Internet Marketing: SEO Services, Search Engine Optimization, PPC, Bangalore

What is Social Media Optimization?

2009-10-21T00:10:00.000-07:00

Social Media Optimization – An Overview

What is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization (SMO) consists of a set of methods for generating traffic on any website through social networking websites, business networking websites, online communities and blogs (macro blogging as well as micro blogging). These methods exploit the customer base that the target social media / business networking website already have and belong to common interest group with the website that is being promoted.

We all are aware of the social networking websites like orkut, facebook etc. These websites provides platform to interact with other users, create groups for common interest, share ideas, share profiles and many more.

How can SMO benefit me?

SMO is a great tool due to its penetration in the target markets.
It does not cost money to run a SMO campaign.
SMO is a good tool for branding
SMO can do wonders for direct sales, direct marketing of products and services
What are various methods for SMO?
Creating RSS feeds
Placing Social News buttons
Setting up a blog (Macro Blogging-e.g. blogger.com , wordpress.com)
Micro blogging through twitter
Incorporating functionality to add third party community tools like videos, images (youtube.com)
Active participation in community forums and discussions with meaningful inputs

List of websites which can be helpful in Social Media Optimization

Measuring ROI for Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Measuring ROI is important in any marketing campaign / advertising campaign you undertake. Similarly in SMO too it is important as based on this one can allocate efforts and invest time in sustaining the efforts.
Again, the goals matter in computing ROI for SMO campaign. The goals can be

Generating direct sales
Brand Building
Generating Leads etc.

For generating direct sales, one can incorporate small software code to detect the source of traffic and associate it with sales if any comes from the visits.

For brand building, one needs to follow the depth of penetration in business / social networking website.

Summary: SMO can be a very useful tool to generate the traffic for any website if used effectively. There is no cost associated with SMO methods but it requires sustained efforts for generating quality leads.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing Firm Himshilp

All About Cloaking

2009-04-17T02:56:00.000-07:00

All About Cloaking

Cloaking is used to serve the search engine bots with content optimized with best results. Some search engine optimizers use it in their promotional campaigns to serve pages optimized for each of the search engines. This can be utilised for Black Hat Practices for quick gains.

In other words Page cloaking is the practice of altering contents of a page depending on the software, method and/or IP address being used to access it.

Cloaking can be used to

Provide the search engine bots, content optimized for best results.
Conceal the real keywords and text used for rankings from normal visitors.
Change the identity of the site depending on who accessed it.
Protect the server and it's contents from malicious bots or misuse.
Re-brand shared content depending on the domain name used to access it.
Bound the options available depending on browser features or capabilities.
Level out browser inconsistencies.
Provide relevant information to the user based on Operating System and/or browser.
Produce a more personalized experience for the visitor.

Cloaking can be done by several methods like:

Identifying the browser program which is making the request
Identifying the IP address through which they are connecting from
Identifying the page through which they are coming from
Using the session data

By cloaking visitors download time can be reduced by not including the meta tags which generally the visitors don’t see. One can also remove the keyword list from their page which one has made through SEO research. Text can be sent to the search engines rather than the pictures as search engine cannot interpret the images and save time and space.

Generally Cloaking is a NO NO term in SEO as once you get caught for the deed, you may be thrown away from the index and your website will not be crawled. But still many professional take this route to gain rankings quickly and use it as a part of short term strategy to attract traffic.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Suggestions while working with SEO Company

2008-11-12T03:09:00.000-08:00

Thing to consider while working with SEO firm

Based on my experience in executing SEO projects for over half a decade, I am posting a blog entry which deals with the suggestions for a client working with any SEO professional or SEO firm for optimizing his website.

Have complete faith in SEO professional: Once you finalize SEO professional or SEO Company, trust their skills. Also you need to trust their knowledge and experience. Do give them freehand to work on their methodology and indulge yourself in learning basics about their methodology and approach. You can discuss the blueprints they prepare for your website, in detail with them. This will help your SEO professional in gaining your confidence and also will help you in reaching a comfort level with your SEO professional.

Have reasonable / realistic expectations about your SEO project: SEO can’t work miracles irrespective of their experience and past track record. Especially if the site is new, it may take months to really see traffic building up because of SEO work. So its quite unfair on your part to expect your website appearing in top 10 search results within a month of SEO work done. This is the reason why a good SEO professional DO NOT guarantees any results for the SEO job.

Be patient with the results and be realistic: SEO is not a fuse wire which can trigger a chain reaction and your site will be bombarded with huge traffic in a matter of time. You need to be patient with SEO. It takes time to implement SEO as it’s a scientific approach and can be implemented after taking a series of steps, each requiring thorough analysis. The approach implemented by a SEO professional may take time to get indexed properly and it may take a little while to get appreciation by search engines in terms of rankings.

Work in detail with SEO and treat him as a partner: You need to detail SEO about every minute thing related to functionality of your business so that he can come up with a decent research on keywords. Talk to him about the nature of business, customer behavior, product range, your competitors, target group / area. Based on the information provided by you, SEO can pick right sets of keywords and can boost your website rankings and get the right traffic.

Be ready to pay for quality work: Chose a SEO professional / SEO company based on the track record. Once zero in on any professional based on the capabilities, then be ready to pay for the quality work which you expect from him. “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. There are plenty of people who are ready to do SEO in a couple of hundred dollars. Their job is just to stuff keywords and create metas and they are done. So my advise is be cautious while picking SEO and be ready to pay for quality work as it is something which is going to bring in more MOOLAH to your business and your growth depends on this.

Do not hesitate taking an elementary class from SEO professional about SEO approaches and methodologies: Learn the basics of SEO from SEO professional working on your project. It takes little efforts but the reward is quite satisfying. You will not be in dark about the SEO progress and you will attain a comfort level with your SEO professional.

SEO is not a one time effort: SEO is not doing a one time job and then sit and wait for the results. You can equate it with the regular marketing and sales efforts. You need to keep refining the approach based on the results which you get crawl after crawl. You need to measure finite parameters and make changes in your website / content / visuals accordingly so that you get better and better visibility. After the work is done, its about putting in time & efforts to sustain rankings and continue taking actions for improve rankings.

