Yet the agency model was built during a time when there were only a handful of channels in which they could push one way messages en masse. Does that model still work in a time when nearly a quarter of online US adults now create content online? Many more questions begin to arise as we open Pandora’s Box: Can one agency do it all? Are holding companies the answer? Can digital agencies compete with them and lead brands? Do marketers rely on agencies like they used to? Should marketers consolidate their agencies or de-centralize to dozens of agency partners? Are technology providers and crowd sourcing legitimate threats? Where is this all going?

To conduct this research we’re speaking with some of the most influential agencies, marketers, and service providers. However, what better way to get a feel for the pulse of the industry than to crowd source it? So we’re reaching out to get your take on the space. Please give us your thoughts in the comments section on the question: What is the future of agencies?

We’re looking forward to your input (and please try to keep it to one or two paragraphs)! Since this research is a collaborative report across roles, this post is also cross-posted on the Marketing Leadership, Customer Experience and Customer Intelligence team blogs.

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Internet Marketing ideas that can help get traffic you need:

1. Create the best content you can with the best products/services you can offer. Content is your best advertisement – if visitors like your content, then they will go back and spread the word to others.

2. Viral marketing is very important – and easy to tap on the Web. But give your users the tools. Some even go as far as giving incentives to those who recommend the site to their friends. If only 10 people go to your site, but these 10 people invite 10 more – that’s additional traffic that you get for FREE!

3. Rank well in the search engines (organic search results, not the pay per click). SEs can be a big source of traffic. The key is to create the best content in your niche. If you have good content, other websites will gladly link to you and offer your site as a resource to their audience. Check the on-page factors and be sure to get linked from authority sites in your topic area.

4. Send out press releases. There are free press release submission places on the Web. Press releases allow you to (a) attract media attention; (b) get more back links to your website without sending each website an email request; and (c) get more visibility especially if your press release gets in Google News or Yahoo News.

india-directory.org – indiacitypages.com – Real Estate Times – Jobs Point – http://www.prleap.com/ – http://i-newswire.com/ – http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/ – http://www.pressbox.co.uk/ – http://www.pr.com/ – http://www.prfree.com/ – http://www.clickpress.com/ – http://www.theopenpress.com/ – http://www.przoom.com/ – http://www.prweb.com – http://www.newswiretoday.com/ – http://www.free-press-release.com/

5. Write articles and submit them to websites accepting author submissions. You get exposure for your business; establishes you as an authority in your field, and allows you to get backlinks for your website. If 50 websites publish your article and it contains a link back to your website, then you easily get 50 links from a single article. The more links you have, the greater your chances for increasing your search engine rankings.

6. Post a link to your site for free where it is allowed (always read the Terms of Use). Examples are:

2letservice.com’s Free Property Ads
Craigslist http://www.craigslist.com
Google Base http://base.google.com
Yahoo Classifieds http://classifieds.yahoo.com/
US Free Ads http://www.usfreeads.com/

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Targeting the wrong keywords is the common mistakes that most people do, even the experienced experts make it. For example, you may optimize your website for the keywords which you think may be best and more relevant and rank number one for those keywords but still may not gain new traffic. The reason is that you are not targeting the right keyword. Reasons that you may choose a wrong Keyword:

1. Selecting keywords that are very popular. If the keyword is too popular, you have to put up lot of work to bring rankings. For example choosing keywords like car, bike etc.

2. Choosing a keyword phrase that is too broad. If you are choosing a keyword that is too broad then you might not get the appropriate traffic as a highly targeted keyword phrase.

Choosing the right keyword may make or break your SEO. So make correct decisions while choosing keywords for your website.

JavaScript Menus

For Search engine friendly website, plain text menus are always recommended rather than JavaScript menus. But still using dynamic JavaScript menus are necessary for some websites. Using JavaScript is not bad until you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your website accordingly. If you are using JavaScript in you website then be sure that you create a sitemap or No Script tag for making your links crawlable.

