Courtesy of chumsit.blogspot.com

As a result, webmasters face bigger challenges as SEO evolves. The last few Panda and search algorithmic updates pulled down many sites while others climbed up the organic ranking ladder in SERPs.

When I stepped into the field of SEO, I understood the role that anchor text played in ranking a site. The times are changing at a tremendous speed, forcing every good SEO pro to use only the most ethical SEO techniques.

We all know that links pointing to your site are good for Google rankings. We’ve talked before about the dangers of black-hat link building and why you should avoid it. Let’s examine the anchor text links, which makes a difference in how Google uses your link information.

First, what is anchor text?
Anchor text is the actual phrase or word that links to a URL. In the above paragraph, “black-hat link building” is an anchor text. Most sites have easily recognizable anchor text, as it’s normally blue and underlined. You can use anchor text either internally (on your own site) or externally (from other sites).

Usually, anchor text includes keywords relevant to the page they’re linking to. If you want to rank a page for certain keywords, try to create as many anchor text links as possible with those keywords. This will help improve your site’s rankings for the targeted keywords. Anchor text remains one of the SEO practices you can use to climb to the top of Google.

Anchor text linking has always been a critical part of any SEO campaign, but there are some practices to avoid. Google now penalizes sites that indulge in excessive use of exact-match anchor text for ranking at the top of search results. If your anchor text linking looks unnatural to search engines, you can lose your site’s rankings just as quickly.

How to Use Anchor Text Effectively
It’s best to diversify the words or keywords used in anchor links. Follow these:

•  Use your brand name or a short description of your company in the anchor text
•  Use long-tail and short-tail keywords to hyperlink
•  Use different synonyms of words you want to use as anchor text
•  Use the desired URL as your anchor text

Notice the difference between these two anchor links:

1. Master Google provides free SEO tips.
2. Click here for free SEO tips from Master Google.

In the first example, the anchor text includes a keyword that potential clients could be using as a search query. In the second example, “click here” is the anchor text. Clearly this isn’t informative for Google. The first example uses a keyword and lets Google know more about the linked-to site. Shoot for the first example when link-building organically.

Another important point is the placement of the link on the page. Let’s look at the example above one more time. Both hyperlinks point to http://www.mastergoogle.com/, but if multiple links on one page point to the same location, Google will only credit the first link. Therefore, the “free SEO tips” anchor text will be counted, but the “click here” is irrelevant.

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin gives a quick but comprehensive anchor text lesson in an edition of Whiteboard Friday. The biggest challenge is that in most instances, we can’t control inbound anchor text.

“If you’re earning links and you can’t control the anchor text, maybe at least you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link,” Fishkin says.

As Fishkin says in the video, links that point to your site from your site help a tiny bit, but links pointing to your site from an outside source help a lot. Think of ways you can control the anchor text pointing to your site. Guest blogging on another website is an organic way to make this happen. Use relevant keywords in your anchor text whenever you have the opportunity.

Remember that Google focuses on the user’s experience. The best practice is to make the anchored links relevant to your user. Google punishes bad practices, but good, relevant links and descriptive anchor text will be rewarded.

According to eCommerce Bytes, an independent news source for online retailers, the users of eBay’s ProStoreswere urged to switch to Magento Go, which eBay acquired last year, in a recent email newsletter from ProStores.

Courtesy of sumoheavy.com

So, what is Magento exactly? And why has eBay turned its back on the older platform? Our operational manager Saeed Khosravi theorizes that eBay has lost interest in promoting ProStores because it is outdated and lacks the required flexibility to become a full-fledged, customizable Internet store.

“Out of the box, Magento Go is very search engine friendly since the open source community version gives you the flexibility to configure your website to perform better on search engines,” he explains.

What You’re Getting
The product is a feature-rich online service that allows entrepreneurs and small businesses to quickly build an online storefront to sell products and services. The main thing the website describes about Magento is the unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of stores that features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools.

The product may be more flexible than its predecessor, but that doesn’t mean the SEO guidelines change. The rules are the same no matter what platform they are on, says Khosravi. The crucial thing to know is how to apply these rules properly to get the most out of the platform and make the site easy for search engines to interact with.

SEO Tips For The E-Commerce Platform
The biggest SEO benefit of Magento, according to Khosravi, is how out-of-the-box search engine friendly it is. They make many standard SEO techniques easy to implement, which he recommends taking full advantage of right away.

• Use the full control they offer over page names, titles, URLs, headings and meta tags for product and category pages as well as CMS pages to optimize each page for your targeted keywords.
• Search engine optimize the configuration of the site’s HTML head. The elements inside the <head> section of a website can include scripts, provide the browser with the location of style sheets, provide meta information and have tags such as <title>, <base>, <link>, <meta>, <script> and <style>.
• Set the preferred domain version, for example www instead of non-www, and create an XML site map.
• Install the product’s free extension, the one that uses a canonical rel link, to eliminate any instances of duplicate content on the site.

How To SEO To Beat Out Competition
No matter which platform companies choose for e-commerce after they implement the SEO basics, our CEO Ali Husayni advises that they stick with targeted writing on a WordPress blog to climb SEO rankings.

“If you are competing with strong rivals, you can have an advantage over them by simply writing and posting articles on your site’s blog on a regular basis,” Husayni emphasizes.

Posting once a month may give smaller businesses that advantage, but the reality is that for most e-commerce sites, even writing once a day may still not be enough. The quantity depends on the market but the quality should remain the same. High-quality content, which means well-written, fresh and relevant articles and press releases, is exactly what the Google search engine wants. Consulting with an SEO expert can help determine how often websites need to post to be competitive in their market.

Can A Magento Store Be Integrated Into A WordPress Site?
Combining a Magento store and WordPress site is simple to do by installing it on a subdirectory; however, Khosravi says it would be better the other way around with Magento installed on the root directory of the site with WordPress as its sub-directory blog. For merchants looking for the ultimate flexibility for SEO needs, he suggests going with Magento Community Edition, which is the product’s self-hosted option.

“As a SEO expert I always prefer to go with a self-hosted shopping cart as opposed to hosted solutions,” he says. “It doesn’t limit you in any way and you can custom-make it or configure everything in the way that best suits your SEO needs.”

Please post your questions here and our team will respond to you. If you need professional consulting, please fill out our main form here.

You could find a company that fits that bill through TopSEOs. But there’s a catch: TopSEOs charges a standard fee for companies to be included in their evaluation.

Courtesy of topseos.com

TopSEOs was established in 2002 and has been identified as an independent authority on vendors who supply Internet marketing products and services, according to their website. Their proprietary analysis tools and methodology, developed over multiple years, include an extensive, rigorous evaluation rating system that is applied to each company that is identified and researched.

“Our evaluations save businesses time, money and stress of using a trial and error system to find the best Internet marketing agency or tool for their Web marketing needs,” says TopSEOs Managing Partner Jeev Trika. “At the end of the day, our ultimate goal is to recommend the absolute best tools and companies based on merit.”

There are five key areas identified by TopSEOs as significant for a successful SEO campaign:

• Needs analysis
• Keyword analysis
• On-page optimization
• Off-page optimization
• Reporting methods

Reporting methods are a highly important part of the relationship between an SEO company and its clients. Do the reports provide clear and concise content that is valuable to the reader? Does the firm offer suggestions on where to go next?

We have not registered with TopSEOs.com because we already get enough interest through our own reputation, says Master Google CEO Ali Husayni. However, we do follow what TopSEOs is looking for, and we view TopSEOs as a reputable and honest firm.

“That’s what we’re looking for in a company that evaluates others,” Husayni says.

But he goes on to say because of TopSEOs’ pay-per-evaluation policy, it doesn’t give a clear picture of which companies truly rank the best.

“They’re only looking at those companies that pay for their services,” Husayni says. “They’re missing out on really good SEO companies such as ours and their audience doesn’t get to see and compare our company with the rest.”

As in any transaction, it’s buyer beware.

“The mere fact that TopSEOs is referring a company doesn’t mean they will provide top SEO services,” says Husayni. “We’ve had incidents where individuals have left a company recommended by TopSEOs because they were less than happy with the results of their work.”

TopSEOs maintains their independent status by accepting no advertising from Internet marketing agencies or software developers that provide services or products in the categories they evaluate. Time is spent gathering information from a number of clients of Internet marketing services to supplement their direct testing of information provided by and of Internet marketing providers and professionals. They gather the experiences of users of Internet marketing tools and of the services provided to clients through their extensive referral questionnaire, as well as talking directly to clients to receive the client’s informed opinion.

Husayni adds, “If and when we feel the need to expand our exposure, we will certainly consider TopSEOs.”

Master Google is available to help and results are 100 percent guaranteed. Contact us today.

Consulting is one of the three types of SEO services Master Google offers. It is ideal for businesses that need a fresh, professional perspective of their website, SEO techniques, ranking trends and SEO team. A consultant can also help locate, hire and set up an in-house SEO team.

Courtesy of seodotinfo.com

Consulting is often confused with SEO coaching services, but it is a slightly different. That is geared more toward assisting businesses that are just starting work on their sites and want to be trained in SEO techniques or need help drawing up a strategy for an effective SEO campaign.

“Understanding online marketing is not an easy task because of its ever changing dynamics,” says Ali Husayni, who is an SEO specialist of nine years. “Consulting can help business owners or marketing directors understand their online market, competition, and how best to use their budget.”

Here are five ways SEO consultants can help businesses get back on track toward success:

1) Pinpoint what is not working and provide clear, concise reports on how to fix it
2) Assess the quality of the current in-house SEO team and their techniques
3) Provide the market and competition analysis necessary to develop a successful Internet marketing strategy
4) Help businesses find and hire in-house SEO talent
5) Answer questions and train SEO teams in the latest techniques and equip them with resources to further improve SEO results

A Glimpse Of SEO Consulting Services In Action
Tim Booth and Shawn Sandifer, the founders of a referral site for local contractors across the nation, hired Master Google as consultants in December 2011 to help resolve problems with their SEO rankings. The pair had doubts about their in-house SEO team since the traffic to their site had dropped off drastically. Five months prior to contacting Master Google, the website had 140,000 visitors per month. By December, they were down to 90,000 per month.

Husayni and his SEO team stepped in to do an in-depth analysis of their current SEO work. The report showed Booth and Sandifer that their site was lacking credible link popularity, an essential part of ranking well in Google’s search engine results. It also revealed that their SEO team had been using black-hat SEO techniques like keyword-stuffing and duplicate content.

“Black-hat SEO techniques are methods used to get sites quick results, but it is merely short-lived success and detrimental to the site in the long run,” says Husayni, who is the author of a Google SEO eBook of tips and techniques that comply with Google webmaster guidelines.

After getting the news about their website, Booth and Sandifer decided to fire the in-house SEO team and outsource to Master Google.

“This was the best decision they could have made,” explains Husayni. “We immediately implemented a powerful link-building campaign, taught their writing team SEO copywriting techniques, pinpointed the black-hat SEO techniques and showed them ways to remove them.”

As Booth, the company’s CEO, testifies, “Our traffic is growing at a quicker pace than their original estimate. Their value to our company at this stage cannot be overstated.”

The site’s traffic is back up to where it was at its peak and still climbing. Sandifer, who is the president, is relieved to see an upward trend and feels optimistic about the future.

“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,” he says.

Booth and Sandifer’s story is just one example of how consulting services can be used. They are a valuable resource for businesses to draw on at any stage in their SEO campaigns, whether they need help pushing through a rankings plateau, solving complex SEO problems or using Facebook, YouTube or Twitter to enhance their Web marketing SEO efforts.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

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“The first step to a successful SEO campaign is to identify the kind of help you need and find an SEO veteran with a proven track record,” says Ali Husayni, who founded his SEO agency in 2004.

Courtesy of dealsextra.com.au

Each business is unique with varying levels of technical experience, budget and personnel, but Master Google has a solution compatible for each one. Some companies want the guaranteed results Husayni offers with a full-scale SEO campaign so they are free to focus on other aspects of their business, but other companies have a different vision for their SEO.

Master Google’s consulting services are a good option for clients who are looking for in-depth analysis of their site, rankings and an SEO team. It’s an ideal choice if they need search engine optimization tips and solutions for specific problems like finding out why rankings tanked after an update. Consulting services can also be used to help companies locate, hire and set up an in-house SEO team.

Coaching is for the businesses that want to be hands-on with SEO and have a working knowledge of HTML, but feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available and need help setting up a road map for an effective search engine optimization campaign. They want to avoid getting sidetracked by insignificant issues or techniques that will eat up a lot of energy and time.

“With so much wrong information out there on the Internet, I cannot stress to you enough how important it is to have an asset like Master Google on your side,” says Don Gerig Jr., a client who hired Husayni for SEO coaching services.

Gerig manages his family’s business American Dream Realty, a Santa Cruz company with a client base primarily from Internet traffic.He and his brother Matt Gerig, the marketing director, had studied HTML coding and SEO for a while but kept finding contradictory information on what worked with the search engines and what didn’t. When they moved their website to a new hosting platform, they knew they needed professional coaching to become more competitive in the market.

“I did a lot of research and, after a lot of frustration, I finally found Master Google. I knew I had to have the best, so I immediately hired Ali,” says Don Gerig.

Master Google spent about 20 hours working with the American Dream Realty team and after a few months of continued support, the hard work paid off. The site’s traffic soared to the highest levels in their market where they now rank at the top of Google for their main keyword: Santa Cruz Real Estate.

Husayni says companies that invest in SEO coaching gain these three benefits:

1.    Avoid Incorrect, Insufficient Or Outdated Information

SEO is constantly changing with algorithms being updated frequently and without notice as search engines work to improve results and fight spam techniques. That means good SEO must adapt to the changes, discarding obsolete practices, avoiding black hat techniques and implementing new strategies to stay on top.

“Using outdated information and techniques or making a simple mistake because of insufficient information can waste your time and worse, have a profoundly negative impact on a site,” says Husayni, an SEO expert.

A veteran SEO coach can show businesses what they need to do for success and then teach them how to find reputable sources to stay up-to-date about developments, technologies and strategies as well as how to implement the information on their own.
“Knowing how to stay current is crucial for the long-term success of a marketing campaign,” says Husayni.

2.    Get SEO Working Right Away

Learning SEO, like any new skill set, takes time and practice. But with Master Google, the process gets started right away. The websites’ SEO is working and the rankings are getting better while the business owners are learning how to use the techniques.

Some aspects of SEO are done once, like certain programming tasks and structuring the website so search engine spiders can easily crawl the content, but a lot of SEO is ongoing, such as link-building campaigns and writing press releases and articles. The SEO coach shows them how to do the one-time tasks, explaining what they are as they are done, and the ongoing tasks can be done together.

3.    Help Establish A Clear Strategy & Avoid SEO Distractions

Establishing where a business wants to go with their SEO campaign and the steps they need to take to get there can be difficult to do when they are still learning about the different techniques. A coach can help business owners set goals with a realistic timeline and equip them with focused techniques that will help their businesses achieve that.

“What a good SEO company does, whether they are doing all the SEO work or getting you set up, is start you out correctly by honing a clear strategy and then focusing on meeting authoritative guidelines with an emphasis on good content,” he says.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

But you must do more than simply “be present” to win the social media game. You have to actually be social.

Courtesy of mediabistro.com

By being social, you can use Twitter to help improve your website’s appearance on Google. Google Search engine ranking and Bing is influenced by social networking websites, according to Pingler.com.

I’m a firm believer in using every tool in the SEO toolbox. We use guaranteed SEO techniques to help our clients appear in the top spots on organic search results, but the good news is that there is no finite number of techniques. Social media continues to create additional opportunities for those who use those outlets properly.

Here’s what several experts say about achieving better search rankings through Twitter and other social media.

1. Be Social
Kevin Gibbons over at Search Engine Land says it well when he explains that your SEO strategies have to include more than tweeting links to your own website if you want it to help improve your ranking.

“You need to enter conversations, respond to questions and queries, talk to customers who mention your brand, and interact,” Kevin says according to searchengineland.com.

2. Write Great Content
Here’s what makes me admire Kevin the most: like me, he’s a firm believer that creating quality content will help improve your ranking.

“This is the simplest rule for most SEO strategies, but it’s also one of the hardest to pull off,” he says. “If you want people to retweet your content and enhance your importance in Google’s eyes, then create valuable articles and tools that will make them want to link to it and share it with their own followers.”

Once you have great content, you need an attention-grabbing tweet to get people to click through. And remember, you only have 140 characters to grab their attention.

3. Optimize
Kevin also recommends optimizing your Twitter account by including keywords that you want associated with your business. Include them in your bio and in your tweets, he says. And don’t forget to make your tweets retweetable by leaving enough characters for them to add their own comment if they wish.

4. Quality Trumps Hype
Duane Forrester of Bing participated in a search engine roundtable at SXSW in March and he confirmed the need for businesses to be active in social media. He indicated that small businesses in particular can benefit from it, because if they have a product or service that has true quality, people are bound to talk about it in social media. And anything mentioned in social media that points to relevancy is given a “big thumbs up,” Forrester says. “Does the rest of the world think you have a great product? If so, and they amplify this on your behalf, we’ll pick up on those signals.”

Forrester went on to say that if you’re not engaged socially as part of your Internet marketing strategy, “you’re missing the boat,” because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content, whether you’re involved or not.

So get on Twitter. When you post something on your blog that is useful, unique and beneficial to others, post it to Twitter as well. Start conversations, reply to what others are saying about the post, and notice the conversation it generates. The number of retweets generated can be a good indicator of how well you’re addressing users’ search for information. Provide information that others deem useful, and chances are you’ll advance your website exponentially in the SEO game.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

What this means for search engine optimization remains to be seen. According to Search Engine Journal, the latest market shares (March 2012) for the top three- Google, Yahoo! and Bing- total more than 98 percent of the total search engine market, with Google far outpacing the other two with 77.02 percent. Yahoo! remains in second place with 11.56 percent compared to Bing’s 9.59 percent.

Ali Husayni, Master Google’s CEO, says the changes at Yahoo! shouldn’t affect the search engine optimization business “because Yahoo! is using Bing’s search results and if/when you rank well with Google, you also rank well with Bing, and consequently Yahoo!”

This is the fourth time in six years that Yahoo, Inc. has conducted mass layoffs. Thompson says the move will save the ailing company about $375 million dollars per year. The layoffs are the largest in the company’s 17-year history. The changes also include a reshaping of the board of directors. Thompson is Yahoo’s fourth full-time CEO in less than five years, a period marked by steady declines in revenue.

After announcing the layoffs, Thompson promised to share more details about his plans April 17, when Yahoo Inc. is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings. Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ analyst Scott Kessler says Thompson “definitely seems to be taking a very broad and bold view of what needs to be done at Yahoo!. He seems to know it isn’t going to be easy and it isn’t going to be pleasant.”

A leader of the search engine pack once upon a time, Yahoo! has been overtaken by Google and Facebook in the race for online advertising. Yahoo!’s website remains a popular destination, tracking about 700 million visitors per month, but people have spent less time there and more on Google and Facebook.

On a related Facebook note, Thompson recently launched a series of lawsuits against Facebook. Facebook is firing back with its own counter-suits. Yahoo! claims that Facebook is infringing upon several patents owned by Yahoo!, including patents on methods for advertising online. Facebook’s counter says Yahoo! has violated its patents covering advertising, online recommendations and photo-tagging. Yahoo! has dismissed the new lawsuit, saying it’s without merit.

Thompson sent an email to employees covering the upcoming changes, which in part reads:

Today we are restructuring Yahoo! to give ourselves the opportunity to compete and win in our core business. The changes we’re announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done. The outcome of these changes will be a smaller, nimbler, more profitable Yahoo! better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.

Change is never easy. But the time has come to move Yahoo! forward aggressively with increased focus and accountability. Our values have always been about treating all Yahoos with dignity and respect, and today is a day to embrace those values. This is an amazing company with exceptionally talented people and I know we will all do our best to encourage each other through this difficult period of transition.

Yahoo!’s future is uncertain but for now, the company remains a player in Web search, albeit a far distant second to Google.

Courtesy of Suratwebsitedesigning.com

Here’s how to help your SEO expert help you:

Do Your Homework

Before selecting an SEO company, do some research. Different companies have different specialties, and you’re encouraged to shop around. Make sure your SEO company is honest and diligent. Be wary of firms that promise unrealistic outcomes. As we’ve said before, SEO takes time, and companies that guarantee overnight results are too good to be true or sometimes using black-hat techniques.

In a previous post, Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni gives readers 10 common mistakes to avoid when choosing an SEO company, including not looking at ranking reports or examining proven results. Since you’re doing the hiring, you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for references.

“Each SEO company should be able to show you at least ten local and international clients they have helped rank at the top of Google with the permission for you to contact them,” Husayni says. “The keywords they show you must be the most competitive for such clients (and not merely long-tailed keywords).”

Be Available

At Master Google, we care about your success, as your success is also our success. Life can be hectic, and if you’ve hired an SEO company, it means that you don’t have time to do your own optimization – it means you’re busy. At Master Google, we’re lucky to have clients who take the time to talk to us despite their full work schedules. Try to be prompt replying to phone calls or emails. In contrast, if you feel your SEO company is hard to touch base with, that’s a conversation you should have with your SEO expert.

Share Your Knowledge

Many Master Google clients are experts in their fields, and as lifetime scholars of their subjects, they’re continually learning. Sharing breaking industry news can save your search engine optimizer time in research, meaning you’ll have an extremely relevant topic while giving your optimizer more time to craft meaningful pieces.

Also keep your SEO company up to date with any changes happening within your company. If you’re introducing a new product line or hiring a new executive, your SEO firm may be interested in writing a press release on these changes.

Give Feedback

Your SEO company has a plan in place, and it’s important to take notice of the changes you see as a result of that plan. Has your business gained exposure? Have you had more inquiries than normal? Fewer than normal? Providing your SEO firm with your experienced results can be helpful for both parties.

Providing real results can help you evaluate the right SEO company for your needs. Also feel free to ask any questions you might have, no matter how trivial they might seem.

The right SEO company will work hard to deliver results, but your small efforts to keep your SEO company informed about your industry will be beneficial to everyone. If you’re interested in learning more about how Master Google delivers results, contact us today.

Vice President of Sales at Master Google Dan Manahan is revealing four common things that SEO salespeople will say and what those statements really mean.

Dan Manahan of Master Google

1.  “We Offer Convenient, One-Stop Shopping”

Some companies try to net clients by offering a plethora of services, claiming expertise in all of them, and spinning it as convenience, but Manahan says beware of a jack-of-all-trades. There are hundreds of companies that tout expertise in services ranging from site design, search engine marketing and email marketing to social media marketing, conversion and pay per click.

While all those services fall under the umbrella of online marketing, the truth is that pay per click advertising is completely different from social media marketing which is completely different from search engine marketing. No one person or business is likely to be able to deliver quality results for all of them. Many companies do have experts on staff for multiple areas, so look into their claims before writing them off.

2. “We Can Cut Costs Once We Get To The Top”

Beating out competitors to get to the top of Google rankings is no easy task, and it takes time and a well-honed strategy with ongoing resources. Yet some SEO companies try to sell a potential client with the theory that once they get them to the desired ranking they can cut back on what their SEO costs.

Manahan says that a company telling a potential client that is not taking competitive backlash into account, making that SEO company’s line of thinking either short-sighted and ignorant or intentionally deceptive.

“An SEO company that doesn’t plan for a competitive backlash either hasn’t experienced it because they haven’t ranked anyone high enough or simply don’t care to exercise the foresight that is incumbent upon a company that hopes to retain clients for the long term,” Manahan says.

Displaced competition will make an assault to reclaim the lost position, and cutting costs right when the competition will come back swinging is just going to make it easier for them to do it.

“The cost reduces in the context that the site is generating more revenue relative to the SEO services price tag, but a flat price reduction is ludicrous,” the SEO expert says.

3. “We Have Set Pricing Plans”

This “set pricing plan” line is taking advantage of clients’ preference for fixed-rate pricing structure and ignoring the fact that fixed prices are not ideal for SEO. Manahan says there are too many variables in markets and websites to make it realistic.

