Locating Cost Efficient SEO

If you are looking to promote the online presence of a business website, you will likely want to hire the services of a skilled and responsible SEO company. Since there is such a wide array of companies offering SEO services, it can at times be quite difficult to decide which company is most appropriate for your particular circumstances.

Here are several steps which can be taken to help source the right SEO Company:

Knowledgeable of advanced SEO strategies: When it comes to hiring a cost efficient SEO company you want to make certain they are highly knowledgeable in the latest techniques and marketing trends. If you're in an industry that is highly competitive, it will be crucial that the SEO agency you decide to hire is able to incorporate the most advanced techniques. Also, you want to be certain that an entirely ethical approach is used to market the website to the targeted audience. You also want to make certain that the SEO experts are friendly and easy to communicate with to make sure the project runs as smooth as possible.

SEO packages: In choosing the right company for promoting your online presence, you want to make certain they are able to offer a choice of packages which can be customized to your specific circumstances. You want to avoid the SEO companies that attempt to offer a single, all-inclusive package. It will be more beneficial if you are able to discuss with the SEO professionals the available choices, and create a personal package that is best able to focus on the individual optimization requirements for the most effective results. A further reason to make sure you're able to arrange a customized package is that you will be certain you won't be paying for services that aren't likely to be relevant for your particular needs.

Inspect the company portfolio: An effective means to establish the qualities of a SEO company is by researching their prior work history, which can be achieved by viewing the portfolio of previous work completed. This is often featured on the company's website. Alternatively, if this isn't an option, you might want to use the Internet to research the company's name to see whether there are any favorable or negative comments online. You might also wish to search for their presence on such sites as LinkedIn which will enable you to get a further overview of the services offered by the company.

Website Design

After you have done keyword research, mapping your chosen search terms to content is the first task in translating keyword research into site design. Search engine friendly design requires proper keyword placement within the site that will deliver searchers to the best landing page for their specific search queries.

Using the homepage to target very specific search terms is the easiest way with new websites / in the beginning but as you improve the link popularity of your site, it's usually best to target more generic searches with the homepage and to move those search terms onto the appropriate landing pages. Your keyword strategy will evolve over time as it depends upon which pages you use to target different search terms.

All of the site's content must be accessible by human visitors and spiders within three mouse clicks from the homepage. Your site's internal linking structure influences the search engine rankings of individual pages in subtle ways.

A typical website has a homepage, category pages, product / service pages, support pages and information pages.

The homepage provides clear paths by which any visitor may find the information he or she seeks. The search terms that describe the general focus of the site are used on the homepage. Searchers who combine two or more generic search terms are likely to land on the homepage so it is not the ideal landing page for very specific search terms.

Category pages are used to target visitors who are either gathering information or comparing alternatives. Use more specific terms than those on the homepage.

Product / service pages are dedicated to specific product / service offerings.

Product or service pages should by keyword-rich.

Information Pages are the supplemental pages that support the website's selling or educating process and provide more detailed information, comparisons, feature lists etc.

Information pages are a great place to bring searchers who are in the information gathering or comparison mode.

Support Pages include contact pages, support material, documentation, Fans and site maps.

Crawl ability (how accessible the site's pages are to search engine spiders) and Site Navigation are two important aspects of search engine friendly design.

Any page that's indexed by a search engine might become a landing page for a searcher.

Good search engine friendly design makes it easy for the search engine spiders.

Solving a site's crawl ability issues will allow search engines to find all of the site's important content. Ensure that the same content is never accessible through more than one URL. When a spider believes that it's being given duplicate content, it may stop crawling and flag the site as unreliable.

Site Navigation (how accessible the rest of the site is to visitors who enter through any of its landing pages). No matter where a visitor lands, you want to guide them back into your site's sales funnel.

Your websites has to work for human visitors.

It's easy for a visitor to find their way to other pages on the site from the homepage, category and product pages because these pages are always fully integrated with the site navigation system.

