot have links of your affiliates in your articles. Further, there are many people who also paste their adsense code in the articles. These links are not allowed in most directories.
You Should Create Products Line. Most directories will allow you to describe the products and services you sell. Further, you can write comments like “to read similar articles visit my website” and then you can point your website. When your article is well written you can have many people visiting your website through it. Further, you should visit a good articles directory and find the most popular articles and start writing your articles in a similar way. This way your articles will also be famous one day.
You Should Submit in Appropriate Categories. You should search for correct categories describing your articles. If you place an article in a wrong category it would be deleted by the moderators of the directory. Even if your article is not deleted there is no use of having it in wrong categories.
You Should Do Manual Articles Submission. However there are many applications available for submitting the articles to a directory but not all directories follow a single pattern of rules. Some articles directories allow you to have HTML after the article and a few will allow in body as well. Further, some directories allow only few tags. So you should try to do manual submission.
Check the Details of Articles Directory. You should not just submit an article to a directory just because it allows submitting articles for free. You should check the traffic and pagerank of the directory as well. Only if the directory has good pagerank and has good unique traffic you should submit your articles to it.
Hire a Person. If you do not have time to follow the above tips then you should hire a professional to submit your articles. When you don’t have money and time then you must submit selected articles to few selected directories and still you should follow these tips for effective submission.

Real World Advantages of Internet Marketing

seowhitehats — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:51:55 +0000

Are you contemplating getting on to the Internet Marketing bandwagon and joining the club of successful people who have already mastered the art of selling stuff online? If you still are not sure if you can make it big in the internet marketing arena, here is something that should encourage you – there are some interesting aspects about internet marketing that make it much easier to selling online than when compared to its offline counterpart, marketing in the real world.

If you are a traditional company who manufactures products or sells services, you already know the pitfalls of marketing, no matter how developed the theory of marketing is and how much research has gone into studies. For instance, if you were to segment your market and target a segment to position your product, you would have to do extensive market research to study the cross section of the society in question. The market is never organized and you would be required to decipher the patterns in consumption habits and cultural inclinations. Most importantly, the market is spread across wide territories and is seldom structured or channelized to perfection.

Online marketing, on the other hand, has a clear starting point, which you can tackle. For instance, consider Google Analytics. This tool from Google comes with a host of reports and insights into the hits recorded in a website. Analytics reports on such issues as who has visited the website, the keywords used to get to the site, the number of pages in the site visited, the path taken by visitors before they stumbled upon the website, the pages that were the entry points for visitors and the pages that served as their exit points from the site. In other words, you have a tool that silently gathers information about Consumer Behavior online.

Loaded with this information, you can decide what you want to do with your site to respond to your consumers’ behavioral patterns and also to make the changes necessary to your web presence so that your consumer’s behavior is suitably modified to suit your needs. If you could know, for instance, the amount of time spent by your visitors on each of your pages, you have the information on your web pages’ effectiveness.

Online marketing can be loaded with a host of powerful tools that would look Internet marketing look like a breeze when compared to real world marketing. While there is no such thing as a free walk in the park, you have a structured environment and an organized space to play around with your creativity and marketing instincts.

Local Search Engine Optimization Tips

seowhitehats — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:42:42 +0000

Whether or not you have a brick and mortar store, it is vital to ensure your website is ranked well in searches for your local area. What does this mean?

People aren’t just searching for ’widgets’ anymore, they are searching for “widgets AND my town” more and more trying to narrow their searches to their own neighborhood. Why is this?

People want to know whom they are dealing with online. They want to be able to visit your business location for your offerings, or at least have the peace of mind that they could if they wanted to.

For example, if you own a dry cleaning business, potential customers want to not only see your prices; they want directions and a map to get to your store. Even in the face of a global economy more and more people are realizing the importance of community and want to give their business to local merchants.

Here are some additional ideas to think about when adding your website to directories on the web.

Community: Yahoo! definitely excels when it comes to including community in local search. They are combining their Yahoo 360 social networks with local listings. The results are most helpful for people who wish to find information relating the their own area.

When you select a listing for a restaurant, for example, you will see all of the consumer-generated recommendations. If a recommender is in your group of contacts, a star is placed next to their recommendation. You know not only other consumers’ opinions, you know when those opinions are from people you know.

Mobile: Do not neglect the mobile search market. With the advent of systems like Verizon’s new technology and the BlackBerry, people search for the nearest theater using their hand-held device. Then they will search for that great martini bar that is nearby and open after the show.

