SEO Marketing is one of the most cost-effective and best e-marketing strategies to increase popularity of a website. Search engine plays a major role in driving the traffic to any website. Millions of searches are conducted globally to buy a product, service or to know any information. But we must be aware of the fact that people go for the sites which are placed in the top 1or 2 pages of search engines. Now how can we reach on top pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN when millions of your competitors are providing the same services?

In this post I’m going to talk a bit about how social networking helps improve website ranking. A lot of time we generally discuss whether or not social bookmarking can help your search engine rankings? and my answer to this question is always “yes”, but only if you do it correctly.

Social Bookmarking has a number of SEO advantages:

• You get a backlink when you bookmark a page on your site
• Bookmarking a new page or a new blog post on your site can help get that page indexed in the search engines quickly.
• Most social bookmarking sites allow you to use tags. You can list your target keywords in these tags and this can help your ranking for these keywords

When you write a new blog article or web page and bookmark it you can also help yourself out by utilizing some basic SEO techniques. To keep it simple what you want to do is choose a specific keyword phrase for the article you write about.

The easy way to set this up is to include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. You should then also include it in the first and last paragraphs of the article before you publish it.

When you go to bookmark the topic/post you want to tag it around that keyword phrase. You should include those again in the title and in the description for additional emphasis.

Search engines spider large social sites such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Simpy and others multiple times per day. By bookmarking your article in these directories you are creating valuable back links to the new pages on your site and you have a chance of receiving visitors from these social sites especially if your post is interesting or controversial and other people bookmark it too.

Always remember that if you draw the attention of the community, enormous traffic will be sent to your site. Even if you don’t you will come across the few that will like what you have and poke around your website. The bookmarks can be categorized in virtually any topic, so you won’t be sending people looking for something totally unrelated to your site.

I have mentioned before the importance of building links to your site. Whenever you make a post on these Social Bookmarking sites, it counts as a link to you. As I said there are a lot of these sites, so you could literally put as many links as you want to everything on your site.

These sites will allow you to post to ALL of them in an almost automatic way. You simply select which Social Book Marking sites to submit to from a list.

I am not talking about spamming, I hate spamming. I am talking about semi-automating what you are doing. You will still have to enter the codes to prove you are human, and work through some quirks on each site, but instead of spending hours going from site to site you are brought to each site’s submit section with the fields usually pre-filled for you.

Once you have become a member, all you have to do is click the button, Hit the submit tab, and you’re off to the world wide network.

Task of improving the rankings of any website has never been so easier for me earlier, when I was not aware of the tactics involved in finding the right methods to be followed. Before you start work on any project one should be careful in selecting the processes that could literally affect ranking in just few days of work. But it’s not that easy task unless and until you have spent enough of your time and you have scratched your mind to the fullest in doing research on various methods traditionally followed by all the search engine professionals. Many of the methods are in front to follow that helps to improve the rankings but to choose the one that affects very strongly and quickly but at the same time is very interesting to do.

Social media is the latest in a series of tools that are emerging for search engine optimization. This is different type of social media optimization, which is about getting your site listed in the social sites. There is social bookmarking or social networking sites out there that provide you the quality one way links which means that if you craft a piece of content and title it with the keyword phrase you need then surely you will be getting a free link with the correct anchor text.

I too have been assigned a task of the same kind for which earlier ranking results were needed. So to start with any off page task was not that tough for me as I had already worked on many of the similar kind. But to improve the ranking of keywords falling not even in first thousand positions within month was something bothered me. I was bound to adopt a keen strategy for further proceedings of the off page task. As I was aware of the fact that according to search engine ranking algorithm highest preference is given to the quality inbound links. So I knew I had to follow the approach that floods me with quality inbound links and with other optional features alongside. So after keen evaluations the only answer to all my queries that can actually affect the rankings very strongly was to link to the huge social networks on the web. This was going to provide large number of quality links on one side but on the other side my website was also about to gain popularity among the web networks. So what else was needed for me to enhance search engine rankings?

• A piece of content that provides value
• A compelling title
• Keyword phrase within the title
• A way to monitor your accounts
• Regular analysis of each link in Google

Creating killer content is my thing. Because I know that is the only thing that can attract numerous numbers of users connected through social networks and causing them to pick my link, add my link, vote for me and even tell their pals about it. And if one of my stories actually gets picked up and voted on at any of the social bookmarking sites then it is entirely better.

The biggest problem with this method is time and the relative effectiveness of the links. You have to make sure the content is good and the title passes spam detection else it will simply be delete.

The good thing about it is that it’s a cheap and interesting way to get sites deep crawled and indexed.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the perfect way to augment any business online. First & most important step is to research relevant keywords for the PPC campaign. We can use keywords in different Match Types like Broad, Phrase & Exact. Basically it depends upon which kind of products & services we are offering. We need to consider many points in our mind to analyze which match type will be best to use in our campaign.

Before 3 months we got a project, they are selling all type of car lights including headlights, fog lights, tail lights, corner lights & light bulbs. They were using lots of high competitive keywords with & without search counts. That’s why they were paying a lot for their campaigns. My target was to low cost & increase sales. We first decided to refine keywords. After analyzing their business, we decided to use keywords in both Broad & Phrase matches because 80% of people won’t search exactly “honda headlights”, their searches will be like “2004 honda civic headlights” or “04 honda civic headlights”. If we will use keywords in exact match like [honda headlights] and someone clicks on our Ad & don’t get headlights for 2004 honda model then he/she go out of our website without buying anything. People can also search for honda headlights of particular colour like “black headlights for 2004 honda civic”; in this case we should use broad keywords only. We decided to test both phrase & broad matched keywords. We added keywords & after one week we realized broad match keywords performing better than phrase match keywords. So that we paused all phrase match keywords from the campaign.

Here I am explaining how we are working with broad match keywords & completing our monthly targets with low cost:

Added Negative Keywords

At Campaign & Ad Group Levels, we have added thousands of negative keywords in all match types which were bringing irrelevant traffic to the website. As we are adding more & more negative keywords, we are getting targeted customers on website & sales are increasing day by day. Here is how we have find out negatives:

a) Added negative keywords of all other car brands: We have added negative keywords of all other brands for which they are not offering lights.

b) Added negatives of all years with car models which they don’t have: We have also added negative keywords of all years with car models which car brands or model they don’t have like 2003 civic, 03 civic, 1999 mustang, 99 mustang & so on..

c)  Find out negative keywords from search queries: Run search queries of all campaigns after every week & find out negatives.

Results

• CTR & Quality Score increased
• Average CPC decreased
• Cost decreasing day by day
• Sales increasing daily

Conclusion is that we can also get best out of our PPC campaign even by using keywords in broad match but we need to add thousands of negative keywords. We are completing our monthly targets easily now i.e. lowering the cost & increasing sales!!!