Maintenance isn’t just a term used by SEO agencies to create a recurring revenue stream. Maintenance in the SEO world can and should include services such as the process of keeping new inbound links increasing, the addition of fresh content, and making onsite adjustments just to name a few of the key maintenance services a firm should be suggesting to their clients. As a firm’s knowledge about search matures and changes there is always a need to go back and review what has worked, what is working, and what new potential opportunities might exist in the SEO channel for any given client.

When most customers start down the SEO path, with an agency, they don’t have the search engine rankings they desire so they spend time admiring and often studying what their competitors are doing. Months later when firms, like this one, have helped them achieve their rankings they forget that other firms with other clients are just waiting in the wings to knock them off their rankings pedestal.

(more…)

I’m a pretty analytical guy. In fact, if I could break a good sweat using MSExcel, it would likely replace my treadmill. I like to measure my measurements just before and after I measure things to make sure my measurements are accurately measured. Sad I know… but true nonetheless.

Let’s talk keyword rankings for a minute, shall we? There are plenty of software applications on the Internet that can scrape the engines and tell you where you rank for as many keywords you would like (my personal favorite is IBP by Axandra). For obvious reasons, the engines frown on this. In case it’s not obvious, it’s because it skews their search statistics and eats up unnecessary bandwidth. I’m sure there are other reasons, but let’s leave it at that.

(more…)

So you’ve conquered your website and implemented best practices in search engine optimization for each of your existing web pages. Congratulations, but what’s next? Well, you should certainly be link building… but what else should you be doing? Well, you should start with the assumption that you (or your SEO firm) hasn’t come close to realizing your web site’s full organic search engine potential.

I often tell clients that proper on-page optimization should be an ongoing process. We’ll begin with that end in mind, but in this series of posts - yes, there will be others - we’ll start with the beginning stages of the on-page search engine optimization process and how you can leverage analytics to get your SEO project started off on solid footing.

(more…)

A colleague and friend of mine, Roderick Ioerger, recently wrote a post on MarketingPilgrim.com regarding an article he read that was written by Andy Beard and a video created by Stomper Net by Andy Jenkins regarding indented search engine listings. (There… I got all the appropriate credits out of the way.)

Anyway, the basic premise is that there’s actually a pretty simple process to achieve indented listings… 2 fer 1 style! When you achieve an indented listing, it will roughly double your visitor counts from the search term. Assuming the indented listing is on the first page… you’ll also be blocking out one of your competitors. Not a bad deal in exchange for a little elbow grease.

(more…)

Link Building is essential for achieving top rankings in a competitive space. Your website can be perfectly optimized for the search engines but if you don’t have links that have been acquired naturally or through manual efforts your website will never rank as high as you want it to. I will assume you know what a backlink to your website is and instead describe some methods you can utilize to acquire links as well as the effectiveness of each and the value of the link that can be acquired.

Having a website write about your products or services and link to your website provides the most effective link to increase your rankings. The common method of acquiring a link of this nature is through press release distribution. Unfortunately, this is also the most difficult link to acquire because your product or service needs to be news worthy in order to be written about on a website that is actually worth getting a link from. You also may need to have some that is dedicated to PR at your firm in order to make sure your press release is picked up by the major publishers of the Internet. There are press release distribution services out there but there is nothing like having someone dedicated to this task either in-house or out-sourced from an agency.

(more…)