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Keeping track of all the tips and tricks that make up the ever changing world of search engine optimization can be a time consuming task, especially if it not part of your everyday job, and is just a tool you use to market your online business. So is it worth it to use one of the many online companies or consultant to maximize your SEO strategy and can it give the results that make it worth the investment? Here are some things to consider before hiring an SEO expert and to determining whether this method of marketing your website or blog is right for you.

How are you doing on your own?

Before looking to spending money on the services of an SEO consultant, it is first important to determine whether you are doing well enough on your own, and whether or not you have utilized all the easy and free tools available to you. Start by doing a search on a variety of search engines using keywords that people may use to find your website, business or blog and see where you come up in the results. If you are making the first page of results you may want to determine how much better a SEO company could do before making the investment. Also, if you are not using free online tools such as Google Analytics then you may want to exhaust these methods first.

Hiring a Professional

If you have done all you can or don’t have time to maximize your SEO strategy and are still coming up short on the most popular search engines, then hiring a professional SEO consultant may be in your best interest. If this is the route you decide to take making sure you hire the services of a company or individual consultant that knows how search engine optimization works and uses SEO strategies that won’t get your website banned from search engines is important. Google, for example is making active efforts to monitor and remove websites that use aggressive “black hat” SEO strategies, and the cost associated with getting yourself back online if this happens can be considerable. Always ask for references and examples of their work, and ask them about the types of strategies they use. In general stay away from companies that use purchased links, as these are the worst offenders to getting your site removed from search results.

In some cases, paying for the services of a professional SEO company or consultant can be worth the money spent, but like hiring any professional making sure you are getting quality service at a reasonable price is always important and is good business sense.

Monitor your visitors and increase your profits!

Last week, we discussed some methods for equipping your blog with analytics services that will tell you more about your visitors’ behavior. Today, I’d like t present you with some specific scenarios regarding how a program like Google Analytics could work for you. If you’re not using Analytics, you’ll see that you’re missing out on some seriously helpful information, and hopefully you’ll jump on the bandwagon!

Bounce Rates

You can use Analytics to determine what percentage of visitors come to your site, and leave without moving on to your intended action. Whether that’s clicking through to another webpage on your site, or signing up for an offer, you can bet pages with high bounce rates need to be modified.

If your click-to-conversion page has a high bounce rate, ask yourself questions like these – Is your offer large enough for people to notice? Do you give your visitors a proper value proposition to get them interested? If they should be able to contact you with questions, is your contact info clear, or is there an FAQ?

If visitors are bouncing on pages like a sitemap, it’s possible that you need to organize your information better. With more and more pages becoming optimized for Web 2.0, you’ll need to arm yourself with the best pages possible to compete.

Visitor Time

There are reports available in Analytics that will let you know how long visitors are spending on your site based on what keyword brought them there. This is as useful as a Google Adwords Search Query report in that you can use this information to help build out your negative keyword list in Adwords. If you find a visitor coming to your site with a keyword that isn’t relative to your content, it’s a good idea to consider making that a negative keyword in your Adwords campaigns.

You can also see if the average visitor over time bounces from your site when brought there with a certain keyword. If you see a repetitive pattern happening where users spend under a minute on your site by using a general keyword, you may want to consider changing match types in Adwords, or eliminating that keyword from your marketing arsenal.

Another useful way to use visitor time is to look at content placements. If you find that, over time, a certain site brings in traffic that either won’t convert or bounces quickly, you can exclude that placement from within your Google Adwords account. It’s easy!

Geography

Many people don’t consider how useful geographic information can be. Take a look at what countries, states, or general area your visitors are coming from depending on your market. If you find that a majority of your visitors are coming from one country, why not build a campaign or landing pages that specifically cater to that country or area?

You may also want to construct your campaigns built on your power country’s peak time zones, to get more converting traffic out of that country.

With so many useful tools available in Analytics, there’s no reason not to take advantage of all the reliable, and FREE information out there for your blog.

