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Posts Tagged ‘search engine marketing’

Here is one example of the financial results that a company achieved by optimizing a single keyword that moved from the bottom of the second page of Google to a number 4 position, above the fold on the first page.

A client’s website had a ranking of 18 for their primary target keywords on the second page of Google’s natural search engine results. Considering how many marketers are competing for the top positions for this keyword, appearing on the second page of search results seemed a like an accomplishment, but we thought that it could be better.

SEO Works

A marketing strategy focused optimization efforts on improving the natural keyword ranking for this one target keyword. After some time and effort, the ranking for the keyword first moved to the number 9 position, and then to the number 4 position of the first page search engine results. The improved search engine ranking for this single keyword generated an increase in sales leads far more than expected, which subsequently converted to an increase in sales revenue amounting to over $1,000,000.

Tracking the Moves

The list below shows the search engine ranking relative to the number of sales leads that were generated from the company’s primary target keyword:

• Nov 08 – position 18 = 6 leads
• Dec 08 – position 9 = 31 leads
• Jan 09 – position 9 = 126 leads
• Feb 09 – position 4 = 102 leads
• Mar 09 – position 4 = 207 leads
• Apr 09 – position 4= 221 leads

Summary of Results

The increase in the number of monthly sales leads can be seen as the target keyword ranking moved up over the six month time period. The full benefit of the keyword moving from the 18^th to the 9^th position is reflected in the January total because the change occurred later in the month of December. The same applies to the move from position 9 to position 4 because the change occurred later in February.

For marketing managers and business owners who are wondering about the difference between having a major keyword listing on the first page of search results compared to the second page of results, this case study should provide some insight based on our experience.

It also shows an example of the potential benefit from having keyword search results listed above the fold of a web page as opposed to below the fold where viewers must scroll down to see more search listings.

There was clear evidence that a higher organic search engine ranking can dramatically affect sales lead generation and company revenue, in this case over $1,000,000.

Wriiten by Rick Smith at 10th Degree Online Marketing and Jazel Automotive SEO.

Search Engine Marketing Video

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start discussing what you should and shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their website, if they happen to have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, what you like and dislike, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

When considering finding out more about search engine marketing; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may decide your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines very much prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorize correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

WordPress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power or flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do too.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

There are a number of steps I always follow when optimizing a site for SEO (note these are just the high points, there are others that I don’t mention here, but these WILL take you a long way):

1) For a new site, I will include the keywords in a non hyphenated domain name (if you can get a .edu or .gov TLD do so, otherwise a cheap .info will do just fine)

2) I like to rename the URL to each money page to include the main keyword for that page.

3) Implement Google Analytics for the site and ensure the tracking script is added to every page.

4) Go through the “money” pages and make sure that the title, meta descriptions and meta keywords tags are different and optimized for the keywords on the page. In a competitive niche (over 1 million result pages in Google), I would limit the keywords to one main phrase, a couple of local modifiers and one or two more closely related terms per page.

5) Go through the non-money pages (i.e. pages you don’t care about from an SEO perspective) and ensure the title and meta description tags are not duplicates of any of the money page tags. Google Webmaster tools will identify this for you once your site has been crawled.

6) I nofollow any links to overhead pages from all of the pages on the site other than the home page. I leave the home page links as follow links, since I want the SEs to index all pages on the site and having privacy, contact, disclaimer, etc overhead pages add to Google’s view of the “trust” for the site. On all other pages I want only the link to the home page to be a follow link, so I can build up the page rank of the home page. I handle this in Dreamweaver by using two different site templates. If your main keyword page is something other than the home page, modify your approach accordingly.

7) I then optimize each pages content for it’s main keywords, modifiers and related terms. It’s critical that each word or phrase used in the keyword META is found on the page to avoid keyword spam penalties.

At this point the on page optimization is complete enough to start with link building. As you may already know, building links is not a piece of cake. I use articles, blog posts, submit forms on relevant sites, reciprocal links, etc. There are ways to make this process easier, without going black or even grey hat. Contact me at Mississauga Search Engine Marketing if interested.

