Back in May of 2009, Google launched Search Options, which is the side panel that lets you apply filters and view search results in different ways. This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but Google actually put in quite a few long years into the development of this technology. The concept surfaced in 2001 and was later unveiled in May of 2007 as universal search. Fast forward two years, and today we have very enhanced and beefed up search options available at only a few mouse clicks away.

So you may be wondering what can you do with the new search options. The simple answer: a lot! The better question to ask would be what can’t you do with the new search options. The more important question to ask yourself – assuming you’re a site owner interested in increasing organic search traffic – is how can I enhance my SEO to capitalize on these new features. Let’s look at a few of the new features and then I’ll offer some suggestions on how to take advantage of them.

The search options available are as follows: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, reviews.

Additionally, you can add these filters to the first six: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, specific date range.

On top of that, you can then filter your view: Standard view, related searches, wonder wheel, and timeline.

The last filter allows you to change your view even further: Standard results, images from the page, fewer shopping sites, more shopping sites, and more text.

So now that we’ve broken down the search options and defined each filter, let’s talk about some SEO tips. Here are a few things that you can do to make the most of the new search options in Google.

Videos: Creating and uploading a videos in YouTube and embedding them in your web pages will increase your chances of pulling up in the video results.

On video sites, such as YouTube, be sure to put the URL of your web page into the description. People as well as spiders will be able to travel from the YouTube video page to your web page. Both activities influence your web pages rankings.

Blogs: Creating and maintaining a blog, and publishing unique and high quality content related to your brand, business, products, and services can help you increase your chances gaining top ranks when users filter and show blog results only.

Don’t discount the possibility of running multiple blogs. The cost and time invested into maintaining blogs is much less than most people believe. Also, I recommend running blogs using multiple platforms. For example, you should have a blog on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and LiveJournal. Lastly, I suggest that each blog appear independent and seperate from the others.

The most successful blogs are blogs that grow off the reader’s activity and contributions. Try to write content in a way that captures attention and makes readers feel compelled to take an action. The desireable actions you seek are backlinks, comments, and social network sharing. These are all activities that influence how well your blog post ranks for keyword phrases in search. Also, content can be carefully shaped and molded in a way to attract the attention of people as well as search engines. And that leads to my next tip.

Reviews: Adjusting your writing style can influence your chances of ranking in the reviews only section. Google looks for common writen trends that typically reflect written reviews, such as product reviews. Spend some time studying the content on some of the pages found in the search results and adapt some of their style into yours.

Index Frequency: You should constantly monitor how quickly new content gets indexed from your site. If content gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, then you should take advantage of that and publish more content. I recommend publishing new content immediately after the most recent content has been indexed. In other words, everytime web crawlers come back to your site, you should have new content ready to be crawled for indexing. Doing so will increase your chances of pulling up in after the past hour, past 24 hours, and past week filter has been applied.

Another obvious reason why I recommend posting new content as frequently as possible is because doing so places your mark in hundreds and in many cases thousands of search result pages. A great pioneer in this strategy is Chris Pirillo. He has multiple blogs, forums, and sites, each being updated almost hourly. Secondly, these updates aren’t done just by hired or team writers. Most of the updates are user generated content. Chris Pirillo’s earns revenue by displaying contextual advertisements off the content created by community members within his network.

Adjusting how you do things and puting yourself more in-line, and in the same direction as Google, can make a significant difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site receives. Just being aware and perceptive of how Google presents information to users via their search results alone can help a lot. And with these new search options available, instantly there is a new resource of traffic that you can be tapping into.

If you’re looking to get some excellent search engine marketing tips, there’s obviously quite a few sites online that provide them. One site in particular has captured my attention. Recently, I discovered a search engine marketing company in Houston called, Search Engine Marketing Group.

The company was formed in 2006 by Gerald Weber, who happens to be an avid reader of SeoHosting.com Blog. The company started out as a web design business; However, when the needs for professional search engine marketing and optimization services increased over time, Gerald and his team adapted to the demands of business.

Quickly the group grew to be one of the leading search engine marketing companies in the city of Houston. Consequently – and in addition to providing some of the most top notch and professional search engine marketing services in their city - their group also sports one of the hottest blogs covering the topic of search engine marketing and SEO tips.

