by Jessica Franke, Owner

If you’re a small business owner with a website, you’ve likely spent at least a little of your time wondering how to increase your online traffic and sales. You may have heard or read about things like SEO, SEM, SMO, PPC, CPC, and other possibly confusing terms. Today, I will be discussing each of these briefly, and hopefully helping to “de-mystify” them for you.

Organic Search

When you search for something in a search engine and click on a result that has not been paid for, that is called an Organic listing.

Paid Inclusion

Some search engines and directories offer paid inclusion services, where a website owner can pay to guarantee that their website will show up in search results. A higher ranking can typically be obtained by paying more than the other advertisers.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is just that: you pay a set amount of money each time a person clicks on your ad. The cost of each click is called the Cost Per Click (CPC). As a PPC advertiser, you bid on keywords that you hope your target market will type in when they are looking for related products and services. The more competitive the keyword(s) are, the higher the CPC for that term. Generally, PPC advertising will not affect your actual search engine ranking. When you stop paying, you stop showing up in search results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Internet Marketing which is intended to make a website more visible in the organic search engine results is called SEM. Methods employed by SEM professionals may include, but are not limited to: SEO, PPC, Search Engine Submission, and Paid Inclusion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The most basic definition of SEO is that it is the process of optimizing your website to conform to certain standards in order to make it more attractive to the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to make a website rank better in organic search engine listings over time, without the need for nonstop paid advertising. Unlike PPC, the results are not instant; it may take anywhere from 6 months to a 1 year to organically show up for your most competitive search terms. For this reason, most SEO is a long term commitment. Most SEO companies will also need to adjust the meta tags, alt tags, and text on your website as part of their services.

There are many different ways to rise to the top of the organic search results, and most SEO companies have developed their own method over time. Because the search engines constantly change their algorithms, truly effective SEO professionals are constantly studying the search engines and updating their methodologies.

There is one major distinction you should make when hiring an SEO company. Generally, “white hat” SEO companies follow Google’s webmaster guidelines and take great care not to do anything which may be considered “spam” by the search engines. On the other hand, “black hat” SEO companies use methods that don’t always conform to what is considered acceptable by the search engines.

Methods used by white had SEO companies may include, but are not limited to:

Creating or Updating Meta Tags (title, description, keywords, etc); Keyword Research to find out what people type in when searching for websites like yours; Creating or updating the content on your website to include keyword-rich text; writing professionally edited blog entries on your companys’ behalf; and finding other websites to link to yours.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Thousands of social networking websites like Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Del.ici.ous, and YouTube allow users to upload, watch, and rate content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Social networking itself is a form of social media, which uses the “wisdom of crowds” assumption to decide what is popular. Blogging and RSS feeds are also popular types of social media.

The aim of SMO is to generate publicity for a website or company using social media outlets such as those mentioned above. For this reason, when doing SMO, it is wise to add “digg this”, “bookmark this”, “stumble this” and other buttons or widgets to your website to make it easy for others to bookmark you. SMO is often used as part of a comprehensive SEO plan.

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Jessica Franke has been designing websites for over 13 years. She is a website designer, and SEM specialist, among many other things.

Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google

And in other search engines, too

By Jason Lee Miller - Fri, 02/15/2008 - 4:02am.

No matter how much some people claim the SEO industry is a den of snake-oil salesmen, there are still definite ways webmasters can improve their rankings, and thus their visibility in Google’s search results.

This isn’t a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won’t get you kicked out of baseball.

That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by “search engine” I mean “Google” – placement.

1. Title tags

Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we’re putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
2. Content

The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn’t mean just throwing them in there like you’re cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should be natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
3. Quality Links

Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody’s recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won’t work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
4. Quantity Links

Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you’ll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose “link-swaps” to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can’t buy Google’s love that way. In fact, you’ll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
5. URL

The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don’t like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can’t read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they’re the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
6. Spider Food

Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
7. Site Architecture

There’s a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.
8. Frequently Updated Content

You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It’ll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
9. Start a Blog

A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you’re in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It’s not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there’s useful content on it and legitimate linking.
10. Don’t Forget Humans

This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There’s an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what’s the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you’ll want to check out. He’s been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.