Monthly Archives: July 2018

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

Is Organic SEO A Dying Art?

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It seems like every few months there’s someone or other who is trying to tell the world that organic SEO “as we all know it” is going down the crapper. Fortunately, like the people who stand around with signs telling us the world is going to end, they’re always wrong.

This time, everyone’s up in arms because the latest Google update has killed their site. “I’ve followed all of the rules,” they say, “so why am I getting pummeled?”

Any experienced SEO guru will tell you — you can follow the rules as best you can, but sometimes, the rules change in the middle of the game. This ain’t Risk, folks, it’s real life, and Google owns the market. That means that when Google says jump, you say “how many times, for how long, in which direction?”

In this case, most of you that have lost rank in the past few months have lost it because, once again, Google changed the rules on you. With the lastest update of their algorithm, they have added a whole new set of rules that you have to follow if you want your site to rank well. The rules can be summed up in the words “user-friendly”.

User-friendly means that your pages don’t have a lot of visual clutter between the visitor and the content. If you’ve got a huge flash banner that takes up 2/3rds of the space above the fold, plus a navbar on one side and some widgets on the other, you’re not user friendly.

User-friendly also means that your site (as a whole, meaning every individual page on it that the SE’s spiders crawl) needs to be entirely set up in the same manner. Any page that defies these rules will drag down the rest of the site with it. Uniformity is the name of the game.

Finally, user-friendly means that the content on your page is fat. No more 150-200 word articles; if you don’t at least triple that, you’re not going to get credit for being anything worth reading in Google’s eyes.

Yes, the world of website SEO has changed — but that doesn’t mean SEO is dead, just that we have to dance the way Google wants us to.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Organic SEO in 2012: What Can We Expect?

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When you talk to the gurus about what to expect in the world of organic SEO, you have to recognize one thing: they’re all talking about Google, and little else. No other company has enough of a market share to even begin to shape the SEO world; indeed, every other company more or less follows Google’s lead. That’s a good thing for us SEO fobs, because it means there’s only one group of people we have to pay close attention to.

On the other hand, Google is notoriously good at keeping secrets. Very few people knew anything about the update last February that shook up the entire SEO world (Panda). I once asked Peter Kasting of the Chrome UI team just how strict their non-disclosure agreements are. Heavily paraphrased, he said “NO.”

So how could Google follow up a shakeup as dramatic as Panda? Well, for one thing, you should get that mindset out of your head — Google’s not out to ‘shake things up’, or ‘screw novice webmasters’, or any of the other things people often accuse them of. Their goal, as it has always been, is to give web surfers what they want as quickly as possible.

To that end, the best way to predict what might change in website SEO over the next year is to look at how the searching experience could be made even better from the searcher’s perspective.

When Google first got started, they were successful because they gave surfers an easy-to-load website with lightning-fast searches that got more relevant results than their competitors. This year, with Panda, they improved those results dramatically by making sure that the pages users saw weren’t crappy scraper sites loaded with ads.

Next year, you can expect that the laws of organic SEO as Google lays them down will be something akin to this:

  • Get lots of quality backlinks from authority sources with a natural link profile.
  • Make sure that people who land on your page will enjoy the experience.

Those really are the only ultimate laws of SEO. Just like Jesus said (also heavily paraphrased) “Love thy god, love thy neighbor, and everything else will fall into place.”, so Google has said “Make your sites pleasant places to be and get loads of natural backlinks, and Google will take care of the rest.”

Everything else really is just details.

Search Engine Optimization

When Does Affordable SEO Become A Bad Deal?

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what to social Bookmark?Some of you are looking at the title up there and thinking “Huh? Affordable SEO is, pretty much by definition, a good deal…right?”

You could be forgiven for thinking that thought. It’s because you’re thinking from the perspective of someone who has already bought a service and you know what you got for your money. Sure, if it all works well and you more traffic and thus more sales and mor money in your pocket, it was obviously affordable. But what about before you buy?

Before you buy something, you don’t know if it’s affordable or not — you can only make educated guesses. Furthermore, before you buy something, you are constantly evaluating whether your money is best spent doing X or doing Y. You’re also constantly worried about whether the product or service you want will fit under your budget at all.

So, depending on your exact situation, it may be that ‘affordable’ means ‘I have the cash on hand to buy it without skipping dinner”. It might also mean ‘Of the three options I’m considering, it will give me the most return for my buck.’

