Online press releases are the driving force behind big traffic surges and multiple search results for small businesses on the web. Press releases are subscribed to by thousands of news organizations and professional bloggers looking for fast-breaking and relevant topics in their industry.

Press releases give an important glimpse into the inside workings of hundreds of different industries, sharing news nearly instantly of promotions, new product launches, recently published books, changes in policies and more. The press release gives organizations a chance to help spread important information to their readers and gives you, the owner of the release, exposure to a vast network of publicity.

Online press releases have to be written with the Internet and search engines in mind. In that regard, keywords and search friendly text has to be implemented. An online press release is different than a traditional print release in that they can have clickable links to website resources, videos and images. All these elements have to be optimized for search engines if the press release has any chance of being found.

Someone with the knowledge of SEO, keywords, hyperlinks, image optimization and online video is needed for the successful press release. Here at IMTC, we know what it takes to have the best chance at online success. Our courses cover every aspect of online training with a special knowledge of how search engines find web pages, sites and especially press releases. A company that's serious about their online marketing will look for those people who can do the best job and reward them for it.

It isn't a job for just anyone, but maybe it's the career for you…

Many people don't realize just how important link building is for good website search positioning. Google pays close attention to how many websites are linking to yours and what quality those links are (whether the sites are legit, whether they have been banned and how popular the site is).

Getting quality sites to link to you takes some work. Some great ways to get a ‘backlink' (a site linking to yours) is to write guest blog posts, being included in a ‘reference or resources' section or being part of an online  directory, just to name a few. This takes contacting websites and writing content that a website would like to include as their own, complete with a link to yours.

How a site links to yours, whether they use ‘anchor text' (keywords in a clickable link) and their reputation as a quality site all need to be investigated to get the kinds of backlinks that will make you shine in Google's eyes. If one or more of these are done incorrectly, you could actually get in trouble with Google and be penalized.

That's why it's so important to have the proper knowledge. Businesses are looking for the best people for the job – people that know how to do it right. People like you, armed with the technical knowledge from IMTC, are in high demand. They can't leave the task to just anyone, their reputation relies on it. This is a high paying career in SEO that few know how to do right, and demands a big paycheck.

Just like any other business, ads play a huge role in Internet businesses as well.

While most believe that search engines bring in all of the customers to web-based businesses, the amount of competition to get on the first page of a search result leaves ads as an important alternative to attracting traffic. The most popular ads are called pay-per-click and they appear on the top, and often on the right-hand side bar of a search result. PPC ads give a business an opportunity to ‘bid their way' to the top of a search result page in just a few hours.

There are also Facebook ads, banner ads and free classified ads such as backpage.com and Craigslist. Each ad is constructed differently depending on how its used. For a pay-per-click ad, the business owner doesn't have to pay until a searcher ‘clicks' on the ad. That being said, the ad needs to be written very carefully so people who would not be interested in the product don't click on it. This is called ‘qualifying' the ad for a specific target customer, making sure that only the most qualified prospect clicks on it.

Free ads need to be written so the most critical information is presented in the least amount of words. People scour free ads by the thousands and it needs to stand out from the others or it will get lost or be ineffective. Whether ads are paid or free, they need to be conversion-friendly: written enticingly and leading to a landing page that makes money. If this is all done incorrectly, there will be a lot of wasted time and money.

That's where businesses need well trained writers and ad managers for their websites. You just can't have anyone pop an ad on the Internet. There's many variables that take place for an ad to work. Millions of dollars are spent every year on ads that stink. Most businesses are looking for someone with the specialized knowledge that you'll get at IMTC. We teach only the proven and specialized techniques that make money on the web. Get your free career brochure and see what you're missing out on.

According to SearchEngine news and Planet Ocean, two of the most respected SEO research firms, the “title bar” area is one of the most important SEO friendly parts of your website. It's where the search engines look first for the respective keywords about your site and carries the most weight of any other area of text for keyword relevance. Are you using these ‘title' area to your advantage?

For most of the website that I look at, the answer is no. Most are still labeled “Home”, “About Us” and “Contact”, etc…  In WordPress, the default title is the name of the page itself: /about-susan-jones and other such labels. However, there is a plug-in that can change the title area to whatever you want it to be – and keyword rich titles are the ticket to SEO success.

The All-in-One SEO Pack plug-in is free and easy to use. It installs in seconds and is a powerful tool for exploiting the proper keywords on your website. After installation, the form will appear at the far bottom of every page and post in edit mode. Here is an example of the SEO Pack below:

Using the proper keywords, you can easily attract the search engines so they can match up your website content with those who are searching the web for information. Learn more about proper SEO of a website.

Google loves websites that look like an authority on a certain subject. Search engines strive to give their customers (the searcher) an exact match of the best and most relevant information. If a website has too many keywords that are unrelated, Google won't put that website anywhere near the top of the results.

What most website owners fail to understand is that the more narrow and selective the keywords are in a specific niche, the better. Often, website owners try and stuff as many various keyword phrases in their site as possible thinking that more is better – that they will attract a larger number of results and hits. But the opposite is really what happens.

Too many keywords that are unrelated to each other makes you look like a ‘jack-of-all-trades' to a search engine. They know that the site may not be an authority on anything at all, and may be just a bunch of half-hearted information on smaller topics. That's not the kind of website that Google wants to deliver to their customer. And they'll avoid a website like that every time.

