The Click Depot Blog

Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are established businesses these days and there are dozens of such firms in every major city in the US. Well, there are many many more online that don’t even have an office or a registered company. These so called Internet Marketers operate from home and some don’t even have a website. Nothing wrong with any of that, except that many of them also end up scamming you. Long story short, they don’t know what they are doing, claim things that aren’t true, make promises that they can’t deliver and overall, end you up in a mess. Unfortunately, many SEO firms are the same way too.

So, how do you know if your Internet Marketer or SEO firm is scamming you?

5. Do they have a website? Is their website optimized for Search Engines?

You will be surprised how many Internet Marketers operate without a website. A company’s website says a lot about how much time and effort they’ve invested into a business. Especially for an Internet business, their website will reflect what they know about the business too. For instance, if their own website is optimized for search engines and is ranking well for their key search term, then that says that the company couldn’t have been formed yesterday and probably has a good track record. That doesn’t guarantee that they will do a good job for you, but at least gives you one more reason to believe that they are real and professional. An easy way to tell if their website is optimized for search engines is to look for the basics - Are their page URL’s full of giggerish or do they have user-friendly words in them? Do their pages load quickly or do they take forever? Take the first few words from the page title on their home page and search using those terms on google. Do you see their website?

4. Is the firm registered with BBB?

BBB - Better Business Bureau is a good place to look for compaints against a company. If your SEO firm has a whole bunch of complaints, they are obviously not a good choice.

3. Do they have “too many” good reviews?

Back in the day, to review any service, all you had to do was go to Google and type <Service name> review. Not anymore. These days, there are tons or sites that write paid reviews. So, chances are that your SEO firm used some of those paid sites to get good reviews. In fact, if you see too many “too good to be true” reviews or testimonials, I would actually take that as a negative.

2. Do they use good SEO and Internet Marketing practises?

Do they use black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, Etc.? Do they buy email lists and spam them? Important - where do they stand on SEO ethics? Do they think that it’s OK to get to the top of the search engine by hook or by crook or do they stand by their morals. The reason why this is important is that most long-lasting SEO companies understand the importance of ethics to thier business. There will always be a gray area, but the ‘whiter’ you are, the better your chances of success. The good SEO companies know that. A good way to find out is to suggest to the company that you WANT them to use black hat techniques. If they agree, you’d know.

1. What does their Internal setup look like?

There are way too many “SEO firms” out there that actually have ZERO employees. The one person shops outsource everything. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, it could be a smart business move. Do they have any sales people? How many dedicated resources do they have internally? Do they offer a timeliness guarantee? These questions will help you determine whether the company can meet your SEO and Internet Marketing expectations.

Do not hestitate to ask these questions to your prospective SEO company. Better safe than sorry, right?

Apple, Microsoft and Google inevitably end up locking horns with each other. Apple and Microsoft have been rivals for over 25 years now and it can be said that, for the most, part, Microsoft won the battle of the computer titans. Apple re-invented themselves with their i-vision. ipods, itough, iphone, imac, macbook pro, Etc. and before you knew, Apple was hot again - how many Apple devices do you and your family together have (including old versions that you upgraded)? You might be surprised to see that most families now have more Apple devices than any other hardware manufacturer. But is all that about to change with Google Android and G1? Well, we think YES. And here’s why.

Search is important to Google and we all know that. They are a $100 Billion market-cap company and 95% of that is from search-related revenues. The mobile business is taking off, we know that because in Europe and Asia, which is generally behind the curve on innovation compared to the US, but when it comes to the use of mobile phones, they are way ahead. As US catches up, there is a huge market here that Google will want to tap. Internal sources in Google  bloggers reveal that they are taking this mobile thing VERY seriously. It’s obvious, as people switch to using the mobile phone for more and more of their general internet browsing needs, searches will move to that area and that’s where the money will be as well.

The PC operating system market went to Microsoft, Google wasn’t even born then. But here’s their second chance, and possibly bigger than the first one due to the ready availability of a huge market with limited competition, compared to Microsoft’s challenge of creating a market for their products 20 years ago. This time Google’s biggest competitor is not Microsoft though, it’s Apple!! Yes, iPhones are amazing and are arguably the most advanced cell phones for entertainment purposes out there. Google is releasing the Andriod operating system which takes that to the next level. It packs entertainment features alongside with great search and easy emailing features. Things that most people also want in addition to just pictures and music. They now have it all - the #1 search engine in the world, ($$$) a great mobile operating system (OS) and the G1 phone (Hardware). Sounds like a winning combination to me. Iphones are great, but when search the ‘net on them, you really don’t feel like clicking on ads like you do when searching on the PC. G1 is optimized for Google Search more than any other device.

