How we achieve this level of success for your business is that Media One Pro provides only the best and most efficient solutions to improve your company’s growth, productivity, and the bottom line. Helping your business is our top priority, not helping ourselves to your bank account. We know how this industry can be – confusing clients with technical jargon to the point where all you can do is throw money at the problem and hope they get the job done right. We’ve seen other companies do this time and time again, and that’s why those other businesses fail.

This is why Media One Pro was established in the first place. We saw an opportunity to corner the market on great, honest web work. Our range of work and services goes above and beyond your average web design firm. We can be a web design, web marketing, graphic design, and social media firm all in one, and for the fairest price we can possibly come up with. When you, the client gets more than they expected, for less than they budget for – that creates an infectious feeling of relief and gratitude that Media One Pro strives for with every single client.

We are staffed with professionals that are devoted, and love to solve your business problems. We don’t just sell you a product that other people like – that would be like only selling one size of shoe in the shoe store! We specifically tailor our services just for you so you can get the most out of them and overcome your business challenges.

Our website is obviously an integral part of our business. We have to make sure that it contains the most up-to-date information; just like our staff! We have also made it a place where you can find out about new products and ideas and a great place to network with other businesses and people with similar interests.

Remember though, that a tool is only as good as the workman using it and you will need to gain experience in interpreting the results of some of these applications. For instance, the same tool might return different results when used multiple times consecutively. With experience you will learn to differentiate between authentic and inaccurate information.

Spread the word and link to our tools page!

We do not make commission of any kind from advertising these third party tools.

Keywords & Content – This is the foundation of SEO, do first

The average SEO results optimised site has shown that, if 5000 visitors arrive via the search engines, 4000 different keyphrases will have been used to find the site.

A wide variety of search terms can be used for different industries. A person looking for an insurance company might search, “life insurance”, “short term insurance”, “cheap insurance”, “insurance company in Sandton” etc.

These keyword tools will help you to determine the combinations and variations of keywords and phrases used by your potential as well as; which key words are being searched more than others, which words people are searching, the importance of related words, the importance of meta words etc.

The Free Dictionary

Your keyword definition(s), set phrases/ idioms (use them to lighten up your writing style), examples of usage, words of the same root (inflected words and derivations), thesaurus, classic literature mentions, keyword phrases, related acronyms.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

Princeton Wordnet

Definitions and sample sentences using your key term.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn/perl

Meta Tag Generator

The Advanced Meta-Tags Generator helps you add Meta-Tags to your site. Meta Tags make your website more visible. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them. To generate the Meta-Tag code for your site, just fill out the form below and let our META tag generator create the code for you.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/advanced-meta-tag-generator/

Rhyme Zone

Type in a word below to find its rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more:

http://www.rhymezone.com/

Synonyms Thesaurus with Antonyms & Definitions

Synonym.com is the web’s best resource for English synonyms, antonyms, and definitions. Type in a word and the synonym finder will come up with a list of synonyms. Check out the most popular online synonym searches to find the right word for any occasion. Use the antonym tool to find find antonyms and check out the definitions feature to read the definition.

http://www.synonym.com/

Keyword Suggestions for Google

The Keyword Suggestion tool for Google will help you choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term. Simply enter a key term and this tool will query information from several Google searches, which it will use to determine popular and re-occurring terms used by websites in the same industry.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-google/

Cambridge online dictionary

Essential definitions and keyword phrases.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Merriam-Webster dictionary

Definitions and derived terms.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Keyword Density Tool

The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters and SEOs achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms. Keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”). This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms. In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines). It will avoid filtering out stop words in the middle of a term, however (for example: “designing with CSS” would go through, even though “with” is a stop word).

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Thesaurus

Your core term synonyms and definitions.

http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Website Keyword Suggestion

The basis of ALL search engine rankings is keywords. Users enter keyphrases in Search Engines to get information they need, It is VERY important that you optimize for such keyphrases. This tools tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates.

http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php

Keyword Difficulty Check

Use this Keyword Difficulty Check Tool to see how difficult it would be to rank for specific keywords or keyword phrases. This tool issues a percentage score that indicates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for this term; higher percentages mean greater difficulty.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/

Search Radar

Just enter the keyword and we will sniff around the web to bring you everything related

http://searchradar.webaroo.com/

Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary is the slang dictionary you wrote. Define your world

