I have been developing web sites for over 14 years and working with SEO Companies for the past 5 years.  If you want to know how to avoid getting screwed and not getting your money’s worth, this blog is for you.

All search engine companies will tell you that it takes 4-6 months to achieve first page placement on the major search engines.  This is absolutely true.  It takes time to build links and time for the search engines to find those links. Therefore, regardless if you go to a great SEO company or a scam company, it will take 4-6 months to see results.  You need to plan for this.

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I have been reviewing a number of articles from experts on search engine marketing and found a lot of great resources for determining a great domain name for your marketing efforts.  In my experience, if you are creating a search engine marketing campaign, it is wise to choose a domain with your targeted keywords in the name.. For instance, after performing your keyword search, you should have a list of 20 top keyword phrases to market.  Based on this list, I would recommend choosing one of the top keywords with the MOST searches and the least competition to target.  For example, let’s say you are a real estate agent in los angeles.  One of your most sought after keyword phrases is “real estate agent los angeles” or “real estate los angeles.”  One of the best ways to get high rankings on a search engine for the keyword “real estate los angeles” is to have the domain name.. “www.realestatelosangeles.com” or “www.realestatelosangeles.net” or “www.realestatelosangeles.org”.

If you want to brand your name like “Mike Berry Real estate” you can also register the domain “mikeberryrealestate.com”.  It is my recommendation to build the web site under the domain above “www.realestatelosangeles.com” and then simply POINT the domain “mikeberryrealestate.com” to the other domain.  That way, you can market one domain in print and one in the search engines.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Question: How would you rate .com, .org and .net – which is best?

BareTrax: All other things being equal, .com domains will always hold the greatest value… After that, there’s some debate whether .net or .org have the edge – but personally, for me, I have had better SEO experience with .org’s.

Question:If you are able to get keyword.org or keywordonline.com which should you go for? Does the extension or the keyword density have more pull in Google?

BareTrax: If all other factors are the same and for SEO reasons only – I would go for the .org all day long [in your example].

Question: What if, the dot com domain name comprises of 4 or 5 words and yet the domain is the exact keyword being searched for? Is there any disadvantage of having a long domain name for 18 to 25 words?

BareTrax:If you are targeting that exact long tail key phrase then this would be the perfect domain.

Question:If I was in the custom embroidery business, and CustomEmbroidery.com was not available, would I be better off with CustomEmbroidery.net or going after something like CustomizedEmbroidery.com even though “Customized Embroidery” might get only 10% the number of searches as “Custom Embroidery”?

BareTrax: For SEO reasons: CustomEmbroidery.net [However,] you may consider the .com if you are looking to build a brand. DotComs have much more kudos

Question: What about suffixes like +s or +es? What do you think about this ones?

BareTrax: If you cannot get the exact match then I would say +s is usually the next best thing because it is usually the next biggest or THE biggest keyword anyway. The +s in a lot of cases gets more searches but depends on the keyword.

Posted on 16 Mar 2010 In: Search Engine Marketing Basics

Build Back links

Using the correct anchor text
There are some golden rules that you must stick to when it comes to the anchor text of the links that you build to your site. It is important that the anchor text that you use are essentially the key phrases that you are targeting for a particular page. Make sure that you use a variety of anchor texts based around your main phrases in order to achieve the best results.

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The major search engines rank web sites differently, but they all have many factors in common like back links, title tags, and above all, content.  In a very recent article, ranking factors were rated by a panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers.  All factors for search engine marketing are integrated into our seo ranking software and can be viewed through an administration area.  Based on reviews by the SEO experts, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.  The following is a breakdown of their analysis as to what areas need to be followed to get your web site ranked at the top of the search engine results.

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I recently read a great article about the definition of Page Rank and how it’s used in Search Engine Marketing.  The search engines and Google in particular are changing their algorithms constantly to provide better results.  One of the major factors people were using to determine their success was getting links from high Page Ranked pages.  This is a good measurement of your campaign, but not for the reasons you might think.  Read the following to understand more about Page Rank and how it used.

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In order to use the Bare Trax software, you need to find the profile ID in your Google Analytics account.  By inserting the Profile ID into the BareTrax software, you will be able to pull all traffic data from Google analytics into the software.  The following are the steps to find your Google profile ID.

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Every web site is built in two separate parts: a HEAD area and a BODY area.  The head area of the code comes first and is invisible to a person viewing a web site.  The body area is the programming that is displayed for visitors to see and includes the text and the images and the layout that people can see.  This article explains the difference between head and body tags and how to use them in your seo efforts.

