SEO Consultants | What to look for

So you’re thinking SEO (search engine optimization) is something that can help your website? Here are some things you should examine when you’re looking for the right SEO company to invest your business’s hard earned money into.

SEO only starts on your site.

In the development or renovation of your site optimization begins through meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, having relevant content, using the proper HTML tags and so forth. However, there are a lot of things that are off site which go into SEO such as link building, putting relevant content elsewhere online, and making sure your site is appropriately indexed. The biggest mistake people make is not keeping up with their outside SEO thinking it starts and ends on their site. If you aren’t actively trying to get organic traffic to your website your rankings and organic traffic can never meet your goals. Having a long term SEO plan that goes beyond your site is going to ensure your organic marketing strategy is well rounded.

Don’t think is the cheapest or fastest means of marketing a site.

Unless you find a company that is doing a lot of work for free, or is offering a great discount, don’t expect your SEO work to be cheap. Search engine optimization is a full time job. In order to get the results most businesses are looking for, it requires constant monitoring and updating. Flat out, with a good SEO strategy there is simply a plethora of things that need to be done often and with a high level of quality. Proper SEO also takes time for content to be searched, relationships to be built with related sites, and submissions to be accepted. When looking to get SEO work done don’t fall into the traps of sites offering prices that are too good to be true or promising quick traffic.

Black Hat techniques hurt more than they help.

Although Google doesn’t say how they weight positive factors going into their ranking, they are clear that black hat techniques are a road that will only take you in the wrong direction. A quality SEO company will support only ethical SEO techniques. If you decide to mess with black hat techniques you can be red flagged loosing all representation within search engines—effectively setting you back and making all of your SEO efforts worthless. Make sure to be very clear on the marketing strategy of your SEO consultants ensuring the integrity of their plan. Stay away from anything that sounds illigitimate ie keyword stuffing, invisible text, meta spamming, etc.

SEO be your site’s biggest ally, or your biggest wast of resources. The difference is in ensuring that it is done correctly! Never be satisfied with your SEO, as there is always be something that can be improved or be done. Look around and contact multiple companies to find the right SEO company for your needs and your budget.

Web Design & Text: SEO vs Style

When coming into the world of online marketing and web design there is a fine line that must be walked. That line is working with the rendering of text. Text is an important aspect to design as well as a page’s ranking so a site simply cannot be designed for one or the other— you have to find the right balance.

The tricky part is trying to keep page content coded in the proper HTML tags (h1, p, strong) for search engine and accessibility purposes, but not to limit the designer. Different operating systems, browsers, screens, and settings can all alter the way a web page is displayed. For example some users will have different fonts on their computers leading to the site appearing differently for different users. Consequently, choosing a particular font does not guarantee that your text will actually display in this font to all of your users and back up fonts will are necessary.

You might ask, what’s the big deal if text shows up in Times New Roman instead of Monotype Corsiva? Well, it doesn’t affect your SEO, but it will effect your user experience in two primary ways. First is stylistically— the fonts you use emphasize important text, help develop your site’s branding, and play a huge role in design. The second is more function than form. A change in font can make content more or less legible and even cause layout issues stemming from variations in font spacing and sizes. A change like that can play a huge role in if a visitor stays on your site and where they navigate. These two factors alone can drastically hurt your conversion rate. This leads us to the question, what is the best way to display the fonts you want across multiple platforms and still remain search engine friendly?

While there is no perfect solution there are a few options for the designer to navigate while adapting their design to the needs of the user.

CSS
Most sites today are going to be largely designed based on some form of CSS. However, like the other options straight CSS does have a downfall. If the font you desire to use is not something that comes standard on most computers there is a large chance that the average user will not see the full potential of your site as previously mentioned. You have the ability to select your primary and alternative fonts, and even a font family that allows the closest option if your specified choices are not available.

Image Replacement
Web designers can cope with font issues by using images of the text exactly how they want it to appear instead of coded text. But like I said, none of these options are perfect. The use of image replacement limits you to the use of “alt” tags for SEO purposes. Alt tags are meant to represent the image using text, however they are considered less relevant when compared to properly coded content. There are black hat techniques such as hiding your text and primarily displaying your images, however Google does warn that “Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.” It can be interpreted that “untrustworthy” feelings can lead to negative repercussions within your rankings— leading back to the ideal motto, do it right the first time.

