Online Business Intelligence In SEO
Online business intelligence means being able to look at the numbers and raw data that your online business generates, and finding ways to turn those numbers into your favor. That can be as basic as looking at income versus expenditure to calculate your ROI, and finding ways to try and make the returns bigger than what you are getting. This means having your finger on the pulse of all the factors which can affect the profitability and viability of your online business, and it can even be argued that running your business on the internet is far more detailed than having a shop on the High Street.
Where the two business enterprises are similar is in trying to find ways to make yourself better than your competitor. At street level that may mean keeping an eye on one or two other businesses, but online there can be literally thousands of different sites all vying for the same dollar. In order to stay ahead of the pack, you must be sure to use competitive analysis to measure your business against all the others who are peddling the same services. You must try to figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and once you find them, then you have to measure that against the way in which you operate. This will help you to find ways in which you can improve, but only if you can cast the critical on your own operations, as well as that of the enemy.
At the end of the day, all that raw data and fact finding information all comes back to how each and every website is set up and run. Those that are built with the search engines, as well as the customer, in mind will always do well, which means the rest will fail. That means that a strong emphasis should be put on website optimization, so that when your business is found through a high ranking on a search engine, the customer can have their high expectation met when they choose to buy. The most successful online businesses rely on maintaining a good balance between what the search engines need in order to to rank high, and what the customer’s needs to find when they arrive at the site.
Basic Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is not as difficult the way many people make it out to be. It seems mysterious, but let me reveal how this simple thing can be done without a line of code, without breaking any law, and still generate a ton of extra traffic to your site.
Basically, search engine optimization is about getting higher rankings. But that’s beside the point. That’s the end result of what you DO that actually gets you those rankings. In Singapore SEO trainings are hardly seen but I often do it for my clients on a private basis.
There are basically 5 things you need to do in order to accomplish better search engine rankings, even if you are complete novice at it. I call these the 5 Pillars of search engine optimization.
Pillar #1 – Multiple Backlinks
Create as many links back to your site as possible. How? You can use submission software that post to multiple websites all at the same time. I prefer to use those that are a little more reputable and I do not spam, especially blogs. Backlinks can come easily, but you will need to do it properly to prevent the backlack. The easiest way to do it is to collect a list of places where you can submit to. I have a directory listing of ping servers that you can find at www.StuartFreeTools.com. That should get you started. The rest need to be Googled as "submit your url" or "submit your article". The more backlinks, the better.
Pillar #2 – Frequency
Even if you are building backlinks, you need to have a regular frequency. If possible, every day, if not every other day. You need to be consistent in your efforts to build backlinks. Now, this may be tedious, but it probably won’t take you more than an hour a day to maintain this. You don’t have to write articles at all. You only need a robot that works 24/7 for you. I’ve got some recommendations that I’ve put up on my blog at www.InternetMarketingSingapore.com/blog and you can see how in Singapore, SEO elements are just as easily implemented by me compared with experts who have many years of experience.
Pillar #3 – Multiple Hosting Accounts
I recommend this because search engines look at IP addresses. with multiple hosting accounts, you get better inbound links from your own site. If you’re smart, you’ll start creating a whole ton of these to boost your own link popularity from other sites.
Pillar #4 – Important Sites
If you haven’t already, Brad Callen’s SEO Elite has a great way of better optimizing high PageRank links. PageRank is Google’s way of tracking how important you are. For SEO purposes, around PR 2 or 3 should be sufficient for your needs. Get backlinks from these sites.
Pillar #5 – Onpage structure
Your onpage structure is very important. If a search engine is visiting you, it won’t spend an hour online. It will be done in a matter of seconds, so you really ought to see how far you can go with this. Ensure you have proper meta titles, utilizing H1 and H2 tags effectively, and of course, anchor text within your site. Make sure you have links into your web page on the first index page of your site. I highly recommend you use blogs for such an endeavor because most of these are already optimized for you. Remember – you are always optimizing for keywords, so those MUST appear on your page for search engines to find you.
Here are the three things you must do.
First, make regular attempts to create backlinks (not reciprocal links) with other sites. Leave genuine comments on blogs, post into classified directories, submit your articles to various sites, whatever it takes. Do this as regularly as possible.
Second, ensure
you have solid content. People will want to link to you because your content is good. So I recommend that you either write your own or ask someone to build it for you at one of the freelancer sites like www.elance.com.
Third, maintain consistency in what you do. 1 a day for 100 days is very different from 100 a day posts on your website. Beware because search engines treat the latter as spamdexing.
SEO doesn’t take forever, but it requires a wee bit of patience. The Singapore SEO market, for instance, is pretty easy to dominate. But that’s because you have niche keywords that you are optimizing for with very little competition. In other markets, it’s not like the Singapore SEO market because you’ve got very competitive phrases, and that might take a bit longer. Whatever the case, consistency wins out in the end, so start right now!
Ontological Text Recognition: The New SEO Reality
The old days of SEO are gone. Just not too long ago, standard SEO practices would place a site in the graces of the major search engines. Let’s examine what these standard techniques are before I venture into the copywriting/ontological part of SEO.
-Clean code and use of a CSS. It is still imperative to write in clean code and avoid proprietary tags or server side extensions such as the ones created/required by certain web design programs. Use a cascading style sheet to reduce attribute clutter.
-Keyword density. The accepted parameters call for keyword presence on each page in order to rank well for the particular term. Too little density and the search engines will not rank the site well and too much will be viewed as spam.
-Unidirectional and reciprocal linking. The more sites linking to one and the better the site will score. Note: reciprocal links are being discounted by Google in particular because of rampant, free for all link exchange abuse. Make sure anchor text reflects the keywords being targeted when conducting a link campaign.
The standard above guidelines are what many SEOs are focusing on to help websites in the top rank arena.
While these are still the basics, we are seeing a a shift in the ranks where sites rank extremely well for a keyword without such term even being present on the page. How is this possible? The only possible explanation is the contextual text relationship or theme of a site.
Google seems to be at the forefront of this technology: the sites that are doing well even for terms that are not present in the text or anchor links are very rich in related content. Also, very important, the site relates to the particular key phrase. Let’s try an example: when searching for "market timing", a site is in the top 3 in Google. The site has hundreds of pages indexed and deals with market research for stocks, stock buying and investment decision tools. A human being reading through the site found by searching for market timing will find the site extremely informative and pertinent to the search. Then, how is it possible that Google could rank it high if it is just blindly indexing the text to find the exact keyword? The answer is ontological text recognition. By reading the contextual relationship between words and paragraphs, Google is capable of "understanding" that the site, without mentioning a particular keyword, will be relevant when a user searches for it.
What does this mean for you? Simply put, a lot. Copywriting is king. Well written content, informative article writing in conjunction with standard SEO techniques are the new search optimization reality. It means more work but also the advantage of maintaining more solid ranks over time as no competitor site can just easily tweak some code to rank higher. We have been focusing heavily on this new aspect to find the best way to create user friendly and rich content that will be positively received by search engines and searchers alike.