Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the art and science of increasing your website’s visibility in the search engines.  A website that is ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is more likely to be visited and this is a good channel to bring in more targeted visitors, leads and customers.  Here are a few things a good SEO expert can help do for your business online:

Gain More Customers

This is the main reason why many businesses look into SEO.  The internet is gaining in popularity as the first place people look when they need to purchase a product or they are looking for a service.  Google is the search engine with the largest market share today, and holds a 77.88% market share in Singapore (according to Hitwise).  That means, if your website is not on the top 20 results for search terms relating to your business, it’s likely you will receive very little search traffic.

An SEO expert can help improve your organic (non-paid) ranking in the search engines, which will improve traffic levels to your website and ultimately ensure that you capture a good number of targeted internet visitors who are looking for your product or service.

In the best case, you will receive free organic traffic for months or even years into the future after your main SEO campaign is completed, so, it’s definitely a worthwhile investment.  In addition, it’s well known that organic search results receive 4 times more traffic when compared to paid (pay-per-click) advertisements in the search engines.

Optimize Your PPC Campaigns

SEO usually only focuses on the organic (non-paid) results in the search engines.  If your business only runs pay-per-click advertising campaigns in the search engines, such as Google Adwords, you might think that you can do without SEO.  That used to be the case when you could buy clicks from Google from a couple of cents per click.

However, clicks are more expensive these days and it’s important to optimize your landing pages on your website properly.  If you’re running a campaign on Adwords, Google calculates a quality score on your ad which partly determines how much your cost-per-click (CPC) is and how high your ad is ranked.  This means that if your landing page is properly optimized, you can improve your quality score and drive down your cost-per-click.  This means that you will pay less than your competitors in the long run.

Improve Branding

Apart from getting more customers, it’s become more important to have an increased visibility online for your business for branding purposes.  Since Google is the first port of call for many when they are looking for a product or service, having your website and brand name on the top of the search engines will improve the visibility of your brand.  Over the long term, an SEO expert can help you to create that crucial “top of mind” effect on your potential customers.

Professional SEO Services

Whether your need an SEO expert to help your get more customers, optimize your PPC campaigns, improve your branding or something else, we can help.  We specialize in designing and executing fully customized SEO campaigns for your specific internet marketing objectives.

P.S. Contact us today for a free trial SEO consultation (usually worth S$297)!

Google has sent QR Code stickers to about 190,000 businesses across the US that have been tagged as a Favorite Place (they have a mobile version of their website). Favorite Places are the mobile equivalent of Place Pages (aka Google Places).

via http://www.netmagellan.com/google-placerank-in-the-wild-750.html

Yet another Google metric for local search (just in the US for now).  I anticipate that searches will become more localized in the future as many people are looking for local products and searches when they do a search online these days.

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Increasing the external links to your website is one of the most important elements of a successful optimization strategy. They can boost your rankings in the search results, drive traffic, and increase your presence across the Web. But securing external links can be a challenge. That’s why it’s important to explore every opportunity to acquire them. A good place to start is by ensuring that your site’s content receives SEO-friendly citation.

This article is a good read. By being very conscious of how SEO works when putting out any B2B or publicity materials, you can leverage existing media outlets to positively impact your site’s ranking in the SERPs.

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SEO has brought amazing new ways to market online. The internet is such a common place for people to search for goods and services that more and more website owners are paying attention to the importance of search engine rankings.

There are many SEO strategies which are integral to local business success and among them local search engine optimization has been a recent addition to this already unique marketing strategy. Local SEO is very effective when a website is focusing on a specific geographic location. Since the localized SEO deals with the long tail keywords, it attracts the actual buyers who are looking for specific services.

I believe that local SEO will get more important in future as the search engines (especially Google) want to make searches more relevant to the geographic location of the searcher. If you are serving a local market, you need to make sure that your SEO consultant does the necessary changes to make sure that the search engines know that your site and your business is local.

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So the first thing to do when analyzing how usable a site is should be to make sure people are able to easily find their way around no matter which page they first landed on. When it comes to huge websites, breadcrumbs can be a great way to help users identify where they are located.

Breadcrumbs are an excellent way to improve the internal backlinking and on-page SEO of a website. However, for a smaller website (like this one) there might not be a real need. It’s always important to balance usability with search engine optimization.

For websites operating on the wordpress platform, there are good breadcrumb plugins available to magically create breadcrumb type navigation for your website.

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But I did it to make a point, and the point is, everyday thousands of naive and gullible newbies are targeted, and ripped-off by common SEO scams – mostly scams that have been around since the advent of the Internet. You may even have been a victim yourself.

The question is, why do these seemingly obvious scams continue to thrive year after year after year? My guess is, because most of the victims are newbies who have entered the newbies realm of gullibility.

Hopefully, this article will prevent other newbies from entering this undesirable realm, and being unnecessarily victimized.

Learn the truth about SEO guarantees and why you shouldn’t lock yourself into long term contracts.

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From today, the headlines of the BBC News website will become longer to make its stories easier to find on search engines.

“We estimate that about 29% of BBC News website UK traffic comes from search engines.”, says Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News website.

The BBC will therefore allow its journalists to create two headlines for a story. While the shorter one between 31 and 33 characters appears on the front page and the website indexes as well as on mobile phones, the longer one – up to 55 characters will appear on the story itself – and in search engine results.

For the SEO skeptics out there, even a big media company like the BBC is jumping on the SEO bandwagon, shouldn’t you have a proper SEO strategy for your website?

It’s also interesting that choosing to optimize the headlines and titles is a core part of what is reported in this article. So often, professional SEOs go crazy over building backlinks, forgetting that optimizing the title and headlines (on-page SEO) is also important.

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>SINGAPORE: A survey by money transfer e-commerce company PayPal showed on Thursday that two-thirds of e-commerce sites by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were launched in the last two years. In the next 12 months, a further 36 per cent of firms were expected to follow suit. The survey polled about 1,500 SMEs from India, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. … However, for many SMEs in Asia, a lack of capability and appropriate sources of information to launch a cyber arm remain as a key challenge.

Doing business online has definitely become more of a necessity as more consumers go online to look for products and services. Many local websites are buried in the search results because of the lack of a proper search strategy. Getting a professional internet marketing and SEO firm involved right from the start of the site design process is one way to maximize visibility online.

The technical challenges of setting up a “cyber arm”, so to speak can be solved quite easy by engaging a reliable consultant. And it doesn’t have to be expensive either!

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Page load time is a frustrating fact for internet users, but it is set to be punishable next year according to hints made my Google’s Matt Cutts. Algorithm changes scheduled for 2010 could include page load time to be taken into account to help high quality sites rank higher than spammy pages.

This is a great reason why you need to move your server closer to your target audience as try to reduce the amount of clutter on your pages. Speed is crucial for the user experience, and it seems it will become increasingly important for the search engines (Google) in the coming months and in 2010.

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BBC News announced that it will invest in search engine optimization (SEO) for its website, giving it stronger visibility in search engines.

“We estimate that about 29% of BBC News website UK traffic comes from search engines,” commented Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website.

With an SEO campaign in play, BBC will allow its journalists to create two headlines for each story. One appears on the front page and on website indexes, as well as on mobile phones. The other headline will be for the article itself.

via Last Click News

If you have any doubt that a proper SEO campaign is now necessary for any business online, you should check this out. When a big media company like the BBC says that it will invest in SEO, you should definitely sit up and take notice, and consider doing the same thing. Having a proper SEO strategy is now important for any business that has a website online.

Something interesting though, this comes in the wake of the Rupert Murdoch empire saying that they intending to make the search engines pay for indexing their content.

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