professional wordpress themes

SEO Traits Your Strategy Should Contain

On May 31, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

As a business you need to fully understand the power and the process of SEO before you decide to get started with applying it for yourself or your business. You need to possess certain kinds of characteristics and traits because SEO is a long term marriage and you need to be in it for the [...]

As a business you need to fully understand the power and the process of SEO before you decide to get started with applying it for yourself or your business. You need to possess certain kinds of characteristics and traits because SEO is a long term marriage and you need to be in it for the long haul.

Here are some traits required for search engine optimization and the overall internet marketing campaign to work well:

Patience: Depending on your industry it could take a great deal of time to really see the effects of SEO. Unless you analyze your Google analytics information almost every day you might not see the power that is building in the background. Studying your analytics information you will be able to see where your traffic is coming from and what links have been generated from your search engine marketing efforts. It is not uncommon to have to wait 6-12 months for things to really work well.

Branding: You have to be able to understand the importance of branding your business online. Search engine optimization is more than just increasing your rankings. It is all about branding your business online the right way and building your business with solid footing in place.

Diversity: It is also important to understand that diversity is the name of the game with marketing your business online. Taking a diverse approach and being open minded will allow a person or a business to bring in website traffic from multiple avenues and locations. Beating a few chosen efforts into the ground is not a long term approach. You have to be willing to utilize all the resources that surround your business.

Trust: This is very important because often times a business lacks the trust of their SEO firm or person to get the job done right. If you have spent some time really isolating the right type of marketing firm to partner with you will have to put your trust into their skills and services. Don’t fight the steps they propose, embrace them.

Do you possess these traits and characteristics? These are important for growing a long term healthy website in the online space. Branding a website and being an open minded business owner will allow your search engine optimization efforts to go much further. Don’t fight your SEO company (or your own internal self if you are building your SEO program yourself), but rather put your trust into them.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Video of SEMPO President Sara Holoubek

On May 30, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) President, Sara Holoubek was recently interviewed at this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference. SEMPO has just released their 6th annual state of search report and the numbers are impressive for this year.
Check out the video and interview with SEMPO’s Sara Holoubek:

For those who might be worried about what is [...]

SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) President, Sara Holoubek was recently interviewed at this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference. SEMPO has just released their 6th annual state of search report and the numbers are impressive for this year.

Check out the video and interview with SEMPO’s Sara Holoubek:

For those who might be worried about what is happening with the industry and where it is going SEMPO’s report outlines that search spending amongst many companies is set to have double digit increases for 2010. After a year of strange ups and downs across the entire business community these types of growth numbers are great to see, helping to keep moral high across the search engine marketing industry. There is no doubt that more and more companies are leaving behind direct marketing practices and quickly moving into the digital landscape. With cost cutting budget changes still in effect there is no comparison in moving a company’s marketing efforts into the online search engine marketing space.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Things to Slow Down Your SEO Progress

On May 9, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

If you have been an internet marketing specialist for some time now you will know that there is a great deal of constant learning required to get the job done right. You have to be willing to learn almost every day because the search game is consistently changing. Reading daily industry sources and blogs will [...]

If you have been an internet marketing specialist for some time now you will know that there is a great deal of constant learning required to get the job done right. You have to be willing to learn almost every day because the search game is consistently changing. Reading daily industry sources and blogs will be vital for any online success.


Let’s take a look at some ways SEO efforts are cut short and slow down overall progress:

1. Lack of Knowledge:
As an internet marketer I am reading blogs almost every single day. Keep yourself up to date with all the newest methods of marketing and online exposure is important. Applying new marketing efforts online is the only way you are going to either stay in front of your competition or beat them in the search marketing game.

2. Old-fashioned Techniques:
If you are still relying on techniques done from 2005 you’re not going to last very long in the search industry. Things have changed quite a bit and they continue to change drastically year after year. The search engines have evolved and it is even more important to utilize all the newest trends and techniques to market a website in today’s business space.

3. Messing Up Step 1:
Website optimization should be the very first marketing effort any website should be doing before they venture out and start marketing their business online. This doesn’t mean just optimizing it for certain keywords. This means optimizing it for the right keywords along with changing or tweaking any conversion metrics on the website. If your conversion metrics are not in place then what do you think is going to happen to your visitors when they land on your website? Not much.