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The trick to writing an effective search engine friendly article is to create unique content about a particular keyword phrase.  Google and the other search engines are looking to educate people about topics relating to your industry or business.  For instance, if you are a pharmaceutical company and you specialize in diabetes medicine and you’re targeted keyword phrase is “diabetes medicine,” a great search engine friendly article would be about the diabetes disease, the cause and the effects it has on people.  It should be a very general article with your keywords embedded in the article.

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Posted on 24 Jan 2010 In: Search Engine Marketing Basics

USING GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL

The Google keyword tool is a great way to get some basic information about keywords to use for your campaigns.  Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – Once you are there, you will see a blank space for entering your keywords.  This is where brainstorming for targeted keyword phrases is a must.  Think about words that other people would type in to find a business like your business.  For instance, if you are looking to market a butcher shop in Kansas City, you can type in keyword phrases such as “butcher Kansas city”, or “meat kansas city” or “cleaver kansas city”.  When you hit submit, Google will return the amount of times that those keywords are searched monthly.  The goal here is to identify the keywords that get the most searches per month AND are targeted to your business.

NO NOS WITH KEYWORD INTEGRATION

You might find that some keywords get a lot of search volume but might not be exact targets for your business.  For instance, if you have a company that specializes in commercial real estate and you enter the keyword “real estate” which gets 1.2 million searches per month, you might think this is a great keyword phrase to market.  However, you will run into a couple of problems:

1) the keyword “real estate” is one of the most competitive phrases on the internet and it will be extremely time intensive and difficult to get a first page placement for that keyword, and

2) Even if you achieve first page placement, you may get visitors looking for real estate listings, residential real estate, articles about real estate, or real estate auctions.  None of these people would fit your target market

Therefore, please be careful with the keywords you choose.  Make sure you brainstorm a great deal to find the most targeted keywords for your business and the most searched.

LOCAL VS. GLOBAL SEARCH

Local search volume is the amount of times a word was searched last month.  Global search includes the average amount of times a word was searched per month over the past 12 months.

DOWNLOAD THE DATA

When you find some good keywords, our recommendation is to download the data into an excel spreadsheet.  At the bottom of the keyword results, there is a link called “DOWNLOAD” and choose “CSV” format.   This will download the keywords into excel.  Once in excel, you can do a sort by the keyword search volumes with the most searched to the least searched. This will give you an idea as to what keywords get searched most.

HOW TO CHOOSE TARGETED KEYWORDS
The most important part of any search engine marketing campaign is choosing the right keywords for your web site and business.  The goal is to integrate these keywords on your web site, create articles surrounding these keywords, and linking to your web site from other web sites with those keywords.  Since it takes 4-6 months to really see the results of the keyword marketing, it is imperative that you choose wisely before you start.
LOCAL VS. NATIONAL
The middle listings in the major search engines cannot target people geographically.  Therefore, you need to market keywords that are local or national.  If you own a car repair shop in los angeles, you do not want to spend hundreds of dollars marketing the keyword “car repair shop.”  First off, if you get to be #1 in Google for “car repair shop”, you could have people calling from Idaho, Texas, or Florida which isn’t your market.  You need to focus on keywords such as “car repair los angeles” or “auto repair los angeles.”
Secondly, the keyword phrase “car repair shop” is more competitive because it’s a general phrase to get ranked.  The more keywords there are in a keyword phrase, the easier it is to get ranked on the first page of the search results.  For instance, “car repair los angeles” is much more defined than just “car repair shop” and easier to get ranked.
GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL
Once you determine if your business is local or national, then you need to determine the keywords that have the most search volume on a monthly basis.  In other words, you want to find words people are actually searching for.  By using tools such as Google’s keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) you can type in keyword phrases and find out how many times those keywords are typed into the search engine on a monthly basis.  If you put in different variations of your keywords like “auto repair los angeles” or “car shop los angeles” you can find the keywords with the most searches.  Also try different geographical locations like “car repair west los angeles” if that market is good for you.
After entering in these keywords, you should have a pretty solid list of keywords and search volumes to target.  I would choose the top 10 or 20 keywords with the most volumes to use in your marketing efforts.
Once you determine these keywords, save them in an email or in a word document.  These keywords will be used in the software to track your search engine marketing campaigns and will be used in articles and on other web sites.  Type in the number of keywords into the area in the software so they can be tracked in the coming months.

The most important part of any search engine marketing campaign is choosing the right keywords for your web site and business.  The goal is to integrate these keywords on your web site, create articles surrounding these keywords, and linking to your web site from other web sites with those keywords.  Since it takes 4-6 months to really see the results of the keyword marketing, it is imperative that you choose wisely before you start.  The following article discusses how to come up with your keywords.

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