Information and support pages also attract clicks, as long as these pages are part of the overall navigation scheme, although these kinds of pages are not designed as entry pages and are intended to be destinations. Information pages are often implemented as pop-up windows keep visitors on the product / service pages, while providing answers to their more specific questions. Make pop-up windows crawl able to ensure that visitors arriving at those pages from search engines can navigate to the rest of the site.

Don't forget to run your pages through an HTML validate to eliminate any obvious errors.

Errors in your HTML code can have a huge affect on the search engine spiders.

So be careful to make sure your pages are clean before the spiders see them.

Browsers are very forgiving with common problems such as extra tags and tags that aren't closed, but the search spiders to choke. Extra title-tags may be interpreted as Spam. Don't overload the alt attribute of image tags with keywords, it's intended to offer a text alternative if the user can't see the image.

On-Page SEO Factors

On-page optimization for your websites is often overlooked and is also the easiest way to rank for keywords in search engines completely free. These are the top ten factors that you should be considering when writing content and constructing an optimized layout for all of your websites. Do not feel the need to check off all of these factors but be sure that you take them into consideration. Do not ever sacrifice readability and appearance for the sake of optimization because it will affect the visitor's experience and that is what really matters in the end. Proper on-page SEO will get you ranking for very low competition keywords without the aid of any off-page work.

1. Meta Content

Title & Description - Provide intriguing descriptions of your content! This will not only help your rankings in search engines but will additionally help increase click through from the search engine results pages.

2. Optimized URLs

Don't use URLS that look like this: website.com?p=123 (as an example).
We are looking for URLs that look like this:

website.com/product-name
website.com/category-name/product-name
This is easier for your visitors to read and will help search engines identify what your content is really about.

3. No Duplicate Content

Try and customize whatever framework you are using as much as possible whether it is WordPress, Joomla or any of the other many standard frameworks. You can usually get away with merely customizing the theme that you are using in conjunction with the framework. It is a lot of work to create unique content but it is absolutely worth it in the long term. Duplicate content is quickly figured out and penalized leading to short-term results that won't endure the test of time. Duplicate content "can" rank but it is not a good strategy because it doesn't tend to last long. This is speculation based on a number of case studies that I have performed and observed.

4. Content on pages

Add lots of content - as much as possible wherever you can. Google and search engines love long content and it gives them more to work with. You can think of it this way: the more content you have on your page, the more keywords Google (and others) can associate your content with. Simply put you will show up for more long-tail searches.

Unique content - don't copy and paste from other sources of the product if your reselling ie. Amazon. It's easy to do but will not give you good results. I already mentioned this but I cannot emphasize it enough.

5. Use Rich Snippets

Learn more about implementing them in wherever you can. The code aspect of these is out of the scope of this article but there are numerous guides online that you can look at. If you still haven't found a theme yet, try and find one that supports these by default. Google is weighing these factors heavier all of the time. Rich snippets include (but are not limited to):

Reviews - (1-5 stars)
Picture (author, product)
Video thumbnails and music
6. Get people to leave comments

If you have a comment section on your posts or website be sure to get people to leave comments. This will add to the content on your page and will have you showing up for even more search terms. Provocative content really helps create conversation. You can even start it yourself by posting the first comment.

7. Try and improve website performance

Use plugins that help with caching to help reduce load on the server and decrease wait times for visitors.

Optimize CSS by compiling all of your CSS files into one. There are usually plugins that can help with this depending on your framework.

Compress images as much as possible. Don't sacrifice quality too much but be aware that these use up a lot of bandwidth for your server and are usually are the largest thing for visitors to download.

Reducing javascript wherever possible. If you are including unnecessary javascript libraries then remove them. Also, a javascript-heavy page can be difficult for search engines to comprehend and can create a slow experience for visitors who do not have a strong computer. I am not saying don't use javascript, just don't use TOO MUCH javascript.

