Every one out there has there own opinion(s) about what a real SEO is such as a “guru SEO”. Well I’m going to discuss what my believes are which some of you might disagree with me, but honestly if you ask me to be successful in search engine optimization you must know the real trades. I see a lot of people that “claim” to know SEO, but they have no idea of what direction to go in.

Matter fact we have a lot of companies that we deal with and they’ve have hired in house SEO’s (before contacting us), but out of all honesty when I talk to them they don’t seem to be too well coordinated with the proper sense (eg someone that has great deal of concepts and understanding of SEO / SEM). Have you ever talked with someone and you can just tell by talking with them that there not fully knowledgeable in that area?

I’m sure we all have one way or another, but then again there is people that are more knowledgeable in some areas that others aren’t. Well let share a few of my thoughts on what a real SEO is.

Major Link Resources: If they’re true SEO they will have resources to links and when I mean resources they will have unlimited supply of links just not 200,300,500, or 1000 they will have unlimited resources that means to be able to build them on on going bases if not they should be able to define a strategy to get more links (know what direction to take to get them).

Link Value: They should understand and know how to measure links if there basing links on page rank or I should say every link on page rank then they don’t fully understand how the linking works which granted links from higher page ranked website are better to a degree, but you only want to use them in the beginning stages or at least to get some juice flowing into your site.

Domain Age: A true SEO must understand how the domain age factors work. Any experienced SEO will know that older domains rank better or at least domains that have been indexed for awhile with links.

Team Assembling: If the SEO gets a large project or maybe a project that someone needs a lot of links for they must know how to assemble a team and build the strategy for there / the company.

For Example:

• The SEO must know how to put together or at least hire a content writer for link bait.
• The SEO must know how to hire link builders because honestly some projects can take more then one link builder, but then again the SEO could outsource or hire a broker to gain links (believe it or not I have met a lot of self proclaimed SEO’s that know nothing about hiring brokers they think they have to do it all there self).
• The SEO must know how to provide reports such as estimated ROI reports (which yes can be hard to predict, but experience builds the charm), Linking Reports, Content Creation Reports, and ETC.

Understanding Directories: This would fall back under the category of knowing how to evaluating link value because there is a lot of SEO’s that think directories don’t carry any value any more and there wrong. The fact is there is a ton of directories out there that still carry value I can think of 100 off the top of my head right now. Google still loves directories, but yes there is some directories that have got penalized due to over linking, buying links, and things to that nature.

Branding: Which this is not a big role, but honestly a SEO should have some understanding of branding because by someone having this trait can help them build a viral site through blogs. I mean honestly blogging is almost like branding to a degree the reason being is becuase your building a character, something that makes people feel connected to your blog and etc (creativeness).

Site Structure: An SEO must understand the traits of structuring a site so it will be visible to search engines or I should say crawlable. I have had many clients call me in the pass and generally when they tell me there website I’ll peep it out of course, but I have ran into sites that have a terrible site structure such as Dynamic Url’s and etc. Then when I ask them about the site structure they tell me there prior SEO never brought anything up about it :(.

Descriptions and Titles: A real SEO will know how to produce titles and descriptions that increase CTR (Click Through Rate) because believe it or not titles, urls, and descriptions can dramatically increase your CTR along with conversions specially on long tails that are driving traffic to a precise landing page that are based around services or products.

Conclusion
Which granted there is a lot to SEO more then I’ve listed above. I was just trying to list some of the things I have seen in the pass and by the way we have dealt with some pretty large brands that got marketing budgets of 1 million+ a year for online marketing. We have also put clients in top 5 for some of the most competitive keywords in there particular vertical, but honestly what it takes to be a talented SEO is to know how to get links.

SEO is about Link Building, which granted along with many other things ;). So what is your definition of a real SEO?

Taking traffic to the next level is something that we do and have been successful at doing. We have driven direct leads (a lot) to our clients sites that have resulted in large deals with major brands. Building traffic to a website is quite simple which don’t take me wrong it does take some practice of course, but when you find that channel and you leverage your brand through there just right you’ll get astonishing results specially on the web.

Let me discuss a few ways that you can build your traffic.

Building Links: Building links can play a major factor in search engines of course. There are many ways to build rankings through strategic link building. A good place to start would be Contextual Style you can get highly relevant links that will dramatically increase your rankings.

