Once again, SiteProNews comes through for us on how to get the top search engine rankings on Google.
The old tricks of keyword spamming and invisible key phrases, no longer work, but here are 3 tips that work like a charm.

Content and links are 90% of how to get placed at the top for searches.
Having your keywords in your meta tags is no longer the best way, it’s all about great content, and using the key phrases your readers would use.

Step 1. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in the phrases that you think your target customers would use. It will give you the data on that keyword, and also provide you with additional keywords to consider.
Those are the ones you’ve probably over looked and in some cases, never even thought of, but when people use a search engine, they don’t always use the same words or phrases you are thinking are the best keywords for your site or product.
Try as many specific keywords and phrases as you can think of, and keep looking at the additional keywords to consider. You’ll be surprised at how many words you never thought of.

Step 2. Content, content, content.
It’s been said many times, content is king, and when you’re trying to gain a larger audience, great content will bring them in and keep them.
Make it search engine friendly and real-person natural content. Let it flow as naturally as possible.
Most search engines can tell the difference between content aimed at people or aimed at search engines. Make the most of your content.
In your first sentence, your number one keyword should be placed. Place your number 2 keyword at the top of that first paragraph as well.
Repeat this using one keyword for every paragraph you write.
For your last paragraph, use the least used keyword first, and end the last paragraph with the most important keyword, your number 1 keyword.
Try not to repeat your keywords more than 3-4 times per content article.

Step 3. Get great inbound links and monitor your site.
Having quality inbound links can account for 75% of search engine hits.
Then you need to monitor your site to see where you are in the search engines, and where you will be for those keywords.
Investing in a good SEO tool will pay for itself over time because it will do all the monitoring for you, saving your hours upon hours every week.

As we continue to see exceptional results from our blog linking programs, one thing that we are noticing is that the programs can be operated a lot like pay per click campaigns. In the old world of SEO, there was no real way to control rankings. You were lucky if you got your home page ranked. You weren’t about to argue that the home page does not convert for a specific category, or product.

Not so with our programs. If you want to target a category or product page for rankings, you can do that. I have heard back from several clients that not only are they seeing more traffic, they are also seeing significantly higher conversions into sales. And that should be the goal for any marketing campaign. If we increase your traffic, we are only doing a fraction of our job. An increase in sales is a true measure of our success.

It seems like every online marketer out there realizes that they need more links to increase the value of their website in the eyes of the search engines. They have been hearing that refrain for the last several years. Reciprocal linking, directory linking, run of site linking, link farms, text links, paid link advertisements, blog links, links from forums, links from video etc etc. So what is the most cost effective way of getting good links?

You could rent them on your favorite high pr site like a local news station. They would be happy to charge you $600 or $700 for a link on their page. The same link. You stop paying, and the link is gone. You run a 6 month campaign. You spend $4k or so, and you get the same effect as paid search, but without the traffic or the ability to track your success.

Or you could run a blog linking campaign with Triangle Direct. For around the same price, we can put your link into 20 or 30 blog articles. These blogs get a lot of attention, so you get some traffic from the readership of the blogs, and their friends. Your articles are also distributed by RSS all over the internet, so you get the added benefit of one link growing into two or three or ten. The article stays on the blog, so long after you’ve forgotten about it, it’s still promoting your site. And the link is keyword specific. It targets a very important term, and a url in your website that converts well into sales. For a twelve month campaign, you can have over 240 articles that might just turn into over 1,000 links.

Or you could just have that one link from your local news site. Along with a bunch of other links going to your competitors. Until you stop paying. Then your rented link goes away. The choice is clear. Go with the blog links. They are more beneficial and more cost effective.

There has been a lot of talk recently about click fraud rates. Advertisers think they are being gouged by search engines, the engines deny it, and consumers don’t really care either way, as long as they are getting relevant results and minimizing the time they have to spend shopping online.

