What to Look For In a Good SEO Company.

People who are turning into online commerce are steadily increasing. A lot of people are now realizing that having an online store offers an advantage compared to having to rent out office space. Aside from that, a lot of services are now being offered to online clients to maximize their income.

In order to be an effective online merchant, one thing you will need is SEO. However, it'll be pretty hard to start up a web store and start SEO as well, not unless you have enough manpower and resources.

Take note that dominating a very competitive industry is not very easy, especially if you're competing with brands or companies that have existed for more than a decade. That is why you need to avail of SEO services. Instead of training yourself to do SEO or (and most likely starting from scratch), it will be better for you to avail of SEO services. If your business relies heavily on online traffic, you can't afford not to avail of SEO services. SEO companies will certainly help you increase your rankings and increase your revenue.

When hiring an SEO firm, be sure that the following services are being offered.

Keyword Research

This is the basics of SEO. Every activity involved in SEO has everything to do with the keywords you want to rank for. You need to consider the number of searches for your keyword. Trying to rank for a keyword that only gets 5 hits per month isn't exactly what you'd call a lucrative business.

Link Building

Another necessary part of SEO is getting links out in the web. The more links you have, the better your site will rank for certain keywords. Every SEO firm should be able to do as much. However, make sure that they're doing white hat strategy. There are SEO companies that do black hat strategy. Admittedly, it can work for a while. Unfortunately, search engines like Google and Yahoo didn't hire PhD grads just so you can easily cheat them. I'm not saying black hat strategies don't work. In fact they do, but it's something that's short-lived.

Social Media Marketing

Increasing your hits will require you to delve into social media marketing. Almost every user of internet spends at least a few minutes, if not hours, on social media like Facebook, twitter, etc. Tapping into these can certainly expand your potential market.

How to Write an Article for SEO Purposes

If you’re running a business that relies strongly on the internet, you’ll have to do a little bit of SEO. And a component of SEO is doing article writing for SEO purposes. There are slight differences between an ordinary article and an article that was made for SEO. SEO writing is the process of combining good quality content and proper keyword usage. In order to do that, see the steps below.

Always start with keyword research

The logical thing to do if you want to rank for keywords is to do keyword research. There are many tools available in the internet, some of them are free. These tools allow you to determine which keywords you should be using by providing you the number of searches per month, among other details.

Identify topics of relevance

Make sure to choose the topics carefully for your keywords. Lately, search engines are getting in terms of identifying which sites to give in the search results.

Write the article

Write the article like you do when writing ordinary articles. The basics still apply, providing an introductory paragraph, the content and a conclusion. Be sure to write high quality, valuable content, something which people would spend some time to actually read.

Insert your keywords

Here’s the tricky part. When you already wrote the article that’s related to your keyword, it’s most likely that you’ve already used that keyword. Make sure though that you haven’t used the keywords too much because it might trigger some spam filters. Instead of repetitively using the same keywords, it would be good to replace them with what we call ‘cousin keywords’. That way, you get to increase the relevance of your topic without being labeled as spam.

Don’t forget to link back to your site

A good practice when writing the article is to make sure that it links back to your site. If you’re writing for your site content, a common practice would be to link back to your home page or perhaps another page in your site. That way, readers can easily navigate through different contents of your site. However, linking to different sites isn’t necessary for your own content.

On the other hand, if you’re writing for article submission (another common practice for SEO), it’s important that you don’t forget to insert the links to your site. Otherwise, the content you wrote will just be good for reading and gives you no benefit in SEO perspective.

How Many Is Enough To Get Me To The Top?

If you're starting a website and you want to put up some content, of course, you would want to know how much it will take to get the job done. This is almost true especially if you're not the one writing your site content and outsourcing it to someone else. You would want to have a pre-calculated idea of how long it will take to get the investment back.

This is true for all types of businesses. You don't just jump into any business without first looking into how much they cost, how long it would take and most especially the ROI (Return of Investment).

Unfortunately, these types of questions have little less than complicated answers because of many variables involved, be it competition, current prices, the target market. Nevertheless, we still continue to plan for them. In the case of promoting a website, we still ask ourselves, "How much content do I need to publish before I see concrete results?"

As you may already have guessed, the truth of the matter is, there isn't a right answer for that question. All of them are dependent on a lot of variables. When it comes to promoting the site, here are the variables that you will need to consider.

Keywords. 

If you're main keyword is something that you only know, then one article may probably be enough to do the trick. Unfortunately, we always target those keywords that a lot of other people are also targeting. We call them money keywords. If you can come across a keyword that is seldom used (less competition), producing minimal content on it can surely put you on the top. Have you tried typing your name in the search engine? Check out the results.

