Tag-Archive for ◊ SEM ◊

Author: Leif
• Monday, October 05th, 2009

Google SEOGoogle SEO is optimization of websites which is done by website owners for getting top page ranking in the ruler of search engines that everyone is familiar with, It is Google. This is a fact that everyone knows and everyone will agree with this, that a majority of internet users are using Google for having an answer on their search terms.

It doesn’t matter when it comes to the user, it may be a blog reader or customer, will type a query which is called KEYWORD in the search column and waits for a very short period of time to see the search engine results that appear for the query. This is the reason where you should think about building your website that is Google search Engine Optimization. It is pretty important that you optimize your business website or your blog, so that it helps you in achieving most of the benefits like better page ranks and targeted traffic from search engines. Indeed, this is one remarkable concept that will help you in having a good business.

As like any other business, you will need to do some investment in the beginning of you Online Business too.  The initial investment is going to be spent for hiring a good SEO agency that will work on optimizing your website. There are plenty of things that need to be targeted when you are into this optimization procedure.

You can ask yourself whether if it possible for you to do SEO on your own for yourself. It is definitely not a hard task to do. It is not going to ask for anything else rather than proper dedication towards work and a fair amount of your time. You will also need to learn a lot of things related to Google SEO concept before you start working on this. As stated before, this task is pretty time consuming, so spending some money and getting it done from professionals is a nice solution and side by side you can learn with your own, so once you are familiar with the concept, you will be able to do with your own.

There are a lot of companies that provide SEO services and solutions but it is pretty important that you find a genuine company that counts worth for your investments. Here again, you will need to search for finding a proper company that will help you in better way. Here again, cost is definitely a concern. Going for a cheap solution will be waste of time, money and it will not be good for you and your company. I’ll advise you to go for a company that will charge you a nominal fee and also make sure that you will get satisfactory results for your investments. You can verify their previous experience and most important their license and make sure that they will be able to provide Google friendly solutions for your website. Once you finish up with a company, your Google SEO website is nearly ready to go for Google Search Engine!!

Author: Leif
• Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Google SEOIn Google SEO (search engine optimization), you, the webmaster, fight with Googlebot, Google’s listing spider. Only this battle has no weapons. In its place it is your content verses the army of Googlebot’s other sites to rank.

To be successful in this battle there are things that the webmaster should do, and things that the webmaster should not do, should he set a possibility in winning the battle and claiming a position on the top 20 results of Google.

There are a lot of things a webmaster should do to take the edge of Googlebot. First and most important, create the website. Let it be a bit unique, or better than the rest. Add pages on top of pages of content. You can put articles, information, anything. With one exemption. It should be related to your website. After you have about 10 pages worth of content, get a number of links to your site. Submit to directories, loads of them. Try to submit to directories without a reciprocal link requirement. Besides use word-of-mouth advertising to get a view visitor. Once you have some links, some visitors, and loads of content, hit your view visitors with a boom. Offer rewards for who possibly will refer the most members, or who may possibly submit the most articles, or everything that will help to promote your site. Also keep in mind to squeeze in possible keywords in your content, and DO NOT forget meta tags, they are the key to SEO.

You might have taken a note, I never talked about or suggested when you should submit your site to Google, that’s the thing you should not do. If google picks up your site before you submit it, you get a way better rank.

Now you have come up with a very excellent SEO website. Now you have to take care of not to blow it. Whatever you do, DON’T:

• Do not link exchanges with the sites that are non-relevant to topic, this will hurt you.
• Do not cheat. Cheating is stuffing of “invisible” keywords on your site. (white text on white background) Googlebot picks it up, and boom, an end to the rank on Google.
• If you hit upon the need to submit your site, do it, ONCE. If you submit twice then, say goodbye to your rank.

That’s all and best of luck with the SEO. With this, excellent keywords, and least competition, you will get inside the top 20 of Google.

Author: Leif
• Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Future of SEOIs it okay to consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as an exact science? Then the answer is NO. Search Engine Optimization cannot be considered an accurate science for the reason that the techniques used in promoting websites or web pages are constantly developing as search engines continue to filter their algorithms to get more perfect and improved results while fighting spam. In an effort to be aware of search engines algorithms secrets, Marketers and Engine Developers engage in a cat and mouse game, equally struggling to get the better of each other by seeking to make use of loopholes in algorithms.

