Some Bad — Very, Very, Very Bad — SEO Techniques

Want to get your website banned from the search engines? Try some of these little nasties:

1) You know that stuffing keywords in your content is bad, so you try to get around it by “hiding” the stuffing. You can do this by having your text be the same color as your background or you place the keywords far off the page — where your site’s visitors don’t see it. Bad. very bad. Google bans you.

2) Flash implemented in your site. May not get you “banned,” but definitely not competitive. Search engine crawlers do read and index Flash, but they won’t rank you high. Why? Because search engines love text. (Important note: the search engines also are starting to love video, especially if you place keywords. Tip: place keyword-optimized video on your site).

3) Do you show different content to the search engine crawlers that you show to your visitors? This is called cloaking and Google slaps you on the wrist crying “Bad, girl!” May not get you “banned,” but the search engines won’t “like” you. Spammers used to use this technique widely a few years back and you know how much Google hates those who spam. Don’t be among them.

4) Do you love to use Javascript in your website design? If so, the search engines won’t love you if you use it too much because it looks like Greek to them — they don’t know how to “read” it. Use Javascript just a little and be sure to include CSS to move it away from your Web pages’ headers and text.

Keep Google happy with your website and hire GoiMarketing.com to optimize it for you. We can create and optimize a new site for you from scratch, or we can revamp your current site to make the search engine crawlers happy. Contact us today!

Five Reasons to Hire an Internet Marketing/SEO Company

Have you decided you need to market your business online? Good for you because online truly is where the action is today:

• About one-third (94 million) adults use the Internet every day in the U.S.
• Of those 94 million, 64 percent (a bit more than 60 million) use a search engine each day.
• 64 percent of Americans use the Internet to search for local businesses.
• What’s more, people searching online for products and services offered locally often want to purchase them right now.

If you’re not where your customers can find you, you’re losing business to your competitors who are.

An Internet marketing  — also sometimes known as a search engine optimization (SEO) — company can help you get found online. You could do this yourself, if you have weeks and perhaps months to learn it well enough so that you’ll see results.

But a professional and well-established Internet marketing company can get you found by hundreds if not thousands of potential customers in the time it would take you to get up to speed on the ever-changing Internet marketing techniques.

Here are five good reasons to hire an Internet marketing company:

1) The company can create a great opt-in landing page for your business. Internet marketing is all about creating relationships and if a prospect fills out the form on your landing page, that will then allow you to…

2) …send e-mail messages regarding your business to the prospect. These e-mails will contain such messages as notices of sales, free products, seminars, etc. The idea is to be “seen” in a prospect’s inbox regularly. Doing so and offering information of value to your prospect will help him or her trust you. Trust begets sales. A good landing page probably won’t result in an immediate sale, but you won’t be able to engage in a terrific e-mail marketing campaign to prospects without it. And it’s the great marketing campaign that sooner or later — and probably sooner than you think — will make your prospect a buyer.

3)  Speaking of relationship building, your Internet marketing/SEO company undoubtedly will want to get a social media marketing campaign underway for you. The company will set up accounts for you at the major social networking sites (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook) and get you started. Remember that the purpose of marketing on these sites isn’t to sell but to build relationships. The buying will come.

4) Pay-per-Click. This can be a terrific way to get more visitors to your site quickly (as in hours). It also can be a great way to bring prospects who could easily end up becoming buyers if you run your PPC campaign well. Your SEO/Internet marketing company will research the correct keywords to use in your campaign, keywords that will help get your ad on the first page of Google and other search engines’ results pages.

5) Keywords are key with SEO. The right keywords used in the right way on your website (in your title and meta tags, in your website’s copy, etc.) can go a long, long way to getting your site appearing in the top one or two pages of search results. Put your patience cap on, however — it can take several weeks or months for your site to appear in these top-ranked”organic” search results.

Take the next step and contact GoiMarketing.com. We are a leading Internet marketing/SEO company and we can help your website get found, get noticed and make sales!

 

 

How Video Marketing Can Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

If you’re serious about bringing traffic to your site via the search engines, then you seriously should consider video marketing.

Why? Because while SEO still brings most of the traffic to a site, social media and video sites (such as YouTube) increasingly are showing some traffic muscle.

In addition, video on a website often is viewed much more than content is read (SEO news sources are reporting that 67 percent of a website’s visitors will choose video over text), so put together a video of you explaining your services, announcing a new product or offering, demonstrate how to use or build your product.

You also don’t necessarily need to have the typical video of people talking and moving. You can put together a live and talking video from one of your articles or blog posts (ArticleVideoRobot.com is a leading site to do this for you).

Creating videos and placing them on your site (as well as on YouTube), promotes you as a leader in your field.

Placing video on your site/YouTube also helps your site in search engine rankings. The search engines at Google and Yahoo! now perform what is called “universal search,” which means that anything — text, video, etc. — will come up in search engine results depending on how well it’s optimized. Video, therefore, can rank higher than text.

In addition, video easily can become viral. Post links to your video in your tweets and Facebook posts and viewers could then send links to their followers and friends.

Video won’t replace optimized text, of course. You’ll still need to create engaging, informative content on your site’s pages that’s of real value to your target audience.

But use video wisely and it can be a truly great addition to your rankings arsenal.

If you’d like to produce one or more videos for your website, contact GoiMarketing.com. We can create affordable videos that will engage and inform your site’s visitors about your products and services, videos that will help bring more visitors to your site. Contact us today.

