Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimizing houston’

SEO Strategy: When to Get an In-House Search Engine Marketing Team

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

If your company is small, you cannot, most likely, afford an in-house search engine optimization team, or a few search engine marketing experts hanging about making your website profitable. The fact is, most small business don’t place much of an importance on their website analytics or website performance simply because there’s not enough money for it, and nowhere near enough time.

For the small business, the best route is to use as many of the free optimization tools on the market, and as soon as it’s feasible, hire an agency to handle search engine issues, web marketing strategies and everything else that requires a web solutions expert. Marginalizing your website in the age of the Internet is just a waste of a valuable resource.

If your company is mid-sized to large, then you most likely have already hired SEM and SEO agencies to polish up your web marketing, and have a host of search engine optimization and web solutions experts to draw from. But is that enough? For you, the issue really isn’t the price, but the quality of service. So when do you hire an in-house search engine marketing person or team?

The answer: When the agency cannot provide you the immediate support you need. An in-house expert is not only available immediately, but is working 100% on your project, can train your entire team on best practices and push your ROIs to the next level of optimized results.

SEO Strategy: Are your links rich with diversity?

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Like a healthy ecosystem needs many different habitats in order to thrive, your online business website needs a diverse array of links to maintain healthy organic search and Internet ranking results.

Although link building may seem like a vast and endless ocean of blogs, directories, social media, forums and more, there is no shortcut to finding the online platforms and places that will benefit your website business. In other words, your search engine marketing person’s online business strategy in this case is to sit down and do some actual research. Fortunately, instead of making a huge list of every website business or organization that pings on your SEO analytics, then working your way down that humongous list, the better search engine marketing strategy is to use a virtual watering hose approach, instead of a watering can.

What we mean is, when it comes to diverse link building, you don’t have to get every single person on your list, but, like Noah’s Ark, you should try to get at least one or two of every type of link relationship that would benefit your online business’ marketing strategy. This benefits your organic search results too, because search engines can find you in more places if you’ve stretched your social network out to them.

For best practice SEO results, try and accomplish 15 to 20 link building activities in a month. This can mean anything from picking a few relevant blogs and commenting on them, participating in a few forums, submitting articles to a few publications. The trick is to cultivate a few favorite of each type and take the time to participate in each of them. The diversity doesn’t just help your online business’ organic ranking, but it keeps you from getting incredibly bored while you increase your website’s good online reputation.

SEM Strategy: Reputation—does your SEO person have one? (Part 1)

Friday, March 25th, 2011

As your online business grows you need a capable search engine marketing and SEO person to handle the reputation of your brand online. Even the most unintentional of online forays can lead to disaster, so it requires someone who has enough experience and enough practical sense to handle what basically amounts to online public relations.

But what reputation does your search engine optimizer have?

Unfortunately, the SEM industry is not currently regulated, so anybody can do it. Search engine marketing can get complex, the more you start looking at the details, but it’s easy enough for a scammer to pass off as a knowledgable search engine optimizer just because it’s a relatively new industry and most people don’t know much about it. The industry experts, apart from the folks who actually created the search engines and their algorithms, are mostly people with excellent knowledge of the industry and markets surrounding search engine companies. Using their knowledge, they have made websites work from years of trial and error.

There are others, who just instinctively have an awareness of how people behave online, but even those SEO folks start using or creating some kind of process, and will rely on their peers to find innovative ways to build organic rankings. While the entire SEO/SEM industry needs regulating, it isn’t now, so you need to be smart about your hiring choices. Before you throw your money away on any search engine marketing company (even one that’s been highly recommended by someone you trust) we’re here to make sure you do your homework and find a reputable SEM/SEO person to increase your online business’ brand reputation.

SEM Strategy: Avoiding a bad reputation

Monday, March 7th, 2011

One of the things you want to make sure of, as you build your online business, is to avoid acquiring a bad reputation through poor search engine marketing strategy.

We’ve discussed avoiding a bad reputation before, but apart from the vague threat of possibly being flagged by the search engines as a spambot, we’d like to go into better detail about the long-term implications of how a bad reputation harms your search engine optimization and online business marketing strategy.

If your website business mishandles its customers by producing bad products or services, messing up online purchases, or generally making your clients unhappy, they will not hold back on the criticisms. The more you neglect the business aspect of your online business marketing, the sooner you can expect to see negative reviews on Yelp, RipOffReports, Facebook and other social media pages with higher Internet rankings than your website business.

What that means is the first impression a potential new customer will get of your company is negative reviews. Even if you are ranking in the top tier for a keyword or keyphrases, those bad reviews will strongly influence customers, possibly making them choose your competitor online.

Another way a bad reputation hurts your online business SEO strategy and search engine marketing is with linkbuilding. It’s not impossible, mind you, but while your search engine optimization or SEM specialist can create good-quality links for you, they might not convert into good organic search results or web traffic because of your rep.

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