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

KW Map

Keyword map of the internet

http://www.kwmap.net

Keyword Optimiser

This tool is designed for anyone who works with large lists of keywords/key terms (e.g. SEOs, pay-per-click subscribers, etc). Paste in your list of key terms and this tool will remove any duplicate entries. It will also re-order the list alphabetically, saving you the time it would take to edit your list manually.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-optimizer/

Wordze

Paid keyword tool

http://www.wordze.com/videos/KeywordResearch

Keyword Top 10 Site Info

About the top 10 sites for a particular term

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/top-keyword/

Google Sets

Automatically create sets of items from a few examples.

http://labs.google.com/sets

Multiple Datacenter Keyword Position Check

There are many different Google data centers. Each of these may respond with different results for the same search query. If you see results that vary from data center to data center, it means that Google is in the middle of updating its search index. This information can be helpful for SEOs who want to observe various individual active servers for search engine optimization purposes. This tool also features an optional language/country selection option, which allows you to receive more specific results for your criteria.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-keyword-position/

Similar Page Checker

Search Engines are known to penalize websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content. Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other. This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Keyword Typo Generator

Enter a keyword or key term into the box to generate a list of suggestions for likely human misspellings and typos. Because the results are based on the proximity of the characters on a QWERTY keyboard, and a database of common spelling/typo mistakes (as well as a few other factors), they are fairly accurate and likely to occur in a real world situation.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-typo-generator/

Keyword Density Checker

Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage.

It is important for your main keywords to have the correct keyword density to rank well in Search Engines

http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

Social Media Keyword Checker

Compare 5 popular terms on Twitter

http://www.tweetvolume.com/

Search Twitter for results on keywords

http://search.twitter.com/

The trends of keywords on the walls of Face Book.

http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/

Meta Analyser

This tool will analyze a website’s meta tags. Although the use of meta data is certainly in question, analyzing a competitors “keyword” and “description” meta values is a good way to find ideas for key terms and effective copy for your website.

Meta Types:

Keywords: This should contain a short list of keywords and terms related to your site. Generally they should be separated by a comma, but some people prefer not to use any sort of delimiter.

Description: This should be a brief description of your site and what it offers. This is sometimes used by search engines as a website’s “snippet” for search results.

About Meta Tags

At one point meta tags were considered a relatively important factor by search engines. AltaVista and other older search engines used them to help determine a site’s theme as well as relevance to a given term. This is no longer the case; search engines now rely on much more advanced techniques to do this. That said, meta tags still have some life left in them; they are sometimes used as the snippet of a site’s content in search engine result pages by Google, and possibly other search engines. It’s also possible they still have a little influence with some search engines in determining a site’s content.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-analyzer/

Keyword Density and Prominence Calculation

Ranking tool to determine density along with other factors.

http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/spider/spider.cgi?lang=

Rank Quest Keywords Density Analyzer

Keyword Density Analyzer helps you find out the density values for words/phrases in various important parts of your page, like Tile Tag, Meta Tags, Body Tags, Alt Tags etc.

http://www.rankquest.com/tools/Keyword-Density-Analyzer.php

Meta Tag Generator

Helps create meta tags

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/meta-tag-generator/

The Website, Server, Domain etc

There are literally hundreds of considerations to keep in mind when optimising for search engines. The following tools help you to understand the way in which the search engines view your website, what they pick up about you from your server, the importance of your domain and much more.

Search Engine Spam Detector

What does this tool do? This tool analyzes a web page, searching for characteristics that search engines could consider spam. If you don’t know what “search engine spamming” means or if you want to know how this tool works, you can read the Spam detector FAQ.

What type of tricks does it find? The tool tries to detect three main methods: keyword stuffing, doorway farms and hidden text. Any trick based on Javascript or on CSS positioning/layering will not be detected (for now). Search engine spam detection is very difficult to accomplish and this tool can’t recognize all the existing tricks/methods; it isn’t perfect and it sometimes fails.

