SANTA MONICA, CA — Recently we gave you an introduction to Google Analytics. We have also mentioned analytics as part of other free online SEO technique tips in the blog series of our CEO, Ali Husayni’s blog series: Google SEO Simplified Parts One, Two, and Three. But what does using this information mean for your business?

All About SEO: Understanding Where Google Analytics Fits In

When implementing all-inclusive SEO strategies and including social media, Google Analytics is the perfect tool to show you how your efforts are paying off with real results, according to Husayni. While Husanyni believes that you must be full-time with your SEO efforts, free online SEO tips like the ones on our blog encourage companies to be proactive, regardless of using our services.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for understanding how traffic is driven to a site, which is really all about understanding how vital SEO is to a business. If no one is visiting your site, no one will link to you, and more importantly, no one will care about your site’s efforts, whether it be for koi fish advertising or for dental patient marketing (yes, we have quite the variety of clients who see results) – the audience must be driven there.

“You cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours,” Husayni says. “That simply won’t happen. In a world where there are thousands of new sites built every day, your prospective site visitors have no way of finding you to read your content.”

Simplifying Analytics: Which Reports Matter To You

In analyzing which content drives traffic, it is important to know how to generate a report that means something to you, as explained in a recent post by John Hope-Johnstone of BuzzMaster.Wordpress.com. Google Analytics is as maddening as it is amazing because of the amount of material. It is noted by Hope-Johnstone that Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports, so it is important to know which to use, as how you look at it is more important than what it contains.

“The bottom line is that you are going to have to create your own dashboard that has meaning to you and from which you can take meaningful actions,” Hope-Johnstone said. “It is daunting in the amount of data that can be obtained. I love to use the expression in our seminars that we’re ‘drowning in data and starving for knowledge.’”

To improve business steadily over time, a company must be willing to steadily work toward improving itself, including its shortcomings, and Master Google is no different. In a recent post, Husayni analyzed what it would take to become the best SEO Company. Husayni puts it best when he compares results to customer satisfaction:

“Any business is given value based upon its profitability as well as revenue, but I want to add customer loyalty, satisfaction and beating our competition in any market as factors into the equation of what it means to be the best,” he said.

Part of being the best comes from understanding where to find your strengths (and flaws), and in this case, we’re using Google Analytics to find these things. One of the ways to best use Google Analytics is to combine some of their reports and make a new number that makes sense to your business, according to Hope-Johnstone.

“An example might be, rather than just measure Unique Visitors, I combine the number of ‘Unique Visitors’ plus ‘Page Views’ into a new combined metric,” Hope-Johnstone said. “When something goes wrong with the website, I will look at each metric individually, but to create our own dashboard, I use combined metrics that tell me more.”

Since optimization is only about 5-10 percent of the total SEO work, according to Husayni, the rest lies with content development and popularity, vital pieces to the puzzle that cannot be ignored. Hope-Johnstone puts all of the parts of SEO together to give an analogy to making a website fly, the same way a plane would. In this analogy, Hope-Johnstone explains that you, the website owner or optimizer, are comparable to airline pilots in control of an aircraft. Airline pilots have ‘key’ instrumentation needed to soar into the air. They rely on these instruments to tell them that all is going well. According to Johnstone, the inspection checklist of those vital instruments looks like this:

1. Check the artificial horizon.
2. Check the air speed indicator.
3. Check the rate of climb or descent. (Now there are many more instruments on the cockpit’s dashboard, but those are the first a pilot will look at if something odd is going on with the aircraft.)
4. Check another row of instruments until the dashboard is exhausted.
5. After all of the instruments are exhausted, make a manual checklist of action items.

Google Analytics is an excellent automatic tool for telling you where you traffic is coming from. To make an accurate Google Analytics checklist for your own records, though, it is important to note what is not there as much as what is.

Filling in The Blanks of ‘Not Provided Data’ in Google Analytics

Courtesy of PayoffMarketing.com

At the end of last year, we couldn’t help but note that there was an item labeled “Not Provided” on Google Analytics traffic reports under the “Traffic Sources/Google Organic” section. We found that this section was “protecting” Google users who were using their account when conducting the search, as Google wants to further protect their users’ privacy by encrypting their search results pages. Google seems to have support from the general public, according to the Pew Research Center. Seventy-three percent of people said they would “NOT BE OKAY with a search engine keeping track of your searches and using that information to personalize your future search results because you feel it is an invasion of privacy.”

