Saturday, August 25, 2007

Search Engine Components That You Should Know About

Understanding the search engine components and how they work is very important part of SEO. And those who think that SEO is all about learning some tricks and techniques to make your site rank well, are highly mistaken. Search Engines are always in the state of change as they have to keep up to the promise of providing relevant and updated content to users and also to keep a vigil eye on SEO experts who try to break the rules to rank high. So understanding the logic behind a search engine's working becomes all the more important for SEOs if they want to remain in touch with the changing rules of search engines.

Things would be much more easier to understand if we treat the search engines as living entities having an anatomy of their own just like a human body. They too have different parts or components that serve different functions to store, index, and then display websites to searchers. The datacenters where these search engines are placed are one of their important components.

The links from the engine itself are another important component as they take us wherever we want to go in the engine and also help us retrieve information. Then comes the spiders/crawlers or the 0s and 1s sent out by search engines to the internet to fetch documents, scanning and retrieving information in the form of fiber optic connections, thus visiting all the paths and directions.

The core function of the search engines is to crawl and index the sites. They know a number of different methods for storing, presenting, prioritizing data. When the search engine spiders are crawling the web, they are collecting the stores of existing data and sending it back to the datacenters where the information is processed through existing algorithms and spam filters. It is there that the website will get a ranking on the basis of the search engine's understanding of the way the Internet and the information contained in it works.

The search engine learns from it's own workings and the workings of the Internet functions in order to ensure that the new document types and technologies are able to be read and the algorithms are changed according to the new understandings of the functionality of the Internet. Not only this, detecting and penalizing spam is also one of the components of search engines.

Understanding how the search engines work, what are their components and what are their long term goals can help you optimize your website in the best possible way without employing tricks and techniques that do not gel with the long-term goals of SEOs. In other words, understand the fact that search engines are ever evolving and dynamic entities that keep updating themselves and their rules. And because they have the capability to "learn", in case you use any unethical means and tactics, eventually they will learn of them.

http://www.segnant.com/

Sunday, August 19, 2007

All About Google Sandbox

To understand the Sandbox Theory, let's take an example. When a new employee joins a company, he/she is kept on probation for a certain period of time to see whether he is the right person for the company and has the capability to work effectively and efficiently. Similarly, when a new website is created and requests the search engines to index it, the Google Sandbox acts as a filter or probation for the new sites so that no spam sites rise and then get banned. During the sandbox effect, these websites do not get good rankings even if they have good content, lots of incoming links, and high PageRank.

Whether anyone believes it or not, the Sandbox Effect is no myth or illusion but solid reality. And the idea behind it is to stop the addition of purchased links to spam sites that indulge in illegal practices to get high rankings. The first appearance of something like a sandbox effect existing was felt by website owners and SEO professionals in March, 2004 when the websites launched after that period stopped ranking well in search engines despite a good PageRank,strong incoming links, and good optimization techniques being used.

There is no way to escape the Sandbox Effect except those sites that were launched before March,2004. Also those sites that target non-competitive keywords and phrases are left out often from Sandbox, and if they are in the Sandbox, the stay is pretty short. The general time frame of stay in the Sandbox generally is three to six months depending upon the competitive level of the keywords/phrases.

So while your site is in the sandbox, the best thing to do is wait patiently and keep adding more relevant content, keyword rich pages, and off page as well as on page optimization of your website. The end result will be that when the sandbox filter is lifted from your site, it will rapidly rise in the search engine rankings. The sandbox is also the most appropriate time to add links to your site with strong keyword rich anchor text added to the links.

The only way to prevent your site from getting sandboxed is by purchasing and sending live a website, before it gets completely ready for the prime time. Though the site will have low rankings, it will set a timer on its Sandbox duration time. Keep adding incoming links to get past the alleged new links filter. Keep adding content to your site. Anything that can be done to speed up your site’s appearance on the internet, including the purchase of an already existing domain, must be done. If you manage your time properly, your site can avoid the Sandbox completely.

http://www.segnant.com/

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Some Important Marketing Terms You Should Know

You may be aware of these marketing terms already, but it is essential to understand them and the difference between each of them fully in order to run a successful online marketing campaign:

Unique Selling Point (USP)-It refers to that particular feature or benefit of your company/service/product that is unique to you alone. It has to have value for the customers and something unique about it for your clients in order to attract them to buy. If you don't already have a USP, you can create one and build your business around it.It can be any idea or concept around which you center your messages.

