Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
Posts tagged SEO strategies
How to Find an SEO Company
23 months ago
SEO Company
It is important for any business no matter what its size to have a web presence. But setting up the website is just a small part of the equation. If you have no way of driving traffic to the site, it is basically wasted cyberspace. This is where a search engine optimization firm (SEO) comes in handy. I know how a business thinks; your first question is How much will this cost me? Because each business’ needs are different I really cannot answer that question. But I will say that when you hire a good NJ SEO firm the traffic that comes to your site and does business with you will be far worth the expense. The cost will depend largely on what your business needs and how involved the web pages are for your site. Web marketing strategies are individualized to the needs of the business.
Domestic SEO firm versus Outsourced SEO firm
Let me start by saying you get what you pay for. Sure, you may save some money by outsourcing to some far off companies who talk about handling your business’ SEO campaign. But what typically happens ends in disaster. They seem to get very quick results and your site appears in the coveted number one spot of the SERPs; but then it all crashes in around you. These companies usually are guilty of using black hat methods of gaining higher positions in the result pages. The trouble is that when it is discovered by the search engines, (and it will always get discovered) the site will be penalized and dropped from the results for good. And the SEO firm (located in India, or some other far away place) will be nowhere to help and will stop responding to your calls It is certainly not worth the risk. It is far better to go with a local, trusted website optimization firm and avoid the penalties.
What to Ask My SEO?
There are a few things that you will need to discuss with an SEO firm to decide which one you want to hire for your business. More than likely you will conduct your own search and narrow it down to just a handful of SEO specialist. There are certain questions that you want to ask each of them before choosing which one you will trust your business’ web marketing campaign to.
The first thing you will want is an example of their work. They should have a portfolio which will display some of their sites. They should also be able to talk to you about the various types of SEO strategies they used to achieve high rankings for the sites. (Try typing in a keyword from the site to see if it comes up in the top three of the results.) Another good question is how much industry experience they have in the field; if a company has experience doing SEO for contractors and you are a contractor this company may be a good fit.
They should also be able to give you good advice concerning how web 2.0 optimization strategies and social media optimization can benefit your website and ultimately your business. They need to be willing to educate you in SEO practices and what they do to help you with your site. When you ask them what types of strategies they will use, these should not be limited to just link building and site content. Those are good, but there needs to be a lot more than this involved in a successful SEO campaign.
Ask them how long it will take to see results reflected in SERP. They should give you a realistic time frame of something like 2 to 6 months. If they say a couple of days they are most likely not legit and will use unethical means. You can also ask them if they can guarantee that your site will be in the number 1 slot in results.
Ask them how long it will take to see results reflected in SERP. They should give you a realistic time frame of something like 2 to 6 months. If they say a couple of days they are most likely not legit and will use unethical means. You can also ask them if they can guarantee that your site will be in the number 1 slot in results. If they tell you that they guarantee you that top slot – RUN! They may be able to come through on the promise, but it will be by black hat, unethical means that will get your site penalized and dropped from the search engines altogether.
Marketing to the 1%
05 months ago
Some think that a successful marketing campaign means driving thousands of visitors to your site every single day. Of course, with this comes the hope that they will invest in your particular products or services while they are there. However, if all you are doing is getting lots of traffic and none of them are interested in your product, you cannot honestly call that a success. A successful SEOcampaign will increase the site traffic as this is the main purpose of getting the site to rank high in search engine result pages. However, traffic isn’t everything. The point is that you want that traffic to purchase your product, or sign up for your services. This means that a smaller, but targeted, audience can be much more effective economically than lots of generic traffic that never purchases anything at all. You are basically going to ignore 99 percent of internet users and concentrate on the 1 percent who will make you money.
Niche marketing
Targeted Traffic
In order to have an effective web marketing campaign you will need to focus the site on one particular topic or product and then concentrate on reaching the audience that is interested in that one thing. You will not be able to reach or please every internet surfer. Simply narrow down the intended audience and focus in on those who will use your services. Fewer visitors who are real customers will bring in more revenue than more generic visits to the site. In short, you can effectively monetize the right audience.
