So you are looking for the “Best SEO Company” that would be in your area. Your first step would be to go to a search engine, like Google and search for Best SEO Company. You see the search results page, it has a bunch of listings, some stand out, others don’t. What most search engine users still don’t know is that some of the listings are showing up there naturally or organically (SEO) and some are showing up because an advertiser has an account that allows the account holder to bid on keywords that trigger an ad the advertiser developed to be displayed at the top or the right side of the search results page on Google (PPC). Other search engines have different display setups each of which benefits the highest bidder rather then the possible search result you were looking for.
When you choose the Best SEO Company, make sure you choose a company you found because they were doing SEO on their own site. How can they be the best if you didn’t find them under “Best SEO Company” for the organic search results. If they are paying to be there, then obviously they aren’t the “best”.
However do not let this deceive you in finding the Best SEO Company to work with, honestly the way search engines work is by providing the best search results based on the words or keywords you choose to put into the search bar. As an SEO Company and Internet Marketing Consultant, my content within my sites do not emphasize Best SEO Company since its not really a good adjective to describe what we do and how we can help a website owner.
Some good ways to find a local company in your area search based on your area:
What are you looking for?

SEO Company
PPC Company
Website or Web Design Company
Hosting Company

Followed by the City Limits you are willing to work with, if location of the SEO company doesn’t matter to you, search for your desired needs without a location in mind. Make sure you research the company before making contact with them, see if they list their clients and check out their sites, search some of the terms that you think you would type in to find the site, if you find the site organically, then you know they are capable of ranking a website. If they don’t provide examples of their work, chances are they are not good at what they do, in fear of losing their clients to other SEO Companies looking to help with website traffic. Think about it like this, if they were giving the client proper care, the client should come up within search results for a given search term or its a work in progress. None the less they should have some projects that are producing some results, especially any clients of theirs that only service clients within a certain radius. Local target marketing is much much easier to accomplish then global search marketing.

FTP File Transfer Protocol

Many SEOs and clients performing their own SEO ask what they need in order to perform SEO. It is actually quite simple and you really don’t have to be that technical to implement on page and off page SEO.

First you need an FTP program, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications, which solves the problem of different end host configurations (i.e., Operating Systems, file names). FTP is used with user-based password authentication or with anonymous user access. (via wiki-pedia)

I know this sounds complicated but all it does is allow you to transfer files from your computer to your web hosting server where your website is located. It is just as simple if you were copying files from a flash drive and putting them somewhere on your hard drive. The programming aspect of the website should be done by someone with extensive html coding experience, but you can add meta information and the proper html snippets of code to your website via FTP by just using a notepad application or a web developer software.

What Do I Need to Learn SEO

First off if you don’t have a computer and cable/dsl or better don’t bother reading any further, there is no reason for you to learn seo! Now that you have a computer, Internet access and an FTP program you are ready to perform SEO or search engine optimization. Anyone can sign up for a Google Account which then will give you access to all of their internet applications like AdWords, Analytics and AdSense. From their you can get the snippets of code to install into the HTML of your website. From here you will copy the code they give you and paste it into the HTML where they verify the code to give you access to:

Google Analytics– Analytical data compiled real time for you to view statistics of website traffic

Google Webmaster Tools– More analytical data which allows you to track links, set crawl rate, see what keywords are triggering your ads and even what pages aren’t working

Google AdWords– This will allow you advertise on Google search results pages for a CPC (cost-per-click)

Google AdSense– Adding this snippet of code will allow Google to show ads from websites using AdWords to share the CPC with you that the advertiser pays

These are just a few of the Google programs that will allow you to track the success as well as earn income or advertise using the Google Network of advertisers that you can use simply by having FTP access and very little html knowledge.

What about Yahoo! Advertising?