Press Releases: Is your business doing something new and exciting online or offline? Are you you’re promoting it? Take advantage of free press releases from services.

Local City Searches: CitySearch is a major provider of local information for sites including MSN, Ask.com, Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and many others.

Contact Information On Your Website: Have a physical address and phone number within an address tag at least on your contact page and one other page; the best option would be the homepage. By far the best option is to have your address on all pages of your website. Such information builds trust rank value for your website too.

10 Ways to Get Free Traffic

seowhitehats — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:32:20 +0000

Getting traffic is one of the most important tasks for any web master. What is more important is understanding you can’t get traffic once and then try to reap the benefits. Getting traffic is an ongoing task and you must be constantly doing it, if you want to get traffic and keep it. Here are 10 ways to get traffic for free:

1.) Optimize Your Website For Search Engines.

Search engines have always been a major way to get traffic for free. That is why you need to do your homework and optimize your website so that it ranks well for the keywords you target. SEO is still the most powerful way to get traffic for free and you really need to invest some time and efforts in the optimization of your website.

2.) Frequently Update the Contents of Your Website.

If you expected some shocking secrets revealed, you might be a bit disappointed. One of the first steps in getting traffic for free is trivial but vital – get great content and frequently update it. In terms of SEO, content is king. If your content is good and frequently updated you will not only build a loyal audience of recurring visitors, who will often come to see what is new, but search engines will also love your website.

3.) Take Advantage of Social Bookmarking Websites.

Social bookmarking websites (especially the most popular among them) are another powerful way to get traffic for free.

4.) Use Your Facebook and Twitter.

Social networks are also a way to get traffic for free. If you are popular on networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, the traffic you get from there can easily surpass the traffic from Google and the other search engines. It is true that building a large network of targeted followers on Twitter and supporters on Facebook takes a lot of time and effort but generally the result is worth.

5.) Get Links with Other Websites in Your Niche.

Another way to get traffic for free is from other websites in your niche. Getting links with other websites in your niche is also good for SEO, especially if you manage to get links without the famous nofollow attribute. But even if the links are nofollow (i.e. they are useless for SEO), they still help to get traffic to your website. If you manage to put your link in a visible place on a website with high volumes of traffic, you can get thousands of hits from this link alone. If you need list of websites within your niche where you could get backlinks from, check out a backlink builder tool. However, be careful if you exchange links because linking to bad neighbors can do you a lot of harm.

6.) Use Any Chance to Promote Your Website For Free.

Free promotion is always welcome, so don’t neglect it. There are many ways to promote your website for free and some of the most popular ones include free classified ads, submissions to directories, inclusion in various listings, etc. It is true that not all free ways to promote your website work well but if you select the right places to promote your website for free, this can also result in tons of traffic.

7.) Create a Free Product or Service.

Content drives most traffic when you offer something useful. There are many types of useful content you can create and they largely depend on the niche of your website. You can have articles with tons of advice, or short tips but one of the most powerful ways to get traffic is to create a free product or service. When this product or service gets popular and people start visiting your website, chances are that they will visit the other sections of the website as well.

8.) Use Viral Content.

Free products and services are great for getting free traffic to your website and one of the best varieties in this aspect is viral content. Viral content is called so because it distributes like a virus – i.e. when users like your content, they send it to their friends, post it on various websites, and promote it for free in many different ways. Viral content distributes on its own and your only task is to create it and submit it to a couple of popular websites. After that users pick it and distribute it for you. Viral content can be a hot video or a presentation but it can also be a good old article or an image.

9.) Use Offline Promotion.

Offline promotion is frequently forgotten but it is also a way to get traffic for free. Yes, computers are everywhere and many people spend more time online than offline but still life hasn’t moved completely on the Web. Offline promotion is also very powerful and if you know how to use it, this can also bring you many visitors. Some of the traditional offline ways to promote your website include printing its URL on your company’s business cards and souvenirs or sticking it on your company vehicles. You can also start selling T-shirts and other merchandise with your logo and this way make your brand more popular.

10.) Include your URL in Your Signature.

URLs in forum signatures are also a way to get traffic for free. There are forums, which get millions of visitors a day and if you are a popular user on such a forum, you can use this to get traffic to your website. When you post on forums and people like your posts, they tend to click the link to your website on your signature to learn more about you. In rare cases you might be able to post a deep link (i.e. a link to an internal page of the website) rather than a link to your homepage and this is also a way to focus attention to a particular page. Unfortunately, deep links are rarely allowed.