Why did you create this tool? To persuade webmasters and SEO to think: if I have been able to create a simple tool capable of intercepting some techniques of spam, imagine what a team of engineers, working for a search engine, could do!

http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/

Domize

Find domain names quickly

https://domize.com/

Check Server Headers

Check server headers and verify HTTP status codes. There are seven HTTP status codes that we are primarily interested in from an indexing and search engine marketing perspective. It is recommended that you verify your URIs are returning the proper Status-Code in the Server Header.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/check-server-headers/

Search Engine Spider Simulator

A lot of Content and Links displayed on a webpage may not actually be visible to the Search Engines, eg. Flash based content,  content generated through javascript,  content displayed as images etc. This tool Simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it. It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the particular webpage.

http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

Psychic Who Is

Domain name suggestions based on your previous searches and related terms.

http://www.psychicwhois.com/

Class C Checker

The Class C Checker tool allows you to check whether some sites are hosted on the same Class C IP Range.

You might want to use the Class C Checker if you own several cross-linked sites. If you do, it may be more efficient (for SEO purposes) to host them on different Class C IP ranges.

Additionally, if you are going to get new links from different sites, you may want to see whether they share the same Class C IP range. Again, this could make a difference for SEO purposes.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/class-c-checker/

Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool

This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages. It doesn’t only analyze the Meta Tags of your pages, rather it tries to use the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self.

http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html

Search Engine Genie Rank Checker

The Google Position Checker tool that we have developed will automatically query Google’s search engines. It checks if your URL appears in the first 1000 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies.

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/google-rank-checker.html

Domain Age for SEO

A website’s age is one of the major factors used to rank it in the search engines. Use this tool to find the age of any domain, including your competitors’ or ones you might want to purchase. Older domains may get a slight edge in search engine rankings.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/domain-age/

Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker

A lot of us lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configuring our redirects. It is very import that when a search engine comes to crawl your website it is able to follow any redirects you have set up.

Suppose you have a website http://www.foo.com and you create a redirect such that whenever any visitor types in the URL http://www.foo.com he is automatically redirected to http://www.foo.com/widgets/, If the Search Engine is not able to follow the redirect it would think that http://www.foo.com has NO contents, http://www.foo.com would end up ranking very badly in search engines.

This tools help you determine if the redirect you have created is Search Engine Friendly.

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

Page Size Extractor

Page Size Extractor is a tool for checking the overall size of a webpage, including content and images. Want to check exactly how large your site is? And what is contained within it? Enter in the URL and go for it!

http://www.prioritysubmit.com/seotools-page-size-extractor.html

Alexa

Learn about the top sites on the Internet as determined by Alexa

http://www.alexa.com/

Future Page Rank PR

This tool will query Google’s various data centers to check for any changes in PageRank values for a given URL. Usually all data centers will output the same, but if queried during an update, you might get a glimpse of any upcoming changes in your chosen URL’s PageRank value.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/

Check Yahoo Web Rank

Find out the Yahoo WebRank of your and your competitors websites.

Yahoo WebRank is basically a rank assigned to a URL by Yahoo on a scale of 0-10. It was introduced a couple of months ago as a Beta feature of the Yahoo toolbar, since it was an experimental feature it is no longer available as a part of their toolbar.

You can just search for “Yahoo WebRank” in your favorite SearchEngine to know more about it.

This tool help you evaluate the importance of a URL as perceived by Yahoo.

http://www.webconfs.com/check-yahoo-webrank.php

Bust A Name

There are still good domain names available, find them with this domain tool

http://www.bustaname.com/

Web Page Analyzer

Free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL below to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html

Indexed Pages

This tool will query all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and AlltheWeb) when you enter the “site:” operator with your chosen URL. It will return the total link count for each URL.

You will notice that the totals vary greatly from search engine to search engine; this is because the figures shown represent the number of links that are crawled by that search engine (which will vary based on the size of their database).

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/indexed-pages/

Compete

Track your competitors

http://compete.com/

Fuzz Find

Searching the web couldn’t be easier! Get the most relevant results through this web search engine mashup that combines the power of the major search engines and social bookmarking sites.

http://www.fuzzfind.com/search.html

Domain Stats Tool

This tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor’s domains. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

It will probably help you figure out why some of your competitors are ranking better than you.

http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php

Domains Bot

Dynamically checks the availability of domain names for 6 TLDs: .com, .org, .net, .info, .biz, .us.

http://www.domainsbot.com/

Page Rank Look Up

You can check the PageRank for a website by using the Google Toolbar (represented by a horizontal blue and grey bar). This tool streamlines the process. Enter a list of URLs and it will return the PageRank value for each one.

About PageRank Google PageRank is a general representation of a website’s popularity; it is primarily based on link popularity. Websites with a high PageRank value will tend to have more traffic and higher positions in search engines (although many other factors are also taken into consideration).

