With the Adwords program, you create an account, choose a design for your ads and what key words or phrases you want your ad to be associated with. For instance, if I created an ad with the key phrase, “PPC Marketing Springfield MO,” then the ad that I designed would appear in the Google search results when someone typed that phrase, or something with similar wording, into their browser. My ad would also appear on website pages with or similar wording.

I can select a virtually unlimited number of keywords and phrases for my ad to be associated with, or I can choose to enter only a few, very targeted words or phrases. When someone clicks on my ad, they are immediately taken to my website and are exposed to any other information that I have presented there. My ad is the attention-grabber that allows my website to further pique their interest and possibly make a sale or generate a new contract.

The nice thing about Adwords and similar programs is that you don’t pay a flat fee for the advertising only to find yourself left with no (or very little) statistics on how effective your ad actually was. With Adwords, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. PPC (pay per click) advertising can be more cost effective than other forms of online paid advertising because the only people who will click on your ad (the only people you will pay for), are those who obviously have some interest in what you’re selling already. This makes converting a lead into a sale that much easier.

But even though Google Adwords is one of the most cost-efficient advertising methods available, I’d to show you how to make it even more cost-efficient.

When you create your ad, you have to choose associated keywords. Those keywords are priced based on competitive bids, meaning advertisers are always competing to have their ads show up when those keywords are searched for or used on the web. The more advertisers select a keyword for their ad, the more expensive it will be since the highest bidder gets first priority in having their ad show up with that keyword.

Luckily, Adwords shows you the competition level for each keyword or phrase you enter. If you click on the Tools & Analysis tab in your Adwords account, you can type in the various key words or phrases you are considering using and then see its relative competition level (how expensive it will be). For instance, if I type both “online marketing” and “online marketing springfield mo“ in the search box, I see that the competition level for “online marketing” is incredibly high while the competition level for “online marketing in Springfield MO” is virtually non-existent. This means that if I used the first as my keyword, I would have to pay quite a bit every time someone clicked on my ad whereas it would be very cheap if I used the second.

Keep reading our blog for more tips on PPC Marketing or give us a call at 417-597-3756 to talk about what we can do for your business.

The post Choosing Keywords For Your Google AdWords Campaign appeared first on 417 Marketing.

It’s the same way on the Internet. Unless you’re an online retailer or disseminator of information, you’ve got to use your physical location to your advantage (even on the web) to avoid wasting resources.

Take this blog post as an example. The keyword I chose to focus on in this post is “Springfield MO SEO”. Why did I do this? Because I knew that this is a fairly commonly-searched keyword amongst my target demographic – and I knew that if I successfully focused on this keyword that there would be a decent chance that it would increase the amount of traffic I see from this post. There are thousands of SEO providers posting thousands of articles on topics related to SEO. If I had chosen a broader keyword like “SEO”, I would have been competing for your attention against all of those thousands of articles and businesses.

Our specialty is helping businesses in Springfield, MO expand online exposure, drive traffic to their website and increase online conversions through their Springfield MO SEO campaign.  For someone searching for Springfield MO SEO services, you’d find us near the top of the page. Chances are that you found this post by typing in something similar to “Springfield MO SEO”.

The point, then, is that if you are a service company or retailer who is located in or serves a specific area, some of your keywords should include various versions of that location: “Springfield MO SEO”, “Springfield Missouri SEO”, “SEO tips for Springfield MO”, etc.

The bottom line, my friends, is that if you are a local company, consider your location when you are considering your keywords. Be specific to reach your target demographic.

Feel free to peruse the rest of our blog for more tips or call us at 417-413-3340. We’d love to help you with your Springfield MO SEO campaign (see what we did there?).

The post How to Choose Keywords for Your Springfield MO SEO Campaign appeared first on 417 Marketing.

Crawling

Given the nearly infinite nature of content on the Internet, Google uses algorithms for its different search-related processes – the first of which is crawling. In this step, Google sends a bot or spider to “crawl” the online universe. It does so by visiting a web page, “clicking” on the links on that page, and then accessing the pages that those link to. As the Googlebot crawls its way across the Web, it caches or creates copies of the websites it visits, similar to snapshots of the contents and links found on those pages.

