This morning I saw a television ad for a stop smoking drug which used a testimonial.  In the commercial, they had both a verbal and textual statement of a customer’s “typical” results.  What they said was “in studies, 44% of customers were quit smoking between weeks 9-12.”

To me, this suggests they focused in on the portion of their test results which showed the best performance (9-12 weeks) and reported on that number.

I would pose the following questions:

1. Is it really typical results if you only focus on the best portion of the data.  For example, if the studies lasted for six months (24 weeks) and the typical results from weeks 13-24 were that 90% of customers started smoking again, wouldn’t their reported typical results be misleading?  Or do they simply craft some of  their studies to end at a particular point in time (e.g. 12 weeks) when they know they will be able to show very positive data?

2. Shouldn’t they have to disclose the full length of the study?

3. Does 44% constitute “typical”?  Do you not need a majority (great than 50%) to claim “typical”?

Search engine optimization includes things such as the proper development and use of keywords, header tags, header text, link text, keyword density, putting JavaScript and CSS style code into external files (as much as possible), minimizing the use of flash, creating the proper inbound/outbound link structure, creating a resources page, a site map page, doing competitor analysis and creating an optimized page for each keyword/keyword phrase.

A simple SEO example: You can boost your rankings by moving the web page content containing your important keywords as close to the beginning of your HTML code as possible. Unfortunately, many web pages are hurt by using layout templates that downgrade the prominence of the pages’ primary content. Elaborate HTML tables which push the page’s content section (and it’s keywords) far down in the file diminish keyword prominence and hurt your search engine ranking.

Search Engine Listings
Helping people find your business on the web takes time, patience and persistence, but it can definitely pay off. Getting listed on major search engines can give your web site a significant traffic boost, which in turn can be an important factor in your company’s sales.

There are free and paid options for getting listed and what you choose will depend on your budget, timeline and overall web site marketing strategy.

There are some distinct advantages to paid indexing and advertising. Free indexing can take several months for your site to be listed, whereas paid indexing and advertising usually only takes a few business days. In addition, if your site contains frames and/or the site content is not optimized for search engines and you’re not building link popularity, then you should purchase search engine indexing and/or advertising.

Search Engine Optimization Maintenance

Every 3 to 6 months, update your web site to comply with the latest SEO rules. This should also be done on an “as need” basis for situations such as when Google makes a major change to their algorithm.

Building backlinks to your web site is part of off-page seo and has become one of the most important aspects of search engine ranking.  The number of links pointing to your site, the anchor text on those links and the page rank/authority of the site sending you the link are all critical.

Aside from Google, the most important sites to get listed in are: The Yahoo Directory (not free,) Dmoz.org (free, but takes a long time) and Business.com. Google considers these sites very, very important and they have excellent ranking, which means your Google ranking will increase by association.

Top search engine ranking is great, but you should realize that an effective back-linking profile can provide your site with more traffic than you would get from top spots in the search engines. A good backlink profile has many advantages and is one of the most important strategies to focus on during your web marketing efforts. Getting links from sites with related content will boost your search engine rankings, give you consistently more traffic and eventually (with an effective ongoing link building campaign), release you from the problems associated with search engine algorithm changes).

There are two kinds of incoming links.  Reciprocal (link exchange, where you must link back to the other site from your web site) and One-Way.

Reciprocal links are generally free, but they don’t carry as much clout in Google’s eys and obtaining them effectively will take time and dedication as it’s quite a process. Not to mention that several outgoing links on your site will bleed your own Google pagerank. For these reasons, it’s recommended you focus your backlink building efforts on one-way links.

One-way links are given a higher weighted value in Google’s ranking algorithm.

Backlink “relevancy” is based on the content of the inbound link pointing to you. Basically, you want web sites with subject matter relevant to yours, to link to your web site. The Google pagerank of the web page linking to your site is also very important. It’s better to have five quality inbound links from authority (higher ranked sites) than a hundred lower-quality inbound links.

Building backlinks to your site is one of the most cost-effective advertising methods. You’ll get targeted traffic from people directly clicking on the links as well as free traffic from the search engines due to your increased pagerank and position in the search results.

Backlink Maintenance

• Always continue to build up your site’s backlink profile

• If you do decide to do some reciprocal linking (especially good if the sites you get links from have a higher pagerank than your site), then monthly you should re-affirm those incoming links. Validate the existence of your reciprocal links and follow-up with their webmasters if your link has been removed from their site. Also verify their page with your link is not:

• • Being blocked from spiders with their robot.txt file

  • Buried or orphaned

  • Using the nofollow tag to block search engines from following the link