So when is ‘affordable’ a bad thing to shoot for? Simple — when it’s going to be more destructive to your business than it is helpful. For example, if you have $350 to spend, you could hire seven different companies to implement seven different social bookmarking plans and get 7,000 backlinks for your money. Or, you could hire one company to use a variety of techniques and only get you 2,000 total backlinks.

If you don’t know SEO, you’ll jump at the chance to get more than three times as many backlinks for your money — but that ‘affordable SEO’ is a horrible deal because of the way Google dislikes repetitive backlinking strategies.

As another example, you might decide that you’re better off hiring a professional writer to write a few hundred really high-quality articles for you and turn them in to the best article directory on the Internet. In order to pay for that, you have to give up the same 2,000 backlinks from up above — the cost is the same. While the cost of $350 for a few hundred high-quality articles is a great deal in the context of articles, it’s crappy SEO — you’re better off with the 2,000 backlinks.

So in short, affordable SEO becomes a bad deal whenever you make the ‘affordable’ part more important than the ‘SEO’ part.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Local Internet Marketing and Small Business SEO

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There are a lot of elements to search engine optimization — and no one has the time and resources to put them all into play at once. Particularly when you’re looking at doing small business SEO — helping a mom and pop store establish a web presence for itself — you have to pick and choose carefully which kinds of activities will have the best benefit on their business.

To that end, you have to choose at the outset what kind of strategy you’re going to use. Will you concentrate on driving traffic to their website and trying to make sales online? Or will you concentrate on driving traffic through their doors and trying to make sales face to face? The difference between those options is the difference between internet marketing and local internet marketing.

When you engage in internet marketing, you’re trying to make money online. When you engage in local internet marketing, you’re performing many of the same kinds of activities, but you’re attaching location-based keywords to the entire process. So you might still be building backlinks by creating web 2.0 properties and social bookmarks and whatnot, but instead of using “inexpensive board games” as your anchor text, you’ll use “board games Olympia WA”.

The location specificity immediately guarantees that you cut out 99.9% of competing pages, especially if you’re in a rural area or a small town. (If you’re in New York, you might need to get more specific, like “Gramercy Park board games” for example.) But more than just ranking easily due to lack of competition, local internet marketing has different-looking results in Google.

That’s because Google understands location names and immediately returns results specific to that location. If your business is listed in Google’s business directory, it’ll show up in the location-specific SERPs. If it’s got more backlinks/authority/juice than the other businesses in your area, it’ll show up on the top of the list and get more clicks.

More importantly, however, it will also show up on the top of the MAP results, showing people how to get to your front door and walk inside. That’s how you drive flesh and blood traffic from the internet, and it’s invaluable.

Search Engine Optimization

If You Have A Website, SEO Is Your Friend

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SEO
SEO recicle arrows

It used to be, about a decade ago, that it was possible to use banner ads, word of mouth, and just a little luck to get all the traffic you needed to your website. SEO — that is, Search Engine Optimization, or more in-depth, ‘the practice of making your website look relevant and authoritative to the search engines’ — has changed all that. Where once you could rely on being cool, new, and different to make you stand out among the millions of websites on the Internet, today you need all of that plus a couple thousand man-hours of SEO work to even make a dent in the trillions of pages on the Web.

Of course, the thousands of man-hours don’t have to be your man-hours. If your site is really revolutionary and phenomenal, you might get a story published on the news, for example, at which point you’ll find that hundreds if not thousands of other people that are excited about your site will be happy to put in a half-hour each writing up blurbs and linking to your site. But given how rare that is, you’re better off playing the lottery.

Really, if you intent to ‘make it’ online, what you really need is a crew to do SEO for you. That means, generally, hiring an SEO company that knows what it’s doing and having their couple-dozen or couple-score of employees work their butts of making sure that your site climbs the rankings effectively.

It’s important to get a company — a sizable group of professionals — because that’s what it takes to do organic SEO correctly. No matter how skilled he is, an individual freelancer or even a full-time employee can’t possibly keep track of all of the information and details necessary to properly optimize for the search engines. There’s simply too much raw data.

