Category Archives: SEO tools

SEO For Startups

Analytics, Organic SEO, responsive web design, SEO, SEO tools, Small Business Marketing, Webmaster Tools, , , , ,

seo-for-startupsStartups have many things to worry about, so it’s not surprising that sometimes they neglect SEO. That’s detrimental to their websites because search engine optimization can bring them online exposure, as well as help them establish a more powerful online presence more quickly. If you run a startup yourself, hiring a SEO company may prove to be one of the best investments that you ever make for your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do some optimization on your own for your website, before the experts arrive.

What to Focus On

First you have to make sure that when someone enters your company’s name in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, the first result that the search retrieves is your website. This is done most of the time by the search engines automatically. Once that is done, you need to focus on optimizing your web pages for search engines, so that when someone searches for keywords that define one of your offerings, your website appears as high as possible in the search results. Ranking first is tough if there is strong competition in your niche, but you must struggle to make it to the first page of the results, because few people check the second page. The SEO for startups strategies below will help you get more exposure, but to really make it on the first page you need the help of an SEO expert.  A SEO company can help you out to make your local business grow in all of the San Francisco area. There are some good companies that are offering SEO services for small fees. Make sure that you always check their portfolio before hiring one.

  • Invest in high-quality web design. A bad, cluttered design can ruin all your SEO efforts.
  • Use Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Tools to monitor your website and get more insight into how your visitors are using it.
  • Make a list of your offerings and come up with relevant keyword ideas. You can use Google Keyword Planner to check how the keywords perform. The best keywords are those that have a high volume but a relatively low cost per click.
  • Ensure that every page on your website has a friendly URL, a unique title, and adequate page tags.
  • Make all website pages accessible in less than 3 clicks from the home page.
  • Fix any broken links.
  • Put your sponsors, endorsers, and partners in a visible location – on the homepage if there’s enough space – and link to their websites.
  • Add keyword-optimized content to your website, including images and videos.
  • Set up a blog on your domain and publish on it worthwhile content weekly, including in your posts links and references to your events and offerings.
  • Optimize your website for mobile devices, making sure that it displays well on all the popular smartphones and tablets used today.

These are only a few things that startups can to do improve their SEO. Save yourself the trouble to apply all these tips yourself by hiring a reliable SEO company. You have nothing to lose.

Citations:

As a marketing expert who has experience with online advertising, our guest blogger Josh loves to share his expert advice. He regularly researches the evolving SEO trends, and provides consultation to a bay area SEO company. You can check his contribution on Google+.

How to Recover From Google Penalties

SEO, SEO tools, Small Business Marketing, , ,

Recovering from Google penalties

Success or failure of your website hinges upon the appropriate use of Google to rank your site in search listings. Unfortunately, Google has the ability to hand out penalties which can adversely affect how far up the search rankings your website is listed. These penalties are put in place usually because Google believes that your site manipulates the ranking data through various spamming or black-hat SEO techniques. This can result in your website appearing way down the pecking order of sites in your category of keywords making it difficult for potential visitors to find your site at all.

Thankfully, there are a number of steps which can be taken to recover from Google penalties which we will outline below. Follow these steps and your site will hopefully be given a fair search ranking.

First Step: Find Out The Nature of The Penalty

In order to begin recovery you will need to know exactly what type of penalty has been levelled against your site. There are two categories of Google Penalties, Manual and Automatic.

  • Identifying Manual Penalties: There are two types of manual penalty which your site may be effected by. To assess whether or not you have been given an Unnatural Link Warning, log in to your Webmaster Tools account which is provided by Google to help site owners maximise their search rankings. From there look for any alerts directly from Google in your inbox which states that your site violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines in the form of unnatural links which lead to your site, unfairly effecting PageRank. The second type of manual penalty is De-Indexation. To find out if you have fallen foul of this penalty, go to Google.com and type in Site:yourdomain with the appropriate ending (com, org, net, etc.) into the search box. If your site doesn’t appear in the resulting search, you’ve been de-indexed which means that your site is ‘off the radar’.
  • Identifying Automatic Penalties: To find out whether or not you’ve been hit with an Identifying Algorithmic Filter penalty, log in to your Google account and click on your analytics reports. Look through the graph presented which shows your site traffic, if at some point there is a complete drop in visitors which never rises, then your site has most probably been de-indexed from searches.