While we appreciate the privacy, we have thus far missed thousands of organic Google search keyword insights, and it accounted for 19.6% of our total Google organic search traffic last November. Husayni has not been happy with this function of Analytics:

“My opinion is that Google needs to find a way to fully show the keywords people use in finding sites,” he said. “Otherwise, we may have to use other software to monitor our clients’ traffic.”

Still, the changes are a challenge that Husayni has risen to, and the Master Google team has remained successful at optimizing websites. Husayni encourages other businesses to use the same strategy to stay on top of SEO.

“The only thing not changing with SEO is that it’s always changing,” Husayni said. “Be diligent in keeping up with those changes as [you handle your] site’s SEO, or partner with a qualified SEO provider to handle that task.”

To increase the likelihood that Google Analytics will work for your website the way it should, Contact Us to see if we can provide SEO services for your website.

NASHVILLE, TN – Until recently, Google users typed in search queries, and a neat list of blue links popped up. Within these links, users hoped to find answers to their questions.

But what if the information they’re searching for is fact? What if they’re searching for the capital of Spain? Google now wants to tell people these factual answers without needing to click away to another website.

On March 15, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google would phase its search results into more semantic modes. If you’ve ever used Wolphram Alpha, you have an idea of what this means. For Google users, when you type “2+2” into the query bar, you’ll now get the answer “4” instead of a link to a webpage that can help you find that answer. If you type certain words into the query bar, the definition will pop up even before you finish the word. When I typed “tumultuous” and “lethargic,” Google gave me definitions. However, no definitions appeared when I tried “general” and “advice.”

“Google isn’t replacing its current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the words it contains, how often other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures,” WSJ reporter Amir Efrati writes. “Rather, the company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called ‘semantic search,’ which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.”

Is this new?

When I told my computer programmer husband of this change, he replied that Google’s been doing that for a while. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan agrees. Sullivan’s March 15 post goes through the WSJ article, wondering why it’s news.

“As for ‘spitting out’ those ‘facts and direct answers’ that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began,” Sullivan says.

Sullivan believes that Google is trying to offset criticisms to Search Plus Your World, as many people were worried that search results would lose quality from this personalized search change. “It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies,” says Sullivan.

Will Google’s ‘semantic search’ mean anything for SEO?

Image Courtesy of TNooz.com.

Whether Google’s semantic search is new, old, or still evolving, effective optimization will still be important as ever. Learn simple SEO tips to keep your website relevant to users and optimized for search engines.

Efrati writes, “the move could spur millions of websites to retool their Web page—by changing what’s called a ‘markup language’—so the search engine could more easily locate them under the new system,” said Larry Cornett, a former Web-search executive at Yahoo Inc.

Boiled down, Google’s going to be answering more things on its own, meaning that websites may experience fewer visits. Websites such as Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia may take hits, but relevant, focused content will still bring in visits.

At Master Google, our SEO team provides results, guaranteed. We empower our clients with quality content and expert Google SEO consulting to give businesses a boost.

SANTA MONICA, CA – The most common question that I have received from my friends and from prospective clients has been about how to best use SEO. Traffic to a website is usually the goal that they have in mind. But getting the initial website traffic boost is only half the battle. How do you continuously keep the traffic coming to your site, month after month?

Getting and staying at a top spot on Google is as simple as following some tried and true steps to success, as explained by Master Google CEO Ali Husayni, who said that success comes with understanding SEO, determination and hard work.

How To Lose Traffic

To get more traffic, it is important to be equally as clear about what not to do. Husayni listed his pet peeves and a few of the sure-fire ways to get a high bounce-back rate. Do any of these things and it will detrimental to your amount of traffic. Ranking loss will inevitably follow.

1. Unrelated to my search query (this includes misleading black-hat seo techniques).
2. Too egoistical. No one wants to read a site full of self-directed press releases.
3. Unorganized content. When it’s too frustrating to find what you’re looking for.
4. Bad colors and design.
5. Sexually explicit content.
6. Money-making driven, where the obvious and sole purpose of the site is to make you pay for something with a minimal amount of effort on their part.

