Search Engine Optimization

The entire process of search engine optimization and internet marketing can be very frustrating. As a Denver SEO professional, I hear from customers frequently wanting to know the progress of their project. We document all of the work that we are completing on a constant basis, and we have many tools to mark their progression through the search engines. This got me to thinking about those that do not have access to the same tools that we do, as a matter of fact many who are marketing their websites will often give up as they don’t see immediate results from the many hours they have sat in front of the computer trying to obtain a page one ranking. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Written by: Nick Hantge

Looking into hiring an SEO Firm. Can they really help with your internet marketing?

Hiring an SEO firm is something many business owners are contemplating these days. Since the widespread popularity of search engine optimization (SEO) and its benefits, there have been many marketing firms offering to run SEO campaigns for other businesses. There have also been some do-it-yourself business owners who feel they can optimize their own website as well. From an overall marketing standpoint, the case can be made that investing in online advertisement will potentially reach more prospective customers through SEO than other forms of advertising such as print ads. Whether you are contemplating optimization on your website or thinking about running your own SEO campaign, here are a few reasons why you should hire an SEO firm to help land you in front of more potential customers looking for your product or services.

1. They have the Expertise
Even though the stereotypical web developer/SEO professional is thought to play video games all day and work at night in his mother’s basement, they should still be respected as a professional. After all, do you know how to change a cascading style sheet or create a dynamic sitemap? A main reason you hire an SEO Firm is for the same reason you hire an attorney to write up your legal documents or represent you in court; they are the expert! I personally do not change the brakes on my car or put a crown on my own tooth. Granted, I could learn how to do it on my own but I know it will save me in the long run to hire someone who specializes in these services. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a few companies out there claiming they know SEO and how to get you on the first page of Google so they can get a piece of the pie but choosing a good SEO firm comes later…

2. An SEO Firm will save you time
When you hire an SEO firm to handle your online marketing and SEO, it will save you loads and loads of time! I cannot stress enough how much time goes into a worthwhile SEO campaign. SEO firms have years of experience under their belt (hopefully) and a full knowledgeable team to work on optimizing and marketing your website for you.

Like anything, there is a learning curve to search engine optimization. I would be ignorant to say it has the steepest learning curve of any profession but I honestly believe it is in the top 25%. The time an SEO professional has but into gaining all of the knowledge they have gained is shocking! The lucky thing for someone who hires an SEO firm is they have already previously put in the time learning which ensures the website will rise in the search engines much quicker than someone who tries to optimize themselves. There is also a pretty good chance the SEO Firm will be able to utilize the connections they have with other professionals to help speed the campaign along.

Not only will the SEO firm you hire know the latest tricks to optimization, they also know what doesn’t work. As an SEO professional, we have learned through trial and error what effort to consume our time with.

3. It’s all in the numbers
Can you imagine paying employees that you cannot track the work or hours they put into their job? You would not be able to justify if paying them has been profitable for you or your company. The same holds true for hiring an SEO Firm. All of the good SEO firms have a tracking system on the website they are optimizing. In this tracking system you will be able to see daily visitors, what keywords they are typing in to find your website, what search engine or source they came to your website from, how long the individual was on your site, where the location of your visitors are coming from and the list goes on and on. SEO firms also have access to very useful web based tools such as a keyword tool that will tell you the monthly volume of searchers typing in certain keywords or keyword phrases. This is extremely beneficial to recognize and understand what keywords should be targeted in your SEO campaign.

If a business owner runs their own seo campaign are they going to create monthly reports to keep track of progress? Is a business owner going to focus on key point indicators such as bounce rate and new visitors in their SEO campaign to ensure prime results?

4. You Get to Focus on your own Business
Probably the greatest part about hiring an SEO firm to help with your online marketing is you get to concentrate on your own business; what you are good at! I have previously stated how much time goes into an SEO campaign and the truth is for the first six months you need to be constantly working on building links, writing articles and creating PR for your website every day. You have to admit, if you had to just concentrate on running your business and manage your staff efficiently while the leads came in you would be sitting pretty happy. There is no reason for a business to be concerned with trying to manage their online marketing and the day to day activities as well; that is hard enough.

Rely on a professional with years of experience and the time and team to fully optimize your website. Although the thought of not spending money on something you think you could do yourself is nice, hiring an SEO firm will pay for itself and then some in just 4-6 months!

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SEO Tips For You

These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily

Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time. I make this clarification because you must understand search

engines, especially Google, are constantly redefining how they rank pages. Here are my favorite SEO tips, tactics and strategies:

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches.

Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don’t forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it – keeping

a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be

keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site – make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name

also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don’t ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google’s influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my

niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text’ is related to your keywords but don’t ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don’t forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant

sites in your niche.

6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 – 700 word informative and helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don’t forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you’re also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don’t forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts – a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts.  Works similar as a sub-domain

but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you’re creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

8. WordPress Blog Software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It’s time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a

WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on

all my content.

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don’t want SEO – you want effective SEO. In order

to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you’re pursuing – your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That’s why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what’s been searched for or discussed.

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived

authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site – tops in your niche – the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you’re into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you’re seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.

…

The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools If you liked the SEO tips above, why not try the Free 7 Day Traffic course here: Internet Marketing Course Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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By: Cade Lee

Is internet traffic the most important consideration for online success?

Of course it is, internet traffic is critical to the success of any site. It is extremely important, but it seems to me that some companies and individuals do not really focus their time on other extremely important factors like conversion. It was a couple of weeks ago and I was at a local meetup here in Denver for SEO, I was talking with one of the other search engine optimization professionals about some projects that we were looking at, when the topic of conversion surfaced. Ultimately I explained how a low bounce rate was so important to us and that it was one of the KPI (key performance indicators) that we really measured our success by. At first I thought he was going to have a heart attack, he began to “school” me in the ways of search engine optimization and explain to me that bounce rate should not be something that we (search engine optimization professionals) should be gauged or tracked by.

Of course we had to respectfully disagree on this. Good search engine optimization does bring traffic to a site, which goes without saying. If your SEO, SEO department, internet marketing firm or search engine marketing professional does not bring more traffic to the site, than the entire campaign is worthless. It’s not necessarily just a matter of getting your site on the 1^st page of Google (which is nice, and important), it is a matter of bringing a constant growth to the overall traffic through site referrals, banner ad placement, social networking, PPC or CPC and organic results. Right next to increasing traffic as far as importance is concerned is conversion. All the traffic in the world without a sale or conversion into a real lead is just as worthless as having a website that isn’t getting any traffic at all.

So, who works on this conversion and how do they funnel the traffic through your site? The answer to this I believe is your SEO firm and your web developer together. Of course if you don’t have both, than certainly either one of these would understand or should understand traffic conversion and implementing a “call to action” within the site. A call to action is any action which visitors can take to complete the selling process. Obviously in a perfect site, a call to action would be so perfectly designed that the end users have no alternative choice but to move forward with the call to action. We have found that most sites are stuck in the traditional methods or “calls to action” with flash banners that say, “Click here” or a “buy now” button. Consumers or end users want information so that they can make educated buying decision. By now that end user has more than likely made a purchase or request for information online that they regretted. This has left most a little “gun shy” to say the least. So, why not give them that information that they are craving. I am not suggesting that you go out and load your sales pages with content, but on the other hand, instead of having another “click here” or “buy now” button, it might behoove the seller to have a link to product reviews or testimonials.

Another call to action that works is stating the benefit or value received next to the action you want the end user to make. So for example, “purchase now and save 46% over the next 12 months”, long I know but this states a clearly defined benefit as opposed to simply “buy now”. Your call to action should also state the benefit of acting now; you want to create a reason for urgency in your buying message.

If you are not obtaining the conversion rate that you are looking for with your internet traffic, re-consider the message that you are giving to your users. Is it enticing to you? After you have reviewed the site, make sure to look outside for criticism from others about what would make them act on your offer. Invest some time into conversion instead of just focusing on increasing your internet traffic.

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Cade, excited at Christmas about some new socks

By: Cade Lee

Completely new to Twitter (at least only having been there for the past couple of weeks now), I have never been so enthused about a new social networking media. I have been on facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sits but I have to say that I have run into more people in a shorter time frame on Twitter than anything else so far. So with that being said, I was asked by GreigWells (@GreigWells on Twitter) to conduct this post and I was happy to do so. I had never really considered the three types of marketing separate or “versus” one another before, nonetheless GriegWells requested a SWAT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Achievements and Threats also referred to as SWOT, O for opportunities) assessment on the these three internet marketing techniques. In trying to remain objective I must state that I am a strong believer in “search engine optimization” and that includes using all three of the above campaigns for marketing online. I definitely lean more towards traditional search engine optimization and social networking versus pay per click (cost per click) advertising and I will explain this very shortly. So with that being said, let’s begin.

