few numbers for your consideration: 80% of visitors to a website begin by typing keywords in the query box of a search engine. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a website by remaining high on the list of results returned by a search engine. SEO IS ABOUT  META TAGS , META DATA  AND WRITING CODE: Once upon a time, the meta tag, an HTML tag that provides keyword information about a web page, was an important part of the SEO process. You should estimate 4 to 6 month for results behind keywords that matter for your business. MORE >>

Once a site has been optimized it can take many months of link building , content marketing, and social media activity to begin to see some improvement. Increase in non-branded keywords generating traffic. If you haven’t done any SEO in the past it’s likely that the majority of the keywords that are bringing traffic to your site are branded keywords, meaning that the name of the brand or company is included. For example, Company X , Company X website , and Company X hours are all branded keywords. Photo credit: Search Engine People Blog. MORE >>

Here are some best practices to optimize your results from SEM campaigns: 1. Determine your budget: while there is no hard-and-fast rule for this, there are a number of factors that will affect the size of the budget required to optimize your return from search marketing: Number of keywords—more keywords means a higher budget. Divide your keywords / phrases into logical groups: keep the number of groups manageable, but ideally you’ll end up with 30 or fewer keyword search terms per group—60 terms as an absolute maximum. Optimize your keyword bids. MORE >>

Will Google+ be a “Facebook killer” or just Google’s next failed social network? Then again, the average Facebook user spends nearly seven hours per month on the site—compared to just three minutes for the average Google+user. Many of this year’s best posts about Google’s newest social platform were written early in the year. “Ghost town” or not, many experts agree that Google+ is here to stay, and it’s valuable for b2b marketing, SEO , personal branding, and reputation management. So what makes Google+ special? MORE >>

Many of the same principles apply to optimizing a blog for search as for optimizing a business website : use keywords in the body copy, post titles, subheadings, permalink URL, image alt tags and meta tags. But a blog also presents additional opportunities for search optimization beyond those that apply to standard websites (which is why Google loves blogs ). But with a blog, you can create any (reasonable) number of top-level categories, and give these keyword-rich labels. Furthermore, some of these are virtually worthless for search (e.g.  Clean code. MORE >>