As an internet marketer you have to always be sharpening your skills when it comes to SEO. Search engine marketing requires varying up the approach and customizing things for every client. Keeping your skills sharp and up to date is a must to make the serious marketing impacts that many people are looking for. As soon as you step back and feel like you don’t have to learn anything anymore is when things start to slow down and really become sour on your online visibility. Your websites and your client’s website will begin to feel the effects of this slow down so it is important to keep your knowledge tight and your techniques even tighter.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Will the SEO Bubble Burst?

On May 2, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Being in the in the SEO industry for quite a while I have seen the industry speed up and grow extremely fast over the last five years and absolutely explode over just the last few years. Recently some are starting to understand that SEO is really a marketing approach and not a science project geared [...]

Being in the in the SEO industry for quite a while I have seen the industry speed up and grow extremely fast over the last five years and absolutely explode over just the last few years. Recently some are starting to understand that SEO is really a marketing approach and not a science project geared towards just achieving search engine rankings. It is good that some businesses are starting to realize that this is the right approach that everyone should be taking and shifting their focus, but many are still clueless, dumping hundreds of articles and press releases per month, taking spammy approaches just to fill in the search engine results. What happens to all those companies that have been taking a science project approach and only worrying about rankings when Google and Bing drop the hammer on the SEO bubble? Will it ever happen? Who knows, people used to laugh when they heard the real estate industry would implode. Who’s laughing now?

The search engines are clearly changing and I still see businesses everyday taking this horrendous approach to their SEO simply to achieve rankings. Google has come out and has clearly stated that personalized search will be making much more of an impact in the near future. When someone is logged into their Google account personalized search has already started taking shape. You can even read more about how personalized search works directly on Google’s official webmaster blog. I think the problem is that most people have a hard time changing and the search engine marketing industry is very fast changing and fast moving industry that can quickly leave people behind if they don’t pay attention to what is going on around them. SEO companies pop up over night with inexperienced individuals make shotty promises and performing subpar search engine marketing techniques just adding to that bubble. As this continues that bubble keeps building and eventually sites like Google are going to drop the hammer on the whole search engine optimization industry. I can see the similarities between the SEO industry and the real estate industry clearly. The greed and the money symbols in some people’s eyes are inflating this industry leading it to it’s demise. The worst part about it is that many of us professionals are left with a tarnished image from all the bad apples. Too many businesses out there have already been burned leaving it very difficult for the ones that do it right to really get the credibility they deserve and to pass on their experience and industry knowledge to their Clients. I guess with every tool comes abuse it is just unfortunate to see it have gotten to this point.

Eventually this bubble is going to pop, where will you be when it happens? Will you have changed your ways and your techniques to cushion the blow? Or are you going to be scrambling around and trying to find out how to adapt at the 11th hour? It will be too late at that point. Like everything in life, what comes up must come down sooner or later and the search engines are getting ready for a much needed clean up. This clean up will happen sooner than later piercing through the bubble and showering the industry with some upset individuals and firms. The problem stems from a lack of knowledge and not enough outside the box thinking. Outside the box thinking like how to put together a nice solid link bait campaign and not figuring out how to control the search results with a not so news worthy press release. Google is dropping a very large algorithm change towards the middle of 2010 which I strongly believe could be the first stages of not only speeding up the efficiency but eliminating the trash that makes its way into search results.

This could very well be the very first attempt to shifting people’s focus away from just rankings and shifting it over to simply marketing their business online the right way. The search engine industry is just getting started but it is growing very very quickly. Unfortunately there needs to be a shift in focus and I think we are starting to see that now. Customers don’t become customers by bumping into one of your hundred articles that you released in one day. They become customers by trusting online brands over time.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

SEO Blackhat Video from SES London

On March 30, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

At SES London there was an interesting video about how current SEO people perceive the black hat SEO community. They asked 50 SEO’s how they felt about the black hat community and received many different responses. It was interesting to hear that some of them said they are innovative and push the edges of the [...]

At SES London there was an interesting video about how current SEO people perceive the black hat SEO community. They asked 50 SEO’s how they felt about the black hat community and received many different responses. It was interesting to hear that some of them said they are innovative and push the edges of the algorithms like it was a positive thing that they do. That is all great but what happens when rankings are not as important as they once where?