Article Content.

Right now, search engines have been including the time you spend on pages as a factor in keeping you in the search results. If your site happens to keep the attention of your visitor for a few seconds or even minutes, then that might mean that your site has the relevant information that the searcher needs. 

Article Source. 

Most people now look into the authors and not just random pages. Some people subscribe to their favorite authors, courtesy of feeds. The more established you are as an author and the more followers you have will certainly produce an impact in your rankings.

Signatures. 

Don't forget to always link your signatures to your site. Why else would you be doing article marketing in the first place right? When it comes to SEO, links will always be your biggest currency. The location of your links will be the ones to dictate the denominations.

Consistency. 

Most site owners come up with articles (self-written or otherwise) and they do so on a continuous basis. If you happen to be working on the same product or field, your competitor will certainly have the edge over you if you decide to write one article and call it a day.

Unless Google (or any search engine for that matter) release their secret algorithms as to who goes on top of the search page, these are only a few of the factors that they consider. Their algorithms may be a secret, but it's no secret that the mentioned points above directly affect your rankings.

Website SEO - How To Create Content That Sells

When the internet was created, its primary purpose was to share information within a wide area. Today, it has become more than that. It has become a venue where many consumers and retailers meet. It has become the world's biggest marketplace.

These days, if you want to sell something, whether they are digital products or things that are tangible, you will need to have a website. However, you can't expect to be the only one selling that specific product in the internet.

So, how do you convince people that they should buy from you and not from others? When you're making a business website, you need to make potential customers that they need what you have. In order to do that, you'll have to convince them they're lacking something and that's where you come in. You need to prove to them in a few words, or maybe more, that your product or service is the solution to the problem that they've been having.

Let's take for example beauty products. Most businesses try to convince their consumers that they will feel better and look better if they get rid of those eye bags, if they get a better tan, or if they lose those cellulites. They usually start off with stories that may empathize with the customer. These are usually stories of being laughed at, or being humiliated for so-called flaws that can do without. Once the reader customer understands what the stories are about, it's time to make the sale. The seller then explains how their beauty products can take care of the problem that you have.

Now, I'm sure it's a lot easier said than done. To help you with writing motivational content, here are a few tips to consider.

- Keep things interesting. Keep you reader from being bored by repeating the same thing over and over again.

- Humor always help as long as it is kept at tactful levels.

- Avoid repeating the same thing over and over again. Repeating something a lot of times will come as an insult to the reader's intelligence.

- Avoid using complex words. Try to use words that you would normally use in a conversation. Plain English always works better when selling.

- When writing the content, try to speak the words. It helps if you write it then way it's spoken.

Once you're familiar with being persuasive, try to back your words with emotions. Make your readers feels something, be it laugh or cry. Make them want to change themselves or simply make themselves want to be better.

Do you know now how to convince others to buy from you? If you're still not confident, try looking at the sites of those things that you bought online. Think about what they're saying or what you read. Try to imitate them. What were their words? How did it make you feel? Obviously, they did something right. You did buy that from them.

Top Reasons Why Article Marketing Is A Prerequisite For Website SEO

You may be wondering, “Why is it that there are a lot of jobs for article writers and they never run out?” Also, a lot of software is created that is intended to produce numerous articles spun from a single article. It’s simple. You need articles for Website SEO. If you have a site which you want to go up the search pages and you haven’t been doing article marketing, then it’s about time you do. Here are a number of reasons why it’s necessary for you to be engaged in article marketing.

Articles are good ways of placing back-links for your site. If you’re not familiar with back-links, these are the highlighted words wherein they will take you to another page (ideally your website). These are necessary for website SEO. It is popular knowledge that the more back-links you have, the more you will rank up in search engines. It’s the internet’s form of currency.

Back-links are not all there is with article marketing. Once you’ve managed to come up with good articles which revolve around a certain theme for your site, you’ll manage to catch the eyes of readers that will want to keep on reading your materials. Ideally, you would want them to bookmark your site and be frequent visitors. The number of visitors that a site gets is also very helpful for SEO process.

Another reason why article marketing is very important for your website SEO is because your back-links are worthless unless your articles are indexed. Now, a lot of people use black hat SEO wherein they automate creating links and Google has a way of knowing which sites should be indexed. If your back-links aren’t indexed, then it’s just a waste of time and money. Original articles have the highest probability of being indexed compared to pages that are populated with links.

To sum it all up: In order to be effective in website SEO, you’ll need back-links, you’ll need readers and you’ll need those articles with back-links to your site to be indexed. In other words, you need Article Marketing.