From the time when the actual difficulty stemmed from the proliferation of websites that used unethical ways of boosting their ranks like Keyword stuffing and link building, newer techniques and methodologies are being developed to prevent unethical issues regarding website promotions. The cumulative effect of SEO black hat method made the crawlers more advanced and more alert as technology formulates new standards for ranking. SEO experts who may possibly have once utilized black hat techniques now have to be more careful in their approach or they may fall prey to engine spam filters which can ban their client’s websites from engines, no longer appearing in Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

The expansion of internet is credited to both academics and businesses that have joined forced to produce a place where everything must be fair and apparently clean. If SEO experts continue to make the most and accept the SEO guidelines issued by search engines, then search engines will forever make basic changes that will promote an well-organized, reasonable transmission and reception of information worldwide similar to what happened in November 2003 when Google made fundamental changes to remove untruthful and unethical rankings, leading to the accommodation of new and honest page rankings.

A brighter future awaits SEO if only SEO experts will continue to judge usability and translations when coming up with search engine marketing campaign. In addition, SEO has a probability of surviving if it will continuously adapt and act in response to the hunt of a more trustworthy and relevant search results made possible by a search engine optimization anchored on strategies set by different search engines. If only SEO experts will do this then the internet will be a much superior place to secure pieces of information and trustworthy data.

Author: Leif
• Thursday, July 16th, 2009

traffic for website Targeted Traffic For WebsitesWeb site traffic is the dream of every website’s owner.

The class of visitors that these owners would like is those who are concerned on the site’s traffic. They are the same ones who will promote more on what the site have to offer.

This is the reason why your visitors must be highly targeted ones. At the present, you may be wondering, what is the most excellent way to get targeted website traffic coming over to your site?

Take it from the expert. Below are some of the things that proved effective for them in improving their web site traffic.

SEOSearch Engine Optimization: This must be essentially kept in your mind. Whichever technique you put it, in the online world, search engine rules. To be well-known in this business is to be recognized by most important search engines. Your site requires optimization in these search engines. Be familiar with the importance of links and site tactics.

RSSRSS: Blogs and RSS feeds go hand in hand. From the time when more people are into blogs, website owners are finding that this has turn into a precious tool in getting website traffic. Once you input RSS feeds into your blogs, expect a huge number of targeted website traffic to come pouring into your site.

Viral MarketingViral Marketing: One way of getting added website traffic is by giving out freebies to your guests. Consumers come running at the first notice of something free. Lots of websites offer free reports that their visitors can download and be able to use.

One example of a freebie that know how to bring a lot of website traffic is updated report and tutorials on using software like RSS for all types of website.

The viral marketing techniques which you can make with a link to the company and that know how to pass around with no problem in any way. Programs that goes with what your site is all about is one more viral marketing suggestion you may like to think about.

article submission Targeted Traffic For WebsitesArticles Marketing: This works all the time. Whenever article marketing is used, major changes for the better have been made on lots of websites. Not only website traffic was increased, the profits are also doubled. Article marketing is an effective way of getting targeted visitors into your site.

Submit your articles to article directories and published on websites. Soon enough, your content will be displayed on a variety of websites and read by customers who would even be concerned to what you are offering.

The method in article marketing is to write valuable and relevant articles that focus on your niche market. Publishers are always on the search for fresh new contents. Once they see your articles, they would like to use them in their publications. When this happens, your link popularity will be given a boost along with your search engine rankings.

While writing articles, try to find the correct keywords to target. Take care that they are relevant to the topic of your site. It is good to try and make use of keywords that have very high traffic but with low competition from existing websites.

EzineEzines: This is for those who have ezines. You can build up a big opt-in list of subscribers to your ezine with the purpose of bringing more website traffic to your site.

Make use of your ezine to give out tips and suggestions to your readers. When you have developed a good connection with your readers, they will remain close to you and try to return for more of what you have to offer.

Your ezine must be directly related to the topic of your site and gives information that will be very much useful. You will understand that once you continuously manage your site based on a single focus, you will be regarded as an professional on that field. When you are considered an expert, visitors will come looking for you to look for ideas and suggestions.
There are other sources of website traffic that can work fine also but not as useful as the ones mentioned above. Examples of these are forums.

Website traffic is a continuous procedure that website owners should maintain. Try to utilize these techniques that the experts have found to be beneficial. Or you can come up with other ways of for your own.