Getting to a Top Spot on Google

At Master Google, we have most recently enjoyed seeing our clients get to the Top Spot in Google Places.

“SEO takes the following three things: expertise, hard work, and patience,” Husayni said. “On average, our clients see the best results within six months to a year after we start a project. When we see results, it proves to us the fact that what we do actually works.”

What works right now must be white-hat SEO, or the rankings will fall quickly, according to a recent article written in a small business article resource, Intuit.com.

The article cites that a bounce rate of 30-50 percent is good, while anything above 60-70 percent is a big red flag, indicating that you need to change your SEO ways immediately to keep your targeted audience. After all, no matter your business, targeted writing is key to get you to the top, and Husayni recently talked about the importance of knowing your competition.

“It is important to remember that audiences change, depending on factors ranging from your competition to your field of business,” Husayni said.

Retaining Readership Rate Successfully

In the discussion of long-term success, I can’t help but connect Husayni’s formula for success to that held by Dale Carnegie, a well-known businessman in his time and author of the famous book “How To Win Friends and Influence People.”

“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success,” Carnegie famously said.

Success in a returning-traffic sense is quite the challenge. Engaging content does not write itself as there are no shortcuts to driving traffic in a quality way. According to Husayni, hiring a quality SEO team is the best way to ensure that you take your business to the next level.

“You may not have the budget for a full-scale SEO campaign if you’re just starting out, but some time with an SEO consultant to get you started may be within your budget and well worth the expense,” Husayni said. “Call the office for a free consultation to find out.” Click here to contact us about our services.

NASHVILLE, TN – It’s no secret that Internet usage has increased dramatically in the past decade. In 2004, 30 percent of Internet users conducted search engine queries on a normal day.

In the present, that number has shot to 59 percent, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. When Google released Search Plus Your World, we reported that Web searches would start getting personal. A study released on March 9 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows the results of a very interesting test. Pew wanted to know how Internet users feel about search engines gathering and saving their past histories to use as a guide for future search results. The survey asked approximately 2,000 participants questions about their Internet use, their feelings on targeting advertising, and their knowledge on how to keep their information private. The survey was conducted from Jan. 20 to Feb. 19. Overall, participants did not want search engines to gather that information.

A whopping 73 percent of people said they would “NOT BE OKAY with a search engine keeping track of your searches and using that information to personalize your future search results because you feel it is an invasion of privacy.” The Internet users that accept search engines tracking their searches feel that the material gathered allows search engines to customize their results, better guessing what they’re searching for.

A chart from Pew’s research shows a breakdown of how Internet users feel (either “good” or “bad”) about personalized searches based on users’ age and income level. The study found that the older one is and the more income he receives, the more he disagrees with this method of gaining tailored results.

Personalized searches are certainly controversial, but sometimes they aren’t all bad. If you search for “Indian food takeout,” your past search results could mean that you don’t have to enter your location in each search. If you’re searching for “oil change,” it might annoy some people to get results in other states or regions.

What This Means for SEO

It can get cutthroat in the SEO world, but try to keep your client in mind. If your client values privacy, and most people do value privacy, refrain from deceptive practices. Don’t share their email addresses. Don’t clog up their inboxes with irrelevant content.

There may be a backlash from Internet users due to the way search engines and websites like Facebook treat their personal data. Keep your customers and readers happy by treating them with the respect they desire.

The best way to get readers to trust you is to give them valuable content on a regular schedule. Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni believes that focusing on the customer’s needs is the way to achieve success.

“Ultimately, humans are more important than the search engine because they are the ones who buy, the ones who will share the content, and the ones who will get you the backlinks to the content, so always strive for a natural tone and relevant topics,” Husayni says.

Contact the Master Google search engine optimizing team to see how we push to get you results while staying true to your customers.

NASHVILLE, TN – So many factors go into Web ranking, and once you’ve set up a solid foundation of clear navigation and relevant content, sharing your information helps people find you.

There are many ways to share, but they’re all basically the same: advertising. You must tell your customers you have a website. You’ll have a Facebook page, maybe a Twitter account. You might pay for a radio ad or a printed coupon in a magazine. All of these are advertising.

Social networks are some weird blend of word-of-mouth advertising and clear self-promotion. The best way to have potential customers find you and trust your content is to act organically. Be educated in your field. Find a connection with your customers between your product and something else they care about.