Check out the video below from SES London about black hat SEOs:

The overall consensus was that they hurt the industry more than they help it. I am all about innovation and finding new ways to communicate your business online, but building a business online requires more than search manipulation which is mostly what black SEO individuals usually target. They are techniques that often times push the technical boundaries not the marketing boundaries which are two vastly different areas to focus on. Search engine marketing in my opinion should be done with a focus on brand building and not a focus of rankings. Search engine rankings will happen naturally over time as you build your business and your links naturally over time. When you force rankings you force yourself to cut corners which over time could come back to bite you in the you know where! Anyway, that is my 2 cents on this topic :)

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Search Engine Strategies New York Day 4 – Training!

On March 29, 2010, In SEO, by Guest Blogger

Day 4 at Search Engine Strategies New York focused on Search Engine Marketing training. One of the downsides to a lot of conferences is that one hour sessions don’t allow a deep dive into the topics we really want to discuss. No fear here, as these are four hour long sessions. Here’s what we learned…

Click to read the rest of this post…

Day 4 at Search Engine Strategies New York focused on Search Engine Marketing training. One of the downsides to a lot of conferences is that one hour sessions don’t allow a deep dive into the topics we really want to discuss. No fear here, as these are four hour long sessions. Here’s what we learned…

Click to read the rest of this post…

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Search Marketing is More Than Search Results

On March 21, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Search engine marketing and optimization is not just for increasing search engine rankings. It is important to understand that once you believe in the power of SEO your mindset will begin to change and evolve into something much different. Eventually your thought process will move past just reaching search rankings and really building your business [...]

Search engine marketing and optimization is not just for increasing search engine rankings. It is important to understand that once you believe in the power of SEO your mindset will begin to change and evolve into something much different. Eventually your thought process will move past just reaching search rankings and really building your business online. SEO is about building your brand and your business online.

Here are some advanced topics to increase your online brand building efforts:

Niche Industry Forums – Forums where one of the oldest forms of internet communication and still hold a tremendous amount of marketing and SEO value. Since many forums are much older your URL will be sitting on a nicely aged domain which is a great benefit. Some forums are still very heavily trafficked and if you find threads that you can really answer and participate in the conversation you can deliver some really nicely targeted website traffic to your website.

Video Sharing Sites – I know many of us have video sitting on video sharing websites already but how many of you actually use the features of the video sharing websites? YouTube and Vimeo both have powerful networking capabilities. Both have the ability to make friend requests and both have the ability to become highly visible in search results. It will take some time to sift around through the data but try making your way through the field of contacts on YouTube and Vimeo and start connecting with your audience in a different light.

User Generated Content – If you have an established website that already receives a generous amount of traffic user generated content can bring you loads of great SEO benefits. Everything from guest blog writers to product reviews can really help you increase your content amount along with generating a great deal of new web traffic.

Business Blog – Every website can benefit from have a business blog integrated into the structure of the site. Even if it is only updated a few times a month it allows a website to grow in size and strength. Over time that size and strength will allow the website to be much more visible in the search engines.

Search engine optimization does not stop at just rankings any longer. Years ago that was the name of the game but now you must take an advanced approach to marketing yourself online. SEO has become a branding game now so marketing your website as a business is vital regardless of what you offer.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Link Building, Do It Right or Don’t Do It At All

On March 18, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Link building is that dreaded phrase that still to this day confuses the heck out of many people trying to figure out how to proactively market themselves online in the search engines. They hear from one source how they need thousands of links to start ranking and from another source they hear just quality links [...]

Link building is that dreaded phrase that still to this day confuses the heck out of many people trying to figure out how to proactively market themselves online in the search engines. They hear from one source how they need thousands of links to start ranking and from another source they hear just quality links gets the job done. So what is the right answer? In a perfect world you would have an abundance of good quality links pointing from only a variety of targeted authority industry websites.

Just building links for the sake of building links is not going to benefit you or the search engines. Links that sit on irrelevant websites can actually hurt you a great deal over time. A link sitting a website that is part of a blog farm is not going to benefit you in any possible way. If you are not sure what a blog farm it is a farm of blogs that a company will use to place links for clients or other websites in order to increase rankings. These blog farms usually have absolutely no strength or power in the search engines but appear to do so. Don’t assume that spending more money is going to get you more quality links. It is not about how much you spend but more so about how good your marketing message is. A promotion that gets your audience talking and bloggers writing will get you much farther than just purchasing a link on a website. Many different businesses take a variety of different approaches in the search engine marketing industry but purchasing links is very frowned upon. Buying a service that generates thousands of links for you is only going to create a mess of your online marketing approach and hurt you in the long run. How good do you really think those thousand links are going to be? Do you think they generate any value to your business?