Second Step: Recover From Manual Google Penalties

If you have found that your site has been struck by a manual penalty in the form of unnatural linking, then do the following to recover a fair search ranking:

  1. Do as Google Asks!: In the original notification mentioned above, you will have been told to look for artificial or unnatural links which point to your site and are being used to manipulate your PageRank. Familiarise yourself with the forms of unnatural or artificial links available so that you can identify them more easily. This will involve a bit of online research, here are is a video from Google about this to get you started.
  2. Locate & Remove Unnatural Links: To remove these unwanted links, log in to your Webmaster Tools and look for the Traffic section. Here you should be able to find stats on the links to your site from other sources. Look for ones which appear unnatural and often added together on the same day in large numbers. Take a note of these then go to this website and type in your URL. Here you will be given a report about the sources back-linking to your site, and which ones may be ‘bad’. Now here is the tricky part, if these links have not been created by yourself you will need to contact the Webmasters of those sites directly and ask them to delete the links. Be warned, they do sometimes try to charge you for this, if they try this scam take a screen capture of the request and attach it to your correspondence with Google about your penalties. Now, use the Google Link Disavow Tool which will let you report these links directly to Google who should remove them from consideration when calculating your PageRank.
  3. Resubmit Your Site For Ranking: Finally you will need to resubmit your website for ranking via Google. You can do this by following Google’s guidelines.

If you believe your site has been de-indexed then you will also be required to apply for reconsideration directly.

Third Step: Recover From Automatic Google Penalties

If you have identified automatic penalties via algorithmic filters, you will need to follow these steps to recover your PageRank:

  1. Find Duplicate Content: The majority of these penalties are brought about by the existence of duplicate content. To find duplicates, take a portion of the content and paste it into Google search exactly. If you have used a piece of content more than once on your sites, then removing the duplicates will help recover your PageRank. If it is the case that someone else has used your content and created a duplicate, then you unfortunately have only three options. First, contact the site owner and inform them that you hold the copyright for that content, providing links, and request that they remove their duplicates or you will have to take them to court. Second, you could contact the web-host who could remove the offending website completely if you can prove the content is yours. Finally, you may have to use a lawyer to threaten legal action if they do not meet your requests.
  2. Remove Low Quality Content:Familiarise yourself with Google’s Quality Controlguidelines. After this, delete any pages you might have which do not pass this benchmark, often pages with little or no content in them.
  3. Remove Over Advertising: Delete advertising which is overtly excessive which could slow down your site and drown out any content.
  4. Increase Page Load Speeds: If your site is really slow to load, Google might not index it properly. Follow these recommendations to increase your site’s speed.
  5. Resubmit: Finally, when you are convinced your page is in a better position to be evaluated for PageRank, resubmit your site for reconsideration.

alice-mcleanAuthor’s bio: Alice McLean is a writer at bestessays.com  with a background in history, sociology and internet marketing. Now she is writing her first book on internet marketing.

5 Best SEO Software Tools

content marketing, SEO, SEO tools, Small Business Marketing, ,

5 best seo toolsBehind every SEO company that is doing well, there is a good SEO software tools set. There are many both premium and free resources to assist everybody from do-it-yourself webmasters to the seasoned SEO professionals to optimize websites. Below is a look at the 5 best SEO software tools that will help you get the full benefit of your SEO campaigns.

1. SEOmoz Pro

SEOmoz, the world’s biggest SEO community produces SEO software tools obtainable with their SEOmoz Pro membership like the well-liked Open Site Explorer Tool. There are many resources available to assist you with on-page analysis, link analysis, competitor analysis and keyword analysis as well as monitoring and tracking SEO campaigns all in a single user-friendly management platform.

2. Google Analytics

This is among the most influential SEO software tools when you comprehend the usage of every report to get the ability to take out web metrics that are relevant and useful to your site. You may learn valuable insights regarding your visitors which you can use for tweaking and improving campaigns. The Google Webmaster Tools is currently integrated with Google Analytics. Among the standard free SEO software reports are tools are: Content Analytics, Analysis Tools, Advertising Analytics, Conversion Analytics, Mobile Analytics and Social Analytics.

3. SEOBook

This is a leading SEO training tool and it offers a variety of free as well as premium SEO software tools for SEO newbies as well as the optimization gurus. These tools will prove very helpful with your off-page as well as on-page optimization from assisting you to set goals that are realistic for your campaigns through to following up and monitoring campaigns. Particular SEO resources that are produced by SEOBook include Premium Web-based SEO software tools, Premium Firefox Extensions, Free Firefox Extensions and Free Web-based SEO tools.

4. CopyScape

This is a simple and handy free tool used for checking duplication of published content on your website as well as on external websites. With the CopyScape Premium, you are able to check if content has been duplicated prior to having it published on your website. CopyScape Copysentry additionally protects your site against content theft and plagiarism by monitoring the web as well as emailing you incase the application sports any content duplication.