Author: Leif
• Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

black hat seo Black Hat SEO Most Popular TechniquesSEO is considered as one of the most popular form of search engine marketing (SEM) used by webmasters. For the reason of its popularity and effectiveness in bringing traffic to a website, lots of webmasters have come to misuse the effectiveness of SEO by using techniques set to go against search engine strategies. These techniques are called black hat SEO.

Equal to white hat SEO, black hat SEO are forms of techniques used to give quicker result, but may finally be banned moreover temporarily or permanently once the search engines notice what they are doing.

A number of techniques used for black hat SEO have been useless since search engines repeatedly change their algorithm to reduce the use and efficiency of black hat seo technique. But some techniques are still used today. Forms of popular black hat SEO techniques used until today consist of: Hidden text Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the similar color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within HTML code such as “no frame” sections, ALT attributes, zero-width/height DIVs, and “no script” sections. Though, hidden text is not always spamdexing: it can also be used to improve accessibility.

People viewing websites for a search-engine company may momentarily or permanently block an complete website for having hidden text on some webpages. According to SEO experts, Google has taken steps to avoid this by parsing the colour of text as it indexes it and checking to see if it is similar to or the same colour as the background, giving those pages much lower rankings. Using Scraper Sites, a scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. No part of a scraper site is unique. A search engine is not a scraper site in any way: sites like Yahoo and Google gather content from other websites and index it in order that the index can be searched with keywords. Search engines subsequently display snippets of the original site content in response to a user’s search. In the last few years, and because of the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at a remarkable rate for spamming search engines.

Open content sites like Wikipedia are a general source of material for scraper sites. Scrapers have a tendency to be associated with link farms and are at times perceived as the similar thing, when multiple scrapers link to the same target site. A frequent target victim site may be accused of link-farm participation, because of the artificial pattern of incoming links to a victim website, linked from multiple scraper sites. Spam Blogs or Splogs Spam blogs, occasionally referred on the way to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The reason of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are generally a type of scraper site, where content is frequently either inauthentic text or simply stolen from other websites. According to SEO experts, these blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites linked with the splog creator which are often disreputable or else useless websites.

There is common misunderstanding among the terms “splog” and “spam in blogs“. Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. Blog Spamming Blog spamming or spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Cookie stuffing or dropping take place as soon as viewer visits a website, and in turn from that visit receives a third-party cookie from a totally dissimilar website. It involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor’s computer without their awareness, which will then produce revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. As said by the SEO experts, income is generated when the affected user visits the target affiliate site and either creates an account or makes a purchase, depending on the terms of the affiliate agreement. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but in addition it has the potential to overwrite legitimate affiliates’ cookies, basically stealing their legally earned commissions.

Author: Leif
• Thursday, June 04th, 2009

SEO Tips for GoogleGetting a high ranking on Google is a big success. There are a lot of factors that go into pulling a high page rank. I have composed a small list of things that should not be ignored when optimizing your site. Let’s begin from the top:

META Tags- Sorry to say but Google doesn’t read META tags. That includes the KEYWORD tag. Some search engines, however, still use them.

URL- Having a keyword or words in URL will help you to some extent. Having a key word in your URL is not by any means a assurance, but it never hurts.

TITLE Tag- This is an most important step, make use of this tag wisely. Place your top keywords here. Keep in mind, your page is indexed starting from the top of the page. Make this one count.

Site Content- The first section of your site is a important part of your optimization. This will also be used as your site’s description. Be cautious not to exceed on the keywords. Make sure your content makes logic. Your keywords should make up a total of 6% to 8% of your page content. A standard of three hundred words is a excellent rule of thumb.

Header Tags- Header tag < H1 > must be considered important. Make headers uniform on your site. I like using them on the top of my page just before the first paragraph.

ALT Tags- These tags are great for adding up keywords to images, so take benefit of them. I also use mouse over text with linked text.

Links- Any links you have on your site should cover key terms in them. Never use “Click Here” or other unrelated words when creating links.

Bonus tip: When exchanging text links, make use of key phrases as the actual links. This will positively help you out.

Links exchange- This will help to increase your overall ranking. It’s actually better to be linked from another site (one way) than reciprocal (both sites linking to each other). Being linked one way is a huge bonus. Though, the following should be kept in mind.

