Search Engine Optimisation
Other Factors to Consider in Assessing SEO Companies
Aug 18th
Unbelievably cheap SEO services can be more expensive. How? There are SEO companies that offer cheap services but actually for a particular SEO strategy only. Meaning, it is not a price for the whole SEO services in a package. You would be paying a lot more once you have signed up a contract with them. This method is obviously a fraudulent strategy you must avoid. There is another case. You are offered with cheap priced services but you are not getting any results. The reason is that they are using spamming method, making everything done through automation such as site submission, link generating, and others. This results to having your site, which you have invested with considerable amount of bucks, being banned from the search engines. Starting another site is costly.
You can also assess the companies’ credibility and reliability by asking tricky questions. Instead of directly asking them like this: “Do you use black hat SEO techniques?” you can ask them with questions like this: “How long will my site rank by automatically submitting my site to search engine directories?” Scammer sites would give you immediate answers as “in a matter of 3 weeks to 1 month.” Another way of knowing that any of your prospect SEO companies to be hired is a scam can be done by knowing the usual case. What is the usual case? Several cases happen in the agreement that takes place between the SEO Company and the SEO client. Let me mention only one: The scam SEO companies would ask what keywords should be used and you want your site to be optimized with. The credible and reliable ones don’t do this because since they are expert, they are the ones that assign best keywords for your site.
How Web Marketing Can Help
Aug 16th
A certified web marketing company, such as Web Marketing Experts, can formulate web marketing tactics to strengthen your presence in the Internet. Identify the strong points of your company and its objectives so that these elements can be combined with web marketing procedures to promote your company online.
It is necessary to acknowledge that there is a multitude of web promotion services that can assist in boosting your web presence. In line with this, your web marketing consultant must be able to suggest the most excellent mix of marketing solutions to for your website. Some of these web marketing campaigns may include:
5 Important Questions About Link Building Answered
Aug 11th
Much like building a house, when you are trying to build a link popularity profile for SEO purposes, speed isn’t the only determinant of success. A house that goes up fast, but falls down around the owner’s ears is obviously pretty useless! So today we’re shelving the ‘more and faster is better’ approach, and looking at the ‘other’ things you need to know about link building best practices.
Speed of link acquisition
One very important caveat to the advice you’ll read about gaining links is that faster is not better … in fact, gaining links too fast can get you kicked off the search engines, and destroy your search engine optimisation campaign thus far. Your links should be built:
- Slowly at first – perhaps 2-3 links per day in the first month
- Faster as the site ages
- Faster as your Pagerank increases
Mirroring external with internal growth
It is also important to mirror any link popularity growth you make externally with internal linking for the health of your SEO campaign. There are several options for creating a platform for constantly updated, fresh content:
- Having an on-site blog, where you can cross-link both to pages of the main site and to earlier blog posts
- Having a News or Press section of the website
- Create a Local Events section if appropriate to your niche
- Create a ‘What’s New’ page; especially useful for e-commerce sites.
This internal growth helps re-assure the search engines that your outside link popularity growth is natural, and also provides a greater variety of content that people may want to link to without any encouragement … doing your SEO work for you!
Choose your anchor text carefully
The anchor text for your links was at one stage a couple of years ago, the major factor in Google’s site ranking algorithm. It has since been downgraded – but it is still very important for your search engine optimisation to control your anchor text to reflect your most important keywords – those with the best mix of high popularity and low competition.
Balance between one-way and reciprocal links
When you link to a site, then they link to you, that link has less weighting in the Google algorithm than if the link was one-way. However, one of the major link building strategies in a long term campaign is to link out to other pages … so how do you reconcile this dilemma? The same way you do every other difficult decision … with compromise. Dammit! Link out – but be selective about it. Don’t bother linking to Wikipedia all the time, they won’t link back – select other sites and bloggers that are likely to notice and return the linking favour.
Link building can actually be a little tricky … but there are always SEO experts around to help you!
PPC VS SEO part 1
Jul 7th
There has been very intense disagreements between which of Paid Per Click(PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more effective for a company.
PPC offers many advantages such as near instantaneous flow of traffic, pay on performance, precise keyword targeting, budget control and time control just listing a few. Since results are instantaneous, most companies tend to keep using PPC. Since there are more people using PPC, costs have risen considerably as there are more competitors bidding for the same keyword.
SEO requires more planning and if conducted well, minimizes cost significantly. SEO can be a timely process and may cost a significant initial cost, usually in the form of link buying. SEO can also improve your websites value. A good example is imagining your website as a property such as your house. With an SEO targeted approach, you would purchase land or other houses around it out expand your existing business. On the other hand, PPC could mean renting the land around you.
