Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog
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10 ways to improve your marketing content

March 25th, 2017

good copy
Good copy is an essential part of any effective marketing campaign. High quality content can increase your sales and generate more customer leads. But when writing is exceptional, people bookmark your site and generate media buzz over your products and services. Literally overnight, cheap jerseys you can get hundreds or thousands of people to discover your company and want to learn more about what you do.

* Write unique differentiated content that no-one else can claim. It is all too easy for people to copy content online. Don’t make it easy by writing generic content. Examine every word and every sentence and ask yourself, “Is this something someone else can claim?” Make it easy for customers to see why you are different.

* Be concise. If a sentence does not need to be there, take it out. Every single sentence in your writing should have a purpose. A sentence can either be a “point”, a supporting sentence for a point, or a chain (something which connects a new thought)
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Bounce rates, impressions, and Click through rates (CTR)

February 1st, 2017

For a while now, Google has been taking bounce rates into consideration for rankings, but there really hasn’t been a lot of discussion on what that means to the average site.  Bounces have a large impact on sites which have low traffic, which for many newer sites is all of them.  One of the things we have noticed is that a site can be a fantastic site, but if it ranks for non-relevant keywords, then those hits will be bouncing at a much higher rate.  So, if you have a low-traffic site, and are ranking for terms which you can see in your Analytics is creating a 100% bounce rate, it’s probably a good idea to actually remove it from your meta-tags or content so that your overall bounce rate is higher.

Another thing to watch for are IP’s that are continuously creating bounces.  Very often, the site owner can be the source of many of the bounces simply because they are checking their ranking or are showing a client their home page, or simply because they have it set for their home page.  In order to stop this, you need to go to the Google Analytics and add the ip of the office to the filter manager.  This way, your internal traffic won’t skew the numbers.

This also applies for Google Maps.  If you see your website on a serp, you always want to click on it and go through a few pages if you are on an ip which is not in the filter manager.  Good luck!

When is a good time to do SEO?

October 25th, 2016

For many website owners, there is a logical process which most companies follow.

1) Build a website
2) Do a pay per click campaign
3) If it goes well pay more into pay per click, experiment with SEO
4) If it doesn’t go well, stop investing in the website.

However, after a website is built, the FIRST step should be determining what your conversion rate is. That means setting up a Google analytics account, getting the goal conversions setup, and MEASURING results from traffic generated from a PPC campaign. What most companies don’t realize is that the number one factor which determines success in a campaign is whether or not the website has the ability to convert. Without that, the money spent on generating traffic is very often wasted. If your site can convert 3-5% of targeted traffic, then there is a good chance you’ll make money from an SEO or Pay per click campaign. If not, then it is wiser to invest the money into improving the fundamentals of the website so that visitors find what they are looking for.

SEO-friendly WordPress Permalinks

October 22nd, 2008

Google has a tendency to give less weight to dynamic urls than static ones. That means if google sees a .php extension or ?article=123, it will not rank as high as a url which has keywords in it and is a static permanent link. WordPress, by default uses dynamic links and therefore is not SEO friendly. Fortunately, it’s easy to change the links. In the newer versions of WordPress, all you need to do is go to the settings button in the wordpress admin and click on permalinks.

Before doing this, you should think about whether or not you have old links which you want to redirect. If there are old links cached by Google, you will need to use a redirect plugin in order to prevent duplicate content issues. Scott Yang has developed a WordPress plug which is available on his site to do the redirects based on regular expressions.

If you don’t have these kind of links, then all you need to do is log in to the wordpress admin and click on settings. Go to “Custom Structure” and enter /%category%/%postname%/ and click save. This will change all of your links to your posts to a seo friendly format. Make sure that your categories for posts are keyword relevant.

Rank checking tools blocked by Google

October 20th, 2008

rank-checking-blocked-by-googleMost people don’t know the sordid history of automated query tools with Google.

WebPosition Gold and Google- The SAGA:

Penalize you for using web position gold: (April 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/12118.htm
Google and position checking software: (Jan 2003) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/8573.htm

Whats the status of Google vs WPG Users? (July 2002) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1231.htm

What exactly gets banned using WebPositionGold; (June 2004) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/4799.htm
Web Position Gold & Google IP bans (May 2009) http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/3337.htm

By the way, it isn’t just web position gold.  It seems that every rank checking tool out there has been affected by this.  There’s a number of people who think it’s silly for Google to be blocking access to rank checkers.  But I’m pretty sure I know why they are doing it now.  Rank Checkers have a huge impact on “impressions” and skew the search data significantly.  As Google uses this data more and more, they have a strong motivation to make sure their impression data is more accurate for search results.
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A reputation management crisis

October 19th, 2008

Reputation management is not the most well-defined term in the industry.  What exactly does it mean?  How does one do reputation management?  The fact is that a lot of SEO’s don’t even know what to do until an incident happens.

It’s not until you’re in a situation where someone is attacking your honor where you realize that Google has a lot of power over what others think of you and your company.  Here is an example one company, absolutepoker.com which literally got devastated by other a few people who were very mad at them.  They decided to advertise under their name to get top placement for their absolutepokercheats.com site and the following is what happened.

absolutepoker

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Google’s content network

October 19th, 2008

Many people that manage Pay per click campaigns are aware that Google’s content network has a significantly lower quality of conversions than their ads.  However, most people don’t know that the reason for it is because that is where the majority of click-fraud occurs.  If you do manage a Pay-per-click campaign, you’re better off targetting specific sites or avoiding the content network altogether.  You want to have control over which sites your ad displays on because very often the quality of the sites can be quite low.

Search Engine Optimization Myths

October 17th, 2008

One of the biggest problems with the SEO world is that anyone can claim to be an SEO expert.  It’s very difficult for someone interested in SEO services to figure out who is really an expert at SEO and who is just good at selling.  Very often, people choose SEO companies based on reputation, but many companies can develop a strong reputation and still be awful at SEO.  Often, the older, larger companies simply rely on their online presence to get new customers, but are serviced by people who know very little about Search Engine Optimization.

The truth is that many online businesses can truly benefit from great SEO, but after being burned by cheaper vendors promising wild guarantees and overcharging with very little results, most people are reluctant to continue with SEO.

Our goal is to blow away misconceptions in the SEO industry, guide people to better ranking, and when you’re ready to take your online marketing to the next level give you the information you need so we can get you there.