Link building should always be done with a quality approach. A blog post on an industry related blog that is an authority in your industry is an example of a great link. A major business publication doing a write up on you for their online division is a great link. A “directory blaster” is a horrible way to generate links and should be avoided at all costs. Link building should be conducted using a strategy and a schedule and not with a number goal. A combination of a variety of monthly efforts is an approach that will help you climb in the search results over time.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

Yahoo! at SMX West and Real-Time Search

On March 5, 2010, In SEO, by Administrator

We had a great time at the SMX West conference this past week in Santa Clara, CA. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked things off with his keynote speech, where he addressed several questions on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Yahoo! participated in several different panels throughout the week, including Thursday’s keynote “The State off [...]

We had a great time at the SMX West conference this past week in Santa Clara, CA. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked things off with his keynote speech, where he addressed several questions on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Yahoo! participated in several different panels throughout the week, including Thursday’s keynote “The State off the Search Union” roundtable featuring David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing. (You can check out the full recap of this at Search Engine Land’s live-blog post.)

One of the hot topics discussed was real-time search, and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel about that subject, titled “Real Time Search & the Major Search Engines.” Among other things, we discussed the real-time features we’ve rolled out for Yahoo! Search, like tweets in Yahoo! search results and getting the freshest information on developing news as well as some of the challenges and opportunities in this space.

In our down time I visited Yahoo!’s popular booth on the show floor – everyone loved our free coffee! Check out some of the highlights in the video below.

Ivan Davtchev

Yahoo! Search

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 

How to Break Into the SEO Clique

On March 4, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting excepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry [...]

If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting excepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry since day one and think they are the all mighty of the industry. The SEO industry leaders have become a tough group of individuals to become friendly with and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. All the “gurus” at the top that think they know every about everything seem to feel that they run this industry like they own it. The SEO industry is kind of like an open source program that should be treated like a group effort. There is plenty of business to go around. Lots of businesses out there that need help promoting themselves in the online space. People need to participate, communicate and get involved to make it a better place for everyone. One person tries something that works well they write about and things spread leading to better online marketing efforts.

I have been actively working in the internet marketing industry for over 12 years, have built Brick Marketing for 5 years successfully and have helped hundreds of clients in the field of SEO yet my educational comments that I leave on certain search engine marketing blogs get deleted, why do you think this happens? Leaving all names aside a certain someone contacted me not too long ago and asked me to stop commenting on a certain blog. Yes, I left a comment on each blog very frequently but isn’t that the whole purpose of starting a blog. These where all well written comments that where generated with real thought process adding to the overall message the blog post was trying to convey. Isn’t the whole idea of a blog to get the community interacting in your conversation? Since when is it bad to leave an educated comment on someone’s blog? Even if the frequency was high it shouldn’t really matter. I have seen this occur with other websites as well. I have seen the tone of this click with others trying to make a name for themselves in the industry and I often see a certain nastiness resonating in the tone of a variety of online discussions. Don’t get me wrong I understand this is a tough industry and if you spend some time in it you get beat up a little but that doesn’t mean you have to be nasty to your colleagues and peers around you especially if they own and operate a successful search engine marketing firm. I apologize if I have not visited you at the trade shows and stroked your ego like many people do. Is it that I don’t kiss the asses of every individual in the “cool group”?

There is plenty of room in the school yard for everyone to get along. Is it because I am a threat to them or the industry? Sometimes I feel like this industry is a lot like high school all over again. You got your cool kids that think they are too good for everyone else and you got everyone else trying to shine in front of their eyes. I by no means want to break into the “cool” click and become one of those has to have their ass kissed by everyone else.

Why is it so hard for people in this industry to come together and work as a team? I understand that everyone is trying to grow their own business but there is no reason why so many internet marketing professionals have to have such a cold shoulder towards each other. We are all in the same game and we do the best we can to provide our clients with great service.

If you are an internet marketer or SEO person do you feel like our industry is heading in this direction as well? Please leave your comments and any related experiences or stories below!

0 Comments
Leave A Response

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
 
Page 1 of 41234

Seth Godin: Sliced Bread

Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers

Anthony Parinello: Your Price is Too High