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/

Instant Domain Search

Dynamically and really fast checks the availability of domain names for 3 TLDs: .com, .org, .net.

http://instantdomainsearch.com/

Domain Age Tool

This tools displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to view how the website looked when it first started.

It also helps you find out the age of your competitor’s domains, older domains may get a slight edge in Search Engine Rankings. This tools has been build using Archive’s Wayback Machine.

http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php

Domain Tools

Whois lookup and Domain name search

http://whois.domaintools.com/

SEO Browser

See your website like a search engine sees it

http://seobrowser.com/index.php?address=www.3q.co.za&action=Parse+URL

Url Re-Writing Tool

Static URLs are known to be better than Dynamic URLs because of a number of reasons

• Static URLs typically Rank better in Search Engines.
• Search Engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages a lot slower compared to static pages.
• Static URLs are always friendlier looking to the End Users.

Example of a dynamic URL: http://www.widgets.com/product.php?categoryid=1&productid=10

This tool helps you convert dynamic URLs into static looking html URLs.

Example of the above dynamic URL Re-written using this tool http://www.widgets.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-10.htm

http://www.webconfs.com/url-rewriting-tool.php

Page Size Finder

The concept of “page size” is defined as the sum of the file sizes for all the elements that make up a page, including the defining HTML file as well as all embedded objects (e.g., image files with GIF and JPG pictures). It is possible to get away with page designs that have larger page sizes as long as the HTML file is small and is coded to reduce the browser’s rendering time.

This tool will help to determine HTML web page size.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/

Google Trends

Learn about the trends on the web

http://www.google.com/trends

Quantcast

Real audience data

http://www.quantcast.com/

Robots.txt Generator

Use this tool to generate a simple robots.txt file for your website. This file allows you to hide files or directories that you don’t wish the search engine spiders to find. This generator tool is designed to create the text for the file for you; you can then make changes afterward should you deem it necessary. Generating a robot file with this tool is ideal if you wish to block certain directories or files from search engines.

To use the generator tool, enter the required information below and click the button. You will then be shown the text for the file. Copy this to a file called robots.txt and place on the root of your website (in the same place as your home page).

Imposing Restrictions

You may impose restrictions on which web pages to disallow indexing. By default, most users will want to allow all directories except their /cgi-bin/ directory, which commonly holds scripts, and their images directory /images/. To enable all web pages, select Yes to “Enable All Webpages,” then enter each web page or directory path in the exclusion box, one per line.

Example: “http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/” (Excludes the /cgi-bin/ directory)

Example: “http://www.yourdomain.com/images/” (Excludes the /images/ directory)

Example: “http://www.yourdomain.com/welcome.html” (Excludes the /welcome.html web page)

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/

AW Stats

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Website To Country Tool

Many people wonder why their websites dont rank well in Country specific Search Engines, most of the Search Engines (including Google) determines country of the website based on the physical location of the website’s IP Address. You would probably rank well in a Country Specific Search Engine if your website is hosted in the same country.

This tools helps determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted.

http://www.webconfs.com/website-to-country.php

Zeitgeist

Search patterns, trends and surprises

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist.html

Top Search Terms on ZDNET

http://downloads.zdnet.com/topsearch.aspx

Domain Name Soup

The domain name wizard will give you lots of options to search for available domain names. If you are after a domain name that is taken, you should not give up. People often think that all the good domain names are taken, that others have search through all the available domains and chosen the best, but there is no such thing as a list of all available domain names as domains are just constructed of combinations of letters. There are 308,915,776 combinations of six letter domains and 8,031,810,176 combinations of seven letter domains and that’s not including using numbers or hyphens. The domain name wizard will help you to come up with ideas for yours.

Once you’ve entered your phrases and submitted it, this will show example results from each of the pages. Click on one of the pages to view those results.

http://www.domainnamesoup.com/domain-name-wizard.php

Graphical Search Engine Comparison

The Graphical Search Engine Comparison Tool allows you to perform your own comparisons, and displays the results visually, making it easy to see both the rankings and comparative positions of pages in search engine results. URLs are represented by small circles, and these circles are connected by a line if the page appears in both engines you’re testing. Mouse over a circle and the full URL of the page is displayed. Click on it to open the URL in a new browser window.