A skilled, cohesive company, on the other hand, will have one guy to comment on blogs, one guy to post on forums, one guy to write killer articles, another guy to submit those articles to hundreds of quality article portals, a few guys to make a cool video about your product or service, another guy to distribute the video, and so on and so forth. At the end of the very long list there’s the guy who keeps track of where all of your links have been built and generates a report and sends it to you at the end of the month. That’s the power of a good SEO company.

Search Engine Optimization, Sponsored Placement

PPC Management: All It Takes is Money

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moneyEver heard someone say ‘it takes money to make money’? Well, in the world of online marketing, that’s not entirely true — but it really, really helps. Let’s watch the development of two different websites, one of which starts with a thousand dollars and the other one of which is on a shoestring budget.

Without Money
Without money, the webmaster of www.sampleone.com can’t even engage in the most basic of affordable SEO unless he wants to do the work himself. He puts in several hours of work and builds himself some decent backlinks, because he’s no idiot and he’s done his research well in advance. As the days progress, sampleone.com manages to score first-page places on a few longtail keywords and gets up to a dozen visits per day.

A month later, scoring nearly 25 visits on average every day, and converting at an impressive 4%, sampleone.com is pulling in an average of one sale per day. The webmaster consumes that entire income keeping the basics of the business running, but as the actual business part of his business has grown a little bit, he has less time to concentrate on SEO.

With Money
The webmaster of sampletwo.com managed to sell a bunch of stuff he didn’t need on Ebay in order to fund his website, and he started with a bang. He paid an SEO company almost every red cent he had in order to purchase some high-quality keyword research and a long-term PPC management team.

The PPC managers used the keyword research to come up with a coherent plan for which keywords he should target and how much he should pay. While the webmaster went to work on every other aspect of his website — improving his product, detailing his website to increase conversions, and so forth — the PPC campaign pulled traffic. A month later, the PPC visits were approaching 100 per day. The extra time he spent on his conversions put him an entire percentage point above sampleone, and the time he spent on his product let him charge 10% more for it.

As such, where sampleone got 1 sale per day at $X, sampletwo got 5 sales per day at $X.X0, for a total of 550% more income than sampleone. That’s the power of spending a little money to make some money, and it happens every day.

Search Engine Optimization, Social Websites Marketing

TwoThings You Need For Every Website: SEO and Social Media Connections

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social bookmarkingIf you have a business website, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are the two must-have elements that will turn a chunk of digital real estate into a profit-making engine. It’s pretty simple why: they drive traffic, and traffic is the beating heart of commerce.

SEO
SEO drives traffic through search engines. Without specific effort in SEO, your website might accidentally end up ranking well for a keyword or two relevant to your business. With SEO, you can handpick exactly the keywords that will be the most valuable to your business and work your way to the top of the rankings for those keywords.

The difference between first and second place for a keyword is the difference between collecting 50% of the traffic for that keyword and 20% of the traffic for that keyword. That’s why SEO is the most important thing your website can ever have — every rank upward you manage to climb, the more visitors you earn. First page placement only means that you’ve broken out of the foothills — you haven’t scaled the peak until you’ve hit first place!

Social Media
Social media work drives traffic through the other largest sites in the world. Create a profile for your business on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and you’re inviting the world to come and comment on your existence. The result is instant and permanent judgment — if your company produces something amazing, your profiles will gather followers, comments, and more. If it doesn’t, you’ll get nothing.

In that way, social media produces some of the most authentically organic traffic in the world — traffic that is the most likely to convert into money when it visits your site. It takes time and energy in large amounts and, as mentioned, can be a real waste if your product doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but when it works, it’s pure gold.

That’s why, if you have a business that has a website, you need SEO and you need social media connections. Without them, the greatest website in the world could be languishing in some forgotten corner of the Internet, never to receive enough traffic to catch on.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

Small Business SEO is The Midgame, But You Also Need A Good Start

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small businessWhen you are just starting to get a grip on the ins and outs of your small business, SEO isn’t the first thing on your mind. A lot of gurus and Internet geniuses will tell you that it should be, but that’s simply not the truth. The truth is that, whether your business is offline or online, you have to have a solid setup before SEO will do you any good at all. That solid setup comes in three steps.

Step 1: A Solid Product or Service
If you aren’t selling something that people need — or at least believe they need — you won’t make it, period. Finding a niche that isn’t already overrun with fierce competition can be quite difficult, but even if you manage to come across a forum full of thousands of senior citizens with a strange interest in interracial dating and you have an amazing idea for helping them hook up, that’s no guarantee that RetiredSwirlCones.Com is going to do good business. You need to do whatever you’re doing well so that the people who do risk buying from you approve of what they buy.