Pay per Click (PPC, CPC)

For those that have not heard this before or are completely new to internet marketing, these are the advertisements that you see on the right hand side of your screen or at the very top of your Google internet marketing and already know this so bear with me for a few seconds while I explain to those who do not know. PPC or CPC advertising is paid for by the advertiser. In a pay per click campaign you will set up an account with whatever search engine you are advertising with, you will “buy” or define keywords that searchers would use to find your product or service and then bid on those keywords. Depending on your bid, you will show up on the 1^st page or perhaps the 5^th  depending on how you bid. You can control the amount of money that you spend on these types of campaigns by defining a daily budget and how much you are willing to pay for the keywords defined in your campaign.

Organic listings are bordered in blue while PPC is highlighted and bordered in Red. Our next figure will be easier "which one of these kids is doing his own thing".

searches. Usually you will notice a “sponsored links” text by these advertisements. I know that many of you have much experience in

Strengths, Achievements: With PPC or CPC advertising you are able to achieve a very high page ranking (as long as you bid high) at a very fast pace or in a very short time frame. You do not really have to work at obtaining high amounts of traffic to your site, it is extremely convenient and time efficient.

So PPC or CPC goes in line with the golden rule, you know, “He/she who has the most gold makes the rules”. You simply pay enough and you are in front of all that coveted “front page” traffic that everyone is after, as long as you have followed the terms and conditions of the search engine that you have placed the campaign with.  

It has been documented in some studies that PPC/CPC advertising attracts 14% of the overall traffic; however, when you consider the sheer volume of some keywords 14% can add up to tens of thousands of searches every day. There are other studies that have shown PPC/CPC obtaining a total of 30% of total traffic. So while it is hard to say just how many searchers trust or look to PPC/CPC to find the solution for their search, pay per click advertising does deliver results and for many companies (especially newer domains or sites) it is a necessity.

Threats/Weaknesses: Man it was certainly tough to cover the strengths and I had to bite my tongue to get here. Threats and weaknesses to a pay per click campaign are many. To start, once you have initiated your campaign for PPC/CPC and “gotten the ball rolling” you can definitely expect to see traffic, but what kind of traffic? Could it be that your jealous competition is simply clicking on your ad to use your budget for the day? Google and other companies that offer PPC/CPC advertising cannot prevent this type of activity from occurring; although they have put some protocol in place to avoid it as much as possible it is still absolutely going to happen. I don’t necessarily condone this type of behavior (clicking on PPC ads to drive out the competition) but, for those that believe business is war (especially among small to mediums sized businesses) I know that this is a daily occurrence having heard it from the mouths of many prospective customers. At the end of the day spending your competitions budget on PPC is a strategy just like any other. The sooner your competition spends your budget for the day, the sooner they can take your advertisement down and then perhaps if they have an ad of their own, theirs will surface from the bottom of the heap where they have bid a much lower amount for the same keywords you have bid on.

Another weakness to PPC is that once you have spent your budget for the day you are off the “board” unless you are willing to go in and change your budget and spend more money. So in PPC/CPC you are sincerely at the mercy of the market. Whether your ad is visible to that prospective customer you are hoping to meet depends on whether or not your ad has been clicked on enough times to spend your budget for that day. If you think about this, what type of advertising have you ever done in the past where your ad disappears? Maybe with passing out flyers, or television ads, both of these campaigns tend to be just as effective in today’s market as PPC (maybe even more effective in my opinion).

Getting back on topic here, I thought I might mention that keywords in PPC/CPC seem to be less forgiving here than in search engine optimization. I say this because it seems to me that if you have not defined the keyword exactly as it is typed in by your searcher than you will miss that traffic as well. An example of this is “Denver Attorney” versus “Attorney in Denver”. In my experience in the past, if I purchased “Denver Attorney” and did not place “Attorney in Denver” in my campaign, than I would not show for it as a keyword.  Makes sense as Google or any other search engine would not want to take charge of your PPC campaign and just assume that you would want to be in front of that traffic looking for “Attorney in Denver”. Whereas in search engine optimization you will be able to “net” the traffic from misspellings, variations of keywords, etc. I will explain more about this in our assessment of search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

Strengths/Achievements:  It seriously pains me to separate search engine optimization from social networking, but given the request of comparing these three “side by side” I must abide by the rules here. Anyway, search engine optimization for those of you who might have heard the term (who hasn’t latey?), but are new to the concept means that you are optimizing your site in hopes to achieve a page one ranking or improve your ranking in the search results by optimizing the keywords

One of these kids is doing his own thing, can you tell which one? By the way, this has nothing to do with this post.

used within your site as well as making use of meta tags and building links to your site from other credible and relevant sites. As cited earlier, 14% – 30% of traffic (according to some studies) is going to PPC/CPC results which would imply that 70% or more of searchers are going to the organic results. This would only make sense as Google or whatever major search engine that searcher is using has taken the time to find the most relevant site or results for that searchers specified search. There seems to be an inherent amount of trust given to the larger search engines as they have proven over time with their very complex algorithms that they deliver the most trusted and useful results first.  So is it really any wonder that the majority of internet traffic prefers organic results over PPC/CPC results?