FLIR
Face Lift Image Replacement, or FLIR, plays off of the concept of image replacement using PHP. Text can still be coded correctly in HTML for search engines, but be swapped out with an image for the viewer ensuring consistency across users. Sounds like we have found the best solution right? Well as FLIR is reliant on PHP’s dynamic interface the text cannot be selected, which decreases site usability. Again close, but still a considerable downside.

sIFR 2.0
Our last option is Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR. sIFR combines Flash, Javascript, and CSS to create the text replacement. Just like when using FLIR, you still get the SEO benefits, however instead of an image your end result is a Flash file. sIFR still has some major drawbacks including the dependance of Flash (which with the development of HTML 5 may be on the way out), increased load times, and difficult to predict changes in CSS layouts.

With the development of new technologies every day we may have a solution to this problem right around the corner— but for now, when choosing a web designer make sure you are both on the same page of how you would like your site for both form and function.

What's in a Niche Market?

What is in a niche market? No, but really. The perspective on what a niche market actually is and why it may or may not benefit your marketing approach has become muddled.

Here we will evaluate what a niche market is, the goal niche marketing will serve and the beginnings of how it can be achieved.

Originally this term would have referred to a person coining a trade and becoming the only available specialist for commercial purposes. Like for instance, watchmaking. Today this form of a niche market is nearly impossible--especially with internet business marketing.

Today a niche market could be more accurately termed as a “focused market.” Meaning that when marketing online the approach will be completely different than any other form of marketing. While the purpose is still the same--to catch and keep attention. The way attention is achieved is by tapping into what keywords individuals are searching and capitalizing on them. Just as a corporation would want to advertise their business during a television show receiving the highest views of a certain age their product would be of interest the same can occur online, but even better.

To begin marketing in the niche fashion you first need to evaluate which keywords are being searched most often that are relevant to your product. If the demand is their you will have something to work with. In addition, other areas of research for determining a focused market should be:

* Competition & Saturation
* Potential Cost (for PPC budgeting)
* Commercial Intention (is there any?)

Once the keywords indicative of the niche market are located it is time to go to work. Some general rules to ensure you are achieving the overall goal while marketing online should be:

Provide Direct Results

If your target market revolves around a product such as the specific type of baby stroller like a “Travel System,” not only is it important to achieve a conversion through the advertisment placed on a Google or the content created on an exterior site. It is also important to optimize the landing page for the succinct purpose it has been marketed. Do not worry about placing your Umbrella or Double Strollers there as well. This was not your focused purpose and will decrease your probability for sales.

Test Your Market

Keywords are never enough to tell us the intention of our market. We will need to test our ads, content and pricing. Never assume you have completed the test market phase, because in reality you haven’t. There will always be more traffic to drive and more sales to produce.

For more on a niche market approach and the most effective business internet marketing techniques follow ideal this.

Achieving organic traffic, what is a site to do?

To open the topic I would like to pose a question. What is it that you have control of within search engines and online? Honestly... not much. You can’t control the searchers, you can’t control the search engines, so what can you control? Mostly your optimization, and that’s what we want to introduce in the succeeding information.

Lets go through the process from start to finish. First the searcher comes up with an idea of they want and they go to a search engine to find it. We can’t control what search engines they use, what phrases they search, or what results they select. Sounding a little pessimistic? It’s actually a lot better situation than it sounds, with online searching we actually have a leg up. Online we can actually track what people are searching and market towards their demands. Using tools like Google’s adwords keyword tool we can research the best possible phrases to market towards within our respective industries.

So now have done the research and we know what people are searching for, meaning we can market towards their demands. That brings us to the next thing outside of our control, how the search engines place us in the results listings. We can control how much marketing we do and our marketing strategy, but with search engine’s hard to understand ever changing algorithms and ways of determining relevancy we can never tell where we are going to rank. However, there are two aspects of control we can exercise to positively influence the flow of organic traffic. First is the display information you provide to the search engines including your page title, description, and URL. And second is your website itself and the keywords used on it. These will be your factors in achieving online marketing success.

Let’s look at your display information first, starting with your page title. Consider your title 55 characters to success. You need to use your title to introduce your website to the world and draw attention to your site. Using your primary keywords in your meta title will help you twofold. First, it will embolden them when they are used in search —drawing more attention. And second, it will help your optimization efforts as your page title is one of the foremost priorities in the eyes of search engines.

Next, your meta description. The description is even more important than your title when it comes down to the eyes of the searchers. Research suggests that 80% of all searchers will look to the meta description before making their choice among the results, that means you need to make the most of it. When generating a description you need to make it appealing to readers by making sure that it is relevant to their search, utilizing a complete thought, and has some kind of call to action or incentive. When writing your description there are character limits as well to prevent your thought from ending prematurely in an ellipsis. Google will display up to 160 characters, Yahoo! 165, and MSN 200; to be safe staying below 160 is your best bet.

