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You have a business, and ever since you started the SEO campaign, business has been good and most of your business enquiries have been coming via your website. You are getting professional SEO support and an ongoing SEO program takes care of all your SEO work.They have optimized your website and now it attracts a fairly good quantity of relevant incoming traffic which has been resulting in good business enquiries and sales. Now, suppose you have other competitors for your business in your region and would like to know if your competitors also have an SEO campaign going on with their website. As you are ignorant on this issue it has been making you anxious. They have always been your stiff competitors so you can’t just call them up and ask about it! So what do you do?

Ok, if you want to find out about your competitors are also optimizing their website it is a very simple process to find it out. It is not necessary for you to send some one out to spy on your competitors to get this information because it will only take you a few minutes to find out and confirm this information online. All you need to do is just go to your competitor’s website and check on its HTML source Code!

This is how one should go about it. Go to the concerned web site’s homepage on the browser and click on “view” and choose “source” and the HTML source code page opens up. If you are using Internet Explorer 2.x, right-click on the web page, and then click View Source. To view the HTML source code for a web page that contains frames, right- click the web page in a frame, and then choose “view source”. Looking at this page you will be able to get the required information.

On this HTML source code page, just see if there are main keywords in the header tags KEYWORDS, the title tags KEYWORDS, and in the image alt tags KEYWORDS. These are always located near the top of the source code. Also if the content on the web page has been optimized for the search engines, you will find that the text on the web page contains a minimal repeated use of the keyword. These clues are more than enough to confirm the fact that your competitor is also smart enough to have gone for website optimization. (Now you have another new area of competition and must outsmart him)

There are many free and paid online tools that can be used to get the HTML source code for any website. It is also a good practice to validate your site’s HTML code. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) compliance should also be implemented for the users, to improve accessibility and usability of their website.

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Website content should be accessible, easy to find and easy to use. Poor usability results in lower conversion ratios and certainly from the perspective of lead generation or ecommerce sites should be considered paramount. One of Mediarun Search’s key differentiators is that we consider usability to be integral to most search engine optimisation projects. We consult our clients proposing improvements, which can make a dramatic difference to revenues.

From a search engine perspective accessibility is key. Search engines are effectively huge databases, which store web pages. If a site has factors preventing it from being indexed by search engines it will never return results let alone first page results. Many things could cause these issues, from server side configuration, characteristics of design; the information architecture and long complicated URL ’s, which prevent the search engine spiders indexing content. Mediarun Search will work with you to identify the optimal site structure and configuration to promote accessibility. We will modify the website architecture to improve human usability and to facilitate spiderability to crawl and index the deepest and farthest sections of your site.

Content/Relevancy

On page content needs to be keyword rich and highly relevant to the keywords you want to rank for. Content should be updated regularly and should add value to the user experience. This does not mean that a site should have huge amounts of static content pages or that the ‘look and feel’ of a site needs to be compromised. What it does mean however is that factors such as an over reliance on graphics for textual presentation, certain content generation techniques and poor html formatting should be avoided wherever possible. Factors such as these can result in a site or page not giving off a strong enough signal of relevancy to the words and phrases being targeted.

Mediarun Search’s London based SEO team will analyse your site in detail to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the content. Mediarun will optimise your site’s current content while our content writers will develop fresh new content to be integrated onto the site. This process dramatically improves and enhances the relevancy of site content to the keywords being targeted.

Credibility/Popularity

In their attempt to return relevant results for keyword searches, search engines try to gauge sites credibility. Some of the factors considered by the engines such as the age of the domain or previous ranking history cannot be influenced through search engine optimisation (SEO).

One of the most important factors the search engine considers is the number of inbound links a site or page has from third party sites. As an example if your site’s core content is related to lighting if you have numerous links to your site from other sites whose content is related to interior design, lighting technology or home furnishing the search engine will identify these relationships along with the sites which link to them. Google provides a credibility score out of ten known as Page Rank to each page it indexes.

Mediarun Search works to build highly credible links from directories, news sites, social media sites and other third party sites to improve your websites credibility and provide your business with a competitive edge, which will result in higher rankings traffic and revenues.

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I’ve been asked by many friends and media folks about the Google Sandbox phenomenon. I will use this post to explain what it is, although more importantly, how to use this knowledge to best capitalize on an effective SEO strategy.