“Real SEO targets the displacement of the competitors’ websites,” says Manahan. “Only after an analysis of a prospective client’s competitors’ websites can an SEO company calculate the resources required to beat them.”

The pricing structure works for certain online marketing services. For example, it works for email marketing because the demand on the company resources to facilitate a 10,000 per month email campaign versus a 1,000 per month email campaign can be anticipated.

However, an SEO campaign is full of variables like site size, starting rank, market factors, competitiveness and number of keywords that make that type of pricing impractical. Or it means the SEO company has compensated for it somehow, such as inflating prices or cutting corners on more time-intensive accounts.

4. “Let’s Draw Up A Contract, Then Put Down Objectives”

According to Manahan, an SEO company that is reluctant to commit to an objective, such as in the top five positions of Google within nine months, without a locked-in contract should raise a red flag.

They are probably more concerned about guaranteeing their income than delivering results for their clients. Quality SEO techniques do take time to work but that timeframe can easily be explained, discussed and agreed to on the front end without requiring a long term contract.

Master Google does not require long-term contracts, although they strongly recommend ongoing SEO campaigns for success. The difference between a long-term contract with other companies and a contract with Husayni is that he offers his clients a guarantee.

“We share the risk. If we don’t deliver, you get your money back—very simple,” says Manahan.

The Takeaway

If a business shopping for an SEO company notices the salesperson using one of these tactics during a consultation or negotiations, they should take a step back to ask some more questions or walk away.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

Seeking some fresh insight, I decided to talk to an expert with a writing and marketing background similar to mine, Aaron Smyk, who is the Director of Web Marketing for Transparent Corporation. Before I delve into the details of what Transparent Corp. has done with SMM, I must first join with Smyk in issuing a disclaimer regarding my ‘new’ findings. Setting out to prove the effectiveness of social media marketing is nothing ‘new’, and has actually been the topic of countless debates over the years. One of the earliest and most public discussions took place at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle, where moderator Danny Sullivan introduced the importance of SMM to SEO efforts.

Image Courtesy of Kirkmktgblog.com.

“Search engine optimizers really need to understand social media. Social media traffic is great for a site. A lot of people are going to social media sites and are doing a basic behavior of discovery,” Sullivan said.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org pointed to YouTube as an example of the power of Social Media Marketing.

“What can viral media marketing do for you? Do you remember when there was no YouTube? In December of 2005, YouTube became more popular in a month. What did that? Lazy Sunday from Saturday Night Live was put there, and now YouTube dominates the market. Viral media gives you the ability to brand. Viral media causes search rankings through links. Viral media means that you are growing your fan base. RSS subscribers go up,”  Fishkin said.

New Money Making Opportunities With Social Media Marketing Platforms

Over the years, the effectiveness of SMM has lead to a plethora of online opportunities that just didn’t exist before, and they range from gaining clients and readers to finding a job. Sites that were once used primarily for link bait are now bringing job opportunities to the attention of qualified applicants.

Reddit is how Smyk became the Director of Web Marketing for Transparent Corporation, a developer of software aimed toward neural stimulation, mental training and biofeedback. Serving over 100 countries, Transparent’s products are used by therapists, businesses, M.D.’s, teachers, academic researchers and the masses. Smyk was immediately interested in the position and was happy to talk about the value of sites like Reddit.

“There is a sort of common culture that unites people on that site, and I think having that common base of interests carried over really nicely into this role,” Smyk said.

The Overlap Between SEO and SMM: Getting Results By Combining Them

Smyk has witnessed the overlap between SEO and SSM and said that while it has been hard for him to tell which set of techniques is more effective on their own, good content will always provide better SEO results.

“It’s a hazy area… is a site ranking well because they have lots of ‘likes’ on Facebook? Or is it ranking well because that content is good, has been linked to extensively, and as a result, has also picked up a bunch of positive social stats?” Smyk asked rhetorically, adding his opinion. “If something does well on a social platform, that shows you that you’ve created something that is actually meeting a need and getting attention, and also increases the exposure to that content.”

Jumping on the social media bandwagon is a topic that Master Google has been addressing from the beginning, and this fact remains the same: you need to have a Facebook account and a fan page for your business, says Master Google CEO Ali Husayni.

“You need to encourage your friends to ‘like’ the page, and you must post useful information, videos and photos to it on a regular basis,” Husayni said.

Of course, Google+ has come into the picture and provided another social media marketing platform.

Google+ Brings New Opportunities

In a recent blog post about Google+, we talked about how the benefits of Google plus are many, and if you don’t have a Google+ account, you are strongly advised to get one.

“It’s a real step in the right direction. They needed to have it from the get-go,” Husayni said.

Smyk sees the value in Google+ for business, but notes that Google+ has its limits.

“Google+ is a completely different story… a single +1 can have a huge impact on how that page is presented in Google SERPs, but that is only if you’re signed into Google,” Smyk said. “Safe to say, if your audience appears to be using Google Plus, you need to have a strategy for it by now.”

Smyk also made an important note about the role of SMM in his line of work, stating that everyone in the SEO industry should be keeping an eye on social media marketing, as best practices in the area are constantly evolving. Husayni agrees that SMM is evolving just as SEO is.

“As SEO continually evolves, so does the need for a dedicated team ready to meet the demands of an ever-changing market. After all, getting to the top of Google takes determination, hard work and a little bit of patience,” Husayni said. “You may not have the budget for a full-scale SEO campaign if you’re just starting out, but having an SEO consultant to get you started may very well be within your budget and well worth the expense.”

Android and iPhone users can download the free Chomp app to search for apps with better results than simply using the respective mobile stores. Apple’s website states that more than 500,000 apps are on the App Store, but finding them is as daunting as finding a needle in a haystack. If you know the app you’re searching for by name, or if it’s a big corporation’s app like Twitter or Facebook, you’ll probably find what you need. But if you’re searching for something like “simulation games” or “fabric stash” or “hidden object”, your results may be murky.

There are blogs that feature popular and underground-sensation apps, but why can’t we just search for them? Google makes it so incredibly easy to find information on anything that we get spoiled. We take it for granted. We wonder why these app markets doesn’t just know what we want.

Chomp’s algorithm reads an app’s specific functions, optimizing the results that users see. Even if the app has an obscure name, Chomp will be able to categorize it for you, to tell you what it’s for. This information is compiled just like Google compiles its index – by crawling. Chomp gives developers the chance to submit an app to their directory, but eventually they’ll get to it on their own. Their website states:

“Chomp’s advanced app crawling technology will automatically find and index your app once it is published to the Android Market, iTunes App Store or the Verizon V CAST Android store. However if you want to help us find it as fast as possible, you can submit your app below. You may also add keywords that describe your app.”

On Chomp’s website, visitors can see analytics for mobile Chomp users, which I personally find pretty awesome. For January 2012, 81% of Chomp searches for iOS apps were for the app’s function; only 19% of searches were for the app’s name. On the Android Chomp searches, only 14% of users searched for an app by name, while the remaining 86% was only searching in terms of function.

And now, with Apple’s acquisition of Chomp, it’s expected that the Chomp team will transform the Apple App Store into something organic, something that can read your mind. So why would an SEO company like Master Google really care? Why all the talk about mobile apps?

If your company has an app, your app’s description page now needs to be optimized for search engines, as Chomp is providing better results than you can see on the iOS or Android app stores.

The implementation of SEO in the app world is long overdue. Hopefully, with Apple’s acquisition of this two-year old search engine app and algorithm superstar, the App Store will step up their results to better serve their customers.

If you’re in the market for an SEO expert – for your website, blog, or app description page – Contact Us to see if the Master Google team can deliver results.

That is how many business owners feel about Google Places and other sources on the Internet that enable people to write reviews or leave comments about businesses. Favorable comments about your product or service can be one of the best ways to build your reputation. Negative comments can have some of the worst repercussions.

Let’s get this out of the way first: your chances of removing a negative review from Google Places are slim. Check out Google’s information on that popular question here. One way to combat the bad press is to use the “flag as inappropriate” option, in which case Google will look into the review to determine whether it violates Google’s guidelines.

So what else can you do when someone slams your business in a review? Growmap.com has a great example of how one business handled it. In short, a company that sells woodworking tools and educational materials got a negative review from a disgruntled customer. The CEO sent out an email blast to its customers that outlined the circumstances surrounding the disgruntled customer and provided a link to the negative complaint, which he answered, the Grow Map article states.

Additionally, he included a link to his company’s Google Places page so satisfied customers could leave their own reviews “so others would have a more balanced view” of the company, the article states. It wasn’t long before the negative review was buried by dozens of favorable reviews.

“No company is perfect, and an occasional negative review should be anticipated,” says Ali Husayni, CEO of Master Google, which specializes in marketing medical practices. “This CEO took a proactive approach to this discouraging situation and I would say he turned a negative into a positive.”

Looking at the situation strategically, you want to drown your negative reviews with positive ones. Essentially, having 50 favorable reviews to one negative one will work in your favor, according to Matthew Loop, a social media and Internet marketing expert.

Multiple experts say it is wise to respond directly to a negative review, which you can do if you’ve claimed your Google Places listing. Be careful how you reply, though. Pop off a response in anger and you’re likely to do more harm than good. A professional, courteous response is what you want to shoot for.

In addition to knowing how to respond to a negative review, it’s important to understand just how important good reviews are to your business and more specifically, your website. Favorable reviews paint a favorable opinion of your business when potential customers find your Google Places page, according to Alex Eaton at Energypro.com. In terms of businesses’ overall SEO plans, the more reviews there are, the better businesses do in organic search results.

It’s also important to note that your Google Places page will list reviews from sources other than just Google places. It pulls reviews from sites including Yelp, Urban Spoon and Insider Pages, to name a few.

“I view this as yet another example of how Google constantly works to make user experiences better,” says Husayni, who works to achieve top SEO results for clients by offering guidance on how to manage their Google Places listings. “Pulling in reviews and comments from multiple sources gives those in search of information a broad picture of the company they are researching.”

I think Chris Robinson over at Giantseed Creative says it best when talking about negative reviews: “We can’t control the conversations taking place on social media platforms, but we can monitor and respond to what is being said.”

In closing, remember these key tips:

• Monitor your reviews
• Truly take note of what is being said
• Respond professionally and compassionately
• Take action if you believe a review is spammy or malicious in nature
• By all means, reach out to your happy clients and customers and ask them to give their honest feedback.

I’m convinced if you take this approach, you can’t go wrong.

Since Google can so easily spot these tactics, why do companies use black hat and gray hat SEO techniques? For starters, those tactics take less time. White hat techniques require creating quality content, careful site optimization, link baiting, guest blogging, internal linking and more. These techniques take a considerable amount of time, which is why to effectively use SEO tactics, you must hire an SEO team with a positive track record.

Image Courtesy of Itsabacus.com.

Master Google only uses white hat SEO tactics because it is the only way to go for successful SEO, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of Master Google. Husayni said to heed the warning of Google’s anti-spam strategy as your rankings will rise and fall accordingly to how well you implement the correct SEO strategies.

“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.”

When done correctly, SEO is not spam at all, but a good tactic that Google recognizes, according to Google Software Engineer and head of Google’s web spam fighting team, Matt Cutts. Watch the video below to hear Cutts explain why Google appreciates SEO when done well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A focused SEO plan is a never-ending job, but one that will greatly increase the likelihood that your customers will find you on Google. Contact Us to see if we can provide SEO services for your website.

“How do I make my blog better and more popular, and how do I get more people to read my blog posts?”

While ‘better’ is a subjective word, there are a plethora of things that you can do to improve your blog’s SEO for free, simply by using some basic tactics that don’t take very long to implement at all. Most of them are a matter of changing old habits and misconceptions. Below are three good starting points to make your WordPress blog more SEO friendly, interesting and ultimately more readable. The best part is that they are all things that you can start doing today.

Image Courtesy of Zenzi.com

Use Videos and Images in Your Blog to Attract More Readers

We recently touted the importance of using videos and images in blog posts, which can help your site rank higher. Be sure to title your images correctly, as we discussed in a recent post about image SEO. Adding other media to your website can increase functionality for your users and, more importantly, help them find you. Want to know how Googlebot sees your images and videos? View your website in Lynx, a text-based browser. The more you take advantage of video and images (within reason), the more readership you are likely to receive.

Update Your Content Regularly with Quality Posts That People Want to Read

Yes, Master Google has repeated this point several times, but when it comes to SEO and blogs, quality content is king. I really can’t stress that point enough and it is especially true for blog posts. Don’t write for search engines, write for what audiences will search for. Be aware, though, that blogs are often crawled faster by Google than websites themselves, according to Google Software Engineer Matt Cutts, who talked about the importance of noting that any change to your blog can help or hurt your site in big ways in the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The challenge is to continually provide engaging content for your specific audience. The shifting of audiences leads me to a great point made about the importance of remembering that your audience might change frequently and you need to be prepared, according to a recent article posted on Business2Community.com.

Keep Track of Who Your Audience Is and Remain Relevant to That Audience

It is important to remember that audiences change, depending on factors ranging from your competition to your field of business. CEO Ali Husayni agrees that targeted writing is key, and recently talked about the importance of knowing your competition.

“If you are competing with strong rivals, you can have an advantage over them by simply writing and posting articles on your site’s blog on a regular basis. ‘Regular basis’ is a loose term – for some smaller businesses, writing once a month gives you that advantage. But the reality is that for most e-commerce sites, writing once a day may still not be enough. So, depending on your market, you need to decide how often you want to write,” Husayni said.

Remember, these blog tips can help you tremendously, but to get to a top spot with Google and stay there, hiring an SEO expert is the best way to ensure that you take your business to the next level, according to Husayni.

“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.

Let’s start with the basics of why search engines were built: because text existed on the Internet in an unorganized fashion. Search engine spiders indexed, organized and provided the text in an easy-to-use format for their users. Google rates and ranks sites based on three important factors: content, relevancy and popularity.

We have said before that content is king when it comes to SEO. After all, Google feeds and survives on content. Google also loves sites that feed it more quality content on a regular basis. As we explained before, a WordPress blog is the best platform for SEO.

Graphic Courtesy of Dpk-GraphicDesign.com

If you are competing with strong rivals, you can have an advantage over them by simply writing and posting articles on your site’s blog on a regular basis. “Regular basis” is a loose term – for some smaller businesses, writing once a month gives you that advantage. But the reality is that for most e-commerce sites, writing once a day may still not be enough. So, depending on your market, you need to decide how often you want to write.

No matter how often you post, always remember the most important factor for more SEO success: stick to your strategy and continue at it for at least six months to see the results. In the meantime, here are some of the most common areas of a blog that I am asked to explain to my clients.

Why Can’t I Use My Off-Site Blog?

You may have a blog that is hosted on blogger: example.blogger.com. Whatever you write and post on this blog will not affect your main site: www.example.com. Remember, your goal should be to show Google that www.example.com is being updated on a regular basis. Thus, your blog needs to be hosted on your site: www.example.com/blog/.

Why Do I Need A WordPress Blog?

There are many blog templates you can integrate with your site, but through our research and experience we have concluded that WordPress is the best for this purpose. Here are some reasons:

WordPress Easily Allows for Skin Changes

You can conveniently design and tweak the look of your blog with WordPress. You do need to know web-development to do so, but they provide you with all the tools you need. So, your blog will look like a page of your site.

Because WordPress is the most popular blog CMS, it has many users and many web developers behind it. Thus, you have a huge pool of free WordPress templates to use, as well as lots of plugins. Also, any time you get stuck on something, you can use the many forums on the topic to ask your question. It is also very likely that your question has already been answered by an expert, just look for your topic and search.

WordPress Allows for Permalinks

Permalinks are a great relevancy tool we use to optimize our clients’ sites. Keyword-rich permalinks help your page rank well for your intended keywords. WordPress allows you to easily edit your page’s URL using permalinks.

Here is an example of a keywords-rich permalink: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/facebook-and-seo-how-facebook-can-help-your-business.php.

WordPress Allows for Meta Tag Optimization

This is also important. You can write a separate title, description and keywords tags for each of your blog posts.

Google Loves WordPress “Tags”

You can give each post specific “tags” that are basically keywords related to the post (not to be confused with meta tags, which are part of the header code). WordPress creates a specific page for each tag and will group all the posts that have the same tags under it. The URL of this page also includes the tag: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/tag/google-seo.

Tag pages rank very well on Google search results because all the content under the tag page are related to the tag keyword.

Using the Blog Feed on Other Pages

Your WordPress Blog Feed could be used on any page of your site. That will help to freshen up your other site pages content since you’re updating your blog content on a regular basis.

Google Indexes WordPress Posts Immediately

When you post on your WordPress blog, Google is pinged and will immediately index your new post and place it in the search results. This eliminates the need for you to have to “submit” your new page to Google or “link” to it from other sites or just simply have to wait for Google to see the new post.

In general, Google loves WordPress sites and will rank sites with such blogs that are updated on a more regular basis better than the competition. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here or contact us directly.

As you can imagine, the social media conversation grows rapidly. The SMW website explains why the event moved to twice a year: “Engaging a global audience to explore the practical applications and business benefits of the most important communications revolution once a year is simply not enough.” Topics such as “Men are from Foursquare, Women are from Facebook”, “Social Media Governance and the Law”, “Blogging BootCamp for Business” and “Social Media for Business and Finance” are just a sampling of what the 60,000 plus attendees will find at SMW events across the globe.

Here at Master Google, we’ve talked a lot about social media and its relationship with search engine optimization. Between Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, it can be a full time job just keeping up with social media for your business. Master Google CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni explains why a social media presence is so important.

“Social media outlets such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo- just to name a few- provide additional ways in which our clients can get their information out to potential customers. The great thing about posting items such as videos, articles and press releases to these sites is that doing so provides relevant links back to our clients’ sites,” Husayni says.

For clients to find you easily, your business needs a strong SEO campaign. Once your content is optimized and your design is friendly, you’re ready to venture into the ocean of social media. Be careful not to overwhelm your audience with posts. If you’re on Facebook, spread out your posts instead of firing off eight posts in an hour. If you’re on Twitter, use hash tags when necessary, but don’t overload them. A post reading “#Writer #JessicaBates has a new #scifi book coming out in #March” will only annoy people. Be genuine. Twitter also thrives on mentions, so get personal. Ask your followers direct questions and learn what they like.

You can follow live SMW tweets from attendees and enthusiasts with the hashtag #smw12 or download the SMW mobile app on your smartphone. To see if you’re close to any Social Media Week events, visit the schedule and search for your city. Major participating cities include Hong Kong, Hamburg, New York, Miami, London, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Singapore, and São Paulo. Most of the events for the week are free or significantly reduced in price.

Not Being Consistent With Your Information

Your website might be flawless, but remember that your online presence also includes your other online profiles. Update all of your content, on every platform (Google +, Google Maps, Google Places, Yelp, etc.), every time. Failure to do so will hinder your SEO efforts, according to a recent article by Ashley Zeckman of TopRankBlog.com.

“It is important that your Google Places profile contains the same information as any other profiles your company may have online. Google Places pages create another opportunity to build trust and consistency as part of your marketing strategy. Be sure to audit your other profiles and answer each question as consistently as you can,” Zeckman said.

Ignoring Very Present Social Media Influences

It has been almost six years since Twitter launched, and since then, its users have grown to giant proportions. An article from Time Techland dated September 2011 revealed that Twitter has 100 million active users. Facebook launched in February 2004, and as of January 2012, there are 800 million users.

Use these sites and remember that they really do impact your SEO efforts. These websites are places where people spend countless hours connecting with friends or acquaintances, and they much are more likely to find you if you are a part of the conversation. Eric Hammer from Quantum SEO Labs talked about the importance of social media in a recent article.

“[Social media] has really taken the concept of SEO and stood it on its ear because until now, you were trying to get Google to notice you. Now, for the first time, because of social media, you need to try to get human beings to notice you too and recommend you to their friends,” Hammer said.

In short, don’t be anti-social networks, because they help your SEO efforts.

Considering Search Engines Other Than Google

Yahoo! and Bing just can’t do what Google can, according to Master Google’s CEO, Ali Husayni. Just take a look at the fact that Google has taken over 67% of the global search market, and that is old news. The number is surely even larger now, as Husayni explains.

“From the SEO point of view, ranking on Yahoo! and Bing is much easier than ranking on Google. But those that rank well with Google also rank well with the other rivals. You could rank #1 on both Yahoo! and Bing and still lose a big chunk of your business to your rivals that rank well on Google,” Husayni said.

If an SEO company shows you successful campaigns with Bing and Yahoo!, then ask them about Google. Tell them that you only want to be at the top of Google. After all, just as you should be careful when selecting SEO tactics, selecting an SEO company is even more important. According to Husayni, an SEO company knows its game and ranks very well on Google for their important keywords.

Keywords to use when researching SEO companies include: SEO, Google SEO, SEO Company, SEO Services, Free SEO, Cheap SEO, Google Ranking, Top of Google, etc. (Master Google ranks on the first page for Top of Google, first page of Google, Google SEO guaranteed and many other keywords.)

“These keywords vary for different SEO companies; nevertheless they must have a strong organic presence on Google,” Husayni said.

To see how our SEO can help your website, Contact Us.

“We have a great team of professional SEO copywriters who create the content that contributes to the ranking results clients like to see,” says Ali Husayni. “A couple of our writers are going to share their process for making that writing a reality and some of the characteristics great content will have.”

To Write For The Search Engine or For The Reader?

That is the first and most important question. The first thing to understand about content generation is the reason for doing it, and—spoiler alert—that reason should not be just to get better rankings in search engine results.

“Writing the press release or article only with search engines in mind may very well help you improve your site’s ranking, but if it doesn’t generate new business, who cares?” says Lorrie Walker, the editor-in-chief at Master Google and the owner of a public relations firm in Tampa, Fla.

According to her the main purpose for writing website content, articles and press releases is to provide useful information for people who are seeking the kinds of services and products that the business provides.

“When I need a service, I want to find the best, most knowledgeable subject matter expert to provide that service for me,” Walker says. “If it’s someone local, I’m probably going to ask my friends and see if anyone has recommendations. But I’m also going to look at business’ websites and do my research. The more information you can provide about who you are and what you do, the better.”

Why Good Isn’t Good Enough

But jotting down some basic information about a company, a brief description of services and peppering in some keywords to SEO is not going to be enough to get top results in this era of the Internet.

“There are too many people producing content, many of them producing good content, to put up basic information on a website and expect to stand out,” Husayni says. “It takes a lot of work, but the opportunity is there for people who are willing to invest the time and energy.”

Three Characteristics Of Great Content

Walker says that when a company has written copy that is interesting, original and well-written, they have great content.

Website content must be relevant to what people are searching for on the topic and be helpful in some way by providing the information they wanted, answering the question or solving the problem. The only way to do this is to know the audience to write for and what they find interesting.

“Content should speak to them in a language they understand,” says Lanette Strong, an SEO copywriter. “They should leave the page with an accurate answer to the question they were searching for.”

That means if a company is trying to reach a layperson audience, they need to cut down on technical language and explain any terminology that a beginner in the subject would not readily understand within the context of the page.

“It’s not that we are dumbing down articles, it’s that we are helping readers get the information they were looking for without having to visit another site to get more clarification,” Strong explains.

Figuring Out What To Write About

The definition of interesting is ‘to arouse curiosity or interest and hold or catch the attention.’ That means companies need to look for topics that their readers might want to read about or would provide information they need. If a heating and cooling company is building a website to grow their residential customer base, they would want to focus on topics pertinent to homeowners like cutting energy costs, the latest equipment rebates or the benefits of upgrading to energy efficient systems. A company that is trying to get more commercial clientele or work with contractors would focus on different topics.

Strong says that researching what competitors are doing and staying abreast of current news is helpful when looking for topic ideas. Just make sure you can relate the topic to your company and put a fresh spin on it, she cautions, and Walker agrees.

“I think a good way of determining what to write about is to listen to your customers or clients or patients. What questions do you frequently get asked? Write about those topics,” says Walker.

Walker says that companies can also write about what sets them apart from their competitors, about business anniversaries or other milestones, including: awards or recognition from the community, new products or services and new employees and conferences employees attended or spoke at.