Make Your Site Useful to Visitors
Once you have established your targeted audience, the entire site should be geared toward meeting their needs. Everything should be centered around your niche, or topic. Become their most important resource on your chosen topic. Your web design should be such that it makes you an authority on the topic and you become indispensable to your customers. You are there greatest resource!
Narrow Your Focus
What does all of this mean? It simply means that you will employ a variety of strategies to form a successful web marketing campaign. You will focus on an intended audience while offering a specific product or service that they will find valuable. It does not leave good SEO practices out of the picture; these are still very valuable tools. It just means that you will be more focused on reaching a particular audience with a specific service.
How to find Good Keywords
35 months ago
Using keywords properly is one of the keys to launching a successful SEO campaign. It is through a properly executed keyword search that you can target the right terms and phrases with your SEO marketing campaign. No matter which tools are used for website optimization keyword usage is at the heart of the matter. They are in Meta tags, page titles, content and several other key places throughout the site. By employing keyword research you can better predict what kind of content will be relevant to the site and learn what users will be looking for when they visit. Keywords help SEO strategies be more effective.
Good keywords
Keyword Research
Understanding the importance is only half of the work, performing the keyword research is the other half. The first thing you need to do is to have a brainstorming session in which you write down every term and phrase that is relevant to the site or business. There’s no limit to how many keyword possibilities you can come up with and really, the more the better. Think about your business or industry from the viewpoint of a client and also try to think about every synonym for each of the core words too. You will want to try to think of any and all words or phrases that could possibly be used in a search engine to find your site. You will also want to use an online tool that can create keyword suggestions as well as search estimates.
Once you have generated a list of possible keywords and phrases you will want to search for your relevant ones in all three of the major search engines. You are looking at the results, but you will also want to look at the paid ads that are above and to the right of the organic results. If there are a lot of ads it usually indicates it is a high value keyword, basically the more ads the better the keyword results.
Keyword Tools
There are a lot of different keyword tools available on line. Some of them are costly, and some of them are free. Here are just three examples of keyword tools that can be used for keyword research.
Google Adwords: Keyword tool is relatively easy to use and is reliable. All you have to do is enter a phrase, or a term and it will display all the available data about the average search volume for the present month and one month back.
Wordtracker Tool is a fair one to use. It is not as accurate as some others, but it is still a good one to use for comparing search volume. Just enter a phrase or keyword into the search box. It will display the trendiest terms that have the words you typed in. It will tell you how many searches a day there are for those particular terms as well as a prediction of how many searches are usually performed on it each day.
MSN AdCenter will require you to log in to use the tools but they do display good, solid data.
Social Media Marketing Analysis
87 months ago
Last time we noted that a mildly alarming number of business owners are completely forgoing SEO in favor of social media. Today, we’ll explain the risks behind putting all your eggs in one basket (that is, the social media basket), and moreover, why SEO is still relevant and why we don’t see SEO disappearing from online marketing strategies any time soon.
First, we’d like to acknowledge that social media is still a viable method for establishing one’s online presence. The point of this post is NOT to belittle the merits of social media (after all, we use Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, too). Rather, the purpose of this post is to remind business owners that social media should not be the only thing that they focus on in web marketing.
The great thing about SEO is that all the optimization you do on your website is yours and no one else’s. In contrast, when you update your Twitter or Facebook page, you are conducting online marketing through a domain that is not your own. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but what happens if one of these social media outlets goes out of fashion? Say good-bye to all the content that you poured into that external site.
The truth of the matter is that all the marketing you do on social media platforms is ephemeral, but all the optimization you do on your own site is permanent. If you get kicked off of Twitter for some reason, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to retrieve your past content. However, if something similar were to happen to your website (say, for example, your web host chooses not to host you anymore), at least you can easily take your backup files and move to another hosting site. But with Twitter and Facebook, you don’t have that option. You are left completely at the whim of the social media powers that be. On the other hand, if you own your own domain, you are in full control over what happens to your content. This is also why, if you blog, we highly recommend that you try to have your own domain name for your blog. Why? Because if you blog through a subdomain and one day decide to switch platforms, you run the risk of losing a lot of traffic, incoming links, search engine rankings, etc.