So, as I saw the new G1 phone advertised on the Google home page and on the Tmobile phone upgrades site, I was forced to think - is this it? Is this going to change everything. If Google ends up capturing a few million people that are G1 fans and can’t stop talking about it and actually start clicking on ads, this could change a lot of things in the search and mobilie advertising market. And we think it will.

So, if you are a small or even large business and like to stay ahead of the curve on markteing, here’s your chance. Invest in mobile and search advertising today..

Whether or not you have a brick and mortar store, it is vital to ensure your web site is ranked well in searches for your local area. What does this mean? What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. We wrote a post about this recently - raleigh internet marketing

With millions of companies competing for top 10 placements for their products and services, local search engine optimization provides a competitive advantage as well as allows consumers to conveniently shop locally as a result of using the web to locate the best deals.

In addition, local internet consumers are prone to shopping locally and prefer working with local businesses. The advantages are options like (a) checking their references (b) performing due diligence (c) establishing trust or (d) meeting in person to finalize deals are easier compared to a national organization.

For example, if you own a dry cleaning business, potential customers want to not only see your prices; they want directions and a map to get to your store. Even in the face of a global economy more and more people are realizing the importance of community and want to give their business to local merchants.

Here are some ideas to improve Organic Ranking of your site on web.

5. Link to Local City Searches

List your company with CitySearch. CitySearch is a major provider of local information for sites including MSN.com, Ask.com, Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and many others. Also consider listing on http://www.superpages.com, http://www.infousa.com, http://www.yellowpages.com, http://www.magicyellow.com and http://www.directorym.com

4. Add Contact information on your site

Have a physical address and phone number within an address tag at least on your contact page and one other page; the best option would be the homepage. By far the best option is to have your address on all pages of your site. Such information builds trust rank value for your web site too.

Search engines pay particular attention to proximity as well as keyword density (the number of times the keyword appears) as well as proximity to other keywords or qualifiers. A qualifier is a term like services, company, professional, expert, affordable, specialist, etc. and are used specifically to (a) add relevance to your keywords or (b) assist your positioning when people use them in search queries.

3. Use the city name and abbreviation of the state in the title or description tag

Pages are interpreted and indexed with the in title, in anchor and in text so understanding this provides one more unique opportunity to construct your pages in accordance to standards which are known to affect how search engines rank and respond to your content.

2. Submit your company’s listing

Submit listing to some top directories like Yelp, Insider Pages, City Squares.com, and MojoPages.com. Submit to Internet Yellow Pages like SuperPages.com, Yellow Pages, Info Space, and Switchboard.com. Submit to Local Search Engines like Google local Business Centre, Yahoo! Local Merchant, and Ask Business Search. Submit your company to Data Providers like Geosign Corporation, Info USA Sales Solution.

1. Add the qualifiers or specific geographic terms

This rule applies if you have qualifiers in the title, description and page, then solidifying the affect of the collective goal of the page for the sake of word density can be accomplished. For an added kick, hyperlink the main terms in the footer on every other page and point them to your about us page, which usually has the highest concentration of local and geographic information.

Bonus Tip: Hyper link the city and function of your web page

When employing links, the less the better for the strength of the link, also the higher up on the page a link is placed, the higher relevance it garners.

The big news this weekend seems to be the insider news leak about the possible launch of Google Android on Tmobile handset in September. This source reported a nice story about Google Android.

OK, now, why is that important to you? Here’s why:

1. 3G is just getting to become a huge phenomenon in the US. This is the new generation wireless communication protocol that will make sharing videos and large data files much easier. This has the potential to explode cell phone usage for Internet access. The iPhone already started this trend in a big way earlier this year. Google Android will make it bigger. Other countries in Asia (Japan) and Europe are already into this stuff and US lags behind. But we have the largest volume of consumers and the most amount of online spending and Internet users. If 3G takes off in the US, things can change for marketing firms very quickly.

2. Today, the big change seems to be people moving from using the Yellow Pages to using http://maps.google.com to find businesses. This shift was quite big. People had to learn the use of computers and know the ways of the Internet. Even then, this happened in less than a decade. People already use cell phones and when the same applications such as Google Maps and Google Android will be available on the cell phone, people will transfer much quicker to using cell phones instead of going to their PC’s as much.