I discovered the blog recently after getting a trackback notification on a previous article I published on SeoHosting.com. It seems that Gerald had some opinions that differed from mine and he felt compelled to share them on their company blog. It’s a good thing that he did though, otherwise who knows how long it would have been before I would have discovered the site.

That said, if you’re looking for some excellent and practical tips on search engine marketing, I would definitely recommend checking out Gerald’s SEM/SEO blog. A lot of hard work goes into the articles being published and as always, the information and education is totally free.

Some of the more recent tips include information on how to reduce StumbleUpon message spam, how to become a Digg power user, and how to make WordPress more secure. Be sure to check the blog out and connect with them by subscribing their RSS feed.

In my previous article about teaching how to research and target keywords, I explained about the importance of targeting keywords that generate qualified traffic. Now that you have an understanding of why it’s important to rank for relevant keywords as opposed to focusing on scoring tons of traffic, let’s take a closer look at two programs offered by Google that can help you drill down and find keywords that you can rank for on your site.

Keep in mind, it’s important for you to have some kind of web publishing system on your site, such as a blog, and someone who is able to write and publish content on it. For more details about this, I suggest reading my article that explains why a blog is important for SEO. That said, the two programs that we’ll take a closer look at are called Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Wonder Wheel.

As mentioned prior, the Google Wonder Wheel an amazing and free service that allows you to easily drill down into discovering relevant longtail keywords based off very popular and competitive ones. It’s handy to use this program so that you can gather a list of keywords that will potentially be used.

The next program, Google AdWords Keyword Tool, is used to further research the list of keywords generated from Google Wonder Wheel. Using this program, you can get a general idea of the amount of traffic and level of competition a keyword has.

Using Google AdWords Keyword Tool gives you the ability to screen your preliminary list of keywords so that you can remove ones that prove to be too competitive or receive far less traffic than desired. Also, Google AdWords Keyword Tool works as a micro keyword finder as well. Just like Google Wonder Wheel, you’ll find that the keyword tool does a great job generating relevant keywords as well.

Stay tuned because in the next few days I will continue explaining more about researching and targeting keywords for search engine marketing. Next, I will show you how to study the search results page to determine whether it’s possible to easily rank on it.

Learning how to research and target keywords for search engine marketing is a valuable skill to learn. Ranking for certain keywords and phrases in search engines can deliver more traffic to your site than you can shake a stick at. But also, it isn’t always about the quantity of traffic.

In most cases, it’s about the quality of the traffic. And that is one of the most common things I believe people mistake about SEM and even SEO. In my opinion, I would rather have 100 super qualified visitors to my site per month rather than 10,000 unqualified visitors. That said, of course you can easily rank for many different keywords and phrases; however, if you own a site that sells kitchen appliances in Dallas Texas. Is there really any reason to try to rank for the search term, kitchen appliances in Alaska?

In other words, it’s relatively easy to rank for keywords and phrases that yield a lot of traffic. But, this is useless traffic that only puts a burden on your server and consumes your bandwidth. Not only is this traffic not going to convert, but eventually search engines will catch on to the misuse of keyword targeting and derank the listings and possibly the entire site.

The best thing a site owner can do is pick out relevant keywords and phrases that will deliver high quality traffic and qualified leads towards conversion or call to action. With that, here is a simple process you can follow that will help you drill down towards finding keywords that’ll work for you.

The first thing I do is write down ten primary keywords, such as: Cars, Doctor, Computer, House, Keyboard, Bed, Door, Plants, etc. Once I have a list of primary keywords that are relevant to the topic of my site, I then start researching sub-topics, or as many people call it, Longtail Keyword Phrases. There’s quite a few programs that can help you do this. One is a program I have been using for a couple years called Google AdWords Keyword Tool. The other is a newer program, also offered by Google, called Google Wonder Wheel. Using both, will in fact, help you quite a bit.

In my next article I will show you how to use both of these programs to find keywords to use towards targeting qualified traffic to your site. If you haven’t already done so, I suggest subscribing to my RSS feed so that you won’t miss my next article. Also, I suggest subscribing to the main RSS Feed so that you don’t miss articles written by my fellow writers here on SEOHosting.com.

