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When Should You Hire A SEO Company?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:46 am  
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The services of an SEO company have been most needed in recent years. Optimizing your site for search engines to achieve higher placement in search results will definitely increase traffic into your site, increase your number of customers and eventually improve profits. While search engine optimization is a process that you can do your best to learn about, in many cases, it is most sensible to hire a reputable SEO company instead. As in many other business decisions that you need to make, resorting for outside help will require you some additional investment in terms of time and money. So, the main question to ask is: is it worth it to hire an SEO company?

There are some pros and cons involved when you do SEO yourself, there are about just as much if you get outside help through an SEO company. It is important that you thoroughly consider these factors before you go on hiring an SEO company to help you.

DIY SEO

Advantages

When you optimize your site on your own, you will save more and you will learn a lot about running a website. Aside from this, you will retain complete command and control over your site and you may feel comfortable about it.

Disadvantages

It takes much time and effort to learn about how to properly optimize a website. Not only that, SEO is an ongoing process which needs continuous maintenance and regular managing. If do not know much about SEO practices, search engine guidelines and programming knowledge but would like to increase your site ranking in no time, you might be tempted to use spamming tactics to make this happen. When you do so, you stand the risk of search engines permanently banning your site.

Hiring an SEO Company

Advantages

Hiring outside help will allow you to maintain your focus on the main function and core competency of your business. You will entrust the SEO part of your site to an SEO company made up of professionals who are armed with the right knowledge, tools and resources that you might not have. Your SEO company will become your partner and it will help you to further achieve the most out of your investment.

Disadvantages

Hiring an SEO will cost you money. You also need to spend some time in explaining your goals and participating in the entire SEO process. In addition, you have to do your research to find the best SEO company which will be able to provide you with reliable services.

Selecting an SEO Company

Once you have decided to hire an SEO company, it is time to look around for one. A reliable SEO company will have a good reputation and should have some industry presence. You can start your search by asking colleagues, visiting popular SEO forums, contacting site owners of pages you frequently visit for good recommendations.

Make a list of all the SEO firms that turn up then do your research about each of them. Cross out the ones which have used black hat or spamming techniques, the ones who do not offer all the services you may need, the companies which charge more than you can afford, those that can’t provide references, or those that don’t respond to your query within 24 hours. These are firms which either do not fit your needs, are not reliable enough or just too busy to give you quality customer service.

Consider cost to be an important factor. Choose a company that has worked on businesses similar to yours in scope and size. An SEO company, who has worked on a concept like yours, can most likely offer you quality services that will fit your budget. However, cost should not be the sole contributing factor to the decision. The reliability of the SEO company should be examined with scrutiny as well. Asking references is often an easy way to know firm’s credibility. The firm should be more than happy to provide references. The relationship you will establish with your SEO company will be a long term one so make sure you only work with one that you are comfortable dealing with on a regular basis.

The pros and cons of DIY and hiring an SEO company for your SEO needs can vary depending on your business’s capacity, budget and goals. However, as long as SEO is done well, either by you or a good SEO company, search engine optimization is by far one of the most effective ways of promoting your business and generating more sales.

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Where Did My Website Go? An Explanation To Search Engine Results

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:45 am  
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There are many reasons why your website’s position in the search engine results will vary. One day your website could be in the top 10 for a particular key phrase, and the next day you’re not on the first page. Changes to a website’s rankings are constantly occurring because changes on the Internet are constantly occurring. But, we can narrow the cause of the change down to four different sources: your website has changed, your competitor’s websites have changes, Google has made an update in the algorithm it uses to determine search results, or you or a competitor got busted using black hat SEO techniques.

Your Website Changes

In order to stay current, many website are updated on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. The small changes that are made to the page can have an effect on your page’s keyword density, and this could in turn have an effect on your rankings for any particular keyword. Minor website updates should not influence your positioning very much. But, if the changes are drastic, or your website had previously been fine tuned by a search engine optimization specialist, any sort of change will certainly affect your rankings.

Aside from on-page optimization, another factor that affects your website’s ranking is the number of other websites that link to you (backlinks). If a large and reputable website (.org, .edu, and .gov especially) add or remove a link to your website, this could have a significant effect on your ranking – especially if you don’t have very many backlinks to begin with. Another explanation for ranking changes could occur due to server downtime. If a robot tries to crawl your website and your server is down, your website will probably be temporarily dropped from the search results.

Changes to your own website should affect your search engine rankings the least of these four explanations, unless of course you unleash a search engine specialist to re-vamp your website, then you should notice a significant increase within a short period of time.

