Outsourcing SEO is the Way to Success

The world of internet marketing has seen many different campaigns and techniques. One of the most cost effective and efficient internet marketing strategies available today is search engine optimization also known as SEO. Owing to the large use of search engines today for finding of new services and products by the internet users the companies today are always striving to get a good high rank among these search engine’s results for those services and products. By ranking high in the search engine results the companies can look forward to increased traffic due to new customers leading to better sales.

SEO Outsourcing has become a preferred and premier method for such SEO optimization efforts for almost any organization. Outsourcing has often been linked to increased efficiency and gaining success. SEO outsourcing is now even seen as a market necessity which saves time and reduces labor and effort.

Some advantages of opting SEO outsourcing are as listed below:

• It is a cheap and cost effective method which is easy to implement for an organization of almost any size.
• It improves the search engine rankings of your website and increases traffic as well.
• Having professional SEO experts in your corner can give you an advantage over your competitors and help stay abreast of the current trends in optimization.
• Handling SEO operations can be a tedious and demanding task which is best handled by experienced SEO companies rather than futile in-house efforts. By outsourcing these operations you can save yourself the pain and effort all the while giving a 100% in your own work for the success of the organization.
• SEO can be an important tool for the success of almost any business and a proper SEO firm will always implement result oriented optimization for your company and help in achieving its goals.

So there is no harm to say that SEO outsourcing is the best way to get success in online businesses.

Taking Care Of Your Site’s Needs: The Smart Phone

With the smart phone becoming one of the most ubiquitous pieces of personal equipment wherever you go, it’s important to make sure that your website is ready to deal with this new client base.  Yes, it does count as a different demographic from people browsing with their computers.  Here’s why:

You have to have a different website programming in order for smart phones to be able to read it.

Part of this is because of the differences of a smart phone’s screen from the average computer screen.  The smaller size means that the pages viewed have to be formatted differently so that everything isn’t  one big left-right scroll bar.  Part of it is because of the basic differences in the operational computer languages of phones as opposed to “normal” computers.  And part of it is because people are going to be more prone to make snap decisions when they’re dealing with you through their phones than they would over the computer.

The problem here is that, unless you know what you’re doing, you’re going to be hard pressed to make the changes you need without wrecking either the smart phone version or the main version of your website.  When you’ve got everything taken care of properly, though, you’ve literally opened the door to a whole new demographic – people who aren’t using their computers to look at your website.  This may not cause a dramatic increase in the amount of business you do in a short time, but it’ll still bring more paying customers to the table.

Taking Care Of Your Site’s Needs: Movie Time

You might have never thought about it, but a video can really help your company website a lot.  From the most basic presentational slideshows to meet-and-greet clips, they tell people that you really want them to get a lot of use out of coming to your site.  That’s because it’s a level of interaction beyond just having them read what you’ve written.  That’s not meant as a dig at blogs, guys; it’s just a simple matter of reminding them that there’s a real human being on the other side of the web page – kind of like all the customer service people you’ll meet when you stop in at a business.

There are lots of ways that this can be done, too.  There are some videos that run automatically, cycling to the start again once they reach the end, and these need to be simpler videos so that they don’t turn people off for simply making the site too busy.  It’s good to have a more complicated video that people can choose to start or stop, too, because that increases the level of interaction with your site that’s going on.  The ironic part is that the video with more complex content can actually be the easier one to make, because it can be the sort of thing hosted on sites like YouTube, while the simpler graphics one will pretty much need to be integrated into the programming of your site.

Whether you decide to use just one or both kinds of video for your website, it’s important to understand the differences in what they do for you and in how they need to be treated.  If you’ve got something where the CEO of your company greets people and gives them the proverbial ten cent tour, you need to make sure that it isn’t going to be forced on people who don’t really want it.  That would make them dislike your site, and your company by extension.  If you get everything right, though, you can help to encourage people to do business with you – and you can actually improve your site’s ranking on search engines.

Of course, it’s important to remember that you don’t want any videos connected to your site to be to long.  If they take more than about five minutes or so, you run the risk of people losing interest and moving on to something else – possibly leaving your site as a result.  You need to be concise and interesting, and you need to make sure that your video reflects well on your site.  That isn’t going to be an easy task without either boring or overwhelming viewers, but it can be done.  When you succeed, you’ll be one step closer to making your site the first place that people go for absolutely everything you offer.

Happy New Year, Internet!

2010 has been an interesting year for the Internet.  Google’s made several bids at major expansions – more than one of which have already proven to be complete flubs.  Facebook has faced scandal over failures in its famous privacy policy (you know that’s why it beat out MySpace).  China has all but declared war on most of the top websites.  Yahoo! has staggered along amid mockery and diminishing popularity.

