Quick and Clean SEO - Part 1

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a complex science, resulting in consultants that get away with charging thousands of dollars per month for just a few hours of consultation. The really good ones can charge tens of thousands per month and have no shortage of clients begging them for their help.

That some companies are willing to spend so much shows you just how important SEO is for an online business. A vital part of any internet marketer’s repertoire, properly managed SEO can get you listed at the top of every major search engine for the keywords of your choosing. For some keywords, being listed at the top can mean a difference of millions of dollars in revenue.

On the other hand, bad SEO can result in low rankings or even get you banned from the search engines. Getting blacklisted is enough to put some companies completely out of business.

Not everybody has the skills necessary to implement proper SEO. Good SEO means staying on top of things; getting to know industry insiders and constant vigilant testing of the search engines as you watch for changes in ranking algorithms.

Even for somebody that has the skills, running a business may take up all their time. So what is a busy business owner to do? The best solution is to hire somebody to do the work for you. While individual consultants charge a premium, you can often get similar results for a much lower cost from internet marketing firms such as OrangeSoda.

In the meantime, here are some quick, yet clean, SEO techniques that you can implement immediately to improve your search engine rankings.

Use Keywords in Headlines

Search engines figure that if something is in a headline, it must be important. Sub-headlines are also considered important, but to a lesser degree.

A headline is recognized as such with the following HTML headline tags:

Headline tags go all the way down to level six (H6) with H1 being the largest headline, and thus receiving the highest importance. If you want to optimize a page for the term “hiking boots”, then you should have that term between H1 tags.

If using a term in a sub-headline (H2, H3, and lower), then including those same keywords in a bulleted list immediately after will help give those keywords the same level of importance as keywords in a main (H1) headline.

In Part II of this article, we’ll discuss more easy SEO strategies.

What Can a Business Profile Do For Me?

You may have wondered, “What good is an online business profile going to do me?”

You might look at a business profile and see just a listing of your business name, contact information, and short description of the services you offer. Real simple, right? So why bother getting a business profile? Well, here are a few reasons:

And that’s just scratching the surface. Let’s look at a few of these points in greater detail, shall we?

It tells people who you are and what you do

A business profile is a useful tool to customers and other businesses alike. The media, customers, and other businesses all use business profiles to find and obtain contact information and confirm what it is that a particular company does.

It provides customers with an easy way to find you

The Internet is quickly replacing the yellow pages as the preferred method of finding information about local companies. Your profile page gives your customers a single webpage that they can bookmark and refer back to whenever they want to give you a call or refresh them on your location – either your physical location or website URL.

It creates a relevant inbound link to your website, improving its relevance with search engines

This is perhaps the #1 reason a business creates a profile. But as I’ve shown here, it’s far from the only good reason.

Furthermore, the additional exposure you receive as a result simply can’t be measured. Your profile could potentially be picked up by an investor looking to provide you with some extra capital, a potential business partner that could increase your revenues, or simply create a higher level of trust with potential customers.

Remember to keep all these things in mind when creating your business profile, and give it the same care you provide for your own website. Your profile is representing your company on the web. Put your best front on for it!

Link Building, Link Exchanges, and Ad Buys – What’s the Difference?

Part I: Link Exchanges

The word is out: having inbound links to your site is good. But what types of links are the best, and what is the difference between an ad buy, link exchange, and one-way link building?

Each linking method has its purpose. Which one you want to focus on depends largely on your end goal. Are you looking to simply get a quick increase in traffic, increase brand visibility, or improve your search engine rankings?

Link Exchanges

A link exchange is the practice of linking to another website in exchange for a link on that site to yours. For a time, this was a good way to increase your search engine rankings because search engines considered the number of links to your site as an important indicator of your site’s overall importance.

Webmasters would often create a links page where they would place their link exchange links, resulting many times in individual webpages containing hundreds, even thousands of links. The web also saw a propagation of “link farms” where a group of webpages all link to the other webpages within the group.

Link farms today are considered by most search engines to be a form of spam against search engine indexes. Spamming a search engine index in this manner often results in a site being penalized, lowering its search engine ranking or even getting black listed.

Link exchanges still have their place however. Two websites with complimentary services may agree to a link exchange where each site drives traffic to the other. When doing a link exchange, you always want to be wary that the number of outgoing links on any particular page does not get too high; otherwise a search engine may mistake your page for a link farm.

Link exchanges generally do not improve search engine ranking because search engines don’t consider a two-way link to be a good indicator of a site’s importance.

Part II: Ad Buys and Link Building

Ad Buys

An ad buy involves purchasing a link on a specific page, in a specific location. The advantage of this is that you have control over where and how your link appears. Placing links to your site from a website that a search engine considers to be important can give your site a boost in its search engine rankings.

Furthermore, having a link on a high-traffic site will result in referral traffic from that site.

Link Building

Link building is the process of placing one-way links to your site from other sites. Since search engines give a lot of weight to one-way links, this is a very effective method of increasing search engine rankings.

An understanding of link analysis is an important part of effective link building. Link analysis is what search engines do to determine the importance of a particular site in a particular category based on the links that point to it. The text contained around a link, as well as the text that is included as part of a link, are analyzed to determine this.

For example, the following text with a link will increase the target site’s importance for the keyphrase “green dog hair” slightly:

However, much more weight is given to a link that includes the keyphrase within the linking text:

The main purpose of link building is to create many one-way links with a specific keyphrase in the link, thereby increasing the target site’s search engine ranking. The more one-way inbound links there are, the more important a search engine will consider your site to be in a particular subject. If you have enough links, then the search engine will assume that you are an authority on the subject and rank your site accordingly.

