What is success in SEO?

Kind of a loaded question to ask "what is SEO success" don't you think? I think it's subjective, so you'd have to ask yourself, what are the goals important to you?

In your case, you can say that you've gotten Phase 1 of your SEO goals accomplished - by pushing up SERP positions, indexed pages, etc.

Now you can focus on Phase 2 which is to increase traffic. That can be done in several ways, of which I will name 2: 1- you increase to Page 1 SERP rankings for your keywords and/or 2 - you increase Page 1 SERP rankings for several "longtail" keywords.

By doing it this way, you are thinking like a marketer (business person) where there are certain short-term and long-term goals you want to hit.

But there are some tough questions you have to ask yourself. Are your keywords that you are targeting good at all? Has your market moved or changed the way it searches? Do you need to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate your original SEO plan?

Those are tough questions to answer and tougher still if it means you need to redo everything. But do it - so that you don't continue to struggle with your SEO in the wrong direction.

refer from (forums.searchenginewatch.com)

PayPal Offers a Credit Card Reader for Brick and Mortar Businesses

The first big move, in my opinion, that PayPal made was when they made it possible for non-PayPal members to use a PayPal merchant account on sites.

When I visit new businesses thinking about adding a merchant account and selling online I usually tell them that if they are not selling $2000 a month then it would be best to go with a third party merchant account instead of a merchant account of their own. One, because of the cost savings, and two I would recommend it for businesses just starting out.

Now PayPal is offering credit card readers that posts automatically to your PayPal Virtual Terminal order form. Since this card reader can be plugged into a USB port of a computer it would be handy when you travel to meet customers.You can read more about this credit card reader here.

(refer from rocksolidseo.com)

Benefits of SEO

Search Engine Marketing helps site owners meet their various online marketing objectives such as generating leads, sales or simply building awareness.There is more to search engine optimisation than just marketing, as companies can derive many business benefits from using SEO. Let’s take a look at a few...

Fixed Costs

The cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time after initial optimisation costs and lower ongoing optimisation costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.

Visibility
Think about that search on ‘car insurance’. The big insurance companies are all desperate to make it onto the first page of Google. The ones that didn’t make it either need to buy PPC ads to be seen, which is expensive for such a competitive search query.
Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
There is no payment to the search engines for being indexed. This is important for high volume, low intent phrases which can be expensive in paid-search (eg ‘car insurance’).

Focus on Web Standards / AccessibilityDesigning
a website for search is an exercise in designing a best practice website. Search engine crawlers notice errors in your code, so valid code is a must for SEO. And that makes for a healthier, more accessible website. Accessible for Google’s crawlers, and for people.

Business
Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!

Credibility / Brand Perception
“Why aren’t you in Google for ‘car insurance’”? Consumers expect big brand businesses to be prominently placed in Google, so what is the effect if you aren’t on the first page or two?

Findability
Search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A song lyric, a company name, a product review, a person…

Customer Acquisition - Targeted Prospects
Search is demand-driven, so anybody referred from a search engine is hoping that your web page matches their search query. If it does, and you show them all the information they need to see, they may well become your next customer.

Repeat Business
Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!

Focus on Unique Content
We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorise and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this. Remember that quality content attracts quality links. And that links are still very important for SEO. So if you invest in unique content you are building a valuable intellectual property asset that will benefit other areas of the business as well as improve your search rankings.

On Page optimization Factors

The most important On Page optimization techniques include content optimization, the title-tag, several META-Tags, headlines & text decoration, alt- and title-attributes and continuous actualization.

• Keyword in URL: The process of identification and giving preference goes in First word is best, second is second best, etc.
• Keyword in Domain Name: This is similar to the name of pages that have hyphens, for example: “automobile-truck-one”.
• Keyword in Title Tag: Make sure you put your Keyword in Title tag that is close to beginning. This title tag should be between 10 - 60 characters with no special characters.
• Keyword in Description Meta Tag: This shows the theme of your site and should be less than 200 characters. Though Google no longer “relies” upon this tag, it may sometimes use it.
• Keyword in Keyword Meta Tag: This should be less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered spam. Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but others do.
• Keyword density in Body text: The keywords shouldn’t be stuffed into body text. The amount of keywords in the body text should be about 5 - 20% for all types of keywords (total) and 1-6% for one keyword. Too much stuffing would penalize your site under spamming.
• Keywords in H1,H2 & H3: Many people ignore this particular aspect. Make sure Hx font is effectively used.
• Keyword Font Size: Italics is same as emphasis while strong is same as bold.
• Keyword proximity (for 2+ keywords): Placing them directly adjacent to each other is the best.
• Keyword prominence: This can be important if its on the top (at the most) and in big fonts.
• Domain Name Extension/ Top Level Domain - TL: .gov sites seem to be the highest status, .edu sites seem to be given a high status, .org sites seem to be given a high status, .com sites excel in encompassing all the spam/ crud sites, resulting in the need for the highest scrutiny/ action by Google.
• Fresh Pages: search engines love fresh content, fresh pages.
• Content: Make sure you put unique and fresh content since search engines feed on it. They simply love it.
• Updates periodicity: Search engine give high status to sites that update regularly.
• Site Size: Search engines, particularly Google, loves big sites. But it should be unique and fresh site. Any duplicated pages would be discarded by Google.
• Domain age: Old is gold, this is the mantra of Google and other search engines.