The internet has made this world a free interactive zone, where people use various sites to stay in touch with their peers. While some sites are entirely community sites like Facebook, others serve a specific purpose like YouTube. But all of these sites attract millions of views from around the world.

But the search engines are the only web entities which attract even more views than the social media or Web 2.0 sites. That is because they cater to everyone and provide solutions for every problem. And that provides a great platform for advertisers to market their products or services.

When it comes to internet marketing, there are two major options – Search Engine Optimization aka SEO and Search Engine Marketing aka SEM. Both of these are helpful in achieving good business by leveraging the power of internet. But I have seen many people with a common question, as to which method is better.

SEO refers to the process of increasing the chances of a website to appear in the organic results of the search engine. It requires certain tweaks in the website which increases the relevancy of the theme of the website and that helps in better ranking. However, SEO is a time consuming process. It requires consistent work and takes time to show the results, depending upon the competition for the targeted keywords.

SEM on the other hand is a simple marketing concept, wherein you pay the search engines and they start displaying your advertisements. This method is highly recommended for those who are unable to appear in the top organic results due to severe competition. With SEM, your site can easily come and sit on the first page of the search results, of course considering the keyword competition and other factors.

So what’s best for you?

Your decision will entirely depend upon your business objective and your online marketing budget. If you want fast results and are ready to spend money, SEM will be best for you. But if you wish to generate quality traffic to your site and patient enough to wait for at least 3 months, SEO is the best strategy for you.

But in either case, I would first suggest that you consult a SEO consultant. The reason for this being he will provide you an accurate and effective strategy and also guide you through the entire process, if you are alien to these internet marketing techniques. So even you will get to learn new things while driving traffic to your site and earn a good ROI from online marketing.

SEO aka Search Engine Optimization has become the most demanding service for everyone who is in the internet business. Be it a small or medium sized company or a Forbes 500 company. Do you want your site to rank in Google for major keywords.

That’s fine. Perfect. Not a big deal. But the companies (read cheap service providers) who claim to be the masters of website optimization actually make the whole concept lose its charm. There’s nothing wrong in tweaking your website for gaining visibility in the search engines, but there are people who do nothing other than making false claims.

Recently one of our potential client rejected us because he thought we were just too expensive. Well, he might have been right, considering his point of view and budget. But then quality never comes cheap. One has to pay / invest a good amount of money for achieving quality, which helps in the long run.

There are lot of people who claim that they can get any website in any industry (irrespective of competition) on the first page of Google within 4 weeks. Whoa! That’s quite a statement. But to tell you frankly, all this is bullshit. The search engines are very smart and its very difficult to fool them with inappropriate techniques. I have seen black-hat optimization techniques deliver unbelievable results, only to end up facing severe penalties from Google.

Usually, these so called self-trumpeters only utilize other people’s lack of knowledge and ignorance to their benefit. They make tall claims, convince about something that is not practical and cannot be achieved, get the money and run away with it. There’s no professionalism, no customer satisfaction and most importantly no search engine optimization.

I do not intend to say that all SEO professionals are fictitious or lack knowledge about the process. In fact, there are some of them who just like to work by staying under the covers and deliver the best results. These are the ones who can actually help you in getting your website optimized.

Basically, its you who has to take the final call. Whether you want to settle with mediocre results because they are cheap or invest fair amount of time and money to achieve long lasting results. Remember, Rome was not built in one day. Same is the case with SEO – nobody can achieve higher search engine rankings or higher PR in just a few weeks. Therefore be very careful while choosing your SEO company.

There are so many blogs being created daily on the internet Blogging .CMS platforms like Blogger and WordPress have made it really easy for anyone to start a blog. While some are hosted on separate domain names, others prefer to use the free service (like example.wordpress.com). Every individual or company tries to cater to a niche and blogs about it. But the internet is such a platform that even a niche becomes a marketplace, full of people talking about the same stuff; and the niche no longer niche.

So how do you distinguish yourself from others  blog and share similar interests?

Use favicons!

Favorite icon (favicon) is an excellent free branding tool for webmasters and blog owners. It helps you to create brand awareness by displaying a little icon in the title bar of your blog.

Also, favicons attract more traffic to your blog by standing out against others who don’t sport a favicon themselves. Increased traffic means more readers, more subscribers and this gives you an opportunity to have more repeat readers. No matter, what subject or topic you blog about, you must use a favicon be recognized for your work.

Some other benefits of sporting a favicon are:

Tabbed browsing becomes easy:
When multiple sites are open in a browser, it becomes difficult to switch between the relevant sites. But with a favicon, you add another level of usability to your blog which helps the visitors to find your blog quickly before other blogs.