Another part of link analysis, though to a much smaller extent than the number of links, is analyzing where the link is coming from. If a site that is considered to be an authority links to your site, then it is assumed that you have some authority on the matter as well. However, since there are usually so few sites that are considered to be authoritative, having a large number of inbound links is still considered far more important that the referring site’s authority.

The purpose of link building, then, is not to increase referral traffic from related websites (though this will usually happen as a side effect), but to increase your search engine ranking by showing them that you are an authority on a particular subject.

Managing Your Reputation Online: Part III – Controlling Your Name

A problem many companies run into with online reputation management are consumers that create their own websites to give bad reviews about their company, then begin to bid on their company name to show up in search engines under the sponsored results.

Some companies believe that there isn’t anything that can be done about this. After all, it’s a free country, right? Well, yes it is. However, freedom stops when it infringes on the freedoms of others. You have the freedom to protect how your name is used and prevent anybody from slandering you.

If somebody legitimately slanders you, then you have every right to ask that person to stop, and can even get a court order to enforce it or even file a lawsuit. Remember though that slander requires that false statements are being made. If a person is simply stating their opinion, then they are well within their rights.

However, if you trademark your company name it provides you with a little more protection and gives you a few more options. To start with, you can prevent anybody from bidding on your trademarked term in paid search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. If anybody tries, simply send them a cease and desist order. If it continues, then it’s time to call your lawyer.

The same holds true if anybody uses your name in a manner that isn’t covered under fair use laws. For example, comparative testing is an appropriate method of using a trademarked name. Truck commercials that compare horsepower, towing capacity, stopping distance, and so forth are considered comparative testing and therefore protected by fair use. Using a trademarked name for most other types of advertising would not be covered under fair use.

A trademark will not protect you from anybody starting a yourcompanynamesucks.com website. This has been challenged in court several times, and so far the law sides with the people who start the bad website. The best way to protect yourself from this kind of attack is to purchase the domain names yourself before an angry consumer is able to.
Be sure to purchase all variations (yourcompanysucks.com/net/org, yourcompany-sucks.com, etc.) Domain registrations are only a few dollars each these days, making it a worthwhile investment.

Watch for more tips on reputation management coming up next week!

The History of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Searching the Internet in the pre-World Wide Web days required downloading and installing programs which would then download and search directory listings from public FTP sites. It was all rather complex, and not for the non-geek. Which was fine since only geeks perused, or even knew of the existence of, the Internet in those days.

In the early 90’s, the World Wide Web was born and began to grow rapidly. Graphical Internet browsers were developed to make “surfing” the Web easy. But finding a webpage required that you knew its URL. Therefore, if you found a website you liked, having some method of keeping track of it was very helpful.

For this reason, browsers developed the bookmark, allowing you to save the location of a specific webpage, mapping the URL to a shortcut button within the browser. To revisit the webpage, you simply opened your bookmarks and clicked the appropriate shortcut link.

However, there still wasn’t any simple method of finding specific websites if you didn’t know the URL. In 1994, graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” in which they essentially published their bookmarks. Over time, it grew into a searchable directory.

Within a few months, the name was changed to “Yahoo!”. Yahoo! helped make the Internet more user friendly and updated search technology for the World Wide Web.

However, Yahoo! was just a directory. It wasn’t capable of searching anything that hadn’t been previously submitted to it. Also released in 1994 was what would become the first popular search engine as we understand them today. “WebCrawler” actively crawled the web, indexing websites automatically instead of waiting for somebody to manually submit them to a directory.

For the first time, Internet users could search a database containing virtually every website available on the World Wide Web. Internet users quickly realized the value of WebCrawler and it became one of the web’s most popular websites.

Copycats soon followed. Webmasters began to realize that getting listed in these new search engines was a way to get traffic with very little work. Thus was born a new science of marketing via search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM) as it is known today.

Early search engines were relatively simple, and easily manipulated. Search engine indexes quickly became overrun with websites utilizing “search engine spam.”
Internet users became increasingly frustrated with the search results being provided by search engines. Then in 2001, Google was discovered and quickly became the most popular search engine. The reason for Google’s popularity was its ability to provide highly relevant search results. Google had created a new way of indexing webpages that negated the spam tactics being used by many webmasters.

Although it wasn’t perfect, Google’s methodology was far better than what was currently available, and so many other search engines began to follow suit, changing their algorithms to provide more relevant results.

Google wasn’t infallible however, and webmasters quickly began discovering ways to trick Google as well.

This has resulted in a never-ending battle between search engines and webmasters. As the search engines change their algorithms, webmasters continually update their sites in attempts to gain or maintain search engine rankings.

Failing the ability to get ranked, webmasters found a new tool in 1998 called Goto.com. Goto.com was the first popular pay-per-click (PPC) service that allowed you get traffic by paying on a per-click basis. As PPC grew in popularity, paid ads began appearing on the popular search engines as “sponsored” results.

Internet marketing today has become a science, requiring highly educated and experienced Internet and search engine experts that continually monitor search traffic and keep up on the latest news. Companies desiring a strong Internet presence now have entire departments dedicated to Internet marketing. For smaller companies that don’t have the resources to fund an entire separate department for it, Internet marketing companies like OrangeSoda can provide those services at a much smaller cost.