By 2013, a CNN report suggests, internet advertising will grow from USD$9.1 billion in 2007 to USD$21 billion. Surprisingly, out for the billions spent on advertising, only 11% is from SEO and 87% from PPC.
In determining which approach suits best depends on your business or the product you’re trying to sell. For example, if it’s a seasonal item, and the popularity is only during this period of time, you would want instant results, thus PPC would be the better option.
The image bellow shows the distribution of clicks by internet users in the US. You can see that most people click on the organic search section compared to the Paid, ‘sponsored’ area.
You decide which is better? Or you can consult an Internet Marketing expert.
A mobile version of your site is important
Jul 7th
A recent survey conducted by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) of 3710 respondents found 21 per cent browsed internet websites in the past 12 months at least once a day. It is predicted in over the next 2 years with better value mobile internet packages; over 52% of mobile phone users will browse the internet.
These figures suggest mobile websites has become a crucial part of websites to increase their traffic. Currently, nearly all major websites such as CNBC, CNN, The Age and more, have a mobile version.
Most might not be aware that Google has a crawler called the “Googlebot-Mobile”. A very relevant post can be found on the following link, which gives you a basic idea on how different mobile sites are. The Google blog also suggests tips on how enhance the chances of your mobile site getting indexed. Here’s the link Google Blog about mobile sites
The cost of developing a mobile version of differs depending on the complexity required. A mobile site costs around $2,000 for a very basic version to $40,000+ for a site which customizes all pages and tools. The market is still considerably young, thus there are less competition, so the prices are still quite high. I would recommend a mobile website programmer company called Appscore. We’ve had a few mobile websites developed by them and cannot be more pleased with their service. There pricing are also very reasonable.
Most websites do work on mobile phone browsers but for me, it sometimes is annoying to scroll sideways, zoom in or out. Sites which require constant zooming in and out causes hassles to browsers and in some cases, browsers leave. The aim of the game is to gain more viewers, but most importantly returning viewers. By providing them with a pleasant browsing experience, at home while browsing on their computer or while they are out on their mobile phone.
Good Tutorial about the basic concepts of SEO
Jul 6th
This is a very good youtube video outlining the main concepts of SEO. It really shows you the jist of what search engine optimization is all about.
5 Essential Website Success Tactics for 2010
May 27th
Right now we’re going back … to the future! We spend a lot of time talking about the timeless SEO and internet marketing tactics. Here are the up-and-comers for the year that will continue to be important for the rest of 2010.
Google Local
It’s like ordinary SEO, only smaller and easier! Get onto that Google Local page and start prettying it up if you haven’t already done so.
Load time
This new SEO ranking factor might not carry a lot of weight, but it really is a no-brainer. Get a good host, and keep your pages lightweight.
Do your Facebook/Twitter/MySpace pages
Everybody else is on here … and if your business has dedicated fans, they are probably actually searching for your profile.
Create a mobile site
Even small, local sites need a mobile version to cater to users-on-the-go searching for goods and services through their smartphones.
Check your analytics
There’s no sense throwing money at SEO without knowing what results it is creating…
Most Internet Businesses Fail. Why?
May 25th
There are a lot of stories on the web about ultra-successful businesses … the ones that fail don’t get anywhere near as much press. The reality is that the unsuccessful businesses outnumber those that survive by about 15 to 1. It isn’t all down to their web marketing or SEO – here are three important reasons most internet businesses fail.
You weren’t doing what you were good at
The only people that millions of dollars with any scheme are those that have a talent in that area. If you aren’t a natural born seller, you’ll just join the 99.87% of people that lose money on the next Amway wannabe scheme.
Investing too much without income
Invest a little – wait til you see income from it. Repeat, and increase. Throwing a heap of money at something is a great way to lose a lot of money.
Information overload
If you’re trying to learn about business on the web, find one expert to help you … and stick with them. Information overload can lead to fuzzy goals and ill-targeted strategies. And all the SEO in the world won’t help you then!
5 Quick Tips for Website Hosting
May 20th
Hosting – one of those silent SEO factors that can have a major impact on your rankings if it goes wrong … but because it goes right so much of the time, we tend to undervalue the importance of having reliable hosting. Here are WME’s top five tips for getting your website hosting right, and not jeopardising your web marketing results!
These gals know about hosting!
- Don’t host your website at the same place you registered the domain name. Most businesses are specialised for one or the other.
- Cheaper is not better. If hosting is cheap, you’re most likely sharing low quality resources which will cause site lag.
- Consider a dedicated server if you have a large, complex, frequently updated site. Having only your own website info on a single server is a form of insurance.
- Host locally – this will help boost your SEO rankings for local searches … generally the sort that you want!
- Don’t forget your hosts when you change credit cards! If your hosts can’t renew your domain, they might be taken off the web without warning. Not good for SEO!