ORLANDO, FLORIDA – Late last month, a major flower shop in the U.K. was penalized by Google for using SEO practices that violated the best practices guidelines. The penalty was so severe that the website didn’t even show up in top search results for its own name. Know more.

Search Engine Land analyzed Interflora’s link profile to find out what happened and reported that more than 70 percent of their links were toxic or suspicious according to Link Detox. In other words thousands of links in their link profile would probably fail during a manual review by the Google spam team.

The SEL article concluded that there appears to be a lot of bad SEO going on but these are a few of the most obvious tactics they used that likely drew the Google penalty. Cheap advertorials, tiered blog network links and paid blog posts all made the list. Read the article here.

There is plenty of evidence that Interflora had been using bad link building practices for years, but they were finally caught and penalized for it. They have a relatively happy ending to their story since the penalty happened after Valentine’s Day and their rankings were nearly back to normal 11 days later before the next major flower-sending holiday.  However, other companies should not assume they will be so lucky if they try to use link schemes to get ahead.

SEO experts are surmising that the flower company giant had already started a big link cleanup campaign prior to the penalty that included using the Disavow Links tool and reaching out directly to websites Interflora paid to link back to them.

“No matter how tempted you might be, stay away from buying or selling links as part of your SEO campaigns, ” says our CEO, Ali Husayni. “They will inevitably get your website in trouble, and it will certainly take more than 11 days to recover since it looks like Interflora got some special assistance in this instance.”

The following are examples of what falls under the category of a link scheme and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank, meaning they don’t have a no-follow tag. This may take the form of paying or getting paid for a link, exchanging goods or services for links, or sending a blogger a sample of your product and asking them to write about it and include a link to it.
• Swapping links with other companies.
• Trying to manipulate PageRank by linking to web spammers or unrelated sites.
• Developing partner pages just for cross-linking purposes.
• Paying a link farm to use automated programs or services to create links to your site.
• Optimized links within a forum post or signature, such as “Loved the post. Very helpful. -Jane” with links like “SEO for content“, “top SEO firm” or “Boulder SEO experts” tacked on to the end.

These shady techniques, among others, are what the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates of recent years were intended to correct. However, they are still widely used techniques used by companies that want to get ahead quickly and make a fast profit.

“The drawbacks of link schemes definitely outweigh the short-term benefits though,” says Husayni. “The main cleanup tools are disavow links and direct contact with the link owner, and those can take weeks or months to work — if it does work — since Google has to recrawl the site.”

According to Google there is only one right way to properly acquire links:

• The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

“The useful, relevant content Google talks about may attract inbound links if your site already has substantial popularity, but you can’t afford to sit back and wait for that to happen,” says Husayni. “Your competitors certainly aren’t. There are ways to get links without violating Google’s rules or getting your site penalized.”

Many of those techniques have been discussed by Husayni and his SEO team on this blog, but some business owners find they need more extensive help than articles and do it yourself advice.  One of our SEO experts can help people understand what they need to do to help their businesses succeed.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – We spend a lot of time at Sinai Marketing discussing SEO, and that’s no surprise since we’re striving to be the best SEO company around. However, the truth is that ranking our clients at the very top of Google is only part of the battle. Businesses want to be number one on Google for one reason only: to increase their sales.

We provide SEO services for many different types of companies, including dental practices, orthodontic practices, e-commerce websites and law firms, and each client has the same goal. Each client wants to know how much their business has grown since they signed up to work with us. Let’s take a law firm as an example. For a lawyer, SEO success may bring him many more inquires than he had before, but how can our lawyer tell if these inquiries are leading to new, paying clients? Does increased traffic always mean increased business? We understand we must not only track how well our customers are ranking on Google for specific keywords, we must also track how much business is being converted because of our SEO campaigns.

“It’s important to have a measuring system to see how many leads and how much business we bring to clients,” says Sinai’s CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni. “If your site doesn’t convert traffic to leads, or worse, it’s getting the wrong kind of traffic, then ranking well on Google is meaningless.”

Tracking Conversions From the Web
It may be relatively easy to track conversions using Google Analytics if your business is coming only from the web. You can use specific tools to track how many users reach a download page, assuming your business sells something downloadable. For instance, if you’re selling an e-book, you can track how many people reach the download page, therefore conversions are easily monitored. With Google Analytics, you can even see the keywords that eventually led customers to download your e-book.