The ranking tool fetches the top results for a query from search engines. You can compare the same search term on two engines, or two unique search phrases on the same engine to see which ranks better. You can also enter a specific website, to see if and where the site appears within in the top search queries.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/graphical-search-engine-comparison/

Backlinks

Links pointing to your website help determine your authority on the Internet, the more authority you have, the better your chances of high search engine placements. The tools below will help you understand the importance of link building and back links.

Back links Summary

This tool will give you a summary of your competitors backlinks.

http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-summary.php

Backlink Watch – check anchor text

Search Engine Optimization now revolves around “link building”. Inbound Links make your website stand out prominent in the SERPs. In today’s SEO world, more than 95% of the focus is on building quality backlinks.

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php

Domain Inbound Links Checker

This free computer program analyzes up to 1000 inlinks (backlinks, inbound links) to arbitrary page (or website) and shows domains of backlinks. It shows separately different classes of URLs like .edu, .mil., .com, .net, .gov and other. It is similar to host and IP backlinks checker, but it might be a bit faster and doesn’t do IP address analysis of backlinks.

http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp

Link Popularity

What is link Popularity? Link popularity is a general representation of the total number of web pages which link to a website (or individual web page). Most of the major search engines support the “link:” operator. Type in “link:” (without the quotation marks) in front of the URL about which you want to learn.

What does this tool do? This tool will query all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) when you enter the “link:” operator with your chosen URL. It will return the total link count for each URL.

You will notice that the totals vary greatly from search engine to search engine; this is because the figures shown represent the number of inbound links that are known to that search engine (which will vary based on the size of their database). Most of the search engines (Google especially) also apply various filters against the inbound links; therefore, some inbound-links may not be counted toward the total.

Why is link popularity important?. Link popularity is important because it is a major factor used by search engines in determining a site’s position in search results. Generally, a site with more inbound links will be positioned higher than a similar site with fewer links. Other factors that are considered include anchor text.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/link-popularity/

Backlink Builder

Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization. It is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines. A backlink could be considered as a Quality Backlink if 1. The Theme of the backlinking website is the same as your website. 2. It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for. This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php

Analyze Backlinks

Analyses the links to websites

http://www.analyzebacklinks.com/

Backlinks Summary

This tool will give you a summary of your competitors backlinks.

http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-summary.php

Backlink Checker from We Build Pages

View backlinks of competitors

http://www.thelinkpop.com/

Link Diagnosis

This tool can show you all the important information about your competitor’s links. The report includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information and more.

http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

Multiple Datacenter Link Popularity Check

This tool will give a back link count from multiple Google data centers. Since the active servers do not update in any predictable way, it can be helpful for SEOs to observe various individual active servers for search engine optimization purposes.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-link-popularity/

Reciprocal Link Check

Reciprocal links have become one of the MOST popular methods of getting backlinks for your website. Although we dont really recommend them, a lot of SEOs have found success with their 2-way / 3-way reciprocal link exchanges. This tool helps you ensure that your link partners are linking back to your website. It also determines the anchor text used by your link partners to link to your website.

http://www.webconfs.com/reciprocal-link-checker.php

article courtesy of seoresults.co.z

In recent years, search-engine marketing has seen triple-digit growth, gaining both more efficient opportunities for marketers as well as serious steam from millions of users.

The online search industry is expected to reach nearly $7 billion in worldwide revenues by 2007, according to Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst for U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. She sees “search as the most efficient way to find products and information, and simultaneously the rise of search as the best way for advertisers to find and acquire customers.”

Even so, getting results remains complicated, demanding close monitoring and measuring. To make the most of marketing through search engines, here are options to consider as well as five common mistakes to avoid.

Search engine power

The idea, of course, is that you figure out which keywords your customers use to search for the products or services you market and then submit those keywords to search engines such as MSN Search or Google. When customers input the keywords, your site is prominently displayed in the results, leading to better sales or exposure.

One step up from free or organic search-engine marketing is search-engine optimization. That can include paying to influence the outcome. The more you bid per keyword, the higher the engine guarantees to place your site on the results page.

Typically, engines bill on a pay-per-click or cost-per-click basis. You’re charged only if and when a customer clicks on your link. Pricing varies, depending on keywords and categories. “Paid search is an incredibly efficient way to bring in sales leads — it’s the Yellow Pages, classifieds and direct mail rolled into a single just-in-time pitch,” wrote John Battelle, a business journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley, in Business 2.0 magazine.

