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…

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

Earlier this month Microsoft released Bing.com, their awaited answer to Google and Yahoo. Live Search and MSN.com are no longer their search platform. Overall look of the search page itself is very similar to live.com, and they rotate daily (and you can go back to view the previous days background). Searching for videos is easier than before as the in page video blurb allows you to view a few seconds of the video before clicking on the link. This is to ensure you find what you are looking for on the first click without actually having to visit the site providing the video feeds.

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.

Searching the web is an art and a science. Understanding how people search is essential to tuning your website so they can find you, and knowing how to search effectively and quickly will help you get the best results from the web. Anyone new to computers or the Internet has surely found themselves staring at their web browser and wondering, “how do I find what I’m looking for?” If you yourself are web-savvy, you’ve doubtless been the recipient of questions from friends and family asking what to type into that mysterious search box. My dear ol’ mom has commented hundreds of times, “with 139,242 search results, how can I find anything at all?” I have to admit, to the un-initiated, those kind of numbers must seem daunting!

Finding the answers we seek, and the search results we need, is made much easier when we know the right questions to ask. This has always been true – any wise old sage or tasty fortune cookie will tell you that knowing what you want is an absolute prerequisite to actually getting it. When discussing web searches, this almost seems a bit over-complicated. We know what we want! Or do we, really?

Consider finding a new store to shop for clothes. Spring is coming, and it’d be nice to sport the latest fashions, not to metion that you favorite white shirt was attacked in the laundry by your favorite red socks, becoming a ghastly shade of pink. Computers have come a long way since they crawled off the desk, bidding their slide-rule ancestors goodbye. But, they still aren’t very smart, and will throw in the towel if we simply ask, “Hey Google! Can you recommend a new place to pick up some clothes? Some place that’s hip, and not too expensive?”

So first, define your question. Clothing stores. Where, in your city? How about nearby townships? What kind of store – a department store? Trendy urban outfitter? Perhaps you’re looking for discount or clearance items, or maybe premium designer threads are your thing. Once you have a handle on this, you can begin to form your question. Boil it down to the most important aspects of what you’re looking for.

To best ask a computer for information, you have to think like a computer. Don’t worry if you’re a luddite, it’s easier than you may think! First, understand that search engines have a lot of information to sift through, and so they tend to ignore the boring and uninformative words. These include all the shorter connecting words, like: a, and, the, of, in, etc. So you can leave these out of your search query.

Second, computers don’t understand language very well, and so asking them questions with a full sentence generally doesn’t turn out well. (There are some exceptions, and it never hurts to try it, just don’t expect to hold a conversation!) The most important thing to keep in your mind is the concept of keywords – these are the most important, concise, and descriptive words you can use to describe what it is you want. (You do know what it is you want by now, right?) If you had to tell your friend what you wanted, using three to six words only, what would they be? You can see here that you have to pick these words well. Choose your search keywords by thinking of unique attributes of what you seek, that may not be found in combination elsewhere. Link concepts together, like trendy, clothing, store, Chicago, spring fashions. Search using these keywords.

Once you’ve tried your search, glance over the first page of results and see if you are getting things that are close to what you want, or at least make sense. If not, change your search terms around a little bit. Try synonyms, or similar ideas. Eliminate words that seem to take you in the wrong direction – oftentimes certain words are used in a completely different way on the Internet, and your searches will go astray. Remember that spelling counts, too, although some search engines are sly, and will suggest other search terms if you happen to spel wun rong. (They will also suggest misspellings, if that particular mangled version of the word is common!)

Some things are easier to find than others, but these days there is so much on the Internet that it’s getting easier to find useful information. Searching is an artform, and takes practice. These basic concepts will help you along your way to becoming a web sleuth! And of course, knowing how to search, and how other people search, will help you to optimize your own website so your mom can find it among those 139,242 results.

In the second article on this topic, I’ll go into some of the more advanced search engine features that will help take your web searching into the realms of mastery.

Free SEO Tips

Bounce Rates in Search Engine Optimization

I have just spent the last few hours looking at posts from the past few years about bounce rates in Google Analytics and I think that there is a lot of information out there that Google must laugh at.  In this post about bounce rates, he talks about how someone else says it better than he does and he passes on the torch to another useless post about bounce rates.  At least one truth from both of the posts is that a low % is a better %, however breaking them down into what they are for and what they can tell you is completely off kilt.

• Low bounce rate is telling you that people come to your site and at some point and time during their visit, go to another page. Meaning that a low percentage of the people that visit your site only visit the first page.  This doesn’t mean your home page necessarily, it could be a product page if you are an commerce site, or another post within your huge blog.
• High bounce rate means they came, they saw, they left.  No clicks to anywhere else in your site, just viewed the landing page and left.
• There is no time limit on how long a person can stay on the page before clicking to another page, if they click in and click out 2 hours later, it’s a bounce.

If your bounce rate is high, evaluate the type of site that you have, if its a blog, expect people to hit it and forget it.  That is really what a blog is for, to provide available information quick and easy.  That’s why you need to make sure that the content within the pages of your site are right to the point, don’t have too little or too much information.  You don’t want to misinform or bore your site visitors.

Bounce Rates in Pay-Per-Click

There are a few things to think about when you are looking at the bounce rates of your ppc campaign, you have to look at the possibility that your price is too high, product wasn’t really what the searcher wanted, or your page itself doesn’t have enough stickiness to keep them on the page.  When someone is shopping they are more likely to leave the site entirely to “shop around” rather than shop around the site that didn’t provide them with the content they were looking for.  Make sure that your landing page supports the words you are paying for, because even if they click on your site and bounce off, it still costs YOU money! Knowing what to expect before hand does make it easier to swallow, it still doesn’t take away the costs you are going to incur.  Good luck and happy bouncing.

Did you know that search engines provide search results for other search engines and those search results contain directories, or databases of websites like superpages.com or thomasnet.com?  These databases or directories,  that is a site with drop downs or drill downs to the specific area that you service.  People do use these directories because they are human derived, meaning they  go through approval by an admin before they are put into the directory.  You do have to submit your site, it doesn’t just automatically appear in their search results.  Being listed in a directory for traffic is not an effective way to draw traffic.  Use this as an opportunity to build some sort of link trust within the search engine industry.  If that directory has 50,000 monthly visitors, that’s 50,000 visitors to the site, not your specific industry.  Say if 10%, 5000 visitors per month were potential site visitors  to your industry, where there are over 100 other sites competing for those potential visitors.  10% is a very hopeful number and realistically would be great but isn’t the truth.

Your best bet overall is to have your site in the major search engines and play the SEO game of trying to increase your site rankings for keywords you choose based on the content of your site.  Direct traffic from the major search engines may not wield the kind of conversion rates that the second tier or third tier search engines may have.  However these 2nd and 3rd tier search engines may not have the same amount of traffic that the may have either.  Use both of the options, but just don’t pay for higher position in the lesser engines.  This is just going to cause you to spend a lot of unnecessary money, save it for Google Adwords or Yahoo! PPC.