While this information can be helpful, it doesn’t provide a complete picture of how you’ve converted your customer. He may have searched “mystery e-book” on Google, which could have led him to a forum on Goodreads, a popular social networking site for avid readers. Your buyer could have read about your book there and decided to visit your website to finally purchase your book. He may have visited Facebook or Twitter before his purchase. How can you track this chain of actions that eventually converted him?

Google Analytics shares a fantastic video about the steps it takes to make a final conversion using the analogy of a basketball game. The player who shoots and scores gets credit for the goal, but other players were integral to the entire play. You can use the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels to see how your customer behaved 30 days before he finally purchased your book. This gives you a complete picture of how your marketing efforts have paid off, and it takes the focus off solely the last “player,” if you will, to score the goal. Last-click conversion isn’t as helpful to marketers as viewing the entire chain that sent a buyer to his final destination.

You want to see how your customer has interacted with social media outlets, organic search results, emails, newsletters and banner ads before they decide to purchase your product. This insight is an invaluable tool that lets you see which marketing channels are most effective for your target market.

Tracking Conversions from Places Other than the Web
Many searches occur online that lead to conversions offline. This happens so often that there’s a term for it: ROPO. This stands for “research online, purchase offline.”

Conversion tracking gets trickier, however, when visitors are finding information on the web and then calling businesses for appointments. New customers could have found your business through Google Maps SEO efforts and then visited the business in person for an appointment.

So how do we effectively track how much business we’re bringing you if customers aren’t necessarily visiting your site? Not many web-marketing companies are able to capture conversion rates effectively and scientifically. Sinai Marketing aims to be one of the best marketing companies for tracking new business conversions.

Jellyfish, a UK digital marketing company, agrees that tracking offline purchases is difficult, but the more online exposure you have, the more likely you are to gain new business.

“Third party reviews for your company or brand provide independent endorsement which may strongly influence their decision to purchase,” say Jellyfish marketers. “You may not be able to track whether or not they have seen the recommendation, but by casting the net wide you will certainly leave an impression with the customer.”

While tracking offline conversions may be hard, it’s not impossible. For businesses that provide services, such as dentistry practices and law firms, we can use contact forms to see how many inquiries are coming from the Internet. From these inquiries, the SEO client will know how many new clients they’ve gained in the past month, the past quarter or the past six months.

However, many of us still like to pick up the phone. It’s not realistic to expect our clients to ask their potential customers how they found their website. Even if they did, this isn’t really an accurate or scientific way to measure results. For instance, if you are running an AdWords campaign along with an SEO campaign, more often than not, your customers cannot tell you whether they found you on the Ads or on the organic results pages. We can provide traceable phone numbers on your website, and these phone numbers allow us to accurately count how many new clients are coming from the Internet, even if they’re picking up the phone for an appointment without visiting your site.

This is a hot topic in the SEO world right now. Keyword reports are becoming less important as clients want to know exactly how much new businesses is generated from their increased rankings on Google. And that makes sense, right?

We are currently using Marchex, which is a very user-friendly phone tracking and phone-recording software used for this sole purpose. We can track and record every single call that goes to our clients’ business and provide them with a back-end administrator panel that they can see all the calls, where they were generated from, how long the call took and even listen or download the call.

We can also monitor where the calls are coming from including organic, direct or pay-per-click advertising. We can even track the success of a specific post.

For now, what methods have you used to track conversions for your SEO clients?

Google keeps changing, and this doesn’t make everyone happy. We’ve all heard the horror stories of a small business that lost big when it plummeted from a top of Google page ranking because of changes to Google search algorithms.

It’s easy for these “victims” to paint Google as the bad guy, but that’s not the case. How well a business fares in the competition for front-page ranking is usually tied to the practices of their SEO services provider.

One of Google’s ongoing goals is to thwart black-hat SEO practices that artificially boost the rankings of a site based on black-hat tricks, and at the same time reward credible sites that follow best SEO practices. In a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, provided this explanation:

“The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the ‘good guys’ making great sites for users – not just algorithms – to see their effort rewarded.”

Staying abreast of Google’s ever-changing search algorithms and “playing by the rules” is key to Sinai Marketing’s ability to place their clients at or near the top of Google rankings and keep them there, says company CEO Ali Husayni.

