Search and Rank

Affordable SEO Services

will — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:21:52 +0000

When you use Google to search for something, whether it’s an article about something you heard about, or searching for a song that you heard on the radio, if you take the “keywords” for your search and plug them into Google’s search bar. Each keyword you add or take away is going to change your search result, the extent of the change, depends on the value of the keyword that is used for the search algorithm. You search for a “pizzeria” you will get a local business result plus a variety of website pages associated with “pizzeria“. When you want to have pizza, you usually search for pizza, or pizzeria, or maybe even the food you are hungry for, like chicken wings, you wouldn’t type in “Affordable Pizza” because let’s be honest when it’s affordable it’s barely edible.

Why Search for Affordable SEO

If you are finding a company website’s homepage when you are searching for “Affordable SEO” that doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to get the greatest value. Search and Rank offers affordable SEO however we don’t rank for “Affordable SEO” mainly because in SEO terms we don’t want to focus on it. We don’t want content surrounding Affordable SEO since we are providing SEO for free it doesn’t get much more affordable. You can only determine if something is affordable, if I search for “Affordable Porche” it doesn’t mean we will find something that we can afford. It’s the same as SEO, if you want affordable SEO you will get 2nd rate service for your money. There is a lot of time involved in SEO, it’s not something you can do once and let it take its course. Time is money, if you spend $500/month on something that should be a few hours every other day, the seo is making a good hourly wage, will spend more time then is expected since he is being paid well and how many employees can you find for $500 a month. If you pay less then that, expect less work and less attention. Don’t forget, the SEO knows, if he/she knows SEO…You don’t know since you don’t know SEO…

Local Edge or Talking Phone Book or Yellow Pages

will — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:13:31 +0000

One of the top questions that I get from local business owners is in reference to the Local Phone Book Directory on whether or not to advertise in it. To be completely honest I haven’t used a phone book to find a business in many many years, pretty much since the creation of Google. So do many of my friends and family, the use of a paper phone book is pretty much obsolete with print publications not to far behind. Technology has pushed most primitive forms of communication out of the way with less and less people using snail mail and using much more email.
As times change so should businesses, but in order to develop a great brand you need to keep up with times as do the consumers you so seek. As a resident of WNY I am presented with the ever not-so popular Yellow Pages; err I mean The Talking Phone Book; I mean Local Edge, heck with it I will just use Google.com
How can you trust something if you use multiple names? When weighing your options on an already limited online budget (that is increasing rapidly) you have to be careful on where you spend your marketing dollars to make sure you reach the right audience you are seeking. Notice in a phone book that there is hardly any web development companies or web design companies in the phone book for these reasons. We just don’t use them, personally I use them as a call list to target local businesses that are in desperate need of an overhaul to their marketing plans. Using good SEO techniques you should be able to achieve high rankings without even breaking a sweat, giving you a chance at the business you are missing out on because you spent your budget on Yellow Pages.
For the businesses that still lack an online presence using a yellow page directory seems to be the only logical solution for your marketing plan aside from mailers and flyers or other print publications maybe even a tv or radio commercial. You could be listed within Google and be found by potential customers without a website.
email us to find out how.

Learn SEO | Best SEO Company | How to find the Best

will — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:54:50 +0000

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.

Learn SEO | Link Building Internal and External

will — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:52:22 +0000

If you want to learn SEO and expect to see immediate results you might want to check out some SEO Basics where you will learn SEO from the start.

Linking your site can produce very positive results or negative depending on how your link structure is set up. Link structure starts with the way your own website’s navigation is set, if you linked your site correctly, you will be able to get to any one page of your site with 1-click. From earlier articles on SEO Basics | Web Design, you will learn SEO on a web design level in where you have your main navigation, company information and so-on. Actual positioning of the navigation menu and what type of menu navigation makes a difference for the search engine crawlers and the people you are targeting that search for you. The search engine spiders and crawlers will follow all links, but will only associate links with text, nothing else. So make sure that your navigation “buttons” if any, have actual html text in them to alert the search engine spiders that “this link” is associated with “a service” or “a product”. People will associate links with what is presented to them, but if you don’t present it properly to the search engines they will never see it to click on it anyway. Text navigation menus help a lot when trying to apply SEO tactics to your website, a lot more then using just plain images with tags. If you use proper navigation, search engines see all your pages and so do the searchers.

Learn SEO | Linking Back to Your Website

After you have installed the snippet of code for Google Webmaster Tools, you will now be able to track incoming links to your site. Other websites, usually forums, blogs, facebook and other social media will have a link on their site going to yours just as if you were to link to another site relevant to the content on your website. You may start to get requests from other webmasters requesting to add a link on your site. Do this only if the content is relevant to the content on your site and the website or company appears to be a reputable company. If the content of the site you are linking to is questionable you may lose rankings for being associated with a “harmful website”, so be careful who you link with when linking. If they are linking to you, there is nothing you can do and you shouldn’t be penalized for this since you can’t control the content on a website other than yours.