3. You can stay ahead of the curve in the following ways.

A. If you have a budget for marketing that you can spend on mobile marketing, then talk to a mobile marketing firm. They can get your ads and brandname on multiple mobile applications.

B. Get yourself listed on Google Maps and other online mapping applications such as Yahoo Maps. MapQuest.com and others. These are getting used on the mobile phone in a big way already.

C. Add a “Send me an SMS” feature on your website. Encourage your website visitors to contact you via sms on your cell phone. http://smseverywhere.com/webmasters.htm. Now, this will have to be done with caution. You might have to keep a separate cell phone line for this purpose alone. I haven’t seen too many people try this but I can see it happening in the near future. Of course, 5-10 years from now, everyone will have cell phones than can handle email very well and sms will slowly become almost extinct or at least slow down in usage. Until then, this might be a good idea to grab the attention of your visitors. Who is more likely to contact you? Someone that just sees a regular contact us form on your website or someone that sees a “conctact me via sms” box and knows that you will receive his message immediately and may even respond to it in the next 30 seconds via sms to his cell phone?

There are many more ways, but I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. In marketing, as in business, staying ahead of the curve is important. Don’t do it after everyone else is doing it. Read the signs and get in early.

First of all, what are backlinks? Backlinks are simply links pointing to a page. So why are they not called just links? Well, you could call them that, but looking at it from your site’s perspective, you have links on your page, for instance, this link to the best raleigh internet marketing company (ok, i had to insert some propaganda, afterall, i want to make money too is an outbound link whereas any links pointing to this page (like the one you should add on your blog is a backlink.

Backlinks are also called inlinks (by Yahoo), inbound links (by Google) and so on.

So why are they so important? Read this post about search engine ranking factors and you’ll see that we said quality backlinks are the #1 factor in ranking pages higher on organic search results. Quality backlinks can skyrocket your website’s popularity and help your drive tremendous amounts of web traffic to your site. If you are serious about your business, whether is is online of offline, you need to know how to generate quality backlinks for your site. For that you first need to know what quality backlinks are.

Here you go, the seven qualities of a quality backlink:

1. Popularity: The page where the link is situated should be popular. In other words, that page should in turn have a lot of quality backlinks itself. It is emperically proven that SE’s look at at least 2 degrees of link popularity to determine rankings. Google page rank is a good measurement of the popularity of a page even though these days its accuracy is being questioned. So, if this is all too confusing for you then just know that you should get at least a few links from pages that have a google page rank that is higher than your page.

2. Outbound links: The page that you are getting backlinks from should not have too many outbound links on it. The recemmended number is 25 of less, in general. This is what makes the links from directories relatively less useful since directories typically have several dozen links on one page.

3. Age: The older the link that is pointing to your page, the better. This way search engines know that you are not buying links temporarily form a website to drive your link popularity.

4. Do Follow: Some websites mark some of their links as NO FOLLOW within their HTML coding or using other SEO techniques. They usually do this to avoid spam. No follow links are basically avoided by search engines when they determine rankings for a certain page.

5. Relevance: The link should be on a domain that is relevant to yours. It is increasingly becoming apparent that search engines understand link neighborhoods. In other words, if you are florist website and get a link from a website that talks about flowers, the link has more weightage than a link from a car mechanic shop. Now, your car mechanic might genuinely love the flowers he buys from you, but say sorry to him, search engines don’t really like his link all that much.

6. Location: Links that are mingled inside content (also called content links) are better than links that are on the footer or the header of sites or on a popup window for instance.

7. One way: Now this should actually rank pretty high up in this list but it’s down here because it is sort of obvious these days. Reciprocal links are less useful towards the link popularity of your website than one way links.

Now that you know what quality backlinks are, your next goal should be to find out how to get them. There are a lot of resources on the web that talk about this, but I’ll give you my 2 cents in a future post..

I knew you’d ask. I knew it. The million dollar question, it is. I wish I could tell you I know exactly Search engines (SE) look for when they rank pages for specific keywords. The truth is noone except the Ph.D’s at Google, Yahoo and MSN headquarters that are paid big bucks to create and maintain this algorithm know this.

I have a friend who worked at Ask.com and now works at Yahoo Search and even he does not know the specifics of the ranking algorithm. Why? Well, if that information were to get leaked out, I really think the Internet will be a crazy place and search engines will not be nearly as effective as they are today. SE results will be a lot less relevant since people with manipulate them with ease instead of letting the SE’s determine true relevance. There is already enough black hat SEO stuff out there without people being sure about how and what exactly SE’s look at.