SEO has changed, too.  You still need to keep track of things like meta-tags and link building, but social media marketing and even video SEO have taken up a lot of the focus that used to go into how much you could get away with without being marked as spam.  Just 12 months ago, social media was the Next Big Thing that everyone was trying to figure out how to use effectively, and now its becoming a proven method of courting return visits from people and even first time stops from their friends.

There have been virus scares on a lot of important websites.  Someone even used one to attack Iran and a number of other countries en masse!  It’s safe to say (pun intended) that the Internet has revealed that it’s every bit as dangerous as the concrete jungle.

But things aren’t all bleak.  As I just said, social media is stabilizing as a way to market your company.  Smart phones are evolving to use satellite technology in addition to cell towers.  A guy made a real fortune selling virtual real estate.  Most of the times a major site has been caught in an embarrassing situation, it’s managed to take care of things and save face.  And the Internet has really proven how it’s become the front line in freely expressing yourself.

I don’t know whether the Internet’s come a long way or whether this has all been just a small step in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been quite a year.  I’m sure that you’re looking forward to seeing what the new year will bring to the online world as much as I am.

Taking Care Of Your Site’s Needs: Back To Basics

Even if you’re not going to try handling your SEO needs on your own, that doesn’t mean that you have to leave your site completely invisible to search engine crawlers.  For one thing, Google has recently increased the amount of information you have available as a webmaster.  That means that you can keep better track of how you’re ranking and what you need to do in order to succeed.

Beyond that, though, there are lots of little things you can do to help your site out.  Just focusing on the basics a bit more can go a long way toward making any website more functional as a page that can be indexed.  More importantly, all of those fundamental website practices will help make it easier for people to do business with you, which is why you’ve taken your company online in the first place.

Of course, once you’re ready to have a skilled SEO team help your site, you can let them handle all of that as well.  They’ll be able to take all those efforts and go far more in-depth than someone who’s just getting started can.  In the meantime, it’s still a good idea to take some basic steps in order to make sure that your company can grow into everything you want it to be.

Know The Best Ways To Promote Your Site

There are more and more ways you can go about letting everyone know that your site is great.  It used to be that everything was spread through word of mouth, back before the search engines came along.  Nowadays, there’s link building, web ads, and email messages sent because a company heard about you rather than the other way around.  It’s even starting to be where you need to make on-site videos in order to help your search engine ranking.

That shouldn’t be surprising, when you think about it:  the most important part of SEO services has always been and will always be the work that’s done to your website itself.  People have known for a while that videos can help them because of how communicative they are, so it isn’t a very big step from that to also using them to help the site show up on search listings.  You just have to be sure that, in keeping with the expectations of quality content, your videos are worth the attention of your client base.

Keeping up with things is always tricky if you don’t want to find yourself on the trailing edge – meaning if you’re actually keeping up.  When that’s what you’re doing, it’s far too easy to try to get a little ahead but take a proverbial wrong turn and find yourself left behind by everyone else.  Continual learning is the only way to deal with this, the same as it is with everything else.

So, you need to take enough time to carefully consider your options when you’re looking at getting anything done to improve your website.  You need to make sure that you at least keep up with everyone else, but you don’t want to wind up fully committed to a dead end method if you get too far ahead.  Only hiring the best services can keep you safely on the right path.

Everyone Should Hate Spam

Anyone who maintains a blog has seen comments come in that look like they might not actually have anything to do with what you’re talking about.  “Hey, you should try this thing I found on http://www.website.com” ring a bell for anyone?  I realize I haven’t talked about this in a while, but it’s on my mind today and I thought I’d share a few things on the matter.

For starters, anyone who actually wants their clients to do well should avoid spamming whenever possible – if a search engine tumbles to the fact that spam is being used, they’ll penalize the site that’s benefiting from it in any number of ways including removing them from a search listing entirely (the searching equivalent of capital punishment, for those who don’t think spam’s a serious matter).

It gets even trickier with the rise of social media in the online community.  People are actually using Facebook and the online games connected with it than Google and all of its subsidiary sites.  That must seem like a ripe field for black hat operators ready to do just about anything to promote their clients.  Even for the rest of us it presents a very treacherous path to walk that can easily see you sliding off into the abyss.  Learning what to look for in your own efforts is the first and possibly most important step in cleaning out the spam from your own content.

Sadly, there isn’t a whole lot you can do beyond that and just clearing your spam filter every so often so that it isn’t stacked up.  I wonder, does a link that’s stored in a spam folder still count towards the ranking of the site to which it sends you?  That would be one for the various search engines to answer, I suppose, but I still don’t want to have them just sitting there in my account.