Step 2: Conversion, Conversion, Conversion
The next thing you need is a way to convince people to take that risk. Online, that means a killer sales letter or some other form of convincing communication like a targeted Email marketing campaign or a sales video. Offline, it means that when someone walks into your store, they need to be impressed with the quality, professionalism, and quality of not only the product itself, but the environment around it. If you’re not converting at least 3% of online visitors and 20% of walk-ins, you need to work on that before you start driving traffic.

THEN, SEO Kicks In
Finally, the time arrives to kick your business into high gear. With the groundwork laid, you can purchase the services of an SEO company knowing that the traffic they add will convert into enough sales to more than make up for the expense.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

First Page Placement Is As Easy as Profiting From Collected Underwear

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boy first place

First page placement on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is suprisingly easy to obtain. All you have to do is be willing to pay for it: a bit of clever pay-per-click advertising will do it quickly, or a significant organic SEO campaign will get it done in the long-term. It’s like the man says: you can get it quick, well-done, or cheap — or even any two of those — but never all three at a time. PPC is the quick and well-done version of first page placement; organic SEO is the cheap and well-done version. You don’t want the quick and cheap version, because it doesn’t actually last long enough to mean anything to your quarterly bottom line.

Now, most certainly there are those of you out there who want to know what the heck underwear has to do with anything. Others of you are reading this specifically because you recognized the reference to South Park’s underwear gnomes, a race of little people who have a definitive business plan:

  • Step One: Collect Underwear
  • Step Two: ???
  • Step Three: Profit!

The sad truth is that for many webmasters out there, their business plan closely mimics that of the underwear gnomes:

  • Step one: Achieve First Page Placement
  • Step Two: ???
  • Step Three: Profit!

The missing link, of course, is conversions. Converting is the art of getting someone who has seen your website to actually spend money on it. Getting first page placement is a critical part of the process — it’s Step One, after all — but it’s only Step One. You also have to be able to get the visitors that your placement in the SERPs provides you to actually part with their money.

In fact, in most modern web based businesses, the actual SEO and/or PPC management — the responsibility for getting onto the first page in the first place — is outsourced to a skilled SEO company specifically so that the webmaster can focus on conversions. It’s a classic strategy because it works. So focus your education and your time on converting your guests, and let an SEO company take care of Step One for you — you’ll be grateful you did.

Internet Marketing

Long Tail Keywords are the catalyst to Local Internet Marketing Success

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keywords-lettersWhat is a long tail keyword? The term “organic SEO” is considered a short tail keyword. If you expand it to “Los Angeles organic SEO link building services” you have a long tail keyword. The objective when using long tails is to more accurately predict what searchers are going to be looking for. The short tail keyword covers a broad spectrum of options, so the field the searcher will be selecting from is much larger and will include firms from around the world. The specificity of the long tail narrows that search down to strictly local companies that offer the exact service you’re looking for.

Long tail keywords are the catalyst to local internet marketing success. If you optimize your content with strictly short-tail keywords, you’ll be buried deep inside search results on pages no one ever looks at. How many times have you gone past Page One when you’re searching for something? If your website isn’t on the first page, your chances of scoring some business off of search are non-existent. You might get a hit or two off Page Two, but if you’re using broad keywords you won’t even show up that high.

Here at First Page Placement, our objective when doing local internet marketing is to drive local traffic to your website. We do that by submitting you to local directories and map sites like Google Places, but we also optimize your content with local long tail keywords. When someone in your area does a search for a specific service, the companies that are listed as local and use local keywords in their content are the ones that come up first. How do we know it works? We’ve used the strategy on our own company website and we are comfortably present on Page One for all Los Angeles SEO keywords. Isn’t that where you found us?

Google changed the rules last year when they adopted the Google Panda change in their search algorithm, but one thing remained constant. Content is the number one variable in the equation. They rate it higher than link count and ahead of your gross traffic number. Content is the element they consider first when assigning the quality score that determines your rank and page position. If you’re using the same keywords everyone else in your industry uses, you’ll rank low. Be different with long tail keywords and you’ll rank high. It’s as simple as that.