But you must efficiently outbid your competitors, who also pay for ranking, or you’re throwing away money. The goal is to pull only customers who want what you sell.

Targeting the results

A recent phenomenon in search-engine optimization is an innovation variously called relevant paid search, or contextual advertising or content-targeted advertising. It moves the sponsored link off the results page and onto sites themselves.

Instead of paying for placement on a results list, you pay engines to place your listing on pages of content related to your products. For example, if a user is checking weather in Miami Beach, he might also see a listing for Miami hotels or car rentals.

You can now target customers at the very moment they’re interested in learning about the wares and services you market.

Judging success

A judicious combination of these search-engine marketing tactics can build business in a number of ways. First, figure out what you’re after.

Search-engine marketing can:

Boost brand profile or gain industry exposure

Acquire new customers

Increase traffic, which builds advertising or affiliate revenue

Generate leads for follow-up calls

Advertise offers or sales

Generate publicity

Market offline products or events

Increase or launch online sales

Avoid engine trouble

Next, gear up your search-engine marketing campaign, but avoid these common mistakes.

1. Killing it with your keywords.

“The worst mistake marketers make is slicing and dicing their keywords too finely beginning on Day One,” says Bob London, whose marketing consultancy is based in the Washington, D.C., area.For example, London’s client Doug Zimmerman heads the mid-Atlantic franchise for Freedom Boat & Yacht Club. The company sells time aboard boats. Founded in 1989, FBYC now has 10 locations, four franchises and 1,300 members who each pay $15,000 a year for unlimited access to boats any time they want one. The only additional cost is fuel.Zimmerman budgeted $2,000 for a round of search-engine optimization tests. “Our keyword program began with ‘boats Maryland,’ which is one of the states where Freedom Boat operates,” London says. “Once we determine whether those leads are qualified, we can drive down the cost-per-click by segmenting, for example, ‘boats Maryland rental.” Adding the word “rental,” London says, is “a proxy for those looking for water recreation without commitment.” After spending only $200, London says they’ve targeted the right keywords. In this case, with a regional and high-end niche business, the process was easier.Mass-market products might take more testing. “Often, companies use industry buzzwords that their target audience isn’t using,” says Stacey Williams of Prominent Placement, a search-engine marketing consultant based in Atlanta. She suggests business owners subscribe to Wordtracker.com, an affordable online tool that can keep you updated on current keywords.

2. Managing it all yourself.

“Managing rankings is a full-time job,” says James Korenchen, managing director for PR at McKee Wallwork Henderson, an interactive ad agency based in Albuquerque, N.M. Staying on top of keywords, measuring results and conversions and making sure search engines deliver on pay-per-click arrangements takes technical expertise and a lot of time.You’re smart to have your search-engine marketing managed by an agency, a consultant or an engine’s software offerings. For less than $100 a year, for instance, Microsoft’s Submit It! can recommend keywords, submit to engines and track your progress.

3. Assuming one engine fits all.

Relying only on the big, well-known engines limits your placements. “The most common mistake is throwing too much money at one method, one search engine or one message,” says Aaron Keller, at Capsule, a brand development company in Minneapolis. Instead, budget your money to develop a distinctive set of messages and use a combination of search engines to successfully reach customers.

4. Giving up too soon.

Make sure your expectations are realistic. Search engines may take up to eight weeks before listing your site. Paid listings go up more quickly, but also take time. You’ll need to fine-tune the right package of keywords, engines and pay-per-click or paid searches. Stay with it and you’ll be rewarded.

5. Blinded by the site.

If your pages aren’t optimized for search engines, all the right keywords in the world won’t get you results. A frequent error is that the home-page floats, say, because of a splash page or a recently redesigned page left unlinked to other pages. If that’s the case, the engine won’t scan all the relevant pages.On the flip side, owners sometimes try to cram too many keywords onto the home page itself. But, says consultant Williams, “when a search engine reads hundreds of different words or phrases on a page, it doesn’t know what that page is really about, and the page won’t get ranked high for anything. It works much better to optimize all the key pages on a site for one or two different search terms.” Besides submitting keywords, for example, Submit It! also analyzes your Web site to ensure that pages are optimized for submission.

Nowadays, every business must offer anywhere, anytime choices to customers. And when done right, search-engine marketing absolutely gets you attention from the online visitors you want to attract.

