Do you know what a blog can do for your website and business? So many business owners ask me about the different Social Media Marketing techniques like the use of  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.. Though not many bring up anything about a blog or blogging. Over the years I have seen too many companies focus their time, money and efforts on these Social Media type sites without ever adding a blog to their own site, this can be a mistake. As many website owners are starting to realize in the eyes of Google, “Content is King!”

Since the late 90’s Google has transformed the search engine industry into becoming an industry that rewards informative, resourceful websites with nice saturation within their search results pages (SERP’s). A corporate blog is the perfect answer to ensuring that Google see’s a dramatic increase in newly written unique & high quality content being generated on your website.  That’s right, even though a blog is usually a bit separate from your main website that usually has somewhat stagnant content; it views the content on your blog as coming directly from your website as long as you set it up correctly.

Creating or adding a blog to your site is not difficult as long as you set it up right, so that Google views it as part of your site.  An example being set-up as a sub-domain (blog.howardsemgroup.com) or a sub-directory (howardsemgroup.com/blog) these are the preferred methods. Having a blog set-up separately from your site with its own URL (HowardsBlog.com) does not necessarily write it off as long as you are using it correctly, optimizing the posts and writing regularly, then linking back to your site using keyword targeted anchor text (ex. “SEO Services” as the text link rather than “Howard SEM Group”) This will provide a good amount of Link Juice from your separated blog.

A blog that is attached to your site will help you in a few ways. 1) Shows Google that constant new content is being developed on your site baiting their site crawlers to visit often and re-index/update their search results. 2) It morphs your site into becoming an Authority in your niche/industry.  This attention helps SEO & Internet Marketing efforts tremendously, and seems to pay off faster, helping site rankings, customer conversions & trust for the long term over short term use of Social Media sites. Do not get me wrong, the Social Media sites are a great and powerful tool, though everyone should start with a blog and regular informative content before going down those paths. Using Social Media sites as tools with your blog can provide excellent results.

Some Blogging Tips & Techniques:

• Use an SEO-Friendly Platform ( I love WordPress)
• Ensure you target 1 or 2 keywords you want to rank for by having that keyword in the Title Tag & body of the blog post.
• Link back to pages on your website that are relevant to the subject of your blog post, using your keyword targets as the anchor text.
• Try not to create more than 1 link per 100 words on average.
• Your Meta description tag should be used with a brief description of your post and a strong call to action, as this is what your sites visitors will see in the Google results pages.
• Occasionally linking back to an older blog post that is relevant will ensure it stays fresh in Google’s eyes.
• Write regularly, I recommend at least 1-3 post (100-300 words) a week, with 1 large detailed post (500+ words) a month.
• Submit your blog to RSS & Blog Directory sites.
• Have a little personality in your writing, just because it is a corporate blog doesn’t mean it has to be robotic and stale sounding.
• Most Important!!! Write for your visitors and target consumers, DO NOT WRITE FOR THE SEARCH ENGINES.

Now Go and Blog! Blog! Blog!

Google’s announcement of their “Instant” search results sent ripples through the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community. With search results showing up so much faster, and updating so quickly, they almost seem to become irrelevant. The user is connected to the destination website with almost no time spent on search results, meaning little time for them to see other sites and go there. The idea behind Google Instant is that the user can instantly find whatever they are looking for, while wasting as little time as possible looking through irrelevant search results. Many SEO professionals initially feared the outcome – if users were going only to the sites they wanted to see, and not taking the time to look at any other sites that may have appeared in the search results, then SEO might become obsolete.

Fortunately, it is evident that SEO will stay around for a long time, despite the initial panic. Legitimate SEO is the practice of taking good content and making it more visible. With Google Instant, it is less likely that irrelevant sites which rely purely on SEO spam will be seen at all in search results, but quality sites which people legitimately want to visit will still be seen and get traffic.