A: The site you are linking to needs to be related to your site.
B: Google’s page rank of the site should be higher than yours; the higher the better.
C: Stay away from linking to sites that have too many links. A site that has forty or more links will only hurt you.

Bonus Tip: See where you rank on Google by using this free tool. http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php

This Google ranking tool will give you an idea about what keywords you are found on. Use this to help change the keywords you want to be found under. Be sure to check your ranking before you start any optimization. Then do it again 3, 4 weeks after you have completed your adjustments. See if your ranking has gone up.

Author: Leif
• Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Google FriendlyLet’s memorize the introduction of Google in September 1998. All of a sudden, massive chaos erupted in between web designer, developers, programmers, and consultants in all over the planet to make sure that their websites are Google friendly or not. Mostly, the term Google friendly means ‘to optimize every single factor on every single page of the website’ that proved a very daunty job.

Currently, Google has made it simple and providing help throughout its web pages like, ‘webmaster guidelines’. Here in this page, general design, technical and quality guidelines have been mentioned to improve the Google rank of your websites. Strategies have greatly dignified the importance of high quality content particularly on homepages. The content should be molded in such a method that it could visibly and correctly explain the reason of website. The content must include all those key words that can be used in search engine to stumble on your services. One must keep in mind that only HTML code of your web pages are being read by search engine. Graphics, javascript code or other script or features are having very slightest importance from optimization viewpoint.

Procedure of Google friendly website starts from the birth of site at the same time you select a domain name. You should always choose a domain name that tells about the subject of your site. You should concentrate on one theme with one website. Just fill up your website with specific contents. As more, you would be paying attention upon one topic; more your web pages would be Google friendly or in other language, it would be optimized in improved way for search engines. Try to make several content pages and separate them with important keyword and key phrase. Main targeted key phrases must be included into page title, description tag, ALT image tags, comment tags, and in internal and external links. With the description in META tags, you can magnetize unique visitors so just try to offer a advantage or answer a problem through description. Frequency and density of keywords may be different for different search engine but it never exceeds from 5%.

Main navigation links of your website must be focused towards your home page. It makes simple for search engine in indexing the web pages. Indexing is similarly essential for search engines in addition to visitors. You can utilize text browser such as ‘lynx’ to inspect your site. Don’t forget to allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID. It is very helpful in tracking visitors’ activities.

Eventually, one must not forget that Google keeps itself updated and you can be comfortable with the mind set up that these few points are under control and therefore my web pages will constantly maintain their high rankings.

Author: Leif
• Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

ebook How to Create an E Book Which Could Help In Driving Massive Traffic to Your SiteElectronic books are self contained executable files of HTML which could be the website or specifically created to be compiled into a downloadable exe. file for distribution. When the file is downloaded, it will be self installed on your clients desktop.

E-books are completely interactive with the internet and can contain live links, graphics, forms, JavaScript, embedded video, can be protective via password/user id, search capabilities and much more. This self-contained executable file can be disturbed in a number of ways va DC, floppy disk, download, etc.

All e-book compilation software is not at all created equal. Make sure you review the capabilities before purchasing.

E-books can provide the Internet marketer one of the best promotional tools online. With its vast variety of uses, just one quality e-book development and distribution can produce an on going promotional tool that will work 24/7. Your e-book can literally be viewed by millions simply by giving it away…

Suggested Uses:

Marketing – Provide your sales network with your complete sales presentation to freely distribute with their ID to track sales.
Promotion – Provide valuable information on a specific subject to bring traffic to your site.
E-zine Archives – E-zine publishers can provide their publication archives to enable subscribers to read back issues on their desktop, visit your web site, subscribe, submit ads, etc.
Catalogs - Provide a desktop catalog for you customers to view on their desktop. You can even provide a form to accept orders right through your e-book.
How To Manuals – Provide your affiliates with a complete “how to” manual for marketing, advertising and promoting your products.
Electronic Books – Writers can offer their books in an electronic version.
Web Site – Create an electronic version of your web site to place on disk and be viewed on your clients desktop.
Instructional – Provide an electronic training manual.

Creating an e-book is just like creating a web site. Simply create your HTML pages just like you would for your web site. Make sure you select a good software package that allows you to include hyperlinks, graphics, search, forms, etc. Keep in mind, the more professional, content rich your e-book, the more exposure it will receive.

There are several software packages available online to assist you in compiling your e-book.