If you are an expert on various, unrelated topics, you may consider having two or more websites that focus on specific keyword phrases and not try and cram all the topics onto one site. As obvious as this sounds, this is one of the most common problems keeping a website from coming up high in search results. Look at some websites next time you're surfing around and see if you can notice multiple topics. It could be a hard assignment because they rarely come up for anyone to find.

How can you make a website for yourself that Google loves?

Sharing and Repurposing

You can get a ton of traffic to your websites by publishing articles that the search engines can find on distribution sites, your own website or ones that are published on other big websites. But you don't have to stop there. Here are some tips on how to share your articles with other resources that you use everyday:

– From your EzineArticles account, go to “Author Bio.” From there you can enter in your login info for Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and your WordPress blog. Now, every time you publish an article, all these sites will tell all your friends about it.

– Send tweets from your Twitter account to your followers as much as possible. Twitter followers respond best when you act as a resource for information rather than just someone who tweets out worthless links. Your articles will be the great information that your followers are looking for.

– Link to important articles from Facebook groups and pages.  Find groups where your target market is gathering on Facebook and leave comments on the wall to articles that they would find valuable.

– Use sharing widgets and plug-ins such as “Share This” or “Add This” to the bottom of your website article pages so others that are reading your articles can use the widgets to share your work with their friends and followers. The widgets even make it easy for a reader to email the article to their friends.

– High content sites.  A couple of popular high content sites are:

http://www.HubPages.com

https://www.Ehow.com

They are user friendly and give you the opportunity to fill the pages with good content articles. The keywords you use to title the modules, articles and images can be found easily by search engines.

Ethically Spying on Your Competition’s Keywords

Here’s a great idea. Why not let your competition do lots of work for you and you reap the benefits?

You can find out what keywords your competitors are using by opening their websites in Internet Explorer browser. After the site you are spying on is open click on “view” then click “source”.

In Firefox click “ctl” then click “U”.

A window will open and it will show you all the behind-the-scenes HTML coding of the site. This most likely will include the keywords that site is using to try to grab traffic. (not all sites will display this and some won’t have META keywords because they aren’t as important as they used to be, but as of June 2010 the description META tag is making a comeback.)

Some very sophisticated webmasters can hide this information from you or even feed you false information, but that is very rare. For the most part you will see what words they are using.

Just because you find these words don’t assume the webmaster for the site you are looking at knew what he/she was doing with them.

Your job is to look for words that you may have overlooked and take them to the Majestic http://Majestic.com to see the popularity of the keywords you find.

Keyword Prominence

Your keyword prominence is simply the placement of your keywords in your content. In SEO, it is not only important to use certain keywords in your content but ensuring you have proper keyword prominence.

Typical SEO practices will get you to include your keywords as often as you can without making your content difficult and un-natural to the reader. Solid SEO practices should also include the proper placement of those keywords in your sentences and paragraphs.

Where a certain keyword is placed on your page, paragraph and sentence, a percentage can be calculated that will determine how effective the keyword will be to the search engines.

Imagine your webpage or paragraph as a big piece of paper. The farther to the beginning of the upper-left hand corner of the paper a keyword is placed, the more prominent it will be to the search engines.

Keyword prominence is placing your keywords close to the beginning of sentences and paragraphs. Simply placing your keywords at the very beginning of your content will not work. Your keyword prominence must fit in your content making sense to the reader and easily flow with the rest of the content.

You can also try the use of bulleted lists containing your keywords to further increase your keyword prominence. Of course, the list needs to fit with the rest of your content otherwise your SEO efforts will be in vain.

Using the heading tags ( H1, H2, H3, etc.), anchor text, and bolding font near the beginning of sentences or paragraphs and make the keywords stand out perfectly clear to a search engine spider.

A keyword prominence analyzer:  http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

Using Graphics for Keywords

Instead of making the file name of a photo “joe.gif” you could name it “presentation-skills.gif” Anything you can do to boost yourself without spamming is a good idea.

 The basics of good SEO is only a click away…

Reputation Management

It is now a common practice that when potential clients or consumers are think of making a commitment or purchase, they will Google your name or the name of your business. If you have created your Internet marketing strategies correctly, you will have thousands of positive search entries that people could spend months reading.

This is more important than ever because of the speed and ease of use of the Internet. One disgruntled client or one devious competitor can cost you enormous amounts of business. The one or two folks out of thousands of satisfied customers that may have had a bad experience, be jealous or just plain don't like you and have put up a website that simply states that you stink.

Every business has detractors. The bigger you get, the more you will have. It comes with success. You can't have a website removed from the search engines, but there are ways to knock that site down off the first or second page of results where it is not so prominent. These are strategies that you can do yourself and you'll find that reputation management will be an ongoing part of your Internet business. This consists of positive information about your brand that you can control.

The first thing you want to do is set up monitoring. You want to know immediately if possible what is being said about you or your business on the web. Google Alerts is a great place to start.

http://www.google.com/alerts

Set up alerts for your name, your company name, your website, your blog, your partner’s names, etc. . . . Basically anything that would be a logical attacking point for customers, former customers, employees and former employees.