Common in the insurance business you will hear things like the 80/20 plan. What that means is some insurance plans will cover 80% of the bill while leaving you with the remaining 20% balance. With Internet marketing, I have coined my own 80/20 plan and indeed put it into practice.

My business is mainly in developing niche sites that are run using WordPress. I write content that targets very high paying keywords in Google AdWords. My content indeed is very well written, unique, useful, entertaining and informative. The goal in mind though is to monetize it using Google AdSense. Some content I write that targets certain keyword phrases need a little more boost than others. Most of my content targets longtail keywords. However, some do not and need additional love.

The 80/20 plan that I follow is very simple. I invest 20% of my time writing content and 80% of my time marketing it. Depending on the strength of competition of the keyword phrases I am targeting will dictate the level of depth I go into marketing each article or page I create. For me, Internet marketing is a primary method of promoting my content on the Internet. It combines two elements: search engine marketing and social network marketing.

Search engine marketing is really simple if you think about it. All that is required is a search engine optimized web site or blog and your ability to write content in a creative way that caters to both humans as well as search engines. In other words, in order for you to rank well for the keyword phrases you are targeting, you have to carefully write your material in a way that uses the keywords and related terms in your content a certain way and at a certain frequency. All in all though, it’s not difficult but it does take some time to master.

The tricky part is social network marketing. As mentioned above, there are times when I want to rank for more competitive keyword phrases. These terms fall outside from what I would consider being longtail. Long tail keyword marketing does not require backlinks, while targeting more primary keyword phrases do. That is where social network marketing kicks into gear.

Many people look at social network marketing in terms of scoring votes of your submitted content into these various networks. While voting does indeed play its role in the my big picture of social network marketing, it doesn’t take the role you may think it does. Many of these popular social networks NOFOLLOW their links. So even though the page that your submitted content appears on ranks well in the search engines, you dont’ get credit for the links.

What is the point towards getting your content submitted into social networks? Well, really the point and reason why I like my content listed in social netowrks is for the fact that if someone else likes what they read, they may in return write a post about it on their blog which will provide a direct search engine friendly backlink to my content and or home page.

Internet Marketing isn’t just limited to search engine marketing and social network marketing. You also have the element of email list marketing as well as instant messenger marketing. Email list marketing is great because you can send out direct email to your subscribers and inform them of the content you wrote. Depending on how close you are with your subscribers, you can possibly even ask your subscribers to link to your newly publsihed content. In doing so, you are establishing backlinks to your content.

The same is true for instant messenger marketing. If you have about 25 buddies in your instant messenger contacts and speak with them daily. You can easily ask them to check out your newly publsihed article or web page and ask if they wouldn’t mind providing you with a backlink to it.

No matter what you do, always remember the 80/20 Internet Marketing Plan. Once again, use 20% of your free time towards creating content and 80% of your free time marketing and promoting your content. If you do that, you’ll see super huge results.

What are some other ways that you can market and promote your content? If you have some ideas, feel free to share them below in the comments.

I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have an interest in increasing traffic to their web site or blog. In this article I am going to show you how you can increase traffic using Google Analytics This is a free tool that Google provides to anyone who wants to track web site traffic data. There is no cost to sign up and only the only requirment is that you to register for an account, which is free too.

Gaining traffic to your web site or blog is probably the single most difficult element to achieve. Building a web site or blog indeed has its own share of challenges; however, what commonly happens to many people is that they do finally build a very nice site but fail to get traffic to it. I don’t want this to continue happening to you. So today, I am going to show you a very simple trick that will make a world of difference for you. If all this sounds wonderful to you, then let’s continue on.

How To Prepare Data Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics is very simple and this system produces some amazing statistics. Today what we are going to do is discover which individual pages of your blog or web site are scoring the most traffic. The goal in this tutorial is to show you how to find out which pages are hot and how to improve them to make them even HOTTER! But, is that possible, you may ask? Yes! This is very much a possibility and this is exactly what I do. So today, in this article, I am indeed revealing one of my own “personal secrets” in my success with search engine marketing.

