Tag Archives: SEO Services

Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing

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Back in the day, SEO was a far simpler proposition. A website owner could put some ‘keywords’ into their website content and maybe write an article or two once in awhile and throw that out onto the internet. You could actually see the result very quickly and celebrate success. You could easily measure this bottom line and take it to the bank. Today is a totally different matter. It’s very sophisticated and ever changing. You could learn it! The Internet is full of online schools, YouTube has free video tutorials, and many articles are posted online for free. Question is, do you have the time or inclination to go and teach yourself how to do this? Aren’t you far too busy doing your own job? Add that to the fact that ‘experts’ are not hatched over night – they grow in experience… they’ve spent time ‘treading the boards’ and they accumulate knowledge. If they do this job full time, they will be staying in touch with what’s happening now, they will not continue to ‘ride’ what worked yesterday.

Q&A

Q: Why should I hire someone to help me with my search engine optimization?

A: Because if you hire someone who actually knows what they are doing, you’ll be investing in the most cost effective way to sell your products and services.

Q: What exactly is ‘SEO’?

A: Search Engine Optimization is a methodical process of getting your website to appear more frequently and higher up on the pages of major search engines such as Google. This means that more visitors visit your website and since they are arriving to your site having been screen for relevance, then SEO essentially translates into more sales…or ‘good conversion rate’ as it’s called. Visitors don’t just ‘hit’ your site, they stay awhile they ‘stick’ on the website and shop. You sell plus they buy equals happy customer, happy company!

Q: How does someone know exactly what to do in order to attract the right visitor who will be more likely to purchase from the site?

A: A good strategist, a webmaster who is informed, makes it his or her business to know how each search engine works, that is, what content is it likely to see on a site & what terms does it respond to when it sets out to look for any given website.

There are so many ways to optimize ‘searching’ a website; the SEO developer can target different kinds of searches such as an:

Image Search
Local Search
Video search
Academic Search
News Search
Q: What are some of the ways n’ means an SEO Expert applies to a website in order to ‘pull’ traffic to it that’s relevant and can be converted into an actual sale?

A: An internet marketing strategist first runs a thorough site analysis. He or she ascertains what, if anything, is obstructing the search engines activities that, when unencumbered, can more easily pull traffic to the site. Some of these obstructions are the following:

How is the website coded? Is it up to speed, as in the current HTML5 Google preferences? A website is in essence – cyber architecture. There are ways into the site and exits just as there are ways to go in and out of a house.

Are there keywords that need removing or adding to enhance the websites indexing activities.

Is there video production content on the site and is that video encoded so that the search engines can locate and index it?

Does the website development have back-links to assist it in being indexed?

The technician can also detect an unfavorable ‘Crawler ‘, that if left unmanaged can hinder the websites development on the internet. They can submit and place code to tell the ‘bot’ to not crawl the site.

Q: How does the Webmaster determine whether you should buy online advertising?

A: There are many types of analytics that help determine what type of advertising, if any, needs to be included into the SEO & SEM activities. Pulling this information together is like a harvesting process, then you must site and sift thru what’s working and what’s not working.

Google states that there are more than 200 indicators they employ when searching for and indexing websites. How many do we know, is a good question!? Lol If we build websites and launch them to sell our products and services, then wouldn’t it make sense to put a bit of effort into getting the website found?

It’s shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the very way in which the site is built can help or hinder it’s performance. The website development, what code was used, what content is on the site, how it’s initially registered in the search engines determines a lot about how it’s indexed. Think ‘filing cabinet’ here…search engines are methodical devices that only understand pure logic. They do not go into the file folder that says “J” and look for “S”.

There is a way to build, maintain, and manage a website that can reduce your sleepless nights and move more of your product.

The main obstacle towards hiring an SEO Website Developer is a very understandable one; it’s a reatively new industry and knowing when and who to hire is often a major stumbling block. To the novice, until you see your sales increased, you haven’t a lot to go on except the monthly statistical reports regarding the websites activities.

Besides, if you are a small business owner, you built your business a brick and a board at a time… sweat and sacrifice a plenty! So, if you’re a typical small business owner, you’ll not part easily with your money. You may even be tempted to stick with the tried, tested and true local press, media and yellow pages! Not a good idea. Not today. Today, you need to be online, with a strategy and at the very least video content on your website.