Half the battle of writing about a business or company is coming up with relevant topics and creating a well-defined goal for the press releases and articles. Stay tuned to read about out the next steps for creating great SEO content: sound writing mechanics, knowing how to use keywords effectively and giving Google what it wants from content while staying away from what can get a website penalized or banned.

“Blogs seem to be an important part of any site because they get updated on a regular basis. I suggest site owners should write for their sites on a regular basis. The more fresh, quality and relevant content they post to their sites, the better chances of exposure and inclusion on Google search results they will have,” Husayni says.

Free blogging services make it easy to set up a blog and start posting content. There are tons of free blogging websites out there, but for today we’ll focus on Blogger (Blogspot), WordPress, and Tumblr – arguably the biggest platforms for blogging. (Some other popular ones include Weebly, TypePad, and Live Journal.)

As a blog enthusiast, I’ve tried out all three of these. I find Tumblr visually stimulating, but for SEO optimization, it seems Blogger (powered by Google) and WordPress are more content heavy and content friendly. All three platforms let users upload posts from their phones, schedule posts, and view statistics. While Blogger and Tumblr show Google Analytics and allow third party tools, WordPress only shows users WordPress Stats.

Blogger

Google’s free blog service, Blogger, allows users a simple and visually dynamic website that takes just a minute to set up. On your dashboard, you can view statistics of your visitors, save other blogs in your reading list, and add widgets to your sidebar.

Pros: In Blogger, you’re able to edit your template’s HTML and save those changes. If you code your own themes, you can upload them to Blogger. This makes it pretty easy to customize, assuming you know HTML, while still being free. No advertisements will show on your Blogspot blog unless you choose to monetize your blog. Within your Blogger dashboard, you can view your website optimized for a mobile phone.

Cons: One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen with Blogger is the inability to create a static landing page on your blog or website. There seem to be a few ways to overcome this through HTML, but they seem to be hit or miss.

WordPress

WordPress hosts many personal and business blogs as well, and users seem to agree that self-hosting your WordPress blog is the way to go, but you’ll have to pay to host it yourself. The free version seems to have good benefits as well. WordPress also has widgets, and the layout includes categories for you to add key words and tags, increasing your SEO reach.

Pros: WordPress, like blogger, lets users easily add tags to blog posts, allowing for optimized search results. Here you can also “team blog” by setting up titles for group users like Administrator, Editor, Contributor, and Author. These contributors can log in and upload posts, and then the Administrator can post them. WordPress also offers more storage space in their free version at 3 GB. (Blogger offers 1 GB in storage and 1 more GB in photo storage via Picasa. Tumblr offers 1 GB.)

Cons: WordPress doesn’t allow users to manipulate the blog templates in CSS without paying an upgrade fee. Your blog posts will also be accompanied with advertisements (unless you pay to upgrade).

Tumblr

While Tumblr is the baby of these three platforms, it has gained quite a bit of blogging street credibility.

Pros: With Tumblr, you can follow other blogs easily. From your dashboard, you’ll see a timeline of blogs that you follow, with the most recent at the top. This layout is optimized for comments and for sharing other people’s posts on your own blog (called “re-blogging” here). When you post something to Tumblr, you first choose the type of post, such as “quote”, “video”, “photo”, “text”, “link”, or “audio.” If you have an iPhone or Android, posting content through the Tumblr app is super simple. Tumblr also has many more free design templates than WordPress or Blogger.

Cons: Tumblr may not be the place to reach all potential clients. If you’re an artist or a photographer, i.e, someone with a visual portfolio, Tumblr might be the way to go. If you’re writing lots of content, Tumblr may not be the most text-friendly place to blog.

This is a very brief overview of these powerful services. It barely scratches the surface, and the best way to get to know a blogging service is to try it! There’s no harm in trying out a Blogger, Tumblr, and a WordPress blog, especially since they’re all free. See what format you like, what makes sense to you and your business. Combined with a fierce SEO strategy, like the ones implemented through Master Google’s SEO experts, blogging provides fresh content to move your business up the search results page.

Which blogging service do you use for your business? What advantages and disadvantages have you found with your preferred service?

The findings were published in a recent report by StatCounter Global Stats. Aodhan Cullen, the CEO of StatCounter, urges companies to realize that while the mobile audience is still relatively small compared to standard computer uses, it is growing so quickly that mobile-friendly sites are a must.

“While global Internet usage through mobiles is still under 10%, the pace of growth is remarkable,” Cullen says.

Still, as with any report regarding a rapidly evolving system, Cullen emphasizes that it’s important to remember that the mobile platform is constantly evolving, and so feedback from mobile phone and general Internet users is very valuable. Cullen extends an invitation to submit feedback using the detect tool that he provides a link to.

“As the mobile space is constantly evolving, we keep our detection under constant review,” Cullen says.

The evolving nature of SEO, specifically of mobile platforms, is something that we at Master Google can relate to. We also work very hard to keep up with it all, but find our efforts worth it when a client hits a top spot on Google. Our CEO Ali Husayni agrees with Cullen that the rapid growth of cell phone usage for Internet surfing is a great indicator that this trend will play a bigger part in SEO in the near future.

“This trend shows the importance of having a mobile friendly site while making sure it ranks well with Google mobile search. Stay ahead of the game so you can stay in business,” Husayni says.

“The Super Bowl is extremely analytical. You have to know exactly who to throw it to, and at one correct speed. It’s precision that comes with a lot of practice with the team, and requires them all to be extremely smart. To win, you have to guarantee that when you throw the ball to the quarter back, it’s going to land in your teammate’s hands,” Husayni says.

Husayni’s Super Bowl analogies are outlined below, and include the importance of a strong team and persistence.

Illustration Courtesy of Digboston.com

Know How To Analyze Different Ideas from Your Team

Husayni has advice for the head of any team, which includes knowing how to utilize the different ideas of his team. Husayni analyzes his own managerial style, saying:

“I can analyze, see a trend and see where it’s headed. What I’m good at is looking at what other people suggest and taking it a step further, combining different ideas to come up with a specific solution to a problem.”

Every employee has a different perspective, so be sure to listen. After all, the solution to any problem often comes from a combination of ideas.

Be a Team Player by Knowing Your Strengths

It suits the Super Bowl topic well to say that when it comes to launching a successful SEO strategy, you have to be a great team player. Each individual needs to know their area of expertise on the field, and each one needs to be the best at what they do. The combination of this expertise and hard work is what’s going to make the team a winning one, according to Husayni.

“Each team member we have is an expert in what they do. What they do is going to make the entire process succeed, and let the ball land with Google, with a higher search engine ranking result for our clients,” Husayni says.

Always Strive for Accuracy: There are No Shortcuts for Effective SEO

An accurate team is a winning team, according to Husayni. We can’t control SEO efforts entirely, because just like a football game SEO has fluctuations. You may go forward and then a little bit back. To hit a 10 yard mark, you need to be persistent and be careful not to go back a couple of yards without noticing it. Husayni explains the importance of a team effort when it comes to carrying out a touchdown of an SEO campaign.

“Before the quarter back throws the ball, the rest of the team needs to protect him. While an SEO strategy is vital, if you aren’t throwing your SEO tactics out at the right speed, you can get red flagged from Google,” Husayni says.

To avoid an interception from another business on Google’s search results, remember that a lot of what Google does is common sense. Google hates spamming techniques, like Black Hat SEO. So remember, while it might be tempting to duplicate content or buy links, if you just copy and paste or try to buy your way to the top without hard work, Google will take notice. Don’t risk getting flagged to save a tiny bit of time.

“Because some SEO companies are always looking for shortcuts, they are also looking for black hat techniques. The client is very happy and then Google changes their algorithm, and the black hat techniques are revealed. Then they hire us.”

So enjoy the game and remember—it’s all about the team.

We all have our preferred methods of social media to interact with others, including potential and current clients. Blogging tools such as Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger give us a place to create content. But where do we share it? I’ve been on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon for a while, but lately Pinterest has really caught my eye. It all started with a big move. See, my husband and I are currently working on our new house – painting walls and replacing fixtures before we move in. Recently, my aunt called me to inform me of something she saw on Pinterest. It was a cute photo of a man and a woman who painted a heart on their wall before they started painting their first home. She told me to check her pin board and see the photo.

Photo Courtesy of VisualPhotos.com.

Pinterest, the virtual pin board to both bookmark and organize cool things you’ve found online, is gaining popularity quickly. It’s easy to use, it has a simple, dynamic layout, and it’s highly visual. People love it, and this report can back up all the hype.

Pinterest Drives Traffic: Pinterest wiggled its way up the January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. This chart shows that for December 2011, Pinterest was responsible for 2.5% of total referral traffic. In January, that figure rose to 3.6%. In July of 2011, Search Engine Journal reports that Pinterest had only 0.17% total referral traffic.

For a reference, Facebook held 26.4% of total referral traffic in January. StumbleUpon came in second with 5.07%, and Google and Twitter took the third and fourth spots with 3.62% and 3.61% respectively. Ranking under Pinterest in total link referrals for January are LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

I know from first-hand experience that this virtual pin board is insanely popular. Sometimes when I want to pin something, Pinterest is over capacity. It’s like when you really want to tweet something clever, but you see that fat whale on the screen. You’ll have to wait!

Are you Pinning? The coolest part about Pinterest is that you can create multiple boards and title them as you choose. You can also select a category for each board with a handy drop-down menu. (Hello, keywords!) So, what should you pin? Pin what you do; pin what you like. Solely pinning your own content doesn’t allow your boards to grow organically. Pin things you like, things that inspire your business, and things you’ve created. That way users will choose to follow your boards, potentially re-pinning your pins and sharing the link-love.

Get creative. If your company sells tires, you could create blog content on tire care tips or how to change a flat. If you make letterpress wedding invitations, pin images from your past designs and other designers you like. Informative pins, such as “how to” or “DIY” do especially well on Pinterest.

Pinterest user Laura Scott-Davis has a board dedicated to SEO and so does Patina Marketing. As you can see, graphics hit hard on Pinterest – it’s all about the visuals.

Use Photos: If your blog content is compelling and informative, people will find it, especially if it’s optimized for search engines. By including a photo (also optimized for search engines) with each blog post or web page, users can see a visual pairing to the content. Make sure your images are relevant, of course.

Make it Easy: Adding a “pin it” button to your content makes it ridiculously easy for users on your blog to add your content to desired pin boards. Here’s how you can get a button. Once your button is added, users can share your content with a simple click. (Users can manually add a pin to their pin boards, but embedding a “pin it” button will allow seamless content sharing.)

Now your content shows up on their board, and every Pinterest user that follows that board can now see your content and they have the option of “re-pinning” your content to their boards. The more users that re-pin your content, the more people have the opportunity to view your content and click the link, driving hits to your website.

While Facebook is a place where friends can chat, share personal photos, and connect with each other, Pinterest has a stronger niche for link sharing, especially in the Do-It-Yourself community.

A strong SEO campaign will drive folks to your website. Pinterest allows those users to virally spread your content through their followers.

As Master Google CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni says:

“You cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours. That simply won’t happen.”

Don’t be afraid to share your content. Giving your customers easy ways to link to your content, through Pinterest or Facebook or Google+ can only work in your favor. Now, go forth and pin! Or, to see how our SEO can help your website, Contact Us.

This seems to be a trend with big talent. Well-known actors such as Will Ferrel, Jim Carrey, and Zooey Deschanel have contributed to Drunk History, a popular web series on Funny or Die. Friends star Lisa Kudrow starred in Web Therapy, a semi-improvised web series. The flexibility that web series allow is attractive to many people.

In my home, my husband and I only pay for Internet service. We watch several TV shows, but we watch them online at our own pace. This fits our lifestyle better than scheduled television programming. Plus it’s cheaper than paying for cable TV. This shift of the way we entertain ourselves and the way we obtain news puts all our eggs in the Internet basket. Since the younger generations spend more and more time on the web, SEO is of utmost importance. The more time we’re on the computer and away from the television, the better your chances are to gain customers online through a powerful SEO campaign.

Image Courtesy of Vator.tv.

With all the focus on YouTube and web videos, now’s the time to examine your business’s video strategy. Not all businesses need to post videos for their customers, but for some businesses, it makes perfect sense. Using YouTube effectively can increase the visibility of your business. If you own a bar, uploading quality videos of your trivia nights can gain attention. If your customers know you have a YouTube page and that their faces may appear there, it could give them an incentive to follow your YouTube channel or frequent your website to see the updated video.

Take your video content as seriously as you do your web content. Don’t make a video just because other people are doing it. Brainstorm what your business could offer its customers through a video that could be better visualized than read on a screen. Do you offer cooking classes? Maybe a short video on how to properly roast a chicken could benefit your potential customers. It’s possible that showing the warmth and originality of your chefs would entice people to sign up for a class. Instructional videos are especially useful, but entertainment also gets you clicks.

Viral videos are all the rage. If you’ve got a clever idea for a cool video, partner with a filmmaker to see your idea come to life. As we mentioned before, title your videos accurately, imbed your videos to your website or blog, and consider including a transcript of the video to increase Google’s ability to crawl your website.

Interesting and professionally filmed videos will look much better than a shaky video shot on your point-and-shoot camera. Quality is better than quantity. Combined with a professional SEO strategy, a strong video campaign can set you apart from the competition. In the SEO game, you have to stay fluid, ready for anything. Master Google’s CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni agrees.

“The industry is constantly evolving and SEO has grown to encompass much more than on-site optimization. It’s really only five or ten percent of the total work,” Husayni says.

By producing videos, driving social networking, developing quality content, concentrating on search engine optimization, and giving customers a solid product, you should see more buzz around your business. But remember, a solid SEO strategy takes time, so stick with it, and keep on reading.

On December 15, 2011, Google introduced their smartphone Google-bot Mobile. It is Google’s hope that by indexing smartphone content separately, users will have better search experiences on their phones. The blog post, written by Yoshikiyo Kato, says:

“With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones.”

Image Courtesy of DigitalTrends.com

In a Search Engine Land article about mobile searches in 2012, Michael Martin explains how users may want different information from searches across different platforms:

“The intention of inputting a search term on a desktop, feature phone, smartphone, or tablet can mean different things for the same keyword. For example, when typing in the term ‘tacos’ on a desktop I may want information or recipes; but on a feature phone, I may want to call a local taco shop; on a smartphone, I want directions to a local taco place, and on a tablet, I want to check reviews or what different items on the menu look like.”

For your business, it’s relatively easy to provide all this information to your potential customers. Having a variety of content, such as recipes, directions, menus, reviews, and photos, can be important on a mobile platform (and on a stationary computer).

A study by the group Meditative shows that images and reviews draw in your user’s eyes. For iPhone users, the study revealed that positive reviews on the Google Places app made a huge difference in which listing got clicks and which did not. While you need to register to see Meditative’s eye-tracking report, Search Engine Land breaks down the basics in this article.

Ryan Jones at Search Engine Journal doesn’t believe you need a different strategy for mobile SEO. Since our phones are just little computers, Jones thinks it’s easier just to design your website to work well on all devices – including phones, tablet computers, and traditional desktops and laptops. Jones writes:

“If you want something that is really native to a device, an app is definitely the way to go. Apps can access multi-touch features, rich media, in app purchases, gps, camera, and other aspects to provide a truly unique experience that a website cannot.”

My favorite websites that I frequent online all have apps. If your business could benefit from a mobile app, brainstorm ideas that would entice your customers, entertain them, or practically inform them about your business. Maybe your pizza place could commission an app to let users create their own pizza. Your personal training business could create a personalized workout app, complete with a nutrition and exercise routine.

While mobile screens are smaller than traditional computer screens, apps can give users a tailored experience on a smartphone. Apps with in-app purchases, such as the photography app Hipstamatic, drive users to their website with extended packages and the ability to purchase photography prints. The Pinterest app is just as useful as the full website for users to share things they like.

Focus on how your customers will find you, and keep up your tireless SEO endeavors. If you believe your business needs a separate mobile site, or even an app, evaluate what’s best for you and for your customers.

But no matter which form of technology is accessing your website due to your SEO efforts, all SEO strategies require three things to be successful, as outlined by Mater Google’s CEO Ali Husayni, who says:

“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.”

Master Google client CariniAir.com recently saw their site rise to the top of Google Places and other search result areas after working with us. Doug Cooper, the VP of Marketing for CariniAir.com, was thrilled with the results.

“Finally achieving the top spot on Google Maps for our most important keywords is a dream come true. Everyone at Carini Heating and Air is very excited and grateful to Master Google for their continued hard work and persistence,” Cooper says.

While marketers may receive more benefits from keeping up with in-depth statistics provided by Google Analytics, individuals that manage their personal or business websites can also use these tools to better understand what drives people to their sites.

Photo Courtesy of Google's http://Analytics.Blogspot.com.

Learn the Dashboard: There are tons of reports you can view through Google Analytics, but those will take more time and more in-depth coverage to learn. For now, get acquainted with your Dashboard. This is the main page, the starting point, for your Google Analytics information. Here, you’ll see a 30-day graph for total visits; the time period shown is customizable. You’ll see a snapshot of Site Usage, including statistics for Visits, Pageviews, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and Percentage of New Visits. Further down the page, you’ll see a map, which highlights where your views are coming from. You’ll also see a pie chart containing information about how visitors are getting to your site. Are you visitors coming from search engine results? From referring sites? From direct traffic? This information can quickly clue you in to your strengths and weaknesses.

On the dashboard you’ll also be able to see your top content. Adding fresh content in the same vein as your top performing content will give your repeat viewers some new material and will likely draw more unique visitors to your site.

Know Your Visitors: It’s important to know who is visiting your site. Are your visitors first-time viewers? How long are they staying on your website? How many pages within your website are they visiting? How many unique visitors do you have? With Google Analytics, you can see a detailed version of this information.

If you learn that most people stay on your website a very short amount of time, try to find out why. Is your design pleasing and simple, or is it cluttered and hard to read? If you discover that the majority of your visitors have visited your site before, then you know you’re doing something right. Having repeat viewers is just as important as bringing new, unique traffic to your site. You can also customize the information you’re gathering by taking advantage of the Premium Analytics feature Extended Custom Variables.

To evaluate if the SEO steps you’ve taken are working (although that’s a hard thing to measure just with a few clicks!), try downloading a plug-in to enhance your Google Analytics. Here’s one from Juice Analytics that gives you data on your new referring sites and your keywords with 50% higher traffic over the past week.

This doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg that is Google Analytics. To really be well versed in the GA scene, you’ll need to spend some time clicking around, browsing forums, and viewing different reports. Different data will be helpful to different users, so learning what you can do on GA will open your eyes to a whole new way of tracking your web traffic.

But, the idea of selling links is still out there, even though Google addressed it years ago by putting Google’s Webspam team head, Matt Cutts, on the case. According to an in-depth blog entry by Cutts, the basic problem with selling links is that it makes a link-based reputation seem shallow, and, even worse, it can even make a Google search less reliable if not discovered. Cutts gives an example of the early link buying days, and what went wrong.

“Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results,” Cutts says. “When the Berkeley College newspaper had six online gambling links [back in 2005] (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo), on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted.”

In fact, the mass buying of links can ultimately render a site unsearchable and get it cast out of Google’s search results, especially if the site is selling links, as Cutts explains. So what should you do to get links? Do you turn to the dark side of SEO practices (as discussed in our Black Hat Vs. White Hat SEO tactics post), and if not, what do you do?

According to Cutts, links will come when you have great content on your site, which will help it to rank well on Google. Although, as Ali Husayni somewhat agrees with Cutts that great content is king but he believes that leaving your great content out there without any hands-on link-building efforts will get you no where.

“Great content may attract inbound links but only if your site has good popularity (did the chicken come first or the egg?)” Husayni says. “But since your competition is not sitting back waiting for inbound links to appear, you cannot either.”

In this case, you need to consult a professional white-hat SEO specialist to help you understand what you need to do.

An article by Blue Glass Marketing’s Selena Narayanasamy states, “Word-of-mouth marketing  has been a tried and true strategy for many brands, and to this day, it’s still one of the driving factors of brand recommendation. The “Like” or “Recommend” feature is almost an online version of word-of-mouth marketing.”

Image Courtesy of www.MrInternetTips.com

This isn’t a surprise. People are more likely to follow a friend’s recommendation on a great new restaurant or their favorite local spa than to take unknown (and potentially spambot) recommendations from the web.

On Facebook’s Developers description of Open Graph, we see that when someone “likes” or comments on a business’s app, Facebook users have three places where they see that information just on Facebook. If the business has a “like” button on its website, then when someone views the business’s webpage, they can also see a count of how many people have “liked” the page from Facebook.

For instance, if I “like” Blumhouse Productions, my Facebook friends will see that action in three places once they visit Facebook. The information will show up in my friends’ News Feed, on my Facebook Timeline, and on the Ticker (the new-ish box on the right of the screen that scrolls recent activity). Once you’ve gotten a “like” from someone, your subsequent posts will all end up in that person’s News Feed. That person is tuned-in to your business on a personal level. It also affects their friends, as the more activity your fans bring (“liking” your posts, commenting or sharing your posts), the more potential you have to gain viewers or “fans”.

Facebook gives developers and businesses with web savvy comprehensive information on how to use Facebook to its fullest. In the Key Concepts for Open Graph, Facebook explains how different sites can tailor their keywords, i.e., their Objects and Actions, to their company. Explaining further, the page states: “First you must define your actions and objects in the Dev App. For example, a running app may define “Routes” and “Marathons” as objects, and “Run” as the action in the Dev App. A cooking app may define “Recipe” and “Menu” as objects, and “Cook” as the action.” This is basically adding specific keywords to your business’s app to further integrate with Facebook.

So what does all this mean for SEO?

Well, when you’re on Facebook and you search for “Nashville bakeries”, any bakeries you’ve “liked” will pop up. If you haven’t “liked” any, search results from the web will show inside of Facebook, powered by Bing. Therefore, optimizing your website for Bing results can be a big help for a user performing a search within Facebook.

Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, mentioned SEO strategy for social media in a panel on Facebook, Twitter & SEO at the Search Marketing Expo East in 2011. His tips for optimizing your Facebook page are very informative, including: “Use brand name in wall posts and tweets” and “push for engagement through likes and shares.” He also urges posting useful content as well as asking yourself if you’re using your SEO knowledge to freshen up your Facebook page.

In a recent Master Google blog post titled “Top Five Free SEO Tips of the Week”, we highlighted how to optimize your business Facebook page. Facebook is a great place to promote your business. First, the market is giant! Facebook will introduce your business to a vast amount of people. Second, the fans that “like” your page can become a community, sharing information and automatically seeing your posts on their News Feeds. This provides an organic opportunity to share special promotions for your business and gain new customers.

In an article by SEO expert Jill Whalen, she comments on the minor changes that helped SEO evolve from 2000 to 2008. In an outline she found from 2000, her introduction stated that Google had 1.3 billion pages indexed. When the article was written in 2008, Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, estimated that Google had nearly 10 billion pages indexed. As all of these small changes and unexplained algorithms rock our SEO boats, Whalen comments on what stays the same: “The one element that will never change is the same one that I’ve been advocating forever—whatever SEO methods or strategies you use, the thing that will get you the furthest is creating an awesome website!”

More Competition
The easier it is to make a website, the more people sign up for personal blogs or websites that can potentially distract users from the relevant information they’re searching for. Services such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Weebly make web development a breeze. As these sites have gained popularity in the past few years, more people have dumped their information onto the web.

Five years ago, if you had a serious niche, it’s possible that you could be one of several websites, or even (gasp!) the only website, discussing a subject. Now that it’s so easy to make a website, i.e., you don’t need to know how to code it, you don’t need to purchase a domain name, new sites spring up daily. In the wake of this over-saturated market, ensuring that your website has up-to-date, relevant information is crucial.

More Social
Twitter launched in July of 2006, and since then, its users have grown to giant proportions. An article from Time Techland dated September 2011 revealed that Twitter has 100 million active users. Facebook launched in February 2004, and as of January 2012, there are 800 billion users. Now Google announced that search results are getting more personal, as users will see Google+ results as well as normal search results in the “everything” category.