Now, contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t call up a website each time a user searches for something. Instead, it retrieves its cache and crawls only when it deems necessary. In effect, what’s being ranked each time Google receives a query is what’s already saved as cache. So, if you update your website, you want Google to update its cache as soon as possible so that the changes are better reflected in your ranking.

Interestingly, the way to get Google to crawl your website more frequently is to add more content. When the bots identify changes in your site, they take note to visit again sooner than they otherwise would have. For example, new sites that update constantly are most likely crawled every few hours, as opposed to less dynamic sites that might be crawled only every few weeks or so.

Take note also that the actions taken by the bots are equivalent to mouse clicks only. They can’t enter login details, and they can’t read pages that have restricted access.

So, the way Google crawls the Web has two primary implications for a site owner. First, the more pages that link to your website, the bigger the chance of Google’s spider “discovering” your site. Second, you want your website to be as publicly accessible as possible, since the bots won’t be able to read your site if they encounter a roadblock, much less store a copy of it for later retrieval.

Indexing

Let’s go back to all those cached web pages. What exactly does Google do with them? Since the company is in the business of search, it follows that this collection of websites would be compiled into an index. This index ranks websites according to authority and to their relevance to specific topics and keywords.

Authority is gauged via various factors. How many websites link to your page? What is the quality of those links (far more important than quantity)? How “clean” or well-written is your code? Is it focused, non-repetitive, and minimal? Also, does your website have a sitemap and good navigation? All these will play into how algorithms will rank your website among your peers and will affect the last piece of the puzzle, the decision to serve your site as a search result.

Serving

Having your site crawled and indexed means little if it doesn’t reach the final step of the process. The main goal of making your page known to Google is so that it appears as a search result when a related user query arises. Now, according to Google, more than 200 factors come into play when it responds to a user search. It’ll be a tough ask to attend to all these—and you probably won’t know what they all are anyway, unless you’re a Google insider—but at the very least, you can take a look at Google’s published guidelines. There are three types of guidelines—design and content, technical, and quality—and you’ll want to pay close attention to the gist of these when optimizing your website for Google search.

It’s a good idea to use Google Webmaster Tools (a free service) to check your website’s performance in their eyes. Here, you will see (among other things) the number of pages in your website that Googlebot has crawled as well as the number of those that have been crawled but have not been indexed. You will also see if there are any crawl errors and adjust accordingly with 301 redirects or something similar (depending on the nature of the crawl error). You can then tweak and improve your site based on Google’s assessment, and hopefully crawl your way up Google’s search rankings.

The post Crawling Your Way Up Google’s Search Rankings appeared first on 417 Marketing.

A responsive website is capable of adjusting its elements to adapt to the screen size on which it is being viewed. This means that regardless of device or browser screen size, the viewer of a responsive website always sees an optimized version of the website, eliminating the need to squint at miniscule text, or to scroll repeatedly to find specific information on a webpage. The outcome is a happier audience and, as claimed by proponents of the responsive approach, improved web analytics.

Take for example, the following Wikipedia article:

Note that the paragraph widths resize with the browser screen size. Imagine if they did not: the reader would have to scroll left and right and back from line to line in order to read the article properly—that certainly would’t be a pleasant reading experience. With a responsive website, all the scrolling one would typically have to do is upwards and downwards.

Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Websites

It may seem that a responsive approach primarily caters to users of mobile devices—after all, this is where the web viewing experience differs significantly from a regular desktop or laptop screen. That may be the case for now, but responsive web design proposes itself to be a more flexible, adaptable solution that goes beyond simply accommodating mobile web viewers.

There are plenty of differences between a mobile website and a responsive one. For starters, setting up a mobile website as a means of addressing the growing number of mobile web viewers still adheres to the idea of a fixed width or screen size. This is precisely the kind of thinking that responsive web design seeks to move away from. Instead it utilizes flexibility—technology is adaptive, and no one knows what sorts of screen sizes will be available in the future. This is why it is better to use an responsive design than a static one.