“Google relies heavily on SEO professionals to prepare sites to be properly indexed, identified and ranked by its search algorithm,” he says. “They encourage white-hat SEO because when we do our job right, it makes theirs easier – and that makes the good information on the Web easier to locate.”

By contrast, companies that engage in black-hat SEO practices are constantly fighting an ever-losing battle, Husayni says.

“Google eventually catches up with them, and in the next algorithm update, they may lose their somewhat easily-earned ranks to the sites that have engaged in white-hat SEO only,” he says. “Because we follow only white-hat practices, our company doesn’t worry about these downgrades.”

One example of how the “good guys” win happened after a recent Google update, which moved Sinai Marketing from the number six position to number two for an extremely competitive keyword: “best SEO.”

“Google downgraded some of our competitors who were involved in shady black- or gray-hat SEO practices,” Husayni says. “We just continued with our white-hat practices and eventually, we got ahead of the wolves.”

There is, of course, much more to high quality SEO work than good intentions.

“The devil is in the details,” Husayni says. “There are more than 200 criteria Google looks at when ranking a page.”

Among the many factors that can increase a site’s Google ranking is the proper optimization of well-written content, which involves such specifics as including headine tags, URL-structure, placing the right keywords within the article and talking about the article on your social media platforms, he says.

One positive phenomenon brought on by the ongoing evolution of the Google search algorithm is the increased value placed on quality content.

“Building sites that attract and retain visitors improves the experience and makes the Web a better place,” Husayni says. “Google is paying more attention to such practices.”

As a result, professional content development has become increasingly important in recent years. This includes not only text but also images and video.

“Another important emerging factor is social media indicators,” Husayni says, “namely Google Plus. If your Google profile is tied into your site, your author image will be placed next to the search results. This helps to both increase the click-through rate and enhance site ranking.”

And, last but not least are the quality back-links that make sites more popular.

“This remains Google’s number one factor in deciding what sites should rank at the top,” Husayni says.

With each new change, Google will continue to seek and penalize questionable back-link practices. This not only weeds out the junk, but also helps push the good guys to the top.

TAMPA, FLORIDA – We are happy to announce that we hired Katie Manry at the beginning of this year as our new editor-in-chief at Sinai Marketing.

“It was a daunting task finding someone with the skill and experience to step in and take over but, I’m happy to announce that we have found a perfect fit in Katie.” says our CEO Ali Husayni.

Notably gifted at a young age, Katie brings talent and more than 15 years of writing experience as well as a background in editing and managing writers to our team. Katie has held positions as a technical proposal manager where she ensured her writing team’s work met the standards of professionalism expected from executive-level clients. On a regular basis she would read blogs of some of the best SEO companies like Sinai Marketing to further her SEO knowledge so she could help her clients rank higher in Google. In her most recent position as a writer and SEO consultant for a retail company, Katie was able to hone her writing skills with product descriptions, blog articles and other copy-writing projects.

“I know I have an unusual skill set so I was excited to see Sinai’s job listing and not only how I fit their description but how the position was exactly what I was looking for in a career,” says Katie.

Katie’s numerous accomplishments began at a young age and include acceptance into prestigious college-level writing programs at Pinellas County Center for the Arts and California Institute for the Arts. Also in 2002, Katie rose to the National Novel Writing Month‘s challenge to write a novel in 30 days. After one month of working days and writing nights, Katie has a 50,000-word novel to show for it!

And while it may seem that she spends all of her waking hours conquering the world, Katie also has a passion for all things creative. She loves to cook, draw and for the past seven years has been an avid nature photographer. While she claims that she is an amateur, we feel that could be argued judging by the professionalism of her photography.

“You can tell that Katie loves working with the writers,” says Husayni. “She is a leader that not only sets out to meet goals, but exceed them. We are all excited about her future here at Sinai, that’s for sure.”

TAMPA, FLORIDA – Change is good, and we made some changes here at Sinai Marketing recently.

After several years serving as editor-in-chief of the writing team here at this SEO company, I determined late last year that it was time to step down and focus more attention on Lorrie Walker Communications, Inc., the public relations firm I have run since May 2007.

I can tell you it was a difficult decision to make. I have been a part of Sinai Marketing’s team since June 2007. Back then, I was the company’s sole writer and we were considerably smaller than we are today. As the company grew, Ali Husayni, our CEO, quickly realized he needed someone to oversee the writing department. Content generation is an integral element of achieving top of Google status for our clients, and well-written content projects a professional image. My journalism background and love for all things grammar- and writing-related, combined with the SEO writing experience I had gained from being here, made me a good fit for the job.