5. Whitespark Local Citation Finder

Among the main factors to high rankings in the local searches are ‘local citations’. The Whitespark Local Citation Finder is an amazing tool to find citation chances. Citations, also referred to as web mentions occur when a site ‘cites’ a business’s name, address as well as telephone number (NAP). A website address doesn’t have to be included so as to be considered a citation. The citation sources can be searched for by a phone number or a keyword phrase.

Conclusively, learning the usage of SEO tools can help you make adjustments to your site as well as give you a better perceptive of the procedures being used by your SEO Company to boost your Search Engine rankings. However, when choosing an SEO company, you have to be careful to choose a good one. There are some companies in the market that offer very cheap prices but their services are of a poor quality. Ensure to get a reliable company with high quality services and reasonable rates.

Our guest post, by Mathew, is a blogger interested in software development, SEO, Google AdWords and digital marketing. He works for INX, a FIFO Software developer in Perth, Western Australia.

KPIs: That Will Allow You To Measure Your SEO Campaign’s Performance

Google AdWords, Key Performance Indicators, KPI's, SEO, SEO tools, Small Business Marketing, , ,

KPIs: That Will Allows You To Measure Your SEO Campaign's PerformanceDo you wish to make your business a flourishing one? Are you aware of the latest online marketing trends that have been made to take e-Commerce ventures and your visibility to a whole new level? If not, then you should definitely know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Getting the highest ranking on the search engines for your website is the main objective of SEO. This is an important aspect to consider because the success of any online business depends on the traffic the website can attract. SEO helps a business get listed on the top most position in various search engines. Therefore, an SEO campaign is essential for businesses to achieve its objective of sustainable profitability.

Importance Of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) In SEO:
Acknowledging the importance of an SEO campaign, there has been an emergence of many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These help in measuring the effectiveness of the Search Engine Optimization Campaigns. However, the measurement of success of any SEO campaign varies vastly depending upon the nature and objectives of the business.
Key Performance Indicators are extremely important for any online business venture because they reveal the effectiveness of their strategies to be listed on the top of the search engines. The SEO campaign can be modified and changed according to the results shown by these indicators. In addition to measuring the campaign, these indicators are extremely important for improving the campaign over time.

The KPIs For Measuring SEO Campaign:
A few standard KPIs can greatly help businesses in measuring the effectiveness of their SEO campaign. The following are the most widely  used:

  • Unique Keywords- The number of keywords can be used to measure the performance of the website on a global basis. When a site uses diverse keywords, it will surely be ranked in a good position.
  • Visits per page- The attention, which the keywords of a website can draw, is also an indicator of its effectiveness.
  • Rate of conversion per page- The keyword that outperforms the others should be found out. The key word, which gives the most desirable search results are considered to be a boon for the website.
  • Indexed Pages- The number of pages of the website indexed by Yahoo or Google can give a rough idea about the website’s crawl-ability. The number of actual pages should not be greater than those indexed by Yahoo or Google.
  • Rankings- When the website is ranked well, the search engine optimization campaign can be considered successful. The keywords should be tracked over a period of time, which gives the website owners an idea about how effective their SEO strategy is.
  • Google Links- Website owners can get an approximate number of backlinks, which point to their site with the help of Google links from Google Webmaster Tool or Majestic SEO. However, the quality of the links needs to be good for getting the desired results. Such a thing also reveals how well the website is placed in the search engines.
  • Return on Investment (ROI) – Businesses can have a system, which would track the monetary value of the conversions. This would determine the Return on Investment (ROI) for the Search Engine Optimization campaign.

Benefits Of KPIs For Business:
Online business ventures can only succeed if they have their website ranked in the top most position in the search engines. When their SEO strategy is measured by the Key Performance Indicators, their efficiency and effectiveness is revealed. With the help of KPIs, business can modify their strategies to gain a profitable position online. When the website is optimized for the search engines, the website will attract more targeted traffic, which in turn will increase the popularity of the brand. Thus, the business enterprise that is agile and analytical can reach higher profit margins while attracting thousands or even millions of internet users.

There is no doubt that by adopting the right Key Performance Indicators, businesses can bring about a great change in their overall position on the internet. They can attract a larger number of customers on a global level.  Businesses can become very profitable over time if their SEO strategy is effective and agile.  By implementing a good SEO strategy the brand, products and services a business offers will be visible and on the minds of their prospective clientele so when a client is ready to buy they will come to you.

Author Bio: Robert Bryant is an online consultant for Cuffs Mart – locket cufflinks men. He likes blogging about online strategies that are related to Social Media, SEO, and Online Marketing.