Getting traffic for free is a vast topic and it is not possible to list all the ways to do it. However, if you know the most important ways – i.e. the ways we discussed in this article and you apply them properly, it is guaranteed that you will be able to get lots of traffic for free.

Writing SEO Articles To Advertise Your Business

seowhitehats — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:06:06 +0000

There are so many tools available on the Internet to advertise your business and a number of ways to use them to your advantage. Because the World Wide Web is such a vast place, it is absolutely crucial to utilize all available resources in order to receive high website rankings in the search engines. Writing SEO articles to advertise your business is one tool that will help you gain readers who will then become potential customers. SEO articles are also written to inform, educate and to sell a product. The average SEO article, the type of article that earns a website a higher search ranking, communicates some educational information to the web reader.

There are many websites that have been built for the sole purpose of posting articles. Such websites allow writers to submit articles so that a large number of people will see them. Various other promotional tools are also available to help link the articles to other pertinent information. It all ties in together so the more you learn the better off you’ll be in the future.

Effective SEO articles are comprised of informative content and effective keywords. The first factor you should consider when contemplating an effective SEO article is its content. If it is not informative you can bet people won’t be interested in reading it. If they bypass one of your articles and happen to catch your name on the byline, you can also bet they’ll remember it and not even bother trying to read the next article of yours they encounter. This is why you want to make sure all content you submit is interesting and useful. You want to capture the attention of your readers in a way that makes them want to know more about you and your business and why your business can help them.

Use effective keywords. The more relevant the keywords are to the topic the more success your article will bring. The keywords you choose should relate directly to your topic and should be integrated into the article, not forced in where they sound appropriate. Readers will pick up on this and again, may skip right past your articles and move onto someone else’s.

Always keep your target audience in mind. Whenever you write an SEO article think of who will most likely benefit from the information. Here you will consider demographics just like you did when you conducted the market research for your initial business plan. You are writing for your target audience in hopes of enticing others to take an interest in your business so never lose sight of this no matter what.

Make sure you have an even balance between not enough and too much. You want to provide the right amount of information without leaving anything important out, but want to be careful not to include words or phrases that could be construed as fluff. After all, you’re not filling space, you’re grabbing attention and hopefully gaining new customers in the process.

Lastly, proofread your SEO article and make sure it flows well. You’ll then need to re-edit and proofread again to ensure that everything is completely correct.

10 Steps to Higher Search Engine Positioning

seowhitehats — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:29:56 +0000

Step 1 – Keywords
You first must choose your keywords. This is perhaps the most important step of the process as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not interested in your product. There are three tools that I use virtually every day to help pick the most appropriate keywords:

1.) Google AdWords Keyword Tool
2.) SemRush Keyword Tool
3.) WordTracker Keyword Tool

Step 2 – Site Content
Even before I optimize websites I like to get a good deal of new content down in order to insure that I know exactly where I’m going and exactly what I need to do to get there. Creating some of the new content before starting the optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip on a coffee and imagine what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again (other than launch into a very colorful discussion with your hosting company).

Step 3 – Site Structure
A solid site structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and yet entirely rewarding endeavor. To adequately structure your website you must “think like a spider” which is not as difficult as it may sound. A search engine spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top left, reads across, and then moves down.

Priority must be given then, to what you place near the top of your page.

Step 4 – Optimization
Once you have your keyword targets, your content created and your site structure established you must now move on to the most obvious step, the optimization of your content.

As noted above, a spider places importance on what it reads highest on the page and so beginning with a sentence that includes your targeted phrase only makes sense. That said, stuffing in keywords in hopes that it will add weight to your page generally doesn’t work. The term “keyword density” refers to the percentage of your content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There are optimum densities according to many reputable SEO’s though exactly what they are is debata ble. Estimates seem to range anywhere from 4 or 5% to 10 to 12% (quite a gap isn’t it).

Personally, when it comes to keyword density I prescribe to one rule: put your keywords in the content as much as you can while keeping it comfortably readable to a human visitor.

Some do it first, I do it last, regardless of when you do it you must choose your heading. At the beginning of your content you have the opportunity to use the

tag to specify the heading of your content. This tag is given extra weight and is also an indicator to the search engine of where your actual content starts. Make sure to use your keywords in the heading but don’t shy away from also adding additional words (though not too many).

Step 5 – Internal Linking
To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice as the anchor text (the actual words used to link to a specific page) add relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with text reading “Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition” or simply “Acne Treatments”. When a search engine spider hits an image it has no idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase “Acne Treatments” to link to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those keywords.

