Category: SEO

Search Engine Optimization came about as soon as AOL and Compuserve offered search methods to find websites on the internet.

Digital Equipment Corporation developed a search system called Alta-Vista and Yahoo began to gain traction as a website portal. Originally, SEO was a method whereby website designers would influence the SERPS (search engine results page) by reverse engineering the top pages in the SERPS for a given search term.

Theories would be advanced and tested as to the elements of website design that yield high search engine rankings, and factors would be measured and large companies with marketing budgets learned to scientifically measure the promotion of a website for a given word or phrase. 

In the early days, as more and more independent dial-up and then broad band providers began to supplement the AOL and Compuserve market, the prevalence of truly naked portals like Lycos and Yahoo grew.

Further growth of search engines like Infoseek, Go, and Alta Vista sparked a new need to look for alternative means of ranking their index of pages. Exotic engines like Direct hit would measure how long you stayed on the page you clicked and how long before you came back if at all. Google analytics today attempts to provide statistics as to the average time on the site.

Search Engine Optimization today can be completely ignored, as some players for certain keywords can skip the lengthy time to rank a website by using alternate means such as Facebook pages and Facebook advertising. Groupon and other coupon sites will market products and services relentlessly for the right price.

But still, the ultimate measure of importance for established keywords requires that we consider a level of SEO to earn our entitled position in search engines. While not number one always, a search for the term ‘Hammer’ quickly leads us the the Estwing brand, an indestructible and well regarded brand of hammer for construction and general household use known by every American ever remotely interested in tools.

Similarly, a search for ‘soft drinks’ gets us Coca-Cola® somewhere on the first page of search results, every time. But, how did you send an email to Coca-Cola® back in the day?

CompuServe started with email addresses that were all digits, such as 1234567890 or 09876543. Some early CompuServe email addresses were only 7 characters long. But as CompuServe grew, account numbers were chosen to be 8 digits long, and in case you paid for multiple email addresses, one or two more digits would be added for each email address assigned to your account. CompuServe thought they were covered with at least tens of millions of available account numbers.

CompuServe started using alphanumeric email addresses in the early 1990s, and they eventually phased out all-digit addresses altogether. Some famous people had old CompuServe email accounts that were all digits.

One famous person who is known to have had an old CompuServe email account is Bill Gates. His account was `70707070`. Gates was a member of CompuServe from the early days of the service, and he used his account to stay connected with other computer users and to access information about the internet.

Another famous person who is known to have had an old CompuServe email account is Steve Jobs. His account was `12345678`. Jobs was also a member of CompuServe from the early days of the service, and he used his account to stay connected with other computer users and to access information about the internet.

Most every web presence we look at lacks the fundamentals that connect the customers with your business. This plan covers the repair and enhancement of the local attributes of your google, yahoo, etc marketing and is required in most cases before we proceed to more enhanced techniques. Customers who purchase this option should have an established business, and an implemented website. Failure to do this plan is like building your marketing on a quicksand foundation. Don’t risk attempts to gain search engine ranking!

The SEO basis localization package provides top visibility for your business in the local listings of yahoo, bing, ask, aol and google, as well as some mundane backlink promotion. You should have a url or domain name and a main phone number and location address before purchasing this option. Google, with its extensive mapping of IP addresses to geographic locations gives you the opportunity to pick the low hanging fruit. Whether a dry cleaner or a gutter hanger, whether customers come to you or you go to them, the reputable business owner needs to put the first business marketing effort toward his neighbors.

Cost – $2,400 or Down payment $ 600 and 6 monthly payments of $ 300

How to get started – Fill out our contact form with your URL, business email, business phone, business fax and business address, and mail the check!

To meet the objective of improved natural organic ranking, promoting traffic to your website and telephone. This program utilizes keyword analysis, standards compliance, and quality of metatags. Bing has strict requirements for metatags, google and yahoo prefer W3C compliance. This program is available for both XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.0 index.html home pages. Requires completion of either analytics or basis with MSinc. optimization products.

Seo’s talk in ways that are hard enough to understand, but sometimes we use nomenclature straight out of a John Wayne movie.  The good guys wear white hats, and the bad guys wear black hats.  In SEO terms, we warn that ‘black hat’ techniques can lead to a possible temporary boost in ranking, but we stress that solid long term success requires the use of white hat techniques.

Bing has published a series of advisories for webmasters as follows;

1. Use valid XHTML or HTML, use the W3C validator.
2. The <title> tag should contain between 5 and 65 characters.
3. the Meta Description tag should contain between 25 to 150 characters.
4. the Meta Keywords tag should contain less than 874 characters.

I don’t know what the penalties on Bing are for violating these guidelines, but I can say that any

good promotion should not be overwhelming to either man or machine.  For example, a dry cleaner that uses every popular keyword including ‘bikini pics’ is not really being honest.  Black hat techniques don’t depend on honesty, they only seek traffic.

The problem for a legitimate dry cleaner is that the traffic that comes from ‘bikini pics’ does not lead to revenue.  The search engines can tell this in advance by heuristically comparing the keywords to the real content and message of your site and they assign a value to the keywords as they pertain to your website, and where your website does not match the hype, that hurts the value they give to your website.