I was browsing on Google+ when I saw a public post from Google on March 20, 2011. The post, linked to their Google Analytics blog, announced a new way to measure your social media efforts through Google Analytics. These new measurements show up as social reports.

“The Overview report allows you to see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from your social channels,” Google’s Group Project Manager Phil Miu writes. “The Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals – both as last interaction, and assisted.”

Last Interaction Social Conversion means that through a social media channel, a customer has found your website and converted without straying from your site. Assisted Social Conversion means that someone converts who had visited your website earlier through a social channel.

This will mean that businesses will know where their most loyal (and highest purchasing) customers are coming from. Social media results will be clearer, and your efforts can be spent on the mediums that drive the highest results.

One interesting thing I read discussed the Activities Stream, which lets us know how our content is being shared and discussed on other social websites. The downside of this is that four of the biggest players – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest – aren’t part of the Analytics Social Data Hub, but you can see how frequently users on sites like Google+, Meetup, Digg, Reddit, TypePad, AllVoices, Blogger and Delicious are sharing and discussing your content.

Why Optimizing Your Business’s Website is More Important than Ever

Google Analytics project marketing manager Adam Singer writes a post on the Future Buzz about the latest social analytics features. Singer believes that these statistics will show how important your individual website really is compared to saturated social networks.

“We’ve been arguing at the Future Buzz that your owned presence (like your website or blog) should be where you focus activities for years,” says Singer. “External social communities aren’t where conversions happen anyway. It should be pretty obvious, but we have to say it again because some people are still confused or looking in all the wrong places: your website or blog (a place where you control the templates, Calls To Action, etc.) is where the most possible users convert and where your business is best poised to capture value.”

You may have 50,000 likes on Facebook or 20,000 Twitter shares, but those numbers don’t show how many fans or likes lead to actual conversions. And in the end, it’s all about results.

SEO specialists like the ones here at Master Google can optimize your business’s website for search engines, increasing exposure and driving potential clients to your doorstep. Master Google’s CEO, Ali Husayni, believes that companies should be proactive in their SEO efforts.

“You cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours,” Husayni says. “That simply won’t happen. In a world where there are thousands of new sites built everyday, your prospective site visitors have no way of finding you to read your content.”

With an all-inclusive SEO strategy and inclusion of social media, Google Analytics will show you how your efforts are paying off with real results. Contact Master Google today to see what our SEO team can do for your business.

TAMPA, FLORIDA — It was this statement from Matt Cutts that instantly made me perk up and take note: “Normally we don’t…pre-announce changes, but there is something that we’ve been working on…to try to level the playing ground a little bit.”

I heard this during a podcast from SXSW in March, and Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, was talking about SEO techniques that Google views as “over-optimization.” You can listen to the podcast at Search Engine Roundtable.

Earlier in the session, it was explained that all SEO experts weren’t bad; that a good SEO expert was like a coach who helps you figure out how to present yourself better via your website. That’s when Cutts, whose job is to hunt cheaters, showed his hand.

In the coming weeks, Google plans to start identifying sites that are overdoing it when it comes to SEO, compared to the people who are just creating great content and trying to make a fantastic site. This is a particular area to which Cutts’ team continues to pay attention.

“It’s an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working right now,” he said. “We want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level. And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive.”

That way, people who don’t use SEO techniques won’t suffer from having their sites buried in search results by people who abuse SEO- whether they throw too many keywords on the page, they exchange too many links, or whatever else they may do to “go beyond what a normal person would expect,” Cutts said.

There are lots of people who seem to think that Google hates SEO, but that’s not the case, he said. It can be helpful by making a site more easily crawled, which increases the site’s user-friendliness.

Still, there are people who take it too far; black hat SEO techniques that do too well.

“We’ve been working on changes where if you’re a white hat or you’ve been doing very little SEO, that you’re going to not be affected by this change,” Cutts says. “But if you’ve been going beyond the pale, your site may not rank as highly as it did before.”

Matt Cutts warns over optimizers: changes are coming.

Google isn’t the only search engine that recognizes the need to address the SEO-on-steroids techniques that some people use. Duane Forrester, senior product manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, also took part in the SXSW session and reiterated “over-SEO is always a problem.”

Ali Husayni, Master Google’s CEO, welcomes the change to Google.