These sites are a destination, where people spend lots of time connecting with friends or acquaintances with common interests. While before, friends could share links fairly easily through email, now, these websites like Facebook and Twitter provide a common ground for link sharing. As Eric Hammer from Quantum SEO Labs writes, “[Social media] has really taken the concept of SEO and stood it on its ear because until now, you were trying to get Google to notice you. Now, for the first time, because of social media, you need to try to get human beings to notice you too and recommend you to their friends.”

Google Loves Change
To keep searches fresh and readily improving for users, Google is speculated to make changes almost daily to their search algorithms. Google introduced Panda (previously known as “Farmer”) to better their search results by weeding out duplicate content and lowering the prevalence of “content farms” in query results. Google launches Google Places to give businesses a place to be recognized.

Just as Google likes changing their own search algorithms, they also favor fresh content, as we recently reported in “The Google Freshness Update”.

While the SEO horizon changes daily like the phases of the moon, what stays the same is the importance of relevant, accurate, and fresh content.

In a 24-hour protest on Jan. 18, many websites blacked out their content, including probably the biggest and most influential participant Wikipedia. Fight for the Future, whose tagline reads “a non-profit working to defend online freedom”, reports that more than 115,000 sites participated in the Jan. 18 blackout. Their numbers show the progression of Senators publicly opposing PIPA, which grew from one lone Senator on Nov. 16, 2011 to six on the morning of the protest. On the evening of the Jan. 18 protest, 34 Senators publicly opposed the anti-piracy bill.

You may have also heard that, for now, these bills have been postponed in Congress; they were scheduled for a Jan. 24 vote. It’s hard to tell if Congress has heard the pleas of many Americans to stop these censorship bills, or if the postponement is a way to shut us up temporarily. Will the bill slide back into Congress with revised text? Will they try to slip it by us?

Clay Shirky, in a very telling TED Talk (which I highly recommend watching), speaks about the history of copyright infringement legislation and its chilling future. He begins by explaining the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which basically said copying content such as songs from the radio to share with friends is okay (i.e, making personal mix tapes). It also said that taping high-quality versions, making multiple copies, and selling these copied tapes is not okay. The media companies wanted Congress to stop all copying, but Congress didn’t go that far. Now media companies, especially those who produce music and films, are spearheading these anti-piracy bills once again with SOPA and PIPA.

Shirky states: “The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we’re given the freedom to create, to produce, or to share. And the people who provide those capabilities to us – the YouTubes and Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs – are in the business of having to police us or being on the hook for contributory infringement.” Some businesses may not want the job of policing their content, which could result in the businesses walking out, leaving us no place to voice our opinions or share our findings.

In the same talk, Shirky also enlightens listeners to an even deeper-rooted problem that SOPA and PIPA propose. He explains how the bills threaten our freedom and an inherent human right: “And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they’re us; we’re the people getting policed. Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another. So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries old legal concept – ‘innocent until proven guilty’ – and reversing it –’guilty until proven innocent.’”

The real problem, as Shirky so eloquently states, is that SOPA and PIPA will make everyone a criminal. Without a proper trial, without gathering significant evidence, the government would be able to shut down your blog or website. The government could shut down your favorite websites. Forgoing the foundation of our basic rights – our Sixth Amendment right to a speedy, public trial with an impartial jury and our First Amendment right to free speech – the government will be able to censor our content seemingly without reason and without a proper check of power. Shirky goes one step further, deducing that media companies don’t want us to produce, but only to sit on our couches and consume. The producing is what threatens their livelihoods.

The hacker organization called Anonymous has shown their disdain for SOPA and PIPA by attacking major websites. Anonymous supposedly hacked the Department of Justice in retaliation to the shutdown of Megaupload.com, a major file-sharing website, and the arrest of its operators. They also hit the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Universal Music, and the Recording Industry Association of America, according to a Forbes article. These organizations are supporters of SOPA and PIPA.

Facebook’s Washington, DC, office has a Facebook page where they discuss their views on these anti-piracy bills. While Facebook is sympathetic to the music and film industry on this copyright issue, they think SOPA and PIPA “are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage these overreaching bills would cause to the Internet.”

For now the bills are tabled, but Wikipedia writes, “SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows.” This isn’t the end of the fight.

Master Google Ali Husayni has this to say about these two piracy bills and what they mean for website content sharing as we know it today:

“I’m all against piracy and hacking. But being raised in Iran, I’ve seen what censorship can do to freedom of the flow of information. You ‘censor’ only when you feel unable to verbally ‘engage’ and ‘encounter’ your opposition. Censorship by its very virtue puts you on the defense and the weaker position. And we don’t want to be portrayed as weak.”

The Rankings Game: What happens when we get addicted to checking our placement on Google’s search results? A wonderful comic strip by BigOakInc.com showcases the dangers of checking your rankings too often.

So how do you avoid this roller coaster? Our client CariniAir.com is a good example of what having the right attitude about the nature of changing rankings does for peace of mind. Doug Cooper, the VP of Marketing for CariniAir.com, has been working with Master Google for a relatively short period of time, and was supportive of our efforts, which landed him the top spot in Google Maps and Google Places. Cooper understands that rankings fluctuate slightly, but keeps it positive about the big gains in his website rankings.

“Finally achieving the top spot on Google Maps for our most important keywords is a dream come true. Everyone at Carini Heating and Air is very excited and grateful to Master Google for their continued hard work and persistence,” Cooper says.

When The Use of Highly Competitive Keywords Goes Wrong: Again, BigOakInc.com makes a great point about overusing keywords by inserting them into a conversation between coworkers at an SEO company.

While funny, this comic strip emphasizes that White Hat SEO techniques are so important for higher rankings, because Black Hat SEO simply defeats the purpose of keywords, because keyword stuffing without anything to back up those keywords is simply bad practice. According to Husayni, Black Hat SEO techniques include any techniques that use spam, cheap links and poor or irrelevant content just to get a higher ranking, and these techniques just hurt you in the long run. As you ruminate over the free SEO advice that you’ve learned about while reading these comic strips, also keep in mind that SEO efforts count for your blog content as well, Husayni advises.

“Blogs seem to be an important part of any site because they get updated on a regular basis,” Husayni says. “I suggest site owners should write for their sites on a regular basis. The more fresh, quality and relevant content they post to their sites, the better chances of exposure and inclusion on Google search results they will have.”

Here’s what this means for you, as a user of Google. If you have a Google+ account and you stay logged in (as I do most always from my home computer), you should see your information across the navigation bar at the top of your page. Once you type a query into the search bar and hit ‘enter,’ if you have any personal results (such as acquaintances posting relevant topics on Google+), these will show up. For now, the search results aren’t commingled. If you look to the right of the screen, there’s an inconspicuous little toggle button where you can select “Show Personal Results” or “Hide Personal Results”. See the full explanation straight from Google’s blog.

Even if you aren’t logged in to Google, you’ll still see Google+ results on the right side of the page. In a small box, Google is promoting Google+ content under a People and Pages headline. Here, content is featured from Google+, including personal profiles and business pages, which is an incentive for people to use Google+.

Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOMoz.org, an SEO expert featured in a recent post about the importance of producing quality content, weighed in about Google’s SPYW on his blog.

“It’s my opinion that if [it] continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it’s been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers,” Fishkin says.

Fishkin also believes that marketers who don’t use Google+ are missing out on a huge platform, as Google is promoting its social application, Google+, through this new search feature.

Get Google+

If you don’t have a Google+ account, get one. As SEO Expert Ali Husayni tells us, Google+ pages for your business are absolutely essential.

“It’s a real step in the right direction. Initially, they said that they weren’t going to add that component, but they needed to have it from the get-go,” Husayni says.

Now that Google integrated SPYW into people’s searches, Google+ is even more crucial. For example, if I search for the term bicycles, and one of my friends on Google+ bought a bicycle from Bob’s Bike Shop and +1′d the store’s page, then Bob’s Bikes will show up in my personal results. As much as people like reviews, a review from someone you actually know usually goes further than a review written by a random person online. How do we know a random review isn’t one written by the business owner to promote his own business? It’s a given that we trust information more fully from people we’ve met and have a connection with.

Update Your Profile

If you have Google+, now is a great time to make sure your information is up-to-date. Since Google is pushing Google+ profiles to the top for users that are signed in, you want your content to be fresh, relevant, and accurate.

Get Your Customers Talking on Google+

Make it easy for your customers to find you by posting your content to Google+. Include a +1 button wherever you have other social networking buttons, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest links. Consider holding a promotion, such as “add us to your Google+ circle and you’ll receive an exclusive coupon code.” Having an incentive for your customer will bring your brand to the front of their brains, and having them add your Page to their circle or +1 you will be vital in their future Google searches.

For this new integration of Google+ into search results, Google is forcing us to get personal. Now’s the perfect time to be friendly in person and on the web. Having a strong SEO presence on your website and on your Google+ can help push you up to the top of the page.

“Search engine optimization boosts the visibility of a website by making sure that the site’s language gives the best possible chance for it to be found when a web surfer performs a search,” Husayni says.

A small part of the SEO process is on-page optimization, which is constructing the code of a website to be easily crawled by search engine spiders, according to Web Developer and SEO Specialist, Saeed Khosravi. A basic search about SEO will pull up a staggering amount of information and ‘How-To’ tutorials. Unfortunately, knowing which list has ethical SEO techniques, and which has outdated or detrimental ones can be a chore. Plus, it is constantly changing.

“Google’s search engine algorithm is updated on a regular basis, which means in order to make sure you are not using obsolete techniques, you have to find a reputable source that keeps you informed about changes,” Khosravi says.

Google wants to mimic the human behavior of reading, analyzing and organizing content, and so the system evolves as people do. According to Husayni, some changes to the algorithm are to block black hat SEO techniques, which include any techniques that use spam, cheap links and poor or irrelevant content just to get a higher ranking.

Panda was an update like this that Google released in the U.S. in February last year. The major change was that Google began “rating” websites on their content and user-experience. According to a recent Search Engine Land article, the focus of the update was to reduce and penalize websites that had thin, low-quality and duplicate content. It also targeted sites that came up short based on other site-quality metrics, such as high advertisement-to-content ratios.

Where To Get Started

Husayni has been committed to the Google-approved SEO methods that work with the search engine algorithm instead of trying to abuse it, since he started Master Google in 2004.

He has written an e-book of best SEO practices that he updates as the industry changes, and here he shares seven aboveboard methods he uses for his clients, ranging from the medical field and real estate to heating and cooling:

1. Navigation. Navigation includes the top menu, footer links, breadcrumb navigation and HTML sitemap of a website. It should be very user-friendly and easy to understand. Do not make content hard to get to or structure the site in a way that only makes sense to experts in the industry or the person who designed the site.
2. Sitemap. Set the XML sitemap to automatically update so that navigation stays current and keeps the latest information easily accessible for users and search engines.
3. Header Tags. Header tags are used to define HTML headings and organize page content. <h1> stands for the most important heading and <h6> means that information is the least important of the page. Headers make the layout of textual information easy for the reader.
4. Links. The purpose of website content is to serve the reader, so linking to other content within the site is beneficial for everyone: the company, the reader and the search engine. A page that expounds on a topic, issue or technique mentioned on a different page builds an internal link structure that Google loves and, as a result, boosts the ranking on SERPs.
5. URLs. Use a consistent URL version and redirect all the other versions to the preferred one. For example, redirect non-www to www, https to http, and the one without trailing slash to the one with trailing slash.
6. Keywords. Using short, keyword-rich URLs is another way to share information about the page content, as opposed to a URL that uses an ID number or another ambiguous parameter. Just make sure keywords accurately explain the page’s content succinctly. This information shows up in the SERs, and Google is also factoring this into their algorithm.
7. Metadata. Do not use duplicate page titles and descriptions in the code for pages. The page title shows up at the top of the browser window, and the title and description show up in the SERs. This is another opportunity to make information available to readers and search engines.

Using a Master Google website page as an example, a popular search term, Google Free Optimization, displayed on the first page of Google results when I entered it. Notice the URL that lists optimization, as the page title is Search Engine Optimization Master Google Free SEO Services, and the description said this: “Master Google offers Free SEO (search engine optimization) in a way which Google spiders could easily find your site, read its code and content, and rank it for your specific keywords.”

Keeping descriptions concise helps SEO efforts tremendously, according to Husayni.

“The person who did a search like this would have a very clear understanding of what the contents of this page are going to be and whether it will be helpful,” Husayni says.

Husayni also emphasized that these SEO tips are designed to benefit the user, not just make a page rank higher on Google’s search engine. The reality is that on-page optimization is a much smaller percentage of the total SEO work than it used to be. Today, it is five to 10 percent of the work an SEO firm would do for a client.

Husayni explains more on his blog about the SEO components needed to build a site Google will love.

Image Courtesy of ObserversRoom.DesignObserver.com

NASHVILLE, TN – Google Maps and Google Places may seem like the same product with two different names, but that isn’t the case. In a recent post, we outlined the success of Master Google’s client, CariniAir.com. With the help of our SEO services, Carini Air shot to the top spot of Google Places, and they’ve seen a 50% increase in qualified leads as a result. While CariniAir.com reigns supreme on Google Places, they aren’t #1 on Google Maps. Let’s delve into why and how these two differ.

Google Maps

If you’ve searched the Internet for directions in the past few years, chances are you’ve used Google Maps. This extensive free mapping service gives us directions and even offers a super helpful Street View, which plops us down virtually in front of basically any address. If someone searches “restaurants” in Google Maps, depending on how zoomed in the map is, they might find 30+ restaurants. Having a great ranking in Google Places will help your business make it to the first, larger map people view in Google Maps.

Google Places

Google Places is a web listing (think Yellow Pages) that includes photos, reviews, a map, and other information about a business. Google introduced Google Places on April 20, 2010 as a revamping of their previous service called Place Pages.

Starting in 2011, Google started using Google Places listings instead of Google Maps on its main search page. These listings share the pin as well as the location on the map with Google Maps, however, the big difference is that they’re basically a combination of previous Google Maps and the organic results, thus having  the site’s title as well as the description under each listing.

Google Places allows business owners and patrons to upload photos, which is especially popular for restaurants. Patrons can also leave reviews, which can help prospective customers decide whether or not they’ll choose your business over another. Businesses can easily share hours of operation, add relevant categories (or search terms), and offer customers special coupons and promotions. If you have a specific service area, you can enter this information, too, so that your business’s information will be geographically-focused.

Get Listed

Even if you haven’t listed your business on Google Places, your information may still be visible. This is because through crawling, Google sets up unverified business listings on Places. If your business has a listing, you can search your business on Google Places. On the business listing, you’ll see information on the left about the business, and on the right side of the page you’ll see a small map. (Clicking the map will take you to a larger map and a smaller listing on the left side, i.e., Google Maps). Above the map, you’ll see a few links: one titled “Edit this Place” and the other titled “Business Owner”. To verify your business’s listing, you can click the “Business Owner” link and update your company’s information. Once you’ve done that, your listing will be labeled as “Owner-Verified”.

If you don’t know how to list your business on Google Places, watch this video by Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni to see how easy it is. Once you’re listed, ask your returning customers to write a positive review for your business. The more your listing is rated, the higher your business will be in Google Places rankings.

Having reviews on other rival websites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor can certainly be helpful, but this Wall Street Journal article reiterates the importance of a Google Places listing in search engine results, as writer Amir Efrati explains.

“Links to the pages often appear near the top of the search results page when people search for information on local businesses, in part because they aren’t subject to the same Google algorithm that ranks other websites in search results. Google Places links often are ranked above links to Yelp, TripAdvisor and UrbanSpoon and Citysearch, which are owned by IAC,” Efrati says.

SEO is Still the Top Dog

Google Places expert Randy Kirk operates the blog Google Places Help, which provides free tips to business owners who want to optimize their Google Places listing. In a recent blog post about the importance of SEO content in Google Places rankings, Kirk writes that paying attention to every aspect of it is a must.

“No matter how closely you watch the changing world of how to rank on Google Places, it is a major mistake to take your eye off the main prize, and that is being highly ranked on the everything search for keywords you care about,” Kirk says.

Having a focused SEO plan, plus listing your business on Google Places, can increase the likelihood that your customers will find you. Contact Us to see if we can provide these services for your website.

Graphic Courtesy of TechTricksWorld.com.

SANTA MONICA, CA – The Master Google team is happy to announce the recent accomplishments of CariniAir.com. Doug Cooper, the VP of Marketing for CariniAir.com, has been working with Master Google for a relatively short period of time, and has already seen big results, both with the number of qualified leads and with his company’s Google rankings. Like most new clients to Master Google’s SEO services, Cooper was at first hesitant to hire a new Search Engine Optimization Company when he started in the middle of last year, but has seen a big spike in the number of qualified leads as a result.

“We get maybe 30 percent of our business from referrals, the other 70 percent is from Google Search Engine marketing. We’ve increased the number of qualified leads with Master Google about 50%,” Cooper says. “I wish we’d started a year ago, I am sure we’d be number one in everything.”

A simple Google search also reveals further success for Cooper, who readily shares his excitement about the recent accomplishments with Master Google.

“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. We are very excited about becoming #1 in the Google Places listings, and expect this to result in another 100% – 200% increase in Google sales leads during the upcoming air conditioning season,” Cooper says.

But it’s important to note that these numbers didn’t appear right away. The SEO results took time, and were the product of hard work, as both Cooper and Master Google CEO Ali Husayni explain. Still, the results happened relatively quickly, as Cooper emphasizes.

“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 says.

Husayni enjoys seeing these tangible results for his clients.

“When we see results like CariniAir.com, it proves to us the fact that what we do actually works. What’s needed is patience and perseverance,” Husayni says.

See Doug Cooper’s interview in our testimonials section. Contact Us to see if your site qualifies, and we look forward to continuing to work with Cooper and our other clients.

IMPORTANT RANKINGS UPDATE: As of Jan. 19, 2012, CariniAir.com took the #1 spot on Google Maps.

Cooper is thrilled about what this means for CariniAir.com.

“Finally achieving the top spot on Google Maps for our most important keywords is a dream come true. Everyone at Carini Heating and Air is very excited and grateful to Master Google for their continued hard work and persistence,” Cooper says.

Help Search Engines Help You

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: don’t wait for Google to find your site through their crawling spiders. Instead, add your website to Google’s index and then submit your unique Sitemap. You can access these settings through Google’s Webmaster Tools, which you can read about on a recent Master Google post, here.

Learn the Importance of Creatively Getting Links

You know you need links, now take it one step further: increase the links pointing to your website, and get creative in how you go about it. You could write a guest post on a related blog or feature a post from a guest blogger on your website. You could even sponsor a product giveaway on one of your favorite websites or blogs. We talked about blog trackbacks and pingbacks in a previous post, and recommend it for extra credit reading.

Be Critical of Your Blog

Adding keywords and updating content frequently can help you move up in search engine rankings. Content is king, after all. Offer relevant information to your potential clients. What have you learned about your field that you want to share? If you choose to start a blog, it’s important to provide good, quality content. Don’t start a blog just to be redundant. Providing fresh topics and insight in your field will make your site a welcomed destination for viewers. You can even allow comments to spark thoughtful conversation.

Review Your Content Critically

Analyze your website’s content carefully. First, make sure your page titles clearly and concisely state what your viewer will find on each page. If you’re familiar with HTML, check to see if your meta tags beneath your page titles are being used properly. In that space, write a concise but descriptive blurb about what each page offers.

Next, imagine you’re searching for your own product or company. What words would you type into a search engine, assuming you weren’t familiar with your company’s name? Google’s Webmaster Guidelines states this well: “Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”

It may seem like common sense, but giving your content a close reading will help. Ask a spouse or close friend to describe your website. Do the keywords they used match the ones in your featured content?

Saturation of other mediums, including videos and images, can help your site rank higher if done correctly. Title your image with relevant phrases, as we discussed in a recent post about image SEO, so that if a potential client is searching key terms in the images section, your content is easily available. After all, adding other media to your website can increase functionality for your users. An easy way to see your pages similarly to how the Googlebot sees them is to view your website in Lynx, a text-based browser.

If you embed a video on your website, consider adding text as a transcript or a detailed summary of the video to enhance the crawling and indexing of your website.

By implementing these small steps, you can get started, but SEO is not a part-time job. To get to a top spot with Google, you need to hire a team that can give its full effort and range of expertise to your business. After all, hiring an SEO expert like our CEO, Ali Husayni, could 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,” says Husayni. “Call the office for a free consultation to find out.” Click here to contact us about our services.

Image Courtesy of GeekBlogOnline.com.

In the second installment of our two-part series, we’re sharing some helpful information on how you can tweak your site and hopefully restore your ranking. We’ll also discuss when to give in and hire a professional SEO web services company.

If any of the factors we outlined in our previous post describe your situation regarding lost Google rankings, fixing the problem is doable, says Ali Husayni, who develops SEO marketing plans for clients.

First of all, as we’ve said repeatedly through the years, you must write fresh, quality and unique content on a regular basis, as Husayni emphasizes. Search for your content online to make sure other sites are not stealing from your site. Simply copy a phrase, put it in quotes in your search box, and see what results you get. Let’s say you find that people have, in fact, copied your content. What then?

Mickie Kennedy, founder of the press release distribution company eReleases, offers some great tips:

Reach out to the blogger or the company that you feel has swiped your content. In a professional manner, explain that your material is copyrighted and they must remove it from their site or pay you for it.

Report a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation. The DMCA outlines penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. A simple Google search will provide you with a template to complete and sent to the offending party’s hosting provider.

Notify the offending party’s advertisers. Telling the advertisers about the offense could cause them to pull their advertisements and affect the blog’s revenue.

“Hitting someone in the pocketbook can be effective in getting your point across,” Husayni says.

Call in the Big Guns. You also should consider that at some point, you might need to hire a professional. SEO tactics and techniques change as often as Google changes its algorithms. Simply running your business likely keeps you busy enough, without also having to play “SEO expert” and trying to keep up with your website.

A business SEO specialist can monitor your site and work to get your site ranked so you can focus on your customers.

You always need writers who understand SEO and the overall SEO strategy, whether they come in the form of a consultant or are provided by a full-fledged SEO provider. Because content is important for a site, you need someone on your side generating that content for you if you don’t have time to handle it yourself.

At the end of the day, it is important to remember that your site must provide useful, helpful content if you expect Google to send visitors to it.

Now there are a couple of new suggestions of ways to keep you ahead of your competition (and rise your ranking) in Google Places: by keeping your content consistent and completing missing information.

Image courtesy of Onbile.com.

Keeping Your Content Consistent:

Keeping each of your online profiles consistent can be tough, but be sure to update all of your content, on every platform, every time. Failure to do so can hurt your SEO efforts big time, according to a recent article by Ashley Zeckman of TopRankBlog.com.

“It is important that your Google Place profile contains the same information as any other profiles your company may have online. Google Place pages create another opportunity to build trust and consistency as part of your marketing strategy. Be sure to audit your other profiles and answer each question as consistently as you can,” Zeckman says.

Other great ideas that Zeckman brings up to create consistency with your content across multiple platforms include:

• Linking: The problem here is often too many profiles for your business. Link them when possible.
• Branding: Be sure to reference your brand in the same way, every time.
• Imagery: Fight the urge to use different images in different places. Keep them the same.

Completing Missing Information:

When filling out profiles, there is often so much to fill out, that a business leaves an optional spot or two blank. Don’t or it might impact how easily you’re found online.

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘better off safe than sorry’? Take the same approach when setting up or editing your Google Places profile,” Zeckman advises.

No matter where your online profile is going to go, or how many of them you have, always fill out these bits of information: company name, email address, phone number, website, and address. Sometimes this can get time consuming, and not all businesses can fix everything at once. But regardless of which of these tips you take or leave, it is important to understand the continuing importance of staying current with Google Places, as Husayni explains.

“It won’t matter if you don’t know how to use Adwords, Analytics, or Google+,” Husayni says. “Being seen at the top of search results is equivalent to purchasing a large, eye-catching ad in your local Yellow Pages that everyone owned 10 years ago. If your ad was the first, your phone would not stop ringing.”