Search Engine Optimization Video

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start talking about what you should or shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and fingers crossed linking to your blog from their site, if they happen to have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

When considering finding out more about search engine optimization; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may decide your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines definitely prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorise correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

WordPress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do as well.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

At long last! You can achieve first-page organic search engine ratings without having to deal with the constant changes of Google.

Successful search engine marketing has been elusive for thousands, if not millions, of people who have the desire to start a profitable online business.

As someone reading this page, you obviously have an interest in search engine marketing. You may be just a beginner in the SEO game, or perhaps you’ve been swimming upstream for quite awhile. In either case, how would you answer this question? If you had a lucrative new endeavor in front of you, and you had the choice to fight either the U.S. Navy Seals or a 98-pound weakling to get there, which would you choose?

Chances are you’d pick the second option. Perhaps a shuffle or sandbox or an algorithm change knocked you off the front page of Google for no discernible reason. Maybe you have a truly breakthrough product or approach, but can’t make it happen in Google BECAUSE THE WHOLE WORLD IS BATTLING IT OUT THERE.

Note: What if you had a great site that ranked 100th in Google and got about 100 hits a week? That same site, optimized for MSN, might attract 100 page views per day. Which scenario do you think will be more lucrative? Get in on the ground floor of the latest discovery in search engine marketing.

Traffic is the lifeblood of a successful Internet business. Without traffic, you will be on the Internet equivalent of life support.

And The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole is a genuine, real-life traffic shortcut. The real McCoy.

I’m not saying it’s a magic button or anything. There’s absolutely no reason, with the ease of this method, that you can’t create the kind of income that will change your life, beginning right now.

Think about the simplicity of this business, and why there’s not an ounce of hype in that last sentence.

With the ability to easily rank for virtually any keyword you want (with the web’s highest-converting search engine traffic), you are literally just one converting offer away from life-changing income.

Especially considering our “either you rank or get a refund” guarantee – is their honestly any reason not to get access to this method and start generating some serious traffic from MSN right now?

If you are a Brick and Mortar business owner,  you want your business Web Site to show up on top of all major SERP’s (search engine results pages) for all of the search terms critical to your business. To achieve this goal, it’s necessary that you learn different Search Engine Marketing tactics that can ensure that your Website beats the thousands — often hundreds of thousands — of other Web Sites competing for top rankings on the same keywod phrases. What follows are some hot tips on the best way to conduct Search Engine Marketing.

The most important trick is to recognize the way search engines operate. They don’t understand pictures but instead, depend on matching the keyword phrases that the searcher typed into the search box with the keywords  that are present in your Website. Therefore, you should make it a point to place as many terms and key phrases as possible into your Website. Research the different key phrases that your visitors would type into the search window and attempt to weave those keyword phrases  into your Website. If you’ve included photos in your Website, be sure to attach “alt text” tags to all these photos so that the search engines can add them to the website content.

The keywords would, ideally, be part of the URL and other related file names because the SE’s examine them. This is a critical Search Engine Optimization technique. So, if your business is Pete’s Paving in Charlottesville, Virginia, or Harrisonburg, Virginia, you might be well-served to use the domain name CharlottesvilleAsphalt.com or HarrisonburgPaving.com.

Your title tag, located near the beginning of your html code, should include the relevant keywords as must your meta description and meta keyword tags. These meta tags are not visable on your Web Site but will be featured in text format when the search engines display their results. Therefore, it is important to include key phrases that direct the reader towards the Website in your description tags. Don’t just dump the same keywords in your domain name, title and description tags and your file names since the major search engines will consider that spamming and simply put your site in the penalty box. As an alternative, try to incorporate various related terms that are similar to your search terms.

Use local words in your meta tags to further ensure top SE placement for your local market. If you business isin the Staunton, Virginia area, be sure to use some of those words in your search terms.

Be patient since once you have completed the required changes to the Website, it may still take some time for the SE’s to verify that fact and move you up in the rankings.

Be certain that your body copy is curtailed to around 300 words and that the top key phrases are placed throughout the page instead of just bunching them at the top or bottom.

If you implement these techniques, you will be leased to watch the search engines boost your site’s ranking. Continue to implement different Search Engine Marketing methods to ensure that your site remains on top since your competition will be doing their best to jump over you.