It is debatable whether this actually helps rank your websites better in search engines but it most likely does and will also result in increased conversions and visitor confidence. Nobody likes a slow website.
8. Create sitemaps for the website.

Sitemaps (often in XML format) help search engines crawl your website. You can submit your sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools - sign up if you haven't already it takes 5 minutes. There are many plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap for you every time you update your content. For example, WordPress has a great free plugin called "Yoast SEO Plugin" that will make this process automated. Be sure to include pictures and videos in the sitemap.

9. Put products and/or categories on homepage.

This helps share authority with product pages and drips down the authority of your homepage to your other pages. This specific example only really applies to e-commerce websites but you should be linking to your other pages from your homepage regardless of what type of website you are creating.

10. Interlink pages

Put related content on posts and pages. These include recommended products, popular content, etc. This will not only help share the "link juice" around all of your pages but it will also help keep the visitor engaged. Offering related and popular content on your website has been proven in many case studies to increase the number of page views per visitor.

If you have any questions or comments please reach out to me by visiting my website and using the contact form. I am always happy to offer a helping hand.

Google Map Optimization

Google introduced the Google Maps tool in the year 2004. Very recently, the name of the service has been changed to Google+ Local. However a large number of business owners still call it Google maps. It is a local search application. Google local maps optimization was developed so that business owners make the best use of the application for increased business.

The competition for gaining a high rank in Google Maps is constantly increasing. Google regularly modifies its search engine algorithm. This makes it difficult for business owners to develop an effective search marketing strategy. However, you can use certain tips and tricks in order to get the best results.

Citations

Citations are actually mentions of your product or service on review sites and business directories. You should build citations before you claim to be verified by Google Maps. Citations are like word of mouth promotion in the internet. The more quality referrals you receive the more the chance will be for you to capture good ranking.

Fill up every Field

You should devote some time and complete every query provided by Google Maps. Enhance the Google maps optimization by giving accurate and detailed information about the business. For example, the URL of your organic site must match your Google listing's URL.

Location

Businesses can spend hours without any kind of positive results if they do not provide information about their geographic location. Do not use inaccurate locations. If you own a shop in the state of California, do not use the geo-location of any other state. Local searches will work best when you give the pin point location of your business.

Cross Promotion

Use the successful promotions of your organic website and use them on the Google Maps listing. You should promote important events, bundling of product and discounts and offers.

Online Reviews

Every time the name of your business is mentioned in a 3rd party review site, the Google Maps listing of your business will be boosted. Google will index all of the online reviews and will collect them for the listing.

Negative Reviews

Generally we try to defend our company or business whenever there is a negative review about ourselves. However, it will be wise to treat a negative review as a customer complaint made in person. Your business's reputation will be better if you properly respond to the negative customer reviews.

Google Boost Ads

Google is always creating new products and services that are implanted by business owners in their strategies. These days a business owner is able to create online search ad and that too from their account at Google maps. However, you cannot control the keywords. These are known as Google boost ads and they offer a way of maximum optimization for your business.

Local Submissions

Local directories can provide Google with vital information that will improve your ranking in Google Maps. Give your focus to the primary local submission directories. They will help you to make your business credible.

All these are taken in a way to accelerate your marketing in search engines.

Selling Digital Media

So, You Want To Sell Digital Media?

How many of you have gone to online media shows and found yourself looking at exhibitor booth signs and wondered:

a. I still don't get it... what do these guys sell?

b. What do they do that is different from each other?

c. Is this something I should know more about?

Are the media buyers confused, too? It's hard not to be when the media sellers are all saying the same thing: "We are the best! We are the #1 way to reach your audience. ROI? Yep, we got it! We're #1!"

Every day, hundreds of digital media sellers attempt to sell their offering by pointing out their unique grip on the market (Theirs? Yours?). They reach the right audience in the right way and therefore should be in the consideration set, right? They are all counting on agencies and advertisers appreciating their unique value. We all want it to be obvious - "obviously, with our brand and yours, we are the right place for you (your advertiser) to advertise."

