Search Engine Optimization

I have gotten several phone calls lately from perspective clients that have a common theme: “I use to dominate in the Google…but my traffic is down…my results aren’t the same…” Basically the caller is very concerned because they were once getting GREAT results and now… well not so good.

What happens after the potential customer dials your number? A phone call may be considered a conversion from my standpoint, but if the way the phone is answered turns the perspective customer off, then all previous effort has gone for naught.

Just when we are still recovering from Panda changes, Google announces a change in search. Per its latest webmaster blog:

Unfortunately, we are seeing trends where videos are posted on that have zero value to the visitor. One example is the “template” video where you can add titles and some phrases to create a video that has drumming, movement, flashing stock images but really no entertainment nor informational value to the viewer

When creating a new site, the site structure can be of some benefit for ranking.

Have you given your site one of these SEO scoring tests? Or has a sales person contacted you about your poor SEO score and wants to help you improve it. There are many of these “tests” that measure a number of different attributes about your website and most of them come up with some comparative score.

Clearly things have changed and getting quality links via article writing will be more difficult. Does this mean that article marketing should be abandoned as an SEO technique? No, but it does mean that this strategy should be revisited

Give any SEO sales person the chance and he or she he will find dozens (if not hundreds) of issues with your existing website. Quite frankly many of the issues are minor and may not even affect your sites rankings.

SEO is is graded on a curve. There is not a universal standard benchmark that you have to exceed; you just have to beat your competition. That is why analyzing your competitive situation is so critical if you are going to be successful in getting your site ranked.

Search engines like sites that have changing content and sites that are adding content. Here are some ideas for keeping your site content fresh.

Google is not perfect. Google strongly prefers refining or changing its ranking algorithms to find the perpetrators as opposed to manually reviewing sites. This is understandable because there are billions of web pages out there and Google could not afford to hire 100s of thousands of people to do that police work, but a computer program has no judgement for exceptions or feelings for its consequences.

There is no question that getting quality links from authoritative sites will help your site rankings. In this day and age, it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible to get quality links by a traditional email request. Many SEO companies and link building services engage in “buying links”.

The Internet landscape has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. What has not changed is that internet use continues to increase. The following are some elements that your business should strongly consider in 2011.

As most people are aware, quality incoming links are valuable in boosting your sites rankings. There are a large variety of methods and sources for link building. One of my favorite sources is optimized press releases.

Google just started showing a preview icon next to its organic search results. This feature was introduced the week of November 8th. When the listings show, it appears that one has to click on the icon once to see the preview, but after that, one can just mouse over the other icons.

Last week Google introduced Google Instant, a remarkable technology advancement in searching. Now when you are on google.com and start typing in searches, Google will predict what you are searching for as you type it. Additionally, Google shows the results as you type. You can adapt your searching on the fly until you see the results that match your searches.

There are lots of good reasons to revamp your website, make sure that you don't destroy your search engine rankings in the process.

Publishing well written and informative articles on other websites can be a tremendous boost to your website rankings.

If all your visitors do when they come to your landing page are frown and leave, then your SEO efforts are totally wasted.

SEO is like a race, your site is competing against other sites to achieve (or keep) top rankings. Some Webmasters seem to think that they are in a short sprint, so they try to use short cuts and constant tweaking to try to improve position.

If you read all the SEO blogs, you will get lots of ideas on how to improve your rankings. Many of these ideas are out of date and simply don’t work. Other items are things that some SEO specialists claim to work but there is a great deal of disagreement.

Many sites that I see have issues that hurt the sites chances of getting any rankings. These are top problems that I frequently encounter with websites:

Want to naturally generate deep links to your site? Who doesn’t? Here is the best piece of advice I can give you.

The truth is that even if you have #1 organic ranking in a search term, doing pay per click on that same search term will get you more traffic and more leads

Do search engines rank pdfs? Yes, provided that the pdf is actually converted text and not scanned. Optimizing a pdf for search engine ranking is similar to optimizing an html page

If you are looking to increase your traffic, finding keywords that your are getting traffic from, but don’t have top 10 ranking should be one of the first places to look.

A lot has been said about the Google “Mayday” Algorithm change that has the SEO world buzzing. Mind you Google makes at least one change every day to its algorithm, but this one appears to have had some significant impacts

Many Internet Marketers today are trying to help their clients use social media to take advantage of the “word of mouth” potential, there is a lot of emphasis on getting hooked up and connected on all the right social media. Web pages are beings submitted to hundreds of social media and book marking sites, and promoted through a variety of channels. But if engaging content is missing, then the results are going to be pretty disappointing

There are a lot of companies and freelancers that claim to do search engine optimization (SEO), and they may or may not be very good at it. But you may wonder where they got their knowledge and do they really know what they are doing.

Let’s start by asking, “Why hire an SEO specialist?” For most businesses the answer is “to make more money.” So an SEO specialist must make money for the customer, now and more in the future.