This has been a position I have loved dearly. Ali has taught me more about SEO and link building strategies than I ever dreamed I could know, and he’s given me the latitude to develop this team of 13 writers in the way that I felt best meets our clients’ needs.

Last year as I evaluated my professional goals, I thought about where I wanted my own company to be, and I realized those goals meant a greater time commitment from me. It’s tough to give up something you enjoy so much, but Ali and I knew it was time.

I am happy to say that I’m not leaving Sinai altogether. Search engine optimization plays such a significant role in public relations that it’s necessary to keep myself in a position where I remain connected to some of the best SEO experts in the world. For that reason, I will continue to serve as a contributing writer to the Sinai Marketing blog. That will make it easy for me to follow what’s going on in the SEO world and write about how it affects what Sinai does for its clients, as well as what I do in terms of SEO for my own public relations clients.

Also, I will remain on staff as a writer for a couple of Sinai’s clients. The truth is that I’ve become incredibly attached to clients I’ve written for since 2007. It would be difficult to give them up, so for now, I’m not.

The writing team has been left in excellent, capable hands with the hiring of our new editor-in-chief, Katie Manry. You’ll learn more about her in an upcoming blog post from Barbara Cagle.

I hope your 2013 is filled with healthy changes, big dreams and lofty goals. I know mine is.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA – Criticism is an inevitable part of doing business, but in a time when more and more people search online when deciding what products to buy and which companies to hire, bad press can significantly affect the success of the company, whether the criticism is warranted or not.

That is why online reputation management tools, also known as reverse SEO, can be a lifesaver. Reverse SEO uses black-hat techniques instead of white-hat techniques. Organic SEO tactics are the best way to prevent negative, undesirable links or bad press about your business from getting top ranking on Google search results.

“We use reverse SEO for businesses that have received unflattering or unfair press in newspapers, blogs or review sites to mitigate the damage and diminish the visibility of the links as quickly as possible,” said Ali Husayni, our CEO.

Sometimes the undesirable content is a messy lawsuit, a disgruntled ex-employee or angry client who either wrote and submitted an article or created a website solely to defame a company. Anyone with determination and some online know-how can create content that reflects poorly on a company that begins to rank well for searches related to the business. While completely removing the content from the Web is usually impossible, it can be pushed onto the second, third and fourth pages of search results where they will garner much less attention.

“What we do is analyze the sites that own the negative content about the business then formulate the best strategy to limit that content’s visibility,” said Husayni.

Although much of the work requires technical SEO knowledge, these tips and techniques are ways any business can help recover from bad publicity:

• If you have direct control over the content, such as personal photos or writings that reflect poorly on the business, delete the negative information or change privacy settings of the site it came from. This does not automatically remove the offending item from the search engine’s index – there’s always a chance that it was picked up elsewhere – but it will make that content much harder to find.
• Monitor consumer review sites like BBB (Better Business Bureau), Yelp, Google+ Local and Angie’s List and address complaints promptly. Search Engine Land reported that 72 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, so consider reaching out directly to the customer to resolve the complaint and ask if you can do anything to switch their sentiment to positive.  If the problem is resolved to their satisfaction, ask them to consider updating their review.
• Keep tabs on the business by regularly checking what is being said about the company.
  • Set up Google Alerts for relevant keywords to find out right away when new content hits the Web. Google sends you an email whenever it finds new results that match your search term, including websites, newspaper articles and blogs.
  • Use the Me on the Web feature on Google Dashboard to help monitor what information is out there about an individual or business.
• Counteract the bad content with a consistent flow of positive information about the company.
  • Create a Google+ profile. From your profile, you can link to helpful videos, original photos, blog posts with relevant content, or even ask customers for testimonials. Google+ information is indexed and will show up in organic search engine results, so this is an important and effective tool to getting more positive recognition. Learn more.
  • An essential part of any SEO campaign – regular or reverse – is having a blog that is updated at least several times a month with high-quality, relevant content. Search engines love original, fresh content. If your business does not already have one, starting a blog can go a long way toward pushing the bad content out of the top search engine results. This also gives you a centralized location to embed videos and photos that highlight your company.
  • Do some short videos, informative ones or testimonials from satisfied customers, and post them on the company’s YouTube channel. This gives the opportunity to use keywords in the video title and description and a backlink to your website. You can also have your videos pull double duty by doing a blog post announcing the new video.
• Search the name of your company along with “review” or “scam”. For example “my company reviews” or “my company scam” to see what comes up.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – Our SEO company prides itself on getting our clients to the top of Google and keeping them there. Recently we noticed a few of our dental SEO clients that used to be on top were being outranked by some sites like Yelp, White Pages, Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local and Super Pages. The good news is, you don’t need Yelp, Yellow Pages, White Pages or Super Pages to get to the top of Google. But first, I wanted to share an example of how this issue recently affected one of our clients.