This article is going to lay out, once and for all, just what is meant by Search Engine Optimization. This is strictly for the uninitiated, the man with a website who is still thinking about why he dropped a ton of money for a fresh new website that doesn’t seem to be getting any traffic, or the woman who has noticed her site’s traffic drop from amongst the top Google pages to the 20th page and has been insisted upon by others that he/she definitely needs to get familiar with SEO.

Why ‘SEO’ isn’t So Complicated

In the first place, this means Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing your company’s web presence so that it places higher when someone looks for whatever it is you’re offering, or for a series of words related to the service you provide. This is generally done in two ways: organically, and through PPC . This last one means paying the big ad companies, usually Google to put your relevant ad on all its various platforms, from the main Google site, or into various other contextually relevant areas (Gmail, YouTube, etc).

These are commonly known as AdWords campaigns and do differ in price. Google also runs a huge amount of banner ads on other sites. All of these things ought to been seen as classic advertising, only with the added advantage that you find the customers who are desperate for your precise product or service.

It’s like that old-fashioned way of placing big ad buys in the yellow pages in your business’s section, only now it’s 2009 and the yellow pages are for a different generation.

Explaining the Concept of Paid Search

All good? A good SEO Marketing company will take the reins for your paid search, telling you how to run ad campaigns and often functioning as your ad agency proper. They’ll give you full analytics (when you see how incredible Google’s tracking is and what it can tell you about your visitors, your mind will be blown).

What Does Organic Search Mean?

So what about “organic search”? That’s all about reaching a nice, high rank in Google’s natural search engine rankings. It happens with good content, optimized code, and building rich, relevant links, and a ton of other variables that are slightly less important. Again, a good SEO marketing firm will get this done for you, and most importantly, will do it transparently.

There are plenty of ways to ‘cheat’ Google, and eventually they are all caught onto and banned. And the people doing them are eventually put on a blacklist. So the SEO company you choose needs to openly go out of its way not to engage in those practices.

Think of SEO Agencies Like Ad Agencies

Think of SEO like this, then: they’re like an ad agency that waltzes in, pushes your brand to its maximum (we’d call this optimization online), and then goes out and places your ads exactly where they are seen by relevant consumers (something that wasn’t really possible before the advent of Google), and gets proper word-of-mouth going around your product, which then gets more stories written about it in the local newspaper (equivalent to organic search).

Starting to see how this all works? SEO is a niche absolutely overflowing with jargon because that’s the nature of the beast, but then again, ad agencies are awash in jargon too. You only have to brush up on the basics and find a good SEO company, and you’ll understand how much better your online presence can be.

Why SEO Can’t Be Left to an Amateur

Think of an SEO like a nice, modern branding agency doing much more specific work in a market that’s still finding its contours. Many of the old-fashioned practices can still be put to some use, but as the market is altering with breakneck speed when it comes to where people get their content and find business online, SEO is a subject of the utmost importance if you’re going to take full advantage of every business opportunity available to you online.

Paying for clicks can be an outstanding source of instant revenue for your internet business. Or, when incorrectly implemented, paid online advertising is a perfect way to burn money like a giant stack of dried up Christmas trees on fire. When you are after broad traffic like seo it is vital to remember that more specific phrases like florida website marketing will convert into profits at a much higher rate and be far less expensive. If you have experimented with paid online marketing and have had less than total success, the cause can only be one of two reasons.

The first is that your site is not translating your internet traffic effectively into sales or the second possibility is that errors were made in key phrase research, ad copy, and/or ad location. There are lots of methods that can be used with search engine marketing that cost very little yet bring thousands of eyeballs to your site and business. Displaying advertisements for very specific targeted key words is wildly profitable. In fact, it is these long tail key phrases that produce the most lucrative return on your ad spends.

For example, a local car dealer in Gainesville Florida, is much better off buying the more targeted phrases that are the most likely to actually end up in a car sale. Phrases such as used cars gainesville fl will convert that traffic into actual auto sales at a far faster pace than the far more expensive and broader terms  like “cars” or “trucks.”

Do you recall the Christmas trees on fire? Yup, that’s your money when you’re advertising with the broader keywords. It is impractical to try to convert such broad online traffic at resonable rates as these are the most steeply priced words you can buy.