The success of your business does not depend entirely on SEO: This is one of the most important points. Do not rely on SEO for generating more revenues and increasing your business reach among the potential buyers. A SEO can drive targeted traffic to your website, however he can not force visitors to buy from you whether its service or any product. The actual SALE entirely depends on your product line, service levels you offer, after sales service, product / service pricing and many other factors. So its unfair to hold SEO professional responsible if you are not getting desired jump in sales even after increase in traffic to your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Inbound links & SEO

2008-10-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Importance of Inbound Links in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Inbound links are the links which are pointing to your webpage/website from any other source apart from your own website. Inbound links are an important source of increasing your Search Engine Rankings. If you wish to appear in top search engine results for your category, you need to give emphasis on the quality and nature of inbound links. In a nutshell, the effect of 1 quality inbound link is far better than 10 irrelevant inbound links to your website, so you need to be extra careful regarding the quality of inbound links to your website.

There are certain points which you can keep in mind while designing a campaign for generating inbound links to your webpage/ website.

Relevance: The source of inbound link should be relevant to the category of your website/webpage. For example, if you have a website selling electronic gadgets, then its good to have inbound links from the directories displaying latest gadgets rather than having a directory listing road construction contractors of your town.

Effective use of anchor text in inbound link: The anchor text should be used effectively to include the keyword which your webs page is focusing. This will enhance the relevance of your web page for the keyword you are targeting, and hence the Search engine rankings will be high.

Page Selection: Carefully select pages and use them as landing pages for various inbound links. Make sure that you use proper distribution and target right kind of page in order boost your search engine rankings.

Links from .ORG, .EDU, .Gov, etc carries special weight age. Try to get more links from these websites and you will see improved search engine rankings for your website.

Constant periodic review: Over a period, review the quality of inbound links, the anchor text, and the landing pages for inbound links. This will help you in fine-tuning and getting improved results over time.

Avoid inbound links from NO-Follow instructions home page. No follow instructions are given by web pages, not to follow a particular links to the search engine crawlers. For example, wikepedia.org is an open encyclopedia project where anyone can post/edit/delete articles along with web links. The links provided there have No follow instructions thus there is no importance given to the links posted there by anyone.

Design and work on a systematic approach for inbound link creation campaign and you can see tangible result in medium and long term in term of enhanced sales/ leads and conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Importance of HTML Sitemap

2008-09-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

Sitemap and your Website

If you visit any website, you will find a fine print usually at the bottom which says “sitemap”. This link takes you to a page where the website’s organizational structure (page wise listing) will be there. One can call it as hierarchical listing of a website structure.

A sitemap has got important presence and role in overall website structure.

It gives an easy navigation option to the website visitors. A visitor can jump to various sections of the website looking at the sitemap without getting lost in the website. Navigational menus can be confusing, so sitemap is used to aid visitor navigation.

It organizes various sections, themes of a website in proper way. Thus a visitor can get a feel of the website and also a broad structure of the website. Thus, it helps in giving visitor an idea about the website theme and scope.

Now, sitemap also plays an important role with respect to SEO. Implementation wise, a sitemap is a single page, which has links to all the pages of the website. When a search engine crawler comes to a sitemap, it gets all the links of the pages of a website. Thus, a sitemap helps search engine crawlers in crawling all the links and indexing all the pages of a website.

The key aspect is to create a sitemap and place it strategically on the home page so that when search engine crawler comes to the home page, it gets the link to the sitemap and it can crawl all the links specified in the HTML sitemap. Creating sitemap is bit tedious job but the benefit it provides far exceeds the efforts spent in creating it.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Anchor Text and SEO

2008-09-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

What is an Anchor Text?

An Anchor text is the text which is the visible pat of a hyperlink. For example, "SEO services Bangalore". The hyperlink is pointing towards http://www.himshilp.com/ but the text is “SEO services Bangalore”. This text is known as anchor text.

Anchor Text is used to describe the summary of the target page. In above example, the page http://www.himshilp.com/ gives details about the SEO Services and various other services provided by the firm Himshilp which is a Bangalore based firm, so the anchor text “SEO Services Bangalore” is justified.

Anchor Text gives an idea to the visitor of a particular page that what is in store for him if he clicks a particular link on that and move to another page. Thus anchor text indicates the nature and type of content on the target page. This increases the importance of the page and enhances the relevance of the target page.

A brief on the importance of the Anchor Text

Use of keywords in the anchor text increases the possibility of target page getting higher position in search engine rankings. Reason: Anchor Text increases the relevance of the target page.
Anchor Text is liked by the search engines as they can give weight age to the target page based on the text used in the anchor text.
A good interlinking of pages within a website using Anchor Text increases the changes of the website in attaining high search engine rankings.
While doing link building, ensure that the Anchor Text you are using are relevant to the target pages of your website. Use keywords intelligently to increase relevance and weight age of your website pages.

To sum up, you must use Anchor Text Optimization as a part of your SEO strategy effectively. Search engines love them so you must use Anchor Text to benefit your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Internal Linking and SEO

2008-09-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

How does Internal Linking Helps?

The links coming to your website from outside that is other websites matters a lot. The inbound links help the website and the page in terms of increased weight age for PR calculation. The links received from any external website / source is one part of the overall linking program of your website.

What about the internal links within the website? This is a very important technique for SEO which is ignored by many websites. The more internal linking you have, more suitable your website is for crawling. In fact some improvement in the internal linking, navigation can improve your visibility in search results drastically.
There are few factors which are required for improving internal linking of a website

Easy to understand sitemap: En easy to understand sitemap can be a well beginning. It is an important element of any good website. It serves two purposes, firstly it can give crawlers a good starting point to crawl all the pages on a website and secondly it can give visitors also a place to start looking for the information they need.
Tip: While setting up a sitemap, use your internal directory structure to group the links within a heading. This gives a neat, uncluttered site map.