In the sites that we manage (we are a search engine optimization firm if I didn’t say that before) we have noticed a lower bounce rate and a higher “lead conversion rate” on our SEO efforts versus the results our customers had achieved through their previous experiences with pay per click campaigns managed by “pay per click” experts. Mind you that some of these customers were using “AdWords qualified professionals” designated so by Google’s very own designation program. In order to qualify for this program (read this) you will read that it is imperative that these professionals have a quota to fulfill before they ever even qualify. This was absolutely amazing to me as I thought Google would want to have the absolute most qualified individuals giving advice on this sort of campaign versus requiring some sort of monthly quota as they have outlined in their requirements.

Okay, okay, back on topic here. Search engine optimization offers stability for those sites which abide by the guidelines stated here. Although Google changes their algorithms and updates their search engine results regularly, I have noticed that by abiding the guidelines set forth and constantly improving our customer’s websites we are able to stay in front of the right prospective customers for the same keywords 24/7 for a myriad of keyword combinations (i.e. “Denver Attorney” versus “Attorney in Denver). So the biggest strengths of SEO (search engine optimization) is that a site has no daily budget concerns because it is free! Also there seems to be more trust among searchers with organic listings and more stability and dependability as far as showing up at “the right time and being in the right place” when that prospective customer is looking for your products or services. Lastly, the conversion rate seems to always be higher with a well optimized site versus only working with PPC traffic.

Threats/Weaknesses: At any given time, when you are depending on search engine optimization for your results, you are at the complete mercy of the search engine. At any given time a search engine can go through an “update” or change their algorithms and not include your site in their new results for various search terms. So you are at the complete mercy of the unknown here. With PPC/CPC as long as you pay your bill, you do not have this concern.

With SEO, there is no such thing as instant gratification and there is no “known” way of obtaining a 1^st page ranking. All SEO experts have usually deomnstrated some sort of ability to achieve these types of results, but even they cannot sincerely guaranty a page one ranking. Perhaps if you are optimizing for a search term like ,”Rodent racing” as used by Peter Kent in “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies” you might see quicker results; however, if you live in the real world it is most likely that there are many competitors vying for that first page result you are looking for. So, there is much competition in search engine optimization not to mention how time consuming it really is. If you are sincere about optimizing your site and obtaining that 1^st page ranking than it is imperative that you work on optimizing your website every day and following an “optimization plan”. I know that there are many other experts out there that would disagree with me, but I sincerely believe that the only way to “white hat” your way to the top is to work earnestly on obtaining that 1^st page ranking every day.

A well optimized site requires regular maintenance, so it is imperative that you continue working on your optimization even when you obtain that 1^st page ranking. PPC/CPC does not require any of this laborious work.

Social Networking

Strengths/Achievements: I strongly believe that social networking differs from PPC/CPC and SEO altogether. If I were to come up with a fair analogy, I view social networking like networking in general.

When I first entered the professional market, I was a sales representative. I trained with a class of other sales representatives and we were taught two basic ways to obtain business. One was through hard work which included marketing, cold calling and basically getting out there in front of strangers. The other way we were taught to obtain new business was in networking. Networking is also hard word, I did not mean to imply that it wasn’t, but it always seemed like so much more fun than cold calling or handing out fliers (I know I used flyers before, who knows both seem acceptable). Social networking online is the same to me as networking. If you can establish you or your company as a trusted source for any particular solution, than when the time is right for the prospect who has been reading your facebook or linked-in page comes, they will contact you (at least that is the hope). These leads are solid as they already know who you are, what you have to say, how many kids you have and where you went to school. These prospects know that they want to do business with you, they have studied your content and they are interested period.

I strongly believe that (personal opinion here) the closing ratio is higher for those businesses and professionals that have obtained leads or prospective customers strictly by networking online versus those who are only using PPC/CPC or SEO. I say this because social networking is more like public relations versus SEO and PPC/CPC which is more in line with advertising. When advertising, it is more likely to get objections from prospective customers about price or value than it is from referrals. I view social networking just like I do networking in real life.

