In any SEO campaign, whether for real estate or anything else, best results correlate to best practices and what’s demonstrated here is poor practice indeed.

This removal of the Yahoo link checking tool and a host of freebie tools and sites that depended on it means that white hat SEO and building of a site [...]]]> Today the lights went out on Yahoo Site Explorer and the free alternative to analyze and evaluate back-links. This may come as bad news to a lot of DIYers but the quality of this method of evaluating the SEO clout of a website leaves a lot to be desired as Google continues to scale down the influence of links to make room for other ranking signals. 

This removal of the Yahoo link checking tool and a host of freebie tools and sites that depended on it means that white hat SEO and building of a site by contextual material that isn’t lame becomes even more the standard of website promotion and ranking. 

There are still tools available to evaluate links that are of good quality but the valuable data you should be extracting from the links to a website is not given out free. Subscriptions pay for the crawlers that have to perform the job of indexing billions of pagea and links. It’s no small, or cheap, task.

Everyone in SEO knows that a link from a quality, high authority site means exponentially more than thousands from link farms and forum profiles, etc., yet the temptation to indulge in link quantity remains for the SEO neophyte.

I recently evaluated top competitors in a real estate market where the #5 performer had 10 times the raw count of links that the #1 website had. Quality of all the ranking factors- best quality links included, determine where a website ranks in Google.

In the above graphic, I used three top competitors and two benchmark sites to analyze competition. Note that the leftmost three columns reflect top middle and lower positions of competitors for a keyword on page one of Google. The winning combination on the lefmost (#1 spot) column were on-page quality, link quality and a better social media score than competitors who had none.

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Chatter levels are increasing on forums like Webmaster World about yet another Panda update going on now. Right now. For those who like tracking by numerical sequences, this iteration would be panda 2.4.

According to Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz, what makes Panda revolutionary is that it is a learning machine. Perhaps considered by some to be not too unlike the Terminator, always gathering information about and better understanding human behavior. In terms of artificial intelligence, Panda’s view of the world was formed in a soup of months of study and opinion gathering from web activities [...]]]>

Chatter levels are increasing on forums like Webmaster World about yet another Panda update going on now. Right now. For those who like tracking by numerical sequences, this iteration would be panda 2.4.

According to Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz, what makes Panda revolutionary is that it is a learning machine. Perhaps considered by some to be not too unlike the Terminator, always gathering information about and better understanding human behavior. In terms of artificial intelligence, Panda’s view of the world was formed in a soup of months of study and opinion gathering from web activities of real human beings. Google has confirmed that extensive research was performed where people were presented with websites and were simply allowed to vote whether they like the website or they didn’t like the website. This could obviously include factors ranging from colors and appearance to images, animations and graphics to menu systems and of course, the text content and layout of a website.

Panda has since recursively crawled, not the web, but the Google index and evaluated the websites in the index and rearranged the search results based on its learning of what is in the index compared to its core learning algorithm from the research accumulated and somehow translated into the “Panda Intelligence”.

These recursive reviews of the index and subsequent rearrangement of the SERP (search engine results placement) seem to indicate that Panda comes back around each time, apparently about once per month, with a higher level of intelligence and understanding of the web. Whether or not this is the real-time result, it is certainly the theory and it is a theory that Google is so far sticking with.

I have a pretty strong notion that if I am reading content and feel like I’m being gamed with duplicate or rehashed content–and I don’t like that, Panda it is probably going to sense the same thing sooner or later and filter out the same things that I don’t like from search results. That is clearly Google’s intent and if you happen lately to type in a misspelled or incorrect word into Google search you’ll notice that Google has a pretty good idea what you are actually searching for and gives you results for that term first.

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Summer is a season when some businesses pick up while others slow down. Either way, the shift in activity spurs many Orange County organizations and businesses to start thinking about SEO related issues like marketing, needs of the organization for web visibility. Orange County is a highly competitive market, but it’s also large enough for many niche opportunities to be discovered and leveraged for success in web promotion and visibility.

Every day, new businesses are discovering Orange County SEO strategies that work to increase their bottom line.