Site bookmarks are easy to find.
Usually we either bookmark our favorite sites in the browser or social bookmarking sites. Having a favicon for your blog helps in differentiating and browsing through the complete list of your bookmarks.

Maximum visibility in RSS readers.
While we all subscribe to various blogs to stay in touch with the latest updates, sometimes it makes our RSS reader look crowded. With a favicon, it becomes easy for the reader to read updates from your blog before others. And if you have an interesting story to tell, chances are that the reader will land up on your blog.

As you would have realized by now, favicons are essential to be recognized on the internet. Sporting a cool and relevant favicon will not only get more visitors to your blog, but will make those visitors look for it whenever and wherever they can. And that will indicate that you are someone special and standout from the rest of the bloggers.

Every site that I have been visiting lately shows me more links in the footer than in the sidebar or the top navigation bar. Without giving any importance to the usability guidelines or relevance, certain sites just spread the links to boost their internal link structure and optimize the anchor text.

Usually, depending upon the navigation of the website, the most important links are placed such that visitors are easily able to locate them. The unimportant links (for a user) like Privacy Statement, Terms of Use, etc. make way in the footer region. This is so because hardly any user would ever look at the footer if his needs are satisfied by clicking the links elsewhere.

Until a few years ago, I remember web designers used to drop a link to their site for every site designed/developed by them. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, it only promotes your brand and helps you in getting more inquiries. But with search engines getting smarter, the anchor text plays a big role on every link you have on your site. And if you use irrelevant anchor text, your site will probably lie deeper in the search results.

In an attempt to trick the search engines and generate lot of links to their site, webmasters get involved in link farms, placing numerous links on their site. And the best place for them to place the links is the footer section because that’s the least expected region to be visited by the user. But if these links are not relevant and uses incorrect anchor text, the SEO efforts would be a complete waste.

Look at the footer of this site –> Sai Info Soft

What did you see? Lot of irrelevant links to various other sites, right. And did you pay attention to the anchor text being used there? Its just the domain name that is being used as anchor text to improve its ranking. Now what do you expect the main site (Sai Info Soft) to rank for?

The intention of highlighting this example is to show how certain webmasters are exploiting the footer region of the websites for better search rankings; only to fall flatly on their face.

The website and its various sections are meant to help the visitor get a complete hang of the site and its offerings. Its very important to keep the user in mind when dealing with the footer links as major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have already indicated that they de-value the footer links. So there’s hardly any chance that excessive links in footer would help in the search rankings.

I feel that its more important to keep the footer clean or include minimal links so that the user doesn’t get confused. Whats your take? Have you ever benefited by including lot of links in the footer? I would like to hear from you.

Every website consists of multiple pages that provide different set of information. Depending upon the business and marketing objectives, one may have a 10 page website or even a 200 page website. It is very difficult to believe that every human visitor will scan through all the pages of your site. But the search engine crawlers will.

And if you are performing search engine optimization for your site, then there is high probability that you always want the crawlers to visit your site on a regular basis. But have you ever wondered what would happen if the crawlers who visit your site return empty handed?

Of course, your site will lie on the back pages of the search results for any keyword(s) related to your business. And the main reason for this would be broken links in your site.

What are broken links?

In simple terms, broken links are the inaccessible links that exist in your website. When the search engine crawlers encounter any inaccessible links in your site, they report broken links and this prevents them from indexing your website completely. When the indexing is done in a partial way, it becomes difficult for the search engine to ascertain the quality and relevance of your website for a particular keyword term/phrase. And this spells the doom for you as your site will lie in the back pages of the search results, attracting meager traffic and lower search engine rankings.

Are broken links spam?

Many people ask me whether search engines treat broken links as spam; and my answer is NO. Broken links are a result of poor website architecture and maintenance. Often webmasters link to certain promotional pages in the website and after a few days delete those pages. But they forget to clean up the links to those pages from the website or/and the Sitemap and that results in the generation of broken links.

Check whether your website has any broken links by using this tool.

Remember that the search engine crawlers are automated programs and cannot find a way through if they can’t see one. Humans can definitely do some trial and error to get to their desired page, but crawlers can’t. The crawlers can only navigate your site via links (internal and inbound) as it allows them to jump from one page to another.

A site that consists of broken links can never dominate the search results, no matter how well it is optimized. It is imperative to remove all the broken links from a site to give it some standing. Also, a neat and structured site architecture provides a better navigation experience to your users and contributes to successful Search Engine Optimization. For more information visit Copper Bridge Media.