What is the Google Sandbox? (Also called an Aging Filter)

Wikipedia has a basic explanation, yet I will go into a bit more detail. Yes, it is not something I’ve seen or heard Google speak about publicly (although Matt Cutts has commented) however, given my experiences, I am convinced it exists. There is also some recent empirical evidence as published by SEOmoz.org on the topic. Clearly there are differing opinions about the Sandbox’s existence.

At a basic level, the Google Sandbox is a novel set of filtering technology used by Google on new domains (www.newsite.com) to protect the Google index from so-called “black hat” spam strategies. It is designed to prevent a bunch of new sites to suddenly appear and do manipulative tactics (ex. bulk link purchases, duplicate content, link manipulation, etc.) to quickly rank in the Google index for specific keywords.

New domains (regardless of who or what they are) go into the sandbox with a PageRank of 0 and forcing limited rankings for competitive keywords. Its a probation period that allows Google to observe the site and figure out many things about it. Below is a listing of specifics related to the Sandbox:

1) Being in the Sandbox has nothing to do with how well the site is optimized.

2) Sandbox is only a Google thing, not the same for other engines. In my experience Yahoo and Bing update rankings rather quickly… Ask.com is slower.

3) Typical time frame in the Sandbox is three to eight months. Usually a longer time frame for sites with more competitive keywords.

4) There is no consistency with how and when sites come out of the sandbox. I’ve heard that Google does like to “release” sites from the sandbox in quantity… basically a bunch of sites at a time. So, if two sites get started on the same day it is very unlikely they both will come out of the sandbox on the same day.

5) Sandbox only effects new domains. If you’ve taken over an existing domain or created a sub-domain on an existing site (ex. blog.xxx.com or xxx.com/blog) you should not be effected by the Sandbox.

6) You can be in the Sandbox and rank well for less competitive keywords.

What now? Yes – there are things you can do… see below:

1) Get started right away and plan long-term and over time you will never think about the Sandbox. This has always been my philosophy to media executives when consulting or with friends. Product development on the web begins when the site is live and customers tell you what they like with their clicks. If the site works well – or is feature rich – you’ve waited too long to make it live.

2) Get your SEO strategy in order, fast. This takes smart thinking, a good tool-set, analysis, and persistence. In my consulting practice we promote a simple “three-legs-on-a-stool SEO strategy. It works very well.

a) Great Keyword-Targeted Content
b) Smart Architecture (including On-Page Metadata)
c) Inbound linking in Scale

A much longer conversation here – for another post.

3) Buy some Pay Per Click Keywords. There is evidence amongst SEO experts that doing some PPC advertising pushes sites out of the Sandbox quicker. Rational is that if a new site(s) is trying to game the system with black-hat strategies PPC advertising is not the desired path.

How long did it take for your site to come out of the Sandbox?

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If you’ve been marketing online for any time at all one of the most popular topics is search engine optimization otherwise called SEO for short.

One of the biggest drawbacks to all of the SEO material that’s on the market is the fact that there is no one search engine optimization technique that is right for every type of marketer and every type of business. As a matter of fact I would say that for most marketers that are working at their online business on a part-time basis most of the search engine optimization material is actually counterproductive to spend time on.

I have been doing SEO for clients as well as myself for a number of years, and just like every client and every client’s business is different so is the optimization techniques that are required in order to increase their ROI.

If you go through some of the SEO material that’s available and you see all the intricate testing and research that you are cold you must do in order to rank it isn’t long before you give up out of frustration because for you there just isn’t enough hours in a day. It is very overwhelming for the person who is working around other obligations such as a full-time job and time that needs to be spent with their family.

I’m going to give two examples, one of a marketer that is a content producer. This type of marketer is looking to make income from AdSense, eBay, Amazon or affiliate products by supplying useful information to their website visitors and including related advertising.

The other example would be the person that is looking to make income from an online store. An example of this would be a Yahoo store or an eBay store where the person is using a drop shipper or buying inventory wholesale and sell it through their e-commerce site.

Now each of these examples are very different and this is why it is very important to tailor your SEO efforts to the type of business that you are running.

Some of the basic SEO techniques that are a must for all types of sites include choosing the right keywords and including the keywords that your targeting in the title tags of your website pages. The next technique that is also paramount is link building and making sure that the keywords that you were targeting are in the anchor texts of those links.

There are all different kinds of software on the market that you can spend a lot of time and money on trying to get your site ranked but for the two business models that I stated above you will be better served by using the simple SEO technique of article marketing.

It has been proven time and time again if you can stay focused using whatever time you have implementing an article marketing plan on a consistent basis over time you will see your rankings and profits increase.

Now of course if someone selling a software product that signed you up for sites and blast your links out to hundreds or even thousands of directories your websites they’re going to tell you this is going to drive you right straight to the top of the search engines. It is been my experience that this type of so called SEO marketing is at best short-lived.

Simply providing quality content with links back to your site that will be distributed on hundreds of other sites will gain you a nice assortment of diversified back links as well as some free traffic.

A nice supplement to an article marketing strategy would be to utilize social bookmarking and RSS distribution both of which can be done for free through various sites on the web.

At one time or another we all fall victim to the latest and greatest must-have software or information product but the more you can stay focused and disciplined yourself to produce articles every week that will gain you links back to your site you will see an increasing your profits as well as building a long-term income asset.

Also keep in mind that it’s not only the income that you will be making from your sites that’s important as your sites grow in your rankings, they also become more valuable as virtual real estate that you can sell if you choose at some point in the future.

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A dream of being able to become one with the ever busy global community, it may sound like a far fetched idea when you try to introduce such thought to an entrepreneur two decades back. But with the advent of today’s cutting edge technology, and the birth of the brainchild of instantaneous global commerce, the internet, doing business today now basically requires you to participate in the battle for web supremacy. And for you to start competing in this competition, you would need something that is called a website.

A website does make your business accessible to the mass media, catering to visitors that may or may not be potential customers, but are guests in their own right. But there is one glaring problem that many websites now face due to the fast growing community and number of websites in the internet, and that is your potential visitor’s vigilance in finding your website using the ever trusty search engines. The obscurity that makes you look like any other generic website in the sea of many other websites in the internet is one drastic horror that you won’t ever try to face, but fortunately we have saviors and heroes that can save you from this seemingly inevitable predicament. This is the mission of an SEO consultant.

But let’s talk briefly first about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and as the name suggests, it maximizes your website’s ability to be searched by people in the internet that are using search engines. Hitting the maximum number of hits possible in a search engine is the top priority of SEO, to make your website very easily accessible to many people online.

An SEO Consultant is a specialist and expert trained in maximizing a strategy in exposing your website to internet users.

The problems that can be assessed can sometimes vary from one SEO consultant to another, but they will more or less address an issue that is clearly visible to them which hampers your success online. Their expertise in this field are almost unmatched, and if you manage to hire a true professional, you world and belief system of what is possible online, will be shattered, in a good way of course.

Not all suggestions that are made by an SEO consultant are always favorable to your planning, especially when it deals with the proposed budget which was intended for SEO, if any. Nevertheless, with an analytical approach and a technical explanation to each and every aspect of your website that needs improvement, you may quickly find that the choice of going SEO was underestimated and absolutely critical.

Remember, as human beings, SEO consultants may not be perfect, but as professionals in the field, you may find their services to be more satisfying and mind blowing than initially thought. Besides, if it’s an investment in your business, every penny spent on SEO will give you a 10x return, guaranteed.

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Wouldn’t it be great to have a blueprint that you can follow to get first page rankings in Google? I said the same thing when I was becoming overwhelmed with what to do as far as my SEO efforts go. So I set out to create a checklist of formula.

I will be outlining that formula here in this article so you can copy it and use it to get more traffic and profits for your business. I use this formula every time I start a new website. I simply complete the checklist and move on to the next project. This is online business at its finest. Your SEO Checklist

1. Keyword Research – every action online starts with a keyword. You must make sure that your targeting buyer keywords. You also don’t want to target keywords that everyone is competing for. Go for the low hanging fruit. These are keywords with less competition but also less traffic. You just have to rank for a number of them to get good results.

2. Site Optimization – here you want to make sure you Title tag includes your keyword and that your META description actually describes your site well.

3. Add Unique Content – Google and other search engines simple love unique content. This adds value to their searchers. So by giving them what they want you in turn get the traffic and sales you want.

4. Add a blog – a weblog or WordPress blog does wonders to your rankings. Adding a blog to your site is very easy these days. There is a ton of information online, on how to do this.

5. Start building links – This is where the magic happens! Look for relevant sites that will allow you to leave a link back to your site. The goal is to get as many as possible.

Please keep in mind that these are your basic steps. Each step needs to be explained further. You can do your research on each step to add on to this easy checklist.

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