Barnett-Davis Dental Group was consistently ranking third on Google for the keyword “Nixa dentist.” At the end of January, we checked again, as any best SEO company would, and we found Dr. Davis’s site way down at the end of the page. With SEO a drop from third to ninth place is substantial. As of February 27, Yelp’s coming in eighth and Dentists.com is ranking tenth. Barrett-Davis Dental Group isn’t even on the first page of Google for “Nixa dentist.”

You may want to join websites like Yellow Pages and White Pages, but the downside is that they’re no longer free to join. They also don’t generate as much traffic as they would if your own website was ranking among them. You may even encourage your patrons to write a Yelp review of your business. That may help, a little at least, though Yelp has had some seriously negative buzz for years about removing or filtering patrons’ honest reviews. These two reviews were written about Yelp’s services on Yelp in February.

 There was even some controversy several years ago about Yelp sales people contacting businesses with negative reviews. These sales people offered to take down their negative reviews if the businesses paid to advertise on their site. While Yelp denies this practice, many business owners have mentioned questionable practices from Yelp employees.

As far as why your site has dropped in its rankings, Sinai Marketing’s Manager of Operations gives a good answer. “The answer is simple; a lot of people will give up doing SEO when they see they are no longer on the first page and they can’t compete with these giant sites,” says Saeed Khosravi. “As a result they will turn to AdWords, which means an income increase for Google.”

He also reminded me that the nearest Panda Update to this event was #24 implemented on Jan. 22, 2013. Google tweeted that this update impacted approximately 1.2 percent of English language search queries. Khosravi also says Google can determine that a local business directory page or Yellow Pages page may be more relevant for users than a single doctor’s website. That said, increasing the exposure of your business’s page is the best way to grow traffic and boost your sales. We’ve brainstormed a few tips to help you succeed on Google.

How to Focus on Local and Climb Up the Google Rankings

There are a few steps you can take to overcome these algorithm changes. Stay away from unethical black hat SEO techniques. You don’t need them, and they’re likely to burn you in the end. Instead, focus on time-tested white hat SEO techniques, such as link building, creating excellent content shared through a WordPress blog, optimizing your on-page SEO and creating a site with a friendly user experience. Focus also on what makes your business unique.

Most of you probably have local businesses. When we say local, we mean you aren’t competing with the entire nation or the entire globe for business. Dr. Davis, our “Nixa dentist,” doesn’t need a high Google ranking in Nashville or San Francisco. Capitalize on your local niche. Make sure your business is on Google+ Local (formerly Google Places), and make sure you understand the basics of Google+ Local SEO. It’s incredibly easy to add your business to Google+ Local. Google gives you step-by-step instructions, and Google is notoriously user-friendly.

You may find that your business is already on Google+ Local, and it may even have user reviews. If so, read the contact information carefully to make sure everything’s correct. You can add photos to entice viewers – just make sure to follow our simple image SEO guidelines. Pay special attention to the “categories” section. This is basically a field for you to add keywords relevant to your business, just as metadata allows you to do within a website.

There are many other ways to optimize your site for your local market. One extremely simple way is to make sure your website lists your address! OK, you’ve probably done that. Next, explore ways to gain inbound links within your community. Is there a local business or charity you partner with? Does your business sponsor a local marathon or event? Is your business listed on local business directories, the chamber of commerce, or your local industry associations? Are any of your employees active in local clubs, or do they write personal blogs? Take advantage of these opportunities to gain links to your website.

Our own Dr. Davis may benefit from writing a piece for a local paper or a local blog on a timely dentistry topic. He may already work with a local school – this is the perfect opportunity for a link, especially when .edu sites are trusted and valuable resources in Google’s algorithms. Remember too that anchor text is important for SEO, and, when you can, make sure your anchor text includes a location keyword.

