If you're a do-it-yourselfer (DIYer) when it comes to building your website, there are a number of strategies you can use to help yourself in getting your webpages ranked in the seach engines. for example, carefully written titles, description meta tags, keyword-rich body text and incoming links.

An important, but often neglected, element is the use of keywords in your Headings. The single most important heading on a page is the headline, name of the article or page name. Call it what you want, just be aware that this isn't the same as the Title Tag which shows up on search engines.

Headings are the large font headlines that tell what's on a webpage -- the main headline as well as subheadings. There's an art to writing a headline, but that's a blog for another day. What we're concerned with here is the structure of your heading/headline.

Headings in HTML,  H1, H2, H3... offer important clues to the search engines . Since headlines often contain important clues to the content of the webpage, search engines take note of any keywords found in headings. 

In HTML, there are six header tags:

• H1
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5
• H6

 <H# ...> indicates a header or a title of a section or subsection of the document. For example, to start the section of your page that discusses your product, you might put--

<H1>Buy My Product<H1/>

Which gives you this on the page

Buy My Product

 Each header tag indicates the relative importance of each section it is heading: <H1 ...> is for the major sections of your document, or as the one header to the entire document. <H2 ...> is for the secondary sections of your document, etc.

Using keyword-rich heading and subheads not only helps your search engine rankings, it can also make it easier for visitors to read the content on the page. Since many people start out skimming a webpage when they land on it, headers and subheads can both help gain their attention and guide them to what they are searching for.

So use keyword-rich headers and subheads frequently on your page. The search engines will take notice and so will visitors to your page.

One of the best ways to guarantee success on the Web is to keep visitors interested in visiting your site often.

One of the best ways to do this is by offering new or refreshed content. Frequent updates to your site will keep customers engaged and assured that they have good reason to return. Frankly, nothing turns off customers more than seeing outdated or irrelevant information.

So how do you keep content fresh? There are a number of  ways to create interesting content, including:

• Blogs: Blogs are a great viral marketing tool because they can incorporate the elements of interactivity, community and collaboration.  One caveat, don’t bore them to death.
• Polls and surveys: People love to share their opinions and polls and surveys work well as they provide visitors with both instant gratification and underscore interactivity.
• Articles and White Papers: People love to get free information. By updating and offering free articles and white papers on your site, you not only give them a reason to return, you can also score inbound links by allowing them to republish the work (with attribution, of course).
• Customer-driven content: One great way to get new content without having to write it yourself or hire freelancers is to ask your customers for contributions. Many visitors will jump at the chance to provide you with content, simply for the chance to see their name in print.

 Content is still king on the Web. It should be the starting point for your Website and never treated as an afterthought. There’s simply no reason not to have an updated and interesting website. Set up a regular schedule for updating content on your site. For example, blog three times a week.

 Keep content fresh and relevant, and you’ll keep them coming back for more.

An interesting Forbes article discusses what its like to find your site in Google Hell. It also addresses what may be a growing issue, Google's ability to continuously index the billions of Web pages floating around the Internet.

In the case of Skyfacet.com, it appears they were penalized for having a mirror site or mirror pages, i.e., pages that have the same or similar content on them, which Google interprets as someone's attempt to game the system.

Skyfacet shouldn't throw in the towel. By retaining a search engine optimization company with SEO specialists who know what they are doing, a specialist could petition Google on behalf of Skyfacet and possibly resurrect their site to Google's regualr SERPS.

Was that too much of a Biblical analogy?  

I've been using Google Desktop since it first came out in a beta version a while back. It's great for finding files that you've long forgotten the names of but suddenly have a need to locate.

It's not perfect. I've gone in search of an item on more than one occasion only to come up empty. But it seems to be better than any of the alternatives.

I didn’t realize it, but Google Desktop has not been available to Mac users, a few of whom are friends of mine.

Well, Google has finally released a version for my Mac buddies.

You can learn more about it, as well as see what Mac-devotees have to say about, by visiting this article at Search Engine Land.

I think this is yet another example of Google staying ahead of the game, and offering products and services to as many Internet users as possible, thereby creating and maintaining a loyal customer base.

Is it any wonder Google stays ahead of all the other search engines when it comes to innovation and keeping customoers?

I was recently reminded about test conclusions, posted last May by those wonderful people at Marketing Experiments, on the subject of Website headlines.

Their conclusions pretty much sum up what most copywriters will tell you about your Website--

1. Your Landing Page absolutely must have a headline.
2. The more specific your headline, the better your results.
3. Properly optimizing your headline will produce the best results.

The report is a quick read, so you've got no excuse for not reading it. Especially when you read how their findings showed that optimizing the headline on a Web page could produce an increase in the Website's conversion  rate in excess of 73%.

I'm frequently amazed at how many Website's don't even bother to have a headline on the page, much less one that is written to attract attention and keep the visitor on the site. 

Let's face it, when you're seeking prospects on the Web, don't you want to do everyting you possibly can to not only attract them to your site, but turn them into customers? Of course you do.

So, read the report, and then do one of two things--

• work on creating a compelling, optimized headline for your site, or
• give us a call here at Zunch, and put us to work on creating a prospect-grabbing headline for you.

And if you think you've got a particularly challenging headline to create, just tell them you want me to work on it for you. I love a good challenge.  

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), has released it's annual industry survey, The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006, whose findings conclude that spending paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization (SEO) and other forms of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) hit a record $9.6 Billion in 2006.

SEO remains the most popular form of SEM, although paid placement still gets the lion's share of online marketing budgets, with total spending of $8 billion.

