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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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EVERGREEN, CO — The two most important people in anyone’s life are their parents. They are the first two people who start shaping your character and are the ones whose influence are everlasting. To a great extent, we are all products of who our parents are.

Among many things, I have learned honesty, integrity and kindness from my father, but it was my mom who shaped my entrepreneurial spirit and taught me to aim high and work hard to achieve my goals. She is an architect and a very successful entrepreneur herself. She was one of the first women to successfully own and operate a private vocational school in Tehran. She later moved back to the United States and pursued her Master’s Degree in Environmental Engineering and is now pursuing her Ph.D. in the same field.

When I was sixteen, I started my first business under her supervision. I signed up a contract to draw some mechanical plans (using AutoCAD). I ended up making the equivalent of $16 and I managed to purchase a pair of jeans for myself. That will always be remembered by me as the best business experience of my life, no matter how much I go on to achieve.

Since then, I have entered and exited a number of business ventures. None of them suited me until I learned about SEO while working at Page1Solutions. In the one year that I worked there, I learned many invaluable business lessons from its Director, Dan Goldstein. When I left, I decided to start Master Google. With no financial backing (except my wife’s credit cards and student loans) and a downward economy, this was a big challenge.

It is thanks to hard work, support from family and friends, and having great employees and clients that we have a profitable SEO company, which is now one of the best in the industry. But that’s not where we want to stop. Aiming high to me means that we plan to become the #1 Google SEO provider in the world by 2018.

What does it mean to be #1?

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.

To become the best, we need to fully understand the big players in our industry, their strengths and what we need to improve upon to achieve our goals. The data below is what I have gathered through Alexa, as well as Top SEO’s.

The table shows where our company stands in comparison to the big SEO players in terms of Alexa rankings (traffic to the site) as well as inbound links. I’m fully aware that these two are not the only criterion for comparing companies. Other factors include sales, client retention rates, achieving SEO goals and having strong guarantees in place, as well as offering a diverse set of services.

According to Alexa, our company ranks above ALL of these companies in terms of traffic to the site. However, when comparing traffic from the US (next table), we rank AFTER most of them.

Due to offering numerous free services, including many SEO articles on our blog, our site has lots of visitors from many countries. We need to however work on attracting US based visitors to our site.

Also our site has less inbound links than most of our competitors (see below). One of our goals is to improve our site’s popularity within the next few years to have more sites refer us by linking to us.

If you’ve read this post, that means you care for our company. We appreciate your support. Please leave us your valuable feedback and what you think we should do to achieve our ‘becoming the best SEO company’ goal.

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ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Hopefully part one of Writing Great Content gave you a clear understanding of the main purpose of SEO Copywriting and how to choose relevant, interesting and helpful topics for blog posts, articles and press releases.

Part two will talk about how to include keywords naturally, why paying attention to detail matters, and reveal one of the must-haves needed for your website to do well in Google’s search algorithm. I will also advise you on two mistakes to avoid, which include the most common and deadly of missteps when it comes to ranking well with Google.

Including Keywords Without Sounding Spammy

Good content also includes keywords, but the keywords should flow naturally within the article or press release and be relevant to the piece. If the non-SEO savvy reader can scan an article or press release and pick out the keywords, then the content is not written well enough. Keywords help a search engine decide what pages are most relevant to a search, but readers do not need to be spoon-fed as to what a page is about, according to Ali Husayni.

“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 said.

Husayni uses a team of advanced SEO marketing researchers, the latest analytics reports and specialized formulas to find and prioritize clients’ keyword selection and link building. Businesses can find out their best keywords by doing their own research, or hiring an SEO consultant to analyze current SEO work or an SEO coach to train and hire in-house employees with the techniques they need to be successful.

Give Customers A Glimpse Of The Company’s Character

A company that pays attention to details within their website content is telling readers that they are thorough. People shopping around for services or goods like to know that their needs will be handled by a person or company that is thorough and attentive.

Misspelling and poor grammar are the most common mistakes that companies make in their SEO writing. Lanette Strong, an SEO copywriter, says overlooking details can give the impression that the writer is ignorant or does not care about his or her work. Blatantly false statements made because of lack of research or proofreading make a company look less reputable.

“Research, grammar and spelling are of the utmost importance for blogs,” she says. “You need to have all the facts first, and then re-read the post for grammar and spelling errors.”

Husayni stresses the importance of hiring a professional copywriter who is a native English-speaker.

“You are creating content to show your expertise in your particular field, and you don’t want to hinder your efforts because you don’t write well in English,” Husayni said.

