When you are considering your SEO marketing strategy for your online sales business, it is important to utilize long tail keyword phrases to get the right traffic. These are very specific phrases that contain adjectives to help precisely define what a searcher is looking for. By using long tail keywords you limit the traffic going to your site; however you ensure that it is much higher quality traffic and they are much more likely to become customers.

For example if you are selling beach rentals by the week in Florida, a keyword like Florida vacation is simply too broad and will be very competitive. If you use it your site will receive lots of visitors but few will buy. In addition, it is very hard for a site to rank high in the results of such a broad search. However, if you were to use a long tail keyword phrase like “St. Augustine Beach House for rent”, you would get much fewer hits but they would be much more targeted and would likely be actually in the market for what you are selling. In this case the percentage of visitors who become customers is much higher and your SEO marketing techniques are more effective.

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Here’s the big question, ‘Is SEM the same thing as SEO?’ Well the short answer is yes and no, but let’s look at what each is first.

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In short, both are done in an effort to get your website ranked as high as possible in the major search engines to increase your online presence and hopefully your bottom line. So what are the differences?

SEO is using keywords and phrases in the body of your text in a relevant manner in order to gain the attention of the search engines. SEM is really a wide-ranging term. SEM is everything that can be done using current technology to get the attention of the search engines and thus promoting the website and increasing its web traffic, its web presence, and in the case of a business website, it’s all important bottom line. That being said, SEO is a vital part of SEM and without it SEM is a moot point.

There are however certain aspects of SEM that are definitely on the outside realm of SEO. These aspects include:

•    Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising
•    Paid inclusion
•    Traditional advertising

While all can be important to your websites success, they have nothing to do with optimizing your website for the search engines.

So the next time you hear SEM think of SEO only on steroids. Here’s the catch….once you get the web traffic to your website you have to make sure that the site is a good one, so don’t waste your time with SEO and SEM unless your site is up to par.

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Alright so you know that a great SEO technique is to write articles that are relevant to your website and then submit those articles to article directories right? Do you also know that you should be spinning your articles? Allow me to explain.

If you write a wonderful article about something that is relevant to your website and then you submit that article to 50 different article directories you can actual hurt yourself, not help yourself. Why? Too much of the same thing is no good when it comes to pleasing the search engines and this type of action will quickly be viewed as spam. Do it enough and without knowing it you will be penalized by the search engines. This is where spinning comes in.

Take that same great article you wrote and re-write it or ‘spin’ it four times. Now go to those same article directories and submit one spin ten times each and you get a total of 50. Your content and your name are still going out to 50 article directories and the search engines don’t whack you for spamming. Win, win.

When you spin your articles, just be sure they are actually spun. Don’t change a word here and there as you will not be helping your cause. You actually need to change the article by at least 30 percent for it to be considered a unique article, so take your time and really do a good job spinning. Trust me, on the World Wide Web it is much better to be labeled a spinner than a spammer.

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You hear more and more these days about the importance of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and this is for good reason. Once you are found on the first page of the major Internet search engines then your web traffic will go crazy. So really everyone’s goal who owns a website should be to get to that first page.

That being said I have put together five quick tips that won’t guarantee you to get to page one on Google, but they will sure help you start your march to the top:

•    Keep it fresh: the search engines love fresh and relevant content. You should always be updating your site and adding new content whenever you can. This is something that the search engines live for.
•    Link up: Don’t be greedy with receiving links and then stingy in return, be the opposite. Link up whenever you have a relevant site and show your love. This action typically brings the love back to you and thus creates more links and better ranking as a result.
•    Create a blog: Going along with the first point, if your site doesn’t change that often then you need to create a blog on your website. This will create the all important fresh text that makes the search engines happy.
•    Make it easy: If your website is too complicated it will discourage others from wanting to exchange links with you or link to you. Make it a nice easy site that everyone will want to be a part of.
•    Don’t spam: Spam equals online death…period. Yes you can spam inside your own website; it is called SEO spam. Avoid using your keywords too much and focus on good keyword density inside the body of the text but make sure that it flows and reads properly.

Remember that in order to be successful with SEO you need to work on it every day. Yes the task is daunting at times, but when your website is on the first page of the major search engines you will see why it was all worth it.

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PPC stands for Pay Per Click and it is exactly what it sounds like; you pay a certain amount of money every time someone clicks that link that takes them to your website. These links usually show up on the right side of the search engines and are a dead giveaway as they are under ‘Sponsored links.’ A PPC Campaign can be a great way to get more visitors to your website but just because you do a PPC Campaign doesn’t mean you will necessarily make more money.

First things first, how is your website looking these days? I have clicked on PPC links before and when I got to the website I wondered, ‘What the heck is this person thinking?’ If you are going to spend money to get people to your website, make sure your website is looking as sharp as a new Cadillac, not like an old beat up Hugo. Having a bad looking site will only get people to click away from your site faster that they clicked on and you will still have to pay your PPC bill.

Next you have to consider your budget. If you do have an advertising budget, then by all means give PPC a try. If after a month or two you find it is not working for you, then try something else.

Lastly, never let the fact that people are finding you online due to a PPC Campaign make you lazy. You should always be working on your site and utilizing SEO techniques to gain organic viewers –ones that find you through search engines naturally.- After all, the only thing better than a visitor that buys something from your website after finding you via PPC is a visitor that buys something from your website and found you on their own….hence you don’t have to pay for that click.

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When you are preparing text for your website it is important to use a method known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. SEO is a way that you use certain keywords and phrases throughout the body of your text so that the search engines will pick up on it and thus rank you higher. But there is a fine line between good keyword density and using keywords too much in which case it could be labeled as SEO spam.

SEO spam, just like any other spam is bad news and the quickest way I know of to an online death. For this reason it is extremely important that when you write your SEO content that the keywords are included throughout the body of the text, but they must be included in a way that the text still makes sense and flows.

For example, if one of your keywords is cell phone use it like this, ‘The cell phone has come a long way in the world of technology.’ This is simply placing your key word inside the text and it is relevant and it makes sense. Here is an example of SEO spam, ‘The cell phone has come a long way for the cell phone in the world of cell phone technology.’ See how that sentence didn’t flow? This type of text creation can easily be considered SEO spam.

Why is SEO spam so bad? Well if the search engines deem that you are an SEO spammer, you will not help yourself but rather hurt yourself. Your website will be penalized and this will make it even harder for people to find you. So do yourself a favor and practice SEO in a non-spamming way if you want to be a big online success.

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