We are always interested in the pros and cons of a particular service we wish to use. It is important for a business firm to understand the working and benefits of these facilities of online marketing. Well your wish is granted as we discuss the benefits and the detriments of both these web techniques for marketing.

For the first timers PPC, pay per click is the paid advertisement appearing on the sides or bottom of the web pages that takes the users to your website. This method can be a quick way to get the flow of traffic towards your page. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process to get your site enlisted in the search engine result pages (SERPs) through web optimization. These two are completely different methods to channel the browsers in the direction of your web pages.

The bright side of PPC is that it is simple and rapid way to set an advertisement campaign working on the web. The apt use of keywords will get your ad and the revenues rolling on the same day as it is posted. This tactic is much easier when compared to the in-depth research and work required for SEO process. There are numerous search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Google and many similar interfaces that offer the PPC services. Many people would prefer this mode of approach to get profits right away.

The darker shade of PPC is visible when you pay high prices for availing these services. Every click has its price, so in due course you may not get desired results through this approach. Competition is the main drawback here as the auctioning process to get the best keywords can be a costly affair. SEO does not involve such challenges.

Playing by the search engine rules, running the race for indexing and page ranking has just move the bar of web marketing to a new high in these past years. The SEO has a slow and steady progress and when your site is older it gets better. Websites come to the internet to be the long term player, whereas you cannot say the same thing for PPC.  Even after few months your favorite blog or website can be found through a regular search, but an ad could be gone in few days or as per the changing trends and rates.

Marketing approaches are fighting with each other on the cost criteria and same is with SEO and PPC services. A layman may think these two are sides of the same coin but an expert can tell there is much more to each of these web marketing techniques. The PPC services gets the major benefit of traceability, the number of clicks can be tacked easily. SEO is seen battling with duplicate content, keywords, links, landing pages and URL limitations. In case you use both of these methods for publicizing your products you may have to prevent keyword cannibalization in a more intellectual manner.

Using different resources to achieve the same target makes it easier for us to reach the goal quickly with much ease. Competing with SEO or PPC alone may not take you very far from the beginning site. Learning from various approaches is the best way to conquer the digital marketing field.

A company having both set of teams should work hand in hand to get into organic listings and share their finds as far as terms or strategies are concerned. It will be a win-win situation for your firm and the benefits are bound to reach you in one way or another. Healthy competition is welcome, but only criticizing or showing thumbs down trick to other can lead to loss.

Discussion to execute ideas like the structure of landing pages, overall concept of a campaign, target audiences or research findings on a specific project can be a reason for the whole company to celebrate. Knowing the pros and cons of one another, shielding the drawbacks to overcome them and exploiting the pros for better revenues should be the combined goal of the two teams. Use of various tools to efficiently get the desired results is an essential aim of the company.

The web world is frequently varying and to keep up with the changing trends is the major challenge for all digital marketing companies. In the end, all we want and desire is success to maximum possible extent so go ahead and aim for the stars.

Duplicate version of your web page is known as the print version. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo penalize website postings that are very analogous as they seem like a copied data to the crawlers. Your website could have products listed and displayed in repeats based on their importance like price, quantity or availability at times. When the search engine is shown that the site is a legitimate part of the original content it will spare the site re-indexing or red flagging process. Rel canonical comes to your rescue when such a problems arise.

Apt use of Rel canonical

Search engines observe every change in your website and its related tags. Without complete know-how, using rel canonical can hurt your well designed and reputed site. Rel canonical is easy to use, but the correct application of this tag makes all the difference. Use rel canonical tag on the print version to direct it towards original page. You can just edit the <head> tag of the page without any modifications in the side of the server.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have search engines that identify rel canonical tag. The Search engine considers this tag only within a specific domain or sub domains, not across various multiple domains. The complete link set from your canonized page may or may not pass on to the other.

Improved Page navigation

Browsing a site can be improved using rel canonical in cases where redirecting a page would not help. URL format may be the important criteria, as some products require category and sub-category page formats.  To prevent risking re-indexing and red flagging of print versions rel canonical tag comes handy.

Checks multiple URL creation

Session IDs are frequently generated and 301 redirects may not be possible in such cases, rel canonical can be put to use here. URLs with tracking code that check link clicks or measure paths can have rel canonical tag. Keep your URLs relevant and sensible, so that adding a rel canonical doesn’t change your visitor graph extensively.

