Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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Search Engine Optimization and You

Monday, April 13th, 2009

The internet has grown to become a significant force in the global economy, and if you want to be successful through internet commerce, you need to be proactive and forward-thinking in your marketing techniques.

“Easier said than done,” you say - but you might be surprised.

Here at USA SEO Pros, we specialize in a powerful form of internet advertising called search engine optimization. We utilize our skills and knowledge to help businesses just like yours achieve ideal placement on the search engines.

Online marketing is so much more than simply putting a website up. After all, what’s the point in having the site if no one is seeing it? Through search engine placement, we can help you attract the visitors you need to truly become successful online.

Our SEO consultants and experienced web developers work diligently to keep up with the fast-paced world of search engine optimization. Sites like Google and Yahoo frequently update how they track and rank individual web pages, and a company like USA SEO Pros can help you stay on top of the online business leader board!

We have been counseling business owners for over six years and have achieved some incredible milestones in the search engine optimization business. We’ve worked with thousands of clients and carved out millions of first page placements on sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN. We pride ourselves on being one of the absolute best search engine optimization and internet marketing companies out there!

Our repertoire of package options ranges from our 5 keyword Nickel plan to our VIP submission and 100 keyword Diamond package. You pick the plan, and we’ll get to work putting your business website at the top!

All of our packages include:

• Full company and industry consulting and research
• Business-specific keyword research and generation
o Geo-targeting tailored to fit the area you want to market to
• Professional content writing
• Site hosting
• Website validation with W3C standards
• Submission to every major search engine, yellow pages, and hundreds of smaller search engines
• Re-optimization (as needed)
• Each marketing campaign runs for 6 months, with the option for a discounted extension.

We offer a full suite of optional services as well, which includes:

• Press release writing
• Blogging
• Conversion consultancy
• Unique web page creation
o Splash page, Content Management System (CMS)
• Conversion Consultancy

By: Zack S.

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Using SEO and Social Media to Gain Authentic Exposure

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Working in the SEO and marketing industry has exposed me to all sorts of social media, and today I incorporate Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Myspace into my daily routine. As a result, I come across plenty of news articles, blog posts, pod casts and various other social media flotsam throughout the day. Today I found a blog post from Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who works with companies that are addressing new marketing platforms.

In his blog, Fred talks about the social media platform and his remarkable experience with @kogibbq on Twitter. Briefly, Kogi BBQ is two taco trucks that drive around Los Angeles and tweet their location throughout the day. They have become remarkably success, and have attracted a large following on Twitter as well as throughout LA. Wilson says this type of media exposure is of the “earned” variety, a phrase he picked up from Jerry Solomon – the executive producer of Epoch media and Wilson’s brother in law.

Solomon compares the brand/consumer relationship to that of a man and a mistress. After a while, the jewelry and other gifts grow old, and the mistress begins to want more. The same is true with a brand/consumer relationship Solomon says. Brands should focus on dialogue with the consumer instead of engaging in mere monologue.

This all felt remarkably familiar to me. The goal of search engine optimization is to draw attention to a particular business or website. We do that in a variety of ways, but blogging is one particular approach we use. This creates a platform for feedback from consumers, both potential and current. The conversation can move from just the monologue to a true dialogue. I use Twitter and Facebook daily, and it opens the door for feedback from the public and the consumer.

Aside from large companies with very deep pockets, the days of effective TV advertising are gone. Kogi BBQ can’t afford a spot during the Superbowl, but they don’t need to. They are able to use tools like Twitter to build a following and grow their business.

Fred Wilson said the big challenge for marketers and advertisers now is to engage consumers without alienating them with perceived spam. Despite the popularity of Google’s Adwords program, how often do you click on a “sponsored link”? I know I never do, because I know it’s a marketing link. And an unwelcome one at that. I prefer to digest my internet material organically

A very effective way for businesses to reach their intended audience is through tools like blogs, Twitter and by using techniques like search engine optimization. This way you’re ensuring that your audience sees the message, but it doesn’t feel like they’re being advertised at. Perception is reality. If you’d like to learn more about what SEO can do for you, visit our site or find me on Twitter (@realusaseopros). I would love to start a dialogue with you!

By: Zack S.

