Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it’s pretty obvious that high search engine rankings still are the be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this time?

‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’ has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a word like ’shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product you might be selling, but then -luckily- there are not as many SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.

So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies? Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to describe your business, it’s time to integrate everything yet again and focus on your site’s usability and accessibility.

Usability

What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does your site still provide valuable information to your human visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense. “Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal being to intertwine search with a consumer’s daily activity. As clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies fail simply on wording and text writing.

It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to your site are not going to be impressed by what they read. Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past and using common sense, neutral language will open up the content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool (free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered; http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.

There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you quite a good insight into your content. If you think your content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to match content and keywords.

Accessibility Accessibility of sites is way more of a technological issue. You will have what is generally considered an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers. Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching between your content and the search engines. The various limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text, JavaScript through the

There are two good ways you can check how accessible your website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can successfully access all your pages and download the Opera browser and follow their instructions to enhanced accessibility. Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’ guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are not excluded from your site because of some silly technical hiccups. Where an SEO says he’s making all the difference for his clients is that he has numerous checklists to make sure your business in whatever location or segment it is, is optimised. He likely will market his services saying that he will make your site more localised than your competition.

There is a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use here and it remains to be seen whether better accessible local business site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher Return on Investment numbers. Local search appears to be performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn’t have (or probably need) a Web site so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results from comparable segments to the one you are in!

All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy, prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. It is not deemed 100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are likely issues you’ve comply with for years already, but it’s always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you that edge over the competition you need!

Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a hyperlink is removed from the text -something that easily happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.

Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets the standard and you can run your site through their validator tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to get it analysed to see if search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your content/page into sections before indexing it - e.g. header, metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out and optimise!

The blog explosion created a great opportunity for savvy marketers–they could post their URL’s in the comments of blogs and reap the benefits of links back to their sites as the search engines crawled through.

Some undertook blog-marketing responsibly. They found blogs legitimately related to their sites and offered insightful, relevant commentary on issues. In exchange for adding to discussion, they were rewarded with a link.

Others found more nefarious ways to take advantage of the link opportunity, and “blog spam” became a concern. Comment sections of blogs were bombarded with URL’s that were not even tangentially related to their content. Incidents became increasingly common and obvious.

Google and the other major search engines determined this blog spam was undermining their efforts to create search engine rankings that accurately reflected the quality and utility of web sites.

And now, as a result, we have the “nofollow” tag. Inclusion of the tag tells search engine robots to ignore a link, rather than cataloging it. The command will automatically become a part of many blogs, as Blogger (a Google enterprise) and several other major blog hosts have announced their intention to build the feature into their offerings.

There is some question as to the efficacy of “nofollow.” Already, some bloggers who are not enamored with the concept are protesting the move and establishing “nofollow free zones.” A quick look through the forums demonstrates a desire on the part of many to discover workarounds for the tag. Some argue that implementation of the technique will not be universal, and its overall impact will not be quite as severe as some believed.

There is no question, however, that “nofollow” will reduce the effectiveness of link-building strategies utilizing blog commentary. As “nofollow” is implemented, site owners who have relied on these techniques will undoubtedly see a drop in their incoming link totals.

Recent “nofollow” events are another chapter in a growing saga regarding linking tactics and the search engines.

Link free-for-all pages were once the promoter’s way to create traffic. Now they are overlooked by the engines–if not banned outright. Partner pages and other mass link dumps have gradually declined in importance.

Link trading is dying due to its cumbersome nature and limited effectiveness. Totally organic link accumulation is slow and gets even slower as the market crowds.

Cross-linking techniques are risky and are generally only available to those who own a myriad of sites.

Where will new links be found? One option offering serious potential is actually building off-site links in the form of freely distributed content. Authoring a valuable, informative article and distributing it with a byline (resource box) containing a link back to one’s site, offers a splendid opportunity to increase links. The results are tremendous and are generally felt relatively quickly.

Though effective, article authoring and distribution is not a simple process. The supplier must have appropriate information regarding submission locations. The content must be good enough to result in acceptance at those sites. The supplier must be prepared to embark on the tedious process of submitting articles to site after site.