If you are not listed with Google Pages, please see the simple steps to getting listed with this video: how to get on Google Places.

Google Panda image Courtesy of TechChunks.com

It can be frustrating to those who spend a great deal of time and effort (and money, if you’ve hired a professional SEO firm), to achieve their desired ranking, only to lose it when Google makes a few tweaks.

This was the case in February 2011 when Google launched “Panda.” It happened again in April 2011 when it rolled out Panda to all English language queries, in addition to making several small updates, according to an April 11, 2011 article posted on Search Engine Land.

Panda was designed to weed out pages and websites that were deemed to be of a quality below Google’s high standards, including content farms and websites filled with duplicate content.

In part one of this two-part series, we will discuss the reasons why your site may have lost its ranking. In part two, we’ll share tips on what you can do to get back your ranking.

So why did your website take a nose-dive after the Panda update? In short, it’s likely due at least in part to failing to observe best SEO practices. Why are we still talking about Google Panda almost a year after it launched? Because many sites have yet to recover from the change, says Ali Husayni, an expert in SEO technology.

There are several specific factors that caused websites to lose their rank after the Panda update. Chances are, you were guilty of one of the following:

You copied content from other sources: If you’ve copied one sentence from someone else’s site, you’re plagiarizing and Google will give you an F. Think about what your English teacher taught you in high school: if you’re going to use someone else’s words, you need to attribute them to the person who wrote them. When it comes to SEO, you need to take it a step farther and reword the information so that it doesn’t appear exactly as it does on the site where you got the information.

But your best bet is to not borrow a great deal of information from other sites. Think about it from Google’s standpoint: why should they rank your site higher instead of giving a high ranking to the site where you pulled your information? That’s obviously the site filled with relevant content. The idea is to generate your own original, relevant content that site visitors will find useful.

Your content was old and never updated: Google loves websites that are alive and kicking. If you launched a website in 2007 and haven’t updated the content or changed anything about it since then, Google likely will not perceive it as having useful information. Could you imagine a business search engine optimization site launched in 2007 and never updated? Yikes! Talk about out-of-date, useless information!

Someone else with a stronger site may have copied your site: In this case, Google probably thinks you are the one who plagiarized, and they’ve given credit to the other site. That sucks and unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do except revamp your site’s content.

Tune in on Monday, when we’ll explain how you can restore your ranking.

A recent commenter posed this question: “Do Trackbacks and Pingbacks matter when it comes to SEO?” The short answer is yes, they most certainly do matter, to varying degrees. The long answer includes an explanation of what Trackbacks and Pingbacks are, and their overall place in your SEO efforts.

Let’s start with trackbacks. A trackback is simply an automated notifier sent to someone else’s blog any time you reference their blog in a post. By sending a trackback, you are creating a link back to your blog, which takes a very small amount of time to do when considering the benefits of it.

Image Courtesy of ITinfoOz.com

Now, on to Pingbacks. Pingbacks have more to do with author control and authenticity, as explained well by an SEO news reporter for Beanstalk-Inc.com in a recent blog post. Pingbacks were originally the response to trackbacks lacking authenticity. Pingbacks make it easy to notify a blog of your use of it just by posting its permalink in your blog post. Of course, there is some controversy over which is really better: pingbacks or trackbacks.

“Some feel that trackbacks are superior because the readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say before deciding if they want to read more and follow the link to the orginal blog source,” Beanstalk-Inc.com’s SEO News Reporter says. “Others feel that pingbacks are superior as they create a verifiable connection between posts. Pingbacks are akin to having remote comments.”

Whether using both trackback and pingback methods, or not having tried either one on a conscious level yet, our CEO, Ali Husayni, has advice for the business owner who isn’t yet using Master Google’s services for their SEO efforts. Husayni recommends his book, Google SEO Secrets revealed, as a good starting point for your entire website, including your blog. Still, Husanyni recommends professional help.

“Engaging in all of these techniques requires months of hard labor, a complete understanding of SEO and, of course, cash. Nevertheless, we’ve been able to transform local, small businesses into large-international ones in a matter of a few months by practicing what we preach,” Husayni says. “Oftentimes, smart business people who have substantial financial backing will delegate important tasks to professionals, instead of spending years mastering what someone else already knows and taking away the focus from their business.”

Fill out our form and we’ll gladly look at your site to see if it qualifies for our Top of Google program.

Image courtesy of Kanx.org.

“If a company is saying things that sound too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true,” Husayni says. “SEO doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an investment and an ongoing process for long-term success.”

Getting to the top of Google rankings is doable. In fact, Husayni offers SEO services for that, but the timeline to see results varies. Husayni explains that he cannot give a one-size-fits-all answer for exactly how fast clients will see results, since there are many factors are in play.

These factors include: the size and competitiveness of the market, the type of business, the number of keywords, the age of the domain name, how often new content is published on the site, and getting a site indexed, according to recent article by Search Engine Watch. After all, a website that has been flagged for violations in the past will also be in for a longer process to improve their previously bad rankings. Saeed Khosravi, the operational manager at Master Google, said that significant results can happen quickly for the qualified client, but that every client sees results.

“Significant results typically take three to nine months, but some clients see results much sooner,” Khosravi says.

Husayni and his SEO team have worked with some clients who saw big changes right away, but the majority of them take several months. See testimonials from our clients here.

“We don’t use deceptive tactics or marketing gimmicks here to sign clients up,” says Husayni. “We use clear communication, realistic timelines and show progress with weekly ranking reports.”

But what about accidental SEO mistakes? Avoid three common SEO pitfalls that often happen in the development part of your website, including: 404′s, server errors, and weird outbound links, as outlined by Glenn Gabe in a recent article in Search Engine Journal. A simple scan can help you determine if you have any of these errors. In this case, Gabe discusses a specific software for scanning a site, but whether using a tool or internal talent, Gabe points out the learning curve ahead when it comes to spotting bad SEO accidents just waiting to happen.

SEO Services Logo Courtesy of Content-Mag.com

“You can learn a lot by crawling a web site… [it is important to note that there are] three hidden dangers that can be uncovered.” Gabe says.

Let’s delve further into the three most common accidental SEO mistakes:

1. 404′s: To define it simply, a 404 is a “Page Not Found”. It is very important that you eliminate all 404′s, because Google will remove a a site from its index for such an offense, and you’ll lose valuable inbound links. Be sure to trouble-shoot, Gabe advises.

“For example, are powerful pages on your site throwing 404’s? Why is that happening? And how much search equity are you losing if they are throwing 404’s? As you can imagine, correcting pages that 404, that shouldn’t 404, is an important task for SEO,” Gabe says.

2. Server Errors: URL “error” messages for pages you didn’t even know you had is more common than you might think. The culprit: content management systems.

“Confused? They were too. In a recent audit, the content management system being used was dynamically building URL’s based on a glitch.  Those URL’s threw server errors.  And Googlebot was finding them too.  Not good,” Gabe says.

3. Weird Outbound Links: This issue, unfortunately, inches into scary territory: hackers. There are hackers constantly trying to get into every part of your website. Don’t avoid searching for these just because the truth could be a little off-putting.

“Here’s a simple question for you: do you know all of the pages you are linking to and from your website? Are you 100 percent sure you know? Are you hesitating?” Gabe asks.

Our advice here at Master Google: know all of the pages that are linking to and from your website, and don’t hesitate to find out if you don’t know. After all, you need to know what is going on with your website, right now. Of course, the best way to tackle these accidental SEO mistakes is to hire professionals with a track record, according to CEO Ali Husayni.

“Google needs SEO companies to better understand sites,” Husayni says. “In essence, we are enhancing the ability of Google crawlers to index and understand sites.”

But, if you are a hands-on type, learn to install and use Google Webmaster Central. This free tool can save you, big time.

Contact us to find out how our SEO services can help your site avoid these very preventable SEO accidents.

When basic image SEO is done correctly, an image like the one above can be an extremely valuable addition to a website (after all, I used an image Google search to find this image). According to Danny Dover, the lead SEO of SEOmoz.org, an image is only as good as the text supporting it. Dover delves further into his image SEO expertise in his video discussion on a recent SEOmoz.org Whiteboard Friday. In fact, Dover points out that search engines need text to help the images serve their intended purpose, and that well-developed sites tend to pay attention to image SEO. This newfound knowledge is a wake up call to this writer to implement those changes from this day forward, and I’m sure that it had the same impact on the plethora of other bloggers and SEO analysts who have read it.

“Besides just being useful for people, images are also, it turns out, useful for search engines. I think part of the reason behind that is that pages that are well developed tend to also have images on them because it helps portray information in a way that textual based content can’t do,” Dover says.

Click here to be directed to Dover’s video tutorial on the basics of Image SEO, in which he gives useful advice regarding image SEO. Here are a few pieces of Dover’s words of wisdom:

1. Alt Text: This is the text that will pop up if your image fails to display, either because of someone’s browser or the image disappearing. From an SEO perspective, you can save face, because alt text tells Google what that image was. Dover has a quick tip: keep them below about 140 characters.

2. Filename: The filename is also information for search engines and other technologies, but alt text is stronger for SEO purposes, especially when backed up with a filename.

3. Surrounding Text: This is often overlooked, but the text around an image gives Google an idea about the image itself. The surrounding text can either be a traditional caption, or it can just be the paragraphs around the image (like the picture in this blog).

4. Inbound Links: As with all SEO efforts, inbound links are very important. Dover has very specific advice: “It wouldn’t necessarily be inbound links to the image URL, although it could be, but what I mean in this context is links going to the page that has the image embedded on it. Just like in normal SEO, the anchor text of those inbound links and where they’re coming from and how many of them are, are all really important factors for image SEO and then SEO in general.”

5. Human Categorization: Human categorization comes from the early stages of developing recognition software. Google would hire people and they’d say, “label this.” In fact, Google was semi-famous for creating this game. It was called Google Image Labeler, and it would show you an image of, say, an apple, as Dover explains further.

“They would ask you in Family Feud style, which is a game show here in the United States, to list words that are associated with that object. You’d say something like apple, and you’d earn points if someone else also said apple. Maybe it’s red, Fuji, or Grandma Smith, or whatever it is. So other words that are associated with the image. And that way they could train their software to start to understand what general shapes and ideas mean within images,” Dover says.

While categorization has evolved, an eye for detail is still best done by the human eyes. But, at the end of the day, image SEO is the most effective as part of an overall SEO effort that is important to reach your desired customer base, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google.

“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 says.

The need for content alone, regardless of quality, is an old, outdated trend. Now you must set yourself apart to get those same clicks, according to Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz.org, in a recent video. See Fishkin’s SEO advice below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“It used to be the case that on the web, there was a lot of missing information, information that needed to exist, so you could produce low quality content and get traffics and ratings.” Fishkin says. “[Now] you need to be something special to stand out from the crowd.”

Standing out from the crowd is made easier with a few extra steps to make your content of a higher caliber than your competition, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google.

“The industry is constantly evolving and SEO has grown to encompass much more than on-site optimization. It’s really only five or ten percent of the total work,” Husayni says.

After all, SEO now is all about generating useful, high-quality content on a regular basis, along with technical research for keywords relevant to the company, and a long-term link building campaign. No matter which part of the process you are in, a strong SEO effort has the constant need for the production of updated content with useful, relevant information in it.

The demand for new content, all the time, makes creating quality content tough, but worth it, for those willing to put in the work, according to Fishkin.

“There is a big opportunity for people willing to say, ‘I’m going to have the best reviews in the city,’ ‘I’m going to have photos,’ ‘I’m going to interview the chef’. That qualitative information can make a big difference.”

So remember, sometimes less really is more.

Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google, has an answer to this question.

“Search engine optimization is like any other demanding industry in business,” says Husayni. “You don’t do it part time if you want to be successful.”

After all, when it comes to SEO, there is a big learning curve while acquiring skills, and it is an ongoing process, a fight to stay current. There are thousands of sites on the internet with tips, lists and tutorials about SEO techniques, including the Master Google website and blog, but search engine algorithms get updated regularly and without warning.

“The only constant about SEO is that it will change,” Husayni says. “One update can turn everything you’ve been doing on its head.”

Learning the basic concepts of SEO might not cost money, but there is still a cost. When a company or individual is wondering about whether they can do SEO on their own, they should carefully consider these questions:

• Do I have the time to keep up with frequent updates to algorithms and new techniques by reading blogs, breaking news and articles online?
• Do I have the skill level to research and write quality content for my site, including press releases and articles?
• Do I know where to submit articles and press releases or how to share new content on social networking sites?
• Do I have a good working knowledge of computer coding languages to manage and update the code of my site in order to implement new techniques while staying within Google’s Quality Guidelines and Terms Of Service?
• Do I have the stamina to continue doing this these things on a consistent basis?

If the answer is ‘no’ to any of those, the company or individual should consider hiring an SEO professional instead. Husayni works with small businesses frequently. In fact, it was his desire to help small businesses be able to compete with their larger competitors that have bigger budgets that got him into SEO in the first place.

“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,” says Husayni. “Call the office for a free consultation to find out.” Click here to contact us about our services.

I am not the first person to investigate this issue. The picture above, ”Paper Blogs”, by Bookwyrmish, was featured in a recent post on the same subject, by Alexander B. Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media. Howard cited two different experts arguing two sides of the issue. One argued that it was a waste of time, while the other said that he enjoyed interacting with customers, but Howard took the time to emphasize his own valid opinion that a blog should be a chance to build a community, not just to preach, which is why comments are so important.

“From where I sit tonight, whether you choose to have comments or not speaks to whether you want to create an online community,” Howard says. “which requires a human’s touch to manage and moderate, or to simply publish your thoughts publicly online, without making the necessary commitment of time and patience.”

Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google, agrees with the need for a quality blog with equally as useful comments. Without an interactive base, readers have no reason to read and comment on your posts, and that will leave you link-less, without the SEO opportunities that every business needs.

“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 [without search engine optimization].”

As for just how often to moderate your comments and how many posts you need to put up per week, consider these things to be a part of your overall marketing efforts. Stay white hat with these for optimal SEO. What exactly is white hat marketing? It includes quality content, site optimization, guest blogging, internal linking, and more. In our recent post, we defined white hat marketing and compared it to other practices. Check it out: Best SEO Practices: Black Hat vs. White Hat Techniques and the Gray Hat Area.

Let’s take a look at a few of the basics of white hat content: quality content, site optimization, link baiting, guest blogging, internal linking, and semantic markup. The differences between white, gray and black hat marketing efforts are described to perfection in the form of a clever picture titled SEO Wars: What Color is Your Lightsaber, featured in a recent article by Angie Schottmuller of Search Engine Watch.

The definitions of gray and black hat seo practices are also made more clear by this picture. The gray hat area of SEO techniques include: spinning/rewriting articles, reciprocal links, buying old/expired domains, and Google bombing/washing. Black hat techniques include: keyword stuffing, link farms, hidden text, cloaking, scraping, doorway pages, comment spam, and paid links/content+.

Keep in mind that both gray hat and black hat areas will hurt you in the long run, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google. Heed the warning of Google’s anti-spam strategy: they can distinguish between black hat and white hat SEO techniques, and your rank will rise and fall accordingly.

“The only thing not changing with SEO is that it’s always changing,” Husayni says. “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.”

After all, the battle lines between white hat, gray hat, and black hat techniques are drawn quite clearly, so pick an SEO practice and stick with it, urges Schottmuller, using Star Wars as an analogy.

“Will you uphold the righteous values of quality content and serve as a SEO Light Jedi, or do you long to be a master of deception as a SEO Sith Lord?” Schottmuller says. “Perhaps you’re a SEO Dark Jedi – once believing in white hat tactics and now thirsting for the dark side. Or perhaps you’re a SEO Jedi Fashionista – knowledgeable of both sides, but discreet in practices to keep up appearances.”

Our strong suggestion: do your search engine optimization efforts justice by sticking with white hat techniques.

“Search engine optimization is the ongoing process of making a website appealing to search engine spiders and readers alike through the site’s content, relevancy and popularity,” says Husayni, who is president of SEO firm Master Google.

One aspect of this SEO process is called on-page optimization, which entails altering a website’s code to make it search engine friendly, explains Saeed Khosravi, the operational manager at Master Google. While the internet has list after list of tips or tricks for doing that, sorting out the tried-and-true SEO techniques from outdated and detrimental ones is a never-ending process.

“Google’s algorithm is updated frequently, so what worked last month might be obsolete today,” says Khosravi.

The reason the search engine algorithms change frequently is because they are making adjustments to more effectively mimic the human behavior of reading, analyzing and organizing content. Husayni says some updates are intended to thwart exploitative SEO tactics used by black hat companies.

One of these big updates rolled out in the U.S. in Feb. 2011, and Google began “rating” websites on their content and user-experience. According to a recent article by Search Engine Land, the focus of the updated, named Panda, was to reduce the prominence of websites that have thin, low-quality and duplicate content. It also targeted sites that come up short based on other site-quality metrics, such as high advertisement-to-content ratios.

Where To Get Started:

Husayni says what he has said from the beginning of his career in the industry: that an ethical SEO company works with the Google algorithm instead of trying to take advantage of it. Here are some simple, current, effective and aboveboard methods that Husayni uses with his clients, ranging from the medical field to real estate to heating and cooling:

Easy to understand navigation. This includes the top menu, footer links, breadcrumb navigation and HTML sitemap. Do not make content hard to get to or structure the site in a way that only makes sense to experts in the industry.

Automatically updating sitemap. Set the XML sitemap to update automatically to keep the navigation current and the latest content easily accessible to search engine spiders and readers.

Utilize header tags to organize information. According to 3Schools.com, Header tags are used to define HTML headings with <h1> defining the most important heading and <h6> defining the least important heading. Using tags helps lay out textual information for the reader.

Link to other useful places within the site. This is also called friendly interlinking. Website content is supposed to be helpful for the reader. Linking to a page that expounds on a topic, issue or technique mentioned on a different page builds an internal link structure that benefits the business, the reader and the ranking on SERPs.

Use consistent URLs. Stick to one version URLs, redirecting all the other versions to the preferred one. For example, redirect non-www to www, https to http, and the one without trailing slash to the one with trailing slash.

Be informative with URLs. A short, keyword-rich URL is much more useful to readers than one that uses an ID number or another ambiguous parameter. Keywords need to accurately explain the page’s contents in a succinct way. This information shows up in the SERs and helps a reader decide if the information is relevant, which means Google is also factoring this into their algorithm.

Put unique page titles and descriptions in the code. The page title shows up at the top of the browser window, but the title and description also show up in the SER. Accurate, informative and short information helps a reader decide if the page is what they are looking for.

For example, search for “Google free optimization,” with Google on your browser. In my search, the Master Google website listed as the third result after the ads. The page title and description, as well as the URL, all provide key information about what the reader will find on the actual page.

These SEO tips are designed to make a website easier and better for the user, not just make a page rank higher on Google’s search engine. Husayni says that on-page optimization is only about five to 10 percent of the total SEO work, so he will explain more on his blog in the coming months about the other components needed to create a site Google will love.

Be Aware of Common SEO Mistakes: SEOFailBlog.com wants you to know that they’re watching for a variety of mistakes. From incorrect footer links, to a Google related searches fail, SEO Fail Blog puts the spotlight on bad practices.

Understand the Audience of New Platforms: Google+ is an amazing new tool for communication, but one that clearly wasn’t appreciated by Steve Yegge, an employee at Google, when he accidentally told the world about his misgivings with the new platform a few months ago. In a memo meant for Google employees on Google+, Yegge forgot one important thing: to click private instead of public post when sharing a blog. Read the now infamous memo on TechnoBaboy.com. One of the most shocking excerpts is of Yegge’s complaint that Google+ is simply a “prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership, down to the very lowest leaf workers. We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood.” Yegges was quick to post an apology. Let us all be considered warned about checking our settings twice.

Impatience With SEO Results: Quality takes time. Do not fear if a project has taken six weeks and the results are minimal. As you build links and prominence with Google, the people will click, according to Husayni.

“If people expect huge results in a very short period of time, they are bound to be disappointed,” he says. “Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that takes time, especially if the website has been in trouble for bad SEO practices in the past.”

Effectiveness with SEO pays off, after all. As it relates to Google search results in the orthodontic field, Husayni notes that, depending on location, there can be an increase in yearly income ranging from $50,000 to as much as $300,000.

“Americans performed 15.5 billion searches in 2010, and around 80 percent of customers research a product or service before making a purchase,” Husayni says. “So it doesn’t matter if you are offering dog grooming services, consulting or selling exotic cars, you want potential clients to be able to find you.”

The biggest search engine victory, though, was achieved by a search engine itself. According to Experian Hitwise, Google properties made for 11.98 percent of all U.S. visits, which is a 22 percent increase from 2010. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 6.81 percent.

As a stand-alone, the fastest-moving search terms of the year mainly focused on big events, disasters, and changes that happened on that specific day. The terms included: Hurricane Irene, Les Paul, Nick Ashford dies, Apophis Asteroid, Sheen dumped, Hurricane Irene path and Amber Cole. Looking at the top public figures and the top five searches in the movie category is equally as amusing (and maybe even a little scary to some degree, in some cases).

Top public figure searches:

1. Justin Bieber
2. Casey Anthony
3. Kim Kardashian
4. Nicki Minaj
5. Selena Gomez
6. Charlie Sheen

Top five movie titles:

1. Star Wars
2. Transformers 3
3. (Twilight) Breaking Dawn
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
5. Fast Five

Looking at the top hits for 2011 is fun and provides some insight, but the analysis goes much deeper when comparing the results of 2011 with 2010. A few important differences, as noted by the Experian Hitwise study: Facebook was the top-visited website for the second year, making up 10.29 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011, which is a whopping 15 percent increase from 2010. Google.com ranked second, with 7.70 percent of visits, which is a 7 percent increase for them, trailed by YouTube with 3.17 percent, and Yahoo! Mail at 2.95 percent with Yahoo! at 2.47 percent.

Check out the Top 10 most-visited websites for 2010 vs. 2011:

Top 10 in 2010:

1. Facebook.com
2. Google.com
3. Mail.Yahoo.com
4. Yahoo.com
5. YouTube.com
6. Msn.com
7. MySpace.com
8. Mail.Live.com
9. Search.Yahoo.com
10. Bing.com

Top 10 in 2011:

1. Facebook.com
2. Google.com
3. YouTube.com
4. Mail.Yahoo.com
5. Yahoo.com
6. Bing.com
7. Search.Yahoo.com
8. Gmail.com
9. Mail.Live.com
10. Msn.com

Taking a critical look at both the 2010 and 2011 search terms, especially in relation to search engine optimization, makes for an important task for 2012, and that is meeting the challenge of knowing what’s current and anticipating what is on the horizon, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google.

After all, SEO helps a website’s visibility by making sure that the site’s language gives an optimal chance for it to be found when a web surfer performs a search.

“The key is to recognize your key audience and think like them,” Husayni says. “For instance, if Sinai is working on dental website marketing for a client, we have to think in terms of what words people use when they search for a dentist. Then we build the client’s entire Google marketing efforts around those 100-200 words.”

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

“Different searches have different freshness needs,” says software engineer Amit Singhal on Google’s official blog. “This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.”

Although the freshness update is estimated to impact 35 percent of searches (at least one result on the page), it will only be noticeable to the average user among 6 – 10 percent of searches. In other words, the update is more effective than will be noticed.

So how is freshness and relevancy measured by Google’s standards? SEO expert and Master Google founder, Ali Husayni, points to respective topics.

“For ‘news’ items, the later a page has been created and content developed, the better rank it will have,” Husayni says. “For other topics such as ‘historical events,’ Google may include old pages along with new analysis.”

Account Director at Punch Communications and Huffington Post blogger Philip Keightley explored the same question in a recent post.

“What constitutes relevance? In Google’s eyes, hundreds of factors, with freshness being a recent development,” Keightley says. “What constitutes freshness? Real-time social networks such as Twitter and to some extent Facebook and Google+ have added additional tools to Google’s armory, since it can now crawl the content from these networks and deduce which content people are interested in, what it is and if it is relevant for its search results.”