 

Article Marketing or PPC? You Be the Judge of Which is Best

Can article marketing really work to bring traffic to your website? Isn’t it just drivel written by hacks? Doesn’t it take forever to get traffic?

The answer? It depends.

Yes, some articles used in article marketing are downright awful. Grammatically incorrect. Full of misleading or even false information. Rambling. Incoherent. Or dense and packed with too much information.

And, yes article marketing does take longer than well-run pay-per-click campaigns, purchasing online ads, and so on.

But you really shouldn’t ignore it. Done well and done consistently, article marketing can bring you traffic. Traffic that already trusts you. Traffic that is primed to buy. And it will continue doing so long after your pay-per-click or other paid advertising Internet campaign is done.

Paid ad campaigns can be quite costly. If you’re just starting or if your budget is tight (and it usually is when your just starting out), a paid campaign can be out of your budgetary reach. If you can’t spend at least $100 a day for several weeks, paying for ads online may not be in your best interest.

But wait, there’s more: the learning curve to can be steep. You’re going to need to learn:

• local geographic targeting
• keyword selection
• writing ads that get clicked on
• creating a great landing page (the page people go to when they click on your ad)

 

Can you do this successfully? Sure. But you’ll probably spend a good amount of money before you see results. And it could take a long bit of time before your skills are such that a PPC campaign brings you a good ROI.

Why not spend that same amount of time writing and distributing articles to the free article directories? Write an article a day for a month, then two or three times a week for the next couple of months. You’ll start seeing a good amount of traffic coming to your site then.

The three months you conduct a free article campaign could be just about the same time you spend learning how to do PPC correctly. Three months that you’ve been spending a minimum of $100/day. Meanwhile, your article marketing campaign has cost you nothing!

Don’t stop at distributing your articles. Place your articles on your blog (then be sure to tweet about your blog update and place a notice about it on your Facebook page). Put your articles together as a free e-book/report you offer on your website. This will help drive traffic to your site even more.

Turn to GoiMarketing.com online marketing campaign. Whether you decide to go the PPC route or start an article marketing campaign for your business, we can help. We live and breath Internet marketing for small business and we look forward to the opportunity to helping you see your sales and profits grow. Contact us today!

Four Things to Require of Your SEO Company

When you engage an SEO company to create, revamp and/or optimize a website for you, be sure to ask them for the following services:

Make sure your SEO company submits your site to the three major search engines: Google, Bing/MSN and Yahoo! The company needn’t — in fact, shouldn’t — submit your site to the hundreds of search engines that exist on the Web. Most people only search using the three major search engines and so paying for submission to hundreds is a waste of your money. Be sure your SEO company doesn’t submit your site to more than about 30 search engines. Require that the company send you the list of search engines to which it submitted your site.

2) Ask to be told when your site is indexed by the search engines. Understand that this could take up to three to four months (although a site — rarely — can be indexed within just a few days).

3) Require that the SEO company provide you with a monthly report regarding anything they’ve done to or for your site. This report should include a listing of any on-site SEO performed (more on this in a moment), as well as a list of search engines and web directories to which your site has been submitted. You also should ask for a progress report (monthly) on how your site’s rankings are faring/improving.

4) Finally, and most importantly, your SEO company should create a site or revamp your current one to ensure it’s friendly to the search engines. On-site SEO tasks can and should include: writing informative, engaging keyword optimized content; creating relevant title and meta tags; and peppering each page with relevant html code.

Allow GoiMarketing.com to create a great SEO optimized website for your business, a website that will bring visitors to offerings and convert them into buyers. Contact us today!

 

Four Pillars of SEO

Search Engine Optimization can feel so confusing to people. So many different terms (RSS feeds, off-site vs. on-site, long-tail keywords, meta-tags, etc.), getting a handle on SEO can seem impossible to do.

To help you grasp SEO a little better, we offer you the four basic elements of SEO. They are:

• Good links to your site (backlinks)
• A site that’s friendly to search engines
• Title keywords relevant to your business and SEO
• Good, informative content

 

1) Good links to your site: The more links you have coming to your site the better your own site will rank. A good link is one that comes to your site from a site that’s trusted by search engines. What kind of sites are these? Article directories (ezinearticles.com; goarticles.com, etc.), web directories (Hot Frog and SiteBeSeen, for example), blogs with a large number of followers.

To get these links, write and submit articles to the article directories, with a link to your site in the resource box; list your site in the free and paid web directories. Also get listed in your industry’s professional associations — and even on your local paper’s and chamber’s directories. As for blogs, offer to write guest posts for blogs you admire. You’ll almost always get to have a link on your guest post back to your own site.

2) Search-engine-friendly site: Keep your Flash, dynamic URls and JavaScript navigation links to a minimum on — or completely off — your site. These can slow down search engine spiders.

3) Relevant title keywords: Use relevant keyword phrases for the title of each page of your site. Search engines mostly look at the titles of your web pages to figure out what your site is all about. (The title of your page is located at the top of your browser above your browser’s menu items). Aim to get relevant keywords on each of your page’s titles.

4) Good, informative content: Remember that you’re content really should be written for people, not search engines. Inform your visitors with worthwhile content, video, discount coupons, free downloads — get them motivated to engage with you and your business.

Let us explain what makes good SEO to you in terms you’ll understand. Contact GoiMarketing.com to build or revamp your site so that more visitors will come to your site, visitors who will become customers. We look forward to hearing from you.