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In Case You Missed It: Google’s PPC Scam Settlement

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Because I work for an SEO company, I often find myself drawing comparisons between search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. The two types of advertising are both great ways for a company to improve its online exposure, but there are pros and cons to each.

First, a review of what we’re talking about here before I discuss the fraud case. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website design, structure and content so it will appear naturally at the top of search engine results. Let’s say you own a roofing company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and you want to grow your annual revenue. You might hire a company like USA SEO Pros to create an optimized site for your business. After thoroughly researching your industry, we optimize a website for your business complete with links and content specific to your business. Then when a prospective client types “roofing design in Fort Lauderdale” into Google, they would find your business!

Pay per click advertising (PPC) works in a similar fashion. Google has a bidding system for various keywords related to your industry – for example: roofing design in Fort Lauderdale. The highest bidder wins the right to that keyword and has a budget of $X.XX per month. Let’s say you want to spend $200 a month for several keywords, including “roofing design in Fort Lauderdale”. You are the winning bidder at $1.05 per click. Now, when someone searches for your keyword in Google, your site will appear at the top, in the sponsored links box. When someone clicks on your link, you’re account will have $1.05 deducted from it, until you run out of money.

Now that we know what we’re dealing with, let’s talk pros and cons. Arguably the biggest problem PPC advertising runs into is consumer avoidance. Many search engine users say that they tend to avoid the obvious advertising and marketing links. Consider how you use sites like Google and Yahoo. When you perform a search and are given the results, how frequently do you click on the “sponsored links”? That being said, PPC advertising is a guaranteed way to put your name at the top of a given search engine.

About the only consideration to make with search engine optimization is the uncertainty of placement. Even if you optimize a site, there isn’t a guarantee for a particular placement on a particular site. My company, USA SEO Pros, offers a guarantee of X number of first page placements, depending on the number of keywords you choose. We work diligently to get every single keyword into the number one spot on Google, but unfortunately we have no control over what Google does. Our clients often appear on the first pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and others. Also with SEO, the results may take a couple of weeks to appear. It isn’t as immediate as PPC.

But the major pro that SEO offers is that you will actually see results from your advertising dollars. Whereas users may intentionally avoid sponsored links, they will likely click on the natural search engine results that appear. This means they are clicking on your links! The other nice thing about search engine optimization is that the benefits can last long after your campaign ends. We offer our clients 6 month contracts, and there are available upgrades and time extensions. But we’ve found that many times the first page placement will remain even after the contract expires. This is advertising that pays for itself many times over!

Finally we get to Google’s PPC fraud case. In 2005 there was a case named Lane’s Gifts v. Google in which Google was sued for fraudulent clicks on online advertisements. Google isn’t the only one to run into trouble for this. Around the same time, an insurance company in Atlanta discovered it was paying Yahoo.com tens of thousands of dollars for fraudulent clicks from places like Mongolia. The problem lay with search engines doing their own click monitoring, and neglecting to filter out many (obvious) fraudulent clicks. Advertisers were paying out millions to the search engines for nothing!

Google ended up settling their case out of court to the tune of $90 million. Of course that is a mere pittance when scaled to Google’s profit, but the real insult comes in the form of payment. Advertisers who were scammed must first submit a claim which Google was to verify. Then if the claim was given the OK, the advertisers were given credit towards future advertising! The companies that lost out on advertising dollars won’t even get their money back. This type of click fraud has cost business owners millions of dollars, but there’s little incentive for sites like Google and Yahoo to clamp down. It’s estimated the PPC industry will bring in some $29 billion by 2010.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t run the risk of being scammed with invalid clicks. I don’t advertise on the internet, and I’m certainly biased toward SEO, but if it gets results without the risk of scam – who wouldn’t be biased!

For more information on SEO, visit http://usaseopros.com

By: Zack S.

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Playing the SEO Game at Google’s Table

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

As I discussed in my previous post, SEO - or search engine optimization - is often based around what the “other Big 3″ are doing: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Combined, the Internet’s Big 3 hold nearly 95% of the search engine market share. If you toss in Microsoft’s Live Search and AOL, you’ve pretty much got the whole kit n’ kaboodle. Google enjoys the largest piece of the pie, gobbling up 81.39%.