The freshness update has not only affected search results, but has already begun to affect the methods of developers and writers as well. Former Master Google writer Kristen Peters has expressed how the freshness update influences her approach.

“Google’s freshness update has certainly affected our writers’ methods here at Master Google,” Peters says. “We always knew that content was a huge part of optimization, but this development has made it all the more important to write quality blog posts more often and has encouraged us to keep an eye on industry news, as the timeliness of the content is also a crucial component.”

Keightley shared thoughts on the immediate future as well.

“This presents a number of opportunities to marketers, regardless of their size and ammunition,” Keightley says. “Essentially, by creating a digital social object, whether that is in the form of an application on Facebook, a microsite or even a blog post, the buzz around that content will have a far greater benefit in search.”

Husayni does not believe any one component to a site warrants particular care and attention, but notes the importance of general consistency as with such formats as blogs.

“Blogs seem to be an important part of any site because they get updated on a regular basis,” Husayni says. “I suggest site owners should write for their sites on a regular basis. The more fresh, quality and relevant content they post to their sites, the better chances of exposure and inclusion on Google search results they will have.”

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

1. Understand the Importance of an Inbound Link. Inbound links are one of the key components to quality SEO, because it tells Google that your website is trusted and important. More links make you an authority. To further understand the anatomy of a link, see the full explanation in a recent article by Andrew Pitre on HubSpot’s blog. And remember, not all links are created equal.

“If you were to get an inbound link from a domain with lots of its own inbound links, like the New York Times, for example, you would get more authority transferred to your domain than if you got a link from my friend Brian’s blog,” Pitre says.

2. Target Blogs With Keyword Research. If you’re looking for a guest blogger, please skip ahead to the next step.

For the writers: what do you want to write about? Think of words or phrases that you currently want to be found under in a Google search. Search for these keywords on Google and determine the list of websites that you wish to write for. To further expand your horizons, use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which will give a thorough list of the keywords from the previous month that relate. Another Adwords column also displays those keywords’ popularity for the last month, a very valuable tool in deciding which sites are worth your time.

Another option is signing up for a service like WordTracker.com, according to Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google. WordTracker’s function is like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, in that it helps you find and evaluate keywords.

3. Join a (Free) Service Like Blogger Link Up. BloggerLinkUp.com is a website that connects blog writers with website owners who need blog content. Each week, a newsletter is sent out with lists of requested blog posts, and writers wanting to be a guest poster. The form is the same, whether you are a prospective guest blogger or a website in need of a guest blogger.

4. Make Yourself Uncomfortable With Your Guest Blog Efforts (Within Reason). What makes you uncomfortable about writing or hosting a guest blog post? Change can be scary, but we need to try every serious idea we have at least once, urges Cathy Stucker, the founder of BloggerLinkUp.com, in a recent post.

“The problem is that too often we don’t try a second or third time (or even a first!) with marketing activities which seem difficult,” Stucker says. “I was terrified the first time I gave a speech. But I got up and did it anyway. You can, too.”

So, forget your fears, and remember, the worst thing that can happen with new content is that, well, you don’t receive any at all. Go get it.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

The most promising news is that of a Panda update, a search engine algorithm update from Google, which was initially released in the U.S. in February of 2011. It restructured parts of the algorithms to integrate a rating system of sorts for websites. One effective part of this update was penalizing content farms, which are typically sites with thin or shallow content, or sites with a poor content-to-link ratio.

Danny Sullivan, an SEO guru who heads up Search Engine Land, took to a recent article to define content farms as companies or people who look for popular searches in a particular category and generate shoddy content tailored to those searches, usually spending little time, effort and money to do so, with the sole goal of getting clicks.

McCreadie’s research further shows the ever-increasing intensity of the war between search engines and content farms, and, luckily for users, search engines seem to be prevailing. Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google, agrees that search engines are winning, and improving the user experience in the process.

“This win against content farms is good news for reputable SEO firms that adhere to white-hat techniques,” Husayni says. “Many sites were hit hard by this update, but none of our clients lost rankings.”

This reinforces the point that Master Google’s SEO is on the right track and that good SEO services will continue to be in demand. Some critics of SEO have said that the industry is dying and losing relevance due to social media and networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but Husayni is adamant that they are wrong.

“The industry is constantly evolving and SEO has grown to encompass much more than on-site optimization. It’s really only five or ten percent of the total work,” Husayni says. “As long as we continue to grow with it, SEO will continue to be relevant.”

The vast majority of SEO is generating useful, high-quality content on a regular basis, technical research for keywords relevant to the company, and a long-term link building campaign to get the new information out to the readers who are searching for it.

Google’s search engine algorithms are constantly being refined to get more effective at mimicking human readers’ behaviors. Husayni says he is just glad that the updates continue to weed out the SEO companies that give a negative reputation to the industry he is so passionate about.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

1. Using YouTube for Video SEO: Do you have a YouTube business page yet? Don’t worry, an entire How-To Make a YouTube Business Page support forum has been established on the subject. Video SEO is all about original content, after all. Content that sets your business apart from the rest, when done correctly, will be more than enough of a reason for a viewer to click on your site, and to become a customer.

2. Read SEO News Daily: You are what you read, it’s true. Just ask Ali Husayni, CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google. Simply looking at sites that connect the latest trends of SEO, (like our blog), Search Engine Land, and SEOMoz.org, will keep you afloat in the world of ever-changing SEO tips and news.

3. Never Allow a Duplicate Batch of Information: It might seem like a time saver, but don’t be fooled by the idea that more content is better, no matter what. Less is more in this case. Duplicate content, according to Google webmaster central is simply described as “substantive blocks of content” or “content within or across domains” that are similar or the same. According to Husayni, this can mean the end of a website’s previously high ranking, as rankings will drop to 10+ pages due to such practices. While there are many other types of duplications, this is a big offender for many businesses.

4. Optimize Your Business Facebook Page: In a recent Search Engine Watch Article about Facebook SEO, Kristi Hines suggests approaching Facebook SEO in a fresh way. She asks users to imagine that a Facebook fan page is you or your brand’s website.

“If you want to keyword optimize your Facebook fan page… pull SEO elements from your page’s content for additional optimization,” Hines says.

Here is what Hines says your Facebook Business Page SEO should look like from an optimization standpoint:

SEO title: The name of your page plus | Facebook.

Meta description: The name of your page plus the About description of your page, followed by | Facebook.

H1: The name of your page.

The process is pretty straightforward, and much more accessible to small businesses now than in the past.

5. Follow the Trend of Finding time for SMM and SEO: Believe it or not, the two can be very happy together. According to a recent Constant Contact Survey, 45% of small business owners said that social media marketing (as part of site traffic generating) doesn’t take too much time out of their day to make it viable. This attitude is a complete reversal from just six months ago, when time was cited as a big concern against doing any type of marketing. But social media marketing only goes so far. The next step is SEO, which is going to drive targeted visitors to your site, according to Husayni.

“We measure our success by the number of targeted visitors who find our clients’ sites using their keywords – main keywords as well as secondary keywords,” Husayni said.

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

But it’s time to face the facts: with over two billion videos watched on YouTube each day, video SEO is a subject that can no longer be ignored. Increasingly, SEO experts agree that a focus on online videos does wonders to increase site traffic.

“A video result in position 4 or 5 may get a better CTR [click-through rate] than a non-video result in position 2 or 3,” claims Dave Holland, co-founder of Smart Video, a SEO provider specializing in video optimization. A thumbnail of the video next to your Google search result instantly draws the eye of the viewer, enticing them to make that ‘click.’

And is it any wonder that, in today’s YouTube age, people are eager for video results? Every inquiry, from how to make chocolate cake, to how to turn your furnace pilot light on, has been converted to short, easy-to-read snippets. For literally every type of business, there are relevant video companions that can be embedded into your website. Are you a local veterinarian? Try featuring an adorable pet video on your site. After all, nothing draws an online crowd quicker than cute cats.

But do not just rely on linking to someone’s work. The best way to maximize your social media marketing and video SEO is to produce original content. Create a YouTube page and start uploading! Check out YouTube’s tips on how to make a great first impression for your channel. Video searches will increase YouTube page hits, which will then lead viewers straight to your homepage.

Though building a YouTube business channel is relatively simple, not everyone has the time or know-how to operate the site themselves—let alone actually produce the videos. This is why companies that specialize in SMM and SEO are vital assets to small business success. Along with Twitter, Facebook and the usual social media suspects, a user-friendly, informative YouTube channel creates the exposure necessary to remain on the surface-level amidst a sea of Google search results, instead of drowning on page 100.

With that extra online marketing money your company has saved up, you can follow the example of Best Buy, T-Mobile and Hot Wheels, who hired video content professionals to make their YouTube videos for them. Think hip, clever viral video meets online commercial, funneling thousands of viewers to company sites—successful Internet marketing in the hands of experts for less than the price of a billboard!

Perhaps the greatest advantage to creating original videos is the opportunity to go viral and all the fame that comes along with it. You may not recognize the name Tom Dickson, but if you’ve ever wondered whether that iPad you’re holding will blend, he is the only guy in the world to ask.

Going viral is rare, but you don’t need 20 million hits to be successful; video content always helps brand recognition and business credibility. Consistently uploading videos, acquiring a loyal fan base and placing expert talent at the helm will increase the traffic, integrity and ultimately the bottom line of any business.

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

After all, as we mentioned in January of last year, SEO changes as Google’s search engine does, which makes it all the more important to stay with the trends. And not to fear, Husayni still remains optimistic that no matter how it continues to evolve, SEO works and will continue to work in the foreseeable future, even with the added features introduced by Google+. Here are some of the changes in SEO that experts expect to see in 2012.

Unique Content, in Real Time: While Google’s search algorithms continue to emphasize the performance of a website, it is even more important to provide new content, especially content in real time. Content that encourages feedback is timely, every time, according to marketing strategist David Meerman Scott, during a recent interview with Socialnomics.net.

“Social media gives us the ability to communicate instantly, yet most marketers have not developed the communication skills to address real time,” Scott said. “Marketers have been trained with a campaign mentality, spending weeks planning, designing and executing in a sequential manner… [using a] new mentality, infrastructure and workflow to meaningfully participate in real time,” Scott says.

Spend more time not only thinking about your target audience and what kind of content they need, but when they need that content. Timely content encourages engaged feedback from viable sites, which helps your Google ranking, according to Husayni.

“If you want to be on the 1st page of Google make an effort to create content that will get the users involved in a conversation,” says Husayni. “Respond to every comment you get on your website. Be nice and offer guidance. When other users see how responsive you are, they will visit your website more frequently as well.”

Focus on User Quality, Not Quantity: This much is still true regarding users: if your site is getting good reviews from users, it will improve your Google ranking. If it’s getting bad reviews, the reverse. But remember, more clicks don’t necessarily mean more customers or higher customer satisfaction rates. Encouraging good reviews by interacting with customers is more important than ever, according to a Fall 2011 Constant Contact Survey study. Sixty percent of responding businesses reported that they enjoy engaging with all customers and prospects who post comments on social media platforms, whether those posts are positive or negative. Consumer feedback can lead, of course, to a higher customer retention and satisfaction rate.

Social Media Continues to Increase in SEO Importance: It’s true that social media is one of the factors influencing natural search rankings for Google. So, more than ever, you must consider social media as part of your SEO promotion strategy. Try to get inbound links from bloggers. If you release a new product, you want to have someone influential twitter about it. Be sure you have a Facebook presence. 

Targeted Websites: Be aware of how your target audience does research and try to entice viewers like more traditional marketing strategies. SEO companies like Master Google note that Google is looking for those sites that are valuable to users. You also need to find the online communities that your target consumer frequents. This will let you reach viewers as a group rather than individually.

The Rise of SEO-Led Marketing Campaigns: Increasingly, all marketing will be driven by SEO. Radio, TV, and print advertising will all be part of SEO campaigns to educate the users about products and services. There is an audience that traditional media reaches, but you have half the chance of reaching as many of them as you would have 10 years ago, according to Paul Gillin, a respected social media marketing guru and Author of The New Influencers. After all, in the last eight years, we have gone through a shift in consumerism. We begin with a search engine, as Gillin points out in his forum at the SuperGenius Conference.

“We used to go to a library and browse, now we expect it to be there,” Gillin says.

With a search engine’s place established by expert after expert, SEO ranking is at the heart of the campaign, rather than being an afterthought, and that is the new normal.

Geography is Even More Important Than it Was Last Year: Google Pages is increasingly part of Google’s search engine results. Google is also working on ways to incorporate the user’s location into results. As more and more people use GPS-enabled phones for searches, geographical considerations will play an even bigger role this year.

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

Ali Husayni, the founder of the SEO consulting firm Master Google, helps businesses find those answers and establish their SEO teams while minimizing their risks and maximizing their return on investment.

“Putting together an in-house SEO program does not have to be a bumpy ride,” Husayni says. “Using an SEO consultant to get the team up and running makes the process smoother and faster, and you are much more likely to get effective SEO from the beginning.”

Getting Started

Before doing anything else, a business that wants to set up an SEO program has to research their market. Finding out who the competition is and how stiff it is helps with the next step of making a plan and budget.  After all, a business needs to ask questions, and lots of them.

The first questions to ask revolve around a business’s target market. Things to consider are varied, but of equal importance. For instance, how competitive is the market? How much investment is needed in marketing to stay competitive? How much effort is it going to take to rank within the top three? Top five? On the first page of Google search results?

After market goals are set, naturally businesses progress to questions about the goals for SEO. What will SEO accomplish for the company? How does the team know it is making progress? How will return on investment be measured? What strategies are in place to convert onsite visitors to sales?

While researching the market, read articles and news about the industry in general to learn the latest trends and happenings. After all. they will be affecting the SEO team the company is trying to establish.

In a recent article by SmartBlog, Simon Heseltine, AOL’s Director of Search Engine Optimization, recommends using sites like SearchEngineWatch, an online resource for news and articles on SEO, PPC and Social Media.

“The SEO community is also very active on Twitter, Google+, etc.  Follow as many as you can, listen and participate, you’ll find articles and news that you may otherwise have missed,” Heseltine says.

While a consultant will be the most efficient and helpful, Husayni says that SEOMoz.org, Search Engine Land and Matt Cutts’ blog (Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team), are all wise choices for resources to read up on.

“A consultant creates a customized strategy and roadmap for setting up the company’s in-house SEO,” says Husayni. “Then the team receives training and is guided through the process of fully integrating SEO into the dynamics of the organization, daily workflow and politics.”

Drawing up a realistic budget that takes into account the resources that will be needed is made simple by using the information gathered from the research about competition, the market, and the company’s SEO goals. Typically, two separate budgets work the best — one for labor, the other for promotional expenses, which included directory listings and press release submissions.

Decide On A Framework

The research should give plenty of information to work with for the next step of creating a framework for the team, though opinions often differ on how many team members are needed. There is no right or wrong answer because each company has specific needs and a certain budget. Some companies want part-time employees, some want full-time. Some want a one-person show, while other companies might choose to hire separate people for positions including tech, writers, a public relations specialist, researcher, and a number of other openings.

Bob Tripathi, an internet marketing business expert and SearchEngineWatch.com blogger, insists that passion can make up for lack of manpower in a recent blog post. “Much can be accomplished in a small to medium company by even an army of one,” says Tripathi.

Husayni agrees that a well-rounded SEO professional can accomplish a lot. However, he says, a person who both knows the technical aspects of SEO and is an effective writer is a rare jewel, which is why Husayni recommends one of each.

Assembling The Team Member (Or Members)

Now that the company knows what they are looking for, and how much they have to spend, they can start hiring the team. But what makes a good SEO expert? Businesses want people that are capable of running a full-fledged SEO campaign and running it well.

According to Husayni, the best way to determine that is to look at the applicant’s track record by asking them questions and scrutinizing samples of his or her work.

An SEO expert will have, at the very least, a proficiency in (X)HTML, on-site and off-site optimization, Java Script, WordPress and link building. They will also have examples of their successes. Questions about a hypothetical website can reveal gaps in knowledge or confirm the skills listed on the resume:

• What’s the most important factor in optimizing a site?
• What are three important things you change in a site when first optimizing it?
• What are the top three optimization mistakes an SEO guy can make?
• How do you plan to increase link popularity?
• How do you keep up with the changes in the SEO world?

Getting a good idea of an SEO writer’s track record, on the other hand, is just as important. This person will be developing content for the website and producing articles and press releases that act as the voice of the company. Copy that is easy to read and free of grammar and spelling errors is essential.

A writer needs to know how to create fresh, relevant content that incorporates the company’s keywords. Of course, the well-written information has to be put out there for the target demographic to find, so a writer that already knows industry leaders and ways to generate in-bound and out-bound links through content is a big plus.

“The big caveat here is when people know the right questions to ask but are not sure if the answers are correct or good ones,” says Husayni. A consultant can quickly assess whether a candidate is capable of managing an SEO campaign and getting results.

People who are looking for a general guide or description of characteristics an in-house SEO needs can check out a summary by Tribathi in a recent blog post.

Put In The Time And Be Patient

Time is often the biggest concern for businesses starting up an SEO program. They are impatient to get things up and running, and they want to get to the results part right away. But it takes time to hammer out logistics. It takes time to find and hire quality professionals. It also takes time to get results. The main thing to keep in mind is being able to trust each service provider, because one bad egg could potentially harm the marketing campaign.

“Each site claims it holds the mantle of SEO and is the expert on the subject, but only a few sites can be trusted,” says Husayni.

He recommends allotting one to two months for the hiring and training period since a hands-on and web-savvy individual typically needs about six-ten hours of coaching to understand the basics of best SEO practices.

“Hiring the wrong SEO team, or hiring the right team but not training them, means the company may lose its edge over the competition,” says Husayni. “Hiring a consultant or coach will save months and possibly years of headache.”

In-House SEO Success

Now, for the answer everyone is waiting for: when will the company see results?

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. The length of time it takes to see results varies based on the SEO team, the market, the budget and the website. To put that in more concrete terms, businesses that outsource to Master Google can expect SEO performance to steadily improve over two to three months; optimal results usually take six months to a year.

In-house SEO is worth doing, which means it is worth doing well. The initial setup may be time-consuming, but with a clear SEO strategy, and patience, it is definitely worth doing.

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

“For large companies with a large website and a big marketing budget, in-house SEO has been a no-brainer,” says Husayni. “Smaller companies are realizing that SEO is a force to be reckoned with, and that they need it to be competitive in their market.”

One example of in-house SEO and what it can accomplish is the Huffington Post, a news source with syndicated columnists, blogs and news stories. Due to the SEO work of their in-house team, Huffingtonpost.com made its name by outranking both print and broadcast news organizations’ websites, such as the Washington Post and CNN, even when these other sites were the original source of the articles, according to a recent New York Times article.

With results like this, business owners see the success of large companies. They also see their competitors doing well in search engine results (SERs), and are determined to get similar results. Some try outsourcing SEO first, but the average business owner does not have the knowledge to discern a real SEO expert from the con artist.

“They may try one or two SEO companies and get burned,” says Husayni, who offers free SEO consulting to qualified business owners. “There are a lot of SEO firms that make a client an SEO guarantee, including big promises about results and timeframes that they just can’t deliver on.”

A recent SmashBlogTips.com blog post about small businesses and in-house SEO makes a similar statement about scammers, adding four other reasons to get an in-house SEO expert: saving money in the long-run, reducing dependence, confidentiality, and individualized attention. The added bonus of having in-house SEO is avoiding SEO scam artists, which Husayni cites as the number one reason for the recent rise of in-house SEO.

“Instead of potentially wasting money on a company that doesn’t deliver, businesses are investing that money in an SEO team,” says Husayni, who offers a package for Top Of Google, or a 100 percent money-back guarantee.

But there are naysayers to the idea of in-house SEO, according to Bob Tripathi, an internet marketing expert and SearchEngineWatch.com blogger. Tripathi contends that in-house SEO is often undervalued because monthly SEO dashboards or quarterly business reviews cannot capture the intangible benefits it offers the company.

Beyond improving search engine rankings, which leads to increased visibility and more customers, Tripathi says that in-house SEO can provide unique thought leadership, unite departments, and attract outside expertise. The task of creating an in-house SEO program from the ground up can be quite overwhelming, though, which is why Husayni recommends businesses work with an SEO consultant or coach throughout the process.

Simon Heseltine, AOL’s Director of Search Engine Optimization, recommends that companies without experience in-house hire an SEO agency to help get the program up and running, as discussed in a recent SmartBlogs.com article.

“I’d say that for a company that is going to start an in-house team, they need to make sure that they know what questions to ask and what answers to expect,” says Heseltine.

Husayni says that utilizing a consultant helps businesses minimizes the risks of setting up an SEO team, and maximizes the return on investment (ROI), by showing them where to start, who to hire, what to focus on and how to measure success. Husayni expects the trend of small businesses turning to in-house SEO teams to continue, eventually becoming the industry norm. Because of this, Husayni is currently developing additional content on his website and blog, including how-to posts, top SEO secrets (that are actually just grounded advice from an experienced professional), and information about hiring SEO specialists, as well as other relevant articles.

“SEO is a dynamic industry, always changing, always presenting new challenges to overcome and puzzles to solve,” says Husayni. “This is just a new way for Master Google to help clients achieve and maintain their search engine results’ success.”

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

According to Cutts, you can have great content on your site and be completely lacking in good SEO, yet your site still could rank well on Google.

Ali Husayni, CEO of Master Google and our resident SEO expert, agrees.

“Great content will attract inbound links by its nature, and sites that constantly write great content attract visitors and Google spiders as well,” Ali says. “Google ranks old and new pages of these sites above their competitors – thus removing the need for out-of-the-box or black hat SEO.”

That’s what Cutts is referring to, he says. Being an SEO expert is not mutually exclusive of being great at content development. A person can possess a great deal of knowledge about all of the little SEO nuances that help optimize a site and make it friendly for Google spiders. But a Google spider isn’t going to purchase your product or service. You need human traffic to come to your site. And once they visit your site, you have to give them a reason to stay and to make a buying decision.

Typically, that is done by providing useful information—good content. Good content is original and relevant. It answers a question, addresses a need and paints you as a subject matter expert.

So while we obviously are big believers in SEO, we also are squarely in Cutts’ corner regarding content. We view SEO and content as being complimentary to one another. That is evident when you consider the makeup of our SEO team here at Master Google, nearly half of which is comprised of expert copywriters.

“Great content also needs great SEO to get ranked better,” Husayni says.

Being aware of what people’s interests are plays hand-in-hand with writing great content. For example, if you run a shoe manufacturing facility, but you’re unaware of what styles of shoes customers want, you will lose your business to your market-aware competitor. Whether SEO helps our writers understand what to write, or how to write it in a fashion that gets the content indexed, one thing is for certain: it helps people find that great content.

There is a post here that asks some questions from those who’ve had positive experience about our Free SEO services. Please kindly visit this page and leave your comment:

http://allmytricks.hubpages.com/hub/Can-they-optimize-your-blog-mastergoogle-review

Thanks,

Ali Husayni

Christmas lights, shopping bags, and endless family gatherings… it is a season full of fun, and distractions. Here at Master Google, we think that the end of the calendar year is the perfect time to plan your marketing budget for the new year. So, what’s the smartest budget choice in 2012?

Since marketing is all about getting to those wanting your product, no matter which marketing tactic(s) you choose, the web is the place for prospective buyers to find reviews and information.  A recent Pew Research Center Poll shows how consumers decide where to eat and what to buy:

• 51 percent use the Internet

• search engines – 31%
• specialty websites – 17%
• social media – 3%

 • 31 percent read newspapers

• printed copies – 26%
• newspaper websites – 5%

 • 23 percent take the word of friends/family/reputation

 • 8 percent watch local TV

Let’s take a look at just how effectively SMM, SEO and YouTube reaches target audiences.

The Skinny on SMM:

Its use is on the rise, and the cost is nearly nil for initial output, which has made it more popular. It’s viable, too, according to a Fall 2011 study done by email marketing provider, Constant Contact. After surveying just over 2,000 small businesses, they found that 81percent of them use some form of it. The most common SMM remarks were that it is “easy to use,” and “works with my customers.” Facebook was cited as the number one tool, followed by Twitter, LinkedIn and video sharing.

