Every once in a while, you have to stop to smell the roses – and that’s just what we’re doing in the first of a series of our SEO success stories.

On a typical day, The Search Guru staff dedicates their time to “more” and “better.” How can we get more traffic to our clients’ sites? How can we get even more laser targeted traffic to them? How can we further boost conversions? sales? return on investment?

We’ve decided to take a short breather from that to share and celebrate some of our most exciting SEO success stories. Here’s the first of many:

Business case study: through organic search engine optimization and in-house SEO training, this client’s online visibility skyrocketed by 6,191%!

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Ready to start a pay per click campaign? Check out these helpful definitions before creating your pay per click management strategy.

Share of Voice (Impression Share): share of voice is a metric that represents the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions.

PPC Match Types: matching options that determine which Google searches can trigger your ads to appear. The four kinds of PPC match types are broad, phrase, exact and negative.

PPC Ad Rank: determines the position of your ad on the search engine results pages. PPC ad rank can be calculated by multiplying the keyword max bid and keyword quality score.

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Strengthen your site – and make it easier for the search engine spiders to index your pages – by boosting the power of your internal linking.

The term “internal linking” might be new to you. If so, here is some helpful info:

• Link: A link – or a hyperlink – is text that, if clicked upon, electronically takes you from one location on the Web to another location.
• Inbound link: An inbound link is hyperlinked text that starts on a web site other than your own and points to a spot on your web site.
• Internal link: An internal link is hyperlinked text that links from one location on your web site to another location, also on your web site.

The focus of this blog post is on creating internal linking that is effective and strengthens your site. (Here is information about inbound link building techniques, plus an e-book review that focuses on effective inbound link building strategies.)

You might be wondering why creating hyperlinks —and optimizing them with keyphrases – is so important for the success of your web site.

Creating hyperlinks that provide clear direction are important for three reasons:

• These hyperlinks help human site visitors navigate the site and find what they need, whether it’s information or a product or a service.
• When you provide logical site navigation cues with clear internal linking, this makes it easier for site visitors to explore your site for a longer amount of time; as you educate them with your helpful material, it increases the likelihood that they’ll begin to browse your products and services – and potentially end up buying them.
• Optimized hyperlinks offer thematic cues for the search engine spiders. Once the spiders understand the theme of a page, they can index the URL – and then return it in response to a relevant query. In other words, if a URL is not indexed by the search engine spiders, it cannot appear in the search engine results pages.

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Could your site be mistaken by Google as a “junk” or spam site? Make sure your website displays these signs of quality to maximize exposure and boost your website ranking.

Tip #1 to improve ranking of a website: Adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that oversees the standards for the internet and internet coding. Having code that meets W3C standards is considered to be a “sign of quality.” It is thought that having signs of quality on a website can help with rankings in the search engines. Therefore having fewer W3C validation errors means that your site could gain a higher Google website ranking.

To help meet W3C standards, follow best practices, such as formatting your site with CSS rather than HTML tables, avoiding using deprecated (outdated) code, and so forth.

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