SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engines attempt to satisfy you (the searchers) by providing the most relevant results based on your keyword search. If you can easily find what you’re looking for from the search engine results, consider yourself a satisfied customer and you’ll likely return to that search engine in the future.

Results found on the left-hand side of the search engines are called organic or natural results. Achieving high rankings in these results is the aim of SEO.

In some aspects, SEO is similar to PPC with respect to keywords. Before you do anything, you should choose relevant keywords that you want to rank for. Keep in mind that it is going to be much harder to rank for generic keywords than it is for specific keywords. If you service a specific area, I’d suggest including a geographic indicator like a city, state, or region within your keyword.

Although there are many things you can do to optimize your website, SEO can basically be broken down to on-site and off-site optimization. This can literally be interpreted as optimizing your website structure and content (on-site) and optimizing the volume and manner of backlinks to your website on other sites (off-site).

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There’s an old adage that says “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Although the answer is debatable, I pose a similar question pertaining to today’s internet world: If you create a website and no one knows about it, does it exist?

This brings up the omnipresent dilemma of marketing your website online in the hopes of drawing visitors. Regardless of what you have to offer on your website, your visitors are the lifeblood of your website.

So, how do you get visitors to your site? There are traditional marketing mediums to draw attention to your site, i.e., TV, Radio, Newspaper, Magazines, but I suggest online marketing. There is one big difference between traditional marketing and online marketing: Traditional marketing requires you to search for your audience, while most online marketing has your audience searching for YOU.

The main means of online marketing are online directories, pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. I’ll go through each of these in detail to explain exactly what they are and how they can bring more visitors to your site.

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Back in the late 90’s, when Netscape and AOL ruled the Internet, there was a new phenomenon called “Chat Rooms.” Remember? Chat rooms allowed online visitors to connect with each other on a virtual level that had never been known before. I know what you’re thinking, “Chat rooms are SO last decade. Welcome to Web 2.0!”

Better take a look in the mirror Mr. Web 2.0. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, are basically glorified chat rooms. Once again, what began as an unknown form of online interaction has become the biggest phenomenon in the Internet today.

Hard to believe? Let’s take a look at all the similarities between social media and chat rooms:

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If you have read or watched the news in recent months you have probably heard something about someone getting rich using Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. I’ll save discussions on social media success for later but I will tell you that to make money on your site you need a lot of visitors; and that translates into the need for unsullied Web hosting.

If you’ve figured out how to use social media for business success or if you are getting a lot of traffic through other means you have felt the burden of making sure your site is up 24/7. This can be an arduous task if you don’t have good hosting services.

How do You Find the Right Fit?
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So you are thinking of setting up an e-commerce store

There are many things to take into account when setting up an online store front. Below is a list of some of the major items. You will want to thoughtfully consider and research each of these options before beginning the actual work of getting your site built and running.
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Most websites fall into two basic categories: informative and sales. Regardless of which category your site falls into, the more traffic you can get to your site, the better off you are. One of the best ways to get more traffic to your site is to make it more interesting for users.

Because of the great interest most people have in expressing their opinions about information and products, as well as being able to find other peoples’ opinions, or even just asking simple questions, setting up the ability for users to do so is a great way of attracting more traffic to your site. This can easily be done by setting up forums or a blog. Both forums and blogs give users of your site the opportunity to ask questions, post their opinions, and see what other users have to say about the products and information on your site.

Forum software, such as phpBB, and blogging software, such as WordPress and b2Evolution, is offered as part of most hosting packages to help you in getting this set up. Each application boasts different features to allow you to set up your blog or forum in the way that best suits your needs.

We encourage those of you who are looking to increase the interest your site generates to add a blog or forum to your site to help in getting more people interested and active in using your site.

Join us in celebrating the holidays by signing up for our new Holiday Special. This is your opportunity not only to sign up for a great plan but to give something back to those less fortunate. WestHost has partnered with the FamilyGivingTree.org this holiday season by donating a gift to a child when you activate a new account on the Holiday Special. The best part is that everyone is eligible to take advantage of this unique offer. In addition, if you activate a new account you could receive up to 2 years of free domain registration. Signing up for our new Holiday Special is really a no brainer. You get a great plan at a great price, you can get up to 2 years of free domain registration, you get WestHosts 24 hour Technical Support, 30-day money back guarantee, and you get to give something back to the community. What do you have to lose? Take advantage of this limited time offer!