Do yourself a favor: Do it right from the start. Get the website built/ constructed correctly, hire some help to draw up a strategy / a plan and work the plan.

One way to understand SEO & SEM and how they actually works is to visualize the inner parts of an antique watch. Every wheel or gear is connected to another one…and sometimes one gear can move six other wheels and gears. If one of those gears or wheels is ‘hung-up’, not turning at all, then everything that follows on is also stagnant. Could you imagine anything more futile than winding up a clock, by using it’s stem, winding and winding…when the clock has no hands to turn on the face of it? How would you ever know what time it is. This is exactly what happens when you hire a so called website developer who cannot prove to you that they have generated sales for their clients.

An SEO Web Developer is worth their weight in gold if you find an honest and committed one. Ask and get referrals; if they are good, their clients will be able to show you results from their efforts. Don’t settle for someone who just exercised their bragging rights. Search until you have one who has proved their worth by making their clients money.

Pay attention to the results the SEO Website Developer puts in front of you. Let them measure continuously….harvest the websites data, trim what needs trimming, add what needs adding and don’t pinch pennies if they suggest to you that you need to modify certain features in your website. The environment that we call the ‘internet’ is dynamic…it changes all the time and some of these changes are crucial and need to be applied to your website.

Let your webmaster cultivate the website within the arena you want it to grow in.

Then you can count your money! Play another round of golf, get to the kids baseball game on time and still be able to take your spouse out to dinner and get up late the next morning!

Do this:

Hire the same quality of expert as you are, hire someone who works as hard as you do to stay ahead of the game… hire them and then take their advice, and let them do their job.

New Smyrna Beach Middle School Jazz Band – Lakeside Jazz Festival

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Being a proud parent, I can’t help but use my resources as a web developer and SEO specialist to show off the talent of my 2 boys. Charles (CG), 14, and Jacob, 12, are both very talented musicians. Today their Jazz band, New Smyrna Beach Middle School Jazz Band, performed at the Lakeside Jazz Festival in Port Orange. Both boys played a solos. Jacob’s solo on the clarinet begins about 2:04 into the performance. CG’s solo on the trumpet immediately follows. Hit the play button above. Excuse the poor audio, it was a bit windy. And cold… What’s up with this April cold snap in Florida in anyway?

Both boys have been playing musical instruments since the 3rd grade. We were very blessed to have the boys attend the only elementary school in Volusia County (Spruce Creek Elementary) with a performing band. A big thank you to Mr. Ed Clowers, their elementary school band director. As both boys started playing, the improvement in their academics was obvious. Here are some startling statistics;

  • Students taking courses in music performance and music appreciation scored higher in the SAT than students with no arts participation.
  • Music performance students scored 53 points higher on the verbal and 39 points higher on the math.
  • Music appreciation students scored 61 points higher on the verbal and 42 points higher on the math.
  • According to the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, music students received more academic honors and awards than non-music students.
  • A higher percentage of music participants received As, As/Bs, and Bs than non-music participants.
  • Lewis Thomas, physician and biologist, found that music majors comprise the highest percentage of accepted medical students at 66%
  • The arts are one of the six subject areas in which the College Board recognizes as essential in order to thrive in college.
  • Researchers in Leipzig discovered through the use of brain scans that musicians had larger planum temporale, the region of the brain associated with reading skills. Also, musicians had a thicker corpus callosum, the nerve fibers that connect the two halves of the brain.

If you have school age children, I strongly recommend you get them involved in music. You won’t be sorry!

Take Your Search Engine Optimization To The Next Level With Video

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Watching videos online is becoming more and more common and it is a lot more engaging than just plain text. Online video is a great way to share a message with your audience. It’s also proving to be a reliable way to boost a website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as increase traffic. Video and SEO seem to go hand in hand. Think of all the websites you stumbled upon accidentally because you followed a link from a video someone shared. Even if your video doesn’t go viral, there is still a good chance it can work for you to optimize your website.

Video is a good SEO tool for a number of reasons. The first reason is that thousands of hours of video are watched online by viewers every day. Another reason is that when Google and the other search engines are out there crawling your site they are looking for indicators such as quality, relevance, keyword placement as well as over 200 other indicators. Video and other multimedia add value to those metrics thus improving your rankings in the search results.  Imagine!  There are over 200 ways, indicators, that you can have displayed and installed in your website that make it ‘search engine preferred’!  How many of them do you know?