Well, they are all right - for someone. But, how should they communicate this effectively? Tout the reputation of their brand? That is offline thinking.

The mistake most online media sellers make is that they don't think of advertisers as publishers, which they are. In fact, every person and every brand and even some agencies are online publishers. If you have a Facebook page (1 in 7 people on the planet), LinkedIn profile, Google+, blog or Pinterest account, you are a publisher. If you are a brand with a corporate website, microsite, Facebook fan page, Twitter feed, etc., you are a publisher. And, obviously, online and traditional offline publishers are publishers as are businesses like retail and wholesale... even app developers - if you have a URL, you are a publisher.

And, we publishers all want the same thing:

Traffic. People coming to our content. More and more visitors each day. Ideally, the cost to us for each new visitor, on average, is less and less. We want traffic that is engaged with our content and the measure we all use is - can this traffic be scaled and monetized? While not every digital asset is e-commerce, we want to monetize our traffic through "proportional or fractional" conversions. To explain: if I sell products or generate leads or subscriptions there is a value to each of these "full conversions."

But, if I want people to read my blog and tell a friend, that is a fractional conversion. In fact, every engagement point is a fractional conversion. Even something as innocent as page views: What is it worth to us to get a visitor to go from the landing page to another page? What is worth to us to get our average user to increase their time on site from 1 minute to 2 minutes? What is each Facebook "like" worth? How many downloads of white papers equals' one person buying our service? What is the actual monetary value we assign to each of these engagements?

If you are selling media, you need to learn the value and goal of each of these desired engagements. Now, take that information and focus your presentation on matching their goals with these four attributes of your advertising opportunity:

1. Over indexing

2. Zero Share

3. Unduplicated Audience

4. Loyalty

Let's look at each in detail:

Over indexing refers to measuring specific buying behaviors of your visitor's compared to those of your peer group. Which quality - THAT IS IMPORTANT TO A SPECIFIC ADVERTISER - does your site or network reach in greater abundance or to a greater degree than your peer group of advertising competitors?

"Zero Share" refers to advertisers who are on someone else's advertising vehicle but not yours. Sellers need to know this in order to more strategically find leads; Agencies concerned with understanding the digital landscape, separation of advertisers and category exclusives should know this too.

Unduplicated Audience. In the same way as there is always a bigger fish, there is always a bigger network that also reaches the same target your site does. So, what part of your audience is more likely to be found on your site than your competitors (including the network's ad inventory on sites that are part of the "bigger" network).

Loyalty refers to the tendency of repeat visitors on an ad-supported site/network to come to the site by way of "favorites" (as opposed to first time visitors who get there via Search Engines and Social Media -check the referring codes on site visitors to see how visitors find your site) as well as engage with your content across all of your platforms. For example, does your small but loyal audience all download your app? Do a high percentage of them view your site on a mobile device? Do they attend your events or follow you on Twitter?
No site or network is inherently better - the question is can you do a better job of matching their goals to your offering - and backing up your claims with real numbers and credible research sources. If you can make that case, you will be #1 in the advertiser's eyes. Otherwise, you are #2.

Steve Bookbinder is CEO of Digital Media Training.

Evolving Business

When people complain how technology, especially the internet, kills jobs they could not be doing a better job of advertising the fact that they don't get it. Starting with cavemen and right up to the present, every new advancement brought better jobs and lives for all of us. We never deliberately stop innovating just to hold on to old jobs. Some jobs exist without enough skilled people to fill them. For example, there are many new jobs building robots, tablets and high-speed micro-processors, etc. There are plenty of jobs for people with internet advertising skills - in many cases, more jobs than skilled people. The Pyramids were built by paid labor, not slaves, before the invention of the wheel. Would they have complained about the darn wheel - "this is going to kill jobs - much better to haul slabs of heavy stone by hand, slowly!" Maybe some would have said that - but as soon as someone thought of putting 4 wheels together, the game changed and suddenly there are plenty of new, great jobs that didn't exist before.