Another significant point of distinction between the two methods is that responsive web design only requires one website, whereas a mobile website is an extra version of a webpage optimized for viewing on small screens. So, with a mobile strategy, you might come up with four different versions of your website to cater to the four general screen sizes—desktop monitor, laptop screen, tablet, and mobile phone!

a mobile website

…and its full version

The Case for Responsive Web Design

Responsive or otherwise, it is important for businesses and web designers alike to recognize the importance of a solution to address the growth of mobile web users. According to recent surveys, 53 percent of American adult smartphone users now access the Web through their mobile device. Web users have options. If a site doesn’t provide the best user experience, no sweat—there is bound to be a competitor that provides what they are looking for. So it’s important to provide a responsive user experience.

User expectations are increasing. They expect full functionality when they access a webpage from their mobile device; and they expect consistency from one device to the next.

What makes responsive web design superior then? First, we go back to the constantly changing nature of technology and the Web. Now that a significant chunk of the population use their smartphone to access the web, a mobile strategy works. But who’s to say the landscape won’t change again in, say, ten years or less?

For now, web designers can create several iterations of a single webpage, but what if the number of versions necessary continues to increase? Furthermore, when it comes time to update the website, having several versions require multiple edits. Imagine the time and resources one must expend on this type of activity.

What Does a Responsive Website Entail?

According to Ethan Marcotte, the so-called pioneer of responsive web design, there are three main ingredients to a responsive website: media queries, fluid grids, and flexible images. Media queries are a CSS3 module used to “query” or to determine the context in which a website is being accessed. It can, for example, find out the resolution and bits per color component of the device being used. Subsequently, web content will be rendered accordingly based on the conditions set forth on the code.

A fluid grid pertains to having a basic grid structure based not on pixels, which are static, but on ems. Dimensions are stated in terms of percentages or proportions, and will thus adjust to the screen size. Part of having a flexible grid means that components such as padding, margins, and type will adapt according to conditions as well, as in this website:

Notice that the picture on the St. Paul’s School website remains static throughout the three screen sizes. This is not a big deal since it serves mostly as a background image. In most other cases, however, a responsive website would need to have flexible images—that is, images that scale in size depending on browser screen—so as to minimize scrolling due to over-sized images that stretch beyond the screen space. Take, for example, the Food Sense main page:

Notice the change in image size along with other responsive elements like the grid, the navigation, and the text. By the time the screen width approximates that of a mobile browser, the image has scaled down to a size that fits the screen size properly.

Responsive Web Design Done Well

Perhaps the most important thing to remember when choosing to embrace a responsive approach is the essence of the word “responsive.” The Web is a constantly changing medium, and a responsive approach seeks to roll with the tides, throwing aside the old-fashioned notion of fixed dimensions, an idea that may have served us well in traditional print media but not anymore with the dynamic nature of the Web.

The Internet abounds with lists of websites that have adopted a responsive approach. Designing a successful responsive website requires embracing the responsive mindset and its principles and then complementing these with valuable tips gleaned from successful mobile strategies.

Here are a few closing tips:

• Look beyond layout. Keep in mind that the reason why you are taking a responsive approach in the first place is to provide users with an optimal viewing experience, so think about what sorts of tweaks will benefit them. For example, adjust the target area of your website’s links—clicking on the right link may seem like a piece of cake when using a mouse, but it’s another story when you’re on a touch device with a small screen.
• One of the main differences between the dynamic nature of a responsive website and the static nature of a mobile website is that the latter designs to particular dimensions. In contrast, the former makes use of breakpoints to determine the screen size at which certain elements of the webpage should adjust.
• Remember that users expect full functionality and consistency across all media. Mobile may have meant less content in the past, but that’s no longer the case now. As a result, it is important to keep in mind the context in which a user may be accessing your website and design accordingly. Instead of removing content, rearrange it.
• It is often easier to establish the bare essentials and then work one’s way up. Luke Wroblewski calls this a Mobile First strategy, in which the web designer sets the lowest common denominator for the smallest screen size deemed reasonable, and then adds elements and rearranges content as he scales up.