Pay Per Click: PPC is one of the fastest ways to get traffic, but keep in mind if you go the PPC route you will have to keep investing money into it to sustain, or at least to keep getting traffic. Pay Per Click can send some of the most highest quality traffic to your website which of course is very relevant traffic. The thing is with pay per click is that you have complete control over all your ads for each keywords then outside of that you can A / B test your landing pages and ad groups, so you can some pretty powerful leverage there plus this will give you a better idea on what you need to work on in organic search.

Buzz Marketing: Buzz marketing can be very effective if done right most generally you want to do this through blogs. You will need to start building viral content that will capture the imagination of people’s minds there on out you will have to leverage it into other segments. Just takes a lot of practice sooner or later you will start to grasp it and get it.

Build an E-mail List: Building an e-mail list can be a highly effective way of generate new leads generally when marketing through this channel online what you want to do is create a landing page then drive pay per click traffic to the landing page then persuade them into signing up, therefore this will build you a highly targeted e-mail subscriber list that you can market around your business. Once you get the e-mail list built up put your self into a viral state of mind before you send your advertisement out to all these people maybe your wanting to create link bait, sale a product, capture more e-mails, and etc. Just leverage it to your advantage.

Conclusion
There is several ways of generating buzz, increasing traffic, and etc. You just have to find out what works for you, once you do find out what works for you leverage it to your advantage. Leveraging is what marketing is all about honestly I mean if you can leverage your brands into different market segments then good luck, but if you can then your traffic will continue to increase for a life time therefore more sales and leads.

Tracking a websites data is highly important in the search marketing (Pay Per Click) or optimization (Organic Traffic) world. When you track data you have a more realistic view of whats going on which granted we all have our own ways of tracking data rather it being through analytics or just something we have figured up on our own, but most generally we would use some type of analytics to track traffic count.

What are the best ways to track traffic?

Personally if you ask me the best ways to track your traffic is with Google Analytics. Out of all honesty from my experience analytics returns the most accurate measurements. Google breaks things down way better then programs such as AwStat, which don’t take me wrong at “one time” aw stat was considered a good program to use, but now days its useless if you ask me.

The reason I say its useless for is because it does not return accurate measurements by any means compared to analytics. when I first start using analytics software I used awstat and the measurement it was giving me was totally out of this world it was saying I was getting around 130 uniques a day from search engines when I was actually only getting 13 uniques a day this was when I first got involved with search marketing, so thats been years ago, but the bottom line is I wouldn’t use software such as Awstat use analytics and get the most accurate returns on your website.

Also please be advised to check out Google Analytics vs AwStats.

How to do a competitor analysis?

Running a competitor analysis can be tricky and I think a lot of people get confused on how its actually done well depends on what there doing for example an older domain can out rank a new domain due the trust rank and a lot of people over look that having old domains is like major credibility toward the search engines (big time).

Anyways lets say you have the same age domain as someone else for example 1998, but your your thinking to your self how can I out rank this competitor the method I’m going to give you is simple and requires nothing else, but what I’m going to tell you to do.

Do a link count on your competitor use your Yahoo search engine to do a link count for example go to http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:www.creditcards.com%20-site:www.creditcards.com now this will give you the results for creditcards.com now you see the link count where it says 5,490 don’t get confused with that the reason being is because it counts all links including site wide links and site wide links give you no more credibility towards the search engine then what a one way unique link does, but what you can do is get an actual measurement of how many links this site has pointing to it.

In this case it looks like its around ~1,000 links (flip through the pages and you’ll see it stops at 10) the down fall about this is that its not an actual result, but it gives you an idea and also keep in mind for some odd reason Yahoo will only give you 1000 results for the links, so in other words if a site has more then 1000 links pointing to it they won’t show them all which I think is quite ridiculous out of all honesty, but hey the Yahoo linkdomain command gives you an idea of what your working with.

The site I just referred to was creditcards.com, but let me tell you something if the site is showing over 1000 links go down your search result until you hit a site that does not show 1000 links for example the yahoo back link checker might be showing 500 links for a particular site in position 10, so what does that mean?

That means you need to get around ~500 links to get up into that position maybe even less who knows that site could have numerous anchor text its using, so you could possibly out rank that site with ~100 links on that given keyword for that search result so if your doing a search result for credit cards and the position 10 site has around ~500 links and you get ~100 links using the anchor text credit cards you might be right up there in the top 10.

Which don’t take these measurements as an accurate reading, but if you set down and start researching this type of stuff it can give you a very good idea on what you need to do to out rank the other site and I will tell you this if your going up against an old domain that is dated back in 1997 and your domain is 2007 your going to have to get a ton of links to out rank them other sites trust me on that.