And now to the final aspect of your display information, your URL. Your domain name is again important to both the searchers and the search engines. You want to have a domain name that first and foremost relates to your market. You want your URL to be short and to the point, this will help keep things memorable and eventually leads to customer retention and brand building. When possible directly containing your keywords within your URL is beneficial for optimization purposes.

And now moving on to the second item within your control, your site! Within your site there are various optimization techniques all stemming from keyword optimization. Ensuring you are utilizing keywords and phrases that are in demand within relative content on your site is really what search engines want. Proving your site to be relevant will help your display information be shown to the right searchers, and —presuming it is done correctly, your display information will then draw searchers to your site were the rest is in your hands!

So say you develop a site optimized within all recommended guidelines and you’re getting organic traffic, what next? Well optimization never really ends, but you’ve made it to a great starting point and it’s time to transition your focus from SEO to SEM. Utilizing the keywords you’ve found to be successful throughout the process of identifying your market strategy you can now open yourself up to new worlds of article marketing, blogging, social networking, and more!

4 Ingredients For a Delicious Marketing Strategy

Though there are many methods to developing traffic, just like creating a meal. You can do it extravagantly with high costs, very complex and intricate to bring out the most in every bite, and you can create a simple well balanced meal with all of the staples. Here are some of our favorite ingredients to creating a delicious marketing dish. Hopefully you can create and share some new and exciting recipes as we do.

A bit of Blog

Running a frequently updated blog is always a good idea. A blog linked to your site will generate additional traffic by providing a quality link from a site with quality related content. Your market will grow to see you as an authority when you are putting valuable information in front of them. You will also be showing search engines that you're related to the new content and frequent updates.

A dash of Article Marketing

Creating articles for your business online gives you many of the same benefits of blogging, such as the ability to put new and interesting content in front of your viewers. Linking articles to your website however do it with an added twist. You may not be fully in control of the guidelines and approval of your articles, but receiving a link from a highly ranked article site such as eZineArticles.Com gives your article and link even more credibility because of the more stringent requirements. Article directories can also give you a new audience apart from people who may have never found your blog.

A pinch of Link Building

Sure, it is a known fact that just like sugar is sweet, links from highly ranked sites help your search engine ranking. Just because you know it to be true doesn't mean you should leave it out because it's common. You wouldn't take the sugar out of your grandma's famous apple pie just because someone else's grandma uses it too would you?? Continuing to submit to directories, social bookmarking sites, and other websites related to your own will really help boost your search engine ranking. Even having friends or family link to it from their website, forums, personal blogs, or facebook page can benefit.

A smidgen of time

Once you've mixed the ingredients you need to let it cook. One major factor that Google likes to looks at for search engine ranking is how long your website has been around. Brand new websites tend to be ranked lower on the search engines, simply because Google doesn't allow these fresh websites to scale the search engines until they've been around for a while. More or less making sure your site is ripe for the picking. Being around longer will also naturally give you more traffic and further boost your search engine ranking. No matter what you do Google will take between 3 and 30 days to change your search engine ranking so don't expect instant results.

It is also important to remember that no company, online or off, steps right into the market and immediately dominates it. It takes time for sales to build up. They say that on average a customer will visit your site 3 times before purchasing. However, when they get their product and like it as well as your service, they will potentially become a return customer, refer their friends to your site, etc. It is important to not only give your marketing strategy time, but time to let your sales catch up to this time gap.

With these weapons in your pantry of productivity you have the tools to get traffic. But remember, you need to track the effects when you change a recipe. Every time you make an alteration to your website be it text, images, promotions, or Ad Campaigns, it is important to track the results. You need to know what ingredients are affecting your success. Every change that you make has the potential to effect your bounce rate, click through rate, or even your conversion rate. Noting things such as where your traffic is coming from and what searches you're appearing on will help you find out what efforts are the most fruitful.

Real rapport is measured by raving fans

With running a business there are aspects related to marketing and getting clients to you, and there are aspects of gaining them as a client and keeping them happy. Establishing and building your rapport with your clients is important to understanding their needs and making them happy. When you have rapport, the sales and fulfilment processes move forward with both parties on the same page. When you don't have it, every step becomes more and more arduous.

There are a lot of techniques out there to build rapport, but unfortunately a lot of them are short lived or in-genuine. The truth is building rapport is already part of your day to day life. When you want your relationship to improve with someone you know where you want it to go and you know what you need to do to get it there. You already have the skills. Running a successful business with true longevity comes from meeting the customers needs and wanting your service to be a real benefit to them. If you understand that you are already likely trying to build true rapport, but we’ve put together these three simple tips to help you make the most of it.