If you’re just getting into the idea of [...]]]>

Summer is a season when some businesses pick up while others slow down. Either way, the shift in activity spurs many Orange County organizations and businesses to start thinking about SEO related issues like marketing, needs of the organization for web visibility. Orange County is a highly competitive market, but it’s also large enough for many niche opportunities to be discovered and leveraged for success in web promotion and visibility.

Every day, new businesses are discovering Orange County SEO strategies that work to increase their bottom line.

If you’re just getting into the idea of using the Internet to make your company discoverable on the web you may have already discovered that it can be a challenge to get your business found on the web by leads that will produce an ROI that makes the investment in SEO and web marketing a profitable undertaking. If you are a small business you may feel the challenges are beyond your reach, but anyone with the right information and understanding of SEO in Orange County markets can build a web presence in a moderate amount of time with even the most limited of resources to allocate to this endeavor.

Small business owners, contact me to find out how to get found now on Google and other web hubs of influence for fractional investments compared to many large SEO project expenditures. Very successful solutions are available for under $500 for niche targets so don’t hesitate to contact me to see what is within your reach now.

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Your best bet in blogging is twofold:

Is SEO going to pay off for your business? Here is the essence of deciding on what, if anything, to do about SEO for your business website: make your determination strictly based on acceptable ROI (return on investment) and your business sales process. In sales training, this will be the sales path, or cycle or any number of monikers but it is the process by which your business persuades customers to make a purchase. The same process should be absolutely followed when making decisions about SEO. No marketing strategy or campaign should stray [...]]]>

Orange County SEO

Is SEO going to pay off for your business? Here is the essence of deciding on what, if anything, to do about SEO for your business website: make your determination strictly based on acceptable ROI (return on investment) and your business sales process. In sales training, this will be the sales path, or cycle or any number of monikers but it is the process by which your business persuades customers to make a purchase. The same process should be absolutely followed when making decisions about SEO. No marketing strategy or campaign should stray away from the formulation and execution of an effective sales process and SEO is as much a marketing campaign as any other form of marketing or advertising.

So, ask yourself. What would create an acceptable ROI? Can I get that with SEO? Will a page one, or number 1 top position for a keyword deliver increased sales volume? Is it worth the expense of getting that spot? How does organic placement perform vs. PPC? How much search traffic is there actually for this keyword or phrase? Do people who search this phrase make a buying decision or are they likely to only be investigating and evaluating? The job of SEO is to sell products and services.

SEO is a topic of debate these days and opinion varies from person to person. Opinion varies from people who think that SEO is just a frivolous activity and that it’s useless and over-simplified (it is made so by some purveyors of “partial SEO” solutions) to those who advocate SEO in the highest terms as an essential core component of online marketing success. Ultimately, the leading companies presently enjoying online marketing success utilize the services of SEO companies. The successful SEO firms (including this Orange County SEO consultant) are those that employ all the essential factors in an effective site optimization and link building campaign. They do their customers and themselves a viable and valuable service producing a win-win result.

Before deciding on any SEO link building effort, companies, and anyone, can get a glimpse of whether it will be worth investing in site optimization. The first course of action is to evaluate search traffic and competition for your business by testing terms associated with your product or service in the free Google Adword Keyword Tool. It is undoubtedly a critically important step missed or misunderstood by many who are new to SEO practices. The process is straightforward: think in terms of the consumer and test terms that they might type into a search when they are seeking a solution, an end result and a benefit. Again, the determining factor in making a purchase is the confidence a decision maker or buyer has in receiving a valuable benefit from your offering. These search terms, or keywords, are the same kind of things you think of during your formulation of the right kind of presentation, script or telephone dialogue in the development of your sales process. A common mistake many business owners make when it comes to optimizing a website is that of forgetting the sales process and forgetting the importance of the emotional connection created by effective, compelling presentation of the benefit of features or products or services that you provide. Consumers online are looking more than ever for the benefit. They are not necessarily looking directly for your product or service or service unless it is the precise benefit they are seeking. You probably already know enough how to promote your business in ways that deliver the highest ROI, and that knowledge should be directly transferred and applied to any search marketing or SEO effort.