There are two google categories that websites with shady optimization techniques can fall into, the google penalty box, and banned.  The banned category is generally reserved for websites that either went so far overboard in the black hat techniques that it is ridiculous, and websites that generally got hacked.  Web sites big and small get hacked, even I had a web-site hacked, where I had failed to apply all the controls on user input that I should have.  A Malaysian hacker using javascript injection managed to replace my clients home page with a spoof page.  There were two funny things about this situation, I didn’t care, because my insolent customer had failed to pay his bill with me, and when I caught it, in only a few hours, no penalty got applied to the website I managed.  So I took it down entirely.  Hah!  But besides being banned, there is the penalty box, where url’s promoted with lousy SEO techniques end up.  We have worked with these situations, and with google to get these URL’s out of the penalty situation.

Building long term success

There are two major categories of getting noticed on the search engines, organic and pay per click.  Most cold calls you receive to promote your website will be from pay per click companies.  We can provide everything these boiler room operations provide, for the same price, while gradually training you and your staff on how to manage your pay per click campaigns.  You should build this expertise within your office, or you will be paying too much forever.  Within a year of using our pay per click service at web-Atlanta you will be able to control your phone from your pay per click budget panel.  Really.  Call me for references.  They will tell you.

Some high pressure sales calls are actually from organic companies.  This is more difficult, because it entails subtle refinement of the website content to optimize your website’s presence on the first page of search engines.  This is the area where a reputable SEO firm is required.  Many ‘get to the top quick’ schemes use tricks to change your ranking.  These tricks may show a short term gain, but in the long run they will hurt the credibility that search engines assign your site.

Some examples of dirty tricks are; buying links, mass reciprocal e-mailings, (we reject more than 5 out of 6 reciprocal requests), mass link dumping to blog comments, email spam, incredible keyword deviation and link farm injection.

The ethical, and responsible way to promote websites involves understanding the search engines and how they ‘think’  (OK, they don’t think, they use heuristic techniques to algorithmic traversal, index and catalog the context and content of domains).  Our object is to improve, refine, and enhance the content of our customers websites to honestly reflect their business.  We create credible taglines and promote them within the website and about the internet at large.  We optimize title tags and meta keyword and description elements to maximize the quality rankings of your website.  Search engines respond to our techniques in time periods of from weeks to up to a year for newer domains.  Take shortcuts, and you will regret not using web-Atlanta, or a reputable firm of your knowledge.

With the rumor being that the Yahoo site explorer is going away, a company has come along to offer the same thing with some new features specifically aimed toward organic SEO gurus called http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ The cost will be a hundred bucks a month and the extra services to start with will be Facebook likes, tweets, and google pluses. Other premium services will no doubt be added.

Continue reading “Site Explorer”

Google Places

Google has renamed the local business center ‘Google Places’, and companies with two or more employees must consider using this resource. Added with Bing and Yahoo, these local listings, which are ‘free’, are, more often than not, more important than a $ 300 per month yellow pages ad. It does depend on your situation. Business managers have many questions around managing these listings. Knowing best practices is an evolving skill as guidelines change several times a year. The professionals at Web Atlanta keep up with best practices, and can manage the google, bing, yahoo triad for local businesses for as little as $ 500. In addition, here is some free information if you want to attempt to do this yourself. Good luck.

Business Address

If you work out of your home, you may well wish to hide your business address. But you should still use a proper address. Addresses in commercial districts get higher rankings than residential addresses. Companies with real commercial presences on the street deserve to, and are ranked more highly.

Owning listings

The first thing we do at Web Atlanta is establish an e-mail address under which all the listings are defined or claimed. We like to use a gmail account, or a domain account, where we are confident that we will never lose control of the password for that account. Domain accounts are best. Only a business owner or their authorized agents should claim the listing. If you have not claimed your listings, you may get scammed. We have charged several thousand dollars to support legal and technical actions to rescue business managers from these scamsters. They swoop in and ‘claim’ listings before business owners notice. Because the claiming process is technical in nature, this leaves businesses vulnerable until the proper safeguards are taken.

Business Names and keywords

Stick to your business name, as you may suffer delays and the penalty box if the search engine heuristics look to match up the business name with a legitimate known business name. The search engines may also look for keyword cheating and penalize that. You want your registered business exactly as the Secretary of State so defines it. Attempting to influence the rank of your local business listing with ‘black hat’ techniques may sometimes work, but we will not do that on your behalf.

Web-site domain name & Phone

A local listing usually lets you to enter a URL and a phone number. A history of yellow page advertising helps your ranking. But Yellow Pages are often printed with tracking numbers, and this does not help, i.e. your business being associated with a tracking number. You want the search engines to associate your business and phone number. It is possible, where a tracking number has been used for many years, that enough business citations are known to the search engines, and this may help. List the tracking number as an extra phone number, if possible.

Other Stuff

Add your business logo. You should have business artwork in digital form, like a logo for upload. Add two to four pictures of your building, products or employees at work. Add Videos, especially youtube videos of your products and your employees working. Add your business hours and use the service area definition procedures to delineate your service area, especially for businesses that visit homeowners like the trades.