Article Courtesy of Microsoft

Link development has morphed into traffic development people. Stop going after the exclusive 146th listing on the tenth page of an unrelated site’s reciprocal links section thinking you’re going to fool a good engine into thinking that means you’re worth something.

Stop aiming for the engines and aim for real, live human beings. Aim for obtaining traffic and not backlinks. Aim for obtaining attention and not pagerank. Stop aiming for the affections of a mathematical computation and aim for commendations from breathing individuals.

Out With the Old (Link Development), In With the New (Traffic Development)

Old:
Send out hundreds of reciprocal link emails each day you find with an automated program explaining to webmasters how SEO works and how linking to your brand new website can help *them* in the search engines to the three separate emails your program scraped from their site.
New:
Find sites that are about your topic in general but are missing pertinent information that you provide on your site or that you can create an angle to merge with their topic and email the webmaster at one email address with a personal email that notes things about their site only a human visitor would and explain why you think linking to your content would benefit their readers.
Example:
If you own a site selling film, write an in depth article on getting the best low light results on your site and then contact photography clubs explaining that you have an article on your site that their members might find useful and you were hoping they would consider including it in their resources/favorite sites/information section. Get enough camera clubs linking to you and you’ll start to see a nice trickle of visitors as well.

Old:
Buy links on any site with pagerank hoping the engines will see the links and think wow, your site must be great to be linked from such a popular site. Even better if you can get a range of site in the bottom footer and get 5000 links for the price of one. Just find a big network with a stable of link sellers and buy from their handy dandy list.
New:
Buy links to get the resulting traffic and having that link placed somewhere on the page where visitors will actually see it and pretending search engines don’t exist when debating a purchase. And if you’re going to buy a link, make private deals with site owners or use brokers who do the same with a very limited clientele of purchasers.
Example:
If you wouldn’t purchase a link if it had a link condom on, then you have no business purchasing the link without one. Buy traffic, not green pixels on the Google toolbar. You will need to sustain a link for a long period of time to get maximum effect and you can’t do that if you’re not getting any ROI from your purchase. Enough said.

Old:
Write 300 word articles of medium quality and submit them to 50 article directories. Wash, rinse and repeat 50 times for the same site to the same 50 directories using the same bio line in all of the submissions at the bottom of the article.
New:
Write 800 word articles for sites that accept submissions that publish based on merit and not that you know how to fill out a form and giving them a custom article written only for their site. Link out generously to other sites in the article and be sure to include a link of your own (to something legitimately helpful to readers of the article) within the article if possible.
Example:
Own a site that caters to business owners? An article on a site like entrepreneur.com is going to be worth far more than submitting an article to 30 article directories in terms of traffic. Sure it takes more time, more effort and is less certain – but the rewards of success are also much greater. Be sure to ask about linking guidelines within the article. Most sites are ok with you linking from within an article provided it isn’t biased, repetitive and makes sense.

Old:
Find the top 50 keywords for your sector and write a drab article aimed at each one basically regurgitating the same information available on every other site. AKA – “How to find online deals on discount widgets.”
New:
Find the top 50 keywords for your sector and write an interesting piece that relates to the topic in an unusual fashion that won’t bore people to death if they bother to read past the first paragraph.
Example:
If you have a content site focusing on widgets, contact the big companies who make them and ask what their media policies are for an interview about their newest product or their company in general. You get new, unique content no one else has (because you’ve created the questions – i.e. the area of the answers) and people are far more likely to link to a page showing an interview with ABC Widgets talking about their new widget development techniques than a page talking about how great (yawn) ABC Widgets are.

Old:
Submitting press releases for no reason aside from getting your site another inbound link from the press release distribution sites.
New:
Waiting until you have a newsworthy topic (or creating one) and submitting a carefully crafted press release focused on getting media attention and making sure it is viewable in all the big news engines.
Example:
If you have a site selling 16 different brands of the same widget, create a comparison engine that allows users to select four widget brands and see a comparison between them. Then create a press release that mentions how your site developed this “propriety technology” to help consumers of widgets and how your site is the only site in the industry offering such a service. Cross your fingers and hope a reporter gets interested. At worst, you get a ton of traffic when people search your topic at a news engine for a week or more.