What if I am a current client am I eligible for this plan? Yes, you are eligible to receive the full benefits this plan has to offer by signing up for a new account.

I already have an account and I want to upgrade to the Holiday Special, am I eligible? Yes, you can upgrade to the Holiday Special by filling out our Add-ons Form and selecting the Holiday Special. Upgrades to the special do not qualify for the free domain registration.

We hope you enjoy this special offer. WestHost wishes you a happy and safe holiday season!

There are many mysteries surrounding how search engine rankings work and what really boosts your Web site’s visibility when it comes to search engine listings, but most industry experts believe that all search engines love Web sites that are updated often. This is why blogs can be so successful at generating lots of Web traffic.

With the help of some basic settings, free plugins, and useful tips you can increase your ranking in most search engines. Below, in no particular order, you will find helpful information on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines:

• Permalinks: Every WordPress blog has the ability to display permanent links to each post in a variety of ways. By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers a few alternative link structures to choose from, or you can even create your own custom link structure to suit your needs.

  The WestHost blog uses the Month and name setting, which will produce links such as http://www.westhost.com/blog/2008/08/post-title-goes-here/. Having a post with a title that matches relevant post content will be a big plus for Search Engine Optimization.

  This setting can be changed in your WordPress admin control panel. Simply click on Settings from the top right and then click on Permalinks from the sub menu that appears below. Once you select what link structure will work best for you, simply click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

• All in One SEO Pack Plugin: This plugin is streamlined for some of the best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings the author recommends using.

  Some features:

  • Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
  • Generates META tags automatically
  • Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
  • You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
  • You can fine-tune everything
  • Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
  • And more!
• Google XML Sitemaps Plugin: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like Google, ASK.com, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
• Link related posts: This one sounds simple enough, but many people forget to do this. If you are making a post that may have related info in past posts you’ve made, link to them. This isn’t just helpful to search engines, but to your site visitors as well. Many search engines will analyze what content you are linking to, and when it is a relevant post, it will help increase the credibility of your current post. For example, in this article we have discussed using WordPress plugins to help with search engine optimization, and only a few weeks ago we wrote a post on how to install WordPress plugins.

These are just a few ideas to help get started with optimizing your blog for search engines. As you can see, SEO on any Web site is a constant task, but all of these little things can really add up and pay off big when it comes to search engine rankings for your blog content.

As you might imagine, as a Web hosting company, WestHost receives requests all the time from prospective and existing hosting clients for help on how to market their Web site. Attracting exposure for your Web site comes in a variety of formats. On the most basic level though, traffic in any form can really be broken down into two categories: natural/organic, and paid. Keyword optimization on your Web site plays a substantial role in both of these categories.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make on their Web site is the result of lack of knowledge or experience with Internet marketing. The mistake is simply the omission of any keyword optimization on the Web site. Any brick-and-mortar business owner understands the concepts of marketing a traditional business using traditional methods, but a substantial portion of these same real-world savvy people generally have little to no experience with Internet marketing, and little idea of how to proceed once they have their Web site online.

Of course by now, most anyone who has a Web site understands the importance of being listed in search engines, but many don’t generally understand how to rank well for their service/product. There are lots of different ways to optimize your Web site by manipulating title tags, header tags, placement of elements on the Web site, navigation, and more. One of the first methods of optimization though is selecting targeted keywords to place on your Web site to “tell” search engines what your Web site is actually about.

Keyword optimization is really the 101 of fine-tuning your Web site to receive traffic. Lacking relevant textual content on your Web site, you will have a very difficult time coming up in search listings on any reputable search engine. If you’re participating in paid keyword advertising, then you’ll pay more for your selected words if you have poorly optimized pages than you would if you had pages that were optimized well. Determining which keywords to target, initially, is as simple as writing down keywords relevant to the product or services you provide. For instance, if you own a bike shop and you’re looking to optimize your Web site with relevant keywords, you might consider initially basic terms like ‘bike’ or ‘bicycles’. The object after generating your list of basic keywords is simply to begin to fine-tune them into more specialized categories. For instance, you might then begin to list keywords relevant to specific types of bikes, such as ‘mountain bikes’, ‘bmx bikes’, ‘road bikes’. Variants of those terms would be beneficial as well, such as substituting ‘bicycles’ for ‘bikes’ in the phrase ‘mountain bikes’. Once you have your keywords in place that are relevant to the content on your particular Web site or landing page, you then pepper your product/service specific pages with those specific keywords to “optimize” that particular page for a keyword, or perhaps a few keywords. Be careful not to use the term so often that it might be considered excessive on that page.

