Sorry to everyone that reads SeoUnique for the delay in the next post, I have just been so busy with new clients and proposals. In fact creating so many new proposals for clients got me thinking about this blog post.

How do you market SEO?

Depending on the brief or tender it does require a certain level of individuality per client. However in a meeting earlier today my boss gave me this word “appetite” to play with, and to a point I think it is important when trying to sell SEO as a marketing channel.

What has SEO got to do with as an appetite?

Well, how hungry are you clients for success? As many of you will know, a tender or brief can come in at different stages of a build; it could be the initial setup, possibly the client has tried some SEO in the past and now has a taste, or perhaps the client has never heard of SEO before until they read about in the latest edition of “How to be successful online”.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that by creating a proposal that describes SEO as a way of filling up the clients hunger for success can be an effective way to bridge the understanding as to the methods involved in such a marketing technique.

Take their needs as an appetite and give them levels of satisfaction with a price!

I have been contacted by an AOL source who has just informed me that AOL is just about to close a deal whereby they will take possession of Social networking site Bebo with their 40 million worldwide memberships!

AOL plan to reclaim their leading position in social media which will help their overall online strategic position. AOL value Bebo as a “true pioneer of the social web” as it’s the leading social network in the UK, as well as being ranked No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand and No. 3 in the US. They plan to enlarge their current visibility to a staggering 80 million unique users worldwide which few other social networks can reach.

This move by AOL is a rapid international expansion and will surely make the other major players in the industry take notice.

Remember you heard it here first!

• I did get this info before the official release by email
• The total price is around $850 million dollars

Ok, I have seen many seo myths being posted and blogged about recently, I think it’s safe to say the myths have been busted in most cases. So let’s have some seo truths!

Truth 1: Including keywords in your domain is an advantage – Domains that include the targeted keywords in them will be marked as more relevant than domains that do not. In my personal experience, the shorter the domain with the relevant keyword – the better!

Truth2: The title tag is one of the most important tags on a web page – Apart from the title tag being one of the first pieces of content to a user the relevancy of the title tag to the page content is vital. Creating unique title tags per page relevancy will give the search engines an accurate idea of what to show when a search is created. Ideally you want to include your targeted keywords at the beginning of the description.

Truth 3:Creating image descriptions will improve traffic – this is 100% true. It has always been a good guideline to include keywords on “Alt” descriptions of images but doing this in a savvy way can really lead to a good increase of organic traffic.

Truth 4:You can use a paid links strategy – After the not so recent shake up with the penalties associated with paid links some people remain confused about this. It is perfectly fine to buy links for traffic and not for PR, you just have to be a bit wary when doing so.

Truth 5: Using “nofollow” tags will keep your page value within your domain – I know some bloggers and website owners are say “boo-who-sucks-to-you” but if you keep the link juice within your domain and don’t leak it to 3rd party sites – your link juice will be higher and this will reflect in your serps.

Truth 6: Black hat methods do work – I was a bit apprehensive as to whether or not to include this. Personally I have never used black hat seo methods but have clearly seen many highly placed competitors of different industries doing so with good results. I would not recommend anyone to do this, but until Google and other search engines open their eyes a little bit more, people can still get away with it and make a lot of money!

Truth 7: Good quality links still hold a lot of influence in terms of SE rankings – Putting every aspect of seo aside, the more highly trusted incoming links you have, the higher you will rank in Google and other search engines, its that simple.

Truth 8: Broken links will affect your SE rankings – I have worked with various clients sites and a common trend is that Google especially will flag these broken links. Certainly achieving very high rankings for competitive keywords will be impossible until they are fixed.

Truth 9: Using fresh new content will give you additional traffic – If you create regularly updated unique content you will see that content initially ranks very well indeed in Google for a period between 2-7 days. Creating posts containing long tailed keywords will provide an additional stream of traffic from your targeted ones.

Truth 10: Seo is here to stay – as long as there are search engine with organic listings, there will always be seo, no if’s, but’s or maybes!