This has been said before, but it’s worth repeating. A responsive website adapts to its users, not the other way around. Thus, make key pieces of information easy to find, and make it easy to navigate your website.

Did we miss any key benefits of responsive web design? Is there anything you disagree with? Let us know in the comments. Responsive web design is a relatively new concept. We’re learning just like everyone else, but we hope the information we’ve provided has been helpful to you.

The post What is Responsive Web Design? appeared first on 417 Marketing.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of getting traffic from the “free” or “organic” listings on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. With SEO, payment to search engines is not involved, as it is with PPC (pay per click) marketing.

The reason you hear so many people asking “what is SEO?” is that it works – under the right conditions. If there is one constant in SEO, it is change. So it is important to do your research when starting an SEO campaign – whether it be through a third-party such as 417 Marketing or done in-house.

Ideally, SEO is a part of a more comprehensive online marketing strategy. Online marketing consists of three main components: exposure for your website online, traffic to your website, and turning website visitors into donors, customers or interested stakeholders (this is referred to as conversion).

Exposure

Quality SEO services lead to more exposure for your company online from sources including (but not limited to) search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Increased online exposure from search engines begins with strategy. Specifically, keyword strategy. Work to create a keyword strategy that consists of keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your organization. Consider relative competition levels and avoid allocating precious resources to keywords that may be difficult (or impossible) to gain exposure for. Ensure that the keywords you choose provide search volumes that make the work it takes to rank at the top of the first page of search results worthwhile.

Once the strategy is in place, the work to achieve the goal of ranking at the top-third of the first page of results begins. Specifically, that work begins with on-page optimization of the website to meet Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work to optimize key online directories, such as Google+ Local and others. Ensure that work is done on an online basis to create and distribute the kind of quality written content that leads to increased authority for your website over time. After all, Google is in the business of judging the authority of websites. The more authoritative your website, the higher your search positioning (and the more exposure you will receive).

Traffic

Exposure is great, but if your goal begins and ends with “getting to #1? with Google, your strategy may be flawed. Exposure does little to nothing for your business if potential customers are not clicking through to your website. So how does one work to get these clicks? It begins with a variety of conversion optimization techniques, including preferential local search positioning (the blended results area), optimized Meta descriptions to encourage people to click on your link and rich snippets.

Be sure to set up website analytics that show just how much traffic you are getting. In terms of the data free analytic services (such as Google Analytics) can provide, limitations are few. This service will show you how many visitors came to your website each month, where they came from, how long they stayed and where they clicked. If they came from Google, they will even report which keyword they typed in to find you (unless that user is logged into a Google account at the time).

Conversion

Exposure and traffic are wonderful, but they mean little unless they lead to growth in your business. This is where conversion optimization comes in. In addition to working to develop increased online exposure and traffic to your website, you will need to work on turning that traffic into paying customers. How is this done? It begins with the development of a clear call-to-action. What are you asking the visitors of your website to do? Are you asking them to do anything at all? Are you asking them to do too many things (which leads to confusion)? Your call-to-action should be clear and easy to execute.

Next, work to setup conversion tracking systems. Fold conversion tracking into website analytics, so that you can see exactly what percentage of visitors to your website “converted” into customers.

Be sure your phone number is properly formatted on your website, using dashes instead of periods. Your phone number should be formatted as follows: 555-555-5555. Otherwise, users of mobile phones will not be able to call your business simply by clicking on your phone number. Given that 56% of all mobile users access the Internet with their phones, this is an important tip!

What is SEO? SEO is both art and science that requires solid strategy, commitment and long-term vision. It takes time to results. If you are looking for online marketing that delivers a more immediate impact, PPC (pay-per-click) marketing services may be a better fit for you and your organization.

The post What Is SEO and What Can It Do To Grow My Business? appeared first on 417 Marketing.

That’s why at 417 Marketing, we like to say your website should be more than an online brochure. It should be a marketing tool.

So how can you build a website that is more marketing tool than online brochure?

It starts with clean, modern design. Have you recently visited a website that looks like it was built 10-15 years ago? What impression did that leave you with? If your website looks like it hasn’t been updated in 10 years, what does that say about how the business is being managed? Less is more. If you need evidence of this, take a look at the #1 website in the world (by traffic) – www.google.com.

