I work with everyday small business owners, and it is not unexpected to hear someone as “Why does SEO take so long?”. This is a valid question. In the day and age of fast food, microwaves, speed lines at the theme park, and call to order groceries, we are getting used to things being quick! But when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, this is not something we need to do quickly. The first reason, that I explain to my clients, of why it takes longer than we would like, is because if it is worth making money with on the Internet, then someone is probably making money on it.  The more competition, then longer it takes to compete.  Of [...]

So you’ve been working hard at getting links for your website and watching links increase! WoooHooo!  But then.. all of a sudden.. Penguin update and WHAM your website begins to slide because of the Google Over Optimization Penalty!  The first thing you want to do is panic.. but don’t! It can be fixed, although it may take some time. First, start looking into what the spread of anchor text links are for your website.  There are a few tools out there that you can use, my favorite being Open Site Explorer. Look and see where your anchor text is the heaviest.  If it seems it is the heaviest weighted toward your key phrases, you may well have experienced the Google [...]

There has been a large stir over the last year with quite a few changes in the way Google is ranking sites on its powerful search engine. This has brought up many questions as to whether small business site owners should be worried about their current ranking and how it will affect them. This article is to give a brief overview of what the changes mean to site owners. First, Content is Still King! What does that mean? It means that Google loves fresh, solid content. If it has been 6 months since you added a new blog post to your website or a new page, then your website is becoming stagnant. There are a lot of searches that have [...]

When researching the Search Engine Optimization world, you will come upon many terms that are used frequently.  Link Popularity is one of those terms, but what really is it? Well Wikipedia has it as “as the number of links that lead to a particular page and the anchor text of the link”.  Well, what is that?  Let us look at the two parts of that statement. First, the number of links that lead to a particular page.  Most people think that all of the links need to go to their home page, but that is not the case.  Depending on which page you are trying to sell more, that is the page you need to link more to.  Your home [...]

If you are a do-it-yourselfer trying to SEO your site and obtain traffic, it can be difficult.  ‘SEO Professionals’ seem to have all these great bells and whistles, tools, and personnel to help them build a ton of links in a quick fashion.. how can you compete with that? The answer… Link Baiting. Wikipedia deems Link Bait as “any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website” on their Link Bait page. So basically, create some content on your website that others are going to want to link to you.  Post it on social sites like Twitter that allow the strength to be passed through the link to your [...]

With more and more marketing efforts turning to the Internet rather than paper books or expensive signage, business owners are faced with the question of “What do I want to be found for?”. This is a very valid question, and one that often gets the wrong answer. In this article I will discuss the main mistake made at this point… research! As a business owner, you know your business, and how to sell it. The problem is… you know your business. You are an insider to the business, and therefore use insider terms about your products or services. The fact is, most consumers do not know the terms that you are using. Thus the spawn of terms like ‘dumaflatchy’ and [...]