Some rel canonical benefits

In case you have ‘page not found’ error rel canonical will allow indexing of the page during repairs or redesigning of web pages. Search engines following a heuristic approach to find the canonical in case of a 404 error. You should follow the rules as you use rel canonical for relative paths and search engine processes your website in a regular format. Slight differences in your page content may be allowed while using rel canonical you must prevent chain of rel canonical to ascertain optimum canonization.

Rel canonical tag not required for the following:

1. Novel sites need not have rel canonical. The print version pages can be avoided when you have the opportunity to design it accordingly.
2. Moving to a single page from a complete site through canonization would not be a smart choice, as it could ruin years of hard work. Search engines de-index such pages and your ranking could be affected on a large scale.
3. Pagination may not involve repeated content, canonization because there are some techniques to keep crawlers off slightly similar pages.

Wrapping up the guide

Partial knowledge is harmful and this proverb suits best if you are using massively altering tags. After through solution searches if rel canonical is your only way out, use it gradually after repeated analysis and testing. Each search engine has its own way of processing such tags, so well informed use of such tags is recommended.

Everyone wants to compete and enhance their internet property for more pertinent marketing and prevent content duplication. Hence, it is essential that we use rel canonical tag wisely.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become such a broad term today that whichever activity drives any traffic on your website is considered as an SEO Activity! In earlier days, we – as SEO Consultants -  used to focus specifically on the structure and content of websites only, which we called “On-page SEO”. We tried hard to make sure that our clients’ websites have been set up right with proper page titles, meta text, content placement, image names etc. But today, the definition of SEO has changed expanded drastically. Now-a-days, SEO as a service is divided into 2 categories :-

1. On-Page SEO - optimize content, internal links, meta tags etc
2. Off-page SEO - backlinks, social media, forum posting, press release etc.

Honestly, I don’t agree with the concept of Off-page SEO. You may call it ‘Off-page promotions’ or ‘Off-page optimization’ but ‘Off-page SEO’ definitely does not make sense to me. Wikipedia defines SEO as

the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural or un-paid (organic or algorithmic) search results.

Then why is everyone writing so much about “Off-page SEO” when, ideally, the term even doesn’t exist at all? I leave this up to you all to help me find the answer in your comments below.

Just because it is such a popular term these days, I could not stop myself from using it as the title of my blog article even though I don’t agree with it This is also one of the problems with SEO Consultants & business owners like us – that we have to keep our readers/customers happy with giving them what they want to take!

Image Courtesy - www.topspotoptimisation.co.uk

Coming back to the topic of today’s discussion, which is about the best “Off-page SEO” tactics or “Off-page Promotion” (for my own sake) that can help you drive consistent traffic on to your website for a long run. These techniques are just the ones which I have tried myself and achieved reasonable success for my clients. You may have tried something else which worked for you so don’t hesitate to share that with our readers.

1.  Participate in Forums & discussion boards: 5-6 responses or 2-3 new questions a day (with your website’s URL in the signature) in 5 different popular forums a day is all that it will take to get a decent traffic on to your website. It will hardly take you more than 2 minutes to write a response or come up with a question to ask the community.  Spending 20 minutes a day religiously on forums for 2 weeks will start generating traffic on your website that you won’t even imagine.  Of course, you need to make sure that your responses and questions are intelligent & look like real contribution. Do not post for the sake of posting. It will give wrong impression and other forum members will look down upon you with contempt! Some will even mark you as spam leading to deletion of your account and your hopes as well.

Many SEO companies offer this service really cheap, say 1¢ per post. DO NOT fall for that. They will do more harm than any good. My advice would be that you should hire someone who (1) understands your business’s objectives and can (2) write decent English. He should  really contribute in the forums to lure other readers in clicking on his signature URL.

Some of my favorite SEO Forums are :

• Digitalpoint
• Webmaster World
• V7n Community

2. Publish Blogs / News / Press Releases & submit them in bookmarking websites - Everyone in the web community knows the importance of blog and news updates on your company/ product website. Not only it attracts search engine crawlers to visit your website more often, it also helps you generate more back links by submitting these articles on press release and bookmarking websites. Tons of bookmarking websites have sprouted up recently. And believe it or not, most of them are a good source of traffic generation for your website.  The ones that I use most frequently for my clients are :

• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Mixx
• Propeller
• Kaboodle (for online stores)
• Yahoo Buzz
• Technorati
• Clipmarks

There are still more than 200 bookmarking websites which you should definitely consider for this task.