This means that when Google makes a change, we as marketers must stand up and take notice. Google, Yahoo and MSN will frequently change their algorithms that dictate how the internet and websites are crawled. If your business is to help others receive good rankings in a search engine query (and ours is!), you must constantly adapt or you’ll be left behind.

At USA SEO Pros, our developers are currently working on a brand new system, code-named Septuro. In speaking with the lead developer (Steve Phillips), he tells me when the system goes live, it will make our entire client database able to update regularly as the Big 3 adjust their systems. Relying heavily on AJAX, PHP, MySQL, SOAP, XSL and jQuery, Septuro will help USA SEO Pros convert every single site into a standardized format, making quick adjusts a cinch. Because we have been around for over 6 years, we have repeatedly tweaked our SEO process, leaving us with numerous versions of database systems. Septuro will replace all of that.

Steve: “Our main objective with Septuro is to drastically reduce the amount of work needed to update our sites when Google makes a change. Right now, we have sites that are built on different platforms, and while they all still function properly, it eats up a lot of man hours to go back and change each different platform when the search engines tweak their algorithm. Once Septuro goes live, we’ll be able to change our entire system database in just one place without going through varying platforms.”

There is a new book out by Jeff Jarvis called What Would Google Do? In it Jarvis writes about the profound effect Google has had on advertising agencies. Largely, Google has made it easier/more effective/more efficient for advertisers and marketers to reach directly to consumers and cater to them, versus the client. Google’s power is showing in media and advertising, and it’s showing in SEO too. When Septuro rolls out, we’ll be prepared for whatever direction Google decides to go.

By: Zack S.

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Google Algorithms Can Disrupt SEO

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Search engine crawlers use complex mathematical formulas and equations to determine how they rank sites on their search engine results page. Some of the things Google, Yahoo and other site crawlers consider when ranking web pages include: keyword use in title tags, keyword use in body text (content), global popularity of the site (links to and from the site), link popularity of site in topical community, and topical relevance of inbound links. These are just a few, but as you can see, there are many factors that play a role in deciding a site’s ranking.

Example of duplicate content filtering equation: possible-duplicate-content-filtering-equation1

Google offers its Webmaster Guidelines to help break down the way Google looks at your site. Included are design & content, quality and technical guidelines. These are great if you’re just starting out and will give you a good idea of what to do, and NOT do on your site.

You can start to run into problems, both as an individual web owner and as a search engine optimization company when Google starts to fiddle with their algorithms and guidelines. For the most part, they won’t change what they expect out of their content and design guidelines, but we have found they will switch up their algorithms every few months or so.

For example, more weight is now being given to blogs and relevant social media posts, depending on the number of links and pingbacks for a given post. This means as a professional SEO company, we are constantly revising and updating our SEO process and how we build client websites. We often return to old accounts and update the client’s optimized website to keep pace with the search engines. All in all, it’s fast-paced, exciting and rewarding work!

By: Zack S.

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Would you like some content with your SEO?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I spend plenty of time rummaging around the web, reading blog posts, comments, news stories and the like. As such, I come across a lot of content regarding proper SEO and how important each building block is. There is of course design. If you don’t have a easy-to-navigate website, you’ll quickly turn users and crawlers away. Visitors hate to search for your content, and we appreciate it when you have a quick and easy way to return to the home page. It’s not hard to have a decent design, so please - from one reader to another - spend a little time on it!

Link structure is also incredibly important when it comes to SEO. These days more weight is given to sites with many link-backs, but you can be docked on search engines like Google if you have too many internal and outgoing links on your site. The hope of everyone is that many readers visit the site and then post links back to it on their own.

Which leads me to content. Without engaging, interesting, relevant, unique content, your site will struggle to develop and will fail miserably at SEO. To begin with, you want to keep your bounce rate low - keeping people on your site longer than mere seconds is required. Quality content is an easy way to assure that your visitors will stick around, and thus help with SEO.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo also like to see original content. That seems fairly obvious, but as I dig more and more into the blogosphere, I find that many people struggle with this. Simply re-posting content from another site will not help your blog rank with SEO. Give your readers and search engine crawlers something worth while!

That all being said - what other ideas do you have to improve SEO? If you were to hire a professional SEO company, what would you want to see done? Please feel free to leave feedback below!

By: Zack S.

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