There are two main ways to insure that your site gets well spidered AND that the relevancy is added. The first is to place text links on the bottom of your homepage to your main internal pages (not EVERY page, that just looks odd). The second is to create a sitemap to all your internal pages and link to it from your homepage. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages but that’s a whole article unto itself.

Step 6 – Human Testing
So now you have your site, it’s optimized and you have your navigation in place. The next step is to put it past someone who has never seen your site (and preferably who won’t know how much work you’ve put in and tell you it’s great even if it’s not).

Ask them to find specific information and see how long it takes. Ask someone else to just surf your site and watch which links they click and ask them why they chose those ones.

Most importantly, find out how the content reads to them. You’ve spent hours working through the content at this point and are probably not the least biased on its readers. Find out how it reads to someone who has no invested interest in the site and correct any issues they may bring up.

Step 7 – Submissions
I take a different philosophy than most when it cones to search engine submissions. I submit to directories (both general and topic-specific) and to a few topical search engines but for the most part I’ve found submitting to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other major engines has proven to be a bit of a waste of time. The major search engines are spidering search engines, which means they will follow links to wherever they go. Simply having sites that are spidered by the major search engines linking to you will get your site found.

When I have spent time submitting my sites I have found they get picked up in about a week. When I have simply skipped this step and sought out reputable directories and other sites to get links from I have found that at least the homepage of the site gets indexed in as little as two days.

Neither will hurt your rankings but simply to make the best use of your time, seek our directories and other websites to get links from and leave the spiders to find you on their own.

Step 8 – Link Building
All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted phrases. Running a search on Google the reads “link:www.yourcompetition.com” will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has.

The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories. After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being more particular than that.

Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be interested in and you’ve probably found a good link partner. You want to find links from sites that are related to yours.

There are obviously many more methods to building links than directories and reciprocal link building. Again though, this is a whole article (or more) in itself.

Step 9 – Monitoring
If a month passes and you don’t see any changes then more work needs to be done. I’m certainly not stating that you should take a month off, a solid search engine positioning strategy involves constantly adding content, building links, and insuring that your visitors are getting the information they want to have and finding it as easily as possible.

Step 10 – Reward Yourself
So you’ve done it. It’s taken many many hours of work but you’re rankings are doing well. What you’ve created is a solid position that will stand the tests of time provided that you continually revisit the above noted steps and insure that your website is always one step ahead of your competition (who have noticed you climbing and succeeding as you would notice others climbing up around your ranking).

Related posts:
Search Engine Optimization and Flash

Local Search Engine Optimization Tips

2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors

Top 10 SEO Secrets

seowhitehats — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:59:57 +0000

Today, everyone wants to have better search engine result page ranks; however, only one can have the rank 1 though. Therefore, you need to optimize your websites constantly and to have an edge over others you need to do something different and unique. Following are 10 SEO secrets which can help you get high search engine page ranks.

1.) Many people still use directories and search engines give preference to websites listed in directories. There are many free and paid directories available today. The free directories usually ask for link exchange, however you should remember that if you have many links on your web page, search engines can reduce your page ranks or rank on search engine result. If you are paying for link submission in a directory, make sure that the page rank of the directory is high and it has good traffic.

2.) Many search engines also provide sponsored links. Therefore you can pay to get listing at the top of the result page. However, you have to pay for every visitor sent to your website. This way you can get traffic very quickly.

3.) Submit articles to article submission websites. Write quality articles related to your websites and products and you can submit those articles to famous articles submission websites. You can also have links in the articles. Therefore you can get backlinks and traffic from an article submission website.

4.) Get as many links as possible. You can buy backlinks and many websites display links for free also such as classifieds’ web page.

5.) Join as many forums and online communities which are related to your websites and products. Talk about your products there and you can also provide links to your website. This way you can traffic as well as backlinks.

6.) Advertise your website in media such as Television ads, newspapers, magazines etc.

7.) Have proper content. Optimize the content on your web page. The content should meet the expectations and needs of your visitors. Further, the content should be keyword optimized.

8.) You can have many email campaigns where you send mails to thousands of people with clickable links. This way you can get good traffic.

9.) Always have a sitemap for your website. This help the visitors to explore the website more freely and conveniently.

10.) You must burn feeds for your websites. This way person get informed when there is some new content on your websites.