In the same way, those who embrace the newest technology will find no end of jobs and most importantly, no end of new opportunities to become owners of new businesses. Can't think of a good one? Well, here are 4 new business models that didn't exist pre-internet and are now the foundation for great businesses and jobs going forward:

1. Stores without buildings, products or warehouses (perfect for people with big dreams but only a small pile of funds to start with)In the past, to go into retail you needed to buy or rent a store and then source, invent and/or make products, buy licenses, invest in warehousing, shipping and distribution. Now, you simply create and market a website. Other companies white label their products to you and ship with your custom labeling. They provide the page on your website. This model means that some small manufacturer of quality goods-using local labor -- can now get to a global market. It means that a marketing-focused entrepreneur can build a business that can scale, creating jobs locally. Customers get the best products, best shopping experience and lowest prices while at the same time finding stuff they need, can use, and ordinarily would not find or pay for.

2. Have cake and eat it too (by partnering with your competitors). You help a big brand sell their products. Not only do affiliate marketers whose only strength is to drive and convert internet traffic make a living with this model, but this can be extended into a Miracle on 34th Street kind-of-way (Macy's Santa sent a customer to competitor Gimbels). Suppose you are locked in competition with a similar provider and you know that buyers are likely to shop and compare. Why not have an affiliate sales relationship with them to make it easier for customers to do their comparison shopping from your site and now you get paid whether they buy from you OR your competition. A button on your website makes it easier for the customer to go where they were going anyway.

3. Put your turnstile in front of the entrance of other people's stores- this is the ultimate position for any internet marketer. Go to any website but go to them through my search engine. Go to any site in a vertical but do it through my website, comparison shopping engine or review portal. No need for content, no need for anything other than a commitment to making customer's lives easier. This flood of people going through your turnstile can be monetized in a variety of ways - serve them ads, charge monthly subscription, offer them a chance to buy something unique or send them to someone else's turnstile.

4. Rock, Paper, Scissors- Platforms, content and distribution are always locked in a Rock-Paper-Scissors battle for supremacy. Look at mobile devices - once this new platform was established there was a vacuum for content to fill it. Suddenly, there are apps and a responsive websites (websites programmed to shape themselves into the screen size and computing power of a mobile device) that not only allows mobile device users to have a better user experience in general but to also do the things one can do when out and about and not tethered to a PC. Once a tablet with content existed, distributors fought for control -transmission services wrestled each other for control of the platform and content... suddenly it was all about Verizon vs. AT&T then together against Cable then Cable vs. non-traditional video like YouTube and Hulu, then online services against Amazon, Apple, Roku and others. You could either develop the platform or develop content for someone's platform. Or distribute that platform and/or content on someone else's service.

Bonus 5th model:

5. Free - the content is free so the maximum number of people comes to the content-perfect for advertising. Or, if your content is so good that people will pay-per-view, then save them money with monthly subscription. Augment or replace the monthly subscription with a loyalty program that offers registered users the chance to buy -or win products... and then sell the registered visitors names to lead generation organizations. Don't like marketing? Then stick to your content-making-specialty by syndicating your content. Too much work? Then create your own content site using someone else's free content and then work with network-fill partners to generate advertising revenue.

Your Headline

Why should your headline for your blog post or any written content you create require that you devote at least 15% of the total effort put into the complete package of writing anything so it is finished and ready to be published?

There is more to SEO writing than keyword density. The fact is you really need to have a headline that catches their eye!

You need a headline that really grabs their attention or creates a question in their mind; a headline that somehow really jumps out at them!

Why?