3. Create your social profile & share your news update with the community – The first names that lighten up in our minds are Facebook, Twitter & Myspace. Make sure you create a public social profile for the company that you are promoting. You ought to have your Facebook Fan page, Twitter profile, Youtube profile, LinkedIn profile (of yourself and/or your clients). All the websites I just mentioned require you to sign up and they provide you a unique URL of your profile. This is your social profile. Following are must-do activities whenever you have a new blog or new story published on your website or blog -

• Tweet about it on Twitter
• Do a status update on Facebook & LinkedIn
• Update status on Ecademy as well. Ecademy (has a lot of junk but) is still a good source of traffic once you have a strong network.
• Share your blog article on discussion boards & forum of these social networks.
• Flickr – “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not exactly true in the world of SEO which relies heavily on content full of words. But still Flickr stands out and can become a good source of traffic for your website. Just make sure that whenever you write an article, you add an image in your post and submit that image on your Flickr profile with apt tags and description. If you have an online store and sell products, make sure all the images of your products are also submitted on to your Flickr profile. Picasa, Photobucket & Picli are some other photo sharing networks.

Once your profile has been set up, you should start building a community by adding/inviting friends to join your network.

• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion
• Slideshare (See a sample below)

5. Yahoo Answers & similar question/answer websites – I love Yahoo Answers and On Startup Answers community where you can post any question you want and community members will respond within hours. SEO companies are using similar sites to drive traffic by maneuvering questions in such a manner that makes other members click on their URLs. It may not be the best way to get the type of traffic you want but still it is one of the widely used method these days. Again, you have to be very cautious with your language so that it does not appear as spam.

6. Article re-writing and distribution – Haven’t we covered this in point (2) above? Not really. This is about article re-writing. Numerous SEO companies are hiring writers to re-write the same articles many times in different versions and keep distributing them on hundreds of press release & bookmarking websites.  It works quite often since your content is not copied and the crawlers will see it as original stuff.

7. Local business listings on search engines & yellow pages- All major search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo offer business owners to submit their business with full details of name, address, phone number etc. This helps in getting local traffic for your website. Optimizing for local search listings is the discussion of a different topic that I will publish sometime in near future. For now, you should just make sure that your business has been listed on all local listings websites. A few examples of such sites are -

• Hotfrog,
• Business.com
• Superpages.com

These are some of the widely used “Off-page promotion” techniques by SEO Companies across the globe. Please feel free to keep your opinions on this post in the comment box below.

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Microsoft's Bing will now power Yahoo's Search Results.

But what does it really mean to your website rankings? How would it effect your SEO efforts? Our experts analyzed its possible consequences and are trying to answer some of the questions you are probably wondering about right now. Read on…

1. Should I optimize my website for Yahoo! SERPs now ?

There’s no need, really. Especially since Yahoo! will henceforth use Bing’s algorithm to show its search results, which basically means you will be wasting your time if you optimize for Yahoo!

2. Will my site’s current rankings change on Yahoo?

Yes, it should since Yahoo! will now be powered by Microsoft’s search technology which means search results should be the same on Yahoo and Bing. This deal will most like be a boon to those webmasters and SE Experts who are ranking well on Bing. Obviously, we’re not very hopeful about the current top rankers on Yahoo!

3. What about Yahoo! Search APIs, site explorer etc?

Honestly, even we do not have a clear answer to this. We think, however, that it would now be influenced by Bing (Microsoft) results as well. We’ll of course let you know when we know ourselves

4. Will Yahoo’s (paid) directory submissions be any useful for my website rankings now?

Yahoo’s paid directory submission has never been the factor of your organic search ranking. So no, it will not effect your ranks.

So here we are, providing you a first hand account of the latest buzz in the Search Engine World along with our humble opinion about the same. We’d like to know your feedback about this development and its possible consequences. Don’t forget to drop your comments below. We’ll keep you updated with more information as it comes.

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