Learn SEO | Linking Spam

If you were to add a bunch of links in a short period of time, it is evaluated for a spam check and I am not talking about the stuff in a can (although I guess it is equally as bad) this may negatively effect your linking thus having a negative impact on your SEO campaign. If you learn SEO properly, you can identify between the two and keep your link strategy spam free.

What do you need to learn SEO?

will — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:36:43 +0000

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.

Yahoo Turns on Bing AdSense | Phase One of the Merger Begins

will — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:07:32 +0000

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.

Submit URL to Search Engines and Directories

will — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:35:04 +0000

I must get about 10 emails a week from various companies telling me that for a nominal fee they can submit my URL for indexing to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing along with hundreds of other directories and search engines. What most website owners do not know when they get these emails, is that they can easily submit their URL to these Search Engines free of charge. Another thing is if 75% + of the search share is Google, 8%+ for Yahoo, and pretty much the same for Bing sitting at about 8% what else is there to submit to? Most of the smaller search engines get their search results from Google, Yahoo or Bing anyway.

Free URL Submission to Google

So I watched a video once where Matt Cutts was giving a lecture on proper setup of web pages to be indexed properly in Google. Matt Cutts himself gets these emails to submit his URL to Google for 29.99 or 99.99 for a bunch of other search engines.

A website URL submission is just a faster way to get you listed in Google as if you were to sit back and wait for Google to find it and index it on it’s own. By no means does this mean that immediately after your URL submission to Google you will start appearing at the top of search results, or that you will even be listed in Google at all let alone at the top. It takes some time before your website is approved for submission maybe a day or so, then you may see yourself if you were to type in www.YourDomain.com in the Google search bar depending on the competition for your name or a variation of it.

Free URL Submission to Yahoo VS. Paid Inclusion

So Yahoo has 2 different types of URL submission. The first being the free submission to the search engine waiting your turn to be indexed, or Paid Inclusion which you can pay to be included right away with maybe even some prime real estate on higher search engines results pages. Either way, its a big waste of money, you are only being promoted to less then 10% of the search market share at ridiculous prices. I am not saying that advertising in Yahoo is bad, just paying to have it grace the search engine with it’s presence. I never personally submit my websites to Yahoo or Bing, they just find it on their own usually before I even see myself on Google after I submitted to Google.

So take responsibility and don’t waste your money on something that takes less then a minute.

Submit URL to Google

Submit URL to Yahoo

Submit URL to Bing

Facebook Advertising | PPC or Optimization

will — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:51:02 +0000

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.

Google Analytics Changes

will — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:38:01 +0000

Recently Google has been providing a little more information on Google Analytics, allowing you to drill down to find exact searches and how many clicks you are missing out on. There are a lot of requests for SearchandRank to decipher the unknown on Google Analytics. The best part about it, is that you can’t screw anything up while clicking around, the only thing you do is enlighten yourself and learn from your mistakes. When you really can’t make mistakes while accessing Google Analytics Dashboard, which is really where the bulk of the important information can be stored. You can really set up your dashboard to display the information you feel as the most important to you analysis of your website traffic using Google Analytics. One of the most important factors of SEO is tracking the data that is at your fingertips and making changes on the fly to improve your rankings and be ready to make any changes back if the changes negatively affect your rankings.

Submit your email address to SearchandRank and we will send you a Google Analytics “breakdown guide” at no cost, which is trademarked information and can’t be resold!

SEO Web Design

will — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:18:39 +0000

SEO or Web Design, You Must Have Both

SEO or Search Engine Optimization can be overlooked in the design of a website. Without proper planning these days, your newly designed website may not be search engine friendly and not provide you with the results you are looking for.

Proper Keyword Targeting

Without keyword research you shouldn’t even be this far in your website creation so at this point you should have the words you are targeting.

Your home page is going to be the most viewed page on your site if you are doing everything right. You want a lot of information (text information) on your home page, revolving around all the main keywords you have for your SEO campaign. This should not be any more then 7 if you want to have an effective SEO campaign. Keep in mind, you are going to need:

Links
Header tags
Page Title
Page Content
Images

All supporting the keywords you selected for your SEO campaign in order for those keywords to be effectively ranked. Once you target your market, use keywords associated with that market, then implement the keywords into the website on the home page and all corresponding pages within the site.

Design with SEO in Mind

Place your main header in the center of the page, give the user or website visitor something to look at, give the search engines a reason to believe you are the best result for the keywords used. If you are using a company or individual to code your website make sure they use text in their websites vs. using images for header tags. Some designers don’t use standard text for header tags only because they say it makes it look more like a document, however it is what the search engines look for in order to rank a web page. People are getting lazier and lazier and don’t like to scroll down, so have your most important information above the fold.