Footer Links: Footer links are placed at the bottom of the page. This also services two purposes, first it helps the crawlers to crawl the entire site and second it helps the visitors to jump to other page in case the page is very long. They need not to go back to the top of the page to navigate to other pages. I short; it facilitates movement of crawlers and visitors within the website.

Using Menus: Menus are the best possible tools for navigation. They guide the visitors to the various pages and sections of the website. Similarly the crawlers also follow menus and move around the website. This is the one of the way to facilitate the deep crawling of a website. For this purpose, the menus should be in a readable format for crawlers. Avoid having FLASH menu items as it can confuse the crawlers. Though they can read if but why to make it complex for them. Feed crawlers with easy to understand HTML menus so that they can do their job effortlessly, this is what an objective of SEO is, isn’t it?

Use a judicious mix of the keywords while strengthening the internal linking structure. A good structure helps crawlers to crawl properly and better search engine rankings and it helps visitors too to find the relevant page of your website thus improving sales conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Simple Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click Strategy

2008-09-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

Simple Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click Strategy

In a Nutshell, Pay Per Click or PPC is a search engine marketing technique which is used by search engines and advertising networks to generate clicks. In this, advertiser uses potential key phrases and bid for their position in the sponsored links section to generate leads to their website. The major service providers in the area are Google Ad words, Yahoo – Overture program, MSN Ad center. Apart from these BIG 3, there are many smaller programs which comprises the PPC universe. Setting up PPC sounds simple, but it requires certain practices and constant monitoring as improper biddings can make an advertiser bankrupt overnight.

Below are the simple strategies, which can make your PPC campaign more result oriented.

Keywords research: Always do good keywords research and come up with as many keywords / key phrases as possible, related to your product / Service. Come up with more and more secondary keywords which are relevant to the service / product offered by you. A secondary keyword may not have good search volumes but can certainly improve your conversion rates.
Create proper landing page: A landing page is the page on a website where the traffic generated through PPC program lands. Always make good. Attractive landing pages. A home page can not be a landing page as it is the identity of your website. Home page is used to present corporate identity, its more on “Who you are” whereas a landing page should focus on “what service / product you offer” and “why customer should buy from you”.
Write Relevant Ad Copy: The ad copy should clearly mention the product / service on offer for a particular campaign and the pricing for it. Any deviation from this will make you lose the space. An ad copy with pricing catches attraction of the visitor, thus making CTR (Click Through Ratio) value high.
Conversions: Incorporate conversion tracking code. Without this, you will not be able to know the exact ROI. One must measure the leads coming through PPC programs, this helps in utilizing the budget effectively.
Bidding: Test the ROI, conversion for various places in the sponsored link category by varying the bids for 2-3 weeks. This will give you the optimal position where you can safely bid and get desired CPA (Cost per acquisition) and can stick to your allocated monthly budget without much hassle. One you do this, you will understand that bidding for top positions is not good always.
Check competition: Look at the ad copy used by your competitors, analyze them and if required, make changes in your ad copy. Use promotional “HOOKS” (offers) to increase CTR.
Branding: Do not let your affiliate to use your brand name for making their ad copy. This may affect your branding.
Monitoring: Constantly monitor your campaigns, there is nothing like AUTO PILOT in PPC campaigns. The competition is cut throat and you will need to adjust your bid in order to optimize your ROI.
REALISTIC expectations: Have realistic expectations with your campaigns. You can not increase your business 10 folds overnight using PPC campaigns. It’s a market where you are selling goods and services. You can get the leads but if your website is not up to the mark or your pricing does not suit visitor, you will not get final CONVERSION. So ideally first step before setting up PPC programs is to do proper home work. Make your website up to the mark, create good landing pages, provide information in great detail so that the visitors get a complete idea about your services, products, pricing etc.
Last but not least, do monthly tweaking in bids, ad copy, remove non performing ads from your campaigns. This is life weeding, removing unnecessary items from your campaigns.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Why Do I need to track my website traffic?

2008-08-24T23:40:00.000-07:00

Why Do I need to track my website traffic?

It gives you insight about your website’s usefulness: The information available through macro or micro tracking tools gives you an idea about general traffic trend on your website. It tells you whether your website is popular or not among the visitors. More the visitors, more popular is your website.
It gives some sort of measure of your marketing efforts, whether it is online of offline: Any money you spend on advertising your website, whether it is online advertising or offline advertising, you need to keep track of ROI in order to maintain profitability. The traffic trend and the micro statistics can give you an idea whether your campaigns are working together to generate leads or clicks on your website or not. This is applicable for all modes of online marketing whether it is a PPC campaign, a banner advertisement or a newsletter.
It gives you a chance to improve your website in terms of content and layout: By using tracking tools, you can come to know the pages which attract more traffic, which visitors visit quite often and on which visitors spend lot of time. Also, you get to know the pages which are “culprit pages”, that is where people come and exit your website after reading content on the page. This exit can be either linked to the content or the design layout. Once you get the list of these pages, you can work on them to make them more attractive in terms of content and design to retain visitors.
You get to know the source of your website’s traffic: You get the source of every single click if you use tracking tool. This gives you info on how your website stands in organic search, how its performing on various search engines, how it is performing on affiliate marketing programs, how your paid advertising efforts are working etc.
You have first hand data about your website visitors: The best part is you don’t have to reply on somebody to get the data about your website traffic. You have the first hand data which you can utilize to perform thorough analysis and fix your website to get more and more “conversions”

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Black Hat Practices and SEO

2008-07-18T02:13:00.000-07:00

There are certain practices which are quite aggressive in nature and which uses methods to manipulate the search engine rankings. These practices are known as black hat practices.

Black hat practices comes under UNEHICAL search engine practices. The technical background of Black Hat practice is that search engine crawlers are robots. They don’t have brains like human beings hence they can not think beyond a point. Few search engine marketers use this to their advantage, making search engine crawlers to stay more on their website and rank their website higher. This results in higher rank and in turn higher traffic. However search engines in principle advocate to stay away from these practices.

