I moved to Orange County to explore the area and I have been surprised to find out just how many businesses are seeking professional help with SEO. We run a national campaign but, since my arrival here a month ago, I’ve had at least 20 businesses approach me who were looking to hire a professional Google SEO company. Of course, not all of them signed up, but having four clients from Los Angeles and San Diego within one month is great – given that I don’t have a big network here yet.

Most of those who signed up are interested in the local market (Google Places) and some in Pay-Per-Click (Google Adwords). I also signed up one client who is interested in a national campaign.

Hmmm… I may decide to make Los Angeles my permanent home after all. It seems I’m more appreciated here than in Colorado. The only thing I don’t like is the traffic.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal featured an article by Sara Needleman and Amir Efrati on the new Google algorithm update. They interviewed a few business owners who had lost their Google ranking and, consequently, a lot of their business from Google users due to the latest Google algorithm update (this happened in late 2010).

Not only did our clients not lose their rankings, but the they have gained rankings instead.

Here is why: Google has traditionally devalued “duplicate” content. If your site’s content has been copied from any other site indexed by Google, your site would be penalized severely – even if portions of your site are duplicate. Read the blog post I wrote on duplicate content syndrome.

So, the respected writers needed to emphasize that the SEO companies that these mid-size and giant corporations are working with were not paying attention to this SEO-101 lesson.

I suggest they interview some of our clients next time, too.

Amongst the clients that gained in rank were www.mavenlive.com for their very competitive keywords including: physical therapy software.  Today, they’re ranking #1 in Canada and #3 worldwide.

We didn’t have a single client lose their rankings with Google.

ORANGE COUNTY, CA – Recently, we wrote about how Internet marketing is made up these days of three elements: social media marketing, search engine marketing and search engine optimization.

Today, we’re tackling the element of search engine marketing and what it means to businesses who have an Internet presence.

Search engine marketing promotes websites through pay-per-click advertising, paid placement and contextual advertising, says Ali Husayni, our resident SEO expert who founded Master Google.

When it comes to PPC advertising, Google Adwords and Facebook are popular- and arguably successful- marketing platforms, Husayni says.

AdWords
Google AdWords enables you to create advertisements that show up on relevant Google search results pages and the network of Google’s partner sites, according to information posted by Google.

You may wonder how Google Adwords works. Bright Hub explains it as a service that enables you to market your website via customized, premium placed advertisement links. These advertisements appear at the top and on the right side of Google’s direct search results pages, and they appear as a result of keywords the advertiser has associated with their ad. The ads also appear on blogs and other websites that utilize Google Adsense and contain your keywords used in your advertisement.

How much you spend on this type of advertising is completely up to you, but costs vary according to the competitiveness of your keywords. You only pay when a user clicks your ad- hence, the name pay-per-click.

“The more you spend, and the more wisely you spend, the more people will visit your site,” Husayni says.

Paid placement enables you as an advertiser to bid payments to a search engine so your service or product is visible in keyword search results. With Google Adwords, bidding higher than others for a specific keyword can enable your ads to rank higher on Google search engine page results than ads from your competitors who aren’t paying as much per click.

“Google AdWords is as important as SEO,” Husayni says. “That’s because there are people who only click on the advertisements, and not the organic search results, and vice versa. Participating in both enables businesses to capture everyone on their search results.”

Our research indicates that although 70 percent of Internet users ignore the “sponsored links” altogether, the majority of the rest only rely on ads to find the services and products they’re looking for.

“So, not having an SEM campaign means you’re losing potentially 30 percent of your clients to your competitors,” Husayni adds.

Facebook Ads
“Facebook ads have become a hot topic,” says Husayni, a top SEO expert. “You can specifically target a demographic that you want. It’s very sophisticated.”

With more than 500 million users, Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with. The social media site allows you as an advertiser to be extremely specific in selecting your target audience by enabling you to select people in certain age groups, in particular geographic locations and with specific interests. The advertising mechanism also provides a great deal of flexibility.

“You can try an ad for a few hours or a couple of days and if it doesn’t generate the traffic you had hoped for, you can alter your audience,” Husayni says.

You can control the advertising cost by setting daily budgets, and they can be adjusted whenever you choose. Like Adwords, you can choose a PPC option, or you can pay per time that your ad is seen.

© 2011 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Sinai Marketing is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

BOULDER, COLORADO – Although it has been around for nine years, LinkedIn has picked up steam lately as yet another social media outlet that can assist businesses in promoting themselves and finding new customers.

SEO expert Ali Husayni, founder of Master Google, said there are ways in which the social media outlet can help businesses gain customers.

LinkedIn- A Brief History
First, a bit about LinkedIn. Created in 2002 and officially launched in May 2003, it is the world’s largest professional network, according to the LinkedIn website.

