Archive for the ‘SEO Denver’ tag
Hiring an SEO Consultant
Written by: Grayson Thrush
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can serve as the linchpin to your overall marketing plan for your business. Gone are the days when all you needed was an ad in the local phone book. The most efficient way to drive leads to your business is through Internet marketing. You need more than just a website, though.
A website that has not been optimized for search engine results pages (SERPs) will only serve as a digital business card. Nobody will find it unless they know about it and where to look. Your competition will quickly surpass such an outmoded approach. You need to hire a Denver SEO consultant to help get your website seen by those searching for the products and/or services that your business offers.
A competent SEO company will offer a full-service approach to Internet marketing, in order to ensure that your SEO campaign is in fact successful. You will need to start out by looking for a Denver SEO company on the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
Mastering the Google Ranking Bounce
Eric Giguere’s unofficial and long-running blog about Google’s AdSense program. He also covers contextual advertising and related topics.
From: The Unofficial AdSense Blog
By: Eric Giguere
As I’ve argued before (see It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!), you need traffic to make money with a website. It doesn’t matter if you’re monetizing with AdSense, affiliate offers, CPA offers, or some other advertising system — no traffic, no conversions; no conversions, no money.
One way to get traffic is to show up in the top 10 results for a well-searched keyword phrase on Google. This is the Holy Grail of Free Traffic. But it can be very hard to hit that top 10, or even the top 20.
There is a way to do it on a temporary basis, though, with some effort. I call it the “Google ranking bounce”.
Here’s how it works: Google currently gives a “freshness boost” to newly-published content. If the site that hosts the content is authoritative enough, this freshness boost can be enough to temporarily catapult the new content into the top 30 results for the content’s main keyword. (We’re assuming good on-page SEO here, of course, with the main keyword in the title of the page and ideally also in the URL itself, plus sprinkled appropriately throughout the content.) The boost lasts for 2 or 3 days, after which the page will “slide down” to its natural rank, there to stay until it gets pushed up through “natural” means (i.e. link acquisition). The page may in fact disappear for a few days from the index before reappearing.
I’ve seen this boost happen on my own sites (I have a few old domains) and on sites like EzineArticles. You can get a real, but unfortunately temporary, traffic boost from this rankings boost.
So what do you do? Write several articles/posts of content targeted at the main keyword and then publish them several days apart. If you’ve done it right, the freshness boost will ensure that one of your articles is continually in the top 10/20/30 until your supply of content is exhausted.
This is not easy to do, and it takes real effort to write all that content. The best place to start is with EzineArticles, I think. Find a high-volume search term that displays two articles from EzineArticles in the top 10. You won’t be able to displace the first article, but you can probably temporarily push out the second article. You’ll be surprised at how many times your article will be viewed. It’s temporary, of course, and only some of the traffic will make it to your own site, but it’s a cheap way to get some good, targeted traffic.
If you try this technique, let me know how it goes for you. It definitely takes work, though. The good thing is that over time all the content you write will itself reach critical mass and help you rank higher in the future.
Are you cutting marketing costs?
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!
The Frustration of Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing
By: Nick Hantge and Cade Lee
“Look at the flow and navigation of the site” the developer says! Google along with many other popular search engines respond “I don’t care.” “The flash is too busy, there is no text, and the navigation is impossible” the Googlebots further explain (that’s if the Googlebots were able to talk, and they can’t).
Many times web developers experience criticism but not always from humans, Google and their “Googlebots” are the ultimate website critics. Can you imagine working with a critic that does not give any verbal feedback? A site has been designed with an interface that pops with beautiful GIFs and JPEGs, dazzles with Flash and functions like a charm with JavaScript, but the search engines simply do not care. The content, keywords and the tags do not correspond with the criteria of the search engines. Therefore, you are ignored. It could take six months to find this out while you are banging away at blogs, online directory submissions and trying to figure out just how to get your website to the top of Google for various search engines.
Just yesterday, we were at a meeting with a local Denver Printer because we have been working with them on a new site that they want to launch at the beginning of 2009. This printer has been in the graphics business since the early 60’s and if anyone knows graphics and marketing, it would have to be these folks. Yesterday’s meeting was the review of the first draft of the new site. The new site was built for Google optimization first and than the actual user has been the second priority. The reason for this is self-explanatory, however to explain, if we build the site for the end user then Google will not rank the site as high as if we appease Google first and the end user next.