Changes in Google’s Algorithms

Yes, I am referring to Google to generalize the whole search engine market, but lets face it, not only do most website get most of their traffic from Google, but the term “Googling” has become synonymous with web search. In simpler terms, the algorithm is a mathematical points system which determines your website’s placement in the search engine results. Nobody knows exactly how Google determines search results, but us search engine optimization specialists have identified approximately 600 factors that affect rankings. A change in the algorithm will certainly affect your website’s ranking, but the change probably won’t be too drastic. Google would not make a significant change to the algorithm because it would probably knock the world out of orbit. Well, probably not, but a big change would have significant repercussions for both Internet websites and users. Therefore, Google prefers to merely fine tune this algorithm to ensure against drastic changes.

Your Competitor’s Websites Change

Depending on your industry or geographic reach, your website could be competing against several dozen to several thousand other websites – all fighting for position with certain keywords or phrases. This fact alone makes it far more likely that changes in your competitor’s websites will effect the search engine results than changes to your website alone. Every website owner out there wants to be listed on the first page or make the top 10 results for particular keywords or phrases. The problem is that there is only room for ten websites, and you may be positioning for a popular key phrase. Not all, but some of your competitors are updating their website and adding new pages on a regular basis. These additions add more competition to the search engine race and make it more difficult for you to achieve your top 10 position.

Not only are new and existing competitors making changes to their website, but they also could be pursuing link building campaigns or employing the skills of a search engine optimization specialist. By optimizing a website for certain keywords and phrases, or acquiring new backlinks to the website, a significant improvement in the website’s ranking in the search results can occur. Changes in your competitor’s websites will probably explain most of the fluctuation of your position in the search results.

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

Website owners should not have the ability to manipulate the search engines results. The fact that SEO specialists have the ability to do so violates the integrity of the search results. But, the fact of the matter is, we have rough (but not exact) ideas of how Google’s algorithm works. Most SEO specialists use techniques that are referred to as “White Hat”. These techniques are more natural, and while Google doesn’t like the search results to be manipulated, white hat techniques are not frowned upon.

There is another breed of SEO specialists who use “Black Hat” techniques – these are little tricks that at one time were considered acceptable forms of SEO, but are now frowned upon by the search engines, and by employing them, the website is very obviously trying to game the search results. Generally, SEO specialists who guarantee quick results employ black hat techniques to the detriment of your long-term positioning. These techniques can work great at first, but if you get caught your website will be significantly penalized – forever. Black Hat SEO is like breaking the law, and once you have a criminal record it affects you for the rest of your life.

Conclusion

I’ve outlined the major reasons for changes in search engine results, but sometimes the changes really can’t be explained. These changes are referred to as hiccups. After a ranking change, it’s best to sometimes just wait it out – within a week or two your website may return to its original position. So, the best thing to do when you notice a change is not to over-react. As long as your website has been professionally optimized for the proper keywords and phrases, and possesses a large and ever growing list of backlinks, you should stay on top.

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What Your S.E.O. Strategist Won’t Tell You

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:45 am  
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Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you’re a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product or service. If that describes you, here’s eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but were afraid to believe.

1. Time To Be Heard
Your mother told you ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ but you’re not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you want to deliver a lot of content that people will remember, try letting your website do the talking.

2. There’s Nothing Like the Real Thing
In a world of virtual everything there’s nothing like the real thing. The sound and image of real people delivering your marketing message makes it a believable, memorable presentation.

3. Unlock the Conventional Wisdom Straightjacket
Driving traffic to your site is great, if those visitors stay long enough to find out why they should be doing business with you. If your website traffic is leaving as fast as it’s arriving, maybe search engine optimization isn’t the answer you’ve been looking for.

4. Linking Your Way To Obscurity
You know the reciprocal linking strategy everyone is talking about as a way to generate leads? Did you ever consider that each link to another website is an invitation to leave your site? Is that really what you want – to invite people to leave? I think not!

5. Your Company’s Voice Is It’s Personality
Give your company a professional voice, with a finely crafted script delivered by a professional voice-over announcer that presents a compelling, memorable marketing message and a unique brand personality. Or do it yourself and sound like an amateur. The choice is yours.

6. Addressing Ass-backwards Priorities
If your website design firm is twisting your marketing message out of shape to conform to the technical ‘technique du jour’ that only looks good in one popular browser, then you hired the wrong guys. It’s not about technology; it’s about communication.

7. Text-Ads Are Dead. Long Live Web-Video
Squeezing your marketing message into a pay-per-click text-ad is like trying to attract leads using one of those newspaper real estate ads where every word needs to be decoded. Start communicating with a Web-video that tells a story – your story.

8. Nobody Ever Bored Anybody Into Buying
The vast majority of website text is boring, unimaginative and self-promoting. If you don’t present a compelling focused story then you are just wasting peoples’ time. Seduce your audience with an informative, entertaining, and memorable presentation created by marketing professionals.