If all these tips overwhelm you, you can always leave the SEO to the experts. At Sinai Marketing we offer comprehensive SEO services, including link building, keyword/competition analysis, content creation and distribution, and even website penalization analysis. Our representatives would love to speak with you about increasing the visibility of your website. SEO is constantly changing, and we keep our fingers on the pulse of these changes to bring you the very best SEO packages out there.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE -Let’s face it: we are now part of the smart phone generation. You’ll notice smart phones glued to hands across multiple generations. My parents both got their first iPhones and are navigating the app world. My nephews and nieces are interacting with smart phones and tablets with ease. I’ve written before about mobile SEO.  Just as SEO is constantly changing, so is the mobile world.

I interviewed web and mobile app developer Mark Freeman about mobile SEO. Mark founded Red Room Software in January of 2011, and since then he’s created apps for music and voice manipulation and home studio recording. Mark’s free iOS apps have received more than 20,000 downloads in the past six months. He created the iOS and Web app Social Impact that allows users to find socially conscious businesses – sort of like Yelp for businesses with a warm, fuzzy purpose. Social Impact was a finalist for the Social Enterprise U.K.’s “Innovation for Best New Product or Service” category, and now Mark has developed a cross platform app to bring Social Impact to a much wider audience. Until now, Mark has exclusively developed for Apple devices, but the new cross platform app will work on Android, iPhones, iPads and on any web browser.

And, for full disclosure – Mark is my husband.

Jessica: Can you explain the difference between a website and a web app?
Mark: A web app has a specific functionality that solves a certain problem. Web apps are generally more interactive than websites. For instance, the recent Social Impact App helps customers find socially conscious businesses in their areas. Websites are instead mainly just displaying information, such as here’s what our business does, here’s our content for our blog, here’s our online gallery or portfolio.

Jessica: How often do you change strategies, learn new languages or adopt new techniques in your industry?
Mark: Once or twice a year I learn a new language and adopt new techniques. The market moves that fast; new languages and techniques are created every few months to solve new problems or solve old problems in a new way. To keep up with the times, to make things look better and work faster, I have to constantly learn and adapt. As a software engineer, at least 50 percent of my job is to learn new technology.

Jessica: How do keyword tags affect individual app pages on the Apple App Store? Can search engines see them?
Mark: Search engines can absolutely see these keywords. The keywords show up in the page’s HTML, so having your app’s descriptions and keywords optimized is incredibly important in having customers find your app. These fields directly affect your search engine ranking and your app sales. The individual app pages are just websites. There’s also a category field where you can help Apple better categorize your app. App developers should be sure to include relevant, optimized keywords when they’re uploading, modifying or updating their apps.

Jessica: Do you think every business needs an app?
Mark: No. If the app serves no purpose, then you just have a useless piece of software that no one will use. Some businesses are more suited to have apps, such as yoga studios where you have customers interacting with a changing schedule. Entertainment venues are also good candidates for apps. They can use interactive schedules that frequently change, and their users may actually find some entertainment within the app itself. Grocery stores are great candidates for apps because they can share store specials, recipes, question and answer forums and coupons. A great benefit to having a native app for something like a grocery store is that customers can still access the app even if their phones have bad reception. Native mobile apps written specifically for certain devices can store and recall their own information, whereas the essence of a website or web app means that information is stored not on your device but on a server. Having an app can be more engaging for certain businesses even where a website would suffice.

Jessica: What SEO tips can you give us to increase exposure with a native mobile app?
Mark: First of all, while search engines can easily read web apps, they can’t see content within a native app. Have a dedicated website, ideally with the domain name of your app, that you can put content on to increase your app’s exposure. That way Google and other search engines can index your website, and customers will have an easier time finding your app. The whole point of that website would be to point to your app’s download location so customers can get it on their smartphones or tablets.

Jessica: What do you see changing in the future in regards to SEO and mobile apps?
Mark: Well, I think companies like mine, and companies like Apple and Google see the great need for improved SEO. The app market, or app-mosphere, is saturated with apps. It’s sometimes hard to find something really relevant and good. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for, if you even know what you’re looking for. Apps sometimes have strange names that don’t clue customers in to their real functions. The next frontier for mobile and app SEO will be to cut through that saturation and better categorize your app. Customers may easily get fed up with the app market because there are so many bad apps out there and there is no great platform to find the app you’re looking for.