Flip side:

Professional practicing black hat practices see this as a quick money making opportunity as it can get heavy organic traffic on the website in a short span of time.

Quick money can be made by seo professional
Heavy organic traffic can be generated to boost sales
Good short term strategy to generate sales

Downside:

Not ethical (Again ethical is a relative word)
Black hat campaign can result in banning your website domain from search engines
Any black hat campaign can not be a part of long term strategy as once you are identified you will be out of indexing process.
It is bound to boomerang you, resulting in loss of traffic

To sum up

Its better to avoid these practices as they are not good for a long term strategy planning. Any good online business grows on ethical practices and a good marketing strategy and a black hat practice can not be a part of any good marketing strategy.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Smart Tips for Managing PPC Programs

2008-07-09T03:46:00.000-07:00

Pay per click programs are highly effective way to get instant traffic on your website. This is a good tool to attract quality and highly targeted traffic. The bids normally start from .05 cents which is quite good as you can get a good number of visitors by spending a little amount. Even if bid is .10 cents, you can get 10 visitors by paying $1

Smart Tips for Managing PPC programs

Identify the set of keywords which clearly defines the services / products you offer. This clearly means that you need to remove unnecessary keywords which might be related to your category but can not generate quality traffic to your website.
Focus on product/service which you wish to sell. Remember, its selling service and you have to be specific in PPC approach. You can not have your whole catalogue on your single campaign.
Take bottom up approach for bid management. Start with a certain minimum value and the scale up the campaigns on a day to day basis till you arrive at an optimum level where your goals are met. ( an optimal combination of your budget / CPA / Bid / position)
Come up with a precise ad copy. Include text in the campaign which clearly states about the service / product you are promoting in the ad campaign. If possible, try to include pricing in the ad copy if you are selling any product. This will increase the CTR if your pricing is competitive.
Setup the campaign and bid on maximum relevant keywords possible. This will increase the possibility of clicks.
Track you campaign: This is the most important step. You need to place tracking to track the ROI. You need to restrict your CPA (cost per acquisition). Big programs like adwords/overture can generate huge volumes and your money can vanish in a day. So you need to track your returns, and this is the only way by which you can know whether its working out for you or not.
Keep tweaking the campaigns in terms if bids and ad copy by looking at the reports. An attractive ad copy can increase the chances of getting clicks.
Do not rush for position #1. Settle for positions 4/5/6 as bids will be lower and visibility will also be OK. This will lower your CPA and increase ROI.

If you try the above points, you can expect improvements in your ROI and in the long run, constant bid management can get you sustained success in managing PPC programs.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

SEO and Content of a Website

2008-05-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

Website Content and SEO

One of the most important and widely accepted areas in SEO is WEBSITE CONTENT. IF a website doesn’t have appropriate content to justify its site structure then irrespective of your SEO efforts, it will not figure in top search results. Search engines will simply ignore the website. Thus, one of the most important areas to concentrate is website content.

During creation of a website, more emphasis is given on how a website looks or how it functions. Tools like flash are used to create beautiful screens to explain the functionality. Animated images are created to give a neat look to the website. While doing this, people completely neglect the fact that website content is one of the most important things and it should get more importance over the design aspect.

The content of a website should actually be the first thing when you are optimizing the website. One need to convey search engines that the website is full of information and worthy to be listed in top search results for the category to which it belongs. Every page of the website should honestly speak about the services, products which it is offering. Kindly avoid irrelevant content, content which is not related to the nature of the web page completely from the webpage. Be honest with the content and you can see miracles in due course. Not to mention there need to be a balance in the content so that the sales pitch of the content part also gets its fair share else the content targeted towards search engine crawlers will attract crawlers but keep the genuine visitors away from your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Organic SEO Vs PPC

2008-04-23T02:36:00.000-07:00

PPC and SEO

Pay Per click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the main techniques to generate visits on your website.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the approach where you bid for the position in search results which are sponsored.

1. higher the bid, higher the position
2. higher the competition, higher the bid

In principal, it is very straight forward. You pay for the position you wish to be and you have a greater control in terms of spending etc.

Organic SEO: Here you try to optimize your web pages around a set of keywords which you feel are suitable to your category. Once search engine crawlers indexes your website and all the pages then your ranking / listing starts appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you have targeted.

So which one of the two is better?

Organic SEO

ROI from organic SEO is substantially better than PPC
Organic SEO pays good in long run
The top positions of search engine results are not for sale. You can get there through organic SEO only
The CTR of organic listings are higher usually
The conversion of organic listing is also higher (lead / sales)
Organic SEO does not require regular maintenance once SEO is done perfectly and is refined for few iterations
There is no recurring cost associated with SEO
There is nothing like “click fraud” as you are not paying per click in organic SEO

PPC

PPC gives you instant traffic
PPC gives you targeted traffic as you can define a set of keywords for which you need traffic
Results can be measured in PPC programs
Marketing strategies can be formulated based on PPC as a tangible forecast of clicks is
available over a period of time
PPC requires professional management once you attain a certain level of spend as maintaining
ROI is very important. An inefficiently managed PPC program can make you loose hundreds of dollars in one night !!
PPC usually is second most cost effective form of web marketing (After organic SEO)
PPC campaigns requires recurring / ongoing management
There are chances of loosing money due to click fraud but most of the major search engines have placed mechanisms to check this.

Final Take: For any website an optimum balance and mix of PPC campaigns and organic SEO is must as they can generate quality traffic if managed properly. PPC gives instant traffic and can be a good source to generate traffic in long run too.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Importance of TITLE TAG in SEO

2008-04-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

Importance of title tag in SEO

Title tag makes up the text which appears in the title of a web browser.
It is very important while considering SEO exercise. There are few tips you need to keep in mind while writing Title tag for your web page.

