Santa Monica, CA – Happy Holidays to all of our wonderful subscribers (and soon to be subscribers). We hope that you have found this blog to be a useful source of information and advice. As you know, it’s almost another year, and you might be putting another SEO strategy in place, which is why now is the time to act on the newest innovations that the New Year brings. Beware of staying stagnant with your SEO strategies, advises Ali Husayni, CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google.

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 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.

Search engine optimization (SEO) was named that many years ago because “optimization” was pretty much the only thing that needed to be done. Today, optimization is only about 5-10% of the total SEO work. The rest lies with content development and popularity which we’ve discussed in part I and part III of these series.

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.

Critics say that traditional search engine optimization’s days are numbered, especially considering the development of Google’s +1 button. But SEO expert Ali Husayni considers the industry safe, citing the more than 200 criteria Google’s algorithm takes into account.

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.”

ORANGE, CA-Since Google+ opened up its pages to corporate accounts on Monday, a number of businesses have jumped on the opportunity to market themselves to users of the new social media platform.

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.

Master Google team is proud to announce achieving another record in bringing organic traffic to our site using organic SEO. On October 18th, we received a total of 246 visitors searching on Google and finding us.

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

TAMPA, FLORIDA—Almost every person seeking search engine optimization services with Master Google is initially skeptical and reluctant to invest—a trend that Ali Husayni says has stayed the same since he joined the industry in 2004.

“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.

Here is a great discussion on search quality with Google and SEO. Dany Sulivan is the well-known SEO specialist along with Matt Cutts, Ben Gomes and Amit Singhal.

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Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, Google+, Places, Images and Videos are only a handful of services Google offers the business world. Small and yet successful businesses have long used these tools to further succeed in their ventures.

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.

Being placed at the top of Google for keywords people search for definitely increases your site’s traffic. Here are some case studies on how ranking well on Google organic search results can do just that.

Mastergoogle.com

Given that SEO companies compete vigorously to rank well for our keywords, having any presence on the first page of Google for its related keywords and generating traffic is extremely difficult. But, as an SEO company that thrives by being able to rank its clients at the top of Google search results, we certainly have to prove it by helping our site rank at the top.

Google SEO Increases our site visitors by 198% since last year.

Mastergoogle.com is a domain we registered exactly two years ago. In the first year, 12,646 visitors found our site by searching on Google. This increased to 37,773 in the second year. And yesterday, we had the maximum number of visitors finding our site in a single day: 186.

This trend is not unique to our site. We serve many Google SEO clients that have trusted us with ranking them at the top of Google for sometimes very competitive keywords. Read more…

Mavenlive.com

Mavenlive.com is a unique and innovative physical therapy software that allows doctors and physical therapists to organize, modify and print exercises for their patients.

In the past year that we were working on their organic SEO, their site has witnessed an increase of 16,000 visitors. This is a 794% increase.

Google SEO Helps Start Up Company Increase Its Organic Traffic By 794% In One Year.

As a start up company, Mavenlive.com had to compete with well-established software companies on the first page of Google. Today, they rank #1 in Canada and #3 world-wide for their most important keyword: physical therapy software.

Read more…

Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that one of our talented employees developed an Internet time machine and traveled forward in time so she could copy and paste an article that we will publish on our blog in February 2012 – seven months from now. Sadly for me, her program collapsed before she could check out some news sites and peruse the stock market. Sigh… foiled again.

But her trip wasn’t a total loss, because what we read in that article is worth re-printing. Or, should we say: pre-printing? Anyway, here’s what we found:

Google vs. Facebook in 2012: How Is the SEO World Changed?
by: Ali Husayni
February 12, 2012

If you haven’t signed up for Google+ and you haven’t migrated from Facebook, you’re among the remaining 35 percent of the social media late-boomers. Almost 65 percent of those who only used Facebook a year ago are Google+ fans now- while some still check their Facebook accounts.

Google once again has beaten another IT giant by building a more successful social media platform that is much savvier, easy to use and more intuitive than Facebook.

Only a few years ago, Google beat Yahoo! with its Gmail account and later bought YouTube to become the owner of the most visited sites on the planet.

As a result of Google+’s success, Facebook – which was at the top of the social media world just six months ago – lost more than 50 percent of its stock market value since July 2011.

So now the question is this: how does Google+ play into SEO, and how are we going to get our clients ranked at the top of Google (Google+ uses the same algorithm as Google search)?

How to Rank on Google

Since Google launched its new algorithm “Grizzly Bear” in December 2011, the results of every search you make today is unique to you and is based on the +1’s your friends, their friends, and friends of friends have given any particular website (given that you’re logged in to your Gmail account).

And in general, the more +1’s a site has, the better it ranks on Google.

This doesn’t mean the back-links have lost their importance, but rather, back-links now work hand-in-hand with +1’s.

SEO used to consist of three parts: content, optimization and back-links. Now +1 is another main factor in ranking on Google. Adding +1’s to your site is more difficult than the other three factors and thus “manipulating” Google SER’s is not as easy anymore.

Here is a short-list of what you need to do (in addition to what you already did) to rank better with Google:

1- Add the +1 button to ALL the pages of your site. Any visitor who goes to your site needs to have the ability to “vote” for your site.

2- Encourage your constituency (friends, clients) to +1 your site. This will increase the number of people you’re exposed to and therefore your +1’s will continue to grow.

3- Write GREAT content for your site and keep it up to date. As we have said for many years, become an authority in your field and be interesting for those who find your site.

4- Increase your site’s traffic in any shape or form possible. Run banner ads if you have to and sign up with Google Adwords. The more visitors your site gets, the better chance you have of getting +1’s.

The Future of Facebook Search

We expected Facebook to launch its search engine a while ago to compete with Google. But Microsoft took longer than expected to give the green light to Facebook and integrate its search algorithm with its partners’ social media platform. Now it seems to be too little, too late.

I conducted a few searches on FB search and compared the results with Google. Its weakness is that FB search only indexes sites that have been linked to from Facebook.com – leaving many sites out there un-indexed. Also, its algorithm is just based on the “likes” and on-site optimization and is leaving backlinks out. This is a fatal error of FB search developers.

I conclude that FB search is going to be a total failure just like Yahoo! and Bing and their merger. Google has more or less monopolized the search market, as well as the social media market. That, plus its advancements in word and spreadsheet processing, Google Maps, YouTube and their other FREE services, is going to guarantee their long-haul dominance over the Internet world.

But there are always ways to do things better, and Google needs to be very careful not to start late – as it did in the social media war. Google got lucky this time around, but it may not be so lucky the next time.