For massive exposure, select a subject with a broad appeal. If your sites focus is on web site traffic, consider creating an e-book on generating traffic. I.E. “A complete “how to” guide to generating massive traffic to your site”. Include several references to your site throughout your e-book such as; “For even more great traffic generating tips, visit “Traffic Tips” Your complete source for generating massive traffic to your web site. http://www.yoursite.com” or “Winning awards can dramatically increase traffic to your site. For a complete listing of award sites, visit “Traffic Tips Award Sites” http://www.yoursite.com/awardsites.

Tips for creating your e-book:

Create a directory on your computer to include ALL the files for your E-book. These files will include HTML, graphics, backgrounds, etc.
E-books should contain mainly text. Try to limit your banners to one per page. To keep your file size down, you may want to use only non-animated banners.
E-books are generally formatted at a small screen resolution so make sure your pages are viewable through any screen size.
Include good navigational links throughout your pages.
Use spell check to search for any possible spelling errors.
For massive distribution, make sure you include a short paragraph on your main page in regard to your copyrights and distribution. I.E., This E-book may be freely distributed.

Sample Example of Distribution
:

10 of your visitors download your e-book. Your 10 visitors each give away 10 e-books – 100 Those 100 each give away 10 e-books – 1000 Those 1000 each give away 10 e-books – 10,000 Those 10,000 each give away 10 e-books – 100,000 Those 100,000 each give away 10 e-books – 1,000,000

This is just a small example of how powerful your free e-book can be…

Author: Shelley Lowery

Author: Leif
• Wednesday, April 01st, 2009

Search EnginesThe important truth is to get noticed by search engines rather than competitors. However, not everyone knows what they need to be better at. There are certain things you need to impliment when it comes down to search engine optimization. Its not important to be the best on the internet, you need to be the best than the people you are competing on your keywords. Utilize the following terms to be number one in the search engine results.

Pick the Right Url

The first step in getting high search engine rankings begins even before you build your website. You need to pick a site name that has something to do with the products or services you will be offering. For example, if you are selling dog collars, you may not want your website named Cats_R_Us.com. You should think about the keywords you will want to target, and try to incorporate them into your site name.

Name Your Pages Correctly

When you are building your website, you should include the best page names possible. Don’t use page titles like “home page”, and “about us”. You should include your keywords in your page titles. For example instead of “Home Page” you could say “Contact Dubai Home”, or you could use “About Contact Dubai “. Try to use your keywords as much as you can when naming your web pages.

Optimize Your Meta Tags

Meta tags are an important part of getting your site ranked high in the search engines. Meta keywords and meta phrases are some of the first things that search engine spiders see when crawling your website. These should be optimized to include the keywords or phrases you think best describe your website page. Each page will have its own metas and they should be optimized for what is on that page. Make sure you keep these up to date as you make changes to pages and discontinue products or services.

Optimize Your On Page Text

If you are writing the text on your page, you should include your keywords as a natural part of the page. Do not stuff the page with keywords, but make sure they are included. On average, a good number is to include your keywords 4% of the time. This means that a 500 word page would have your keywords listed 20 times. This should be done naturally, as a part of the headers and the text. The keys should be used in a grammatically correct way and never use improper spelling.

Age of Site

While you can’t make your site older than it really is, this is something to consider. Do not change your website every few months. Some people do this. They get fed up with a site because it isn’t working and they start something new. The problem is that search engines do look at your websites age as a factor for ranking it. This doesn’t mean that a new site cannot get high ranks. It just means that in the same way you get higher ranks after months of building links, age will also raise your search engine rankings.

These are just a few of the ways you can build you site to get higher search engine rankings. There are dozens more ways today. The key is to create a user friendly site that convinces visitors to stay and buy while they are there. After all, it does no good to bring in 20,000 visitors if you can only close two sales.

Author: Leif
• Monday, March 30th, 2009

Red AppleAt a small college a group of incoming freshmen marketing majors gathered for their first class. As the wise, old Professor of Search Engine Marketing made his way to the front of the room, one of the students asked him, “Professor, what is SEO?”

The professor looked over the classroom full of young students and replied, “Let me tell you a story…”

There once were 5 families that lived in a rural valley where the soil was rich, the weather was harsh, and the best apples in the whole world grew wild.

One day at the first home the man of the house said, “My family is hungry. I know there’s an apple tree on the ridge. I’ll go and see if I can get some apples for my family.”