To read more about the crucial differences between SEO and social media, be sure to keep an eye out for our next post.
SEO for Bing
48 months ago
Microsoft released their new search engine, Bing, most of us thought the algorithm used to rank sites in search results would be the same. Everyone seemed pretty surprised to see Bing give Yahoo! a run for their money in the Search Engine battle; and overall Bing received good reviews. Its popularity raises a question or two, such as what are we to do now to optimize a site to rank high in Bing? And I think most of us are curious as to what th
SEO for Bing
e differences are between what Google looks for and what Bing searches for.
We are pretty familiar with Google and being able to get a site ranked in search engine results. Google’s results center around keywords and back links to the site from outside sources. Bing’s ranking algorithm is based on two things. One thing that a website owner has no control over is the age of the domain. Domains which have been up for a longer period of time will rank over newer sites.
The second criterion that Bing uses to rank sites in search results is centered on inbound links. The difference from Google’s algorithm is the placement of the primary keyword. The main site’s primary keyword must be included in the referring site’s title tags. Google considers inbound links from anywhere, but Bing only looks at the links from other sites and directories which have relevant keywords.
For any of the search engines, quality content is essential but it takes more than this alone to rank higher in Bing’s search results. It is really about acquiring links from authoritative and relevant sites to boost a site’s rankings.
What does this mean for the small business or contractors who have been using proper techniques to optimize their sites? Marketing for contractors or local businesses is pretty much unchanged; especially to be listed in the top three of Google and Yahoo! search results. Site building is still important and the same SEO should be used. Continuing these good practices will keep the sites ranked high in the other two search engines.
In order to have a site rank high in Bing’s search engine results you will need to engage in some link building techniques. Instead of just trying to get as many back links as possible, you will want to build links from other sites with relevant keywords in their title tags. This can be time consuming and you may need to hire an SEO professional to accomplish this goal.
SEO for Google Panda
28 months ago
The Panda update has everyone scratching their heads regarding proper SEO practices. We all want to know what works now. It’s not based on trying to simply find a way to beat the system, but legitimate questions on what all the changes mean for SEO and the new practices for the best web marketing.
There’s been a major emphasis on indexing in the past and to have URLs ranked appropriately they had to be in an index, at least after being crawled. And for most of us it means that we have been monitoring sites and indexing with a focus on the major search engines, and of course Google has remained at the top of our concerns. If a site was not indexed deeply enough we had to perform all these tactics to help move it up in the rankings; and sites that were well indexed had to be carefully watched to make sure that the ranking was maintained.
Post Panda indexing is not quite as viable, but that’s because Google acts like it wants everything in its index. So all that indexing means now is that Google has the URL in the databases. Panda really hasn’t had as much of an impact on indexing or crawling, as much as it has affected rankings. In other words sites can receive less traffic even though the pages are indexed but some of the individual pages do not rank as high as they did before Panda.
So what does this mean for SEO? Pretty much what worked before, still works but with one major change. Instead of trying to get as many URLs as possible indexed the emphasis is now to get the highest quality and the most important URL’s to be indexed. To achieve this you need to look at the URLs and choose which are canonical and which ones have the strongest signals. For instance, robot exclusion, rel canonical, SML sitemaps and the internal link profile. Then make sure that your most valuable URLs are well optimized and indexed.
Any URLs that are low valued, duplicate or irrelevant URLs should be removed from the index. Rather spend your time building your internal links to canonical URLs from power pages. As far as external links, build them through social media connections.
Removing low quality or duplicate content URLs from indexes may possibly be the most important practice. A site that has high quality content along with too much thin content could see a traffic decrease post Panda.
As far as Panda is concerned the best SEO practices are concerned with putting forth the highest quality information and completely removing low quality pages from indexes. This just means that it is more difficult to compete without good quality content. This means that SEO is a little more difficult to achieve.
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