LinkedIn is sometimes unofficially referred to as “Facebook for professionals.” As of March 2011, it had more than 100 million users located in 200 countries. LinkedIn users conducted nearly two billion people searches last year.

Gaining Clients Via LinkedIn
“When you have an outlet with so many users, you have an opportunity to gain clients,” Husayni said. “Add to that the fact that it appears LinkedIn is becoming increasingly savvy regarding SEO for its users and the effect on Google ranking, and as an SEO expert, suddenly you have my attention.”

Randy Schrum, president of a social media solutions company dubbed My Corporate Media, shared information in a recent webinar on tips to jumpstart an individual’s LinkedIn presence.

Schrum recommends using a professional photo as your profile picture. It also is important to complete your social profile by including an engaging headline that explains to people how you can help, he said. He suggests including keywords in this headline.

Husayni said businesses and professionals, such as dentists, orthodontists, realtors and attorneys, could use these same methods to promote the services they offer. It appears to Husayni that the developers at LinkedIn clearly understand the power of search tools and are seeking to increase that power on LinkedIn.

“I believe that is the reason why they recently added a new section in which users can enter information about their skills and assets,” Husayni says.

This new section allows users to highlight those things that separate them from the pack, so to speak. Users can enter languages they speak, patents, certifications and publications. Businesses can use this section to enter the types of services offered, because LinkedIn enables users to search companies by attributes, descriptions and more. Spotlighting these items moves personal and business profiles up in search queries, according to information posted on the LinkedIn Web site.

“Entering keywords into your profile information is like a mini, do-it-yourself search engine optimization campaign,” Husayni says. “This has the potential to help businesses and professionals attract clients when potential clients conduct searches on the site.”

When optimizing a profile on LinkedIn, the person with the most keywords wins, Schrum said in the webinar. For example, a realtor in Seattle who wants to appear first on search results for “Seattle Realtor” simply needs to look at the profile that ranks first in that search result, see how many times that phrase is used in their profile, and use it more times than their competitor.

Why Bother?
“Why not?” Husayni questioned. “Why not use all of the tools at your disposal?”

For business owners who are interested in SEO, it is important to note that profile information on LinkedIn can be fully indexed on Google, which can help a business improve its Google ranking. To take full advantage of this, make sure your profile is fully public, according to an article posted on 10slate.com.

“This is another outlet in which you can use targeted keywords to make sure your page contains words that people are actually searching,” said Husayni, a top SEO expert. “For our SEO clients, this is another avenue where our keyword research for their businesses can be applied.”

Learn More
To learn more about SEO company Master Google and the role that social media can play in SEO, visit www.mastergoogle.com or call toll-free: 877-932-6559; internationally +1-303-932-6559.

About Master Google
Master Google is a search engine optimization firm based in Boulder, Colorado that utilizes knowledge of the Internet market and ongoing research to develop and implement SEO strategies for its clients. It is an affiliate of Sinai Marketing, founded by Ali Husayni in 2004. Husayni serves as the firm’s chief executive officer and SEO expert.
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© 2011 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Sinai Marketing is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

I just saw an advertisement from a link-building company, titled “10,000,000 backlinks,” on my Facebook page. I love these ads. They make me laugh, but they may end up making you cry.

The rest of the ad says:

“That’s how many links we’ve developed for our clients in 4 years. How many do you want?…”

Wow… catchy title and catchy ad (also has a good looking girl as a picture , which initially grabbed my attention). But wait a minute, in 2 years we were able to build our site , Mastergoogle.com, 60,000 links. I thought that was plenty until I saw this ad. So, immediately I thought, let’s find out how many links these people have. So, I went to Yahoo! Site Explorer Tool and looked them up.

I laughed even more. They have only 50 links. Then I removed the number of links that they are giving themselves. The count ended up at 32 links.

So here, I’d like to give them another link to make that 33.

See my other post on buying cheap links.

We’ve posted a lot of information about how to get quality links for your site. I’m going to make some videos within the next few weeks on this topic as well. Stay tuned.

Orange County, CA – It is a topic tossed around from time to time in the world of Internet business – is SEO going to die one day? Will there come a time when SEO services and SEO marketing are no longer needed?

While some naysayers might be painting a grim future for Web search engine optimization, top SEO expert Ali Husayni says there is most certainly a place for the high quality SEO specialist in the future of the Internet.

“While the role of SEO is constantly evolving, and there are those disreputable companies that may not survive, the use of SEO with quality Web content is solid,” Husayni said.

Richard J. Tofe’s article “Someday, the sun will set on SEO — and the business of news will be better for it” indicates there is no future for SEO. He “looks toward a future when search engine optimization has been rendered obsolete by advancing technology” and “the implications for news.”

