Category: <span>SEO</span>

Overview of SEO and SEM SEO

Overview of SEO and SEM

Overview of SEO vs SEM

By most people’s standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.

A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.

The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM — search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.

Search Engine Marketing

I see SEM as a rather broad term. It’s everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a website and increasing its traffic, its “stickiness,” and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.

Aspects of search engine marketing that I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:

Paid Inclusion

This is simply the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some search engines and directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it’s presented as an option. If you’re willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It’s also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.

Traditional Ads

This involves placing paid advertising on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Normally, these ads appear based on the keywords entered into the search engines, and one is charged based on the number of impressions, i.e. appearances, of the ad. In other words, you pay whether the ad sends anyone to your website or not.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They’re text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.

The Advantages of These Practices

In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don’t have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go.

The Disadvantages

You knew this was coming, didn’t you? Think about it this way: you’ve spent your time and money to bring people to your website. What will they see when they get there? You’ve convinced them, at least for the moment, that your site is worth visiting, so they’re expecting to find exactly the information they were seeking. Is it easy to find? Is it there at all? You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they’re looking for, click their browser’s back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn’t, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

SEO First

No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. Moreover, since the purpose of SEO is to make the site better for both search engines and users, you may find that it will suffice on its own. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

By most people’s standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.

A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.

The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM — search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.

Search Engine Marketing

I see SEM as a rather broad term. It’s everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a website and increasing its traffic, its “stickiness,” and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.

Aspects of search engine marketing that I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:

Paid Inclusion

This is simply the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some search engines and directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it’s presented as an option. If you’re willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It’s also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.

Traditional Ads

This involves placing paid advertising on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Normally, these ads appear based on the keywords entered into the search engines, and one is charged based on the number of impressions, i.e. appearances, of the ad. In other words, you pay whether the ad sends anyone to your website or not.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They’re text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.

The Advantages of These Practices

In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don’t have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go.

The Disadvantages

You knew this was coming, didn’t you? Think about it this way: you’ve spent your time and money to bring people to your website. What will they see when they get there? You’ve convinced them, at least for the moment, that your site is worth visiting, so they’re expecting to find exactly the information they were seeking. Is it easy to find? Is it there at all? You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they’re looking for, click their browser’s back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn’t, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

SEO First

No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. Moreover, since the purpose of SEO is to make the site better for both search engines and users, you may find that it will suffice on its own. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

Google Webmaster Tools Gets Updated Robots.txt Testing Tool Digital Marketing

Google Webmaster Tools Gets Updated Robots.txt Testing Tool

Webmaster tools

Google has released an updated robots.txt testing tool in Webmaster Tools. The tool can be found in the Crawl section.

The aim of the new version of the tool is to make it easier to make and maintain a “correct” robots.txt file and make it easier to find the directives within a large file that are or were blocking individual URLs.

In the above you will see the current robots.txt file and can test new URLs to see whether they’re disallowed for crawling,” says Google’s Asaph Amon, describing the tool. “To guide your way through complicated directives, it will highlight the specific one that led to the final decision. You can make changes in the file and test those too, you’ll just need to upload the new version of the file to your server afterward to make the changes take effect. Our developer’s site has more about robots.txt directives and how the files are processed.”

“Additionally, you’ll be able to review older versions of your robots.txt file, and see when access issues block us from crawling,” Amon explains. “For example, if Googlebot sees a 500 server error for the robots.txt file, we’ll generally pause further crawling of the website.”

Google recommends double-checking the robots.txt files for your existing sites for errors or warnings. It also suggests using the tool with the recently updated Fetch as Google tool to render important pages or using it to find the directive that’s blocking URLs that are reported as such.

Google says it often sees files that block CSS, JavaScript, or mobile content, which is problematic. You can use the tool to help you fix that if it’s a problem with your site.

Google Launches WordPress Plugin For AdSense & Webmaster Tool Online Advertising

How to create and use wordpress child themes

How to create and use WordPress child themes

A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes allow you to modify, or add to the functionality of that parent theme. A child theme is a safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want to make a few tiny changes or extensive changes. Instead of modifying the theme files directly, you can create a child theme and override within.

Why use a Child Theme?

Here are a few reasons:

If you modify an existing theme and it is updated, your changes will be lost. With a child theme, you can update the parent theme (which might be important for security or functionality) and still keep your changes.

It can speed up development time.

It’s a great way to get started if you are just learning WordPress theme development.

How to Create a Child Theme

Child Theme directory structure create a directory in your themes directory to hold the child theme. The theme directory is wp-content/themes. You should name the directory without any space as part of the name, and it is common practice to use the name of the parent theme folder with “-child” appended to it. For example, if you are making a child of the twenty fourteen themes, your folder name would be twenty fourteen-child.

Overriding Parent Theme Template Files

To override the template files in the parent theme, open the original template file and save a copy to the child theme folder with the same file name and folder structure. The file structure has to match with the parent theme.