“When Matt described an ethical SEO professional who makes sites user-friendly and more crawlable, he could have been describing us,” Husayni said. “We use only white-hat techniques because we understand that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.”

“What’s interesting in Matt’s approach is that he mentioned two of the most common black-hat SEO techniques: keyword stuffing and link-exchange,” Husayni said. “So by over optimization, he means black-hat SEO. Unfortunately, Google has recently lost its handle of such practices as I explained in our recent post. So, Matt is on the right track here.”

Husayni predicted that this next Google change will further weed out bad SEO providers and enhance our clients’ rankings on Google.

“When you’re doing everything above-board, you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “But when you’re trying to cheat the system, Matt’s team at Google has shown time and again that they will catch onto you eventually.”

EVERGREEN, CO — I’ve been a fan of white-hat SEO for many years. After all, Google likes white-hat SEO, and from its early years, I have promoted Google for its accurate search results. In my opinion, the main reason for Google’s success has been that its team of engineers in the anti-spam department, headed by Matt Cutts, has worked tirelessly for many years to prevent spammers from exploiting SEO techniques in order to rank themselves above the competition, when those types of tactics don’t deserve Google’s approval.

Matt and his team’s work has been no small task as new black-hat techniques are created on a daily basis by websites looking to shortcut their way to the top – at the expense of quality websites on the Internet.

However, it surprises me that Google is still unable to detect old black-hat SEO techniques. For example, a few days ago, I was shocked to see one of our peers’ sites securing a #5 rank on Google organic results for “Best SEO” using (for the most part) black-hat SEO techniques. Interestingly, Google has known most of these techniques for years. So, I’m wondering how they get away with tricking Google.

Image Courtesy of SeoBook.com.

Matt… if you’re reading this, please write a post and let us know how this website slipped through the cracks of your genius team – especially that they’re affiliated with SEOmoz.org, which I’m really proud of for their great SEO software development.

The site in question is: www.localseocompany.net.

The keyword I searched for is: Best SEO

The page that comes up #5 is: http://www.localseocompany.net/best-seo-company/

And now the main black-hat techniques they’ve used:

1.  Keyword Stuffing: the site mentions “SEO” exactly 40 times. The term “best SEO” has been repeated 20 times.
2. Excess use of H1 tags: there are seven H1 tags throughout the code of this page.
3. Self-linking anchored texts: there are 21 links on this page using anchored texts that are linking to the page itself – thus sending Googlebot in circles.

Interestingly enough, this page has ZERO inbound links (however, the root domain is very popular getting links from sites such as Adobe and SEOMoz.org).

Leave your thoughts and comments; I’m interested to know what you think of this.

Please note: I’m not going to report this page to Google for SEO malpractice – because I honestly think Google should have been able to detect it by itself.

Our notes have been made only because we love Google and we want it to stay at the top of the game in regards to being the best search engine out there.

SANTA MONICA, CA — It’s refreshing to alleviate dread when it comes to the beginning of the work week, especially where our clients are concerned. For our clients who formerly had ineffective SEO strategies in place, the week often looked bleak when assessing the week’s SEO goals with a company that just wasn’t working for them the way they had hoped. For Shawn Sandifer and Timothy Booth, this was their experience until they came to Master Google wanting more than unfilled promises for their website, TenList.com. TenList.com is aiming to be the go-to source for home improvement and construction-related services, and they are well on their way.

Shawn Sandifer and Timothy Booth of TenList.com.

Last week, TenList reached a daily record that had not been crossed since Aug. 15, 2011: organic search results that brought in 5,690 visitors. This week, the site has already reached another record high for 2012 of 6,048 visitors, a number that the website last experienced on Aug. 1, 2011. Sandifer shared his relief that Mondays mornings are no longer going to be a major source of dread.

“Mondays were dark days for sometime and it’s nice to start the week off once again on a bright note,” Sandifer said. “We could always determine how the rest of the weeks’ leads and traffic would be depending on the Monday’s numbers.”

Living on the TenList roller coaster ride was not the track that the website wanted to stay on, and that’s where Master Google came in.

Why Google Rankings Fall With the Wrong SEO Company

While Mondays used to be one of the TenList.com team’s favorite days of the week, as SEO efforts with other companies always started out well, the inevitable drop was hard to take. After all, trusting the wrong SEO company can leave you feeling more lost in the shuffle than found at the top of Google. What makes a good SEO company is often misunderstood, according to a post by Master Google CEO Ali Husayni. Husayni said that most of the SEO companies claim to be SEO experts, when the truth is that they only know a few small aspects of SEO.

