According to a content writer, SEO is considered as a Website marketing method used by several, often valid, marketing agencies. The purpose of SEO is to enhance the quality and increase the volume of visitor traffic. It’s all about ranking.

Search Engine Optimizers can wear many different hats. SEO philosophy and the methods determines the color of the hats that is used to optimize websites. We usually speak of black hat, White hat and gray hat SEO.

If you want to get the most out of SEO, stick with white hat SEO. White Hat SEO may use technology and automation to build their websites too, but they use it to accomplish different goals. This type of SEO follows the rules. They write content for people, not for search engines. The use of black hat SEO often involves tactics that are illegal.

Some of the black hat SEO methods are keyword stuffing, hidden or invisible links, hidden text, Meta tag stuffing, link spamming and cloaking etc. Black Hat SEO is all about getting fast and results. The method they use to optimize their websites will often get the website to the top of the search engines instantly, but when the search engines catch-on; the website will very often crash or get banned. White Hat SEO is able to get more inbound links from other websites, because their content is considered valuable. They go by the philosophy “CONTENT IS KING”.

Never recommend anyone to use any black hat SEO strategies because this will almost get you banned in the search engines. It is important that you never take too big a risk with your most valuable websites, and here it is much more valuable, that you make a more safe and long term SEO strategy for these websites.

If you are adopting Gray Hat SEO procedure it is very important, that you measure the risk and reward of each strategy, and determine for yourself, if some of these Gray Hat SEO strategies makes sense for your websites. Everybody should strive to be a white hat SEO and focus on writing quality content. However it may make sense for you in some instance to use Gray Hat SEO tactics to gain a competitive advantage.

Praveenkodur.com is an Online Marketing, Analytics, Product Marketing Blog. http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog

The idea of this blog posts and future blog posts is to identify problems in web based business and how analytics can help solve it?

Blogging and Blogs

You have a small blog and spend considerable amount of time updating it, also have spent some money in creating and putting it up live. Measuring the success of a blog is not just pageviews, subscribers and unique visitors count.

ROI of a popular blog can be huge, if you have rich content and have active RSS subscribers. You don’t need a resume. Every popular blogger gets job offers regularly flowing into his email. Above this you have created a brand for yourself. This is a huge economical benefit considering the money and time you spend on make your blog active. If you have a great blog then you have separate brand and identity for yourself.

Small Scale Business Online

Concentrating on search engine marketing, seo, affiliate marketing to generate profitable visitors to site is fruitful. This is the cheapest form of advertising online. You have control over spends and will be able to monitor your ROI. Set up Google Analytics or any other analytics tool which will help you look at the visitor information.

Conversion University from google is very helpful in optimizing the website for higher conversions and sales (http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77123)

Small scale business must focus their marketing efforts cleverly around geo-locations to get maximum return from marketing & advertising. The site must clearly offer maximum benefit & response to their end users as promised in their USP. Most sites initially work on small set of customer base and keep them satisfied at all circumstances.

These companies are ecommerce sites, shopping sites, travel agent sites that are looking to sell products to their websites’ visitors. They should target at long term steady and consistent growth not looking to achieve instant traffic hoping to dramatically increase page-views and visitor count hoping make revenue quickly and grow faster.

Large Businesses Online

There are various large online website who advertise heavily online & offline for the purpose of promotion. The spend a big amount of money with an objective to increase visitors, page views hoping to increase brand value. It is unwise to spend money on marketing, advertising without looking at the actual value it adds to their users (customers).

Increase in page views and visitors may not proportionally be related to increase in revenue and profit. There are definitely smarter ways to reduce cost of marketing & advertising without impacting the bottomline.

I read about many large advertisers in US & worldwide who have decreased spends on search marketing as it has become unprofitable after a certain limit. They have found search engine optimization, social media marketing ways more effective to gain relevant traffic to their websites for increasing their sales.

Measuring ROI through every channel and making them profitable is very essential and must be the key factor

EXAMPLE:

The traffic to my blog has constant traffic from social media sites like stumbleupon and other social network sites. Few days it has huge spikes of about 2000 hits in a day from stumbleupon alone, totally free traffic.

Blog attracts about 16% of overall traffic from social media sites of which 48% contribution is from Stumbleupon alone.

The cost of promotion on stumbleupon is consuming few hours of time in writing rich useful content and building a network of bloggers, friends & general users. Comparing this with search marketing campaigns, same amount of traffic might have costed me few thousand dollars.

Never be afraid to use new format of media, content for promotions such as Videos, Apps, Images, podcast, audio files, flash files etc. It is just a new form of content by the underlining principle of promotion remains the same.

Reading:

Measuring ROI from SEO : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625973

Measuring ROI from Social Media Marketing: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/measuring-the-roi-from-social-media-marketing.html
This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/