When you’re devising your internet marketing campaign, it has been the case until relatively recently that people have been seeking out the pages with the highest PageRank to take their links. However, the current school of thought is that PR is less important than the relevance of the website in relation to your own. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, it’s a far more natural approach to link building. While a search for high PR websites to accept your links can lead to your content being split across a strange variety of sites with content often shoehorned into an inappropriate category for the sake of high PR, this approach appears to be far more reminiscent of how links really work. Website A, B and C are in the same field. Website A is considered an authority on the subject, so B and C link to A. It is now argued that it’s better to have these links from other sites in the same field than any powerful, high PR website.

The main reason this is useful is because when Google is trying to match pages to a search term, if it sees a large number of relevant sites referring to one other site, it suggests that the other sites in the field are ‘vouching’ for that website as an authority, making Google more likely to select it as a top result. It’s the equivalent of all the small bakeries in a town sending their customers to one big bakery, considered the authority on cakes, to help them with any important queries. It’s better to have the smaller bakeries referring you to the big bakery than one big garage and one big garden centre.

Another way to look at this analogy is that it builds trust between your site and Google. If you’re looking for a complex wedding cake, are you likely to listen to all the little bakeries, with at least some expertise in the field, telling you to visit the big bakery? Or would you prefer to take the advice of the best car mechanic in town? It’s the same principle. Even if that garage is world-renowned for fixing cars in no time at all, it’s very unlikely that they’ll have much specialist knowledge about cakes, so you should listen to the people in the know.

While ‘irrelevant’ links aren’t necessarily a bad thing, as they can form part of a natural network of links, it starts to become an issue when you’re clearly targeting lots of irrelevant, but high PR, domains to take your links. Google will spot that this is unnatural, and it will make it harder for Google to notice you as particularly relevant for the search terms you want to target. Too many links from sites outside your field might also look spammy, so think about sticking within your industry.

Search Engine Optimization is an industry surrounded by metrics. Thanks to the likes of metrics packages like Google Analytics, Statcounter, and Clicktale, business and website owners have the availability to be buried under a mountain of data when it comes to visitors to their own website.

With that said, it’s hard to understand where to focus your attention. It’s way too easy to get lost in all of the metrics – and also hard to figure out which ones are important – so this post details the four biggest SEO metrics to watch.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a key metric that also feeds information back to the search engines, and in turn partially determines your website’s rankings. Bounce rate tells you the percentage of visitors that land on your website, view only the first page, and then leave, or “bounce.” This metric is usually over 50% for small businesses, so don’t fear if your numbers are higher! Too high, though, and it shows the search engines that users aren’t finding what they want, so has a negative impact on your SEO success.

Pages per Visit

Pages per Visit is the best metric for showing user engagement. This tells you the average number of pages that a visitor looks at on your website, so shows how well the content entices them to view more. If you have a bounce rate of 100% then every visitor is only viewing one page before leaving, so your pages per visit number would be 1.0. If your website is very engaging, however, visitors will view three, four, or more pages, so the pages per visit will be much higher.

Percent of Organic Traffic

This figure is the number that will actually tell you how much of an impact your search marketing efforts are having. If your website relies largely on traffic from search engines then this number will be high, which shows your dependence. If it’s not already high, though, then seeing how this number changes over time will tell you if search is becoming more or less important for your traffic numbers.

Percent of Mobile Users

Metrics packages like Google Analytics will also show you the breakdown of users’ devices so you know where your website’s visitors are coming from. This is becoming an even more important metric as Google and the other search engines are looking to websites to optimize towards mobile, since more and more searches are coming from smartphones and tablets. By keeping an eye on your percentage of mobile users you’ll be able to determine how important optimizing for mobile is, and more than likely you’ll see that you need to invest in a mobile compatible website.

To learn more about these metrics and more SEO techniques, check your local events listings to see if there are any SEO training workshops.