It is a struggle between art and science that frustrates many. The responsibilities of web developing – the art — clashed with the role of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — the science. This is why some companies and development firms are designating web developer and optimizer as two distinctive jobs. This being said, many smaller companies and shops still have the web developer fulfilling both roles. In the case of the printing company we have been fulfilling both roles.
The first comment I had received was “the landing page is too busy”, I did not get the opportunity to explain to them that Google craves content and that if we do not have relevant content on the first page then Google will not place too much importance on the site or landing page in general. The problem is that search engine optimization is becoming challenging and competitive. Here is some information to help start the website optimization before, after or during the development of your website.
Content
It is all about the writing on the wall. Remember that search engine optimization is all about the written text. I can’t stress enough how important the content of your website is. So if you have not read anything about SEO yet, make certain you understand that Google (the king of search engines) places the most importance on content or text. Search engines are text driven but there are still some basic HTML tags to keep in mind (i.e., h1, h2, meta tags, title tag). SEO helps improve search engine results but does not guarantee top ratings. Patience and realistic goals will keep the frustrations low. By this I mean planning on 60-90 days getting real results. Search engines have to crawl a site to determine what the site is about. This takes time, usually about a month, before the crawling and indexing are completed by the various search engine spiders.
Take some time to think (a lot) about the purpose of the website. Write down and brainstorm a lot of content in a word processing program even if it sounds ridiculous at first. Then edit what you wrote, edit some more, get some feedback and then start working on the keywords and keyphrases that identify the unique quality of your website.
Keywords and Keyphrases
The days of locating and finding easy Keywords are gone. Keywords are extremely competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even four-word, phrases makes optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase) helps identify the distinctiveness of a website. The keyword “catering” will generate about 92 million (!) results. The keyphrase “wedding caterer” will generate about 2 million results. That is a difference of approximately 90 million. The keyphrase “Denver wedding caterer” will generate about only 419,000 thousand results. The time needed to be spent finding unique keyphrases and determining your target market will be worth it in the end. When you narrow down the results, with multi-word phrases, this provides a better chance of your site being noticed and ultimately allows quicker results.
The density formula is D = KC/WC (D = density; KC = keyword count; WC = word count)
For major keywords target 3-7% density
For minor keywords target 2-3% density
Keyword density measures how relevant keywords are on a page. The formula density = keyword count divided by the total word count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords, try to keep the density between three and seven percent. For minor keywords keep density between two and three percent throughout the page. For best results, try to optimize between two to three keywords per web page.
Avoid the old SEO tactic of keyword stuffing or writing your keyword numerous times on a page. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines and your chances of being listed at the top will go right out the window. Keyword stuffing involves many techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or Meta Tag with several occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.
Title Tag
The title tag is absolutely critical! We have found that focusing on the Title Tag and making certain a site has the keywords included here is one of the most important keys to SEO. Most search engines will read up to 100 characters in the Title Tag. The Title Tag should be unique on every page just like the content and keywords are. Make sure to match your Title Tag to the keywords you are aiming for on each page.
If you have a webpage about digital printing in Denver, make sure you include that in your title. Absolutely do not title your pages with “home” and “contact”. Instead use “contact denver printing company, digital printers, best denver printer, denver printing estimate”. This keeps us under the 100 characters, the user will look at the top of the page and still be able to see ”contact” and we have used great keywords for search engines.
Meta Tags
The Meta Tags are important although some will disagree. Meta Tags once were the solution to SEO a year back but have began to slightly fall of the chart. Keywords and content are more beneficial in getting a web site in top rankings however, Meta Tags are still important. Meta Tags are a part of the HTML and are used by most search engines to find a description of your website.
When building a website, place these Meta Tags below the Title Tag on your page but make sure these are all included in the <head> and before the <body>.
<title>~</title>
<meta name =”description” content=”~” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”~” />
Using keywords and keyphrases in these tags helps to slightly boost search engine rankings. Although the Meta Tags do not have the influence on search engines they once did, it is still vital to
include them in your SEO campaign.
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Cade Lee seen relaxing with some of Santa's Helpers
About the Authors: Cade Lee is in an independent web developer/SEO Expert who owns and maintains over 100 different domains. Cade has worked on various e-commerce and website projects. Cade has coached and implemented successful SEO strategies for many Denver Companies as well as national Companies.
Nick Hantge specializes in SEO campaigns at both local and national platforms. Nick has spent time educating several other individuals to comfortably run their own SEO operations. Nick has dabbled with website development for companies that range in size of 4 employees to over 500