Google instant drives users to the content they are looking for faster. Since they can see the search results for their query as they type, they are more likely to type a search query that reflects what they are actually looking for. Misspellings or broad queries can instantly be refined to narrow down search results, without having to retype and resubmit the whole search query. It is expected that Adwords – Pay Per Click advertisers will notice and increased amount of impressions with a lower click through rate (CTR). SEO spammers who relied on misdirected users to come to their site will see a decrease in traffic as well.

A site that has legitimate content which visitors may actually want to see should still expect good quality visitors. Small business SEO practices will still remain relevant – if you offer a good product or service, then people will want it and search for it, and you can use SEO for small business to make sure that your site ranks well.

Google Instant also makes it more important to rank well. For small business SEO, this means that you should still use the same methods and best practices to optimize your site to make it visible. In this way, it makes SEO all the more important – potential visitors take even less time deciding what site to visit, defining the importance of ensuring your sites visibility. Using SEO for small business can help your site to get lots of visitors, regardless of Google Instant. Will Google’s investment pay-off is yet to be seen…. SEO LIVES!

If you are looking for ways to increase your online visibility contact us today.



Why a credible web presence is essential for small businesses

As a small business competing for customers in your local market area, you may still think an ad in the yellow pages or local newspaper will be enough to attract new customers, but these days – especially in this economy – it is absolutely essential to be found online.  In fact, most potential customers will look online before they look anywhere else.  Just having a web site is not enough.  You will also need to market your site in such a way that lets customers find your business first.

According to a study by the Kelsey Group, 97% of consumers use the Internet to search for products and services within their local area.  Which tools do they typically use?  90 percent use general search engines; 42 percent use comparison shopping web sites; 48 percent use online yellow pages services; and 24 percent use vertical search engines.

The growing fragmentation of the Internet means businesses need a strategic approach to being found online on various channels, including directories, industry-specific blogs and social networking sites. A diverse online presence can make a big difference to your bottom line. Small Business SEO is a very powerful tool that provides a very high ROI.

Pay-per-click advertising, also known as paid search, allows you to target your advertising messages to a local audience as they search for products and services like yours.  While this type of advertising can help drive immediate and targeted traffic to your web site, that traffic only comes as long as you are willing to pay for each click.  Search engine optimization (SEO) may take a little longer to get your site listed on page one of the Google results, but you will continue to get high rankings long after your SEO efforts are done.  Google research shows that up to 80 percent of their users will click on organic listings before a sponsored message, but the best results come when a site appears in both places.  In order to truly succeed with search engine marketing, it makes sense to use both pay-per-click and SEO.

Major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo all understand the power of localized search, delivering dramatically accurate results for users.  Thanks to their ability to track a computer’s IP address, search engines like Google usually know where your customers live, and will provide search results that are based on that specific location.  For example, if a customer types “plumber” into a search engine, they are likely to see a list of local plumbers’ web sites come up as the first result, along with their locations plotted on a local map.   Just think of the impact a listing like this could have on your local business!

As you read this, you may be asking yourself, “If online marketing is so important, then why are most of my sales coming in ‘offline’?”  If you are like most brick and mortar businesses, only about 5 percent of your sales will occur online; but that doesn’t mean that your customer’s buying decision was not made on the Internet.  Most people start their research online, and they expect to get the information they need from your web site.  When your business has a professionally designed web site, it levels the playing field in your industry, allowing you to compete against much larger enterprises in your area.

With more cell phone companies offering smart phones with Internet access, customers are able to find local businesses instantly through voice-activated Google searches that return relevant results based on their GPS location.  This recent surge in mobile search volume has been a real windfall for local business owners who are positioned well on the search engines.

All of these developments point to one thing: the Internet has changed the way we do almost everything, including the way we conduct business. Today’s customers have the tools to find out if they are making the right buying decision before they ever pick up the phone or stop by your place of business.  At one time, it was easy to differentiate between an online business and brick-and-mortar store, but now it’s becoming more and more difficult to draw that line.

Instead of trusting in a company’s advertising claims, customers now look to a growing variety of consumer review sites, search engines and social media to find out what their peers think.  How well a business is positioned online really counts.  In fact, the Internet has become a natural extension and evolution of how most businesses operate.  With this knowledge, many more small businesses realize that they can no longer afford to ignore the power of the Internet.