Truth is, no one knows them all except Google and they aren’t going to give us a check list so that we know them too!  But here’s the deal – we do know many more of these indicators than you probably do and continue to learn and apply new ones when we SEO the websites we develop and the ones we’re hired to optimize.  The favorable results of  increased sales our clients can take to the bank, prove our worth.  Not bragging here but worth letting you know, that this is our full time job and we maintain our knowledge base and do everything possible to keep it updated.

Here’s a good example to illustrate one of the indicators Google and other search engines employ:  when someone watches a video on your site, their stay on your site is increased. Time spent on a website is read as important indicator for Google and the other search engines.  People are often heard boasting about how many ‘hits’, visitors and viewers they have to their website – okay, this is a good thing, now we know that it’s ‘on the road’ but doesn’t  it make sense that an even better indicator is that the viewer stay on the site long enough to make a purchase!?  That type of site is called in the trade: ‘sticky’.  Wouldn’t that indicate to the bots that crawl the web and search and measure these factors, that your website is being ‘hit’, visited for the right reason?  That’s called in the trade: relevance.  And wouldn’t the most natural conclusion be for just these two indicators, that the content on your site, is in the right place to be seen by the right surfer?  It’s simple really, Google is constantly updating their game just as you and I do in our jobs.  Their job is to be a ‘good search engine’ and ensure that when someone types in the search bar ‘second hand auto parts’ they don’t end up with one or more of the 10 results on page one of sending them to ‘computer processors’ in China!  Or ‘grandma’s cookies, some of which happened to look like Joey’s truck!  Relevance…and folks that visit the site find what they need and want.

Another important reason is that people are more likely to link to video content. Page-rank (PR) is another important indicator for Google. Think of all the videos that are shared across social media platforms. Someone linked to them from a website and from then on they were shared. When this is ramped up, it’s called in the trade: viral video. This can produce hundreds even thousands of backlinks to your website thus increasing your PR (placement within the Google search engine).

Think about it, millions of viewers, all over the world, all night & all day, view videos  and share them in peer-to-peer, social media platforms including forums – now if you add to that, the unremitting fact, that all research has indicated, viewers prefer to have information about products and services delivered to them in video productions…then why not have professional video production, correctly displayed on your website?!  When its plugged in correctly the search engines, chief among them is Google,  ‘prefers’ it as content and makes it readily available for the ‘searcher’ to locate it.

How Do You Get Your Video Onto Your Website So That Google Reads It:

When you use a video on your site it is important to use them correctly. The best method of using videos on your site is to take advantage of the new HTML5 video tag. If your website is not coded in HTML5, it is time to upgrade! You will also need to create a video sitemap and submit it to all of the search engines. Be sure not to put all of your videos on the same page. Give each video its own unique URL with its own unique keyword phrase. Google doesn’t know what is in your video, it picks up the relative keywords from the URL you assign the video, the title and description in the video sitemap, and the related content on the page.

Add other related images and content to the page your video is on so Google can see what you video relates to. This ensures that each video is ranked and searched separately based on it’s targeted keywords. For instance if you have a website about cooking with videos of you making chicken you’ll want those videos to be searchable. If someone searches how to make lemon chicken your website may not pop up, but a page with a video would have a better chance of being ranked.

In conclusion, if you really want to pull traffic to your website and sell your products and services by using video productions as content, never use YouTube, Vimeo or Bing to host your videos. Unless your intentions are to increase traffic to their websites and not yours. Don’t spend your time and resources creating a great video only to to drive traffic to someone elses website.  It’s just not good business.

Build a good SEM (search engine marketing) strategy and get it doing the heavy lifting for you.  Many Webmasters like ourselves, who are hired to not only develop websites, but utilize them as advertising and marketing devices to sell the clients products, are staggered at why anyone wouldn’t have video as an option on the website!?

We all know, and anyone can do the most minimal research and draw the same conclusion – if you get decent, relevant, video production onto a website and plug it into that site correctly, there isn’t a more cost effective way to increase your sales.  There just isn’t.

Professional Video productions plus solid search engine optimization is marketing on steroids!

 
Search Engine Optimization Services

 
For the best video production services available. Visit: factandfable.com.