Category Archives: SEO

reelWebDesign.com Becomes A Yext® Certified Partner & Adapts to Change

Content creation, content marketing, Google glass, Mobile Marketing, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology, The Importance Of Content Creators, Video marketing, Web Design, , , , ,

google-hummingbirdAs the SEO world has recently been turned on its head by the new Penguin 2.1 and Hummingbird algorithm we at reelWebDesign.com are compelled to focus more on two areas:

  1. Helping small businesses with local SEO (getting you found locally on the web with geographically driven keywords and intentions in mind).
  2. Helping you with social media marketing and content production.

Our focus will be in these two areas more than ever and it will benefit your business and ours in many ways.
How?
Google’s new algorithm is centered around people and helping them find what they are looking for. In essence they have bcome the new ASK.com (even though they’d never admit it), but where ASK had failed to deliver good results Google claims that they will deliver excellent results, and who am I to argue with them as they do own the worlds largest search engine!  So content is what we are going to focus on for our clients. However, many local businesses like pizza parlors and locksmiths don’t need to answer a lot of questions for their consumers and others just don’t have time or money to create fresh content, for these businesses they just need to be found! That’s the second part of Google’s algorithm: where having citations is more important than ever (a citation is basically a listing on any of the major local directories and social networks on the web i.e. Foursquare, Yelp, zagat, 8Coupons, Citysearch etc.).  So we have partnered with Yext to make it inexpensive, consistent and easy to implement.  Note: Consistency is extremely important as the search engines will see the same business as a separate entity if listed with different names, phone numbers or addresses.  This inconsistency will water down your search or ‘Google juice’, thereby lowering your ranking.

In addition to teaming up with Yext® we are offering a free Google plus/places listing optimization as part of our local SEO plan.  Google, as no surprise, values it’s own social networks, Google Plus and Google Places over all others. We believe this focus on providing relevant content, social media management and marketing and local SEO with Yext® as our partner will provide excellent results for all new and current customers.  Please watch the video below about the Yext® service.

responsive_web_designer

Our focus will also be to deliver responsive or mobile ready web design (responsive web design is developing a website that changes or responds to diferent sized screens for a better user experience.  Example: Our website is responsive and will appear differently on your laptop, tablet and phone).  

Why responsive/mobile ready?

mobile-search-dataAnalytics firm BIA/Kelsey has predicted that mobile search queries will overtake desktop queries by 2015. If your website isn’t mobile ready then you’ll be missing out on the larger piece of search.  Compound this with the push in the SEO world to focus more on local search and you’ll understand that mobile search is the area of largest growth and the best bet for acquiring new customers from this point forward.

Social Media

So where does social media fit into the equation? Social media is similar to the old word of mouth marketing… on steroids! It allows for your message to be broadcast to countless people in an extremely fast fashion.  It also helps with search engine rankings.  The more a post is shared the more the search engines see it as valuable. Google+, although an underused social network by most,  is extremely important as Google values it above all other social networks. For this reason we post your message to the main 4 driving forces on the social web: Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  If you have a blog we’ll also post your article/blog post to various other networks as well including: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Plurk, Newsvine, Scoopit, Diigo, Folk and Hubpages to name a few.  This will not only boost your viewership but also your Alexa rating which influences search engine ranking as well.  It is from the social networks that search engines are able to personalize your user expereince and give you results that are customized for your personal liking’s.  So as you can see social media is an extremely important factor in online marketing and its value to both people and search engines is growing more important every year.

Conclusion

It’s been a tumultuous year in search marketing but I believe I know where it is all headed and I see why Google is doing this great transition. With Google watches, glasses and more voice search integration on the horizon the way we perform and undertake search is going to change dramatically. Search will move more towards speech and visual cues with geographical underpinnings wrapped around your personal likes and dislikes i.e. personalized mobile search.  People will be asking more questions about: ‘what’s in the area’, ‘how to do things’, ‘what do you know about this’ and ‘what’s going on now that I would like’.  From this information, surprisingly, we can see that small businesses do have a future as there will be more of a need to discover and cater to micro-niches.  So as long as we, small businesses, focus on a niche and excel at it we can have a successful life as Google and other social networks will actually be driving people towards us.

The future brings more focus to everything, the question is what will your business focus on, and our job at reelWebDesign.com will be to find you your appropriate crowd through all of our partner networks including our latest, Yext®.

By Peter Marino owner of reelWebDesign.com, a company helping small businesses find their niche.

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+.

Organic SEO : Why All-Natural Is Still Best

Content creation, content marketing, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , ,

My mom is a devoted supporter of anything organic. She checks the label on food items, makes sure that she buys only from organic family farmers and buys me yogurt while everyone else in school enjoys ice cream. Nevertheless, I was proud of the fact

and never complained that I was the “healthy kid” in class. I knew my mom was doing something right.

Organic SEO

Just like food, I prefer doing business the healthy way. There’s no way I will empty my pockets for so-called shady companies who use shortcuts.