You and those who you employ sacrifice and work very hard every day to be the best, but are the people who want and need your company’s products and services finding you on the Web? Should you make as mart investment in SEO for enterprise businesses, you will experience the benefits of revenue growth.Search engine optimization is about establishing, increasing, and protecting your business’ “reach” in the online marketplace. Traditional marketing and advertising can only take a business so far in today’s world. With the decline of print media, even the flashiest of advertisements for companies are becoming less and less cost effective. Computers with Internet access are now present in every home and even front pocket of most teenagers. Nearly every business has a website. With Web indexing algorithms, it is possible for individuals to discover companies and products they otherwise would never know existed. Putting you company’s URL in the top results for apropos keyword searches is where SEO techniques enter the picture.

Gaining the Outsider’s Perspective

You likely work at your business five or more days a week, every month of the year (with an occasional vacation thrown in to keep from going crazy). At work, you have attended dozens, if not hundreds, of project and sales meetings. You participate in work conference calls, write work emails, and interact with customers and partners regularly. Because of all this exposure you have received, you now have a rich and vast amount of specific business domain knowledge and expertise. So be proud that you are a subject matter expert for your company.But this knowledge does come with a disadvantage; you are not an outsider anymore. You do not think like someone who has never spent a day at your company. Your brain is now wired in a way that other people’s brains aren’t. It can become a struggle for you to communicate with and reach people who have never seen or heard of your company. How can you avoid being ignored? How can you help them grasp the concept of your business? This can be extremely challenging when your company has a niche or is based on something that is new and often foreign to most of the world. SEO companies specialize in filling that role of “the outsider” and help you tune the messages your company uses to reach those who often think very differently from you. Investing in SEO can make the difference between hosting a corporate site on the Internet no one visits versus having such a powerful presence on the Internet that even your competition feels it.

Conquer Search

It is not just about establishing an impressive page rank. To really conquer search, you want a positive, professional result page presence that will drive more business your way. It is actually possible to abuse SEO to the point that you have what may appear to be an excellent reach but is actually causing damage to your business due to an overall negative impression. The value proposition your company makes must be correctly understood in the minds of those who are exposed to it. It is difficult to undo damage caused by a negative mental model because it is unnatural for us to purposefully forget what we learn. Try it; learn some bit of information and then try to intentionally unlearn that same information. Our minds know how to receive, not delete. Make sure that when a customer does find you, they also learn the best about you.

Protect Your Brand

Because the bar is much lower than it has been in the past, competition in the Web marketplace can be fierce. Don’t let your hard work be for nothing by failing to invest in one of the most effective strategies available for driving new revenue. It is possible to recover from a stumble or even turn a crisis into an opportunity, and the SEO opportunity is there for you.SEO for enterprise businesses is here and will protect your company’s reputation and appeal. Use search engine optimization services to give your company an edge over the crowd.

When it comes to promoting a small business the most effective way to reach new customers is through SEO marketing with OrangeSoda. The reputation of the Utah based Internet marketing firm extends across the country as businesses everywhere have come to rely on the expertise of the organization that is an authorized reseller of Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s search engine marketing campaigns. In every one of the 50 United States the influence of local marketing strategies can be found. Whether a company is looking for a national campaign to reach consumers in every state, or the business is concentrating on local efforts to attract the attention of their consumers, the result of keyword enhanced online marketing campaigns delivers the best results available.

Research Provides Insight into a Business

Any marketing strategy that is developed for the online consumers that are constantly searching through cyberspace requires the understanding of SEO experts who are as concerned about generating new sales from their work as their clients are. Before working out a series of campaigns that will influence the visibility of a website in the search engines the people who work of OrangeSoda conduct a consultation. By understanding the nature of each client’s business and what goals they wish to accomplish through the use of keyword driven marketing campaigns, the people who are producing search optimized strategies are able to deliver the products that best support the needs of the individual client.

