I want people to people know that after reading this SEO blog post it will not be hard to choose and SEO firm. First thing is first that search engines optimization and search engine marketing is a need local or world wide because today’s generation turns to the internet so you need SEO. If you do not know how to SEO or want to know choose your SEO carefully. There are so many Search Engine Optimization firms out there that really do not know what they are doing. SEO is one of the fastest growing online businesses so everyone wants a taste of the money they can make. Below are some questions to ask.

1. How long have they been doing SEO? You want to make sure they have some experience. In my opinion four years isn’t going to cut. Google has been around for nine years. Professional SEO experts that have been doing search engine optimization have been around before Google. Although no one know how exactly work, there is basic SEO rules to follow other that inserting keywords to your site and submitting. Why would you pay 1500.00 for keywords only? So make sure they have at least nine years of experience and are keeping up to date with the search engines daily.

2. No matter what an SEO company says it is ok to ask you what key phrase you want to rank for. Most companies will say they don’t need any keywords from you they are the expert. An SEO optimizer should ask because they can research the subject of the phrases they give and then come to you with the niche and popular phrase they came up with.

3. If a search engine optimization specialist guarantees you they are wrong. If you go to Google’s website. They have a page that states no one can guarantee listing. I have provided you with the link. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291. You probably want to stay away from any one that guarantees you listing.

4. Price doesn’t matter with search engines optimization. It only gets pricey when you have to buy heavy duty back links. So if an SEO claims they are more expensive because they can get you ranked. Or if an SEO says that cheap SEO companies can not get you ranked because their price is too low they are wrong. SEO is not rocket science. It is very easy to sit at a computer and market your site if you have the time to do it. Most of search engine optimization is just time consuming. There is no reason to pay 2000.00 per month unless you are getting every page on your site optimized and getting heavy backlinks. Even then 2000.00 per month is too much money. Here is an example. InitialLendingGroup.com has 3500 backlinks pointed to there site. They are on the first page of Google for business loans, listing number three. They didn’t spend $10,000 on SEO. Please becareful on price. Do not forget to read contracts carefully either.

5. Do not go with a company that only optimizes Title tags and Meta Data. These days are over. Although titles and meta data are important, the search engines have only gotten smarter and will continue to get smart.

6. Ask your web optimization firm if they know Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the new internet. The second generation internet consists of blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS Feeds, etc. Make sure your seo firm knows this.

7. Ask for a testimonial and call that company. You want to make sure your new seo company doesn’t damage your website. You do not want an optimizer to add your site to bad neighborhoods site that were black listed from Google. This will look bad on your site. It is very important to get a testimonial.

8. Does the search engine optimization company use automated software? If they do, stay away. You can research this in Google and all the articles you read will this technique is very bad. You want to go with a company who manual submits. This looks more natural to the search engine results.

9. Try to use trick questions. Ask how many search engines they can auto submit you to. There is only one answer to this question. “We do not auto submit”. Remember that manual hand submission is the best. No other.

10. Do SEO firms offer a monthly service? Choose a company that does because SEO specialist can’t rank your site in a day. It takes a lot of time to get you where you want to be. This is why you want a monthly service. They can try to get your ranks, keep you there and bump you higher on the list.

 Carefully choose who you want to go with. Do your research as many questions as you can and you will find the right company. Think of SEO as buying a car, you aren’t going to buy the first one you see or choose the first dealership you see. DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST.

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This post is about strategic website marketing. First thing is first that there is no guarantee for website placement to google, yahoo or msn. This doesn’t mean give up. This means you are not guaranteed where you are going to be listed in the natural search engines results. You will know if you’ll be on page 1 or page 9. Take InitialLendingGroup.com for example. Web site has been up for almost a year. They have over 3000 websites pointed to them and they are now number 3 in google for business loans.

Website marketing doesn’t only mean search engines either. Don’t forget about blogs, forums, message boards, social bookmarking etc. These are other sources of added traffic to your site. To me website marketing is kind of like the old days where you have to go out and find your clients. It’s the same thing but you stay at on the internet find sources to link to your site. Talk about your site as much as you can but do not spam. People on the internet like to read information. Don’t post anything to BUY NOW. Give good detailed content about what you do and you’ll most likely get a click to your site.