Let us stipulate here that the majority of companies are in favor of search engine optimization in some form, but  many do not have enough understanding of SEO to transform the process into an effective return on investment. There are numerous “SEO companies” selling partial solutions, or misrepresenting the amount of investment or work that will be required to deliver an appreciable ROI that many business owners have already been left with unsatisfactory results that add to the impression that SEO is not a viable pursuit for their business. These partial solutions tend to exclude a difficult component of SEO and that component is usually effective link building. Contextually relevant links from external sources must be created or obtained and that’s an intensive process that must be done in accordance with the Google TOS to provide a lasting, effective result. Many so called SEO providers will try to sell businesses on shortcut strategies like PPC which is proven to receive a predictable but small and expensive ratio of click-thru and conversion traffic. PPC is fair enough if you understand its metrics and expectations but the overwhelming majority of online search trust goes to the organic results. The other usual “trick” of those offering an incomplete solution is providing only on-site optimization including site design, blogging, content creation and structure, etc. These all account for around 15% of the total factors in search engine rankings according to surveys of top SEO experts. The other 85%? You guessed it. Acquisition and aggregation of quality, contextually placed, keyword-rich anchor text back links.

Companies who understand this holistic approach to SEO continue to dominate search engine results and acquire the lion’s share of online business.

Contact me at 888-216-1231 for ROI focused SEO | Orange County SEO.

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Here’s what I mean: the gist of a promise that cannot be kept on one website I recently reviewed is this: We don’t charge monthly SEO fees because WordPress does everything you need for SEO. Its communication with the search engines is automated by using a Google site map plug-in. All [...]]]> Beware of bragging or otherwise promotional hyperbole on terms like “SEO blog coach” and the deception of mostly untrue advertising.

Here’s what I mean: the gist of a promise that cannot be kept on one website I recently reviewed is this: We don’t charge monthly SEO fees because WordPress does everything you need for SEO. Its communication with the search engines is automated by using a Google site map plug-in. All you have to do is blog several times a week following our particular instructions for content creation, etc. (Hence, the need for a service that is dubious- you can get everything you need regarding content for search engines for free)

Search Placement shall not live by blogging alone.

To me, that’s downright deceptive especially noting that the website that has this claim relies on the very thing they ignore when it comes to promoting the product to clients–link building. That is, links to the website in question from external sources. Given a topic with any appreciable competition your website is not going to rank high in searches regardless of how well it is written or constructed. Let’s take an example of that–one I work with routinely, South Florida real estate.

Let’s look at one particular area that I’m not involved in, Boca Raton, Florida real estate. Every website that shows up on page one for that search has over 1000 back links except for one that has around 650. These are all links from external websites, however they were acquired, and those links already essential part, in many cases the sole determining factor of which website appears first, second, third and so on in the lineup. SEO experts across the country have reported in the biannual SEOMoz SEO factors survey that on–site factors account for only about 15% of the total SEO picture. Anyone who tells you differently is gaming you in order to fill their own account with your hard-earned money, while depriving you of the knowledge and tactics that you need to perform well against the big hitters that you will undoubtedly run into for any product or keyword or term or service of value being promoted online.

Don’t be fooled by any demonstration of high placement for low value keywords. Check the claims out for your self use the free Google adword keyword tool and see how frequently words and phrases are actually searched for by anyone. Be sure to use the [exact] and “phrase” options on the left panel to see what the traffic for specific terms actually is. The broad option gives you a general search for words in any order and can be misleading, especially for specific types of searches. If the search volume is low and competition is low, the bragging about placement for this keyword or phrase is a ruse to trick you into perceiving performance where there is little or none.

Putting my money where my mouth is: TBP

Need an expert SEO blog coach who  also provides excellent training in SEO? Visit Katerina Gasset’s SEO Coaching page: SEO Blog Coach

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Rules:

- Use the keyword in more than one form.

- Don’t overuse the keyword (keyword stuffing)

- use <strong> [...]]]> I made some minor changes in the website for Atlantic Coast Medical Care Chiropractors. I noticed that there was perhaps an over use of the primary keyword, so I changed it to a variant form. I also unbolded some non-keyword text and bolded (strong) one more of the variant keywords. I’ll check the Google cache until I see the update. Then we’ll see if there is any change in position.

Rules:

- Use the keyword in more than one form.

- Don’t overuse the keyword (keyword stuffing)

- use <strong> tags on keywords.

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