What to Know About SEO:

SEO works, when used effectively. Effectively is the key word, pun intended. When looking at the Google keyword tool in AdWords, for instance, many changes have taken place, with the addition of everything from mobile apps to Google+ features. The questionable accuracy of keywords, as researched in our current AdWords-Focused Article, puts SEO up to scrutiny. In light of these worries, SEO expert Ali Husayni gives us assurance of the continuing stability of SEO as a viable marketing tool, as highlighted in our recent interview.

“SEO, and Google SEO in particular, are still very solid marketing tools for any small-, medium- and large-sized business,” Husayni said. “We do realize that, since Google+ has been born, SEO has become even more complicated, but at Master Google we’re staying at the top of the game.”

Now, let’s move to the often-talked about, seldom-understood potential of YouTube.

YouTube’s Place in Online Marketing and Media:

The face of the media is changing, and Paul Gillin, a respected social media marketing guru and Author of The New Influencers, stresses the importance of being bold with the new opportunities presented by being able to target an audience. Using traditional media is limited, after all, according to Gillin’s forum at the SuperGenius Conference.

“We are seeing a collapse of mainstream media because it’s based on an economic model that is highly inefficient,” Gillin said. “If you’re interested in selling wedding gowns, in the past, you had to market to 100 percent of the population, instead of the one percent looking for a wedding dress. Now we can reach those people directly.”

Why is this industry expert a proponent of YouTube? For one thing, I found Paul Gillin there. (Fun side note: have you heard of Justin Beiber, the song Friday by Rebecca Black, Antoine Dodson, or Auto-Tune the News? They all have YouTube to thank for their fame.)

As for the smartest budget choice in 2012, we at Master Google say a healthy dose of all three. If you have any questions regarding your marketing, please contact us directly. Happy marketing, and happy holidays.

To know how many people search for a specific keyword, there are many tools available. But the most trustworthy one is Google’s Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. Because it is pulling the data from its search engine.

In the SEO community, it is common knowledge that Google’s Adwords traffic estimation tool is at best inaccurate. But no one really knows how Google measures these numbers. According to Google, it is “averaging” each month’s search volume across its search engine platforms. But for a long time I’ve been suspicious that these numbers are not real. So, finally I decided to conduct a test.

I selected six websites that we have access to their Analytics data and are ranking within the top five positions on Google search results – world-wide – for somewhat competitive keywords. The tables below illustrates my findings.

The first table are the keywords in Exact format. Which means we’re only looking at Google’s traffic for these keywords when the exact phrase is searched for as well as the traffic for the same keyword:

The following table are for the same keywords but this time using the “Phrase” selection. In other words, the searcher could have used the same phrase in conjunction with other words:

As you see the number of people visiting the site is much less than the number of monthly search volume (Traffic Estimate) regardless of whether we searched for “Phrase” or “Exact” keywords.

It is less likely that less than 10% of those searching for any given search querry are going to visit the top ranking sites.

Therefore, my conclusion is that the Traffic Estimate is blown out of proportion. 

But by how much?

Looking at the numbers, we can say that these numbers are blown out of proportion by 3 times and up to 100 times depending on the search query.

Where is the success in SEO?

Another important factor is that we’re able to generate a few times more traffic to our clients’ sites than the total search volume for their main keyword(s). For example, doctorjennifer.com’s main keyword is Minneapolis Orthodontist. But this keyword only receives 58 searches each month (if that was accurate). On the other hand, the site is receiving over 1,000 hits through organic search results. The reason is that we are not just focusing on the MAIN keyword. We work on a pool of different keywords related to each site/business. Doctorjennifer.com for instance has over 100 keywords we’re targeting.

For those clients that care very much for having that top ranking placement on Google for their main keyword I have to say that that is not so important compared to being ranked for many of their keywords that may not be as popular.

In other words if our client is not ranking at the top for Minneapolis Orthodontist, they’re just losing a very small fraction of the search volume; however, there are 50 other keywords (Minneapolis Children Orthodontist, St. Paul Invisalign, Best Orthodontist in Eagan, etc.) that the client has a top five ranking. The site is going to get traffic and business from Google generated through secondary keywords.

We measure our success by the number of targeted visitors who find our clients’ sites using their keywords – main keywords as well as secondary keywords.

Optimization means making a site “relevant” to specific search terms (keywords) so that Google or other search engines recognize these keywords and rank the site better for them. Thus, the term “relevancy” was derived from this notion.

Here I should note that most of the “black-hat” SEO concentrates on optimization. In a future post, we’ll discuss some of the no-no’s when it comes to Google SEO and  more specifically optimization for Google.

Our team’s focus is on Google optimization. Everything we do is approved and accepted by Google as explained by Matt Cutts through Google Webmaster Guidelines. And here is a glimpse of what our team considers best optimization practices that we conduct on a daily basis for our new client (not everything serves to better the ranks, some are simply for monitoring purposes):

1. Adding you website to our Google analytics and setting up the tracking code (to monitor traffic coming through your site).
2. Adding your site to our Google webmaster tools and completing the verification process (the reports through webmaster tools identify any optimization issues your site may have).
3. Creating a sitemap.xml file and submitting it to Google webmaster tools (and keeping this sitemap.xml file up to date).
4. Creating/updating the HTML sitemap page of the website.
5. Make sure the search engines are not blocked through no index Meta tag or robots.txt file or anything else that blocks search engines from accessing/indexing your website.
6. Exterminate any instances of duplicate content.
7. Remove any instances of black hat SEO (hidden text or link, <noembed> tags, link farming, Meta redirection, cloaking, doorway pages, long keyword-rich comment tags).
8. Redirecting the non-www URL to www version. For example, http://mastergoogle.com will be redirected to http://www.mastergoogle.com/.
9. Trailing slash redirection. In other words making the site pages consistent. For example all the pages should have the trailing slash at the end of the URL.
10. Creating keyword rich URL’s for all the pages.
11. One version URL for home page (Any references to index.php or default.aspx and any other versions of the home page URL should be redirected to the main URL: ie. http://www.mastergoogle.com/).
12. Building a blog for the site and hosting it on the site. Example: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/.
13. Creating and optimizing permalinks for blog posts.
14. Installing “SEO” plug-ins for the blog.
15. Installing a “Sitemap” plug-in for blog.
16. URL canonicalization for CMS website (Very important for eCommerce websites and blogs).
17. Adding your blog links to the footer links and/or top menus.
18. Adding latest blog post section to the home page (important for fresh content development – discussed in Part I).
19. Text optimization. Inserting the appropriate keywords in the right places.
20. Meta description and title tag optimization (unique Meta tags for each page is very important).
21. Image alt tag and co-text optimization (co-text is a notion we borrowed from linguistics to refer to any textual content surrounding an image or any specific keyword).
22. Domain renewal for 5 years or more.
23. Avoid excessive use of “Meta redirection” and use “301 redirection” instead.

Also note that Google web master accounts should be observed on a weekly basis to make sure there are no not-found pages.

In an article featured on SitePoint—an online media outlet for Web professionals—Miles Burke said that “there’s a clock ticking” on SEO. Contrary to the title, “SEO is Dead,” Burke said that there is still some time for SEO, but not much.

Husayni said that this is simply not true, as “+1’s and ‘shares’ are going to be added to over 200 criteria that Google’s algorithm takes into consideration.”

“Links from sites that have a vast link popularity are still going to be the dominant factor in the algorithm,” Husayni added.

Links will remain as the most important factor, Husayni said, because of the +1 button’s narrow margin of influence and its loopholes for corruption. “It seems that +1’s are easy to purchase, for those conducting black-hat SEO,” he said. “And the button only makes a difference in search results if you’re logged into your Gmail account and someone in your network has +1’ed something relevant to your search query.”

Despite its limitations, Husayni said that the power of Google+ and its new impact on search is still significant.

“Nevertheless, the importance of Google+, +1’s and ‘shares’ should not be underestimated,” he admitted. “So, in any SEO work, social media and Google+ should be important factors to consider.”

Right now, the degree of its ability to effect search results remains to be seen, but Google is “certainly testing this feature,” according to Husayni.

“I’ve seen more search results popping up with sites myself, or someone in my circles has +1’ed,” he explained. “So, if I can get Matt Cutts to +1 our site, then we’re set, right?”

In the article, Burke argues that he cares more about what his friends think than about “business propaganda,” referring to SEO. Husayni thinks that searchers trust lies somewhere in between.

“If you’re going to watch a movie or buy Nike shoes, you might want your networks’ feedback,” Husayni said. “But if you’re going to study heart disease, I’m not so sure. If you combine your friends’ recommendations and Google’s traditional algorithm, then we’re certainly looking at more accurate and trustworthy results.”

In the end, Husayni said that SEO works and will continue to work in the foreseeable future, even with the added features introduced by Google+.

“SEO, and Google SEO in particular, are still very solid marketing tools for any small-, medium- and large-sized business,” he said. “I consider Google+ features an added element to SEO. We do realize that, since Google+ has been born, SEO has become even more complicated, but at Master Google we’re staying at the top of the game.”

StatCounter Global Stats—the company’s research outlet—reported that Chrome took 25.69 percent of the world market in November, with Firefox trailing just behind at 25.23 percent. Just two years ago, Chrome held only 4.66 percent of the global market.

Chrome’s huge jump was not enough to surpass Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which maintains a strong lead with 40.63 percent.

“We can look forward to a fascinating battle between Microsoft and Google as the pace of growth of Chrome suggests that it will become a real rival to Internet Explorer globally,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen in a press release. “Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads, our stats show that people are actually using it to access the Web also.”

In the United States, Chrome still holds just 17.3 percent of the user market. Firefox retains second place with 20.09 percent, falling far behind the clear winner, Internet Explorer, with 50.66 percent of the U.S. market. Although Chrome sits in third place, the browser has made a sizable leap from last year’s 10.89 percent.

According to rival statistics released by Net Applications, an Aliso Viejo-based Web analytics firm, Google Chrome will most likely become the second most popular browser by mid 2012.

In any case, Google’s recent growth as a Web browser, search engine and social media platform is great for those marketing their business on the Internet, especially those focused on Google SEO.

Google wants to further protect their users’ privacy by encrypting their search results pages (through https://www.google.com).

In Nov. our site received 1,144 visitors from organic Google search which their search keywords were not shown (see below). This is 19.6% of our total Google organic search traffic.

This Thanksgiving, we at Master Google would like acknowledge the people, technology and search engine optimization techniques that make our work worthwhile.

1. First and foremost, we are thankful for all of our trusting customers. “They are our motivation and we don’t succeed unless they do,” said Ali Husayni, owner and founder of Master Google. Many of our clients have tried working with other SEO specialists in the past, only to find their promises broken and their trust betrayed. We would like to thank our customers for their faith in our work and their continued loyalty to our company.

2. “We are also grateful for our smart, dedicated and dynamic team,” Husayni added. Many of our customers don’t get a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into their optimization work, but behind those top rankings are hard working, intelligent individuals. “Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” Husayni said.

3. We are thankful for Google’s new algorithm update, called Panda. “It was a great change,” Husayni explained. “It eliminated a lot of spam from Google’s search results, penalizing duplicate content and base sites,” Husayni explained. It aligns with our goal of creating fresh, new and relevant content, enabling our clients to better market themselves to Internet searchers.

4. Finally, we are thankful for black-hat SEO techniques. Yes, you heard us right. “Black-hat SEO methods have proven to us that white-hat techniques are the way to go,” Husayni said. Master Google never uses keyword stuffing, cloaking or other techniques frowned upon by search engines. “All of our techniques are approved by Google,” Husayni assured.

For more information about how the experts at Master Google can help your Web site reach the top of Google this holiday season, be sure to visit www.mastergoogle.com. For inquiries or to set up a free consultation with Ali Husayni, call Master Google toll free at 877-932-6559.

The search engine giant unveiled the widget along with Google+ Pages last week, allowing businesses to connect fans with their new page on Google’s social networking site.

The customizable widget, dubbed a Google+ Badge, lets Internet users either +1 your Web page or add your business to their circles. And starting today, users can see the faces of those fans already following the brands they love.

“The Google+ badge has graduated out of preview today, be one of the first to put it on your site!” Google said in an email Wednesday. “For those who’ve already added the code, this means all users will be able to see the badge starting today.”

“Featuring both an ‘add to circle’ and a ‘+1′ button, the Google+ badge helps you grow your audience on Google+ while also showing more recommendations on Google Search,” they added.

So, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and get your company a new badge!

The college students are making a robot butler as their Capstone project.

“I admire their ability to dream big,” says Ali Husayni, founder of Master Google and the affordable SEO services company’s top SEO services expert. “I’m also proud of my brother, Mahdi Zadeh, who is part of this group of college students.”

Zadeh and his classmates plan to build a robot from scratch that has unique abilities.

“This robot will carry beverages and plates on its back and will be sitting in a room ready for service,” Zadeh says, adding the robot will be called by a microphone through a voice activation system and will take orders such as “drink,” “food,” etc. Another possibility is that it will work with a number of claps.

For example, if you clap once, it will bring a beverage. If you clap twice, it will bring food.

“This robot is going to have the ability to find you wherever you are,” Zadeh says.

Locating people will be made possible through two GPS units. Thanks to a radar system (or bumper system) it will be equipped to dodge any walls or other obstacles that stand between you and the robot as it makes its way toward you.

Although Husayni says he looks forward to seeing the finished product, he’s also happy to have been able to contribute to an interesting cause.

“I believe that part of being a good business person means giving back to the community when you can,” said the Internet SEO specialist. “This is a hardworking group of students who are going to go on to do great things after they graduate. If this project helps advance those efforts, I’m proud to be part of it.”

To learn more about Master Google, visit: www.mastergoogle.com. Alternatively, you can call the company’s toll free phone support service at 1-877-932-6559 or call internationally at +1-303-932-6559 with any questions or to schedule a free consultation with Ali Husayni.

Owner and founder of Master Google, Ali Husayni, affirmed that this is the smartest move that business executives could make to bolster their Internet marketing campaigns.

“If you don’t have one yet, set it up,” he urged. “It’s absolutely essential. Get people interested in your Google+ page. Attract as many fans as you can to add you to their circles and then add them back.”

Husayni said that Google’s decision to allow businesses into the social networking site was a great move. “It’s a real step in the right direction,” he said. “Initially, they said that they weren’t going to add that component, but they needed to have it from the get go.”

According to a blog post written by Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra, a lot of businesses, brands, corporations, musicians and sports teams have already joined, including Burberry, H&M, the Dallas Cowboys and The All-American Rejects.

Google+ Pages has brought with it new implications for Google searchers, which Husayni said has “opened up a new window to the future of search,” as well as brought about unforeseen effects upon SEO.

“First, any business now needs to have its own Google+ page,” Husayni explained. “Second, these pages will be listed on Google search results. And third, people can search for your Google+ business page by adding ‘+’ before their search query.”

Combined with the impact of Google’s +1 button, Husayni said that Google is really harnessing the power of social media.

“It is obvious that Google understands the power of social media and its possible effect on influencing search results,” Husayni said. “If I’m looking for a dentist and a few of my friends in my town have +1’ed a particular dentist’s site or Google+ page, then that Web site is going to rank better than its competitors on my search results.”

“This is even without powerful back links, Google Places reviews, optimization or the other SEO techniques used in the past,” he added. “As a potential customer, I’m more likely to consider him than other dentists that rank well on Google, but have no recommendations from my people in my networks.”

For SEO professionals, this could mean drastic changes, Husayni lamented. “My initial thought is that Google is shifting the power from SEO companies toward networks and circles,” he said. “It’s kind of like the past, when word of mouth was more important than anything else. We’re almost moving in that backward direction, but on the virtual world of the Internet.”

Husayni said that, if SEO companies are going to weather this change, they have to be willing to adapt. “Social media is more important than ever,” he said. “Google+ is competing head on with Facebook and Twitter, but they’re not going to sit idle and watch. The war is ongoing.”

“And SEO is now more relevant and more sophisticated than ever.”

For more information about how the experts at Master Google can improve your Google ranking and help manage your Internet marketing campaign, be sure to visit www.mastergoogle.com. For inquiries or to set up a free consultation with Ali Husayni, call Master Google toll free at 877-932-6559.

Owner and founder of Master Google, Ali Husayni, is setting the record straight about at least one source of information.

On October 31, Jason Hiner—TechRepublic’s Editor-in-Chief—wrote an article about Google’s newest algorithm update, named Panda. He cited SEO as one of the main reasons for which Google revamped its page ranking system. Hiner claimed that SEO merely helps Web sites get ranked as high as possible on Google search results, regardless of relevancy to the searcher’s query.

“As a result, the sites that land at the top of Google search results have become more about which sites are best optimized rather than the ones that have the best and most relevant content,” Hiner wrote.

Husayni refuted the ungrounded assumption, saying that he’s simply confusing SEO with black hat SEO.

Black hat SEO breaks search engine rules and regulations. It is unethical. According to Husayni, the difference between black hat SEO techniques and Master Google’s SEO efforts is clear: Master Google has morals.

“Optimization, fresh content and encouraging other sites or people to recommend our clients’ Web sites are all valid business practices,” Husayni said. “They are even approved by Google.”

“Google needs SEO companies to better understand sites,” he added. “In essence, we are enhancing the ability of Google crawlers to index and understand sites.”

Hiner also stated that social media platforms were threatening Google’s relevance, forcing the search engine to launch Google+. “Social media has been replacing traditional web search for many different kinds of information gathering…” he said.

But Husayni said, “It cannot.”

“Social media is what it is and it will certainly help your search results, based on what your friends or circles suggest,” he said. “But it cannot and will not replace Google as a search engine.”

Husayni said that there are several reasons Google has nothing to fear, one being that a social media platform cannot index every site or page. It’s also susceptible to spam, just like other search engines, he added.

However, Google did need to add Google+ to compete with rivals, like Facebook and Twitter, Husayni asserted.

“It was essential for Google to start generating money through ads placed on social media sites, especially after the enormous amount gained by Facebook and Twitter this way,” Husayni said. “They also sought to customize their search results based on social connections. In theory, this will return much more relevant results.”

Hiner went on to say that Google’s Panda update caused “collateral damage,” weeding out sites that actually have good content and still ranking spam higher.

Husayni, on the other hand, thinks that the update has done wonders for Google searchers, achieving the exact results it was intended for.

“Panda was a powerful update and it cleared the air from content farms and base sites, those that spammed searchers with lots and lots of content or duplicated text,” Husayni explained.

Despite Hiner’s opinions, Husayni thinks that Google is stronger than ever, with SEO being a valid contributor to their success.

“There is always going to be manipulation,” Husayni said. “Some people are going to use frowned-upon techniques to boost their site’s ranking, but that is black hat SEO. I hope that Master Google’s honest SEO services will raise the standards of the industry.”

For more information about how the experts at Master Google can improve your Google ranking using ethical techniques, be sure to visit www.mastergoogle.com. For inquiries or to set up a free consultation with Ali Husayni, call Master Google toll free at 1-877-932-6559.

The new facet of the social media platform, dubbed Google+ Pages, allows businesses to add their own content so that fans can stay connected “to the sports teams [they] root for, the coffee shops [they’re] loyal to and the TV shows [they] can’t stop watching,” Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post this morning.

“So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people,” Gundotra said. “But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide.”

Social networking rivals, such as Facebook and Twitter, have long accepted business accounts. In fact, building a corporate presence on these sites has become an essential part of marketing your business on the Internet.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that—since its initial release in June—many businesses eager to get on Google+ established personal accounts to advertise their companies, but were forced out by Google as early as July. Terminated account holders, however, were consoled by the promises of corporate accounts in the future.

A week later, Google Product Manager Christian Oestlian posted an announcement to his Google+ page that a pilot program to test business accounts was in the works, to which thousands applied. Already, businesses such as Macy’s and Coca-Cola have begun using their Google+ Pages.

And for good reason. As if the release of Google+ Pages wasn’t enough excitement, Google also revealed two perks to having a business account.

“Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search,” Gundota explained. “The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.”

According to Gundota, the Direct Connect feature guides users that type “+” before their query to the relevant Google+ page. For example, those searching for “+Pepsi” will be immediately redirected to the beverage’s Google+ page.

In addition to the aforementioned features, Google+ gives businesses the freedom to add friends or companies to their circles, interact with customers via Hangout video conferencing, attract followers and share information about themselves. Google+ Pages offer unique capabilities that Gundota is sure the corporate world will love.

“Not only can [fans] recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term,” Gundota said. “They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.”

Invisible Text

Including hidden text in the background of your site is an old black hat SEO technique. Invisible text is designed to be unseen by visitors, but detected by Google crawlers. There are many ways to implement this trick, such as making the text the same color as the background and hiding the text by positioning it behind and image. Ali Husayni, SEO expert and founder of Master Google, considers the technique malpractice, adding that “many sites have been penalized for using such SEO methods.”

Keyword Stuffing

Stuffing is bad. And we’re not just talking about the kind you eat with turkey. Also called over-optimization, keyword stuffing is the excessive use of keywords on a Web page. While a few repeats is okay and may even be necessary, overuse is frowned upon and can get you banned from Google. According to Husayni, keyword stuffing can be done in multiple places, like in the title tag, description tag, header tags, image tags and other content rich areas.

Link Farms

Link farms are a completely outdated and potentially dangerous way of link building. A link farm is a group of Web sites that all link back to each other created either by an automated service, or individuals. A site that uses link farms is sure to be detected by Google and penalized. Because some directories act like link farms, Husayni suggests submitting your site to only the most reputable Web directories.

Duplicate Content

If the copy on your Web site is plagiarized from someone else’s page, expect negative consequences. “Google is able to cache who the original owner of the text is and any other site that posts duplicate content will have its rank negatively affected on the search results,” Husayni advised.

Cloaking

Sounds scary, huh? Cloaking actually cloaks content, meaning that the content shown to search engines is different than that displayed by visitors’ browsers. Husayni said that this trick is most often enacted by doorway pages, using JavaScript redirect.

For more information about how the experts at Master Google can help your Web site stay safe this Halloween, be sure to visit www.mastergoogle.com. For inquiries or to set up a free consultation with Ali Husayni, call Master Google toll free at 877-932-6559.

According to Ali Husayni—industry expert and founder of SEO company Master Google—a newbie should do anything but give up.

“Without a strong SEO campaign, it is very difficult to compete in today’s market,” he said. “With the economy down, people spend their money wisely. Potential customers research anything and everything on the Internet before they contact any retailer or decide on services. If your site is not easily found, you are not able to compete effectively.”

I know what you’re thinking. “Okay, so it’s essential, but what is SEO, exactly?”

Husayni explained that SEO is “the art of changing sites and their popularity on the Internet so that search engines perceive them as highly valuable, thereby placing them at the top of their search results.”

What search engine should my SEO campaign focus on?

Now that we have established what SEO is and why it’s so important, it’s time to decide which search engine you should focus your campaign on. Husayni said that, while Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing do get some traffic, those search numbers are nothing compared to Google.

“Google receives more than 75 percent of the global search market and about 65 percent of the domestic market,” Husayni said. “Google is the giant of search engines. If you are visible on Google, you’ll be attracting customers.”

How do I go about initiating my SEO work?

This should all be becoming a bit clearer, but we still need a plan of action. Husayni advised that there are multiple ways to go about SEO, such as hiring a company to do the work for you, employing an in-house SEO professional or working with an experienced SEO consultant.

“The path you choose to take depends on your market, your budget and your level of Internet savvy,” Husayni said.

Small companies, he said, are better off hiring a professional SEO company who can place them at the top of search engines at an affordable price. On the other hand, a larger firm working with a bigger budget could benefit from having an in-house SEO team, supplemented with coaching help from a reputable SEO company to keep them in check. And, of course, the more ambitious business owner with minimal time constraints could learn SEO practices himself, though Husayni recommends receiving some guidance from a seasoned professional.

What do I need to know about SEO before I begin?

Even if you choose to hire a SEO company to do your optimization work, it’s still important to know the main elements that will help you increase your site’s ranking. Husayni said that the three most crucial aspects of any Internet marketing campaign are optimization, lots of fresh content and popularity, also referred to as link building.