Threats/ Weaknesses: Similar to SEO, with social networking, your ranking and account are always at the mercy of who you have them with. Just as Google has guidelines, so do the majority of social networking sites. So at the end of the day it is not beyond the realm of reason to suggest that the page on linkedin you have been working at so hard to promote goes away over night as they are sold off to a larger competitor or perhaps they change their guidelines and the scope of your page goes against their guidelines now. While my first example might seem more ridiculous (imagine facebook disappearing overnight, right) the second is not so unimaginable. Facebook could change guidelines tomorrow eliminating all references to any commercial product or company within their domain tomorrow if they wanted, and if they did I don’t think they would suffer all that much for it. I am obviously using my imagination here; the point is that anyone depending on social networking is at the mercy of the services they use to network. Take Squidoo for example, many were using this as a way to promote themselves only to have Google disregard the high page rank they had obtained for their Squidoo page and next thing you know they were not visible any longer. The rules can change at any given time.

So, there you have it. The strengths, weaknesses, achievements and threats of SEO versus PPC versus social networking as I see and understand it. Ultimately, I think any professional or company for that matter is insane not to take advantage of all three of these. I am not suggesting that anyone go out and do all three at the same time, but I do believe that the first stage to obtaining good traffic for a new site is through PPC/CPC. I say this because a site that has never been marketed or is newer will not be able to achieve results organically right away (at least not for the long run), so while the search engine optimization campaign is being worked on, PPC/CPC can deliver results immediately.

The second phase of a solid internet marketing plan incorporates search engine optimization and social networking. Both search engine optimization and social networking used hand in hand will deliver the most optimal results for your search engine marketing campaign. First time I used this term right? What is search engine marketing you say? There are several different definitions of this; I am going to give you the meaning I give to search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is any attempt within the “whitehat” world of internet marketing to get a useful message out to the online community about your services or product, period. By making a constant effort to market you, your website and your product or service, I believe you are marketing through the internet and search engines alike.

The third phase of your internet marketing plan should be improvement. Improving traffic, improving conversion goals and education. The internet is obviously changing faster than any of us can keep up with it, so by constantly striving to stay on top of it all and educating yourself on the latest social networking techniques, PPC/CPC and SEO strategies you will be able to keep your traffic and grow.

At the end of the day, any one of these internet marketing techniques is beyond valuable and they have all assisted with the success of thousands of professionals and businesses alike. Used in combination with one another, an explosive internet marketing campaign can be designed for almost anyone.

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In this tougher economy many companies are cutting their marketing costs, yet they are not taking advantage of the free resources that they have online.

By: Cade Lee

I have seen a great deal of articles about how to cut your marketing costs in this economy; how to “eliminate waste, make fewer mistakes, nurture what you have got, increase conversions, etc.” I have read these articles and sincerely considered the true message of each article and I continue to think about all the clients that we have visited with over the last several months. With the market the way that it is and the state of the economy, it is definitely easy to lose site of the bigger picture and start making cuts without much thought. On the reverse side of this, something that struck me as funny with all this talk of cutting costs is that many businesses have not considered changing the way that they do business or rather the way that they approach their market. What I am saying here is that if it is new, a new way of marketing online for example, they are not even considering this as an alternative to their current marketing strategy. In our case it is because they don’t have the money to invest in a new marketing campaign, but that begs the question as to why these same customers are not taking the time to focus on search engine optimization or internet marketing.

In our meetings with prospective customers, we continue to hear that “search engine marketing is not in the budget right now”. It did not hit me until I started to read these articles that our clients in Denver that are working on their search engine optimization campaigns are not sharing in the woes of the economy like those prospective clients that cannot be seen online. It’s hard to grow or even survive in an economy like this if you don’t have new customers calling and e-mailing you about your services.

I also understand that search engine optimization takes one of two different things, money or time and many of the prospective clients we talk with seem absolutely unwilling to part with the first of the two, I just don’t see how they cannot invest the time at least. Here are five things you can do to help your business right now at absolutely no cost to you. I am assuming that you have a computer and internet connection, so with that being said, here goes:

1. Obtain a local listing with the major search engines: Submitting your businesses information to any one of the major search engines will allow your business to be more easily seen and this service is offered completely free! It’s not always easy to figure out how to list with the various search engines, so the best thing to do is to simply perform a search like, “how to list your business with Google”, etc. By simply listing your business with Google or Yahoo, this does not mean that you will automatically pop up on the first page when a prospective customer is searching for your service or product, but it does get you one step closer to optimizing your site.