With the correct strategy and the right words, your pay per click campaign turns your pennies into gold. When your marketing campaign is targeting your best keywords and phrases with persuasive ads, the more you spend the more you make. It is at this time that you have to put into effect self restraint. When you are packing your mattress from the long tail keywords you naturally want to go after the broader ones. Stay away. Those wide terms are nothing more than your personal Christmas tree on fire.

The investment that search engine optimization requires extends indefinitely even after the site design project and the initial SEO are complete. In order to understand SEO pricing we need to underline the fact that the very SEO process in itself is very advantageous, and it is supposed that the traffic a well-indexed page generates will pay for itself. In fact SEO was increased with such a purpose in mind: increase leads and sales, and therefore, generate more money!

There are some elements that influence SEO pricing, and the first on the list is the amount of work necessary to optimize the web page. The aspect is directly connected with the complexity and the size of the site. Companies and agencies that offer SEO services often promote a free site analysis on the basis of which the SEO quote is created. Such an analytical investigation will tell you about the level of competitiveness, the problems and the changes required.

Then, for SEO pricing, a business owner should discuss the customization, the goals and the budget in the first place. Sometimes, less expensive solutions are suggested together with the money-wisest procedure for the implementation. Further on, the SEO pricing for small businesses which still covers initial setup and monthly fee, is more advantageous than for the packages for larger corporations.

The optimization campaign requires lots of steps, and SEO pricing can be kept under control when you know exactly what needs to be done next. Thus, first of all, the SEO company will start with the analyses of the industry and of the competition. Next come the keyword research and the key-phrase selection, followed by the phrases implementation. Then, the web masters will continue withbuilding of links and their submission to search engines and directories. At the end of this final stage, the site will only need constant monitoring and periodical reporting to the owner.

To give some general figures of where SEO pricing can range, we should begin by saying that the entire optimization process could cost you somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000 depending on how tough the competition is and how complex the site you need to optimize. Beware of too low quotes since these are generally practiced by people with little experience in the field, who may not perform the best of jobs for your site. Ultimately, the client has the final word!

About Us

Real Easy SEO provides search engine marketing services to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Visit our website for seo information, seo tools, and to buy seo services.

If you operate a small business with one to ten employees that caters to mostly local customers, then you should have a web presence!

More and more, your prospective clients are forsaking those cumbersome Yellow Pages print books for Google and other online search engines. It is simple and quick to research “Internet Marketing Service Charlottesville Virginia”. If you don’t locate the service you’re searching for in the city of Charlottesville, you are able to very simply broaden your search to “Internet Marketing Services Waynesboro Virginia” or even “Internet Marketing Services Central Virginia”. (See if you can widen your search like that while your “fingers do the walking”!)

Online Marketing For Local Businesses

If your local business does not use the web to promote itself, keep in contact with its customers, extend its reach, and take your competitions clients, you can believe that your competition will do it to you… and it will happen in the very near future.

For many small businesses, shifting from traditional OFFline marketing to the ONline world is like pulling teeth. Quite a few brick and mortar businesses hold on to “the way it’s always been” and turn away from online marketing.

How should you shift your company from “the way it’s always been done” to an internet marketing mind set?

Moving Your OFFline Business ONline…

Internet marketing doesn’t always need a web site. Email marketing by itself can make a big difference.

For a local brick and mortar company to succeed with a promotional campaign on the net would probably necessitate the dedication (and salary) of a full time employee. Establishing a simple direct-response web page or two, acquiring a keyword rich domain name, search engine marketing, email campaigns, article marketing, and other forms of internet promotion are time consuming chores. Once the web site or email opt-in methods are set up, promotion is the primary task. Nonetheless, if it isn’t carried on on a daily basis, it won’t generate the wanted results.

An internet site is great, but it’s easily forgotten unless it is promoted continuously and kept up regularly.

Employing a qualified external internet marketing service is a realistic solution for local businesses who would like to to add a web presence to their promotion, but who don’t want the added work.

All in all, bridging the offline/online gap shouldn’t be looked upon as big hurdle. There are services — right in your own locality — that will assist. Here’s a idea…  Why not Google “Internet Marketing Yourtown Yourstate” or “Online Marketing For Local Businesses Yourtown Yourstate” and see what you come up with? It’s the smart way to do business today!