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?

Yelp.com is all over the place these days. They have a community in just about every major city in the country, especially the west coast. It started at San Francisco, which is undoubtedly the hub for Internet-related innovation. It must be a fun life out there in SFO for people that are Internet savvy. So what’s so great about this site? Here’s some statistics on the site that we dug up from a few different sites.

Traffic

As you can see, there are in the same league as top sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us, which are huge social bookmarking sites. The difference though is that people visit social bookmarking sites more for fun than for real information. On the other hand, Yelp is a reviews site that people go to look for information on businesses and things to do in places. If you are a small business, you should be worrying about getting yourself placed on local search results and sites such as Yelp.com should be on your agenda for cheap marketing tactics.

Here’s more statistics about this site:

Those are some amazing numbers that most sites can only dream of. And the best part? The owners of the site don’t spend a dime on marketing the site (alright, may be that’s an exaggeration,  but you get it). All content on the site is user generated. And as you know, content is king in the Internet world. So guess what that means? The site will grow exponentially as more users take to it and the value keeps going up, all thanks to the great site features that its visitors love.

The lesson learned from this is not anything new, but a reinforcement of the idea that building a community is THE best way to make a website successful. Create a a community around your site using features such as blogs, forums, polls, rewards programs, give-aways, Reviews, Etc. Find creative ways to engage your visitors to interact and add content to your site. And that process can be fun too. It’s an amazing feeling to see a community grow, just like it is to see your business grow. And more often than not, the former can lead to the latter as well.

Don’t wait. Local search and online marketing can be your competitive edge.

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.

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..

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.