SEO and the Bottom Line

seowhitehats — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:02:27 +0000

A question on many Webmaster’s minds these days is whether or not they should bother with optimizing their site to rank high in the search engines. We’ve discussed this in previous articles and it always seemed to come down to a big “it depends.” However, I’m starting to realize that for many clients, good search engine rankings can actually make or break a business.

Do You Have Money To Burn?

The work we did for a recent website lead to a very successful optimization. After our optimization, it had achieved the desired top 10 results in most of the search engines and directories for a number of relevant keyword phrases. Traffic had increased substantially and users were finding the website through the intended keywords. Since those are the metrics I look for when determining success, this appeared to be quite a successful optimization.

Content is Still King!

It’s important to note that simply being found in the engines isn’t always enough. Once found, your website still has to sell its products and/or services. I believe that a big reason why our optimized sites end up getting so much new business is because we increase the overall appeal of a website when we work on it. That is, we write great, professional marketing text and suggest other changes that may give the website a more professional appearance. These things are just as important to the bottom line, as getting the high rankings in the first place.

It’s true that not all businesses will achieve the same kinds of return on investment from a successful optimization as the websites discussed here; however, when you consider the low cost of SEO compared to other forms of marketing, your bottom line may increase substantially. Just make sure you find the right specialist for your needs. All SEO consultants are NOT created equal!

The Top 10 SEO Mistakes

seowhitehats — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:24:12 +0000

Below we have compiled the top 10 seo mistakes made today.

The Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1.) Targeting the Wrong Keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool.

2.) Ignoring the Title Tag

Leaving the title tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your tag shows in the search results as your page title. 3.) A Flash Website without an HTML Alternative Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it. 4.) JavaScript Menus Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable. 5.) Lack of Consistency and Maintenance If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines. 6.) Concentrating Too Much on Meta Tags A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions, but don’t except to rank well only because of this. 7.) Using Only Images for Headings Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet. 8.) Ignoring URLs Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs. 9.) Backlink Spamming It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. 10.) Lack of Keywords in the Content Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them. Related posts:<ol><li><a href='http://www.seowhitehats.com/2009/08/13/how-to-avoid-common-seo-mistakes.html' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: How To Avoid Common SEO Mistakes'>How To Avoid Common SEO Mistakes</a></li> <li><a href='http://www.seowhitehats.com/2009/11/05/4-seo-mistakes-you-must-avoid.html' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: 4 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid'>4 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid</a></li> <li><a href='http://www.seowhitehats.com/2009/10/15/see-your-website-with-the-eyes-of-a-spider.html' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: See Your Website With the Eyes of a Spider'>See Your Website With the Eyes of a Spider</a></li> </ol> </article> <article> <h1>Client Involvement in SEO is Key</h1> seowhitehats — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:14:05 +0000 Jill Whalen wrote a post over at Search Engine Land called “Most of SEO is Just a Boondoggle“. At the end of her post she says the following about a client’s role in SEO: Client Involvement is Key <blockquote>Don’t get me wrong, this is not an SEO is dead article. SEO is alive and well if you focus on the things that matter. Part of the problem is that the things that matter are often a lot of hard work that need client involvement, whereas the boondoggles can often be done strictly through the SEO company. Most clients are too busy to get involved, which is why they’re outsourcing their SEO in the first place. But a professional SEO company cannot get long-lasting, needle-moving results for a client that isn’t willing to help.</blockquote> I think she hits the nail on the head with that. Long lasting results need a good relationship between the search marketer and the client. There are a lot of positive things that SEM/SEO marketers can do for clients without a lot of input from a client, but to keep the results moving in a positive direction there needs to be that consistent interaction. When clients are involved in their SEO campaigns, it opens a lot of doors. From an on-page stand point we are able to build out a site faster and with better content. We can research and try to learn a client’s business and industry inside and out, but at the end of the day, the client will still know more. They know what changes are happening in the industry, what competitors are doing, new products or breakthroughs. All of that information could be turned into content or used to help build out a website. From a link building standpoint, clients know what the major industry publications are, their partners or distributors, trade organizations, etc. These things can be used to build quality and relevant links. Search engine marketing takes hard work and long hours, both from the client and the marketing firm. A big key to success is a good solid partnership between the SEM/SEO firm and the client, end of story. Related posts:<ol><li><a href='http://www.seowhitehats.com/2009/10/14/what-makes-seo-careers-recession-proof.html' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: What Makes SEO Careers Recession-Proof?'>What Makes SEO Careers Recession-Proof?</a></li> </ol> </article> </main></body></html>