Jessica: Thanks, Mark, for letting us pick your brain!

Have you searched for apps and found what you were looking for? Do you have more questions about mobile or Web apps?

TAMPA, FLORIDA—When you place content on the Internet, the odds of it getting stolen are stacked against you. If this is something that doesn’t sit well with you, you’re in luck because we can help you get it back.

In a previous article we offered tips and tools for protecting your content with the warning that there is no tried and true method for protecting it, aside from keeping it off the Internet altogether. Since website optimization and providing quality content are the best ways to reach potential clients and essentially grow your business, that’s probably not an option. 

“Google places high value on quality sharing,” says Ali Husayni, CEO of Sinai Marketing. “Producing quality content for our blog, as well as our clients’ blogs, is one of the main reasons we have been able to become one of the top SEO companies in the world. The growth we have achieved is through quality work that not even the best SEO software can reproduce.”

When content is placed on your website first, Google gives you the credit for it. But sometimes, there are disreputable websites that take content that isn’t theirs and because of their site’s popularity, they end up getting credit for it.

“Not all sharing is bad,” says Lorrie Walker, one of our writers who is experienced in publishing content online. “In fact, when others share your content properly they earn you popularity-boosting backlinks.”

How aggravating would it be to sit back and watch someone’s popularity grow because readers of your stolen content are sharing it and unknowingly earning them – the thieves – back-links?

You should be the one who gets the credit and reaps the benefits of your content being shared – not a thief. But first, let’s talk about methods and tools you can use to identify if your content has been stolen.

Use a search engine – You can simply take a phrase from your content – make sure you put it in quotes – and perform a Google search. If your content shows up somewhere other than your own site, it may have been stolen. Don’t jump the gun though, it’s possible that someone shared it and gave you proper credit. You can also do the same for your images using a Google image search.

Copyscape - This online service allows you to search for content that is the same or similar to yours using the URL it originated from. Copyscape’s premium service can be set up to run automatic, daily searches for stolen content or to protect you from purchasing stolen content. You can also add a banner to your content that warns thieves it is protected by Copyscape.

CopyrightSpot - This service works like Copyscape. You simply use the URL to a webpage or blog feed that contains your work and it locates copies of it.

TinEye - Similar to Copyscape, TinEye scans for stolen images. It can even identify stolen images that have been edited. It’s more time-consuming, but you can also search for the subject of your image – “wild horses,” for example – and sift through the results for your original image.

Review incoming links - Many bloggers will link to the source of the content they share or in the case of a thief, steal. If you consistently check all of your incoming links you may find one that leads to a case of copyright infringement.

Google Alerts – You can use the title of your content/blog – in quotes, of course – and set an alert schedule where Google will alert you of URLs where your content is being posted.

Once you have identified that your content has indeed been stolen, we suggest using the following steps suggested by Lorelle VanFossen to get it back or get you the credit you deserve:

Contact the blogger - Remain professional and give them a chance to make things right – not everyone steals content intentionally. Ask them to remove it, rewrite it with linked excerpts, credit the material to you and your website specifically, or to compensate you monetarily for an amount you feel is fair. Be sure to give them a specific amount of time to meet your request before you take further action. Maintain a paper trail, which will come in handy for the next steps. If you can’t find their contact information, you can use a Whois Lookup or try Googling them.

Initiate a cease and desist order - Once the time you allotted for the thief to meet your request has passed, it is time to initiate legal action with a cease and desist order. This should not only be sent to the blogger, but all parties that may be unknowingly involved – including advertisers and the blog’s server host. Here you will find free downloads as well as additional information regarding the use of a cease and desist order.

Involve other parties - If several days pass without response to your cease and desist, you should contact the businesses that advertise on the violator’s blog. The majority of advertisers want to do business with reputable clients and by providing them with the evidence of the blogger’s infringement and a paper trail proving their negligence in taking action, the advertisers should react quickly. You may even be able to use a site popularity checker tool to prove to them that your stolen blog led to an unjustified increase in traffic of the thief’s blog that should have been tied to you. As a bonus they may have access to more information than you do and can contact the thief or host server directly.

Bring in the big guns – Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, search engines are willing to assist you by banning the blog from its search results once they have received adequate evidence of the blogger’s dishonesty – another reason why we can’t stress enough the importance of a good paper trail.