At the end of July 2010, Yahoo! announced the first part of the merger agreement between Yahoo! and Bing which means that starting in the Fall of 2010, Yahoo! search results will now be showing paid advertising from Bing Advertisers. What does this mean for Yahoo! advertising? As the spots fill up on the first page search results how does Yahoo! turn a profit? Last July I wrote an article on the Yahoo Microsoft Merger and in the article was discussed that this would happen, but Yahoo! would receive up to 88% of the profit on the advertising as part of the agreement. This is more then likely hike up the pricing for Bing advertising since the advertisers will now have access to both second and third place search engines via one advertising portal. This is going to improve ROI for both companies and get almost 20% of the search share to the advertisers that still advertise with the companies. In my eyes, Yahoo! just signed up for Microsoft Ad Sense, their new source of revenue! So is this merger a competition of search share, or revenue share. Concentrate on the user and worry about their needs in what they are looking for. Improve the already terrible algorithm to incorporate relevant search results at the top of search results rather then spamming the page with the highest paying advertiser. Thats how people get scammed!

Google’s Take on the Yahoo Bing Merger

Google has over 80% of the search market, which means they get 80% of the customers that are looking for something on the Internet. That is higher chance at success and failure for advertisers with a limited online marketing budget. Regardless, they have 80% which doesn’t really make them scared, they have done this before with the acquisition of Ask.com advertising rights and search results and AOL.

Facebook Social Media Optimization

The newest form of the “original AOL Instant Messenger” and social media hotspot, Facebook is becoming more and more of a user interface for people everyday.

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Facebook Meta Description Via Homepage

What it doesn’t say is that you can play video games, click on sponsored ads, allow different programs and companies access to your photos and friends list for advertising reasons unless you click otherwise when the default is automatic to allow. You can also start groups and fan sites which other people see you approving or dissaproving. This can be a useful tool when starting a variety of different things, including but not limited to a new website. Starting a group can allow followers the ease of everyday specials, events and news articles without the annoyance of emails, snail mail or even the dreaded phone call.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click

Facebook has a PPC system in place that allows businesses to advertise for a cost per click, but when you think about it do you ever click the ads on the side of your facebook page that you are on? People do love the different social media games that use your friends list as a catalyst for using them in the new game, so if you have a web based game that you created, facebook is a great place to start.

Business’s ask all the time if I can work for them full time rather than just to do the SEO as a consultant. It is not really worth the budget to hire a full time employee for SEO unless you are an Internet Marketing Company and have many websites to look after. Hire the full package, an IT webmaster/seo/web designer, the perfect employee has extensive programming experience in different languages but you are going to pay an arm and a leg for such expertise since the employee should have his or her own company with that much knowledge.

Learning to do SEO on your own could very well be the factor that determines your website performance as a small to medium business owner. Spending the time learning the basics to some of the more advanced techniques will greatly improve your chances of being ranked higher in search engine results page. Even having some of the basic SEO techniques down pat while operating your website will effect the rankings of your site. Depending on your keyword setup that may be in a bad way or a good way and how you apply the basic SEO techniques you will see different results. Which is one of the key ingredients in a successful SEO campaign, trial and error. This is what Search and Rank was founded on, using the best practices in different fashions. 

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Benjamin Franklin

If you are doing the same thing over and over and you don’t see any positive changes, make some different adjustments and look for different results. So take the time to learn seo, even if you were to spend an hour a day, could make a huge difference, but like always if you don’t feel like putting in the time, let us handle it for you!

How Sweet It Is…

It has been awhile since the last post on the site. Not that there isn’t anything to write about, Search and Rank has been under going an overhaul of it’s existing website.

I want to say thank you to the regular viewers we have this year is already going to be a record year for us with over 21,000 New Visitors so far this year also bringing in a record 25 clients of SEO, Web Design and PPC clients so far this year.
If you haven’t already done so, submit your email information with your business name, industry and contact name(s) to be emailed with the Kick Off for 2010 June 1st Raffle for a Brand New Website Design with Full Initial SEO FREE!! Terms and Conditions Apply

Put in the Time, Get the Results

If you want to learn how to do SEO, you really need to read. If you don’t plan on putting in the hours, don’t bother starting the project. A lot of times new website owners will go full board for a month or two, then stop what they are doing because it gets mundane and extremely boring. Well that is what SEO is, repetitive, mundane tasks that all together make a great and effective SEO campaign.

Pay to Learn SEO?

I cannot discredit things I have never myself experienced, but I probably wouldn’t waste my money on school for SEO only because of the nature of search engines and their ever changing algorithms. If something is a moving target, how could you teach on the past? Only to show bad habits that have been stopped, but if you never knew a bad habit, the times you do something that may effect your rankings negatively only in multiple examples or exploiting, not when you do it accidental or you just don’t think its wrong. My number one rule in SEO is if you don’t feel right doing it, don’t do it.