FOR EXAMPLE:

let’s say you want to edit the loop.php file in the parent theme and it is stored in the “includes” folder

open the loop.php file and save a copy in the “includes” folder of the child theme

edit and save the loop.php in the child theme

FOR ANOTHER EXAMPLE:

let’s say you want to edit the page.php

open the page.php file and save a copy in the child theme

edit and save the page.php in the child theme

HERE ARE SOME OF THE TEMPLATE FILES THAT YOU CAN OVERRIDE:

header.php

footer.php

index.php

single.php

page.php

sidebar.php

includes/loop.php

includes/slider.php

Child Theme functions.php (optional)

If you need add additional PHP functions, create a functions.php in the child theme folder. It will load in addition to the parent theme functions.php file.

<?php

/* custom PHP functions below this line */

?>
Activating The Child Theme

Finally, activate the child theme at Appearance > Themes.

CMS comparison - Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress Online Advertising

CMS comparison – Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress

CMS comparison – Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress

WORDPRESS

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. It started out as a platform exclusively for blogging, but has grown and advanced significantly over the years. Today, over 40% of sites using CMS’s are using WordPress. In addition, over 60 millions websites are using WordPress which shows just how popular it is. WordPress offers many advantages to those looking to create a website, including the following:

Easy to Install – Many web hosting companies offer automatic installation of WordPress sites, which means you can have a new site up and running in well under five minutes. Even with manual installation, you can create a new site in less than a half hour.

  • Easy to install.
  • Easy to administer.
  • Easy to add popular and common features.
  • Easiest learning curve; ideal for those with little to no technical background.
  • Strong SEO capabilities.
  • Highly flexible (blog, eCommerce, website, etc.)
  • Does not require coding to edit.
  • Easy posting using WYSIWG interface.
  • Stable plug-in API architecture (i.e. easy to develop plugins)
  • Websites can be completely customized through the use of widgets and plug-ins.
  • Most extensive number of extension vendors and themes.
  • Extensive support via Google searches.

Drupal is the second most popular content management system available today. It is a fully open-source program, which many people prefer, especially those who are more technically minded.
The Drupal platform is extremely powerful, and is less resource intensive than that of WordPress. Drupal can be set up for anything from a simple blog to a content portal used by large corporations. Some of the most significant benefits to Drupal include the following:

Technically Advanced – Drupal is the most technically advanced of these three content management systems. It doesn’t use nearly as many system resources as WordPress, so people won’t have to worry about upgrading to a more expensive hosting option as quickly.

  • Steep learning curve.
  • Requires code (lacks editor tools such as WYSIWG)
  • Difficult to use for those without technical backgrounds/knowledge.
  • Developers forced to create their own solutions.
  • Lack of free plugins.
  • Lack of themes (great designers necessary).
  • Posting requires setting options for URL Alias, Menus, Revision Logs, Comments, and Author Meta data.
  • Lacks in terms of unofficial support beyond the main documentation.

JOOMLA

Joomla is often thought of as the compromise between WordPress and Drupal. It is a powerful content management system, which can run smoothly on most web servers without any problems. It doesn’t require the same level of technical experience to run as Drupal, but it still offers many of the extra features. Like Drupal and WordPress, Joomla does have a lot of plug-ins and themes available to choose from, so you can customize your site to look and function in any way you desire. Other reasons people choose Joomla to include:
Social Networking – This is perhaps the biggest benefit of Joomla. Of the three, Joomla makes it the easiest to create social networks. Social networks can be a powerful asset for many sites, and with Joomla, you can have one up and running extremely quickly and easily.

  • Easy to install.
  • Ideal for those who fall between tech-pros and tech-newbies.
  • Strong content management capabilities.
  • Automatically creates responsive sites.
  • Thousands of features and designs.
  • Extensive plugin (‘extensions’) library.
  • Strong well maintained support communities and forums

The Conclusion?

When it comes to a pure website application, Joomla comes out tops – the code is stronger, there are more features, and it is growing and expanding as a platform on an almost constant basis, which makes it easier to adapt to the ever-changing requirements of large-scale websites.

However, if you are looking for a basic website or blog that looks like a website, and you want something quick, easy, and simple, WordPress is more than up to the job.

More often than not, creating and launching a website with Drupal requires IT professionals as this program lacks editor tools such as WYSIWYG and uses code instead. With its foundation in code, Drupal is difficult to use for those without technological backgrounds or knowledge and the learning curve is so steep it may as well be vertical

Of the three, you will need more technical skills to manage and maintain a Joomla or Drupal site, so if you are worried about your skill, it might be better to opt for the simpler WordPress option.

In all, both of these CMS packages are great, easy to use, adaptable, and low cost. Decide whether you need a monstrous, mega site, or a simpler site that showcases your business in the best light, and then work from there. Joomla is up to managing just about anything, including thousand-page mega sites, while WordPress will give you a clean, stylish and simple business site without breaking a sweat.

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