Keyword Drive Traffic to a Website

A thorough analysis of the website determines where the optimization efforts need to be focused and what campaign tactics will be used to deliver new customers to a business. Many people make the common mistake of believing that if they choose some popular keywords and phrases that customers will naturally gravitate to their website. While keywords do drive search results there is a great deal of research that is done before any campaigns that promote a business or a website are put into place. Even if a company has been using the same string of keywords for a long time, the SEO experts are required to examine what has been working and make any adjustments to the selected phrases that are designed around the buying habits and interests of a targeted consumer group. Once the analysis is complete, the specific strategies can be mapped out. Marketing is not a hit and miss theoretical exercise. It is a calculated plan of specific campaigns that each build on one another to deliver the results that business owners are anticipating. The road map that is developed for a specific business cannot be used for every industry.

Sales are the Result of Marketing Strategies

There are differences in the size of a campaign as well as the execution that is required to accomplish the objectives of the marketing strategy. After the roadmap has been determined it is time to begin putting together the individual campaigns that will promote the business within the search engines. This is where the resources of a professional Internet marketing company are used to deliver the customers and clients that small businesses across the country are counting on for their success. When it comes to SEO marketing with OrangeSoda companies of every size are able to benefit from the expertise of trained marketing professionals who work closely with their clients to achieve specific goals that relate to increases in visitor traffic and sales that result from the conversions made in the search engines.

In the world of search engine optimization, it’s imperative to track metrics for your clients. You always want to know how their websites are fairing in the rankings so that you can measure the success of your SEO campaign. Here are some critical tools used for measuring and improving SEO.

SERP Workbench

The SERP Workbench is a great tool for tracking the rankings of keywords for all of your clients. Simply add your client’s URL and all of the keywords that you’re tracking for your clients, and this Google Chrome extension will begin tracking your progress. Complete with stats and graphs, the SERP Workbench also allow you to monitor how your competitors are ranking on the keywords that you’re optimizing towards.

Open Site Explorer

SEOmoz, one of the leaders in SEO tools and news, offers this tool for free to the world. As we all know, links are everything in search engine optimization, and having a good method of measuring the number of links pointing at the sites of your clients is critical. Open Site Explorer will tell you how many links a site has pointing to it, as well the number of root domain to root domain links (crucial metric to have!). It also goes one step further by providing both page authority of the and domain authority, a metric created by SEOmoz that is a very accurate predictor of how a site will perform in the search engine rankings.

Check My Links

Another browser extension, Check My Links, helps you with on-page optimization. Every SEO company needs this tool; having a broken link on a page is bad for the user experience, meaning search engines won’t like it either. Find broken links by simply clicking on the Check My Links extension, which will tell you exactly which links on your current page are broken.

**Tip!** This is a great way of getting an “in” for a new client or a link back to your own website. Log on to a random website and run Check My Links. If you find a broken link, email the webmaster and let him know! He or she will be thankful you pointed this out to them, and at this point you can ask them for a link back for your help or perhaps to have a quick conversation about what else you can do for them!

WebPageTest.org

Google’s Panda algorithm is aimed at lowering the rankings of bad websites with unpleasant user experiences. One of the factors of the Panda algorithm is page speed. If a website loads very slowly, wouldn’t you leave that page in search of one that’s faster? Google believes you would, and as a result you want to make sure that all your pages are loading quickly. Enter WebPageTest.org! Just enter a site’s URL into the prompt, press start, and you’ll see a few things pop up: a number of grades, A-F, telling you how well your site ranked for speed, as well as the really cool part, the waterfall chart, which displays how fast each item on your page loaded. This means you can see exactly what’s slowing your page down, and address the issues.

In the world of search engines, plagiarism free content rules. Plagiarism free content is ranked at a higher position in the search engines. Hence, for efficient SEO companies, it is important that the content written by the writers is unique and does not possess any repetition in it. This is how most of the articles and writings are positioned in the search engines.