Myspace is a great tool to use. There are thousands of people on myspace. It’s not just a dating site or friend’s site. You can get a lot of new clients from my space. It’s free and easy to use especially when browsing accounts. If you are marketing a real estate product than browse profiles that are real estate. Talk to the agents, get to know them and you’ll feel the conversation out. Then you sell. This works with any other site like message boards, blogs, and forums. What you are doing is networking. You’ll even get a free back link out of it. It’s just like opening any other business. It is up to you to get the name out. As long as you work hard at getting the backlinks you need and posting your site on blogs you will eventually get business and top rankings on the search engines. If backlinks or optimizing pages isn’t something you know how to then look for a firm that can do the dirty work for you.

Other great website for marketing and posting quality info:
http://blogmarks.net
http://del.icio.us
http://digg.com
http://www.fark.com
http://feedmelinks.com
http://www.furl.net/
https://www.newsvine.com/
http://reddit.com/
http://www.simpy.com
http://www.spurl.net

The above sites are all social bookmarking sites. Basically they are huge online communities. You can meet a lot of people on social bookmarking

End for now….

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I am writing this article because not to many people are clear how Google or any other the other search engines work. This is more directed to individuals who have little or no knowledge about the search engines.

There are two types of listing on Google. The top three and right side are Pay Per Clicks and the middle is what you call Organic or Natural Listing.

Pay Per Clicks are good for only one thing. If you want to get listed in 10 minutes. But if you want to pay for pricey clicks everyday wait till the end of the month when you get your credit card bill.

Organic listings or Natural search engines results are always better. They are free, longer lasting and there’s more click through rate because ass you view the natural search engines listings you see better description. Now keep in mind that you must keep up to date on all pages you optimized so you stay at the top ranks.

Its been proven that more educated people click the organic side because they tend to research more of what is being search. Although it is better to be on the first page of the natural search results, and your listing is on the second page of google, it will get clicked as long as he title and description is well written.

This leads to pushing your search result higher up the ranks. If your listing is stuck on the second page you can always do some link building. These are one way links pointed back to your site. As time goes by eventually your listing will start to move up. It takes some time though. So you need to be patient.

Here is a quick check list for you to remember.

1. Writes a nice title tag for your site with the key phrase you are trying to target.
2. Use a heading tag preferably H1 with the key phrase
3. Save the HTML page as the key phrase such as search-engine-optimization.html
4. When you create Meta data the keyword you are targeting as the first phrase of the keyword section. Use the same key phrase in the Meta description.
5. Write good content around your subject line for better results

Think of this as a starting point. I will update this blog post in case I left anything out.

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I’m going to basically talk about the key points of search engine optimization and how it will benefit your website. The new marketing strategies compared to old marketing strategies are very different. For example with the old types of marketing consist of inside sales, telemarketing, tradeshows, seminars, print advertising direct email and email, things like that.

New marketing strategies are all about seo, pay per click, blogging, buzz marketing, conversion tools etc. It’s basically all online.

Below are some key points and tips of building an online marketing machine:

First I want to talk about organic search engine listings. Organic search engine listings are the listings that show up on the left side of the page. Pay Per Clicks are the top three and right side of the search results. You pay for those. And the cost per click can get pretty pricey. The organic listings which show up on the left are free. The only time you pay is hiring an expert to get you where you want to be. Hiring an seo expert is not a bad thing because they know the ins and outs of search engine optimization. Once you are in the organic spots you stay there as long as you keep up to date with the pages you are optimizing.

25% of people that search on google click on the pay per clicks. This means 75% are clicking the organic results. You are most likely to get a high Click Through Rate (CTR) on organic listings.

There are two types of optimization. On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. On page optimization is the visible content and graphics that you see on the web page it self. The most important thing on your web page is the Title of the page. The title tag is located at the very top of the browser above the file, edit, view etc. The title tag basically tells you the subject of the page. You want to add some keywords in the title. For example: If I generally want to talk about search engine optimization, my title tag will be Search Engine Optimization. Aside from the title tag the search engines also look at the keywords in the URL string. Example: http://www.your-domain.com/search-engine-optimization.html. Notice the keywords. Also notice how it matched the title tag. This is a key point to remember. Next, heading tags such as H1, H2, H3. On every page you build use these heading tags. The first heading tag should always be H1. Heading tags are important because, well, they are the heading, stronger than a bullet point. They are recognized. H1 tags are rather large so you can use css to shrink it down. Page text, bolded keyword and italicized keywords are an import thing to on page optimization. You want to have good clean content with keywords in the body on your webpage. Make sure to add some key phrases as well and bold them or italicize them so they are more noticed.