Graphic Header

Many websites are designed with graphic header. We can see websites having company logo occupying the full width of the page. This mistake has to be avoided. The upper part of the page is very important place where you can insert your targeted keywords. When search engines see a graphic image, the prime position is totally wasted there since search engines do not make use of images. And another mistake is that header contains text information in image form to make it attractive. But again text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and will not contribute toward page rank.

The best way to present a logo is to use a hybrid approach – keep the logo at the top of each page and size it that it does not occupy the whole width. Use the rest of the width for the text header.

Pure Flash Website

Search engines do not understand flash and if a website is designed with pure flash then they will see the entire website as a single page. And you may not get the opportunity to optimize different pages for targeted keywords. If you are having a pure flash website, then do follow the below strategies,

1. Rebuild your website by breaking up the flash file and moving the major sections to its own HTML page. Flash elements can then be included as needed on each separate page.
2. If you can’t do the first point then you can get smart by using separate URLS by implementing SWF address.
3. Give more focus on Off page optimization. Concentrate more on the keywords targeted.
4. Creating a HTML alternative is another best option for Flash SEO. It is not only helpful for Search engines but also for disable visitors for the website.

Importance of URLs

A good URL helps you to rank better in search engines. Dynamic URLs are commonly used in E-commerce sites but the disadvantage is that an URL with keyword can rank better than dynamic URLs with special characters and session ids. Major search engines provide more weightage to page with static and URLS containing keywords. If you are having a website with dynamic URLs then you can use Mod-Rewrite Rule to handle conversion still keeping the dynamic URL.

SEO Trends is a SEO Company offering affordable SEO Services including Multilingual SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Optimization, PPC Management Services. Our SEO process comprises of innovative solutions, path-breaking strategies and tried-and-tested techniques for search engine optimization, search engine positioning, search engine ranking, search engine optimisation. Also provide value added services like Site Tracking, ROI Measurement, Visitor Profiling, e-mail marketing, PPC, directory advice, viral, PR, link building, copywriting, ezine, newsletters, seo friendly hosting and more..

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Not satisfied? See Google’s point of view on this subject. Talking at an exclusively hypothetical level, if your site is already well ranked, with relevant and daily refreshed content, and if you make a new, well optimized and properly keyworded page, well and properly linked to it, then, MAYBE, you could access directly in the top ten results sooner than later. Towards this, if you need professional and expert help for long-term reputation building, hire us. Yes, SEO is no rocket science, but our consultants need to spend time on your business site and if you put more sugar, you can expect more sweetness in results. If you want to do-it-yourself, refer below:

Some tips for the DIY search engine optimizers or SEO guys.
1. Keyword analysis of the industry segment that will be targeted.
2. Meta Tags (title, descriptions, keywords, re-visit after)
These are a few things to keep in mind in the meta tags. There are 2 ways to target this.
A) Either focus on the high ranking keywords
B) Focus on the most similar keywords.
3. Internal Link structure: So that you do not donate your PR and at the same time ensuring that you link with similar PR sites or higher. (Linking to lesser PR sites would require more number of links as compare to linking to high ranking PR sites, it’s like benchmarking in business)
4. Alt Tags for images and links: Focus should be on putting your keyword or phrase in these ALT tags for relevancy.
5. Keyword Weight/Density/Prominence: By having a good number of keywords being repeated in the content is advisable.
6. Title Tags: Ensuring that your keyword/phrase is mentioned in the title tag.
7. Robots.txt: To ensure that the right pages get indexed
8. Natural link building: Linking your sites to similar sites so that the relevancy of your site is increased. This involves even linking to your competitors sites as well.
9. Submissions: Submitting your site to the SE’s and Open Directories viz. DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, etc.
10. A well designed sitemap to help crawlers.