Master Google’s Editor-in-Chief Lorrie Walker says this is an obstacle that is easily overcome with the help of an English-speaking writer. A professional copywriter helps companies and businesspeople accurately portray their knowledge and professional image.

The Freshness Component: Don’t Leave Your Blog Without It

Google loves fresh content. They recently added a component to their search algorithm that takes into account how recently information was published when determining how relevant it is to certain search queries.

Husayni suggests, “Site owners should write for their sites on a regular basis. The more you post fresh, quality and relevant content on a site, the more you improve the odds of exposure and inclusion on Google search results.”

A regular basis could mean once every month or every other day, but the most benefit comes from posting often because of Google’s freshness algorithm. Google wants to give searchers the most relevant and up-to-date results on a topic.

Companies debating their number of postings should consider their purpose for the articles, according to Walker, who is also the owner of a public relations firm in Lakeland, Florida.

“If you’re just writing for search engines, you might get the results you want from three ‘OK’ articles,” she said. “But if you want customers, you have to provide relevant, quality content that will encourage people to read on and take action.”

Plagiarism Can Be Deadly For Rankings

Filling a website with interesting content is the goal, but the content has to be original, not copied from other sources.

Walker says the biggest mistake people make when it comes to SEO content generation is seeing similar sites and loving the content, then simply copying it to their own website.

Google views that as duplicate content, and they penalize sites that copy. Readers do not appreciate copied content either and can quickly deem a site not worth reading if it is just regurgitating content they have seen before.

“Strive to enlighten the clients or patients instead of rehashing material over and over again,” Husayni said. “And never copy and paste material directly to your own website.”

What creating the best SEO content comes down to is a balancing act. There are certain components that must be included, but the process is fluid. To be successful, companies and writers must be flexible and make continuous adjustments to keep everything working together to accomplish the goal of building a site that Google loves.

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SANTA MONICA, CA – At Master Google, we have gone so far as to say that quality content matters so much that our SEO efforts are nothing… without a WordPress Blog (or wp-content). The importance of great content is crucial to a successful business, according to Kari DePhillips, the owner of The Content Factory. DePhillips said that her standards are very detailed when it comes to the quality of work expected from the writers on her team. After all, good or average work is not work that will set your website apart from the masses.

Image Courtesy of Webylife.com

The Content Factory Standards for Great Content

1. Extremely Catchy Title (preferably with a keyword): When your articles come up in Google search results pages, the title is almost all the reader has to go off of — and your article’s title is up against at least nine others on the page. If you rank #3 but your title is significantly better than #1 and #2, you’ll get more clicks. Titles really, really matter.
2. Grabby First Sentence (also, preferably with a keyword): Internet users have ADD, whether they realize it or not. There are tons of shiny links to distract them and take them away from the page that you spent hours writing. So, you have to grab their interest and keep it — from the very first sentence. People usually figure out whether they want to read the rest of the article before they finish the first paragraph. If you make that first paragraph awesome, you’ll get ‘em hooked and they’ll keep reading (and you’ll see a spike in the time they spend on your site).
3. Interesting, Funny or Informative Subject Matter: Before you come up with a must-click title or killer first sentence, you have to choose a subject to write about and figure out how you’re going to present the information. Nobody wants to read another iteration of what they’ve already seen a dozen times. If you don’t have new info to work with, you’ve got to be clever with how you present it. This goes a long way toward increasing the sharability of the article. These days, having people share your content should definitely be a top goal.
4. Clean Copy: Did you really mean discreet when you said discrete? Was the wrong kind of they’re/their/there, your/you’re or it’s/its used? People who know better will be turned off by errors like that, and they definitely won’t want to pass the content on to a friend. Errors will silently kill your copy.
5. Clean Formatting: The engineers, mathematicians and magicians at Google have trained the search engine to look for (and like) the same things that people like, so the content should be formatted appropriately. Don’t have 14-line long paragraphs, break up your copy with bold subheads and bulleted or numbered lists. The article should be organized in a logical way, and bolded subheads should be used as new ideas are introduced.

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

There is in fact an opportunity for SEO companies that maintain high standards of content and quality search results to get the recognition that they deserve for their clients, according to Husayni.

“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.

DePhillips agrees with Husayni that there is great satisfaction in rising to the top of Google by producing quality work.

“There’s something really satisfying about taking ho-hum copy, throwing it out and building a new web presence from the ground up,” DePhillips said. “To me, there’s nothing cooler than when the client is thrilled with the content we’ve written and Google Analytics proves that it’s working significantly better than the old content.”

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