Single Message-This is basically the one most important idea or message that you say about your business when you market. It may be closely related to your USP but not be exactly the same as the USP. So once your USP is decided, you can create a single key message also, something that you tell your prospect clients so that they start looking at your products/services in a new light.In other words, it is used to change the mindset of people and make them think what you want them to think about your products/services .

Tagline-This is the actual line of marketing copy written to sum up all that you do and want your prospects to know about your products or services or benefits if they purchase from you. Your USP and single message will help you chalk out an effective tagline. The tagline has to be very customer-centric to actually make it work.While drafting it, keep asking yourself, "What's so amazing about it?".

http://www.segnant.com/

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How Can You Improve Your Marketing Results

Marketing forms an integral part of any business venture. Without proper marketing, you cannot achieve the desired profits in lesser time. Executing the following steps can make a big difference to your online marketing results:

Learn from Your Previous Marketing Experiences-This should be your thumb rule always that you review your previous marketing activities in order to understand the ones that worked well and brought more sales, customers, clients, and growth for you. This will also help you eliminate the strategies that failed or didn't work at all.

Broaden Your Definition of Marketing-Marketing is more than just giving ads or sending a mail to clients. Everything and anything you do to improve your business prospects by interacting, and talking with the clients about your products, services and brand is marketing only. Even if you send a thank you card or email from your business, you are marketing. Always remember to include your business card when you mail a letter to a client and don't forget an email signature that has your business name, phone number, email address, website address, etc. This makes it easy for people to remember and contact you.

Monitor the Marketing activities that lead to a sale-You conducted a seminar on behalf of the company on benefits of your products and services, and someone contacted you and made a sale after that seminar. This is called tracking your sales to your marketing, directly or indirectly. If a considerable amount of customers bought from you after certain marketing strategies of yours, then find out the exact number of sales, customers that were generated by your marketing plan.

Do away with those Strategies that didn't work at all-Seperate all those marketing activites and strategies that you tried but didn't help you in increasing sales, customers, or clients. Otherwise you would be spending money on things that have not proved fruitful for you and hence there is no sense continuing them.

Make use of the information gathered for future plans-It would really benefit you if you spend some time, effort and energy on all those activities that brought you more business and proved effective for you. This will help you focus more on them in the future and maybe improve upon them, instead of wasting time on experimentation with different new strategies.

Always Track your future marketing plans and activites- and one of the simplest ways of doing this is to ask your new customers where and how they found about you. You must make a note of every marketing activity you do so that you can keep track of all events. This kind of tracking will help you immensely to zero-in on those marketing activites that have been effective and beneficial for you.


http://www.segnant.com/

Saturday, August 04, 2007

The Key Qusetion To ask Yourself For Successful Marketing

Do You Know Your Customer?

Well, if you don't ask yourself this question, and better still figure out the answer for it, you may be off the mark as far as online marketing is concerned. You must find out why the people are coming to your site and what are you doing for them to make their visit as comfortable and enjoyable as possible. It is very important to find out the "why" of clients coming to your site and it is very simple also. All you need to do is ask them. When the information comes from the horse's mouth, it is always genuine and true. Only your visitors can give you true feedback and insight into the benefits they get from your products/services and what they dislike about them.

You can ask them the following questions to know where you stand in the market:

Why they purchased from you?
Have they got what they wanted in the time frame promised by you?
What is that one thing that they don't like about your products/services ?
What suggestions can they make to improve your products/services?
What would they want to see added to your products and services?
Why they didn't buy a particular product?
How much they generally spend on your products/services ?
What is their age, gender, location, profession?
How would they want you to help them in the future?

It is a known fact that the more you know about your prospective clients, visitors,and buyers, the better you will be able to serve their needs. In fact this information can help you figure out or modify your Unique Selling Point (USP) for better marketing. Gathering information from your prospects is not at all cumbersome process as you have options of emailing them, or calling them up, or sending a questionnaire to fill, etc. The rule basically is to send a formal survey if the number of people are large and call them up, if they are just a handful of them. Always end your queries on a polite and curteous "Thank You" note.

You can also offer some incentive to encourage your prospects and clients to participate or repond to your queries. After all it is very important to make them feel special and show your appreciation to them for taking out time to answer your questions.

http://www.segnant.com/