The other point to remember is the SE algorithms are constantly changing. The algorithms are tweaked to increase the relevance of search results and make search engine marketing more lucrative for pay-per-click customers. They are also tweaked to make it harder for people to manipulate their sites to inappropriately display higher on search results.

That being said, if I don’t know the answer to this question, then what is this whole deal about SEO? Well, based on research, experimentation and emperical testing, it is process to read into the SE algorithm. At least somewhat. And that’s what SEO’s have done over the years.

So. let me give you my version of the truth. The factors are listed in the order of importance according to me.

1. Number of quality backlinks pointing to your page

So what are quality backlinks? I am going to have to write a separate post about that. But in essence, backlinks form high page rank, relevant, aged pages, preferably containing your keyword in their anchor text are quality backlinks. I know that leaves you asking for more evidence and explanation which is why a separate post is in order.

2. Your keyword in your page’s Title tag.

This is more important than most people realize. Your title needs to be carefully crafted to include 2-3 of your keywords but at the same time sound relevant and enticing to your human readers. I spend over 3-4 hours per month figuring out the right Title for my most important pages.

3. Age of your page/domain

Exact extent of this is hard to gauge because the older pages also usually have more “optimization” done on them over time naturally. But it is much easier to rank higher for pages on domains that are old.

4. Your Keywords in your URL

Search engines used to give a lot more importance to this a few years ago than they do now, but this still ranks among the top 10 ranking factors in my list.

5. Age of the backlinks pointing to the page

This is a factor that was almost not important at all 5 years ago but today, is gaining importance steadily as more and more websites buy “Temporary” links. So those temporary links will be rendered ineffective as a result of this rule since SE’s will not consider newly formed links for ranking pages. A generaly rule of thumb is to have links that are over 90 days old but again, that’s not set in stone at all. Just based on experience.

There are several sources for more information on this topic.

1. SEOmoz search engine ranking factors is exhaustive but too general.

2. Here’s a good discussion about the number one ranking factor on Google

Several other sites talk about this. And there’s too much information out there in fact. The crux of SEO, like in life, is FOCUS. Focus on the top 5 factors. Don’t get overwhelmed by the whole thing. Just one SEO technique applied right can sometimes make a HUGE difference. If you have even thought about optimizing your page for search engines, you are ahead of 75% sites out there. If you have spent 5 minutes on it, then you are perhaps ahead of 90% sites.

So you’ve decided to create your website and drive traffic to it! And you’ve heard these terms tossed around - SEO, SEM, SEF etc. They all seem the same to you. They are not.

I was like you too, until recently. I can shamelessly admit that it was after I had done a few website optimization assignments that I actually figured the difference between these words. Let me cut the c@ap and get to the point.

Let’s start with what we think you’ll already know.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization:

Wikipedia Definition: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

In essence, SEO is the process of increasing a site’s ranking for organic search results on Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing

This is where the confusion begins. Most people use SEO and SEM interchangeably and they might even justify it. In fact, the Wikipedia definition of the term SEM actually includes SEO. That’s strange.

But I can tell you that if you are one of them, the pros are gonna laugh at you behing your back :). So, regardless of where you stand on the chicken-egg debate, it might be a good idea to know what SEO experts think the difference is.

SEM is the process of marketing a website via paid/sponsored search engine listings. In other words, Google Adwords Marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter advertising all qualify under SEM. So, to me, the major differentiating factor is that in SEM you are paying money directly to the Search Engines for sponsored listings. It is a more direct form of advertisement than Search Engine Optimization where you are actually trying to naturally/organically rank higher for your target key phrases.
SEO usually takes longer and more creative techniques to implement. Your rankings on search engines depend on a variety of factors. I will cover these in a separate post.

SEF - Search Engine Friendly

This phrase is usually used in the context of Search Engine Friendly URL’s. So, SEF is not a process or a technique. It is an adjective used to describe certain elements of  website such as URL, Title, Footer, Design, Code, Etc. that are designed to make it easier for search engines to crawl and rank them for relevant key phrases. Making a site SEF is one part of the SEO process. Makes more sense now?
Any debate about these definitions is welcome..

Whether you do SEO for your one website or manage an entire portfolio, you know two things. 1 - Quality backlinks are the number 1 way to achieve a higher search engine rank. 2 - You need tools to quickly identify quality backlinks and rapidly implement your link building campaign.