1. Get out of the rut

Through everyday communication we get into the habit of having undirected conversations. We don't realize the end goal when we initiate communication and that often leaves it lacking personality or needed information. This is all to frequent when dealing in regular customer service. The conversation is so often question and answer based and both parties come in preoccupied with the tasks they want to see completed. Keeping in mind how you want your relationship to improve with a company or an individual through the course of a conversation can help ensure both parties come out satisfied. Being able to empathize with your customers helps you understand that there may be more to helping them to simply answering their questions.

2. Guide the conversation

Guiding the conversation and understanding the clients needs are the best ways to get the client the right product or service for them. You are the expert in your product and you need to make sure to get that across. Through guiding the conversation using questions, you can probe their feelings as well as use their own reasoning to establish your authority in the matter. Asking the right questions will help solidify the information you already know to be true and gain their agreement. If something needs to be completed on the client’s part, don’t be afraid to hold their feet to the fire. Give them a call to action and make them want to take the next step.

3. Join them on their path to their success

It’s a common cliche that a business’s success is based off of it’s client’s success. Isn’t it sick how often these overused stereotypes are true? You want to make sure to help them find what will really make them happy. Your clients come to you having thoughts and ideas that are already occupying their attention, make sure not to ignore these if they don’t meet up with your goals. Find the best solution to satisfy. If the conversation is progressing the way the client wants it to you will often see that the conversation’s momentum progresses as well. When you can get your client excited about your service meeting their goals, your service becomes part of their mental path to meeting those goals and that is how you create not just customers, but fans.

As you ponder these simple tips remember this final piece of advice, you don't need to be in a face-to-face situation to establish rapport. No matter how you are working with your clients you can establish rapport; be it over the phone, on an instant messenger or live chat, or even through email if need be. With online business your first contact with a client is more often than not through in direct means, meaning you have to be even more clear and receptive.

The Basics to Building Back Links

Building back links to your site can be a valuable means of increasing your websites ranking. Google and most other search engines use links to determine the quality of a website. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards your ranking. Many people have questions about the best practices for organic link building and here are many different perspectives, but our approach is always to follow what is outlined in Google’s webmaster guidelines and that is what we want to outline for you.

The best marketing technique for new websites is to get involved in their niche community. Building your brand and reputation alone can drive people to your site. If you are providing quality long-lasting, unique content people will want to recommend it to others by linking to you. Great content is the best tool for organic link building. Interacting and contributing with the community though publishing articles, posting on forums, and through blog commenting and posting can have unmeasurable benefits when you are contributing in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site.

When looking for a promising way to create valuable content for your target group and earn great links try to find a topic that will help them. Think of issues or problems your market might encounter and present them with solutions. Visitors are much more likely to appreciate something like research results, your experience, a tutorial, or a practical tool than reading a sales pitch. Valuable information grows your credibility in your niche market as well as increases your brand visibility. This can help you gain quality, merit-based links that direct traffic and improve your image as an authority.

Directory submissions are another common way to promote younger sites in Google’s index. When submitting your site to directories always make sure they are focused on your niche and well moderated as there are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet, but most directories are of lower quality and are generally of no benefit. It is also common to see mass submission services. Most of which are useless and not likely to benefit your site unless it is a quality service ensuring that all links are topical.

There are also other ways to develop links that are not going to be as valuable as the aforementioned. With social media services constantly growing viral marketing techniques are now becoming a larger strategy to increase the visibility of a site. However, these short-lived tactics are wear off quickly. As powerful as viral marketing can be, and as much traffic as you can get, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or your only marketing effort if you are looking to create a site with long term potential.

It's important to understand that developing a sites longevity through legitimate link building is a long term effort. There are those who advocate for short lived methods of link building, but if your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid buying links, mass submissions, or randomly participating in link exchanges. Google considers these to be some of the worst ways of attempting to gather links and it is likely they will have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. Buying and selling links is actually in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results if discovered.

I hope this information has been helpful to you and you have an idea of where you stand as far as a quality link building strategy. As an after thought, when developing links you can use Google webmaster tools to view links to pages on your site located by Google on the web and check your progress. The data Google provides is comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded . All you need to do is prove you are the webmaster for the site by adding a small piece of code to the header tag.

In order to help you analyze the data lets look at the two categories links are divided into, external and internal.

External Links

External links are considered to be the links that reside on pages outside of your domain that link to your site. For example, if you are viewing links for www.idealthis.com, any link not coming from a subdomain of idealthis.com, such as a link from www.overtairsoft.com, would appear as an external link to your site.

Internal Links

Internal links to your site are come from within your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for www.idealthis.com, all the links that originate from pages on any subdomain of idealthis.com, such as www.idealthis.com/carte or marketing.idealthis.com, would appear as internal links to your site.

We hope you enjoyed this article and remember, there is always more great info to come!