• Jpegs and gifs, photos, logo
• Videos
• Hours of Operation
• Categories of products and services
• Payment forms accepted

Best Practices

In the SEO industry, Web Atlanta can be trusted to protect your business investment. Using off-shore or inexperienced help can be risky. Experienced search engine optimization professionals should be used for businesses not wanting to risk their reputation.

Places uses different heuristics from organic search results pages and say that inclusion in Google Places is not influenced by your Google advertising budget.

Whether you are creating your listing or engaging in Google Places Listing Optimization, we need to take advantage of as many features as possible without abusing any areas and thus risking a lengthy period of invisibility on the Google search results pages. Remember that Google is not a consulting firm, does not charge for your local listing, and like the IRS, relies on you to either hire a CPA or figure it out, preferably a little of both. Google Places uses different heuristics from organic search results pages and say that inclusion in Google Places is not influenced by your Google advertising budget. There are a lot of lies and hype about Google Places, partly because of Google’s lack of support but also greatly due to the ignorance and naivety of business owners when it comes to understanding search engine results.

• Business Name: Use precisely your legal business name, or risk a penalty.
• Do Not stuff keywords or geographic terms here.
• Categories: Use all five categories to not just tell consumers what you do, but to influence search results.You must use the first category for a Google approved category.
• Images & Video: Load 10 images and at least 1-3 videos to ensure the listing is 100% complete. See our section on Youtube optimization.
• Citations. These are like links, but they don’t require a hyperlink with the url as much as they depend on the exact same business name and phone number, possibly address for things like yp.com, citysearch or angieslist.
• Have your business address prominent on your web-site, and enter the URL on your Google Places listing.

The last practice is a real problem for small business, many of which are run out of our homes. But once we grow to open an office location, use this key to maximize results. Reviews also help, as well as people searching for your exact business name and town, and even asking directions. All these activities are recorded by google and make your listing more important.

Modern web design can be a waste of money because the most attractive web-site on the internet will generate very little interest in your products or services if no one can find it. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are used by people to locate products and services on the internet. This includes finding companies all over the world and in your neighborhood. Search engine optimization services (SEO) and internet marketing strategies must be used to gain quality visitors through search engines.

No other Atlanta company can compete with the knowledge depth at Web Atlanta for search engine optimization. While we provide PPC services to boost traffic of qualified prospects our internet marketing strategies, campaigns, and optimization work can give companies an organic presence two to three times greater than their size. Our services concentrate on the major aspects influencing the searches of qualified prospects and our keyword research is done at a level of transparency and interaction that every other competitor fails to provide. When we partner on your brand name you will learn how truly rote is this process others seek to represent as some sort of magic elixir.

Local Search is a mysterious area where our partner format of SEO empowers our clients. We stress the importance of not only domain ownership but of claiming and verifying local listings. Divergence and convergence of search results are not well understood, but superbly anticipated by our unsurpassed computer science oriented staff. Google and Yahoo are convinced that customers will increasingly use Local Search to find products and services in their local area. We excel at making sure local listings achieve rankings because local search has long ago surpassed use of the Yellow Pages to find businesses. Our expertise at web-site content analysis means our customers are prominently displayed in the Local Search components of Bing, Google and Yahoo.

The major search result providers use factors to determine rankings related to the importance and relevance of a site and its importance to other sites and publications on the internet. Effective methods of promoting a web-site organically include blogs, press releases, classified ads, directories, twittering and social bookmarking,

The fastest way to generate visitors from the search engines is to implement a Pay Per Click campaign. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo offer paid advertisements that appear on search results pages and on their respective partner sites. Advertisers pay Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo every time a visitor clicks on the ad and visits the advertiser’s web site. The amount the advertiser pays the search engines depends on the amount the advertiser bids on a keyword. Very little optimization of a web site is necessary to begin a Pay Per Click campaign and drive relevant traffic to a web site. The bids for competitive keywords can get expensive. We have the expertise to create effective advertisements, minimize the cost, and maximize the benefits from Pay Per Click campaigns.

We stress the importance of not only domain ownership but of claiming and verifying local listings.

1. Google Plus One (local)

1. Yahoo
2. Bing
3. Yelp
4. Kudzu
5. Angie’s List
6. Manta
7. Hotfrog
8. Merchant Circle

We see businesses with websites that are rarely found and never through an internet search. Business managers search for information as to how they can make their site more visible and often respond to the promises of lead generator companies that disguise themselves as SEO companies. One firm we know of sets up listings of the above type with a tracking phone number, for a small monthly fee. This is really a bad idea, although it is very popular with managers seeking a quick fix.

Other listings with ‘link juice;’

White Pages
MapQuest
Superpages
JudysBook

Paid;

Yellowpages.com
Patch.com

Social;

Facebook
FourSquare

Human capital management software or cloud applications never contain a simple hours of service display, until Wyn Rocket WRbil.com came along that is. Wyn Rocket will keep three weeks of time tickets on line and convert time to a hours of service display on demand.