Expect SEO spending to grow as a percentage of marketing budgets, as a growing number of advertisers continue to see the benefits of organic SEO as an important element, maybe the most important element, of their marketing.

Just a few days ago, February 7, 2007 to be exact, Yahoo! launched Pipes, a service designed to allow users to combine, or as more tech-savvy types might put it, "mashup", data from various Web sites.

What is Pipes?

Here's how it describes itself on it's Home Page: "Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant."

A further explanation on the same page says:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

What's that mean?

Well, for example, using Pipes, you can combine news feeds from both Google and Yahoo News on one site.

But maybe the best way to get an idea of what this mashup produces, is to visit their site.

And it seems Pipes is part of a broader initiative at Yahoo! that's been dubbed "Brickhouse." You can learn more about Brickhouse in this BusinessWeek article.

What it boils down to is Yahoo! is hoping Brickhouse will give it a way to develop new products, rather than finding itself buying up other companies who've already beaten it to the punch on developing next generation Web features, tools and platforms. Remember, Yahoo! and others had developed photo sharing sites, but Yahoo! found itself spending millions to buy Flickr because Flickr was seen a s both an innovation leader and, perhaps more importantly, cool.

There's a desperation among large companies to appear "cool," on the Internet, and thereby attract the millions of 18-to-34 year olds who advertisers and businesses alike crave as customers.

Of course, as we've seen time and again, even if you can somehow manufacture or buy cool, it eventually fades away. In fact, not to long ago, Yahoo! was cool, only to see itself supplanted by Google (we should note, even Google's cool cache is way down these days).

Whether Yahoo!'s Brickhouse proves to be a good idea remains to be seen. The brief history of the Internet is waist deep in similar ideas and operations that failed.

It's no big secret that Google and other search engines see local search as one of the next big steps in search engine results. Toward this end, Google has been working to include local businesses at the top of specific geographic search queries.

How's this work?

Well, let's say you decide that Japanese sounds good for dinner tonight. And let's say you are in Dallas, which, as you probably know, Zunch is. So you do a search in Google for "Japanese Restaurants Dallas." This is the image that appears above (yes, ABOVE) the search results:

  The cool thing for the restaurants appearing here?

The map and the listings appear at the top left of the search engine results page (SERP), prime real estate and generally the first area of the screen that a viewers eyes land on.

The cooler thing for the restaurants appearing here?

It didn't cost them a dime to appear there!

Really.

And it won't cost you anything to list your business.

You can read Google's own blog on the subject for more info.

The blog doesn't explain how to get listed, so here's what you do:

1. Visit https://www.google.com/local/add/login and set up a Google Maps account. Not only can you add address, telephone and other information, but you can include a link to your Website.
2. You'll next have to verify your address. To prevent anyone from posting fraudulent listings, Google will verify via snail mail (yes, snail mail), by sending you a postcard.
3. You will receive a PIN on the postcard. You'll need to log back into Google Local/Maps and enter the PIN.
4. The next time Google updates the listings, you'll be included. Be aware that it may take 3-4 weeks before you appear in the Map listings.

This is an unbelievably simple way to get listed at the top of the search engines for local listings. If many of your prospects are local, doing this will give you a leg up on the competiton, unless, of course, they've figured out how to do this also.

So get the jump on the competition and do it, now.

Outsell, Inc. has released its second annual report on U.S. ad spending and, based on their survey of 1,010 advertisers and media companies, spending on advertising on search engines is expected to grow 39 percent.

The press release, issued by Outsell,  indicates that overall online spending will grow 20 percent.

Interestingly, 49% of those surveyed indicated they plan to reduce their Pay Per Click (PPC) spending because of click fraud concerns.

The report demonstrates the growing confidence advertisers are gaining in marketing on the Internet, as online spendings share of ad budgets rises while more traditional media will see continuing declines in ad spending.

Also noteworthy in the report is the fact that advertisers rate online advertising as a very effective means of branding, wihch runs counter to the conventional wisdom that online is effective for generate leads, but poor for branding.

Expect to see an increased focus on search engine optimization (SEO), as these same advertisers continue to see the value of SEO in both attracting prospects and bolstering their branding efforts.

If you'd like to know more about how you can leverage SEO to both develop your brand and attract prospects, why not give us a shout today? One of our Zunch account executives will be happy to discuss what SEO can do for you. 

And if PPC is part of your online marketing efforts, don't forget that we also specialize in click fraud detection, and can help you both identify and recover ad dollars lost to fraud.

Some of you may recall receiving a promotion we ran earlier in 2006 in which we predicted a rise in click fraud for the latter part of 2006.

Seems we were right.

In an article appearing on Bizreport.com, Kristina Knight writes that the latest research indicates that click fraud reached 14.2% in the fourth quarter of 2006. In the promo we sent out, we had predicted that click fraud would rise during the busy Christmas buying season, hand-in-hand with increased Christmas purchases, and searches, online.

Not that the 14.2% figure isn't undisputed. As the article notes, Google engineers believe there are fundamental flaws in reports of increases in click fraud.

Regardless of the actual percentage of clicks that are fraudulent, click fraud at any level should be unacceptable, but it continues to be an issue that Google doesn't want to address head-on.

Unfortunately, there are no real defenses against click fraud. the only real protection is to use click fraud detection software to first-- detect it, second-- document it, and third-- file a claim with whichever search engine the fraud took place on.

And if you are looking for an excellent click fraud detection and reporting system, might I recommend Zunch's own, Click Fraud Detective? It's a proven system that can be used to detect, document and report click fraud. In addition to its reliability, it's also very affordable, especially when you consider it will help you recover ad dollars that have otherwise, gone to waste.