Consider this:

Anytime someone searches for anything anywhere on the internet the search results will normally give them at least 10 choices on the first page returned. This does not include the fact that most of the time there will be paid ads as well so let's make 15 the number of choices they have to choose from on a single page.

A basic principle of SEO writing that you need to understand is that people scan, they don't read! This is especially true when they are reviewing the results of a search they have just made.

Your headline is the first chance you have to grab their attention. Once they skim past your headline it is extremely doubtful they'll come back and look again therefore you have just lost a potential customer!

So what good is all the effort you put into composing a great piece of SEO writing if you really skimp on the headline so no one is interested enough to click and visit your web page?

If you can't get anyone interested in visiting that web page to read what you wrote then all your effort spent on that great piece of writing is wasted!

For SEO writing purposes your headline not only has to be awesome as you can make it but you need your keyword phrase in there as well.

But wait! It gets even better. Despite a few exceptions over the last few years, Google and the Yahoo! / Bing search results limit the headline to a character count of 65.

That's right; you have only 65 characters including spaces to squeeze in your keyword phrase and write an irresistible headline because the first 65 characters are all that will be displayed.

Yes, this is another aspect of good SEO writing that will obviously take some time and some creative effort.

But again, writing great content that no ever visits so no one ever reads it is a waste of your time.

Let me present a little mathematical equation to explain to you why writing a great headline is necessary for good, complete SEO writing:

You have written a great blog post on a less searched, less competitive keyword phrase. Not a lot of searches per month but remember the internet will give you 'time' as you'll see below (and these numbers are low in this example).

If that blog post (or any piece of content) appears just 100 times on the first page of a search results returned each year for 5 years. That is 500 people you could possibly get to visit your site!

Now we'll say the time you put into your headline is 15 minutes so:

15 minutes = 900 seconds; 900 seconds divided among 500 people = 1.8 Seconds Of Your Time And Effort Per Person!

That is why I say that it might seem a little slow and frustrating at times creating a good headline but that effort is actually very small for each person that will see it!

I would consider 1.8 seconds per person to be a great investment!

Look, if you really want to be accomplished at SEO writing you need to understand the whole package and I haven't mentioned anything regarding how SEO writing works with a summary or description.

Your Business Today

Given the skyrocketing amounts of internet traffic, getting your business to stand out has become a monumental task in itself. This is where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, comes into picture. A critical part of any modern business, SEO helps businesses attract online traffic, helping them easily and cheaply maximize the efficiency of the traffic on their website.

The following is a list of tips to help your business increase its online presence, drawing new avenues of business -

* Register your site with all the search engines available, like Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and others.

* Develop an effective social media strategy. Not having a strong and constant presence on social media websites, like Facebook and Twitter, can be extremely detrimental.

* Ensure the inclusion of your keywords or keyword phrases in everything on your website, including test links, alternative text for images and the domain name.

* Have a domain name that contains your most popular target keywords or phrases. This enables your site to be found easily, adding to your search engine ratings and your site's preference among search engine bots.

* Consistent posts containing useful information and content will enable search engines to take note and promote your site accordingly.

* Fresh and useful content will also result in greater traffic coming to your site, thus promoting you in search results as well.

* As a rule of thumb, the simplest and clearest design makes it all the more likely that your site will be recommended by a search engine.

* Graphically intensive sites take more time to load, which may cause low bandwidth consumers to move to alternative avenues.

* Sharing a server with other sites that have been banned, or are known for spamming, will have an adverse impact on your search engine ratings.

* Another key point to keep in mind is boosting your site's Page rank. This is accomplished by developing content on your website which engages customers for a longer period of time.

* Linking up with relevant websites which will offer a link going back to your site (i.e. back-links) will also help enhance your Page rank.

* Submitting articles to online magazine websites can be extremely useful if they serve your website's target market. These articles are often archived, thereby allowing potential customers to access them even after a significant time lapse since its creation.

