By : Nidhi Gupta

This article is not about unscrupulous search engine optimizers who mislead surfers by promoting web pages to the top of search results, only to automatically redirect them to completely off-topic pages and sites. Search engine optimizers here mean those people who promote relevant web pages and sites to the top of relevant search results for relevant search terms. These constitute the vast majority of search engine optimizers. These are ethical SEOs (search engine optimizers), and are the SEOs refered to in this article.

SEOs have exactly the same aim as Google; that is to see the search results filled with relevant web pages for any given search term. Both SEOs and Google strive for that. The only difference between Google and SEOs is that SEOs want to see one of their relevant pages at or near the top, whereas Google doesn’t care about individual websites. Apart from that, the aims and desires of both Google and SEOs are identical.

Its been realised that Google would like to index the natural web - a web that hasn’t been tainted by arranged link exchanges and modifications to pages and sites, for the purpose of improving rankings. But the web wasn’t in a natural state when Google arrived, and it will never be in a natural state in the future, so that ideal is something that Google can never have.

The reason that SEOs exist is because of the way that search results are returned - 10 or 20 at a time. It is common knowledge that not many surfers go deeper than the first few pages of results, and it is common sense that no search engine can display all the relevant results for a given search term in those first few pages. It is also common sense that many of the results that don’t make it into the first few pages are equally relevant with those that do make it, and many of them are much more relevant than some of the higher ranked pages.

The difference between those that are ranked at or near the top and those that are not is that the higher ranked pages have more PageRank, or better inbound link text, or their on-page criteria is better suited to Google’s algorithm, or a combination of such factors. Without SEO involvement, all of those things occur by chance, but chance isn’t a very fair way of deciding which pages are ranked highly and which aren’t, and chance isn’t a very fair way of deciding which sites get the traffic, the business and the profits and which don’t. Yes, Google can usually fill the top results with relevant pages, but their alogrithm cannot choose fairly when there are many relevant pages. No algorithm can.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Whether your launching your brand new web site, or trying to increase current business from the web, you should be using both pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) in your internet marketing plan.

Why both? Quite simply they can compliment each other. Pay Per Click is a fast, very controlable form of internet marketing. Search Engine Optimization is a viable, must needed method to promote your site ‘organically’ in Google, Yahoo, MSN and so-on.

Search engine optimization takes time. If you are a brand new site, consider a good 6 months to a year (yes that long) to really start seeing some good ranking results on the search engines. While you build up your organic SEO, you can have Pay Per Click in place helping you bring in leads by promoting sales, offers, specific products and services. Pay Per Click can literally turn on within a day, use a very specific budget (monthly, daily, etc), track results to and from your web site and even be geographically or industry targeted.

As your organic side of internet marketing grows, consider slowing down the pay per click side. For example, if you have a great keyword ranking in the top 10 positions of Google (the left hand side of their search engine), then you may want to scale back on the paid version of this keyword to save money. The beauty of this is simple testing, re-testing and reviewing your campaigns to see what works, what’s already ranking and what can be removed to save you on marketing costs.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Attracting new writers to your blog is a difficult process and there are many variables to consider. Your goal is to sustain the value your blog offers, or ideally, increase the value it offers to your readers. As most bloggers know, value comes from content, and content comes from the minds of people, so your first goal when outsourcing the writing of your blog is to find the right people.

It’s pretty clear that the best blogs have talented people writing them. While talent alone isn’t enough, it’s important to focus on attracting, then filtering and finally retaining talented individuals as the key outcome of your outsourcing efforts. Even if a blogger can’t commit to as many articles as you would like them to write, having one great blogger send in one article a month will do more for your traffic and blog growth than a mediocre blogger writing once a week.

Finding talent is not a process that can be done quickly and you won’t really know if a new writer you bring to your blog works well until they have published to your blog for a period of time. Watching how the blogosphere reacts to your hired bloggers is a good way to determine if you have added a good person to your team. Look for comments, trackbacks and incoming links generated by your bloggers as key metrics to assess their performance.

When Is The Right Time To Hire Bloggers?

This is a tough question to answer. You have two variables to consider -

1. You
   How much writing do you intend to do yourself and what role do you want to play at your blog(s).

2. The current status of your blog
   How much traffic you have, how entrenched is your personality with the current readership, what can your blog and you offer to incentivise contributions.

The first part, only you have to decide, since you know what volume of work you want to contribute to your blog and what role you want to play. You may have an end goal of stopping writing altogether and acting as the manager of a team of writers. Or you may want to continue writing to your blog but want to bring on additional bloggers to increase traffic, or start a new blog or even a blog network.

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