“The optimization gives Google the information it needs to understand the theme of each site,” he said. “Content gives Google the impression that the site is being updated with valuable information on a regular basis, thus providing useful information for its visitors.”

But remember, “Google is a machine with limitations and language barriers,” Husayni warned.

“The only two ways for Google crawlers to determine if your site is valuable are by measuring how often you update your content and by gauging whether or not you’ve copied your content from elsewhere, or written it yourself.”

Google’s algorithm is always changing, too. For example, Husayni said that, with the development of Google+, the search engine has “added the +1 button to further determine your site’s usefulness.”

I’ve started my SEO campaign, but how long will it take until I see results?

After learning the basics of SEO and how to get started, you still have a long, albeit rewarding, journey ahead.

“While changes to optimization are viewed by Google almost immediately—provided you have quality back links—other SEO components are built over time,” Husayni said. “So, initially, when we optimize a site, there is a jump in its ranking on Google. Then, slowly thereafter, the site gets ranked better and better.”

And it’s a journey you have to stick to in order to see lasting results.

“Google revamps its algorithm every few months, making it important to stay on top of new techniques,” Husayni said. “And your competition is not sitting idle. They’re also doing SEO and, depending on how many resources they allocate, they could replace your number one listing in a matter of months. So, take a deep breath and get ready for a long SEO battle.”

On October 11, comScore, Inc.—a global leader in digital business world analytics—released its monthly analysis of the nationwide search market, revealing that 65.3 percent of searchers typed their queries into Google’s search box. During the same month-long period, second place market shareholder Yahoo fell to 15.5 percent, trailed by Microsoft’s Bing that remained unchanged at 14.7 percent.

Ali Husayni, SEO expert and founder of Master Google, said that Google’s increase was predictable, considering the company’s history of technological innovation.

“With Google being the cutting edge provider of search, it’s only natural for their search market to grow,” he said.

Husayni said that Google’s recent raise in market shares validates Master Google’s concentration on the search engine giant.

“It reiterates our thought process in developing our SEO strategies to focus on Google alone,” Husayni said. “Ranking on Google is what generates new business, which is our goal for every one of our clients.”

Following the release of the comScore report, shares of Google increased by $22.05, amounting to $537.17, compared with Yahoo, which rose just 37 cents to $15.84 and Bing, which climbed 69 cents to reach $26.94.

“Business owners should be aware that, in order to stay in business and grow, they need to be found on Google search results,” Husayni added. “That is the bottom line. If your business is not on Google, your business is doomed.”

Google’s third quarter results, which were announced October 13, reported revenues of $9.72 billion. “We had a great quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google, in a press release posted on Google Investor Relations. “Revenue was up 33 percent year on year and our quarterly revenue was just short of $10 billion. Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark. People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!”

The wealth of new search features and social networking components is what sets Google apart from the competition, Husayni said.

“The search results are not diluted or full of spam,” he said. “They have a very sophisticated, fast-paced way of analyzing sites and their relevancy to a particular query. What’s more, their development of Google+ is a good alternative to Facebook and Twitter.”

Husayni said that, in light of Google’s imminent monopoly of the search market, the Master Google team will continue becoming better at optimization strategies specifically geared toward Google crawlers.

“Now there is going to be even more competition for Google placement,” Husayni said. “And Master Google will certainly rise to the challenge.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The most searched for keywords yesterday included free SEO, Master Google and Google SEO Blog.

This brings our total search visitors in the past month to 4,955. Our current Alexa ranking is 27,588. This is much better than most SEO companies world-wide.

Some of our clients also achieved a breaking record last month including:

www.immigrationman.com
www.drpamelali.com
www.aeortho.com
www.arubavilavacationhomes.com

“For large companies with a large website and a big marketing budget, in-house SEO has been a no-brainer,” says Husayni, the founder and CEO of Master Google, SEO company. “Smaller companies are realizing that SEO is a force to be reckoned with and that they need it to be competitive in their market.”

One example of in-house SEO and what it can accomplish is Huffington Post, a news source with syndicated columnists, blogs and news stories. Due to the SEO work of their in-house team, the Web site www.huffingtonpost.com was outranking the news organizations’ Web sites, such as Washington Post and CNN, who originally posted the articles, according to a New York Times article.

Business owners see the success of large companies. They also see their competitors doing well in search engine results (SERs) and are determined to get similar results. Some try outsourcing SEO first, but the average business owner does not have the knowledge to discern a real SEO expert from a con artist.

“They may try one or two SEO companies and get burned,” says Husayni, who offers free SEO consulting to qualified business owners. “There are a lot of SEO firms that make a client an SEO guarantee, including big promises about results and a time frame that they just can’t deliver on.”

A recent blog post about small businesses and in-house SEO makes a similar statement about scammers, adding four other reasons for the trend: save money in the long-run, reduce dependence, confidentiality and individualized attention.

Husayni maintains that avoiding the SEO scam artist is the number one reason for this in-house SEO trend, though.

“Instead of potentially wasting money on a company that doesn’t deliver, businesses are investing that money in an SEO team,” says Husayni, who offers a package for top of Google results with a 100% money-back guarantee.

According to Bob Tripathi, an internet marketing expert and Search Engine Watch blogger, the in-house SEO is often undervalued because monthly SEO dashboards or quarterly business reviews cannot capture the intangible benefits it offers the company.

Besides improving search engine rankings, which leads to increased visibility and more customers, Tripathi says in-house SEO can provide unique thought leadership, unite departments and attract outside expertise.

But the task of creating an in-house SEO program from the ground up can be quite overwhelming, which is why Husayni recommends businesses work with an SEO consultant or coach throughout the process.

AOL’s director in charge of search engine optimization, Simon Heseltine, recommends that companies without experience in-house hire an SEO agency to help get the program up and running.

“I’d say that for a company that is going to start an in-house team, they need to make sure that they know what questions to ask and what answers to expect,” says Heseltine.

Husayni says that utilizing a consultant helps businesses minimizes the risks of setting up an SEO team and maximizes the return on investment by showing them where to start, who to hire, what to focus on and how to measure success.

He expects the trend of small businesses turning to in-house SEO teams will continue, eventually become the industry norm. Because of this, Husayni is currently developing additional content on his website and blog, including how-to posts, top SEO secrets that are not actually secrets and information about hiring SEO, as well as articles with the latest information on the topic.

“SEO is a dynamic industry, always changing, always presenting new challenges to overcome and puzzles to solve,” says Husayni. “This is just a new way for Master Google to help clients achieve and maintain their search engine results’ success.”

Google Instant, first launched in September 2010, is a feature that guesses what a user is searching for as it is typed into Google’s search bar, providing real-time search results that adapt to the final word or phrase entered.

“It shows you what most people are looking for, based on your initial few letters or words,” Ali Husayni, SEO expert and founder of Master Google, said. “You can then select the most sought after keywords from a drop-down box menu.”

At last year’s Google Search Event in San Francisco, company vice president Marissa Mayer predicted the new tool to save users two to five seconds per search, equating to 350 million hours saved collectively each year.

For a searcher, Google Instant means a more productive and personalized search. For SEO experts, it means another small adjustment to take into account.

“We want our clients’ sites to come up on Google for keywords or phrases that people are actually looking for,” Husayni said.

Because Google Instant’s real-time results are based on the popularity of certain queries, Husayni said it’s possible  to see a shift in keyword usage down the line.

Similarly, right after Google Instant debuted, Google search engineer Matt Cutts said that, while the results will remain the same for a particular query, “it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time.”

For this reason, Husayni said that the team at Master Google will continue to keep a close eye on regional keyword statistics using the Google AdWords keyword selector tool.

“But remember, this is just a new trend in search,” Husayni said.

The new tool merely effects the way that users interact with the search engine, not the way that Google ranks pages. The algorithm hasn’t changed, Husayni assured.

Even though Husayni doesn’t anticipate any drastic changes to SEO methods in the future, he said that Google Instant, combined with the power of Google Places, has already shifted search results to reflect more specific areas.

“Traditionally, if you typed in ‘orthodontics,’ Google would show results from all over the Internet,” Husayni said. “But if you search for this query today, Google will show you a list of three to ten different orthodontic services in your area, depending on where you’re based.”

These real-time, geo-centered results have made Master Google’s focus on both Internet-wide and local rankings stronger than ever.

“We can no longer just worry about the general search engine results. We have to be aware of the local results and get our clients to rank there, too.”

For more information about how Master Google can help your Web site reach the top of Google search results, please visit www.mastergoogle.com. For inquiries or to set up a free consultation with Ali Husayni, call Master Google toll free at 1-877-932-6559.

Husayni, founder of the SEO consultation firm Master Google, wrote an article titled, “Long Live the King- SEO Still Rules the Internet Marketing World.” The article explains how SEO marketing strategies provide the best value for the money.

The article tells readers how developing keywords, optimizing their websites, developing quality inbound links, participating in social media circles and utilizing Google Places can help orthodontists ensure that when people in their geographic location search for orthodontic providers, their websites appear prominently in organic search results.

The Orthotown article features comments from two of Master Google’s clients who have had a great deal of success in their practices as a result of their SEO campaigns: Bob Donovan, administrator of Dr. David Alpan’s practice, Aesthetic Orthodontics in Las Vegas; and Peter Eisenhuth, administrator of Dr. Jennifer Eisenhuth’s Eagan, Minnesota orthodontics practice.

Donovan and Eisenhuth offer valuable insight to orthodontists considering an SEO campaign, Husayni says, adding that he was particularly happy with Eisenhuth’s input because Eisenhuth had worked with two other SEO firms prior to choosing Master Google. That experience brought about several helpful tips, which Eisenhuth shared during his interview for the article.

“I’ve enjoyed showing readers of these publications how our search engine optimization results are better than those of our competitors by explaining a bit about what we do,” says Husayni, who has had articles published in “The McGill Advisory,” Bentson, Clark & Copple’s “reSource,” and “The Progressive Orthodontist” this year.

Husayni also has been forthcoming with advice on what practitioners can do on their own to improve their SEO in Google organic search results.

“We’ve shown through some of these articles that there are several steps orthodontists can take on their own to improve their sites’ rankings on Google,” he says. “But we also make it known that for advanced SEO work, it’s best to bring in a professional. Of course, we want them to choose us because we truly believe our efforts are the most effective and we back that claim up with an SEO guarantee.”

It is a quarterly publication.

Husayni’s article gives helpful tips on how- with the proper approach to SEO- first page Google results are at orthodontists’ fingertips. The article is titled, “Beat Your Competition on Google Organic Search Without Hiring an SEO Firm.”

“We’ve had an incredible amount of success over the years with our orthodontist and dentist clients, in terms of getting their websites to appear on the first page of search results for their most important keywords,” says Husayni, an SEO services and website ranking expert. “There are plenty of steps practices can take on their own to improve their search rankings, and this article shares 10 of the most important steps.”

Some of the tips Husayni gives include recommending that practices list their sites on Google Places, and having their webmaster build a blog under their site’s domain name.

“Particularly with Google SEO, blog updates done frequently are a key factor in improving organic search results,” Husayni says.

Other recommendations made to orthodontists were to write articles and press releases about their practices and post them on their blogs and on relevant distribution sites. Husayni also recommends that practices add their sites to the Yahoo! Directory.

Orthodontists who belong to professional organizations can request that those organizations place a link to the orthodontist’s site from their site. He listed civic organizations and non-profits as examples.

Husayni embarked on an article writing campaign earlier this year to share important SEO information with orthodontic and dental professionals. He recently has had articles published in “The McGill Advisory” and “The Progressive Orthodontist,” in addition to “reSource.” He also has an article slated for publication in an upcoming issue of Orthotown magazine.

“I would like to parlay this into some speaking engagements at future seminars and conferences,” Husayni says. “SEO is important, and I enjoy helping dental and orthodontic practices increase their revenue by enabling more patients find them easily online. I want a platform to share this information with more of these professionals.”

“Many businesses see their competition ranking better than them, but they’ve tried SEO a couple of times and it’s failed,” he says. “So they often abandon the whole project, thinking no one can get them there.”

Husayni has built his top SEO business by convincing those skeptics to give him a chance to get them there, delivering on his promises and converting them into long-term clients.

Husayni provides professional SEO and website services, including optimization, inbound-link building, Google+ SEO and keywords analysis. He hears the same anti-SEO objections over and over again and has developed a retort for each one.

SEO Is Relevant For Every Business
A lot of small business owners do not see the value of SEO and make the mistake of assuming that it does not matter for their business.

“Americans performed 15.5 billion searches in 2010, and around 80 percent of customers research a product or service before making a purchase,” Husayni says, whose free SEO services include a site analysis. “So it doesn’t matter if you are offering dog grooming services, consulting or selling exotic cars, you want potential clients to be able to find you.”

As one illustration of SEO’s relevance, he says being found at the top of Google search results in the orthodontic field, depending on location, can increase yearly income $50,000 to $300,000.

SEO Produces Results…Over Time
Another objection Husayni hears repeatedly is that SEO does not produce results because they worked with an SEO company for six weeks and there was no change in the search engine results.

“If people expect huge results in a very short period of time, they are bound to be disappointed,” he says. “Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that takes time, especially if the website has been in trouble for bad SEO practices in the past.”

While some clients see results quicker, significant results take around three to nine months, although that is influenced by the client market and strength and the client’s background, according to Saeed Khosravi, the operational manager at Master Google.

Husayni gets his clients to the top search engine results though, and he fully guarantees his work.

Here is what one of Master Google clients, Paul Kariniemi, a co-owner of Retrofoam of Arizona says about his experience: “With all the used car sales types out their pushing SEO on business owners, I must say it’s been refreshing to deal with true SEO professionals who deliver real, quantifiable results.”

Return On Investment Is Significant
Some people look at search engine results page rank to gauge whether the SEO is working, while others attempt to measure the return on investment in other ways, wrongly concluding that the investment does not pay off.

“We can precisely measure the increase in site traffic within the time the client signs up for SEO,” says Husayni, who shares free website optimization tips on his blog. “The bottom line is higher ranks on Google result in more targeted traffic which translates to more sales.”

Master Google provides clients with weekly ranking reports as one tool to track changes in keyword ranking on Google and other search engines. With the correct system in place, businesses can measure their campaign success based on the sales calls they generate from the Internet. SEO by far has the best ROI compared to other forms of advertisement.

Eagan, MN orthodontist Jennifer Eisenhuth had been with two SEO companies prior to Master Google and neither company could get her practice past page two of Google search results. After signing up with Husayni, she saw new patient exams from the Internet go up 500 percent from year to year, with new patient revenue from Internet case startups more than 400 percent during the same time frame.

Not Every SEO Company Over Promises And Under Delivers
One of the biggest obstacles to signing up new clients is that they have usually had bad experiences with other SEO companies before coming to Master Google. Some of them might have fallen prey to black hat SEO, techniques that exploit SEO Google guidelines and bring harsh penalties from search engines when discovered.

Two examples of these bad techniques are keyword stuffing and link farming. Keyword stuffing is creating content consisting of keywords and nothing else, no relevant content or meaningful text. Link farms are sites that sell businesses link space. These pages often have no real content and contain hundreds or thousands of links to other sites that are totally unrelated.

“I understand that a lot of business owners have been burned by SEO companies before, which is why I show them similar businesses in similar markets that we have helped,” says Husayni. “Then, I ask them to contact those people and hear for themselves what we did for them.”

Matthew Smillie, who owns Aruba Villa Vacation Homes, says other SEO companies let him down but that Master Google did what they said they would. “I highly recommend Ali Husayni’s company,” he says on the testimonials page on the Master Google website.

Husayni offers a free SEO consultation to people who are interested in finding out how they can SEO their site. Even though the testimonials alone practically sell his services, Husayni also offers clients a 100 percent money-back guarantee if he does not deliver on the results he promised.

One thing Google loves most is fresh textual content, according to Saeed Khosravi, the company’s operational manager. The SEO marketing service uses WordPress blogs to get and keep their clients on the first page of the search engine results (SERs).

Husayni and his SEO team are always monitoring updates to Google algorithms so they can adjust their strategies and stay on the cutting edge of SEO. Right now, Husayni says WordPress blogs are an important part of SEO techniques.

“By incorporating a blog into a website and posting unique content on a regular basis, you will feed Google with what it likes most and will convince the search engine to crawl your site more often,” says Khosravi, an expert in organic SEO.

The sub-directory setup, or embedded option, is what gives the most benefit for search engine optimization. An embedded blog helps the ranking of the associated site, whereas blogs set up on a sub-domain do not because they are treated as a separate domain by Google and other search engines.

An embedded blog URL looks like this: www.mastergoogle.com/blog. Any other format, for example blog.mastergoogle.com, means the blog is setup as a sub-domain.

“If clients already have a blog, we optimize it to meet their SEO needs, but if they don’t, we will set up their blog as part of our SEO services,” says Husayni, who is a leading resource for businesses seeking SEO outsourcing services.

Master Google uses the clients’ blogs to continuously update the site and provide readers with quality content, which increases online recognition and establishes their sites as a main source of information in their respective markets.

Each new post gives another opportunity to add keywords to the URL, title, description and keywords. This is a recent post about ranking on Google places by Husayni on the Master Google blog as an example.

URL: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/google-places-is-where-you-need-to-be.php

WordPress has features and functions built in that are automatically set up for SEO. The blog will guide spiders through the posts, pages and categories, quickly and easily gathering information about what to include in the search engine’s index, according to Husayni.

Setting up a WordPress blog does not have to be time consuming, but Khosravi stresses the importance of the blog looking the same as the site to maintain a cohesive aesthetic. There is a famous five-minute WordPress installation with step-by-step instructions on the company’s site.

Some web hosting providers set up WordPress for their clients for no charge. There are also many tutorials and videos online explaining how to set up a WordPress blog. Google has a starter guide that includes explanation, how-to and best practices for basic SEO techniques.

“For those with limited budget, my suggestion is to install a WordPress blog, use a free theme and just focus time and energy on writing quality posts,” says Khosravi.

Because WordPress is essentially a content management system, it is also a great option for people who do not have a website but want to get one and start search engine optimization right away with WordPress. The company or business can use the blog as their website. Khosravi says there is no drawback from a SEO perspective to running an entire site on WordPress.

Husayni’s e-book, “Google SEO Secrets Revealed,” helps small business owners determined to bring their business to the top of Google search results with more than a hundred tips about SEO that they can implement themselves.

“At the end of the day, a website with high quality content of any kind and strong back-links is the winner of the Google game,”   Khosravi says. “But having an active WordPress blog can make things a lot easier and in some competitive markets having a blog is a crucial and determining factor.”

Learn More
To learn more about Master Google’s business SEO services, visit: www.mastergoogle.com. Alternatively, you can call the company’s toll free phone support service at 1-877-932-6559 or call internationally at +1-303-932-6559 with any questions or to schedule a free consultation with Ali Husayni.

Husayni’s article explains how dentists and orthodontists- or any business, for that matter- can create a successful Internet search engine strategy for themselves.

“Every year, more dentists and orthodontists who have websites see how significant a role the Internet plays in attracting new patients,” says Husayni. “I felt that by providing some information on SEO link popularity and other SEO-related topics, it would be helpful to practices who are interested in bolstering their Web presence.”

Furthermore, Husayni knew the information he provided might also help doctors determine whether providing quality SEO services for themselves was a task they could tackle alone, or if they needed to turn to a SEO consulting firm to achieve their goals, he says.

“Sometimes providing a road map for SEO services has the opposite effect of giving a business owner the confidence to try making some changes and improvements on their own,” Husayni says. “Sometimes it actually shines a light on how much you don’t know about SEO, and provides the tipping point that prompts you to turn to a professional.”

Either way, Husayni is happy to provide the information, he says.

Husayni’s article shares information about recent changes in Google’s algorithm that might affect business’s website rankings. Here at Master Google, we help clients stay abreast of their sites’ rankings by providing weekly SEO ranking reports.

The article also covers information on Google’s anti-spam strategy, and it sheds light on the difference between “black hat” and “white hat” SEO techniques. It also explains what it could mean if your website is ranked on Page 1, but drops off the first page unexpectedly, as well as what fluctuations in your site’s rank might mean.

“The only thing not changing with SEO is that it’s always changing,” Husayni says. “It is my hope that the article makes that point clear to dentists and orthodontists and prompts them either to be diligent in keeping up with those changes as they handle their site’s SEO, or to partner with a qualified SEO provider to handle that task for them.”

The McGill Advisory costs $20 per issue for individual issues, or $227 for an annual subscription. Dentists and orthodontists interested in subscribing to The McGill Advisory can contact the publication for more information, (888) 249-7537, or visit their website: www.mcgillhillgroup.com.

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

But Google also poses a big challenge for everyone who wants to gain business from them. It’s way too complicated.

Google adds new services way too often- sometimes faster than business owners can learn about them. Yet, many of its important features, such as its standard search, change drastically over time, making it difficult for companies to stay up to speed. Even JC Penny and Walmart couldn’t predict Google’s behavior and lost a great deal of business as a result.

One way to approach this obstacle is to identify which of these services is vital to your business and use it to your advantage.

Without a doubt,  Google Places (combined with organic SEO) is the most important for small businesses. Why? Because if your site is among the top five listings on Google Places, your customers will find you. It won’t matter if you don’t know how to use Adwords, Analytics, or Google+.

Being seen at the top of search results is equivalent to purchasing a large, eye-catching ad in your local Yellow Pages that everyone owned 10 years ago. If your ad was the first, your phone would not stop ringing.

If your business is listed high on Google Places, you will witness firsthand Google’s power to send customers your way. In a survey we performed, our clients that appeared on Google Places showed an increase of $45,000-to $274,000 in their annual revenue compared with when they didn’t show up on Google Places. On average, they spent just a small fraction of that money promoting their site. No other advertising method can beat that.

Now, the question is how to get on Google Places. Or, if you are already there, then how do you improve your rank to reach that number one spot?

If you are not listed, the first thing you ought to do is register your business with Google. The steps are simple and are explained in this video: how to get on Google Places.

If you are listed but you’re not at the top, then you need to improve your business’s reputation online. Here is the blueprint for accomplishing just that:

1- Get your customers to write positive reviews for you on your Google Places page. If they search for your business name along with the city you are listed under in Google Maps and then click on the letter associated with your business, a window will open at the top of your listing on the map that has a rating stars link. Clicking on the rating stars will get you to the reviews page. If you don’t have any reviews yet, then there will be a “write a review” link in this window.

2- Add the +1 button to your site’s pages and encourage your friends, family and customers to +1 your site. This will improve your site’s ranking on Google (for those who +1’ed your site’s page and those in their Google+ circles).

3- Improve your site’s link popularity. This means running a campaign that gets you natural, quality links from related Web sites. Since this is going to be the most important factor in helping you rank better on Google Places, I’ll explain it in greater depth in an upcoming article.

Keep your questions in mind and stay tuned.

This week’s expert of www.ask2achieve.com is Dr. Stephanie Sarkis.

Click here for a quick registration.

And here is the full message from Ask2Achieve.com:

“You know all those times when you sit at your desk, stare like a deer in the headlights at the pile of things you need to do, and think, “Hmm… I wonder what’s new on YouTube…?”

Dr. Stephanie Sarkis

That’s procrastination at it’s best. Keeping us from getting everything we need to do done, to make our businesses grow and thrive.

We all do it at one point… Even when we know the consequences of watching online videos of people giving ferrets a bath, when we should be completing those quarterly figures the financial guys are screaming for.

But you don’t have to be a procrastination victim anymore. On Tuesday, July 26, we will be hosting a free webinar called How to Power thru the 5 Types of Procrastination and Not Only Finally Get it All Done… But Get it All Done Faster and Easier.

In it, Dr Stephanie Sarkis will show you the five different types of procrastination, what triggers each, and simple solutions for each. And because it’s Ask2Achieve, she’ll also answer all your most pressing questions on how to stop putting things off, and get them finished. It’s invaluable information for any business owner or executive who needs a push once in a while… Or needs to push their employees.

So don’t put this off… Click here now to register for the free webinar. And start checking things off your To Do list. Also, at the bottom of her page, please post your question!”