“They read a few articles, make some changes to the site’s meta tags and claim that your site is ready for Google,” Husayni said. “Then, a few months later, when you are frustrated at the lack of progress, your so called SEO expert tells you that you have to wait as it takes longer for Google to rank your site.” And the wait is all in vain.

Don’t Be Afraid to Switch Up Your Normal SEO Efforts

At first, Husayni’s ‘clean-house’ approach to TenList’s SEO strategies felt like a big overhaul, but by taking on the broken parts of their current system, TenList was really able to make drastic improvement that they appreciate now, according to Booth.

“By challenging our current culture, they have helped us develop a greater understanding of our business and help us map out our goals and take steps to achieve them,” Booth said.

Sandifer seconds the relief that Booth shared about TenList being headed in the right direction this time, happy that Master Google is on board and exceeding their expectations.

“With the drop we had in traffic due to bad direction by consulting companies it is nice to finally see a growing trend,” Sandifer said. “This means we can finally begin to plan for the future and growth of our company and stop trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out of the hole we were in.”

Always Look Toward the Future and At Your Ranking Reports

Master Google Editor-in-chief Lorrie Walker looks forward to seeing what the next writing campaign will do for the success of the site, and knows that the site will grow as its quality content does.

“We’re embarking on a three-month content writing campaign to really get the word out about the relevant, useful information the site provides to those who need the services,” Walker said.

“It is rare to find a company in the SEO space that will go month to month, in their business relationship with you and to continually prove their value to your site,” Booth said. “Our traffic is growing at a quicker pace than their original estimate. Their value to our company at this stage cannot be overstated.”

NASHVILLE, TN – Every industry has its own jargon. Doctors, marketing executives and journalists tend to speak in different languages when they’re in a room full of peers. The world of search engine optimization is no different. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the unfamiliar terms used in SEO tips and guidelines. Hopefully if you’ve found your way to our blog, then you at least know that SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”.

Here, we hope to demystify some of the terms that circulate frequently in SEO-speak. Once you understand the process, you can better develop your SEO strategy.

How People Find Your Site

Analytics shows how traffic finds a specific website. Analytics record how people find you, how long they stay on your site, and how many pages they visit within your website. This information is useful in further marketing your site. We’ve written before on Google Analytics, the free analytic service offered by Google. When a user types in a search query, the SERP is what pops up in response. SERP is an acronym for “Search Engine Results Page”.

Websites don’t appear magically in Google’s index. Or maybe they do! Websites are “crawled” by computer software programs. These crawlers, or spiders, find new and updated webpages and add them to their search engine’s index. Spiders crawl webpages for new content, cataloging keywords and adding new pages to each search engine’s index. Google uses GoogleBot to crawl its search engine, thus making GoogleBot a spider. The pages are collected in an index using over 1 Million computer servers for speedy retrieval, and having your page in an index allows users to potentially find your site through a search query.

Now on to the important explanation of how giving and receiving inbound and outbound links should happen. Building links should happen organically, and the use of link farms and link buying is considered black hat. When you see text on the web that links to a different page, that linked text is called “anchor text”.

The behind-the-scenes programming of your website can also determine how easily people find you. Meta tags are used in HTML, specifically in the <head> section, so that spiders can better categorize websites. Google’s Webmaster Tools gives helpful information on how to use these tags. By outlining your website’s structure in a sitemap, your website can be more easily directed by search engines.

Google utilizes PageRank to give different weights to different websites. It takes into account how many links a website has linking to it, though not all links are created equal. Some links are from more “respectable” sources, and therefore, these links have higher weight. PageRank alone isn’t the deciding factor in whether or not a website has relevant, valuable content.

How You Help People Find Your Site

Adding fresh content to your website helps potential customers find you on the web. Many people use blogs to keep their content fresh. The term “blog” first came from “web log”, as in an online journal or record with regular updates. The term evolved to “blog”. Blogs show the most recently added content at the top of the page, and the older content moves down as new content appears.

Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni believes that WordPress blogs are an important factor in the SEO game. “Google feeds and survives on content. Google also loves sites that feed it more quality content on a regular basis,” Husayni says.