9. Too Much of Good Thing, Isn’t So Good
You were worried about load times and search engine optimization so you dumped most of your images and multimedia and proceeded to put enough text on your site that would take a month to study; but have you considered whether anybody is ever going to actually read that stuff? And that’s assuming people could ever find what they were looking for in the first place.

10. Stop Hiding Behind Your Email Address
You’ve got a killer website. It tells visitors everything. All they have to do is place an order. But wait … somebody has a question. So they go to your contact page and find an email address. No contact name. No address and no phone number. You’ve provided a Q&A, an FAQ, and a list of technical specs. What more do they want? Well, what they want is to talk to somebody to make sure you’re legit and if they have a problem that you’ll stand behind what you’re selling. Silly them.

11. Do You Suffer From Redundant Redux Reflux?
Search engines love content. They index all your text, searching for keywords and phrases. So what do you do? You repeat and repeat stuff, over and over to make sure the search engines understand what you’re all about. To bad all your Web-visitors get indigestion from reading your redundant copy and leave because they forgot why they were there.

12. Inform. Enlighten. Persuade.
Knowledge is today’s high-value commodity. If you have a set of skills that people want to acquire, then you’ve got something to sell: something to build a business around. But if you don’t know how to present that knowledge to an audience, then your skills are unmarketable. If you want to get paid for what you know, you better find out how to deliver your content.

13. It’s Not About Numbers; It’s About Quality
It’s not the number of hits you get on your website, it’s how long visitors stay on your site and how much information they retain after they leave that counts. It’s about the quality of traffic not the quantity. And the best way to create quality traffic is to provide easy to find, easy to understand, easy to remember content.

14. Don’t Play Constant S.E.O. Catch-up
Every time an S.E.O. whiz kid comes up with a trick to beat the search engine algorithms, the experts at the search engines change their criteria. This means you’re constantly playing S.E.O. catch-up. Good for the whiz kid, not so good for you. And have you ever wondered how all those search engine optimizers can guarantee you, and everybody else they are selling, top billing – kind of hard to believe isn’t it?

15. Show Me What To Do
Anybody who has ever spent the night before Christmas trying to decipher the arcane instructions provided by the manufacturer of the bicycle you bought your kid, or the bizarre graphics included with the do-it-yourself kitchen you bought from ‘you know who’, knows that there is nothing like a good video to explain how Part A actually does fit into Part B.

16. Even Cows Have Brands
If you’ve got a business, you’ve got a brand. We’re not just talking about a logo. We’re talking about every thing you do: your website, your print collaterals, everything, including how you answer the phone. You do answer the phone don’t you? If your website design firm doesn’t get it, if they aren’t creating a brand personality, what are they doing?

17. Lost In Space
Ever go to one of those websites that’s impossible to navigate. Maybe the navigation system doesn’t work in your favorite browser, or maybe the navigation system is so confusing visitors get lost in cyber-content-hell. Information architecture, how people find the content they are looking for, is critical to creating a satisfying user experience.

18. You Can Have It Both Ways
Remember when your mother told you, you couldn’t have dessert if you didn’t finish your broccoli? Sounds like those know-it-all search engine gurus telling you that you can’t have multimedia on your site. Well you’re a big boy now, and if you want that multimedia hot fudge sundae you can have it. And you can also have all the good-for-you search engine friendly copy too. Who said you couldn’t have it both ways?

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What Starbucks Taught Me About Search Engine Marketing

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:45 am  
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When it comes to having a lot of options for coffee you can’t really beat Starbucks. It seems that there’s virtually a store on every corner. Bad planning or an intentional marketing ploy? It’s been statistically proven that the more Starbucks stores there are in a – mile radius the better each individual store will do. So what does this mean for your Internet marketing campaign? It means that the more ‘stores’ you own, the better your main store will do.

Here’s a real-time illustration: if you have a main website and five incoming links, you’ll get traffic to the main site from five places. Now this doesn’t mean you need five additional sites along with your main one, these five incoming links are from other websites that often won’t belong to you. Now if we’re talking numbers let me say this: five is paltry compared to where you need to be. When we work with clients we like to double, triple, or quadruple their incoming links. What does this mean to sales? Well, let’s go back to our Starbucks example. Let’s say you’re scouring the ‘Net for a perfect cup of Joe. When someone Googles “perfect cup of Joe” the mentions of your site come up in excess of 5,000 times. Your competitors come in somewhere at 1,000 or less. So it stands to reason that someone searching on this topic will go to your site before they hit your competitor, right?

Ok, so now that we have the incoming links thing down, how in the world do you go about getting all of these links? Well, sometimes the build is slow but that’s ok. What we’re looking for are high-quality, high-traffic incoming links to your site. Let’s break this down even further.

Going after incoming links can happen a variety of ways. Not the least of which is a link you get from a site after your book is reviewed. That’s probably the most basic link you can get. Ideally you want links from sites that can drive readers (buyers) to your book. Links from other author sites might be a nice way to network but they don’t often leverage anything in the way of ranking or sales potential.

