What is Search Engine Optimization?
Published October 12, 2010 | 
Search Engine Optimization, otherwise popularly known as SEO, is a critical tool in determining your online success. It assists in thousands of ways the promotion of a website to earn a share of the billion‐dollar amazing Web.
SEO is a way of making content more correct for the Web, in the mode that search engines will have an easier time seeing it. Web pages or an entire Website can be “highlighted / painted” with appropriate SEO techniques to make Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines pay attention to it.
SEO involves understanding what to do and what not do, so your Website will be given higher positions or rankings whenever an individual person searches for information on the Web. 
As luck would have it, even when you do everything you know about SEO, it does not automatically denote your Website will be the highest of all the Websites in the search results, and be the most noticeable search for a specific keyword.
Understand that in fact more people will visit your Website when the correct SEO techniques are employed. Even though SEO does that, it cannot be associated or compared to advertising. SEO is not about buying ratings to be at the top, but more about having greater relevance to what it is that people are searching for.
Search engine optimization might fine-tune a Website for twenty or thirty minutes and everything will be first-rate. It might also imply a recurring task that is required to be carried out to be highly ranked in search engines.
SEO, by all measures, is not achieved in an instant but needs your valuable time and energy before its targeted results can be seen. Understand also that Optimization works best if you familiar with how search engines work so your Search Engine Optimization reaches the target effectiveness you plan for it.
Principles of Search Engine Optimization
Published October 1, 2010 | 
To understand search engine optimization you should begin what the traditional objective of SEO is, which is to produce a positive visual impact leading arbitrary or random searchers to click through search results listings to specifically identified destinations. It is by and large understood that the very first position (top of first page) in search results listings is the most advantageous in that the greater part of user generated click-throughs traditionally take place on the first position. On the other hand, experienced searchers will more than likely choose and click on the most obviously pertinent listing in the search results or many times on more than one listing.
As a search optimizer your goal should be to craft a persuasive visibility in search results that serves to drive traffic to a specific targeted website. 
Nevertheless, for a target website that requires more than just arbitrary traffic (requirement of a specific action), you as the search optimizer should be driving vital convertible traffic to the destination. In other words, the searchers who decide to click on the listing in the search results should be sensibly convinced they will find what they are looking for prior to clicking on the link.
You need to be aware of four factors that directly affect your Web content’s showing in search results including (1) What YOU do with your page, (2) What OTHERS do on their pages, (3) What the SEARCH ENGINES do with specific data they collect about Web pages, and (4) What informational content people SEARCH for.
While you cannot dictate what other’s do with their pages or even what people search for, you do have power over what you do on your own pages and the search engines always encourage Webmasters to present some guidance for how to index their respective Web pages. Business-related search engine optimization must always address four specific areas in order to achieve success including (1) keyword research, (2) how content is organized, (3) search visibility, and (4) linking.
Choosing Relevant Keyword Terms and Phrases
Published September 4, 2010 | 
After you have determined all keyword possibilities with sufficient search volumes, you should then filter the keywords for relevancy. Remember that you don’t just want to pull in traffic for traffics sake, so it’s important your goal should be to ensure your traffic is of high quality, simply because quality traffic helps conversion of your visitors into customers at a higher rate.
You should see the data as free or low-cost market research for the proper mindset to proceed to formulate a content strategy that just might have a shot at ranking well, and remember, before Google will like your content, people need to.
Here are some essential things you need to always cover when researching keywords:
Research Tools – According to some, Google’s Keyword Tool is all you need for research, and others use another free option that is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, which makes use of Yahoo! Search data as well as other useful metrics. 
Of course, paid tools might be superior choices to those provided by search engines including Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.
Be Specific – “Keyword” is just the term that gets loosely tossed around, but in most cases what you’re really after are keyword phrases. For example, a real estate attorney in Abilene, Texas would gain little actual benefit from ranking highly for the single word “attorney,” but consider that specific keyword phrases based on geography and specialty (“Abilene real estate lawyer”) would yield much more important highly targeted traffic.
There is Strength in Numbers – Be a little skeptical of the reported number of monthly searches provided by any particular tool, but do pay attention to collective popularity among search terms. You really want to be sure enough people use your selected phrase when thinking of your niche to make it worth the time and effort, especially if this term is a primary search term you have targeted for your site.
