My SEO In - SEO Web Tips, Latest Search Engine Optimization News

Businesses, and even consultants, often do more damage than good when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Google's search algorithm is constantly evolving and getting better at what I call "SEO detection" -- the ability to detect artificial backlinks and attempts to manipulate your website to rank better.

In a lot of ways, what worked a decade ago for SEO still applies today. But intentional SEO -- such as over optimizing your website, too many backlinks with keyword anchor text, lack of diversified backlinks and other tactics -- can actually get you in trouble with the search engines. Google can distinguish, for the most part, what's natural and what's not.

One thing to remember is that Google likes sites and content that other people enjoy, find useful and share with others. When was the last time you shared a site that felt like spam or had little content on it?

Here are four tips that can help improve your website's SEO, without doing any SEO:

1. Create killer content. Just because you offer a service or are an expert in a particular industry doesn't mean your website deserves to rank on the first page for your particular set of keywords. What ranks is quality content and resources that people find useful and want to share.

As a business owner, your time and money is best spent on generating original, useful content for your site. Try to post a new piece at least once a week, if not three times a week. Google loves fresh, original content.

2. Include your keywords in your articles and titles. Let's say you're a manufacturer of solar panels and one of your keyword phrases is "solar panel manufacturer." You'd want to write an article on what to look for when seeking a solar panel manufacturer, and work that phrase into the headline. This isn't SEO rocket science. It's about properly labeling your online content.

3. Incorporate social media share buttons on your site. Increasingly, social signals are being taken into account by search algorithms. Why? Because people share content that's worthwhile. Having social media buttons allows your online visitors to share your website and its content.

You'll also want to incentive people to share. Host a contest or product giveaway to get people tweeting and sharing your website URL.

4. Offer expert advice on other websites. Most blogs, magazines and news sites welcome content submissions. Offer to contribute an article or post explaining something related to what you do. These sites often receive a lot of submissions, so make sure that yours is authentic and informational.

Not only can contributing to other sites help generate awareness about your brand, it's an effective way to getting high quality, non-spammy links back to your site. If you do it right and people like what you write, this can help establish you as an industry expert as well.

The independent authority on Search vendors in Australia, topseos.com.au, has released their list of the thirty best SEO Companies in the Search marketing industry. Each of the companies named in the rankings have been through a meticulous evaluation of their organic optimization services focusing on five areas of evaluation. The strengths and competitive advantages of the companies included in the evaluations are compared in order to generate the list for each month.

The Managing Partner of topseos.com.au, Jeev Trika, explains “we often times talk to the clients of the agencies. We address how much needs analysis was performed by the agency prior to any work being conducted, the quality of keyword analysis carried out, and both the on page and off page optimization strategies implemented by the agency.”

The Top 30 SEO Companies in Australia for November 2012 are:

The process for evaluating and ranking the best SEO Companies in Australia involves the use of a set of evaluation criteria, at least three customer references, and the use of various industry resources for information and research. The five areas identified to be critical for SEO services include on page optimization, off page optimization, needs analysis, keyword analysis, and reporting methods. In addition, customers of SEO services are asked their opinions on the service provider and about their online marketing initiatives in general.

Most Search Engine Optimization experts find search engine submission services to be a waste of time and a scammy type of service.

That being said, Google's John Mueller took it a step up by saying using these services may hurt your rankings.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread John responded to a webmaster who was asking "mass website submissions to search engines," and asked if it will have any impact on their rankings.

John from Google said, yes, it may, it may have a negative impact. Why? John explained that it can lead to a tremendous number of unnatural links for your site. As you know, unnatural links can more than ever have a negative impact on your site. Despite the concerns with negative SEO, this is the reality we live in these days.

So yea, it sounds like in some cases you can use these services to negatively impact your competitors, assuming their link profile looks horrible anyway?

As anyone who's ever struggled to achieve and maintain high search results rankings can attest to, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a constant race to stay one move ahead of your competitors. To win that race, you need to continually improve your own website and monitor your competitors' SEO activity.

If you've watched rivals usurp your top rankings, you'll want to consider these five tips:

1. Focus on content creation.
When it comes to digital marketing, the acronym "ABC" doesn't just stand for "Always Be Closing." It should also remind webmasters to "Always Be Creating."

Whether you're pursuing SEO, pay-per-click or any other digital marketing strategy to attract new visitors to your website, the quality and amount of content matters. Adding fresh content to your site makes it more appealing both to the search engines and their automated indexing programs, as well as the people who read your pages. High-value content can also lead to viral sharing, which increases the number of external backlinks pointing at your website and further improves your SEO.