Must include keywords for the webpage in the Title tag: Title tag is the tag which gives information about the webpage. You can take analogy of a bus number and route display on any metro route. The route is displayed prominently on the bus and that is the identification of the bus. Similar is the Title tag. A search engine crawler would like if you display the title clearly. It takes the title and then matches with the content and links on the web page. If all are in sync, the search engine will love it and assign a certain weight age to it. So, try to stuff your primary keywords for the web page in the title tag of the page
Ordering keywords / phrases in the title tag: If you are using keywords in the title tag, then make sure that the primary keywords are given priority in the position. Ideally you can start your title tag with the primary keyword for that page. This gives strong signal to the search engine about how important you feel the keyword is.
Make your title readable: The text you write in the title should be pleasing to eye, in short readable. Avoid using ALL CAPS. If you use it intelligently, it will make people to click the link while searching through search engines as the title tag appears with a hyperlink in the search results thrown by the search engines
Have unique title tag for each page of your website: Try to keep title tag uniquie for each page of your website. This will help in proper crawling and proper indexing of all your web pages within a website.

Points to keep in mind:

1. Never leave Title tag BLANK or UNTITLED.
2. Write only relevant text in the title tag
3. Do not spam keywords in your title tag.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

SEO and Heading Tags

2008-03-24T04:25:00.000-07:00

Importance of Heading Tags in SEO

Heading tags: These are the tags in HTML which are used to show that a particular text is important by making them bold. As the name suggests, these tags are used to display headings for a webpage or for a portion of text in the webpage.

The text appearing under these tags is made BOLD, thus separating it from the other text on the web page.

Search engines searches relevant and important text on the web page. If you are using heading tags, then crawlers assume that they (heading tags) represent something important on the web page. Thus they give certain weight age to the heading tags.

This is H1 Tag

This is H2 Tag

This is H3 Tag

The size and importance decreases from h1 to h3, that is h1 tag will have the largest font size and its importance is highest.

H1 tag can be used for showing the heading of the page, and ideally it should contain a mix and match of the content of the website with one or two keywords stuffed in between which should justify the text in h1 and the text in the web page content.

By using heading tags, you are making search engine’s job easy as the engine now has the summary of the web page, it knows now what the heading of the web page content is.

Remember, only heading tags can not help you to attain good rankings. You will need to follow other search engine optimization practices sincerely and ethically so that your web page can be crawled and indexed properly.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

SEO and Alt Text Tags

2008-03-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

SEO and Alt Tags

Like Meta tags, Alt Text tags were also an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) till few years ago. Now days the importance of Alt tags have been diminished.

Alt Text tags are meant for providing alternate text to the images, for visually impaired surfers. Stuffing keywords does not help them as they will be stuck in reading the same thing again and again, if keywords ate stuffed in all the alt tags on the page. For them, it will be keyword spamming. Probably this is the reason why all major search engines have started ignoring Alt Tags.

What does this mean?

Alt Text tags should be used for the purpose of representation of image. This was the purpose
of their creation so they should be used for the same. Never try to SPAM through alt tags, in fact you can use 2-3 instances of your primary keywords in Alt Text tags but try to avoid using more than that. Even W3C highly recommends the usage of ALT Tags to describe images. Do not use the text which is irrelevant to the image. If you are trying to fool search engine by excessive usage of keywords in Alt tags, then you are into “Black Hat” practice. Better to avoid this scenario as this will adversely affect your rankings if it backfires.

Final word

Rankings are determined by many factors and Alt Text is just one of them. Focus on this but do not try to use it excessively, instead use a combination of all other factors which will definitely increase your rankings.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Importance of tracking website traffic

2008-03-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

Importance of tracking web traffic

Keeping track of traffic on your website is vital. This is an important aspect of search engine optimization too. You need to know how much traffic your website receives everyday in order to make short term and long term marketing strategies. Also the tracking helps in fine tuning ROI from the website.

Very few website owners have idea about how many visitors visit their website, where they come from, which pages they visit. Website traffic tracking deals with the following

•How many people visit the website everyday, every month
•What is the source of the visits on the website that is from where the visitors
come?
•Segmentation and classification of traffic originating from search engines, PPC programs,
and affiliate network programs, links from other directories, paid banner advertising etc.
•What keywords are typed by the visitors in the search engines to reach the website?
•What is the typical navigation by a visitor on your website?

Answers to above can help you maximize the ROI and optimize your marketing spend.

There are many third party free online tools available which you can use to monitor the traffic. There are certain limitations on free accounts as you can not store more data through them. The paid options give you more storage and you can have data for a longer duration. The typical parameters which should be considered for web traffic monitoring are:

• The number of visitors
• Average number of page views per visitor
• Average visit duration
• Most popular pages
• Most popular landing pages
• Frequent exit pages
• Path of a visitor
• Source of traffic

Once you analyze the above parameters, you can work effectively on search engine optimization and you can significantly improve your ROI.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

What is Link Popularity and how it helps in Search Engine Optmization?

2008-03-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

Importance of link popularity in Search Engine Optimization

What is link popularity?
Link popularity is the measure of the popularity of a website in terms of the incoming links it has got. This is the measure of how many domains / websites have a LINK reference for a particular website.

Most of the major search engines now have crawler based mechanism to assign rankings to any website in search results for keywords. Therefore link popularity has become an important concept as it plays a vital role in getting higher ranks in search results. Crawler based search engines love to hear from others. They do not have much interest in what you are boasting of yourself. This concept makes Link Popularity, an important aspect in Organic Search Engine Optimization. More the other websites refer you; more popular are you in the eyes of search engines.

I will quote a simple example here.

If you wish to advertise about your retail shop, the more effective way is to put up 100 banners at establishments throughout the town rather than placing all 100 at your retail shop. In first case, the other establishments are referring you so your importance increases and your visibility / credibility will also increase thus giving you advantage. Similar is Link popularity for a website.

Link popularity always pays in long run. If you are serious about search engine optimization, branding of your website then link popularity has to be given a good weight age as this over a period of time pushes your website in rankings amazingly.

Conceptually there are 4 types of links which are considered for increasing link popularity. Each type has its own weight age and importance in search engine optimization.

Internal Links: This refers to the internal links of your own website pointing to various pages within the website. These need to be properly structures in order to contribute for link popularity.

