June 2010 Archives

Archive for June, 2010

SEO Guide: Free Ways To Promote Your Business Online (Part 1)

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Whether you are a small or mid-sized local business, finding ways to promote yourself for free can be a challenge. It is more of a challenge online to rank in search engines and drive up organic traffic to your website—especially with a limited budget. This is the first of a two-part series about promoting your business online.

#1: Google—Google has a few free applications worth using, no matter what your business’ size, to improve and optimize your website performance. Use Google Base, Google Coupons and Google Local to make your website more competitive and allow potential customers to have access to the services or products your company sells.

#2: Yahoo Local—If you put anything up on Google Local, the logical way to increase your search engine presence is with listing your webpage on Yahoo Local’s directories. Yahoo Local is organized by geographic location and industry, so people looking for what you do in your area will be more likely to find you.

#3: Yellow Pages—Basic listings are still free, and will go to print and on the web.

#4: Free Directory Advertising—List your website for free at places like Dmoz.org, BOTW.org, and GoGuides.org. Choose your website directories discerningly, and avoid the D-listers because it will be wasted effort to put your website up with them.

To ensure your website’s continued growth and performance you must have the initial groundwork done of having proper H1 tags for all of your products and excellent, optimized keywords for your categories and content. Even if your website’s look isn’t quite together yet, its structure must be sound to get you any traffic, or build up a loyal customer base online.

Tags: internet marketing, keywording, online business, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, seo houston tx, website optimization, website performance, wesite content
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SEO News: Twitter’s URL Shortener

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

For all of you business owners who are active on Twitter, and SEOs who are big on blasting announcements into the Twitterverse, read this before you Twit your next Tweet. Recently, Twitter announced it would be using its own version of a URL shortener, so your link would have this: http://t.co/ as a URL.

The potential problem, here, is that more search engine optimizers or web solutions experts already use URL shorteners to make their links look cleaner and fit the character limits. The URL shortener, like bit.ly, is 301 redirected. The Twitter URL shortener also 301s links.

For web performance, this creates an unnecessary and un-optimized chain-redirect, where the bit.ly shortened URL goes to a t.co URL and then that gets 301-ed to the final destination URL.

The more 301 redirects there are, the slower search engines pick up and pass through to your website. This reduces page rank, and can potentially put off new traffic. From an Internet marketing standpoint, this is a huge failure to search engine optimize, because Googlers and other web browser users will not recognize a 301 as easily as just having a direct link, let alone having two 301 redirects.

Unless Twitter changes its mind, the only reasonable thing to do is leave off using your regular URL shortener and give Twitter’s shortener a try. It should not impact your optimizing by any means, and it might shave off a few minutes in your link posting schedule that you can use to write more blogs, check Facebook, or even post more Tweets.

Tags: houston, internet marketing, online business, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, search engine optimizing, SEO, seo houston, website analytics, website optimization
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SEO Strategy: Keeping an Eye on Google

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

While Google may be the go-to search engine, they have a few practices worth keeping an eye on, for the sake of your business. This is from a purely PPC point of view, since organic search typically comes from a combination of search engine campaigns and efforts.

Fact: If you have an actual office location, Google Maps will take information from your page and lists hours of operation, driving directions and other pertinent information about your company without a user having to ever click on your site. This could possibly drive down your web traffic.

Fact 2: If you want your page to rank on Google, you should be familiar with Google Adwords. If possible you should have and use an account to optimize your website.

SEO Tip: By listing your office’s pertinent information, Google Maps is attempting to create a more passive searcher who just wants this basic information. On a plus note, it cuts down pass-though traffic and encourages people who are actually interested in your site to find it. As for Adwords, you may not get the best results using it for keywording or Internet research, but if you don’t use it, you run the risk of not using the words and phrases Google will rank for your company or product.

It’s a bit of a catch-22, but since most of Google’s products are free, or moderately priced, it is worth your time to use their tools to give your website the optimal amount of leverage online. The keyword research and SEO tools are fairly decent, compared to their competitors. The fact is, until something better comes along, Google owns a lot of real estate online, so you’d better be nice to your landlords.

Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing houston texas, internet ranking, key word phrases, keywording, keywords, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, search engine optimizing, website performance
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SEO Strategy: When Change is a Bad Thing

Friday, June 11th, 2010

If you have a functional e-commerce website that sells products and generates traffic, and you have built up a loyal customer base, then you are already on your way to creating a competitive, optimized site on the search engines. If your company tends to generate its highest revenue in the fourth quarter, the “holiday season,” then your one goal as a web marketer, until the holidays end, is to MAINTAIN.

Fact: A base of loyal customers is integral to maintaining any website business, because it is guaranteed money. If they are familiar with your website’s visual theme and operation, then the last thing they need is a massive change right around when they are beginning to seriously shop.

SEO Tip: Even if the new website is improved, it’s generally unwise to test the waters during your peak revenue-generating months. If nothing else, create the new site as a beta site, and perfect it before unveiling it after the holidays. In the meanwhile, continue to optimize your current site and layout as best you can.

While it will certainly be extra work for the people involved in creating content and optimizing your webpage, it is worth it to hold off on unveiling a massive overhaul until the first quarter, when sales generally tend to be new, and the market is ripe for experimenting. Any search engine optimizing expert or marketing expert should not recommend risking “guaranteed” money on a new website design, layout and process that may not even appeal to your core audience.

Tags: interney marketing houston, search engine marketing strategy houston, search engine optimizing houston, seo houston, seo strategy
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SEO Strategy: Submitting to Web Directories; After the First Tier

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

If you are submitting your website to the Internet’s web directories like a good like optimizer, you should ask yourself if it’s worth your time to submit to any of the directories past the top tier.

Fact: Generally speaking, there are plenty of other ways to spend your valuable time and money than submitting to second or third tier web directories arbitrarily, so to get a decent ROI you (or your qualified web consultant) need to do a little investigating.

SEO Tip: Before submitting your website to one of the second or third-tier web directories, figure out how much traffic they get. This can be as easy as a quick look around the website to see when it was updated last, and checking the cached date. Use those common sense search engine optimization rules here—and look at the pages. If the pages look like they haven’t been updated recently, that is a bad sign.

After checking out what quality of pages exist on the web directory, take a gander at the cached date and think search optimizing logic. If the cached date is over a few months old, you’re not going get a whole lot of web crawlers finding your page. A little research can save you the time, and give you the opportunity to improve the quality of your search engine optimization process and the functionality of your website, because if you see a bad page on a bad directory that looks a little too much like yours…

Tags: internet marketing strategy, internet search, search engine optimization houston, seo houston, Submitting to Web Directories, website directory submissions
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