So content creation is a "win-win-win." If you're concerned about competitors usurping your high search rankings, you can't go wrong by investing time in creating blog posts, articles, downloadable products and other content for your site.

2. Plan your keyword targeting strategies carefully.

As you're creating this content, you'll want to pay careful attention to the keywords you're targeting. Just because you've reached the top spot in the Google results for a given keyword doesn't mean that maintaining this ranking is a valuable use of your time.

What you need to focus on are the search queries that yield the highest total traffic. To determine which keywords are most effective and which ones can be ceded to competitors, look at the traffic data for different search queries using Google Analytics or Google's Webmaster Tools program. If possible, use advanced tools like Raven Tools (free, with paid plans starting at $99 per month) to determine which keywords are producing the most conversions.

3. Stay abreast of SEO news.

SEO is a field that's constantly changing. If you're able to jump on a new technique or growing trend before your competitors, you may be able to cement your lead in the natural search results.

Set aside time each week to monitor SEO news websites such as Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch. If you see evidence of a major change in SEO best practices, take action right away to prevent your site from falling behind in the search results.

4. Monitor your competitors' backlink profiles.

While it's important to monitor your own website's backlink profiles to prevent negative SEO attacks, you should also keep a close eye on any changes in the links your competitors are building.

Often, the best SEO techniques aren't widely publicized. Instead, people accidentally stumble upon a winning combination that leads to positive website results. By monitoring your competitors' backlink profiles using tools like Majestic SEO (free, with paid plans starting at $49.99 per month) or Open Site Explorer (free, with paid plans starting at $99 per month), you can both identify potential linking partners for your site and uncover any new linking strategies your competitors may be using to try to beat you.

5. Monitor your competitors' on-site SEO activities.

Also monitor competitors' on-site optimization efforts. If any competitors dramatically change their SEO activities, you could be looking at one of two possible scenarios: They may have discovered a new way to optimize their pages in the search results, or they may be updating their pages in response to a penalty from the search engines.

Online Branding vs SEO

For marketing, while SEO has its own advatages, online branding offers many benefits. In certain instances, marketers may be confused to use whether SEO or online branding. However, we bring in the benefits of both strategies for marketing a product or service.

Search engine optimizer is popularly known as SEO and a process of improving the rank or visibility of a website by editing its content and HTML including associated coding and removing barriers to the indexing activities. However, SEO has nothing to do with online branding. The more you do SEO the more you attract visitors and customers.

On the othe hand, spreading your brand and getting recognized by the online world is online branding. Social media sites started helping marketers to promote their products more effectively than ever before. The brands are noticed when the internet users while using certain social networking sites resulting in purchasing your product or service.

How important is it to be on top? In search marketing, the difference between a first and second place listing can be huge, according to new research from Compete.com.

Their recent analysis of "tens of millions" of consumer-generated search engine results pages from the last quarter of 2011 highlights a few interesting insights for marketers. As shown in the illustration above, 85 percent of all listings shown are organic, with 15 percent paid search listings. Overall, 55 percent of search engine results pages have ads.

When it comes to clicks on those organic listings, 53 percent go to the top result. The second sees 15 percent of the action, the third 9 percent, the fourth 6 percent, dwindling all the way down to 4 percent to round out the top 5.

“Since the vast majority of listings on a SERP [search engine results page] are organic, and the majority of clicks are on the first listing, it’s imperative that brands strategy including constantly monitoring results due to the ongoing evolution of search engine algorithms,” Compete analysts advise.

Paid listings perform far better at the top, as well. Not necessarily the top of the ad block, but the top of the page as a whole.

Compete’s research shows that 61 percent of paid search ads are displayed in the right sidebar. Yet these ads get just 13 percent of the clicks. Sure, you want to be on top in the right ad block; the top listing on the right gets 4 percent of all paid search clicks, while the second gets just 3 percent.

However, the third listing in the top ad block gets more than double this, at 9 percent. The first listing at the top of the page gets an overwhelming 59 percent of all paid search clicks. Clearly, wherever it makes sense and is attainable, the top of the page is the place for advertisers to be.

A few other interesting tidbits stand out in the report:

Compete also offered by way of advice for marketers, “There is a strategic battle going on in SERPs and every decision has a dramatic impact on results. Most, if not all, search marketing efforts need to prove a ROI as there is a very definite spend, whether it is SEO or SEM.”