Focus on maximizing online exposure. It’s not enough to just build a great-looking website. Exposure is essential. Take the time to optimize your new site to meet Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. Build pages that are easy to crawl, quick to load and coded with useful Meta data that helps search engines understand what they are crawling. Create a properly-formatted XML sitemap and upload it to the “Big 3? search engines – Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Setup Google Webmaster Tools and monitor their feedback as they initially crawl and digest your new website. As they give us helpful tips, be sure to take action. Did they give you a warning about a missing page? No problem. Discover the new location of the URL in question, write the 301 redirect into the .htaccess file and check back later to make sure Google’s web-bot is no longer confused.

Work to maximize conversion. Exposure and traffic to your site are great – but if traffic does not lead to conversion you are missing the boat. Focus on building easy-to-use, responsive conversion forms. Then, work with Google Analytics to setup conversion goal tracking. Create a goal and notify which URL they should use to track conversions. This will give you data on what percentage of visitors to your website are meeting your conversion goal. Good marketing is measurable marketing. Given that your website is a marketing tool, there must be measurable data to draw conclusions from. Following this step will allow you to address potential short-comings with a different approach – whether that be new text, a new conversion form, customized landing pages, A/B split testing and/or heat mapping (the process of measuring visitor mouse activity on the screen). If you are in the non-profit industry, your conversion form will typically be a donate form. If that is the case, be sure to purchase an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate from your hosting provider. This will provide additional security to the form and is a requirement when processing online payments using Authorize.net, a common payment gateway.

Seek support you after the launch. After launching your new website, seek the support solution that is right for you. Prefer to do it yourself? Make sure the company you work with offers an easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS). At 417 Marketing, we work with the #1 Content Management System (CMS) in the world – WordPress – for most projects. WordPress is simple and easy to update if you have advanced computer skills. Prefer to have someone update your site for you? Make sure they offer comprehensive and affordable website admin services – including hosting, discounted labor, monthly backups, web analytics and monthly reporting.

Once these steps have been taken, you and your business are left with an online marketing tool that looks great, increases your brands’ exposure online, turns website visitors into customers and is easy to update. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

The post How to Turn Your Website into a Marketing Tool appeared first on 417 Marketing.

Step One: Develop a Keyword Strategy

It’s hard to begin optimizing a website when you don’t know what your keyword strategy is. While you want to focus on writing content for people and not search engines, there will be specific decisions that are colored by this strategy, as you will see if you keep reading. To begin researching your keyword strategy, begin by deciding which online market you wish to serve. Is it within a specific geographic area? What keywords best describe your business? Next, try the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to start getting a rough idea of how many searches per month a keyword gets (I have found data from this tool to be more reliable than most, but it is still imperfect). For more information on developing a solid keyword strategy, be sure to check out this article we wrote back in January 2011.

Pro Tip: Be sure to select “Exact” under match types in the left column of the tool.

Step Two: Work On Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Now that you have your keyword strategy in hand, you are ready to write your page titles and Meta descriptions. For your page title, consider using your company name, brand name, or most important keywords. Just be sure to keep your page title under 70 characters. Use any more than that, and Google won’t display the whole thing in search results. For your Meta description, work on writing compelling copy that will encourage searchers to click on your listing. Consider including the phone number or another call to action. Just limit it to 156 characters, or your copy will go partially unread. For more information on Meta tags, check out this article we wrote back in February 2011. Just ignore the part about Meta keywords, as I really thing that tag has become useless.

Step 3: Mind Your Headers

Make sure you are using header tags appropriately. Ensure that H1 tags exist, and make an effort to use your most valuable keywords within the tag. This article talks about ordering header tags, while this video from Matt Cutts (head of search quality for Google) tells us not to worry too much about how we order header tags.

Step 4: Add Your Alt Tags

Alt tags describe what an image is to a search engine. Alt tags also allow someone who is blind to have a description of an image read to them by screen reader software. So I’ve just given you two reasons to add them to your images. Adding keywords (appropriately) to images can send significant amounts of traffic to a website through image searches. Just be sure to use relevant alt tags though, or the quality of the traffic from image searches will be very low.