Log into your Google Analytics Account. Click on the “Content Tab” found on the left sidebar. By default, the screen will show you results from the last 30 days. That is fine, you can work with this. However, sometimes because I deal in more “seasonal” type of keywords — holiday shopping deals to be specific — I tend to narrow my results by the previous week, as well as the same 30 day period from last year. However, for sake of simplicity, let’s just leave this set to default for now. Later you can experiment with this on your own to figure out which blend is best for you and your site. Please see the above screen shot for example. You can click on this to view it in full size.

Now what we have here is a simple snap shot of the individual pages that have received the most traffic within the last 30 days. You can see this section circled in red in the screen shot above. The next step I do is click on “View Full Report.” If you are following along with me, please do this now. After you click on view full report, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Once again, please click the screen shot above to view in full size. Now this screen shot is called the Google Analytics Top Content Performance Report. It will show you exactly which individual page(s) are receiving the most traffic and why. If you look closely you’ll see little “Arrow” icons to the left of each web page listing. You can click on these and a new page or tab will open up direct to the page that is scoring all the traffic.

You can do that now, if you’d like; however what I would like to do is actually click on the blue underlined text of each page. In this example, I am going to click on the /wal-mart-photo-center-vs-walgreens-photo-center.html listing. At this time, please follow with me and click your #1 most visited web page on your site. When you do, your current web page will update to a new screen. This screen will look something like this:

Once again, please click the above image to view in full size. This is called your Google Analytics Individual Page Content Detail Report. This report will give you quite a bit of information about this paticular web page. The element that we are concerned with is where the traffic is coming come (i.e. social network, search engine, direct referral, etc.).

Now at this time, please click “Entrance Sources.” By doing this, we will then discover where majority of the traffic is coming from. This is VITAL to know, because depending on where the traffic is coming from will dictate how we go about using strategy towards modifying the page to allow us even more traffic in the future. And real quick, what I mean by that is this. If more traffic is coming from the StumbleUpon.com social networks, it would be better for us to promote our StumbleUpon social network profile. If traffic is coming direct from Google, it would be better to promote a mailing list option or a RSS feed subscription sign up form. Please click “Entrance Sources” and you will see a page that looks like this:

Once again, please click the above screen shot to view full size. In this example above, you will see the StumbleUpon.com delievering the most traffic to this page. Second place is Reddit.com, third place is Google. Now, real quick… I want to talk to you about Social Network Traffic. This is VERY temperaory traffic. Meaning you will indeed only get a few days of “Burst Fire” Traffic from social networks. Social network traffic has a very SHORT shelf life.

Depending one how much time you want to invest on each of your individual pages, you very well may want to modify these pages twice. Once, to capialize on the social networking traffic and then once again about a week later to finalize your final edit towards a very fine tuned search engine marketing campaign towards increasing traffic.

With that said, in this example, I am going to bypass doing anything with the “Burst Fire” traffic I am getting to this page and focus on Google. As you can see, Google is the 3rd most popular source of traffic and quickly this will soon become #1.

At this time, please click “BACK” on your browser. What I would like to do now, is show you HOW GOOGLE IS SENDING ME TRAFFIC TO THIS PAGE. Please stay focused becausee this next step is CRUCIAL towards the goal at hand. After clicking back on your browser, click on “ENTRANCE KEYWORDS”. Here is a screen shot of what this page looks like:

Now, once again, please click the above screen shot to view in full size. Ok, folks… this is where the money is at. We have now hit jackpot. What we have in front of us is the “Answers” to HOW GOOGLE IS GIVING US FREE TRAFFIC. This report gives you a complete list of exact phrase keywords that people search for in order to find your web page. There NOW is absolutely ZERO mystery!

What Can We Do With This Data?

This data is worth more than gold! The reason being is the fact that you have totally UNLOCKED keywords and phrases that are delievering you free traffic to your web site. I have said this once, and I will say it again many times, in order for you to be highly successful in the business of search engine marketing, you have GOT to have skills or software that allow you to predict which keywords and phrases are HOT. It is all about keyword predictibility. Nothing less and nothing more.

With this list of keywords and phrases, I can then go back to my web page and better optimize, add to and rebuild the content on this page. Further research of these keywords may show my page being listed on page 3 or page 4 of Google and by going back and enhancing the content and improving my keyword saturation, I can then achieve page 1 on many of these popular search terms.