Why? Well, readers shopping for similar titles often won’t migrate from one author site to another via a link, they’ll generally head over to Amazon and find a list of “similar titles” or the category: Readers who bought this also enjoyed this title. Which then refers you onto a list of their best-selling books in the same genre. Second, unless you’re getting a link from a celebrity author site, you’ll probably find that most author sites don’t have great ranking. Google looks at the ranking of the site that’s linked to you to determine how valuable this link is and in turn, how much it will matter to your overall site ranking.

The ideal incoming link is from a niche site, meaning that if you’re pushing a WWII novel or a book on dieting, the link is coming from an authority site, i.e. a site that specializes in that topic.

The next option for getting more real estate is to start your own social networking page. There are a variety of sites that can benefit you including: Linkedin, MySpace, Squidoo, and my personal favorite: Facebook. These sites can all offer you a way to connect not just with other people in these social networking circles but also gain a valuable incoming link to your site.

Article syndication is another fantastic way to get more links. Most of us know and understand the article syndication process. You write an article of 500-2,000 words and send it (called syndicating) to sites like: EzineArticles, ArticleCity and many others. Remember to include your byline in the article with a link back to your site.

Commenting on blog postings is another way to drive links back to your site. Head on over to Technorati and dig up at least twenty of the top blogs in your market. Then get in the habit of commenting on the various posts with a link back to your site. The more you comment, the more links you’ll get. The secondary benefit to this is virtual networking: getting to know bloggers in your market is never a bad thing.

Gaining valuable real estate and building your “stores” isn’t as difficult as you might think. It takes time, persistence, and some keen research skills to find the appropriate sites. In the end, the benefits far outweigh the amount of work you’ll do. Gaining exposure online will increase traffic, build platform, enhance exposure and grow your bottom line. So take a lesson from Starbucks and start building a store on every corner. You’ll be glad you did.

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Top 10 Search Engine Ranking: How To Get It And What It Means For You

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:32 am  
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High search engine rankings; online businesses need it to survive. Have you ever heard that phrase before? If so, do you know that it is true? If you currently run an online business, your website for that business needs to achieve a high ranking in the search engines. In fact, it is best if you get a top 10 search engine ranking. Why is this you wonder? Well, in all honesty, there are a number of different reasons why you need to have a top 10 search engine ranking to run a successful internet business. After a close examination, you will see that all of those reasons end up benefiting you and your business, often in a number of different ways.

As you likely already know, a large number of internet users, maybe even you, rely on search engines to find what they are looking for online. Whether it be to research a particular topic, purchase a particular item, or inquire about an online service, internet users rely heavily on search engines. If you, personally, use search engines to help you find what you are looking for, how far do you go into those results? Most internet users do not go past the second or third page; they can usually find what they are looking for before that point. That is why it is extremely important that your online website has a high search engine ranking. In fact, it is best if you get your webpage to display on the first page of search results. With almost all search engines, this requires a top 10 search engine ranking.

By having your online website get top 10 search engine ranking, you will find that you end up getting a relatively large amount of internet traffic. As previously mentioned, many internet users find what they are looking for by the second page of their search engine results. If your website has a top 10 search engine ranking, you are, almost always, guaranteed to get higher results than other websites that are displayed further back. If you are selling an online services or products, you will often find that your extra internet traffic turns into to extra sales. As a business, you need sales to survive and a top 10 search engine ranking can help you achieve those sales.

Although it is important to understand why a top 10 search engine ranking is important, you also need to know how to achieve it. When trying to achieve a top 10 search engine ranking, there are a number of different steps that you should take. Those steps include link building, website content, and article distribution. In a way, link building and article distribution can be connected together. By creating relevant articles, which are somehow related to your online website or business, you can distribute those articles around the internet. If internet users like what they read, there is a good chance that they will make the trip to your online website, particularly if you include inbound links. Inbound links, when it comes to article distribution, are links that will direct internet users to a part of your online website or business, preferably the main page.

It was also mentioned above that you can try and get a top 10 search engine ranking by having content, text, or articles on your online website. Before developing those articles or content, you are advised to research keywords that are related to your online business or website. You not only want to find relevant keywords, but you also want to target keyword phrases that internet users are searching for. This will not only help you achieve a top 10 search engine ranking, but it will also help to make sure that internet users, who are searching for what you have, end up getting to your website. It is also important that you make your website content interesting and readable. There is a good chance that people will actually read what you have to say; therefore, you can use this content to make a good impression.

Above it was explained how you can go about achieving a top 10 search engine ranking on your own. If you are interested, you may also want to think about seeking professional assistance. When it comes to high search engine rankings, you will find that the assistance is best if it comes from an internet marketing firm that specializes in SEO.

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