One alternative to traditional ppc is Turn.com a fully automated CPA or cost per action platform. According to them, they “blend site analysis, past performance, categories, audience, and over 60 other variables to select the most relevant graphical and text ads”. They also claim to be completely pay for performance in that the advertiser sets the bid price and pays only when a specified action occurs. Whether it’s a site visit, product purchase, email signup, or lead, the advertiser is in total control of both what they pay and when they pay it. I think this bears further investigation. If you are wasting 20% of your spend on fraud this platform could be very beneficial. Of course it is no alternative to being ranked in the natural search results, and in order to do that you need to have a blog and engage in blog linking.

I saw a recent article concerning online spending by local auto dealers. Cars.com polled all of their dealers trying to discern where they were planning on spending their marketing dollars in 2007. Two thirds said that they were going to increase their spending on online advertising. This contributes to a broader trend, with spending by auto dealers rising from $1.4 billion in 2005 to a predicted $2.7 billion in 2007.

I am not sure where these dealers are planning on spending their money, but if the results that we get for our realtors are anything to go by, they would see a tremendous return from blog linking and blog marketing campaigns.

As a company that continually tests new ways to serve our clients, we have been experimenting with blog linking for quite some time. Once we were completely sure that it would work, would not be viewed as spam by the search engines, and would help clients’ rankings in a cost effective way, we started promoting the service to selected customers. We have been very happy with the results, and so have our clients.

In a short space of time we have seen very solid increases in natural search traffic, coupled with increased conversion rates into sales. It really should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the effectiveness of our programs. Search engines in general, and Google in particular value relevancy and backlinks. Our propietary network of blogs provides both. Companies that initiate a blog linking program today, will see more natural search traffic tomorrow. If only every aspect of online marketing was so simple.

We got an email today from a client who has been tracking his traffic sources. He has been a client for around three months. When he first started, all of his traffic was coming from paid search. He submitted to the Yahoo directory in an effort to boost his natural traffic. He initiated a blog marketing campaign with us.

In September, 80% of his clicks came from paid search, 9% came from natural search. By November, 71% was coming from paid, 19% from natural search and 4% was coming from his blog. To date in December, 66% of his traffic is coming from paid search, 23% from natural search, and around 6% from his blog.

That’s a pretty nice trend and one that we expect to continue and strengthen as we  institute our blog linking campaigns, which we fully expect will have a dramatic effect on his natural search traffic. Six months into the campaign he will be getting most of his traffic from organic search and will use paid search sparingly.

I came across an interesting article on Clikz.com detailing expected cosumer spending patterns during the upcoming holiday season. The prediction is that more people than ever will make their purchases online, but more interestingly, there is a corresponding increase in shoppers who use the internet to research products prior to buying them in a store. The stat that stood out was that almost 60% of people contacted said they were planning on researching products online. If a consumer does a search for a product and finds all the big box retailers on the first page of search results, they will research the product online, and then go to the store to buy it. This is not a good trend for etailers without brick and mortar stores.

The way to combat this is to make sure that when consumers do research on a specific product that they are finding product pages of your site in search engine results. The fastest way to achieve that is with blog linking and viral blog marketing campaigns.

A lot of blog marketing companies are guilty of focusing solely on generating traffic into your website. While traffic is the lifeblood of any website, the problem that a lot of etailers run into is what to do with that visitor once you have them in your site. Gaudy traffic stats are all well and good, but it is sales that pay the bills. How do you ensure that the visitors you have are converting at as high a rate as possible into revenue for your company? I will put out a series of articles directed at making your landing pages more attractive to buyers. Thanks in advance to Site Pro News for providing the basis for this information.

If your visitor is coming from a search engine or a paid search listing, you need to have the keyword in bold and clearly visible on the page. If I am looking for a specific product or item, the keyword shows me that this page is relevant to my search. Make sure you pay attention to the Golden Triangle on the page. This is the area on the page that starts top left, goes over to the top right and the continues back to the left side of the page. This triangle is always positioned above the fold on the page, ie people don’t have to scroll down. Then make sure you put your value proposition; sale, new product etc, in the middle of the triangle.

It also goes without saying that in order to have a high conversion rate, the page itself needs to be ranked for the keyword or product it focuses on. The best way to do that is with a highly targeted blog linking campaign.