Selecting the right keywords for your website content and html tags is still one of the most fundamental parts of any SEO strategy. While anyone starting a website or blog is likely to spend a considerable amount of time selecting the keywords they think will get them top search results, how often should you revisit the task, and how can you determine whether you have selected the keywords that are working the hardest for you? The following tips can help you keep your SEO strategy fresh, and your keywords the most effective they can be for your website or blog.

Evaluating your results

The first thing to consider when deciding whether it is time to rework your keywords is to determine whether they are performing as they should. There are a number of great tools on the market, both free and proprietary that can make this a fairly simple task. One of the best free keyword tools is part of Google’s popular Analytics application. If you haven’t signed up for this application then you absolutely need to. It is a great tool for your overall SEO strategy, and the keyword tool can help you determine the overall search results for each of your keywords.

If you are in the market for a more customizable SEO tool then you may want to consider purchasing the top selling SEO PowerSuite, though you may also want to think about the rather expensive price tag before making this decision. It has a variety of features that can really help you maximize your SEO strategy, and the keyword tool will not only help you evaluate your keyword results, but give you suggestions for more effective keywords as well. Though Google Analytics also has this feature, SEO PowerSuite is much more effective overall, and will improve not only your Google ranking, but your overall ranking online.

Improving your Keywords

Both Google Analytics and SEO PowerSuite can offer you tools to improve your keywords through suggesting ones that may be more effective. While this can get you started on improving your keywords, what sort of strategy should you have to maximize these results? The temptation to “keyword stuff” can be overwhelming, and while this can temporarily improve your rank, if your content quality goes down this may have the reverse effect on your revenue stream from PPC links or donations. One way to get around this is to try including keywords in areas of your website other than the content. Using meta tags in your pages title, using multiple domains, and working on your backlinks can all improve your overall ranking.

So in general, developing a regular routine of checking your keywords with some sort of SEO keyword tool and making improvements based on the provided suggestions, as well as your own experience will keep your website or blog where you want it to be.

With the ever increasing number of websites appearing online that create revenue from ad space, and the spike in software programs available that offer to track and analyze your web traffic, Google Analytics is the easy to use, and free option that is definitely worth a look. In fact, it is currently the most popular web analytics tool used according to Wikipedia, and is used by some of the most successful websites around to keep track of their online presence.

While Google Analytics has been around for a few years, its success essentially lies in its use of fairly simple technology to accomplish the task. Primarily it uses java script, time-stamped cookies, and an implementation code called ga.js. This allows the data to be collected and tracked, as well as analysed.

One of the benefits of Google Analytics is that there are multiple ways to analyze your data. It offers reports that are customizable depending on the type of data you want to know, and how you want it displayed. It is also very functional with other types of software that you may already be using, or that are part of your web host’s control panel; a feature not often found with free analytics tools. Another feature that makes this an excellent free web traffic tracking option is its ability to not only track direct web traffic, but related traffic, such as hits from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as through multimedia searches for your site’s images and videos, and even more importantly, search engine hit results.

Another great feature of Google Analytics is both the free and paid support options they offer to help maximize your web traffic. Their site has an extensive Help Centre that contains numerous articles and blogs from industry and Google experts that help you use the product. They also have an active User’s Forum where many question you may have can easily, and quickly be answered. They also offer email and telephone support if needed; a rare service in the world of free online business. If you require more professional, or intensive help in analyzing your web traffic data, or with your search engine optimization and web marketing strategies, Google Analytics also offers paid services from authorized consultants.

Google Analytics does offer a great product and service; however, there are a few limitations that should be kept in mind, especially if it will be used as your only web analytics tool. Google Analytics can often be easily blocked by privacy software that block or deletes tracking cookies. This however, is the major issue with most tracking software available, and it certainly does not affect the overall rating of this web analytics tool in general. Overall, Google Analytics is a highly useful tool that all webmasters and web marketing professionals should seriously consider.