Tricks of the Trade, Anyone?

In our modern world, we have a lot of gadgets and machineries that make life easy for us. We like to pay more for automatic vehicles when we can manage with a stick shift. We love ordering fast food, even though we can always prepare healthy 10 minute meals. You’d like to avoid these tactics when it comes to boosting your website rankings.

 Content Spinning – Google is always looking for uniquely written content. For talented copywriters, it’s not a problem. However, content spinning software is heaven sent for lazy writers. They can take any article from the Internet (including this article!) and use the software to create reusable content. Though considered as a black hat SEO technique, it was still acceptable by some blog owners in the past. However, Google found a way to detect those spun articles and yes, content is king again. Thank you for that!

  1. Purchasing Social Media Followers – Even if you have the money to buy the likes and plus ones, don’t ever fall for this technique. Chances are, those accounts are not owned by real people. The reason why you need social media as part of your marketing strategy is for customers and potential clients to be interested in your products and services. You can’t achieve that with fake accounts.
  1. Keyword Stuffing – Trust me, this does not taste as good as turkey stuffing. As the name suggests, an article is stuffed with too much keywords. If you’re looking for a cheap florist in Sydney, you don’t want to come across this:

“If you are looking for a cheap florist in Sydney to provide flowers for your next occasion, you’re in luck. As the only cheap florist in Sydney, check out the products and services we can offer you. You might also want to read on the multiple benefits you can get from a cheap florist in Sydney. Hurry and contact us, the cheap florist in Sydney you can rely on.”

That’s ugly as sin. No one in his right mind would want to read and share that.

The All Natural Goodness of Organic SEO

I view SEO rankings like a test in school. Those who don’t have the patience to study may do well in school for the moment, but will ultimately fail. That’s the same reason why you should choose an SEO agency who can help you with your goals, sans cheating. They should be able to offer SEO service that’s legitimate. With Penguins and Pandas on a witch hunt, you don’t want Google to penalize you for taking shortcuts.

In conclusion, if you’re a businessman who does not have time to write good, interesting and share-worthy content, find an SEO firm who can help you with that. You want your content to be read and shared by people, not thrown out. Real people (and not fakes ones) means money actually coming in, and not the other way around.

By Debra Wright

Debra Wright is a creative and innovative blogger and online marketing specialist. She uses her wordsmith skills to share her ideas, thoughts, and tips to other people about topics that fascinate her, such as Organic SEO. Follow Debra on twitter @debrawrites…

What in the World is Google Doing with Hummingbird!

Content creation, content marketing, Link Building, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

google hummingbird updateGoogle Hummingbird Update As of October 9, 2013

For those of you that have a website that was currently ranking for different keywords you may have noticed a disheartening minor or major drop in ranking. Google has recently launched 2 algorithms. One is Hummingbird and the other is Penguin 2.1. Hummingbird has to do with quality fresh content detection and Penguin 2.1 has to do with spam-filtering.

The general overall pattern seems to suggest Google likes content oriented sites and sites that regularly update their website.  Many of the sites which fell in rankings either lack text-based or video content or did not update the site regularly with unique offers/content.  On-page search engine optimization is not just about having the right meta information any more. It seems Google is actively targeting sites which do not update their on-page content since Hummingbird is designed to look for the content originator.  This means on page schema coding is more important than ever!

Me and my team do differing amounts of link building from different networks and record them just to see the effect it has every time an update gets rolled out. After careful consideration, I decided to discontinue the links from some of our partner networks and invest more on custom built blogs or blogs with high Google authority.

My team and I just made a major change to how the links are distributed during the syndication process. Instead of adding 4 links on some of the article pages with differing anchor tags, we have limited it to 2.  We are making all ‘click here’ anchor tags as no follow links.  Due to this process, you may see some link loss over time. We do strongly believe this process will help everyone in the long run. We’ve also decided to include more co-citations in the articles we create to help with the new algorithm.  What is co-citation? Read here for more.

What I am also seeing is irregular patterns which do not single out any one single factor. Some webpages and sites just seem to have randomly lost rankings while others gained traction from the same domain.

We are fighting an uphill battle since we just never know what Google will do next. There are some reports that Google will de-rank a site if almost no one clicks on the site while it stays on page 1 even though you are doing everything correctly SEO wise. All we can do now is constantly make an educated guess and deal with it. I highly recommend regularly updating your websites and adding a blog to your site and/or post articles on other sites as a guest blogger.  Thus, our focus at reelWebDesign.com will be starting to go deeper into the realm of content marketing as this is where Google is headed.
For current clients I am disappointed just as much as you are as we are at a time of such great change in SEO prompted by Google.  However, if we work together we can prevail, we’ll just need to cooperate with this giant that controls the Internet.  Content marketing seems like the most fool proof way of getting your website ranked and to add consistent traffic for the long term.  For more information and sample content marketing packages click here.

Peter MarinoA direct message from the owner of this blog,  Peter Marino.