Step 5: Set Up Google Webmaster Tools and Submit Your Sitemap

Next, you’ll want to setup Google Webmaster Tools, confirm your site, and  then create and submit a sitemap.xml file. Setting up Google Webmaster Tools is easy, but confirming that you are the webmaster of the site can be a bit tricky for beginners. It usually involves adding a script to the header file. If you are using WordPress, the Yoast SEO Plugin does a great job building a sitemap for you. Once created, it’s fairly easy to submit the sitemap to Google.

Step 6: Optimize Load Times

The primary concern of a search engine is to deliver quality results to its users. Without this, it will be hard to get them to come back. One thing a search engine can do to improve the experience of the user is to deliver sites that have high-quality content and that load quickly. This is why load times are important. Fortunately, Google has a free tool to not only measure – but improve – load times through specific suggestions that they make. I highly recommend you check to see what score your website generates – and then get to work improving it into the 90+ range (on a scale of 1-100).

Step 7: Make Sure Meta Robots is Correct

While you want Google and other search engines to index your site, you may not always want them to index every page or element within your site. Fortunately, you can request that search engines not index content through Meta Robots. This is for advanced users only, but again – if you are using WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin makes this fairly simple.

Step 8: Make Sure Your Canonical Tag is Correct

Canonical tags were designed to let Google know which version of a page you wish to be indexed. So if there are two versions of the Home page (http://yourwebsite.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com) the canonical URL tag will let Google know which page to index. The proper use of the canonical URL tag can help to avoid dreaded duplicate content issues across a domain, but can also cause serious problems in the wrong hands. Use with caution.

Step 9: Use Internal Linking

Help boost the authority of pages within your site by linking to them from the Home page. Do the same in reverse by linking to the Home page from pages with higher authoritative content.

Step 10: Setup Google Analytics Tracking

Make sure you have setup Google Analytics tracking so that you can monitor metrics such as visitors, average time spent on the site, bounce rate, sources of traffic, pages viewed per visit, and much, much more.

Bonus Tip:

If you launching a new version of a site, make sure you write 301 redirects for pages that have their URL change. For example, if the page www.yoursitehere.com/services becomes www.yoursitehere.com/ourservices, you’ll want to be sure to add a 301 redirect to the .htaccess file to let search engines (and users) know where this content went.

On-page SEO isn’t always easy. It isn’t always fun. But when done properly, it can be hugely rewarding.

The post How To Do On-Page SEO in Ten Steps appeared first on 417 Marketing.

While Google is still the clear market leader, it did see a 0.4% drop from July 2012 (66.8% to 66.4%). Their month-over-month trend may be negative, but the growth over the past 12 months has been positive. They experienced a 1.8% increase in market share from August 2011 to August 2012.

Another thing that stands out in their report is the continued decline of Yahoo. Over the past 12 months (August 2011 to August 2012), they have lost 3.5% of their market share, declining from 16.3% to 12.8%. One wonders if new CEO Marissa Mayer can right the ship at Yahoo when it comes to search.

For a more in-depth breakdown of these numbers, click here.

What This Means for Bing

As I said earlier, Bing has clearly positioned itself as the #2 search engine of choice. I believe that Bing has a solid search engine, but they aren’t going to pass Google any time soon. It would take years for them to become #1. Instead, I think they should be focusing on a strategy of differentiation and innovation. If they try to out-Google Google, it won’t work. They need to focus on coming up with search innovations that attack Google’s weaknesses, and then communicate these innovations to the public in ways they can understand. Links have been the ballot-box of search since 1998. Many feel that system is broken. If that is true, why is Bing following Google’s lead on using links to judge the authority of a website? It makes me wonder why Bing doesn’t decide to shake things up in the world of search by making links a much smaller part of their algorithm. Many have speculated that Google is working towards that end. I wonder if Bing could shock the search world by beating them to the punch? Hmmm…

What This Means For Google

Google is obviously in great shape when it comes to search market share. But some have speculated that they may willing to go the way of the nuclear option when it comes to fighting the SEO community for online advertising dollars. For more information on Google’s war on SEO, click here. Would they be willing to risk it all in an attempt to get rid of the SEO industry and clear the way for significantly higher AdWords revenues? Who knows. I doubt it, but I guess we’ll see!