Free links: There are many website which provide free links to other websites to make their content look rich and to attract more traffic.

Link exchange: Link exchange is an agreement where two websites place links to each other. This technique was useful till a couple of years ago but due to its misuse search engines do not give much importance to it.

Paid links: Some directories, websites charge to place the other website links. The charge can be one time or recurring.

Link popularity is a tool, if used effectively can improve your search rankings drastically across the major search engines. The quality and relevance of the links coming to your website is important and has to be kept in mind while carrying this exercise.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

What is a CTR (Click Through Ratio)?

2008-02-28T02:04:00.000-08:00

What is a CTR

CTR refers to Click Through Ratio. It is a widely used term in Search Engine Marketing.

Click through Ratio (CTR) is the ratio of the number of times the Pay Per Click (PPC) AD appears (number of impressions) to the number of times it is CLICKED by the visitors.

For Example, if your ads are shown 100 times and 2 persons have clicked on them during this then your CTR would be 2/100 => 2%

More the CTR is, more relevant your ad copy is. This means that person who has typed something in the search box will look for the most relevant AD in the results. If your ad copy shows him/her the information he is looking, more likely he/she will click on the AD. However CTR also depends on the competition, position you are bidding and whether the ad is thrown up in content or direct search.

CTR is important while you set and manage CPC campaigns. Especially Google gives certain weight age to healthy CTR. CTR can be improved by:

Writing effective ad copy
Making keyword appear in the Ad copy
Creating multiple Ads within a Ad Group

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Google Adwords - Getting Clicks and Converting them into Customers

2008-02-23T23:40:00.000-08:00

Google Adwords – Getting clicks as well as Customers

Google adwords is PPC (CPC) program provided by Google which is an excellent tool to attract traffic on a website. Newly launched websites do not have organic / natural rankings for months, may be even a year so the best way to attract quality traffic is to take help of Google adwords or similar PPC program.

Adwords give full control to you with various tools to optimize budget spend, maximize the clicks, and extract a good ROI. Following are few tips on how to use your Google adwords campaign effectively.

Aim for getting customers / Sale / Conversions rather than getting clicks:
Every single click through adwords comes with a price tag. Remember this and take actions accordingly. If you are getting clicks only and no conversions / sale / customer then your ROI is ZERO. You need to develop campaigns, which not only attracts clicks but also the customers, which exactly is your purpose of choosing a CPC program like Google adwords.

Track the traffic on the website:
Before you start and adwords campaign, you MUST place an independent tracking on your website to track the traffic which is coming on your website. This will give you an idea of what you are paying and what you are getting. In addition to this, you can track other traffic too which is landing on your website and the source of the traffic. Google analytics can also be utilized for this purpose. Other independent tools are WEB-STAT and Statcounter.com

Budget, Bid, And Position:
The basic information you can get from adwords help center. You need to know the importance of these parameters in order to get maximum out of your campaign. The position is based on the CPC (bid) and which in turn directly affects your click volume. You need to strike a balance for the three things to arrive at an optimal combination to match your budget.

CTR:
Click Through Ratio(CTR) is the figure, which gives you the ratio of number of clicks against the number of impressions. But this ratio is so not important as for primary keywords, you may get a high value and for secondary keywords this figure can be very small. This also signifies how good is your ad copy. Better the ad copy, more will be the value.

Keywords:
When you setup your campaign, start with few keywords. Then monitor the impressions, clicks, CPC everyday and then keep on increasing the set of campaigns, and keywords based on your observation. Keep refining the campaigns, remove non performing keywords, add more secondary keywords as they have less BID and your ad will rank higher thus increasing the chances of conversions a low acquisition cost.

Ad Copy:
Keep it simple and straightforward. The copy should match the services you offer. Irrelevant references to the services will yield in mere clicks, not the conversion / sale / customer and will dent your ROI.

Ad Targeting:
You need to be specific in targeting geographical location. You cannot create a campaign selling electronic gadgets in Europe and targeting the US customers. This again is very important in getting quality clicks and affects ROI.

Landing Page:
A good landing page is very critical in getting good conversion / acquisition rate. Remember, home page cannot be a landing page. Your landing page should provide comprehensive list of services and offers you have on your website. This is the page where customer will land when he / she clicks on the ad. The page should be action oriented, literally should force customer to take an action. If it fails to do so, you will only get a click not the sale / customer and this in turn will affect your ROI. Be honest on landing page and the page content should justify the ad copy you are using to target the customers in adwords.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Meta Tags - Use them effectively

2008-02-19T03:28:00.000-08:00

Use Meta tags effectively for your advantage

Meta Tags: Meta tags are the HTML tags which are used on a HTML page to provide information about the content of the web page where they are used. Commonly used Meta tags are Title tag, Description tag, Keyword tag.

Meta tags are critical part of the SEO process. One needs to use then effectively. Selecting the right tag can make or break your entire SEO exercise to get listed in top search results.

During the initial days of internet, search engines were solely relying on meta tags about the information regarding the page on which meta tags were placed. This was misused by the webmasters to get their website rank higher and hence post 2000 era, search engines have reduced the dependency on these tags. The tags are still relevant as they provide the basic information to search engine crawlers about the nature of the web page. Majority of search engines have evolved their own algorithms to crawl the web pages and they have their own mechanism where they use the combination of Meta tags and the page content to arrive at certain weight age which is used to place a particular web page in search results.

What you should do with Meta tags

* Use Meta tags on each and every page you wish to get indexed.
* select content of meta tags in a manner that it is relevant to the web page content
* Format tags properly and then use
* Keep the frequency of keywords checked, do not overuse in meta tags

There are many tools available online which will tell you whether you are using the tags effectively or not. Choosing Meta tags is NO rocket science, it just need a little common sense. Effectively used, it can do wonders.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Pay Per Click (PPC) Programs

2007-08-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Management

Search engine positioning and placement is critical for increasing your website traffic. Just a few good positions can drive traffic in thousands to your website, day after day. While search engine optimization is an essential long-term strategy to boost ‘organic’ search engine rankings, it takes time and there are no guarantees. That’s why paid search advertising is a necessary supplement to organic search engine optimization. With pay-per-click advertising, you can get any amount of traffic and first page search engine exposure if you are prepared to pay for it.