Internet Marketing

One naked truth about internet marketing and SEO is that there is no bureaucrat textbook on the appropriate procedure or line of attack. All depends on the business executives or owners to determine the internet marketing as well as the search engine optimization that will work for their various businesses. However, optimizing of your site for search engine always consider what people search for, how the search engines work, the real keywords or search terms typed into search engines as well as the search engines that are favored by their various targeted audience as an internet marketing strategy.

Optimizing a site may entail editing its HTML, content and associated coding in order to remove barriers and increase its relevance to certain keywords to the indexing activities of search engines. Another procedure of optimizing search engine is by promoting a website to boost the number of inbound links or backlinks.

Therefore, to achieve the best of internet marketing, the workload must be segregated because online marketing is excessively enormous and multifaceted to be managed by a single person. In other words, it needs a team of professionals who are knowledgeable across one or more of the distinct discipline, to be successfully managed. The fact that employing an internal team can be pricey is the main reason for a lot of business owners deciding on outsourcing their internet marketing to organizations.

For instance, you may decide to employ freelance writers to write content for your company blog. On the other hand, in order to maintain the stability of your social media channels, you could also employ social media marketer. Always think of the cost-effective ways of performing the lots of online marketing aspects.

In addition, allocate an adequate amount of money to your internet marketing campaign and stop looking for low-priced SEO services that will not take your business anywhere. This is what is called "penny wise, pounds foolish". Therefore, focus on building your own personal brand through guest blogging, organically build your brand's social presence, engage in social media marketing as well as design and carry out a quality content strategy for your website in order to create a center of attention to inbound links.

Having an offsite content approach is another way to get the best of internet marketing and SEO. This is due to the fact that a planned SEO link building promotion is vital for the success of your internet marketing idea. Moreover, Google's ranking algorithm and inbound links are the heaviest weighted factor. You can gain positive branding, exposure and referral traffic when highly authoritative websites link to your own and the consequence of having more links is to pave way for more customers and clients for your service or product simply because links are like roads to your website.

Successful Business

Search engine marketing for business has changed dramatically over the past 18 months with engaging content much more important than it ever was in the past. This has resulted in a change in the relationship between businesses and the outside agencies employed to deliver an improved website rank on the search engines. This article discusses the key changes and suggests a revised business/agency relationship.

There are two key elements to search engine marketing known as On site and Off site SEO. On site SEO is well understood and has changed little in recent years. It is associated with website code and how it is interpreted by the major search engines. Page content is probably more important than ever but the meta title and meta descriptions are still relevant. Meta keywords still have a role although their importance has been significantly reduced over time.

Offsite SEO for any business is associated with building site credibility as measured by the search engine algorithms. Traditionally, this was measured by the number of incoming links to a website. Over time this measure was improved to cover the number, quality and relevance of incoming links. Now, after the major algorithm updates of 2012, it is less about links and more about how users engage with a website.

Relevant content, both on and off site, should engage users and the search engines are attempting to measure this engagement. There appears to be little doubt quality incoming links are still important but now content and how that content is shared and engaged with is key. There is much hype about content marketing and socially sharing content via the various major social media tools such as Google+, Twitter, Facebook and (key for business) LinkedIn.

The implications for traditional search engine marketing agencies are major. In the past a SEO agency could optimise a website co (onsite) and build quality inbound links (offsite) with minimal reference back to the client. A business could engage a marketing agency to improve the position of the business website and simply leave them to deliver.

With the increasing importance of relevant content it is no longer possible for a business to simply hire and forget an agency. The business is in the best possible position to generate content (and lots of it). The marketing agency role is then to set the content marketing strategy and formulate a plan, enhance basic content delivered by the business and distribute that content by the most appropriate media to secure engagement.

For successful search engine marketing for business a partnership is required between the business and the marketing agency. Between them engaging content must be generated and delivered to potential customers on an ongoing basis. Appropriate media (including social media such as Google+ and Twitter) must be chosen to ensure the content reaches the target audience.