2. Post an ad with Craigslist: If Craigslist is not charging you for an ad, why aren’t you posting a flyer or advertisement with Craigslist? The most common objection I hear to this is,”I don’t have time to post on Craigslist” to this I reply that they should hire an internet marketing firm to take on this responsibility for them. Like I said earlier, it takes time or money. If you do not have one or the other you had best examine your schedule and make the time or you will not ever see any change in your business.

3. Start a blog: This is not at all complicated. Google offers a free blogging service and there are so many more that we do not have time to go into. Blogging about your company and services will often time make it to the 1st page of a search well before your site will. Make certain you incorporate a habit of blogging at least every other day.

4. List your business and yourself with Linked In:  We have a fantastic competitor here in Denver that shows up for all the various keywords applicable to our business. This gentleman has a blog, a website and a linked in page that all show up on the first page of Google when you search for Denver SEO, SEO Denver, Search Engine Marketing Denver, Search Engine Optimization Denver and Internet Marketing Denver.

5. Create a facebook page for your business: Once again all of this takes time but does not cost you a thing to do. I know that facebook is not a revelation to you or your business, but if you make certain to mention your site in your page and continuously link to and from all these sources to each other you will start to build links to your site and more importantly your presence online.

None of these things are new or revolutionary; however I am amazed at the amount of our prospective customers that do not have these things already completed. Once you have established these accounts it is important that you continuously work on them. If you were to spend as much as 1 hour per week updating the content of your facebook page or your blog for that matter, you will start to see these sources rise to the top of the search engines which of course gives you more exposure.

The most important thing you can do is link. Link to your site, link to your facebook page, link to your local listing for that matter always be linking. Always focus on linking all of your web presences together which creates a larger presence online.

Please let me know if you have any questions as always, we are here to help!

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Written by: Nick Hantge

With today’s shift from paper to major search engines and online directories, a website is one of the best marketing tools a company can have.  A website can reach not only individuals searching for your services or products locally; it can reach hundreds of thousands of individuals nationwide and around the globe.

Whether you sell a product online such as cookies or jewelry or provide a service such as laser hair removal, the first step to being successful online is being found on the major search engines.  It does not matter the size of your company or how great your website looks, if individuals cannot find your business in their searches you simply will not be successful online.

Too often, companies or individuals spend thousands of dollars on the design of their website thinking they are doing the right thing.  This idea of creating a website that just looks good is a thing of the past.  If a website is unable to be found under searches relating to its content, this marketing tool is a waste of your money.

The quickest possible way to get listed on the major search engines is through search engine marketing (SEM) where you pay for quality leads to your website often called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  Although PPC does get you immediately listed on search engines, through our research 75% of individuals using the internet do not click on paid advertisements on the side.

A more effective but time intensive way to get noticed by the search engines is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is the science of analyzing and enhancing your website to manipulate your ranking on major search engines such as Google® and Yahoo!® to increase the volume of traffic to your site.  Since 65% of searches make their decision before moving to the second page, it is vital to have your website optimized and show up for different search terms on the first page at least once.  The more times your website appears under searches relating to your business, obviously the more exposure you have that will ultimately lead to more traffic to your website.  After your website has been optimized and starts to appear on the first page of the search engine for a few terms, then the appearance, flow, and functionality starts to become a factor.  It only makes sense to keep the individuals on your website once they are they.  The longer people are on your website, the more likely they are to use your product or services.

A huge advantage to SEO when it comes to advertising is the quality of the traffic viewing your site.  Most everyone that visits your optimized website is looking either for the product or services you provide.  This quality lead is much better than the traffic you are reaching through a billboard, newspaper, or radio advertisement.  The reason I say that is because the individuals who hear or see that ad, do not necessarily need or want your services.  Plus in these types of advertisements, your information does not stay in front of individuals, whereas a properly optimized website can be found over and over again with your contact information and list of products and services blaring right at them.

There are many techniques that SEO experts use to increase the ranking of websites.  The key to a good SEO campaign is a constant effort.  Web pages need to be added and updated, link building needs to continue while your website remains live, and submissions to all major search engines along with directories are just a few of the many techniques an SEO company would use to help increase a websites rank.  If you would like more information on SEO techniques or strategies, call Iniquitous as (303) 327-8991 or visit their website: Iniquitous

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