SEO - Search Engine Optimization

So you're looking for a great SEO company to rank your website among the best in your category or industry? Choosing the right company can make all the difference between getting thousands of hits or millions of hits. It's important, therefore, that proper care be exercised when evaluating competing offerings.

Here are four key considerations when choosing the best SEO company for your business.

1. Check the page ranking of the SEO company's website. If the SEO company can't even rank its own website highly, why should you believe that the company can rank your site highly? A good SEO company should have a page rank of at least 4. We like to use a Firefox add-on called Search Status, which gives us a nice little view of every page rank right in our browser.

2. Avoid companies that are just "submission engines". A good SEO company will do a lot more than simply submit your website, even if properly categorized, to the various search engines. That is something that you can do yourself, for free.

Because competition is the name of the game for the search engines, you need to do everything possible to engage and entice your website visitors. You need to pay attention to what your competition is doing right, as well as what they are doing wrong.  You can learn from your competition's success and put some of their ideas to work in your internet marketing campaign.  

You only have a small window of opportunity to grab your visitor's attention, make them feel positive about your company and create a customer.  That's a pretty tall order for the first 5 seconds of your initial meeting.  This is what we need to accomplish if you not only want to gain a new customer, but also give them a reason to tell their friends about what they have found on your website.

If you can implement these three key strategies in your search of that coveted page one search engine ranking, you will remain competitive, even if their SEO budget is much larger than yours.

Never Boring

Keeping with our theme of the Future of SEO, Google's Matt Cutts has provided us another informative update of what we can expect to see from Google's WebSpam team over the next few months. Much of this will have a direct impact on webmasters and the search engine optimization community. In a seven-minute "Webmaster Help" video, Cutts explains what their team has planned for the coming months, and what it all means for webmasters. It involves the Penguin update, the Panda update, advertorials, hacked sites, link spam, and a lot more.

My favorite line in the whole video is at about 4:20 when he states, "If you've been hanging out on a lot black hat forums and trading different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff then it might be a more eventful summer for you." :) It looks like the summer is going to be a bumpy ride regardless as I do not recall Google releasing information like this prior to an update. Maybe I am wrong but it seems like there are some BIG changes coming and we will be hearing much more about it in the near future. Of course Google still stands by their consistent recommendations for ranking well:

Human beings are innately social creatures.  We feel better when we eat together, laugh together, and converse together.  When we have a problem, need advice, or want a recommendation, historically, we’ve always turned to people in our social circle— friends, coworkers, family— for the solution.  The internet has, of course, changed the way our social species socializes.  Now, when faced with a question whose answer is not immediately known, it’s not uncommon to hear someone respond with, “Google it,” or, “Ask the internet,” as if the web is our human pal in the next room.  But that’s not so far off from the truth.  When we want to find a good restaurant nearby, figure out how to install a low-flow showerhead, or find the most tactful method of breaking a heart, we turn to our new best friend: the int ernet.  Or, more specifically, a search engine.  But our friend the search engine is changing, and it’s mostly because we, as a species, are pretty much staying the same.

Google announced a new Tag Assistant Chrome Extension last month and we had a chance to install and test it out recently. The new extension will help to verify that you have setup your tracking properly on your website and other online properties. 

According to the Google Analytics blog, " A new Chrome Extension created by engineers here at Google hopes to make troubleshooting tag installs much easier. Tag Assistant aims to highlight errors, warnings, and provide useful suggestions for Google's most widely adopted tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Adwords Conversion Tracking, the new Remarketing Tag, Trusted Stores and Floodlight. "

Here is a fantastic guide to setting to understanding Google Analytics for small businesses.

If you are not using Google Analytics on your website or even worse, do not know what Google Analytics is, then this guide may be a little advanced for you and you should definitely contact us to setup a Google Analytics account for your website. Setting up the account properly is relatively straight forward. Once you start capturing the data (first nuggets will start appearing in 24 hours) the fun really starts.

Accroding to mashable.com, Google has launched a major new initiative to influence search results.

Starting May 17, 2012, a vast portion of Google Search results will work with you to intuit what you really meant by that search entry. Type in an ambiguous query like “Kings” (which could mean royalty, a sports team or a now-cancelled TV show), and a new window will appear on the right side of your result literally asking you which entity you meant. Click on one of those options and your results will be filtered for that search entity.

To understand the gravity of this change, you need to know about the fundamental changes going on behind the scenes at Google Search. Google is switching from simple keyword recognition to the identification of entities, nodes and relationships. In this world, “New York” is not simply the combination of two keywords that can be recognized. It’s understood by Google as a state in the U.S. surrounded by other states, the Atlantic Ocean and with a whole bunch of other, relevant attributes.

Google announced this week that they will be rolling out more algorithm updates targeting Black Hat SEO and webspammers. You know all those SEO companies that promise #1 rankings and don't have a concern for the risk of getting your website banned from Google's index or demoting its' value to obscurity. Essentially they are looking for individuals and companies that are blatantly attempting to manipulate the Search Engine Ranking Results using whatever means possible. These techniques go against google's recommended webmaster guidelines and are considered Black Hat SEO. There are a couple fine example in their blog post.

Google believes that this algorithm change will only affects about 3% of queries in English. So it should not have a major impact on your results (if you are not doing anything against their guidelines). However, the complexity behind all of this is huge and makes performing SEO that much more difficult and risky.

A good portion of any quality SEO program will involve keyword research. Keyword (or more appropriately, key phrase) research is an ongoing effort and not just a one-time setup task. Every month we look for new keyphrase opportunities for our clients. We also perform this task for our own web properties and this is usually reserved for the weekends (or in this particular case, Sunday afternoon).

As we were researching opportunities today, we came across a nicely positioned phrase with a fair amount of traffic and surprisingly moderate competitiveness. We also noted that we currently did not rank for this phrase. This wasn't of grave concern at the moment because we had not targeted this particular phrase and we had not yet made any efforts to rank for it.

However, when doing a Google search and looking at the results, something quickly caught my eye.

We have been saying it for years...

Research and tactics used in Organic SEO can apply, somewhat, to your PPC campaign research and tactics. And vice-a-versa. However the keyword has always been "somewhat".

Today, more than ever, this is true and for those companies and organizations that are utilizing the web to its fullest possiblities for marketing will realize how to take advantage of these crossovers.

The most obvious of these symbiotic channels is Research. While researching key phrases for your campaigns, be it PPC or Natural SEO, you discover information about the key phrases. While some of this may only apply to one campaign or the other, certain elements of your research will assist with both. For example if a key phrase is highly competitive, you may decide to skip it for Organic SEO because of the cost and effort to compete naturally (it may be out of your budget), but meanwhile for a PPC campaign, you can decide to compete with the understanding of a higher cost-per-click for the particular phrase.