“What this entire debate misses,” Tofe writes, “is that SEO itself is an inefficiency, a transaction cost rather than a value-creator — it is a technique designed entirely to compensate for the failure of the search engine to correctly analyze site content, searcher desire, or both. Over time, economics teaches us, inefficiencies tend to be wrung out, and transaction costs reduced.

Husayni responds, “Google is an artificial intelligent (AI) super-machine, able to analyze content which is manually created by human intelligence. This is a recipe for inefficiency. A machine is never going to be 100 percent accurate in analyzing human art and intelligence. Google will always make mistakes, and will be prone to manipulation by human intelligence (SEO).

“So, Google will always need white hat SEO, and is always going to be fighting black hat SEO.”

Google has asked site owners to use “rich snippets” so it can rank businesses on Google Places easier. It has opened yet another door for manipulating its data — sharp SEO experts now use this to help clients rank better with Google Places.

As Google tightens the reins on sites that offer useless information, some experts lump all SEO operations into one category and declare their time is almost over. Does SEO, dubbed by critics as the “dark side of online publishing,” deserve the criticism? Complaints are aimed toward writing fashioned to draw Web search hits, content tagging to point to topics, and the demise of witty headlines in favor of keyword-laden titles. “Content farms” are also under fire – designed to draw hits to sites for commercial reasons and not because the Web needs the repetitive content.

“This is purely black hat SEO — feeding content to Google that is used mainly as bait for commercial gain,” Husayni said.

Tofe further wrote, “Improved search, and diminished SEO, should tend to place a greater value on such readers, elevating content of higher value, higher quality and, therefore, higher cost.”

For SEO companies that maintain high standards of content and quality search results, this is not a scary prediction. “If SEOs that practice higher standards rise to the top and content farms and SEO companies that are low quality sink, that’s all right with us,” Husayni said.

The SEO Google analyst said “We focus on improving client site value with viewers, as well as Google. By optimizing sites and gaining valuable and trustworthy links across the Internet, we improve Google rankings, eventually landing on the first page of Google. We are not here to trick Google into accepting client sites as best. We are here to make our client sites the best.”

© 2011 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Sinai Marketing dba Master Google are credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

It’s been a while since I have posted anything on here, as I have been pulled in many different directions and just haven’t had the time to do so. I’m moving to Orange County, CA in order to help build our new site (it’s not officially launched yet, so I cannot tell you the URL) and, at the same time, to sign up new clients. But, I feel it is beneficial to all of you to learn about links.

Today, I was speaking with one of our prospective clients (whose site is constantly losing rankings on Google) and he asked me how much each back-link would cost. I gave him the answer and he was surprised that what I quoted him was a few times higher than what his current, so-called SEO company was charging him (I really appreciated his trust in sharing that information with me).

I asked him to send me the most recent report his previous company (ironically, based in India) had sent him. He did. All I had to do was click on the first link on the list and, boom, I landed on a link-spam/link-farm page (http://afaequipments.com/). I’m using a nofollow tag on this link so Google doesn’t penalize us for linking to this page.

Take a look for yourself. At the first glance, it looks like a legitimate business site. But only on the top of the fold. As you scroll down, you see a bunch of nonsensical text with over 150 embedded links in them.  My prospective client’s link (who is now our client) also has a link within this page. Google will realize this page is a link-spam page in one-tenth of a second.

Let’s assume this company charges $20/link.  Having 150 links on this page means they made $3,000, while giving their clients nothing in return, except for the chance of getting banned by Google.

I picked up the phone, called my my prospective client immediately and explained to him what he was getting from the Indian SEO firm. I compared that with some of the links we had built for one our clients and, a couple of hours later, he signed an agreement with us.

The links on the spam page each cost $20, but have absolutely no value. Now, let me tell you something even more interesting: I saw an ad today on my Facebook page advertising back-links at $0.15 per link. Oh, my God. You can only imagine what kind of links they would be. If I have time to learn more about spammy link-building techniques, I’d certainly research them.

This is not even “black-hat” SEO.

Guys (and ladies), if you want to purchase cheap links, please do yourselves a favor and save your money. Better yet,  pay for Adwords instead. At least that won’t get your site flagged by Google.

Link-building is a sophisticated process that requires both the knowledge of SEO and Google algorithms, and has to be done manually and correctly. Otherwise, it will either have no value for you, or will get you penalized.

I’ll offer my consultation services for free to my loyal friends. Leave a comment here or contact me through my Facebook page and ask me your questions. I’ll be happy to help you if I can.

Best,

Ali Husayni
www.mastergoogle.com