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Last year a popular diamond retailer’s website traffic vanished overnight from Google search results, and their sales dropped 0.5 Million Dollars in just a couple of months. The site was transferred to Google’s supplemental index – some prefer to call it Google Hell. It is the worst fear of many that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. It means most users will never see the site or many of it’s pages, when they search. And getting out can be difficult – because most don’t know what they did to get placed there.

It is meant to work as a holding pen for pages of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results. Such pages are scanned less frequently than those in the main index, meaning that once a page is marked for Supplement, it can languish there for many months before Google’s reappraisal.

If that makes the world’s leading Web crawler sound judgmental, consider Google’s difficult position. The search behemoth is faced with the endless task of reading and ranking billions of webpages, the equivalent of putting our Planet’s population in order from tallest to shortest every few minutes. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of pages filled only with junk text and advertising, designed solely to fool the search bots. It’s Google’s task to sort out the trash from the worthwhile, and to do it better and faster than competitors like Yahoo!, Microsoft or Ask.com.

How does Google decide what kind of pages get punished? For obvious reasons, Google keeps the details of its decision-making a secret, since it is trying to prevent sites from playing with the search engine. Unfortrunately, it also means that site owners can offend Google and not know what they’ve done until its too late.

There are few other stories. Consider MySolitaire.com, an online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site’s vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business tens of thousands dollars in sales, and he says he doesn’t know why the site’s pages got down.

But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic. “For a small site like ours, you have to stay right on the edge to compete with sites with bigger budgets,” he says. Jhalani says he removed the links that may have offended Google, but the site remained in Google’s gulag. Jhalani wrote Google asking the search engine to reappraise MySolitaire; nothing happened. Since Google ranks sites partially by the quality of sites that link to them, he painstakingly contacted every site that seemed to be of low quality and linked to MySolitaire, asking them to remove their links, sometimes even sending cease-and-desist letters. Finally the site returned to Google’s main index last June, though Jhalani has no way of knowing just what finally caused Google’s algorithm to forgive him.

Doesn’t it sound something like a Governement crackdown on surrogate advertising by cigarette and liquor companies by bringing their advertisements under the magnifying glass. Similarly, online crackdowns are essential for managing a liberal online society, but the question is who should be responsible for it. Google may feel a moral responsibility to take such actions, but I think there should be independent, democratic and international institutions, and they should take the leading role to make the web stable – both socially and economically!

Source: Forbes and Solution Point

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1. Your Keywords: Selecting your keywords, Prioritize your keywords

2. Domain name / Filename: Domain Registration, Keyword in domain name, Keyword in filename, Length of Website Address

3. Keyword Placement: Keyword in title tag, Keyword in Description Meta-tag, Keyword in Keyword Meta-tag, Keyword in Content H1, H2 and H3, Keyword Font Styles

4. Linking Strategy: Never use unethical means! 4.1 Internal Links: Keyword in links to internal site pages, Valid internal links, Efficient linking

4.2 External / Outgoing Links: Quality Links, Inspecting your Links, Title and Description, Limit number of links on a page

4.3 Incoming Links (backlinks): Quality of Referrer, Trend of link popularity, Anchor Text, Age of Link, Number of Outgoing Links on Referrer Page, Position of Link, Trusted Websites, JavaScript/Flash Links

5. On-Page Factors – Home Page: Over optimization penalty (OOP), Getting Reported, File Size, Freshness of Pages, Frequency of Updates Site Age, Dynamic Pages, Texts inside Images, Excess JavaScript, Inline Frames and Frames, Hidden links / texts, Cloaking, Duplicate content, Understandable Content

6. Off-Page Factors: Traffic Buying / Link Schemes, A minimum of one backlink, Buying Links, Server IP Address, Links from bad websites Server Reliability and Uptime

7. User Activity: Search Engine Traffic, Click through Rate (CTR), Time spent on page, Monitoring Bookmarks, Leaving the Website

8. Gathering Links, Collecting Links, Unique Content, Articles, Press Release, Forums / Guest books / Blogs, Sponsoring Directories, Link Exchange and much more.

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