What do you think? Should Bing risk their position as the #2 search engine and shake things up? Is that an opportunity for them? Are they agile enough to pull it off and do it well? Would Google risk it all in an effort to make more money from AdWords? What should Yahoo do about search? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The post Google Still Dominates Search (but don’t sleep on Bing) appeared first on 417 Marketing.

1. People are spamming search engines and it makes it harder for Google to do its job (provide quality, relevant results to searchers).
2. They want people to spend their money on their pay-per-click advertising services (and not SEO).

The first reason makes sense. The second is a bit more sinister, I think. It doesn’t matter what I think though. What matters is this: how does one optimize a website in the current hostile environment, where Google is seemingly willing to do anything to kill SEO (even if it means lowering their own search quality to get rid of SEO’s and make more money in pay-per-click advertising)?

Start with a Quality Website

A professionally built website should be free of HTML errors, load quickly, and be easy for search engines to crawl. It should use current best practices for Meta data and incorporate quality content. Most importantly, it should have a strategy. What market are you trying to get in front of? Know your target and do your keyword research. Don’t hire a web design company that doesn’t have a firm grasp of SEO. Not if you want to be easy to find in search engines, that is. Having a well-built, properly optimized website is extremely important. It’s only going to get more important in the coming months and years.

Produce Lots of High-Quality Content

Let’s keep this simple, ok? I’m not going to go on and on evangelizing on why you need to blog more. What I will say is this: blogging serves two extremely valuable (and highly practical) purposes. One, regular blogging ensures that your website will have lots and lots of pages of quality content. Two, it will mean that your link profile will be naturally more…natural. Un-natural backlink profiles (ones with the same keywords repeated over and over again) are easy for Google to detect, and they have gotten more and more aggressive about penalizing sites that have these un-natural backlink profiles.

Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks aren’t dead (yet). What is dead are low-quality backlinks. High-quality backlinks are VERY much alive. It’s important to build backlinks to authoritative, relevant websites. Anybody that tells you that backlinks aren’t important are being too simplistic. They are important. Just stay away from backlinks from sources that are not authoritative and/or relevant.

Get Social

Personally, I have better things to do than to spend all day on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. I’ll assume that you do too. But it doesn’t take all that much effort to use it effectively.

For Facebook, focus on likes (authentic likes…don’t buy them), shares, and comments on your status updates. There are two ways to do this.

1. Produce high-quality content
2. Help others. If you help others with social shares and comments, they will probably help you.

The post SEO in a Post-Panda and Post-Penguin Era appeared first on 417 Marketing.

Here’s my take on his article:

First, I want to take a minute to talk to business owners

Look, I get that every business wants to save money where it can. It’s perfectly understandable. Just don’t expect great results from your online marketing strategy if you aren’t willing to pay for quality.

There are no shortcuts. Google is getting smarter (and more aggressive) in the way they combat webspam (did you hear about their recent patent?). Hiring the wrong SEO provider can get you in a lot of trouble with Google. Hiring the wrong web designer can get you a product that is poorly designed, difficult for search engines to crawl, and worthless as a source of new business to your company.

In short, don’t expect A results for C dollars. If you want your business to be associated with quality, then associate yourself with quality providers.

SEO and SMM providers, now I want to talk to you for a minute (myself included)

You want to make your clients happy (and people in general). That’s understandable. You tell yourself that by offering low-cost solutions, you are helping your clients. But you are only kidding yourself and them. There are no shortcuts. Start providing only the best quality services, and start charging what those services are worth. By trying to play nice and keeping your services cheap, you are hurting both yourself and your customers. You are hurting yourself because you aren’t giving your best. You are hurting your customers because you are playing into the myth that there are shortcuts when that is clearly not the case.

Thanks for reading.

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