Meta data still matters for on page seo. The description is good for a higher click through rate. The search engines scan the description and you also want to use the keyword you are targeting in the description.

Now we go to off page optimization. Off page optimization is your site on other sites. For example, you have page rank as an off page optimization technique. Page rank basically is how important Google thinks your website value is form a scale of 0 to 10. Off page optimization also is the number of backlinks you have. The more links that point to your site, the better. But you have to be careful where you go to get links and what the link says to point to you. Carefully choose the website that you want pointed to you. See if sites such as link farms are pointed to them or if they use what is called black hat seo. Black hat seo is a bad technique. Think of it as the dark side of the force. When you have a site pointing to you as a back link make sure the link has the keywords you want to rank for. For example: You don’t want your domain name as the link, you want Search Engine Optimization as the link. This technique is valued more. But notice the backlink has the keyword search engine optimization as the link, title tag, in the URL, and heading tag. Notice how they come together. This is important to SEO.

Start a blog! Don’t go to websites like blogger.com or sites that offer you a blog to run off of there site. Start a blog on your own domain name. Something like this, http://www.your-domain.com/blog. Blog’s always have fresh content and the likelihood of your getting a backlink is better. Blogs are more conversational especially if there’s something good to talk about. Wordpress blogs are free to download and to install on your hosting account. I recommend the word press blog because it is simple, user friendly and allows you download free specialized plugins that are great for seo, social bookmarking which is a another part of web marketing and submitting rss feeds.

You can also make forms more appropriate and appealing to the eye. If you design your web forms well enough, you’ll most likely have more of a conversion rate. What turns people off are long forms. Try to have the basic stuff. You don’t want to have a lot of thing s to fill out because people just don’t like to fill out a bunch of information. Do your best to shorten your forms. Try to use cookies to get more information on your users. This will allow you to understand how they found your site, how many pages did they view and how they stayed on your site. Another tip for web forms is to remove site navigation. This allows people to be more focused on filling out your form mails. You can add a short testimonial with a photo next to the form for more confidence and also adding special offers for users to sign up that day. It is custom for people to add email addresses to forms so next to the email address put a link to the privacy statement so they are more secure. (Make sure the privacy statement opens in a new browser window)

These tips should get you started in developing an online marketing machine. If you have any questions please contact me personally.

Thank you.

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Search engine ranking is important to any business looking to attract new customers. Chances that your business in not in the first 3 search pages of the Google search result, finding your website is remote. Not to worry though, steps can be in place to improve rankings in Google and list you in the 1st page of Google results. The technique used for this is called search engine optimization.

There are a number of things Google will look for to improve your rank. It is vital to use all techniques to ensure Google scans all factors of your website.

Keywords and Key Phrases
One of the best ways to improve your rankings is adding keywords and key phrases. Once you have done your keyword research, place them through out the content of your site so Google’s spidering will recognize them.

Links to Your Site
Links to your site or Backlinks is another method to improve rankings in Google. Backlinks mean other websites link to you. This improves your link popularity. The more Backlinks pointed to your website the more improved your rank will be in Google

Don’t forget that it’s not the number of links, but it’s the quality of the links. Try your best to get links from high traffic sites. This will add more weight to your website

Page Titles
Add the targeted key word to your title tag. The title tag if one of the first things the search engines sees when they scan your web page. This will work in your favor when trying to improve your Google ranks.

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Markup validation ensures the code behind your pages is clean and valid. Think of markup validation as spell check. The cleaner the code is the more willing search engines are to accept your site. Validating your website ensure the most accurate code for a clean site.

Many web designers underestimate the importance of a properly validated website. The benefits far surpass the small amount of work it takes to accomplish it. Every website can and should be validated as it provides better usability to your users, aides cross browser compatibility, and ensures better chances of being properly seen and apprecaited by search engines.

By adhereing to XHTML and CSS standards your website has a great chance of functioning properly in all types of browsers. It greatly cuts down on inconsistencies that are browser specific. IE for example has many IE specific features that simply aren’t able to be validated, aren’t browser compatible, and only add to the demise of your web page. It is very important to have your site reachable not only by search eninges but by users using every sort of operating system and with every sort of browser. Ensuring your website validates is the first and most important step in accomplishing this.

If you want to ensure validation of your website please call us at

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