Good keyword optimization is paramount for your Web site; it has substantial affect on your ability to rank in natural/organic listings with all search engines. In addition to that, keyword optimization is also factored into such things as your quality score when purchasing advertising through Google’s Adwords.

To help with this beginning process of optimizing your Web site with keywords, consider using any of the following tools. These tools help you choose keywords by listing such items as competition among the term and search volume, and also variations of the term, which oftentimes leads to keywords that are relevant to your Web site, but that you may not have thought of by yourself.

KeywordDiscovery

Wordtracker

Google Keyword Tool

GoodKeywords

With over 60 million blogs in the world, attracting readers can be difficult even if you link to other Web sites and blogs. The reason being of course is that there are simply too many blogs and tens of thousands are added and deleted every day. Thankfully, the online world offers a few tools to help bloggers get noticed. However, before we get to the “how”, let’s talk about the “what”.

First, before you can attract readers, you need to offer something they will be interested in. A good blog is a lot like a product. If you design and market your product to the target market of “everybody,” chances are you won’t be very successful. A reader’s time is very limited (like everybody else) and they will not aimlessly surf the Web in search of any blog. They will rather, conduct narrow searches for information and topics they are interested in. For example, if your blog is very broad and covers a wide range of topics such as your opinions about politics, pet nutrition, and online trading strategies, you will do better to write three separate blogs under each topic. Broadly-based blogs tend not to be very successful unless you are already a popular author or celebrity and people are simply interested in what you think. For the rest of us, the world isn’t all that interested in what we think about anything and everything.

Second, offer something unique. If you don’t know of any other blogs that cover the same topic you do, go surfing for a few hours and chances are you will find several. Become familiar with the competing blogs and make a list of issues they don’t cover or important points they miss. These blogs may also be a good source for traffic to your blog, don’t be afraid to ask for a link. The bottom line on this point is to be unique. Give readers a reason to visit and bookmark your blog.

Third, there is a new Mozilla browser out there called Flock (www.flock.com) that is specialized to social Web browsing and blogging. You can download a free copy at the address above. Flock is currently in version 1.1 and we have identified a few minor bugs in Flock here at WestHost but nothing serious enough to not use it. If you are a serious blogger or social Web surfer, the features will impress you and make keeping track of your social network and many blogs painless. It may also introduce you to many social Web features and sites you were not aware of.

Promoting your blog
1. Make sure your HTML tags (meta, title and H1) reflect your keywords. These may need to be adjusted for every post to include details of what your blog is talking about.

2. Submit your blog to the major search engines and link your blogs together. Submit your blog posts using your narrowly defined keywords, and make sure you are linking each post to other posts. If you would like to boost traffic for a specific post, go back and edit your previous posts, adding a link to the post you are trying to promote. This generally causes a rise in Google rankings.

3. Submit your site to Blog Index sites and other social network sites. Below is a list to get you started but is by no means comprehensive.

• www.myspace.com
• www.facebook.com
• www.stumbleupon.com
• www.zimbo.com
• www.twitter.com
• www.readburner.com
• www.freewebs.com/blogotion
• www.webloogle.com
• www.myblog2u.com
• feedfury.com
• www.rssmicro.com

4. Subscribe to the leading blogs and industry RSS feeds. This will keep you abreast of what is going on in the vertical market your blog addresses. Responding to hot issues quickly will generate quick traffic to your blog.

5. Submit your articles to industry leading sites and request a link to your blog if the leading site uses it. This is a great way to get known.

6. Lastly but by far the most important, post to your blog at least once a week. The Web is littered with abandoned or seemingly abandoned blogs. Let your readers know you’re still actively posting by frequently adding to your blog. This will also keep you ranked in the many blog engines.