In my previous post, I mentioned how it is very important is it for a business to start a blog. If you have a blog, you could then add these keyword phrases as tags. Tags are additional pages that can be built with the snap of your fingers and instantly you have additional pages that get indexed in the search engines and are automatically optimized for the keyword or phrase you are trying to target.

I hope that you enjoyed this tip today. Stay tuned as I am going to do it again and show you how you can use Google Insights, yet another free tool by Google, that will once again, give you yet another blend in discovering and predicting keywords and phrases that you can use towards increasing traffic to your web site or blog.

For now, please share your feedback with me by leaving me a comment using the form below. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help answer them for you.

Take moment to subscribe to my RSS Feed and be sure to start following us on Twitter.

I have often speculated whether or not having your content submitted or bookmarked into social networks and bookmarking sites could improve your site SEO. I know for a fact that you can for sure increase traffic to the individual pages and sections of your site that have been submitted or bookmarked. However, in doing so, does it actually help your site become more search engine friendly?

It would be silly of me to claim that I am truly an SEO expert. I am honestly not. I have much more experience in search engine marketing rather than search engine optimization. For those who don’t know, indeed, there is a huge difference between the two. A search engine optimization expert is one who specializes totally in making a web site truly a search engine magnet. A search engine marketing expert, in my opinion, is an individual who specializes in writing content for the exclusive purpose of ranking well in the search engines for certain targeted keywords or phrases.

With that being said, I consider myself to be more on the lines of a search engine marketing expert over being a search engine optimization expert. While I am not totally discounting out that I indeed have SEO skills, I just know that for there are many other people who have a higher level of SEO skills than myself. Also another thing to consider is the fact that I feel that SEO is slightly over-rated. What I mean by that is I think people tend to over-complicate the simplicity of having a search engine friendly web site.

On the matter of discussing whether social networks and bookmarking sites can indeed enhance your web stie SEO, I’d say that they do. I don’t believe that they have a very large impact on your web site SEO, but I do believe that there is a slight improvement. With that said though, the improvements or enhancements if you will, are not what you might expect. The elements that I believe are enhanced stems a little deeper than the default answer most people would assume to be increased backlinks.

While it is true, submitting your site, sections and individual web pages will help increase the number of backlinks, it is also true that many of these claimed popular social networks and bookmarking sites use the NOFOLLOW tag on external links. For those who don’t know what the NOFOLLOW tag is, this is a tag added to a hyperlink that disallows a search engine (commonly Google) from passing through the link to the destination site. In other words, when an external link has the NOFOLLOW attribute assigned, credit for that backlink is not given. Most all social networks and bookmarking sites use the NOFOLLOW attribute.

So as I mentioned, backlinks really isn’t something I would bank on. But still, I do believe that SEO can be enhanced with submitting into the social networks. For me, in addition to having SEM qualities, I too consider myself to be an “Out of the box” thinker. I tend to look at cause and effect a lot. I tend to observe end user patterns and behaviors. More so, I consider what people do when they find things of interest within the social networks. While most people would assume that the traffic and SEO is received from the submission into these networks, I more believe that it is what the community does after they find the content within these networks.

I have a personal blog of my own. Many of you reading this already know this. One of the most common things I do on my blog is share information with my readers. At the moment, I have around 1200 subscribers who read my blog daily. When I find something interesting on the Internet, my gut reaction is to share this information with my readers. By sharing excellent and rich quality information with my readers that helps my blog continue to grow. So, when I find something cool in the social networkings or bookmarking sites, I typically end up writing a blog post about my findings and provide my readers with a direct link to the source of information I found.

So you see, while the process of having your content listed in social networks and bookmarking sites might not technically help your SEO, in many ways it does. If your content is listed or submitted, then there is a very good chance that people who find it will end up writing a post about it on their blog or web site. When a publisher or blogger does that, the results are huge for your SEO. Backlinks indeed are very powerful and backlinks are totally needed to compete with higher competitive words in Google as well as other search engines. The more backlinks you have to your web site, sections within your web site and individual web pages within your web site, the better your SEO is for sure.  So consider this, next time you discover that someone has submitted one of your web pages or blog posts into a social network.