Anthony Howard is an SEO Expert/Search Engine Strategist and the owner of Howard SEM Group helping businesses succeed on the Internet. To find out how Internet Marketing can help your business visit HowardSEMGroup.com or call 1-877-4EZ-RANK (1-877-439-7265)

If you like Java, Google Caffeine is going to rock your world! For those of you that are not aware Google has fully launched there new web search indexing system called Caffeine on June 8th, 2010. With this new indexing system new content will be indexed by Google much faster compared with there old system. There old system used to index every few weeks or some times as long as a month or so. With Google Caffeine indexing will be so much faster it will be almost like real time indexing. This full roll out of  Google Caffeine has been long anticipated as Search Engine Marketers and SEO Consultants have been curious of effects Caffeine would have in the market since mid 2009.  This will change a lot in regards to Internet Marketing….

How Google Caffeine Will Effect SEO

Time will tell as many are consistently researching the changes in Google’s new indexing system. One thing is for sure the websites that are creating fresh, quality on-going content, on a normal basis will have an advantage in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Those who are not, might find their rankings being crowded by newer fresher content pages. So if you do not have a blog, and/or you do not update content on your website it’s time for change.  As we’ve recommend in the past, Google and other main search engines love fresh, high quality, original content, so don’t be left behind get that WordPress blog going and be consistent.

With MSN’s Bing roll out in 2009, and Bing and Yahoo joining forces, Google has lost a small piece of search market share to Bing. Though we like Bing, and the size of Yahoo’s massive index of sites and pages we just don’t know if they will be able to catch up with Google’s massive amount of search market share. Now with Caffeine launched, instead of the Google search engine indexing the majority of the web every few weeks, it now indexes pieces or chunks of the web almost in real time and continuously. Meaning it is updating the index on such a larger scale and with a more in depth and faster look at the web, that new content like this will be live to search on Google possibly within hours rather than weeks, so you can see how the competition for popular search terms will really start to shift more aggressively.

We understand many small businesses do not have the time to update blogs, or write fresh new content on a continuous basis to their site so we recommend working with a professional content writer that has experience in writing SEO optimized content & best practices. You may also look into hiring a SEO Consultant or SEO Firm as many of them provide SEO content writing services.

We would love to hear about the changes and effects Google Caffeine has had on your website or just the way you search and the results you receive??!!!

T8A4BNNV39G7

During an economic crunch and downturn, Mastercard and its Spending Pulse – March Report is showing double digit growth in sales within the eCommerce venue. With booming sales just over 2 years ago, we find many online retailers that have gone under due to slow sales during these hard economic times. We have also found more eCommerce stores and online business merchants requesting proposals for SEO and Internet Marketing for their website, realizing the need for more targeted customer traffic.

Lately eCommerce channels show sales are up 18.4% form this time last year according to Mastercards’ Spending Pulse Report. It’s 8th consecutive month of double digit growth, showing that e-commerce is Alive & Well! Clearly growing at a faster rate than regular brick and mortar stores. This increase though still lower than prior to 2008 is a great sign for online merchants and websites alike.

Now Is The Time For e-Commerce SEO

In a time when so many online business were thrown into economic fear and reduced or stopped their marketing budgets, we’ve advised many clients that now is the time to use those marketing budgets for eCommerce promotion, Internet Marketing and website promotion. It is the typical domino effect when businesses reduce their marketing budgets due to economic downturns, marketing companies have to tighten their belts as well, as it all rolls down hill. This is the perfect time to negotiate better rates with all marketing venues and agencies. So many SEO Firms, including our own have reduced their pricing structure to accommodate struggling online businesses.

Another point to think about is when you reduce the amount of companies that are utilizing professional SEO services, you are also reducing the amount of tangible competition in the search engine advertising market. So again, I say now is the time to launch that eCommerce store you’ve been wanting, or that merchant website to compliment your brick and mortar business. The next step is to partner with an Internet Marketing or SEO Firm that has a strong specialty in e-Commerce marketing strategy and online sales, it’s even better of the firm has solid experience or understanding of your niche industry. We are especially happy to see some good online sales growth, and looking forward to continuing growth that will benefit our clients and ourselves.