Anyone can do SEO

Learn to do SEO from the courtesy of your own home and for free, but if you don’t feel like doing it yourself, hire someone, hire someone reputable and has had some success. If you want really good results, let us handle your SEO, 33% of your revenue should be spent on advertising if you want to succeed. Internet marketing is taking over for all of marketing only because that is where the traffic is and that is where the traffic converts.

There was a post previously about long keyword phrases vs short keyword phrases and the differences and the pros and cons. Over time there has been patterns in my customer’s traffic showing that longer tail search queries are becoming more and more and people are staying on the site longer after the search.

Short Tail Search Query

When your website is envisioned on the web, you always have high expectations of what the website is going to accomplish. When placing your content on the site, you are thinking that you want to be indexed for one word search phrases and two word search phrases. When in essence the person performing the search is getting smarter and refining their search to find exactly what they want on the first search. Four, five and six word search phrases are becoming more common and providing more useful search results for the searcher thus two word search phrases are becoming obsolete and harder to rank for.

Long Tail Search Query

How do you tell what is a good search phrase is? Let the searcher tell you, check analytics regularly to see new search phrases that may have been used to find your site. Think of how you would search for your product or service if you had no idea other than what it was called. Many times search engine optimization specialists are told specific names of the product or services, so because they have no idea what they do or how they do it and go with what they are told. When come to find out, that product or service name given to the SEOS actually is only known amongst the specialists in the industry and the searcher doesn’t use the terminology and searches for something completely different not listed in the content on the site. This will result in your site not being under a search phrase that has a lot better chance of a conversion due to the specific nature in the long tail search query and the jargon is down to the consumers level increasing accuracy in what they are looking for and how well you provide the content they are looking for.

Every business comes to a crossroads where their website isn’t providing the web traffic and sales leads they believe their website is capable of providing. Just like every other aspect of business there are professionals that can provide the services at a much lower cost that of which an actual staffed employee can provide.

Freelance SEO Specialist

Obtaining the services of a freelance SEO has it’s pro’s and con’s and this little list should provide adequate information on what your choices really are.

A freelance SEO may not have all the same qualifications as a reputable Internet Marketing Company or the same work experience with various business industries. With a reputable Internet Marketing Company you may not get the same type of attention you would from a freelance SEO. In this comparison, you could get a lot more bang for your buck by hiring someone that is willing to work for you rather than working for their company. You may hire a big company, but only 1 or 2 people will be doing the work on the website for that company. Hiring a freelance SEO will allow you to get that 1 person to work on your site with no one else to report to allowing you to possibly get some small additions for no additional cost.

Internal SEO Specialist

Instead of hiring a company to take care of all of your internet marketing needs, you may venture into hiring someone with SEO/Internet Marketing experience and bringing them on your staff full time. This just like anything else has it’s pro’s and con’s, bringing on someone full time will ultimately bring more cost to your company. Providing insurance, payments into unemployment and normal full time staff requirements. Hiring may be a pain because you can’t find the right employee for the job, the person with the most experience or possibly even a proven track record of success. Also if you were to hire someone full time to help with your internet marketing they may have no idea what they are doing with SEO and provide you with some bad choices that ultimately hurt your search engine rankings and negatively impact your marketing campaign.

Whether or not you are looking to permanently improve your search engine rankings for your website (most people are looking for permanent) you make your choices carefully just like any other business decision. Remember there isn’t any matriculated programs in schools to teach SEO due to the constant changes in search engine algorithms, so its constantly a moving target.

One of the most widely used forms of paying an SEO or Internet Marketing Specialist, is a small fee for preliminary work being done to the site (mainly to protect the SEO) and a commission for sales on the website is a way to track success and to put value to the work of the SEO.

Magento SMS Messaging Plug-in

The Magento eCommerce CMS platform, is not only open source allowing you to tweak the programming, change the look and feel, get free updates from the forums and get profit building plug-ins from Magento masters.

Magento SMS Plugin Now Offered

Evangelizmo “provides messaging solutions for open source e-commerce platforms. We strive to make messaging simple, so that you can focus on making your business grow.” This enables you to send out text messages to your clients or potential clients at a low cost per text. Instead of sending out fliers in the mail, or phone calls for reminders for an order or for a service call. You can minimize your cost and time by sending out blast messages to multiple people in one single message. Pick what type of customer you want to send to by defining the demographics before sending out the messages by filtering out those you want to exclude.