But how can you ensure that the content on your web page is free of plagiarism? There are few things which if considered by the writers may help them write plagiarism free and unique content. Some of the most important points are as under:

• Do good research before starting your writing. A well researched article if written in the writer’s own words gives out a very good impression to the reader. What should be done in order to avoid plagiarism is that do not use the words from the searched content. Try incorporating your own innovative words to create exclusive content.
• There are many plagiarism checking internet sites which can be used to check the uniqueness of your content. Some of them are free, however, they are not very reliable. If you are serious about controlling plagiarism, spend some money on sites like CopyScape, Grammarly, etc.
• Moreover, while writing any article, keep a simple rule in mind: do not take three words in a row from any web page. If you follow this, you will never have to face plagiarized work.

In addition to this, what if your website has been copied by someone else and you are a victim of plagiarism rather than the culprit? Well, if you spot a website using your content, there are a few things you could do.

• First of all, sign up for plagiarism checker tools like Copyscape. They will detect any website that is using your article. If you don’t want to spend money on that you may also pick up a unique line from an article and search for it in Google.
• Once you have found such a website, contact the owner and ask him/her to take off all copied content. Be prepared for being accused of replicating “his” content.
• Your next step is to contact the web hosting company in case the owner of the site ignores your claim. You will have to convince him that the content is yours. If you fail to do so, you lose your content. So make sure you put in a link to your Google cache, your page rank and other things that will indicate that you uploaded that content before anybody else.
• If that does not work then your best bet is to get a complaint registered with search engines and advertisers on the site.

Thus, if you want to drag majority of the users towards your website, then ask your SEO writers to write unique, well researched and completely plagiarism free texts. Moreover, keep on checking other web pages if you fear your content being copied. You should have a content strategy to ensure the substance in your website it concrete. This is how your business will flourish and no one would be able to take advantage of you.

In this article we will focus on the common mistakes that beginner webmasters usually make and which could lead to a penalty in one’s search engine rankings (SERPS).

1. Too much focus on links – Links are the strongest ranking factor of any website. The more quality links you have the higher your chance is to rank well in the search engines is. However many webmasters charge into link building tactics without caring much of what their site’s on-page optimization is. If your website is poor in on-page optimization, any link building effort would be in vain. Make sure you have well written quality content with proper keyword density (1.5% – 2%) and nice looking design and user interface.

2. Too many exact anchor tags – On April 24th, Google rolled out their latest “Penguin” update that analyzes a site’s link portfolio (as well as a good number of on-page metrics). It is not natural for a site to have 100% of its links with exact anchors. Furthermore it is not natural to have a high percentage of the total pie of links for a single anchor. Try to build naked urls links and always rotate anchors in order to avoid triggering a Penguin penalty.

3. Not enabling commenting under posts – Comments are usually associated with spambots. However this is not always true. Allowing your users to interact with your site is something that can be truly beneficial for you. Each comment will add up to a page’s value in the sense that it could be posted from a professional who can give an argument or discuss a different perspective to your statement. This automatically means free high quality content for your page.

4. Not synchronizing the key on-page settings – The best way to optimize your site in terms of on-page is to utilize properly your title, H1 heading and the body text. In order this to be truly effective it would be best to select 2-3 keywords per page and ensure that they are present in your title, at least as one H1 heading and to be present in your body text with a proper density.

5. Aggressively interlinking – Some webmasters try to interlink too much in their hope to boost the ranking of their internal pages. Some even use plugins for popular CMS (such as Word press) where predefined anchor is being linked to a specific subpage. This results in an over optimized internal linking that could result in a Penguin penalty.

Remember that SEO is a process that involves the influence of over 200 factors. Always start from your site and once your site is ready move on with careful link building. Don’t spam exact anchor tags…as Google has changed. The world of SEO has changed as well and if you want to be truly successful, you need to stop thinking of how to stay under Google’s radar. Try to think how to add value to your site and to do link building at the same time. Writing quality posts is one way to do it. Google in its core is always about chasing high value sites/pages.