We hope that if you are faced with the problem of stolen content, you can use this article to take a proactive stance against the thieves.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Our CEO Ali Husayni recently shared a chilling blog post with the SEO team that discussed how to kill competitors’ ranking on Google.

The author, Jared Bates, listed three techniques that a competitor could theoretically use to attack another company’s website and cripple their business by causing their rankings to tank.

“Someone can easily sabotage your search engine presence,” wrote Bates, who is an affiliate marketer. “These techniques are the worst of the worst, although there is really no reason to think they would not work. They violate all of Google’s terms almost simultaneously, yet there are little safeguards implemented to protect us against them.”

Thankfully, the Sinai Marketing website has not been a victim of a negative SEO campaign and neither have any of our clients. Husayni has a decade of experience in search engine marketing and has seen plenty of companies use unscrupulous tactics, but he said the article still sent shivers down his spine.

The internet marketing community has been buzzing about negative SEO with many top SEO bloggers weighing in with opinions. The topic has gotten so much attention that Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, addressed it in a video on Dec. 18.

“Most people don’t need to worry about this,” reassured Cutts. “If you’re just a regular mom and pop, you’re a small business, this is not the sort of thing where you are likely in any way, shape or form to run up against this.”

Extremely competitive niche markets such as casinos were the exception. Cutts pointed out that although a lot of people have been stressed about the possibility of negative SEO, so far Google has observed very few instances of actual attacks. On Oct. 16 last year, Google released a tool that they claim is a simple way to diffuse potential attacks: disavow links tool.

Users can upload a text file list to Google and tell them which links they want the algorithm to ignore or to not count when determining the ranking. For example, if an SEO scammer tried to send thousands of low-quality inbound links to an online gambling website, the site’s webmaster could use the disavow links tool to tell Google to ignore those links and avoid a penalty.

“In theory, this should be a good tool to combat negative SEO if you’re actually experiencing it, though there is no guarantee that Google will actually ignore the links you tell it to,” writes Chris Crum in a WebProNews post.

In a question and answer section in the official blog post announcing the tool, Google explained:

This tool allows you to indicate to Google which links you would like to disavow, and Google will typically ignore those links. Much like with rel=”canonical”, this is a strong suggestion rather than a directive — Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment for corner cases, for example — but we will typically use that indication from you when we assess links.

While Google said it might be rare, there are some cases of negative SEO, such as Robert Prime, a web developer who had a site designed to help people sell their cars sabotaged by competitors before he even officially launched it. Although he admits to using black hat SEO techniques with previous sites, he decided to strictly use organic SEO for his new site. To his dismay, he noticed a sharp drop in rankings and discovered his site had been blasted with more than 13,000 bad links just before the drop. Prime opted to use the disavow links tool and hoped that Google would show mercy, but on Twitter a month later, Prime said the site was still not doing well despite disavowing them.

Google said that the process can take multiple weeks since they have to recrawl and reindex the URLs a company has disavowed before the disavowals go into effect.

“The disavow tool taking months is a token gesture that doesn’t near cover things,” said Prime in the comments section on his blog post.

Like the founder of SEO Book Aaron Wall mentioned in the comment section, someone with ill intent could easily cause 10 hours of link cleanup work each week with only $10, an anonymous email account and some gift cards. Or they spend $20 daily and make it where cleaning up links is all the person under attack has time for, which Wall called a pretty stupid, perhaps evil, incentive structure by Google.

“It’s not very hard for a software to produce 10 million bad links and direct them to different pages of a website from different URLs,” said Mahdi M. Zadeh, who is one of our SEO experts in the sales department.  ”How can it be affordable or even possible for a human or a team of humans to sit down and clean up the mess a high-performance machine created in no time? Then the victim of the attack is penalized by Google and has to spend more for Google AdWords to stay visible in search results.”

In the race to rank at the top of Google, there will always be individuals that attempt to harm competitors with unethical tactics, but according to Husayni there is a way to help prevent potential damage to a website. The main tactic is to keep a close eye on the site’s backlink profile.

He recommended doing this by downloading a complete list of links pointing to the site, marking any that came from the negative SEO attack and submitting those links using the disavow links tool. Just disavow with caution because, used incorrectly, the feature can potentially harm a site’s performance in Google’s search results.

“Google needs to accept responsibility for the mess it made and take more aggressive measures, even consider algorithm changes, to correct the problem,” said Zadeh. “In the meantime, people will have to use the disavow tool.”