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising is a feature that is now being offered by the major search engines. Through a competitive bidding process, you can buy a favorable position on the search engine results for specific keyword search phrases that you choose. You pay for results only on a “per click” basis, hence the name Pay per Click Advertising. The twin advantages of PPC advertising are immediate visibility and strategic placement. When you opt for PPC advertising the listing process can be done within just a couple of days. Which means that you can feature ‘right up there’ almost immediately. Of equal importance is the fact that you can determine your ad placement within the search results, depending on your budget. This method of advertising is highly valued by advertisers, because it gives them complete control over their ad spends and also due to the fact that they can monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns and take rapid corrective action. This results in minimal wastage of vital ad budget allocations. Right now, Pay-per-Click is the fastest, cheapest, easiest and most effective method of advertising on the Internet. While almost all major search engines offer Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising opportunities, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Overture represent the two best Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising programs on the Internet today.

The most popular PPC provider on the internet today is Google. It is commonly known as Google Cost-per-Click Program.There is no monthly minimum spending requirement and bids start at $.05. Himshilp professionals have the unique qualification of having worked with Google Adwords right from its inception. This has provided us with deep insights on how the system works and how to work around its limitations. Our vast experience helps us in structuring your ads intelligently and in getting maximum mileage for every dollar you spend.

Yahoo-Overture is the other major PPC provider. We know what works and how to generate low-cost traffic to make your PPC adds attract clients starting the very first day. We setup your online PPC advertising program, making it easy and trouble free to attract new clients. Our experience and expertise will ensure a highly cost effective PPC program optimized to meet your marketing goals. Across a wide spectrum of clients, we have over the years, developed highly effective PPC campaigns resulting in maximum click through rates (CTR). Our PPC Experts constantly monitor your PPC bids for the different keywords, the click through rate for those keywords, the ROI and other minute details. We observe conversion rates over time and edit campaigns resulting in maximization of ROI.

We periodically provide you with comprehensive reports regarding the amount of clicks per keyword, individual and average click through rate, the individual and average cost per click and other reports. Monthly management services are also available to ensure you get optimum results month after month.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Search Engine friendly website designing

2006-04-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

Website Design keeping in mind the search engines.

Designing a website keeping in mind the search engine perspective is very important. The website should be designed in such a way that the search engines do not face any difficulty in crawling. Search engines are becoming more and more intelligent day by day, so the more crawler friendly website, the more higher is your ranking and more your reach to potential customers.

Efficient Search Engine Friendly website design services from India at Affordable rates. Kindly email at himanshu@himshilp.com for detailed list of satisfied clients and consultation on search engine friendly website designs.

Kindly contact Himshilp at himanshu@himshilp.com for

Search engine friendly website design
Web designing Catalogue designing using flash
Brochure designing
Multimedia and print media designing

Internet Marketing Basics

2004-11-23T06:29:00.000-08:00

Search Engine optimization company

Internet Marketing Basics

Almost all of the articles on Internet marketing lacks coverage on all the basics and all the avenues of Internet marketing because there is just too much information to cover in a few words. Here I am going for an attempt which will be an overview, not an in depth affair.

Here I would cover four basic marketing subjects:

* Market Research
* Search Engines
* E-zine Advertising
* Email Marketing

Market Research This is the most basic part of any marketing campaign. This involves how much you are going to invest in the campaigns and where you are going to invest. Investing the right money at right place is the key. If you don’t know your target market and how to reach them; if you don’t know the value of the message you’re attempting to convey; if you don’t know the answer to all the pertinent questions…your advertising and the whole project will fail.

The most basic step in researching your market is to first have a “target.” There should be a clear picture in your mind about the target audience and you should treat them as your potential customers. This means you know who you’re aiming for (their likes, dislikes, general age group, income, business type, etc.) and have a general idea how to “hit” them. Sample target markets would include:

This includes the segregation based on

* Age group
* Qualification
* Per capita income
* Spending capacity
* Geographical location
* Business class
* Technocrats

Once you know who your target is – the more information the better – you’re ready to get into the nitty-gritty of market research. There are five basic ideas in market research: “Primary,” “Secondary,” “Combined” (all types of research) and “Qualitative” and “Quantitative” (ways of gathering the information). A quick definition of each:

Primary research is research conducted by the primary user of the information. Secondary research is gathered elsewhere and used by you (purchased, leased, etc.). Most small businesses conduct both of these types of market research – customer surveys for primary information and by researching free or paying fees for secondary information. This is called “Combined” research.

Qualitative research is usually exploratory and has a direction or goal. It generally aims at specific issues in the subject matter and gives you a better idea in which direction you should proceed. This type of research is “loose” and is geared more towards finding a market or narrowing your market than it is towards getting specific information on that market and where your product fits within it.

Quantitative is much more rigid than qualitative marketing. This research gets much more accurate statistical results and information and is best used when your target market is already narrowed and you wish to find ways to reach or explore that market as well as find specific information on your product as it relates to that market.

Generally businesses conduct qualitative research during the exploratory research and development phase of their product to see if it is viable on the market and what they need in order to reach their market more fully with the product (colors, shapes, uses, etc.). Once the item is ready to hit the streets, qualitative research is used to fine-tune the market niche and begin offering the product for sale.

Conducting your own market research is time-consuming, but is very well worth it if you have a need for information or if you are spending any considerable amount of money on your marketing for specific products or services.

Search Engine Marketing
This has, for a long time now, been a “hot phrase” in online marketing circles. I’m not sure why, since while it is generally an important part of a presence online, it is not the end-all-be-all of marketing on the Internet. Search engines have become one of the most expensive forms of advertising on the Web, but have also become one of the most effective. Great search engine marketing (read: placement, strategy, etc.) is done by professionals and takes a lot of time to do correctly. There are two types of search engines to market towards: search engines/directories and pay-per-click (PPC) engines.