It does require a significant investment of time, energy and expertise and corner-cutting is not a good option. A low-quality article or an ineffective submission plan will produce no tangible result and could actually decrease a site’s credibility and marketability.

Article Staff writes custom content for the internet and the leverages that content to maximize its value through viral marketing distribution tactics. Article Staff provides content solutions of all types, including editing services.

http://www.articlestaff.netfirms.com

What runs through your mind when you hear that ezine articles will bring you masses of fr^e traffic, get you higher listings in the search engines, and raise your profile on the web?

For many people, their reaction is this: “But I’m not an expert - how can I write an article?”

Well, you don’t have to be an expert and you don’t even have to write the article - at least not much of it.

Interviewing internet experts is one of the easiest ways of coming up with new articles - all you do is ask the questions!

Here are some tips on how to interview internet experts:

1. Ask them to introduce themselves to your readers - how did they get started in eCommerce? What products or services do they market and what are their domain names?

2. What is their main promotion technique? Why does it work so well?

3. Did they have a mentor? How important was their mentor in getting where they are today?

4. What is the biggest mistake they made in their online career?

5. What projects are they working on right now?

6. What is the one program or software they couldn’t do without?

7. What single piece of advice would they give to someone starting out in online business?

Once you get their answers, you’ll immediately come up with half-a-dozen follow-on questions. Write back to them with your extra questions. You’ll quickly have more material than you can fit in your article.

To make your article flow properly, use chatty phrases like: “that’s interesting, Joe…” or “that’s a really good tip, Mary”. Give the reader the feeling that you were having a real conversation.

The amazing thing about this technique is you’ll never run out of new articles - there are enough experts on the web to keep you going for years to come.

Which is why I call this system The Perpetual Traffic Generator.

————————————————————
Michael Southon has been writing for the Internet for over 3
years. He has shown hundreds of webmasters how to use this
simple technique to build a successful online business. Click
here to find out more: http://ezine-writer.com/
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There’s a stiff wind blowing in a new direction on the web. And you’d benefit from taking the time to notice the direction its headed.

Website owners are clamoring for “holy grail” hyper targeted (relevant) links from sites with a lot of traffic and high pagerank. More than ever, we are all looking for fewer links to our sites, but much more powerful links.

Another trend to watch and certainly implement on your site is getting the links out of your link directory and onto the content pages of your site.

The trick here is to go through you link directory and clear it of dead wood. Certainly all links who are not reciprocating must go. Then get rid of low-traffic sites with no or very little pagerank. They are doing you no good.

Once you have whittled your directory down to a lean, mean group of links from sites that matter, contact those partners and tell them you are moving their link to a higher traffic spot on your site.

They will of course be glad to hear this. Also look out for deals you can make with each of them to do the same for your site.

“But Jack, won’t this send traffic away from my site?” With all the excitement I can muster in response to that, the #1 question I get, YES!

But it will also work for you as you seek the same kind of link from other sites. Look, you are sending people away from your site anyway. People who are just not going to take action despite your efforts at top-notch content and offers.

Why not reward your partners with traffic like that, where the person might just take action on a partner site? If you have a similar link on THEIR site, you are going to benefit from traffic in the same exact way.

It’s all about how you want people to leave your site. Most are going to do it without doing much more than sign up for your list. Good. You can get them back later. But if they are closing their browser or leaving through a link that has no benefit to you, what have you got in the end? Squat.

But when you are one of your link partners big traffic producers, they are going to be willing to put you higher and higher in their site. You have a foothold because you are a great link partner!

Let loose of your old-fashioned and outdated theories on losing traffic through links on your content pages. The system of link directories hidden in deep corners of your site where no humans ever visit is dying an ugly death.

Getting hip to the changing winds on the net will reap huge rewards for the webmaster who brings their links out from the dark corners of their site and puts them where people can use them.

Seek partners who will do the same for you, and you will actually get an increase in all that’s good: traffic, sales, customers, rankings, and profits.

Jack Humphrey is the author of Power Linking 2: Evolution, available at http://power-linking-profits.com See also http://webfoxmedia.com for more information.