Old:
Submitting your site to 200 free directories and a handful of paid directories with decent pagerank and a low listing fee in an effort to increase your link count.
New:
Not wasting your time unless the directory itself has a large following or pageview tallies (meaning it will send a lot of traffic).
Example:
Submit a test site (or simply take a look at the logs of a website following the tired tradition) and after six months, take a look at the total referrals from your logs. Anything that doesn’t produce a valued amount of traffic or sales (depending on your objective) should be cut from the list. You’d be better off during those 2 days of submitting to those directories to put that time to good use on another method that will actually bring you eyeballs.

Old:
Deciding on ten keyword phrases and developing links to fit within that mold (having all of your links using 1 of your top ten phrases). Contacting webmasters who don’t give you the desired anchor text and requesting changes.
New:
Encouraging extreme variety in anchor text of your inbound links and letting people link to you using whatever anchors they feel necessary.
Example:
Stop sending out pre-written anchor text in requests for links. Let the site owner know about your site and if they choose to link to you, do so using whatever anchor text they feel necessary. There is no better way to accrue *natural* anchor text than by letting people label your anchor with whatever they deem fit. Site owners know how to speak to their readers and how to make them interested.

Old:
Making hit and go forum posts to get a handful of backlinks a piece from 50 different domains.
New:
Finding one (or a few communities) and becoming a regular, valid and helpful contributing member.
Example:
By making yourself at home at a limited number of places, you give yourself time to really contribute and be a visible and helpful member. Rather than grabbing a few links on various identifiable forum domains, you build up a reputation (aka trust) which gets you a good amount of traffic through your profile or signature (targeted traffic too, since you will be posting to people on a forum relating to what you do or sell) and can also get you off forum mentions as well (for example, someone may go post on their blog that your name did a great post on widget making – linking your name to your site and widget making to the appropriate forum thread).

Old:
Button pushing to get thousands and tens of thousands of automated links on blogs, guestbooks and forums.
New:
People pushing via hiring people to help out with traffic development efforts and ideas.
Example:
Blind mass links are going the way of the dodo (though mass, mass quantities still work – at times – for now). Spend the efforts of your programmers on developing useful tools for consumers/site visitors and employ people to write great, quality content rather than buying cheap links from reciprocal link farms – excuse me, I mean firms. You can get a lot more *long term* bang for your buck and it will get you visitors who appreciate your content – not angry victims of comment spam looking for ways to dig your heart out with a spoon.

Old:
Creating a blog on a free subdomain to put up nothing more than posts about how great your products are and linking to yourself freely in each one.
New:
Creating a blog that has real value and traffic attraction on your own domain (or a separate domain if branding is an issue) which leads readers into the commercial area of your site during opportunities within posts or the blog design where it makes sense.
Example:
If you sell widgets, make an accompanying blog that acts as a review center for *all* widgets. Be fair and include all products whether or not you sell them. Do a write up of each product that acts as a general “spec” overview and allow users to leave reviews in the comments section (I recommend you set them at moderated to check for quality, spelling, language, etc if that matters to you.) and link in to the products you *do* sell where appropriate.

Well, I’m going to stop there as I like my farm.

The best part is that all of these ways of developing traffic have the side benefit of doing exactly what you wanted to do with traditional link development. By aiming for traffic, you end up acquiring (purposely anyway, scrapers will continue to exist) a dream team of inbound links for SE purposes.

Does this mean there are no sites ranking on the old methods?

Sure there are. But, I’d have to venture to say the age of those links acquired from the old methods may have something to do with it. In addition to the fact that being at the top of the engines several years ago probably got them a handful of traffic as a result from good sites. I don’t think people trying the 2003 approach to link development would find the same success in a smart search engine in a half way competitive industry on a site they launched tomorrow. Traffic development, in my honest opinion, is the road to long term success.

Hopefully this gets a few people thinking about ways they can apply traffic building to their own sites and gets some others moving towards to realization the standard, tired methods of link development that used to work are no longer the best way to assure new site or long term success in the engines.

Anyone else with thoughts or suggestions on traffic development are encouraged to add to the list.

article courtesy of www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/3047.htm

Search engines want genuine content pages and not doorway pages that are created for the sole purpose of achieving high rankings. If written properly search engines cannot possibly view your web pages as undesirable and the rankings they achieve tend to be as stable as those that are achieved by other search engine optimization techniques.  SEO copywriting can achieve rankings that tend to do well across the search engines, although no page can do equally well in all engines.
Competitive search terms are not necessarily those where millions of results are returned. They are those where people are competing hard for the top positions. There’s a big difference.

courtesy of www.pg1searchs.com