Search directories (Yahoo! ) and engines (Google) require a lot of patience to market effectively. Even if you are paying for your listing, it can take weeks to appear on their site. Further, your positioning on their site can change regularly as their indexes change or they change the rules of “ranking” on searches. On top of all of that you have paid advertisements and paid listings (see PPC below) that can usurp your position or push you further down in the results.

Pay-per-click (PPC) engines are much easier to use, but also more expensive. A campaign on Overture, for example, can total hundreds of dollars in a single day. These engines, however, can usually get you a higher listing on a regular search engine (such as Yahoo!) much faster and with steadier results. Google Adwords is one more example in this category. This approach should be taken when the site is a new site, there is no brand name associated with the website. this gives instant traffic to any website and which in turn increases popularity of the site among the affiliates who are in constant search for the god affiliate program websites.

Whichever course you take (I would recommend both if you’re serious about search engine marketing), be prepared to spend a lot of time and a goodly amount of money in your endeavor. A listing at Yahoo!, for example, is $300/year and the average per-click cost on Overture is about $0.75.

E-Zine Advertising
In my experience, this is by far the most effective form of advertising at very low cost online. That said, be leery of offers to “get your ad in 50 email newsletters for only $25.” I doubt you’ll see one response for your $25 since most of the “readers” of these e-zines are probably other people who paid for advertising as well.

If you have researched your market well then you know the general wants and desires of your targets. Using that information, you can find the online newsletters (email or web-based) that these people would be interested in. Chances are that publication takes advertising. There are three basic types of advertising to a newsletter list: solo ads, top-line ads, and classified ads.

Solo ads are sent to the entire (or a part of, depending on the options given) newsletter list – these ads contain ONLY your advertisement or perhaps your ad plus an article to get the reader interested in looking. These are the most effective type of advertising through most newsletters, but are also the most expensive. Expect to pay $20 or more per 1,000 impressions in a good publication.

Top-line ads are just that: ads that appear at the very top of a newsletter or at the top of an article in the newsletter. These are also highly effective and are fairly cost-efficient at about half the price of a solo advert.

Classified ads are the most useless of the three options given. They’re usually very cheap, but almost always appear at the bottom of the newsletter and are generally bypassed by the readers who rarely read that far into the publication. These are cheap, though ($5/issue is not uncommon) and can be effective when combined with one of the other two options to spread your advertising over several issues.

Email Marketing
Marketing online using email is a touchy affair and can easily lead to many problems. Despite this, it is by far the most effective form of advertising online – bar none. An email advertisement to a targeted and strong list of people can generate responses of close to 1/3 (1 response for every 3 targets). That’s phenomenal in ANY form of advertising.

There are three types of email marketing: SPAM/UCE, opt-in, and newsletter marketing.

SPAM/UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) is something that everyone, whether savvy online or not, has heard of. The word SPAM has risen from “questionable meat in a can” to “plague of the Internet” in the past three or four years. Despite its bad name – and any personal feelings I may have about it – SPAM is a very effective form of email advertising. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t exist. Doing it correctly, however, is expensive and requires much thought – using it even just once can affect your business for better or worse for the duration of your time online.

Opt-In email advertising is extremely effective and carries very little of the weight of SPAM marketing. The idea is pretty basic: you create a list of email addresses and send marketing messages to them occasionally. The hard part is getting those names to start with. Usually other forms of advertising get your website going and this type propels it forward.

Newsletter marketing is similar to opt-in marketing, but includes useful information such as articles or insights. In fact, you’re probably reading this article through a newsletter that is being used to market a business of some type or another. Newsletters can be time-consuming, but are well worth the effort. Some newsletter publishers supplement their income by running advertisements in their publications (see “newsletter marketing” above).

Of these three types of marketing, I have had the most success with newsletter marketing followed closely by opt-in advertising. That said, be VERY wary of “email lists” for purchase or hire that claim to be “opt-in.” Generally, these are NOT what they appear to be and you will receive several complaints of SPAMming if you use them. Building a list of names and emails for opt-in or newsletter publication is difficult, but very much worth the trouble for the payoffs in the long run. I have run my own newsletter for over a year now and receive more comments, input, and business through that than I do any other venue excepting word-of-mouth. If done right, a proper newsletter or opt-in list can greatly increase your success online. If you feel you don’t have the time or skill to publish your own newsletter, there are those who will do it for you (including myself!).

Conclusion
Advertising online is a very time-consuming affair, but essential to your success. If you don’t advertise, your business will fail. There are no exceptions to this rule. Some form of advertising takes place for every business type without exception. Marketing requires thought, time, and effort to succeed but as an essential part of your business, it’s directly related to your rewards at the end of the day!

Contact us or kindly visit http://www.himshilp.com for more on our services

Search Engine Optimization

2004-11-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization services

Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site. Many web sites are expensive to build and are technologically advanced but they cannot be ranked by the search engines because they were never optimized.

The objective of search engine optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and do submission of your site to the available search engine indexes and directories.

The initial step is to build a great content-rich website. The last step is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory.

There are no search engine optimization secrets - just ranking and promotion methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords

What I suggest is to carefully , by using your instincts and Internet experience, do the following

Identify your competition
locate potential back links to your URL
Identify the relevant keywords (its far better to have ranks for more than one keyword or phrase than to be at the top for only one keyword)

Avoid these

Repetition of keywords
Use of irrelevant keywords
Use of colored text on same-color background
Duplication of pages with different URLs
Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL

After keywords identification, follow these

Add keywords in content
Submission of website to major search engines
Recheck search engine registration (it will take few weeks to get your site listed in engines and directories)
Check the search engine placement (please keep on checking the results as you have to feed this input to your further optimization process)

Repeat all the steps mentioned above periodically to keep your listing improving

Search engine optimization has become a necessity for companies that are serious about increasing Internet business and achieving prominent rankings in the major search engines.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp