Nearly every SEM professional has a different opinion on PPC versus organic search. Personally, I believe natural search will bring you the best ROI long term. However, paid search has its advantages too. Below I’ll opine with my thoughts on each:

Natural (organic) search advantages:

1. It’s free (duh!)
2. Natural search results are trusted more
3. Natural search results are clicked on more

Natural (organic) search disadvantages:

1. It takes time to get results
2. SEO hourly rates can be pricey
3. You can’t possibly rank for every search variation (long tails)

Pay Per Click (PPC) advantages:

1. Instant ranking
2. Ability to rank for any search term (long tails)
3. Ability to test best converting keywords for natural search
4. Ability to send visitors to more targeted landing page

Pay Per Click (PPC) disadvantages:

1. It’s very expensive. In some industries, you can pay several dollars per click
2. Click fraud is prevalent

While each method has it’s pros and cons, I strongly believe that together SEO and PPC have a synergistic effect. For example, appearing in both natural and paid sections increases your visibility. Possibly, and visitor will click on both results and one will resonate more than the other. In addition, I’ve found PPC is a great testing ground for which keywords to optimize naturally for.

Check this post for more Pay per click optimization tips.

I’m amazed everytime I get one of the those phony invoices from search engines submission companies. Just today I got one for a domain I manage (nice to know my registrar keeps our information private). For only $65, they offer to submit my domain  to 25 search engines yearly. Wow, what a deal.

I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise to some, but search engines don’t need help finding your site. Back in the day (2-3 years ago that is), it was helpful to submit your site to ensure that it gets noticed by the spiders. However, with the power and complexity today of engines such as Google, it’s no longer necessary. The most effective way to get your site noticed is through backlinks. Rather than wasting time submitting,website owners should be creating links pointing to their pages. The SE’s much prefer finding a site on its own. While many of the major engines still have submission pages, the benefits of using them are likely slim to none. In my experience with clients, I’ve been able to get their site listed within 2-3 days by simply creating a few external links from other sites.

Excessively submitting to search engines looks like spam. Many of these shady paid services offer to re-submit your site at regular times intervals. While it’s not likely that a few submissions will get your site banned, overly submitting it will. Play it safe, and stay away from these services.

The moral of this post: If you are currently paying for Search Engine Submission, stop wasting your money! If you get one of those submittal offers in the mail, throw it in the trash.

I’ve spent hours scouring the web for the best article directory sites. After finding more than I knew what to do with, I wasted time submitting to most of them. As time wore on, I’ve come to realize there are really only a few that matter and that Google still likes. I’ve listed them below, along with my thoughts on each.

1. Buzzle: My personal favorite, Buzzle is the most SPAM free article directory, in my opinion. However, they are also the most difficult to get your articles into. They require you to submit previous work in order to be approved as an author.
2. EzineArticles: A very popular directory, EzineArticles is another great site. They allow you to initially submit 10 articles, and then you must be reviewed again in order to continue submitting (which seems odd to me, but what heck)
3. IdeaMarketers: Offers instant article approval, as well as a generous number of backlinks allowed in the article text and author bio.
4. GoArticles: Not bad, articles are instantly approved. While the author bio only allows one link, you can put several in the body of the article.

Besides the sites listed above, I haven’t found any other worthy directories. Be sure to leave a comment if I’ve missed a good one.

Google’s love affair with links has forced many search marketers to focus most of their efforts on link building. However, many significant gains can still be made by properly executing on page SEO. Of course, gone are the days of meta tag stuffing or endless keyword repetition. But there still exist a few tactics that are extremely effective.

1. Title Tag: Still the single most important on page SEO variable. I’ve seen a single change to the title tag bring in thousands in monthly sales for clients. The key is to use relevant, rankable keywords.
2. H1 Tags: Second to the title tag, an H1 tag is the second most influential onsite variable. In the past, some web designers have disliked using it because it makes the font extremely large. However, with an external style sheet, you can use an H1 tag at with any font size you wish.
3. Contextual Linking: Linking to another page on your site from within the body of text is extremely powerful. Basically, you should create links on your site as if it were an external site. Create a network of pages all linking to each other by different means. Vary the anchor text to create diversity. Avoid keyword stuff links within navigation, as site wide links are very ineffective.
4. Original Content: Don’t expect your pages to rank if you are copying and pasting content from another site or syndicating content. The SE’s love original content.

On page SEO can still be very effective. Leave a comment if you have know any additional strategies that have worked for you.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and specializes in SEO for Church websites.

I’ve noticed a trend in the Google SERPs lately. Google seems to be
integrating their different vertical engines such as Image and Blog search, into
the normal search results. For certain search queries, you even see a few images
appear above the webpage results.

With this change in the way Google displays results, website owners must
place additional focus on optimizing for image results. By taking a quick look
at your log files or analytics software, you might be surprised to see you are
already getting decent traffic from image searches.

The following tips will get you started with optimizing the images that
appear on your site.

Alt Text: Probably the most significant factor in ranking for an image
search is the contents of the image alt property. Basically, the alt text should
contain a brief description of the item as if you were explaining it to a blind
person. After all, the original intention of this property for the vision
impaired.

Surrounding Text: Google will weigh the surrounding text heavily when
in determining what the picture is about. Be sure to place relevant keywords
above and below the image you are optimizing.

Image File Name: Another important factor is whether or not keywords
are in the image file name. For example, if you were trying to optimize for the
word “Christian t-shirt“, you might name the image christian-t-shirt.jpg. Of course, it
always difficult to optimize this way if you are forced to go back and change
the name of existing images. Keep keywords in mind when you are naming them in
the first place.

Anchor Text: Although it’s somewhat uncommon to link directly to an
image that’s not in a web page, you can greatly increase your ranking by using
relevant anchor text in the hyperlink just as if you were optimizing for a
webpage.

As people’s search preferences become more sophisticated, the popularity of
vertical search engines will grow. In addition, Google and other SE’s will
likely continue to mix results from various types of content.

Please leave a comment if you’ve used any other tactic for image SEO or have successfully used any of the above.

Lately, I’ve been quite disturbed reading articles and blog posts about negative SEO. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “negative seo”, let me briefly discuss the topic.

Negative SEO occurs when a malicious part (often a competitor) create hundreds of junk backlinks to your site in a short amount of time. It’s common for the anchor text of these links to contain spam words like “online gambling” or “viagra”. The most common source of these links are from Splogs (SPAM + BLOGS) created using a free blog account.

Google sends up a red flag anytime you acquire too many backlinks too quickly, especially if the links look spammy.

As this unethical practice seems to becoming more common, how will Google respond? How will their algorithm know the difference between ethical seo links and spam links?

Has anyone heard of a way to report negative SEO? Please leave a comment if you have any ideas.

As an SEO consultant, I’m always looking for new linking strategies. In this post, I’ll share my current favorite 3 sources of high quality backlinks.

1) Newsvine: Newsvine is well known as a news site similiar to Digg. However, some people don’t realize you can submit articles to Newsvine as well. The articles can contain html links, and they’re quickly crawled and indexed by Google.

2) Buzzle: While many article submission sites have fallen out of favor with the SE’s due to SPAM, the Buzzle article directory remains high quality. It is however, harder to become an approved article contributor. Since you’re required to submit previous work, don’t count on using Buzzle as your first article submission endeavor.

3) Squidoo: Relatively new to the social scene is Squidoo. Wikipedia explains the concept behind Squidoo, “Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses –single pages that highlights one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise.” A Squidoo lense is highly customizable, allowing you to add links, images, and more. If you network your lense properly, it will be crawled and indexed regularly.

Have any creative link building strategies of your own? Feel free to drop a comment.

Unfortunately, yes it can. Let me explain.

Suppose your website is relatively new, and you currently only rank for a few terms, namely your brand name. After a year or so of optimizing your site for search engines, you notice that despite a huge increase in search traffic, your conversion rate is significantly lower than it used to be. What happened?

Unfortunately, the SE’s are not as smart as we think they are. Occasionally, they will rank your website for keywords that are completely irrelevant or too broad for your business. For example, I have a client who retails a highly niche clothing type. After about 2 years of SEO, they currently rank first page on Google for the broad search term “clothing stores”. However, looking at the web analytics, I found that not a single visitor from this keyword has converted to a sale.

I would venture to guess that most sites rank for several major keywords and many long tail keywords that are either too broad or have nothing to do with their website. So what’s the big deal? Nothing really, express your conversion rate will suffer.

From a birds eye view, it would be very disconcerting for an executive to see the conversion rate fall after beginning an SEO campaign. However, this is completely normal. It’s important to delve deeper into the analytics and monitor not just the overall conversion rate, but the individual conversion rates from SE’s, direct traffic, and referring sites.

It’s important not to obsess too much over conversion rates. If overall conversions (sales) are up, yet the conversion rate is down due to some external factor, there is absolutely no cause for alarm.

About PWM

Palmer Web Marketing offers e-commerce site reviews and advice on the PWM e-Commerce blog.

It’s an intriguing question. Is social media optimization (smo) today what SEO was a few years ago? Is it an infant giant ready to explode, or will it blow over? The question here is really whether or not the growth of social bookmarking and socialization sites will begin to compete with the SE’s. Although I strongly believe social media sites will continue in growing popularity, I find it hard to believe that people will anytime soon choose to search on sites like del.icio.us instead of Google.

Is it possible? Of course, but we’re a long ways away from that. However, since the number of people relying on social media sites for search is growing, it’s in the best interest of search marketer’s not to ignore this medium.

About Palmer Web Marketing

PWM offers Christian SEO and Christian internet marketing consulting.  The Palmer Web Marketing eCommerce blog offers insightful internet marketing advice for internet retailers.

As the inaugural blog post, I don’t have too much to say other than “please stay tuned.”

I’ve been involved in internet marketing and e-commerce for about 5 years. Needless to say, these last 5 years has been a professional whirlwind for me. The purpose of this blog is to share what I’ve learned and experienced in that time. I also hope to interact with other internet marketing professionals and contribute to the ever changing conversion of online marketing. Specifically, I’d like to share insights into online viral marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, and a “new” type of marketing I like to call Street Team marketing or Brand Repping.

For now, please checkout my site Palmer Web Marketing