Variety in the search results gives online marketers multiple opportunities to rank and gain new listing visibility. But how does the user feel? In today’s SEM agency issues column, “Universal Search Should Be a Plus,” William Flaiz reminds us that as new listing types begin appearing in results, we often lose sight of whether these listings are really helpful to the user.

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As SERP listings and functionality changes, there are still two types of listings that have weathered the storm and are still attainable for marketers: traditional organic listings and paid search listings. In today’s SEM agency issues column, “The Organic and Paid Balancing Act,” William Flaiz explains that by making sure your site stays above the fold in these two outlets, you can maximize your controllable visibility.

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Tools to monitor your brand or your competition have become an important part of an SEMs arsenal. Search Monitor has been working hard to provide the latest tools for our industry and just announced the launch of geo-targeted monitoring.

“Geo-targeted monitoring enables companies to watch their competition and affiliates, and to manage their reputation and brand use locally. With this launch, interactive agencies, marketers, affiliate managers, and compliance teams are able to monitor paid search, blogs, forums, news, and web sites around the world from a local point of view in countries including: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and many thers. Monitoring can be conducted in English or in the language native to each country,” their press release stated.

Search Monitor covers

1. Competitor Monitor gives insights into competitive bidding strategies, competitor market share and visibility, ranking on sponsored search, ad copy strategies, and promotions like free shipping, trials, or sales.

2. Trademark Monitor eases the tasks associated with reputation management by auto-detecting advertisers sponsoring branded keywords, use of trademarks and slogans in ad copy and display urls, and negative, positive, and neutral brand buzz on blogs, news, and web sites.

3. Affiliate Monitor simplifies oversight of affiliate programs by auto-identification of affiliates using sponsored search to detect violations of rank requirements, keyword restrictions, ad copy
requirements or restrictions, and landing page copy requirements or restrictions.

Being advertised on a search engine is one of the most basic ways of inviting visitors into your site. But advertising yourself is not enough you also have to ensure that you have the right amount of visibility which will get you noticed; a high ranking therefore is an absolute must. Search engine optimization is that missing link between a good and a great business, it earns you customers, keeps your website well visited and makes your investment in the site a success.

While nobody dare deny the kind of benefits you are likely to reap from being ranked high on a search engine, a certain amount of decorum needs to be maintained. A number of unethical practices have recently become prevalent amongst those desperate to boost their rankings. While at first glance these might seem to be completely harmless, it is important that you recognize them for what they really are. The first step towards doing that is spotting what YOU might be doing wrong. Following is a list to help you through your SEO knowledge:

Inappropriate use of keywords

Sooner or later you are bound to find out that between you and the search engine, you are the one with the brain cells. But don’t go overboard with your discovery. Yes, you can fool the search engine with long strings of text into which you discreetly bury a gallon of keywords which have no relevance whatsoever with your site, but in the end you won’t be fooling the customers who will be finally using the links. Let’s face it, if the user is searching for “fish” or “fishing” he/she is most likely to not click on a site with a text like “boating fishing exotic animals site seeing great locations cruising Kuala Lumpur”. The irony is that if someone is really searching for a subject related to your site’s material even then he/she is probably going to skip clicking on your link because the description betrays no clue as to what really the site is about.

Inappropriate use of Meta tags

First things first, if you are wondering what META tags are then they are in the html code that your website designer has used while creating your webpage. They are also used to inform search engines as to what the keywords on the site are. So as is obvious by now, certain ways of tampering with your META tags, certain ‘tricks’, let’s call them, might help you fool the search engine in ways very similar to that described above. However, your brainwave won’t get you too far unfortunately because stupid though it is, even a search engine knows not to go by appearances alone when it comes to websites, so instead of depending on the META tags alone it also checks the content!

False content

As a user you have probably come across a dozen sites which seem to have long strings of text which have nothing to do with the site as a whole and probably make no sense individually either. These are what are called ‘False content’; they are put up on a site only to use a few keywords which might get detected by a search engine. Needless to say such content is a complete obstacle in a good read and even if the overall look and feel of your site is A1 every visitor will get put off by these.

While no one is taking away from the fact that a good ranking is important, it is also important to gain it the right way. And tricking the visitor or disrupting their read is certainly not the way I would call right. Stick to making your website useful and make sure it has ‘real’ content. Once you do that, no one will be able to stop you from getting a high ranking with the search engines.