The best blogs are those that take shape organically, and keywords should follow that rule as well. Keywords are important to SEO, as all relevant websites should stay true to their audience. Keywords can happen organically. If you’re a software engineer, your website should discuss programming, code libraries, and other specific things relevant to your niche.

Black Hat and White Hat SEO

We’ve discussed the differences before, but here’s a refresher:

Black hat SEO is basically any unethical practice in SEO. One black hat technique is implementing hidden text. Hidden text is exactly what it sounds like: If a website’s background is white, hidden text that is stuffed with keywords in a color that is undetectable for people visiting the website. The hidden text is invisible, but it can still be crawled. Adding content that isn’t relevant or helpful to your customers, especially if that content is riddled with unnecessary keywords, is black hat as well. Cloaking is a black hat technique that veils the content that real humans see with keyword-stuffed content that only the spiders can see and crawl. This is considered a deceptive practice.

White Hat SEO is the ideal way to optimize your site for visitors. White hat techniques are organic, and its advocates believe that quality content, relevant linking, keyword analysis, and following search engines guidelines generate steady, meaningful results.

Unless you have loads of extra time to devote to learning SEO, an SEO firm, like our team here at Master Google, is probably the best bet to comprehensively market your business. The SEO game is always changing, and it’s a full time job to keep up with the latest trends. An army of search engine experts can spend more time and expertise optimizing your website for search engines than most entrepreneurs can allow. Contact Master Google to see how our SEO experts can help your business grow.

SANTA MONICA, CA – The Master Google team is proud to announce another Top of Google Places announcement. The foam insulation company Retrofoam of Arizona has reached #1 on Google Places for “Phoenix Insulation.” Having an active SEO strategy is a vital part of the equation in the formula for business success, according to Retrofoam of Arizona Co-Owner Paul Kariniemi.

“SEO is something I always want to have. We also do radio and TV advertising [and other forms of advertising], and I will always have SEO running in the background,” Kariniemi said.

After all, it takes an active campaign effort to get results. Citing the sometimes maddening truth that there is no way to know exactly which part of your SEO efforts will take you to the top and exactly how long it will take, Kariniemi shared his humorous equation for Internet success:

A strong Internet presence is 1+1=3.

This joke is a great example of why it is so important to understand that Kariniemi’s success didn’t happen overnight. As with past clients, SEO results  took time, and were a part of an intricate plan by Master Google CEO Ali Husayni and the Master Google team. Still, the results happened relatively quickly, and Kariniemi’s comments echoed those of Doug Cooper, the VP of marketing for CariniAir.com, when their site hit #1 on Google Places.

“In a matter of about one to one-and-a-half months, Master Google helped us reach the top spot in the Google Places listing for the air conditioning keywords, while still retaining our #2 spot for heating,” Cooper said.

Reaching the top spot in Google Places is a good example as to why it is important to consider the full SEO picture to evaluate the return on investment, according to Husayni.

“We can precisely measure the increase in site traffic within the time the client signs up for SEO,” Husayni said. “The bottom line is higher ranks on Google result in more targeted traffic, which translates to more sales.”

Husayni continues to enjoy seeing these tangible results for each one of his clients. He advised Kariniemi to continue to work on his Google Places reviews, as the number and quality of the reviews matters for SEO efforts, according to Husayni.

Comic Courtesy of Kayzoe.com.

To learn how to list your business on Google Places, watch this video for instructions. Once you’re listed, ask your returning customers to write a positive review for your business as Husayni advised Kariniemi to do. After all, the more your listing is rated, the higher your business will place in Google Places rankings. When done well, the combined efforts of an ambitious SEO team and the patience and trust of the client is what makes all the difference, according to Husayni.

“SEO takes the following three things: expertise, hard work, and patience. On average, our clients see the best results within six months to a year after we start a project. When we see results, it proves to us the fact that what we do actually works,” Husayni said.

Having an SEO company on your side that you can trust has been a refreshing experience for Kariniemi, who shared: “With all the used car sales types out there pushing SEO on business owners, I must say it’s been refreshing to deal with true SEO professionals who deliver real, quantifiable results.”

Contact Us to see if your site qualifies, and we look forward to continuing to work with Kariniemi and our other clients.