The interesting thing, though, is that you can now get spam on your smart phone, so that there’s no waking moment when you aren’t at risk of a polluted Internet.  As soon as you open it to your homepage, you’re going to find yourself faced with a lot of links that have nothing to do with what you’re after and some that may even offend your values.  All in the name of helping some company do better online.

As search engine optimizers, it’s perfectly natural that we should want to help our clients be more visible online.  It’s even right, because that’s what they’re paying us for.  But it should never be done at the expense of the people we’re trying to get to go to our client’s with their business.  If you’ll forgive me a Star Wars analogy, black hat techniques are “quicker, easier, more seductive” but in the end will leave your clients looking all rotten and gross, cackling “good, good” whenever someone launches another spam campaign on their behalf.

That doesn’t ultimately do anyone any good.

The Pervasion Of Spam

It’s worth thinking about, just how much spam is floating around the Internet these days.  With the threat of various malevolent software attacks, it’s probable that half of what you come across has ties (direct or indirect) to viruses or worms.  However, a lot of stuff is just there so that someone can try to draw attention to themselves or to something that they’re trying to push – albeit very sloppily.

Most email systems have had spam filters for several years now, in order to help people to avoid sifting through all the unwanted emails that are sent out like a net to see what can be reeled in.  However, that’s not the only place you’ll see spam.  Odds are, if you have a blog of your own, you have to cope with spam comments, too.

Even social media sites like Twitter and Facebook aren’t immune, though on Facebook it comes more in the form of friend requests from people you’ve never met and who may not even exist.  That brings home the problem with spam, though:  It’s not the fact that it’s everywhere that’s the problem, it’s the fact that even the most benign examples aren’t actually out to help you with anything.  Instead, they’re there because someone wants something from you.

And so they go around, like thousands of barnacles drifting through the currents of the Internet, attaching to whatever seems a likely way to make a buck or just sending out runners to whomever they’ve gotten a little contact information on – sometimes purely by accident, even.  That’s why it appears in such large quantities all over the place.

Everyone knows spam is annoying, and most people don’t even bother to check it out when it comes up.  It just gets deleted, because we already know that it’s not worth our time to look at it.  This pervasiveness is a good demonstration of what’s so wrong with it.  It’s taking up space to try to steal your attention, bandwidth that could be better used for just about anything because the attention sought isn’t gained.

Which really begs the question: why do people bother cranking out so much spam, since most people are only going to trash it as soon as they get it?  Largely, it’s because not everyone does.  Spam has been proven to be a fairly effective marketing strategy, as long as the ads can come up with interesting subject lines.  Unfortunately, that means it’s not going to stop any time soon.

All we can do is work to improve spam filters, refuse to send it out ourselves, and get rid of it as soon as any reaches us personally.  In the meantime, don’t get too bothered by its presence.  That just gets you thinking about it more, which is what the spammer wanted in the first place.

Being Found

Being found online is important, but being found on the right search engines is even more important.  There are a lot of search engines out there, most of which are only used under specialized circumstances.  It doesn’t matter if your site is easily found on any of them unless they actually pertain to what you do.

The only ones that matter are those that are intended for what your website covers and major engines like Yahoo! and Google.  So long as you’re easy to find on them, you’re fine.  Otherwise, your site is in real trouble, because the only people who will be going to it are those who already know about it – that means little or no new business will be coming your way.

That’s where SEO comes in, actually.  It makes sure that your website works with the search engines that you need to be visible on.  That way, the only limit to how much business you see depends on your own efforts to satisfy your clients.  Since that’s the way it should be, you need to be absolutely sure of what search engines you need besides Google, if any.

Search Overview

There are dozens of search engines out there that see a lot of use – there are hundreds, depending on what you’re looking for.  Some of them are actually pretty good at helping you find specific things.  However, most people don’t use them, either because they don’t know about them or because they aren’t powerful enough outside the specific subjects for which they’re intended.

When it comes to looking for absolutely anything, there aren’t a lot of engines that can really compete with the “Big Three” of Yahoo!, bing, and Google.  They’re easily the most powerful search engines available, which is why they’re the dominant search providers on the internet.  They search pretty much everything, even entries that are specifically placed on other search systems like YouTube (which is partly a search engine for finding specific videos and categories within the clips posed to it).

The tricky part is that lots of sites include search engines as part of what they do, but can’t reach beyond their own limits.  Only search engines dedicated to that purpose can, which is why they are generally the only ones people think about.  However, anyone who wants to do some powerful searching needs to include the “lesser” engines of places like YouTube, Facebook, and so on.