So, the man took a basket, hiked up the ridge until he arrived at the apple tree. He thought, “I’m tired. I will set my basket under the tree and take a nap. Perhaps when I wake up some apples will have fallen into my basket.” So, he set his basket under the tree and fell asleep. When he woke up he found one apple in his basket, which he took home to his family.

He did this day after day, but one apple was not nearly enough to feed his family so they grew hungrier and weaker each day.

At the second home the woman of the house said, “My family is hungry. I know there is an apple tree by the river that looks healthy. I’ll go and see if I can get some apples for my family.”

So, the woman took a basket and a picking stick and walked to the apple tree by the river. She pulled out her picking stick to pluck apples from the tree, but while the tree had seemed health from a distance there were only a few apples on it. (In some versions of the story the tree is full of apples but they are all very high in the tree.) She jumped and reached as high as she could with her stick, but she only got 2 apples, which she took home to her family.

She did this day after day, but 2 apples were not nearly enough to feed her family so they grew hungrier and weaker each day.

At the third house, the man thought, “I know of many apple trees in the valley I will visit each one and see which one has the most apples I can reach with my picking stick.” So, he did. And while he saw some trees that were bigger, and other trees that had more apples, he settled on a small tree that had a good number of tasty apples, which he brought home to her family. They had enough to eat each day but no more.

At the fourth house, the woman thought, “I know of many apple trees in the valley. I too will visit each tree and taste an apple from each to see which one has the most edible apples I can reach with my stick.” So, she did. And while she saw some trees that were bigger, and other trees that had more apples, she too settled on a small tree that had a good number of tasty apples, which he brought home to her family. They had enough to eat that day.

After dinner she thought, “If I only had something to stand on, I could pick more apples in a taller tree.” So, she went to her workshop and made a small step ladder. The next day with the help of her ladder and her picking stick she was able to pick more apples from a slightly bigger tree. Her family had some extra apples they canned for the future.

Each night the woman would go into her workshop and add a little more to her ladder, and each day she was able to pick more and more good apples. After many months she was picking the best apples from one of the biggest tree in the valley and selling the extra apples to the other families in the valley.

At the fifth house the man did all of the things the woman of the fourth house did, but he also picked from many different trees and wrote down in his notebook how many apples he got from each tree each day. If he noticed a tree was bearing less fruit he might stop picking from it. If he noticed another tree had more good fruit at the top he would add to that tree’s ladder. After many months of this he was bringing home more apples than all the families in the valley could eat, so he started shipping extra boxes of apples to markets all around the world.

When he finished the story one of the students asked, “Professor, what does it mean?”

The professor replied, “The apple pickers represent website owners, the apple trees are keywords, and the apples – website visitors.”

The first apple picker who set his basket under the tree and took a nap is like the person who builds a website, doesn’t optimize it for search engines, and hopes people will just drop in.

The second apple picker who chose to pick apples from the tree that looked healthy only to find it had few apples is like the person who builds a website and optimizes the web pages for phrases she thinks will bring visitors. But she neglects to do any keywords research and ends up optimizing her site for phrases that aren’t searched much (or phrases which are out of reach for her site to compete for).

The third apple picker who looked at all the trees in the valley and choose the one with the most fruit he could reach is like the website owner who builds a site, does keyword research, and optimizes the site for good, relevant keywords that his site is able to compete for. They are not the most popular phrases in his field but with on-page optimization he is able to get his site into the top 10 search results and generate sales or leads.

The fourth apple picker who looked at all the trees, chose the one with the most fruit she could reach, and built a ladder in her workshop after dinner so she could get the apples from bigger tress is like the site owner who builds a site, does good keyword research, optimizes her site, and begins building links to her site. He not only receives good results early on, but her number of visitors and sales grow as the number of links to her site grows and she is able to compete for more competitive keywords (bigger trees).

Lastly, the fifth apple picker who looked at all the trees, built a ladder, and tallied the number of apples from each tree each day is like the website owner who does keyword research, on-page optimization of his site, link building, and tracks his search rankings with ranking reports and his website traffic with analytics. He is able to build a successful website that competes for the best search phrases and can adjust as his industry and search marketing trends change.”

From that day forward every student brought an apple for the wise, old professor each day they attended class.

And that’s where we get the tradition of an apple for the teacher. Don’t believe me? Google it.