How Can SMS Messaging Increase Profits?

SMS messaging can increase your profits on a lot of different levels. As any business that runs promotions, the cost for sending out text messages can replace anything besides emails. If you aren’t using anything besides emails, you probably aren’t doing well unless you started out some other way. Multiple marketing can increase your exposure thus increasing the amount of people you show your product or service and increasing your chances for a sale.

A dry cleaner could even ask for an additional dollar per dry cleaning order to alert the customer that the dry cleaning is finished. Get 10 people a day, do the math… An insurance agent can put the cost of the plug-in in the insurance premium to alert the policyholder of a possible lapse in coverage to protect against the “Oh I didn’t receive that notice in the mail, or my phone didn’t have reception.” Real estate agents can alert potential buyers of a new house that has become available or that an offer has been made. If the agent is dealing with multiple buyers for one house, the buyers could receive notification of a new bid or the possible new place with same standards.

The list goes on and on and if you don’t think so, how bout an optician that asks “Sir/Madam, would you like to be notified when your glasses are finished, that way if you are still in the area you don’t have to be just arriving back at your house and listen to your answering machine tell you that your glasses will be done? It is only $1 dollar extra for 2 text alerts.” Now you just got an extra dollar and a way to remind that person to come in for an exam to check up on the prescription.

As a developer that sells services, this would be a great addition to any arsenal of CMS that you may have. Evangelizmo has developer abilities to allow you to resell the service and not have to worry about any of the integration or service issues, that all lays on Evangelizmo.

Google AdWords Campaigns

When choosing to advertise your website on Google AdWords you need to first start out with a campaign. A campaign is a complete advertising group or advertising campaign full of ad groups, keywords and ads. Each campaign you create on Google AdWords has it’s own settings which can include:

• Geo-targets of countries, states and cities
• Demographics from age, sex, gender, income etc.
• Day-Parting or showing your ads at or within specific times
• Languages the ads appear in
• Max CPC (cost-per-click) across the entire campaign
• Choose which networks

1. Content Network, places you on relevant websites participating in the Google AdSense program
2. Google Search, for Google and their search partners
3. Mobile Devices

• Daily Budget
• Scheduling
• Position Preference
• Ad Rotation
• Ad Frequency

These settings for your campaign can be changed or modified at any time and over time you will probably change these settings multiple times.

Google AdWords Ad Groups

After you create the Google Ad Campaign, you are then prompted to make an Ad Group. The ad group is what consists of the keywords and the ads associated with those keywords. From here you can choose your keywords from a broad sense to an exact sense. The difference between broad match and exact match is simple.

Broad Keyword Match is any keyword search performed containing that particular word or words in the search. If you bid on the keyword “steak” any search performed with that word in it will show your ad as long as you meet the min. bid requirements and have enough of a budget and have met the Google Advertising Policy standards.

Exact Keyword Match is any keyword search performed with only the keyword or keyword phrase in the exact order you selected. If you bid on the keyword “buy steaks” your ad will appear when someone searches “buy steaks” onlyas long as you meet the min. bid requirements and have enough of a budget and have met the Google Advertising Policy standards., if they type “steaks buy” your ad will NOT appear.

Keyword Phrase Match is any keyword search performed with the keywords you selected only in any order.

During your SEO campaign set up you come to a point where you brainstorm on keywords to target giving search engines something to rank you for. Effective keyword research will allow you to find that broad search terms like “SEO” will receive more traffic due to the broad range of phrases that can be made using that one word. A long tail search phrase like “Learn How To Do SEO” which is more specific in what the searcher was looking for.
The challenge of broad search terms in any SEO campaigns is the amount of competition you will have trying to target the same term. Using long tail search phrases you will find a lot less competition and you will find a higher conversion rate on the searches that do find you. Keep in consideration Google and most search engines do not recognize certain words as search query words. “?” “if” “for” “a” are examples of words and grammar that they don’t recognize.
If your website has a product or service to offer chances are you can set your website with keywords getting more specific as a searcher clicks deeper into the site. On your home page should contain the most used search terms and the broadest of all the terms brainstormed by you.