Google PageRank Update, What That Means To You?

Google, the most popular search engine on the web uses a tool called PageRank, which was believed to be named after Larry Page co-founder of Google, Inc. to help determine their view of the popularity, authority or quality of a web page. Using numerous terms, filters and variables PageRank determines a numerical value for a specified page. Taking into consideration other pages that link to your specific page and those links/page value as well, it will determine a PageRank between 1-10,  ten being the highest. Simply thought of like a popularity contest, the more web pages that point a link to your web page, it’s reasonable to concur it is like a vote for your page. The more votes (links) to your web page, the more popular you are considered, thus aiding the PageRank increase in your favor. Now don’t get me wrong it is much more complicated than that, as there are many, many other variables that are considered like the value of the page that links to you for instance.  “PageRank” itself is a known trademark of Google, and the process in which it operates has been patented (US Patent 6285999). Though this will give you a basic idea…

April 2010 PageRank Update

As some of you that might keep track have noticed, Google performed a PageRank update in the beginning of April 2010. This seems pretty standard for Google’s trending MO (method of operation) as it seems to have happened around the same time in the last few years.  This update looks to have happened on April 2nd, so if you notice a slight increase in your page rank that is why. With these possible increases can also come a negative decrease in page rank depending again on their algorithm, and how they determine your web page to rank depending on their findings. Link Farms and other sites known to sell links have been known to have their pages PageRank decreased or penalized severely by Google. A black hat practice that should be avoided at all costs.

Why Is It Good To Have High PageRank?

For small businesses the value can be enormous as PageRank is considered to be involved in organic search rankings. Meaning if your small business web page has a high PageRank combined with its relevance determined by Google for a specific keyword or phrase it can equal very high rankings within the organic search results used by most folks to find information, a product, or a service depending on their needs. This high visibility will increase the visitors/consumers that frequent your web page or site equaling in increased interaction, sales, leads & targeted consumer traffic. I consider this to have enormous value as it can essentially make a business! Think of it like:  A customer wants to buy a baseball bat and in driving down the freeway to a sports store they get lost, or cannot find one until they see this HUGE billboard pointing them to your sports store that sells baseball bats. By having a high PageRank and a high relevance for a certain term related to your business that can lead to a high ranking in the search results which will show your billboard helping folks to find you on the web.

There are also many businesses out looking to advertise on blogs and websites with high PageRank and visitors to expose their brand, product or service. So there are different values for your business that can increase your overall value and monetization of your website to be considered when thinking of the value of PageRank. Though the true value and results of PageRank has been debated within the Internet Marketing industry over the years it is still a strength, and / or weakness of a site that can be changed to help monetize your small business site.  You can find out what your PageRank is by downloading the Google Toolbar for your browser. Also you might want to seek the help of an experienced SEO Firm or SEO Consultant to aid you in increasing your PageRank.

Tell us if your PageRank has moved at all with the April update???

So if you thought you had a bad day this week. You must not work at Wikipedia or YouTube, those folks had a truly bad day! Between yesterday and today, both large authoritative sites went down for different periods of time. Wikipedia stated their issue was the result  of an overheating problem in their European data center, which forced them to move all user traffic to there back-up at their Florida Cluster. This however resulted in another failure that shut down Wikimedia globally for over an hour. This created quite a stir in Twitter with enough mentions that it soon became a bit of a Twitter trend.You can read Wikipedia’s Tech blog here

YouTube which is owned by Google, Inc. had went down as well, though not due to the many rumors about Google’s recent issues with China. A representative from Google states the outage which lasted just over an hour was not cause by outside sources, but rather from technical problems. Google did give an apology for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.

With the pure size and traffic hitting both of those widely popular sites, we hope the engineers and techs’ working for those companies can finally put there feet up a bit and relax as both sites issues have been resolved and are back up and running.We wish them the very best, though all we can say is “Ouch!”