At the same time, you should be realistic, and if your goal is to rank in a very competitive sector, aim for a smaller attainable milestone first, or make sure that a certain keyword combination can rank for an easier phrase before attempting the more competitive term.
Highly Relevant – You should make sure that any search terms you are consider using are highly relevant to the eventual goal, and if you are selling specific products or services you provide, keyword relevancy may be easier for you to determine. 
Other goals might require much more careful consideration, such as subscriptions to content publications and contributions to charities, to name a few.
Develop a Resource – Finally, here’s the key element and question. Can a particular keyword phrase support the development of content that is a valuable resource to your readers?
Keywords versus Keyword Phrases
Published September 3, 2010 | 
Let’s take a look at how one creates a keyword list with the example of a website selling real estate in Texas, where the immediately obvious keywords are items such as ‘property’, ‘real estate’, ‘Texas’ and ‘Texan’. These can also be combined into phrases such as ‘Texan property’ and ‘property in Texas’. In general, focus should be on ranking for keyword phrases rather than for keywords.
It is true that ranking well for ‘Texas’ will give a thousand times as much traffic as ranking well for ‘Texas Property’, but understand it would cost a 
hundred times as much investment to rank for ‘Texas’ as to rank for ‘Texas Property’ very simply because competition is many times more heavy for individual words then exists is for phrases. Additionally, most of the traffic for ‘Texas’ is for topics (such as Texas Revolution, Texas Flag, Texas Food) largely irrelevant to the business, so the majority of the traffic is of no value to the business.
Consequently, in most cases, you will achieve a much better return on investment by simply focusing on relevant keyword phrases or targeted keyword phrases, than by doing Search Engine Optimization for individual keywords.
A related point you need to keep in mind is that ranking well for individual keywords in no way means that a keyword will automatically rank well for phrases that include these keywords. 
For example, a site might rank well for ‘Texan’ (perhaps resulting in lots of traffic about ‘Texan Food’) and rank well for ‘Property’ (perhaps resulting in lots of traffic for ‘Australian Property’), without ranking well for ‘Texan Property’ (which is what we were after in the first place).
In fact, many targeted keyword phrases, are more often than not the best investments in terms of attracting website visitors searching for the precise product that you might be offering. So imagine if you are selling ranches in Texas you might find the best Search Engine Optimization investment is ‘Prestige Texan Property,’ whereas if you are selling run-down ranch houses to people looking for inexpensive seasonal homes they can fix up you might find the best Search Engine Optimization investment is ‘Cheap Texan Ranch Houses’. 
So admittedly, the actual amount of traffic for these lengthy phrases is most likely low, the probability of the resulting visitors buying is much higher than for the more general phrases, and the cost of Search Engine Optimization is a small fraction of the cost for more general phrases.
Of course there will be such cases when ranking for individual words makes more sense. Let’s look at a website which provides international property rather than property in just one country that may find it cost effective to rank for ‘property,’ and likewise, websites that focus on niche topics identified by a single word. However, the fact is for the majority of websites, keyword phrases are not only more cost effective, but also tend to attract the specific type of visitors that actually match the products being sold.
Analyzing Your Web Site Traffic with Log Analyzers
Published March 28, 2010 | One method of analyzing your Web site traffic is parsing server access logs connected with the specific Web site. The log is created when the server makes records when someone has requested a Web page from it and the request is recorded in its raw visit logs, and as you might think, the server access log contains a lot of useful information. 
Many of these programs, called “log analyzers,” are able to parse server logs and display the information it contains in a user-friendly format.
You must understand, as with most things, there are some disadvantages with this method of web site traffic analysis, and for certain reasons server logs do not often provide information precisely like we might want, for example, visits made by a person who uses a dynamic IP address (e.g. accesses the Internet via dial-up) will be recorded as made by several visitors, and conversely, several visitors working through a corporate network with only one external IP address will be counted visits made by one unique visitor, and if a page hasn’t completed loading into the user’s browser, the server writes this visit to the log as soon as it has sent back the request header, even if the visitor might have not seen the page at all.
These shortcomings specific to using “log analyzers” are solved with another kind of Web site traffic analysis which is called “real-time visitor tracking,” which is an improved system for tracking visits, and remember, there is special software to simplify both of these techniques for Web site traffic analysis. If you want a much more affordable real-time tracking solution for your site performance measurement you need a tracking tool that utilizes browser-side scripts to report various data about visitor page views to a remote database of collected marketing statistics.