SEO Tips

In the recent past, we have written on the subject of selecting the best SEO expert and the best Web designer for your projects or websites. Revisiting the subject is warranted after reading a blog post over at Blazing Minds regarding SEO Packages for Small Business. It’s an important subject, and understanding it or the lack of understanding it can effect your long term business goals.

In our article Selecting a Web Design Firm and SEO Expert we highlighted these points:

• Avoiding the SEO Amateur – This continues to be a problem among startup businesses and those that do not do their research. We have rescued a few of these since the writing of our original article.
• Avoiding the Submission Scam – Be wearing of anyone who tells you that they will submit your site to 100′s or 1000′s of sites. First, that’s probably not going to do much for you. Second, submission of your site is a tactic and not a strategy in search engine optimization.
• Understanding how keywords are really used – It is a common understanding that being ranked #1 for a keyword is the goal of SEO. Well, it’s true, if you are using the right keywords. If you are ranked #1 for keywords that no one uses, then your keywords are junk. An expert SEO will help determine the best keywords to attract the visitors to your site that convert into leads or sales.

The Blazing Mind’s article points out these concepts in regard to buying an SEO package.

• Bulk Link Building – Root domain authority building should be one of the primary goals of any SEO package and not building low quality links.
• Results in Less Than 3 Months? – While real resultscan happen in less than 3 months, it often takes more time to develop solid ranking results that will stick around for the long term. Usually those 3 month promises is a good indicator that you are talking to a used car salesman. (No offence to used car salesmen.)
• Are you Being Offered a Complete Package? – Avoid the SEO package that doesn’t include keyword anaysis or competetor research. An SEO strategy that doesn’t include these will leave you wanting for more and few conversions from visitor to customer.

You can read the complete article about Selecting a Web Design Firm and SEO Expert here at the Abraxas website and you can read more about understanding SEO Packages for Small Business over at Blazing Minds.

Abraxas offers a highly effective strategic approach to search engine optimization and provides custom SEO packages to small businesses and startups. Please contact us for more information.

Optimizing your web pages and images for Google’s image search is, in my opinion, underused. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. It’s good if you are looking to gain more traffic to your site from image search, because competition may be low. It’s a bad thing if you are doing the searching and looking for images based on particular keywords. At Abraxas, we always consider image search optimization when we design websites or optimize for search engines in general.

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Back in March we wrote a blog post regarding one of our current SEO R&D projects, HD Movie Trailers Online. It’s been about 6 months, so it would be timely to post an update on the progress of that project.

First, we have taken a minimalistic approach to the search engine optimization of this site. We’re doing about as much SEO as the average blogger or website owner might do, except we are armed with a little understanding of how the search engines work. We don’t have any overly grand expectations that we will dominate the niche, but we want to be competitive. We will also gain a better understanding of how we should sell our SEO services to our clients.

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If you will remember a few months ago I dispelled the importance of Google’s PageRank in organic search engine ranking position (SERP). The argument has been blazing for a while now, but I think that most professional search engine optimization (SEO) experts now agree with my side of the argument. PageRank just doesn’t mean that much anymore. Now what?

You wonder where you should spend your efforts to get those highly prized organic SERPs. Just like SEO, the answer is complicated yet simple. When you get right down to it, SEO is an exercise in common sense. And so is the answer to what has replaced PageRank as one of the most important factors in high rankings. We’ll call it Google Trust and Authority.

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The foundation for any search engine optimization strategy is developing a list of relevant keywords or relevant keyword phrases that searchers type into search engines to find a Web site like yours. Not all keywords are created equal, so we need to set some criteria for the types of keywords that we want to target in a SEO campaign.

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2010 looks like it will be a big year for SEO (search engine optimization) with a lot of the web trends of 2009 such as Twitter making its way into SEO. 2009 seemed to be a dismal year for most every industry including SEO. With the US economy picking up and the ever increasing awareness of technology, we are looking forward to leaving 2009 behind us.

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This article continues from SEO Tip: Improve PageRank (Google PageRank Demystified…Sorta) Part 2. As with any of our articles you should be aware of the disclaimer:

Disclaimer: Chattanooga Search Marketing Blog features SEO and Web Design tips for the benefit of our readers and clients in order for them to understand what we do and help them with their own SEO projects. As with any SEO technique, these techniques and tips are based on our experience and are our best opinions. Our opinion may change and this tip may still exist.

It has been a little while since I started this series of articles. I expect that everyone is waiting on pins and needles to learn more. After I bashed PageRank in the previous installment; you are wondering why you should read this. Honestly, PageRank isn’t going to help you much with SERPs.

Here’s what it will do for you: PageRank is Google’s way of measuring how important your Web site (actually Web page) is to the overall World Wide Web. If you have a PageRank of 10, then you must be very important. If you have 0 PageRank, then you aren’t important at all. Most Web site home pages have a PageRank of 3 or lower. Depending on what your PageRank is that is how Google treats you – but not in SERPs.

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I have written an article that is filed in the pages of this Web site offering up advice to Chattanooga business owners (and any other business owner) regarding picking a SEO company and a Web design company. I didn’t think the full article warranted a post in the Search Marketing Blog, because, there is no real SEO tip there, but is more intended for prospective clients. However, I did want to bring up a few highlights and point those interested over to the proper article for more details.

As most “real” experts in the SEO business know, we are constantly fighting false information, and companies offering less than desirable SEO techniques. Just as buying anything, the informed buyer is a better buyer. That’s the goal for this article, to inform the buyer.

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This article continues from SEO Tip: Improve PageRank (Google PageRank Demystified…Sorta) Part 1. As with any of our articles you should be aware of the disclaimer:

Disclaimer: Chattanooga Search Marketing Blog features SEO tips for the benefit of our readers and clients in order for them to understand what we do and help them with their own SEO projects. As with any SEO technique, these techniques and tips are based on our experience and are our best opinions. Our opinion may change and this tip may still exist.

In the previous article I introduced some of the common myths about Google PageRank. There are many myths, but the three that I listed are the most common and are somewhat tied together. The reason for discounting the myths is simple. It’s important to work on other aspects of your website and not to just grieve over PageRank night and day.

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(Disclaimer: Chattanooga Search Marketing Blog features SEO tips for the benefit of our readers and clients in order for them to understand what we do and help them with their own SEO projects. As with any SEO technique, these techniques and tips are based on our experience and are our best opinions. Our opinion may change and this tip may still exist.)

When Google exploded in the search space in prehistoric times (1998), one of the concepts that made Google much better than the popular search engines of the time (Alta Vista, Excite, etc.) was PageRank. Of course, PageRank, was not the only thing that made Google better, but it is one of those things that allowed Google to provide better search results. PageRank has evolved since 1998, and I expect it to continue to evolve. Search engine optimization (SEO) experts that figured out PageRank in those early days were able to get results for clients, and those who had always done practical SEO continued to do well.

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