What to look for in a CMS (content management system)

1. Be able to optimize page titles, meta-description, meta-keywords and text content on each and every page to obtain unique pages.

2. Be able to optimize each and every image (alt attributes).

3. Have a page for conversions (static “thank you” page for purchases) need to install tracking code on each conversion page.

4. Make sure pictures and images are smaller, the larger the page the slower the load time and the lower the rankings because of it.

5. Navigation rollover scripts, other JavaScript-based code, and all CSS scripts should be taken out of the code of each page and put into external files to which each page of the site is referenced. Doing this has several advantages, but one of the most beneficial is that any site’s keywords and content all move up in the code, communicating their importance to the search engines and boosting the site’s relevancy ratings. In other words, this can boost search engine rankings by improving the code to text ratio of the page. This is a simple and relatively inexpensive thing to do, depending on the total number of pages in the site.

* Important *

o It can take a while for the search engines to index a site and the rankings to change for that site. For some search engines, the lag time between the work and seeing results can be as long as six months. Clients need to be patient and have realistic expectations (from sales) regarding the time frame involved with organic (the natural, non paid results) search engine rankings. If the business need for increased search engine prominence is greater than can be met with optimization alone, I recommend adding a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to the marketing campaign mix to bridge the time. PPC campaigns such as Google’s AdWords can be set up in a matter of a few hours, allowing for immediate results.

Content Piece of the Puzzle (the design)

You get better results if you design with optimization in mind from the beginning. If you incorporate optimization into the very construction of your website, it is much more seamless and genuine than if you build your site and then try to tweak it for optimization. The most search engine friendly sites are straightforward sites built from basic, non-frame, non-Flash, HTML documents. Your site should also use basic HTML links (not links in dropdown flash menus or hidden in fancy animations) as these are most easily followed and indexed by search engines.

First, a site loaded with high-quality content of interest to site users will give them a reason to stay and a reason to come back. After all, the reason they came to the site was to find information. Second, you will receive the added benefit of serving up exactly what the search engines want – content. Search engines will have more information to store about the businesses and products; that information will translate directly into the ranking they give the site for related keyword phrases.

o Each page should contain about 200 words of text content increasing relevancy ratings and thus making optimization of the pages easier to monetize increasing the search engine rankings.

Prominence of Targeted Keyword Phrases – It is not enough to have your keyword phrase(s) somewhere on the web page, the placement and prominence given to them also affects your search engine placement. For example, leading off the site’s first paragraph with your keyword phrase gives it more weight than burying it half way down the page in the middle of a paragraph. Also, using larger font sizes and bolding the text can emphasize its importance and positively affect the page’s ranking for that phrase.

Using keyword phrase(s) in the <h> tags of the site will also improve search engine rankings. Specific use of just one type of header will not be as effective as using multiple <h> tags on the page.

Alright you have your site, you performed your SEO plan to the best of your ability, how do you track the success?  Reading earlier you may have learned how to use Google Webmaster Tools and installed them on your site.  Now you may want to get more into the meat and potatoes of tracking SEO success.  Google Analytics is the easiest and most affordable way to track your results (its free!).

All you need is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access and you can install a simple code and let the tracking begin.  Install the code between the <body> and <body/> tags in your site.  If you have no clue what you are doing you may want to contact your hosting provider to give them the code that google analytics provides to you after you sign up your site.  Just send them an email that you want them to add it to all the pages of your active site, 24 hours later you will have some data and going forward you will be able to track each visitor to your site.  You can track, IP, city, network, browser type and more!  You can even track when a searcher lands on your site and proceeds to a checkout or maybe even a contact form.  You can track your month to month results to show where you were last month and where you are today.  See how many visits you got today, yesterday, last week or last month.  Look to see what is your most popular page, what page gets the most hits, or how many pages the avg. site visitor views before leaving the site.

You can use Analytics to really gauge how well your SEO campaign is doing, or your PPC program.  Bounce rate is a very important statistic of your site.  This tells you how effective the web pages in your site are for what they are being found under.  Meaning if someone was to search for blue widgets, and found your green widgets page, chances are they are going to leave the page to find a blue widget, giving you a bounce. More to come with bounce rates and how to use Google Analytics.