Also keep in mind page rank is not a big deal which you want to try to get links with some what page rank, but don’t get caught up on the whole fact that you need 10 pr 8 links to rank high because quite honestly if you have an older domain with a hand full of half decent links maybe coming from pr2 websites they will work a lot better then one silly higher page rank website for example you could get ~200 permanent links with different anchor text a lot easier and faster then compared to a pr8 link and better yet rank better on the pr2 links because you got more of them (even with different anchor text) that page rank is not everything your page rank bar only goes so high then it stops.

One thing I notice when I consult with clients is that they always play around with there titles and description tags they think just because they have a keyword rich description there going to rank better well the answer to that is no I mean it really won’t help that much out of all honesty it might have a 1 percent effect on a non competitive keyword ranking, but for more competitive keyword ranking it won’t make a difference.

The idea is to write your description for users not for search engines. When you write your description for users this will improve your overall CTR (Click Through Rate) thereofre resulting in more sales. If your wanting to rank build links or create viral content that will attract links don’t just go out spamming your description tags out because if your doing this chances of you getting very good profitable traffic will be never.

Becoming an effecitve PPC marketer is something that takes time and dedication, but the thing is if you are really wanting to improve your skills in the PPC game start promoting affiliates programs.

The reason I say start promoting affiliate programs through PPC is because this will by far increase your skill set the reason being is because your limited to what you work with such as commissions and plus when your promoting affiliates generally your promoting several niches at one time through a particular vertical market.

When your promoting multiple niche products from numerous companies rather it being cellulite lotions, ringtones, online dating, or computer products. What this does is it increases your skill set your probably asking how could this increase my skill set?

1. Limited Profit: See with affiliate your limited to your profit margin you only have so much profit to work with, but at the same time your paying out on PPC. Now if your promoting your own products generally you’ll have a lot more margin to work with.
2. Numerous Verticals: Your promoting numerous products for numerous verticals or just for the individual person. What this does is increase your lateral thinking skills for numerous markets and lateral thinking is highly important when it comes to promoting affiliates.

The thing is with PPC is that it can be a challenge, but if you set there for long enough and test you’ll eventually figure it out, but to be quite honest spending is the biggest factor in the PPC game the more you spend the better you will be and the more CTR ration you gain the better quality score you have.

If you want to get into the PPC game I would suggest you to start off by promoting affiliates first which you don’t have to, but it sure wouldn’t hurt thats for sure.

The other day Jeremy better yet known as Shoemoney wrote a post called Why I do not like 95% percent of SEO Experts, well it stirred some controversy up and now hes offering SEO’s a chance to be heard on webmaster radio to get more details about it click here.

I think we all have to do this from time to time such as check or re-evaluate our website then you get to that point where you know its right, but then again you might be over looking something simple. The reason I decided to write this article is to give you guys some insight on things that should be checked for or maybe some of the things below will remind you of a few things that you need to do to your website.

1. Content Density: Check your content density make sure your using your keywords, but at the same time don’t get to caught up on this I would focus more on well written content. Now if you see a few places you can slide somewhere keywords in do it just make sure you keep your content well written and very professionally looking.
2. Search Engine Friendly URLS: Make sure your urls are search engine friendly and always use your keywords in your domain names. We have clients all the time that call us and you would be surprised on what there urls look like its just crazy they have long session id’s in the urls and believe it or not if you format these into a search engine friendly url with a great title and make sure the whole website structure is at its best it can increase your traffic.
3. Build More Links: Building links is something you always have to do speaking your wanting your company to continually grow, so always make sure your building links, but at the same time keep in mind quality is the key and not quantity.
4. Usability: Granted usability might not effect your rankings in Google, but it can determine how well your clients convert, and there out look on your business.
5. Titles: Check your titles and make sure there relevant to your website of course, but at the same time try to use keyword rich titles and if at all possible use your brand name in the title.
6. Crawability: The best way to make sure your website is crawlable by search engines is to download a Lynx Text Only Browser this is a text only browser and if your website is navigable through out the whole Lynx Text Browser then it will be fit for search engines.
7. Increase Content: You don’t have to do this, but if you don’t have a blog why not install one having a blog installed can majorally increase brand awareness and links speaking you stay motivated and keep crafting up high quality content on a daily bases.

Which granted if your a SEO guru then you know there is way more to SEO then what I’ve listed, but this is to give beginners or even remind experts of things that generally need to be done or it might even remind you of things that you need to improve through out your website.

If anything is more time consuming and complicated its building website rankings strategically through search engines. If any one would know I would know this and any other great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert someone that is very well experience can tell you getting traffic to your website takes time speaking your getting it through organic search.