Now there are hundreds of SEO tools out there. I am not going to try and cover everything, just the top five seo tools that will get you everything you need to get started on a link building campaign without spending a penny.

5. Mike’s Free Search Engine Rankings Tool

If you don’t have a tool yet, please get one. It is way too time consuming to keep going back the the search interface and search for where your site shows up on the results. There are several free and paid tools out there that can make your life easier. This is one thing in which the paid professional tools do seem to offer much better functionality than the free ones. The paid ones like IBP 9 and Web CEO provide the ability to run the rankings at one shot for over a hundred key phrases and then compare today’s results with results from the past. This is very useful. Mike’s rankings tool does offer limited ‘memory’. It remembers your last 20 key phrases and their rankings. Anything beyond 20 is forgotten. Also, the memory comes from cookies. If you clear your cookies, the history is lost. Despite that, this tool provides the best of the free ones. I usually take snapshots of the results using SnagIT and so I can compare with results from the past.

4. Onlywire.com

Social Media sites are THE in thing these days. Between social networking sites (like myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.orkut.com, http://www.linkedin.com) and social bookmarking sites (like http://digg.com, http://del.icio.us, http://stumbleupon.com, etc.) that’s where people hang out. For most niches, you will benefit immensely by participating in these networks and intelligently using them to your advantage. Onlywire.com allows you to submit to 15-20 of these sites at once. That saves you a ton of time and is a really useful handy tool that comes for free. Hats off to them. They have been able to scale as well. The tool has been on for months now and still performs, each and every time.

3. Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Directory Submitter

Brad Callen is almost a celebrity SEO consultant. He has been around for almost 5 years now. His products are widely used. His paid tool SEO Elite is ranked as one of the best SEO tools around. His free tools, however, Article Submiter and Directory Submitter, make it into my list. Article Submitter allows you to submit your article to hundreds of article directories and directory submitter submits your sites to link directories. These can help you get much needed backlinks to prep up your page rank. However, remember that the overuse of this technique can actually hurt your SEO campaign. Only about 10-20% of your total backlinks should be from Article and lInk directories.

2. Yahoo SIte Explorer

This is a great tool, period. Google is a great company. But one thing I don’t like about them is that they don’ reveal search stats to you as openly as Yahoo does. This site basically shows you the number of backlinks pointing to a specific website. A great way to gauge the progress your link building campaign and to see whether your link building campaign is getting results.

1. Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer Tool

This is my #1 seo tool. This is a brand new tool and it’s totally crazy that it is available for free. It allows you to look at the backlinks pointing to a site, and then look at their anchor text. You can also enter a keyword and get all the top sites for that keyword and then appraoch them for backlinks or link exchanges. A great great tool that you should be using.

At http://www.theClickDepot.com, we use all these tools and several other paid tools to optimize your campaign for you.

The Internet is an interesting place. We all know that it is expaning constantly (how many new websites do you browse to in a week?). But did you know that it is also constantly changing? It started off as more of a communication and information source sort of place in the late 90’s. Email was the eighth wonder of the world. Y2K brought with it the dotcom boom and everything from buying books to shoes to PC’s went online. The early twenty first century further made the Internet easier to use but there were still way too many technologies, few standards anda growth so fast that most people were’nt sure where to get started.

All that has changed today. This blog that I am writing on was installed on very affordable ($10/month) shared hosting, on free blog software (Wordpress) without a single line of code, without any IT person’s help, in less than 10 minutes. No kidding. This means a lot. The last 2-3 years have seen businesses, and I am not talking about the Walmarts and the Amazons. I am talking about the salons, the little soccer-apparel store, the neighborhood chinese market AND yes, your neighbor himself, create websites. So what does that mean for us and wait a minute, I thought this was going to be about local marketing!

You are right. More and more business have their websites. More websites means more competition and that’s what is changing the landscape. I run an SEO firm. A small one at present, and still, I see at least 10 businesses moving their advertising and marketing spending from direct mail and traditional methods to online marketing. Your customers are not looking at the thick Yellow Pages book anymore. I throw mine into the trash the day it arrives. I look only one place, that’s the Internet for all my business needs.

If you are not capitalizing on this market, WAKE UP! On the Internet, getting in early is too important. From getting a good domain name, to gradually building traffic from a variety of sources, it takes time to grab a piece of your market that’s searching for you online. All that competition (which is multiplying on a daily basis) means that it is getting harder and harder to do that.

No BS and sugar coating this message. Get in before it is too late.