When your building your website stay focused and don’t give up specially on a new domain. On new domains they take a lot of time to build up thats for damn sure excuse my language, but they honestly do. I’ve seen new domains go from no where to number 1 for very competitive keywords, but it took some time and a lot of dedication and when I mean dedication I mean a lot of work, no joke.

That can be another issue out in the web 2.0 space a lot of people think there going to jump on and make a million bucks in a month. I had a prospect call me the other day and I think he would make a great client, but he told me he wanted 25 leads per week, and then said if I could get that many leads per week everything would be changing around here and I’ve had many other people call and ask the same thing and they have a brand spanking new domain.

Which granted someone can get that many extra leads per weak maybe through PPC (Pay Per Click) or paying for traffic somewhere, but if someone is wanting it from organic search it will take time. Sometimes it can take a good year or two to actually get good traffic just to be on the safe side I generally tell someone a good two years unless there willing to pay out some major bucks and we can put our brains into it and work like we never have before, but then again chances are it will take time for them leads to come in heavily.

So if your someone building links and wondering why your not getting no results well relax it takes time. When I say time I mean it takes a lot of your time and dedication you need to give it everything you got and thats no joke, but the outcome is astonishing.

Now if you have a old domain thats dated back to 1998 then your in super good hands a domain age like this can be very easy to rank on certain terms and requires 10 times less work. Don’t take me wrong it still will take some work to get the traffic coming in, but less work.

I had one client that was ranking on very competitive brand name keywords, but his domain was dated back to 1996 and the guy hardly had no links what so ever, but when we would put a link up against his website it would rank for that given keyword like you wouldn’t believe I mean with 10 links it would rank for pratically any long tail and check this out the guy was the largest reseller for Hallmark Ornaments if that gives you any idea on what type of business he was conducing through organic search engines.

Now we’ve also went up against sites that are about 5 years old and they do pretty good, but most generally sites around that 1-2 year age frame just don’t rank that well any more; in other words, like they use to in the old days. In the old days you could throw a site up and build links into it and rank it because the search engines measured things a little differently.

Which granted don’t take me wrong you can get some good traffic with then 1 year or so, but you better plan on working your tail off and getting a bunch of links because like I stated earlier a new domain requires 10 times more work then a old domain I seen it every day I do this for a living.

The whole reason I decided to write this post up is to give you some insight on whats going on and just to remind any one that is trying to make a living through the web or start a online company just give it time and things will start to happen it just takes a lot of work and dedication to build a profitable websites through search engines or blogs. Also be sure to keep in mind older domains rank better then newer domains and if your domain is younger then 2 years then you better work your tail off to get it going because new domains like that are very hard to rank.

Building momentum through a website is very important you can use momentum to build traffic into numerous parts of your website and leverage it into other things such as forums, affiliate programs, convert sales, and etc. For example if you have traffic dedicated around your forum or maybe a blog that has a high rss subscriber list you can leverage your traffic into your forum and start getting sign ups which there numerous way of building momentum, but if you read on I’ll get more into detail about it and give your some tips.

• Search Engine Traffic:  You can use search engine traffic to build momentum through your website which its not the best way, but over time it can be very effecitve combined with numerous other strategies.
• PPC (Adwords, MSN Ad Centers, and ETC): You can use ppc such as adwords and other pay per click program to build traffic and create momentum. Which this technique can be very effective if done right, but its very costly. So expect to have some money to throw into it if you want it to work, and experience of course.
• Blogs: If you have a RSS feed built up you can leverage your subscribers into other areas into your website. Just channel them freely for example maybe your wanting to build a forum channel them into your forum and get them to sign up there is several things you can do, and create.
• Social Networking Sites: You can use social networking sites to build momentum.

See how momentum can be so helpful just build it one way or another and leverage it. Marketing is pratically about building momentum and leveraging it one way or another. The idea is to just test, test, and test like I’ve said many times and see what works you sure won’t get anywhere not trying thats for damn sure thats one thing I don’t understand about people to be honest they want traffic, but they don’t want to test anything or start building momentum up.

So give it a try and leverage it.

I just notice we was getting traffic from MSN which we generally do, but it has went up a little. I think I know what I did to get it there which I won’t discuss, but I notice MSN is pretty easy to rank its a little different on how it ranks its keywords for example if you compared Google to MSN you’ll notice a big difference of course.

We was actually number 2 on google for website design were like number 12 now and getting ready to hit the top 5 for internet marketing on Google, anyways cool stuff!