Posts Tagged ‘SEO Company’

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My top 5 SEO predictions for 2010

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

Well, another year end is almost upon us – and doesn’t time fly when you are having fun!?

It’s that time when us SEO’s start to look forward to the new year, and what challenges and changes it brings to the world of Search Engine Optimisation.  2009 saw alot of change and revelations such as Google denying the duplicate content penalty, changes to Page Rank sculpting and the introduction of real time social media being included in search results.

So what challenges will 2010 present us with?  Here are my top 5 predictions.

1. Real Time Search will be huge in 2010 – but to what benefit?

The growth of social networking sites, such as Twitter, simply cannot be ignored.  Late in 2009 Microsoft started to include real time social media feeds in their results pages, and Google promptly followed.  However, this isn’t neccesarily good for SEO as it potentially detracts from the need for quality content and inbound links.  Why not just tweet about a topic in order to get noticed?   The flip side of this is that real time search surely can only show the results for seconds as live results will change nearly every millisecond.

2. Search Engine Results Evolution could me less traffic

What do I mean by this?  Over the last 6 months we have seen more and more results displaying additional information in the actual search engine listings.  For example, type in the name of a Football Club whilst they are playing a live game and you will probably see the actual realtime score in the SERPs.  Great for searchers who are looking for quick fire information, but maybe not so good for site owners relying on click throughs.

3. Organic  SEO spend will rise

More and more companies will turn to organic SEO in an attempt to increase traffic to their site.  Organic SEO continues to outpace PPC in terms of growth, and 2010 will be no different.  More and more searchers become ’suspicious’ of PPC results whilst trust in the organic results grows.  This is surely a sign that the search engines have been doing the right thing when it comes to delivering results that searchers want to see?  What this might mean is that SEO’s are employed in house, rather than as an external resource.  Time will tell.

4.  The conversion metric will be king

2010 will see a greater emphasis on conversion.  In the past SEO’s have mainly focused on driving traffic, whilst the more dynamic SEO professionals will also have put a strong focus on conversions.  I personally beleive that 2010 will be the year of improving bounce rate and converting prospects to enquiries and enquiries to sales.

5. The Top 3 positions in the SERPS will become more valuable then ever

Generally speaking, sites that have been on the first page of the search results have tended to get the majority share of the traffic, but towards the end of the year we saw a trend that our sites in the top 3 ranking positions started to grow dramatically in terms of visitors.    This could be mainly down to the amount of information that Google is now trying to cram onto the first page of the SERPS since its ‘Caffeine’ engine was implemented.  Never the less, this makes SEO much more competitive and potentially more expensive for clients but the ROI from investment could also be much more rewarding.

In Summary

Of course, as we have seen with 2009, the world of Search Engine Optimisation can change on a regular basis and our friends at Google are quite happy to keep the majority of these changes under the hat and keep us all guessing.

What I am certain of though, is that 2010 will be a very big year for search, and with the right mindset and SEO company it could also be a very rewarding year for your business.

Have a very Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year from all of us at eSoftware Solutions.

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Posted in Daily SEO, News, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »

Why You Should Hire an SEO Firm

Monday, June 15th, 2009
Looking into hiring an SEO Firm, Can they really help with your internet marketing?

Looking into hiring an SEO Firm. Can they really help with your internet marketing?

Written by:  Nick Hantge

Hiring an SEO firm is something many business owners are contemplating these days. Since the widespread popularity of search engine optimization (SEO) and its benefits, there have been many marketing firms offering to run SEO campaigns for other businesses. There have also been some do-it-yourself business owners who feel they can optimize their own website as well. From an overall marketing standpoint, the case can be made that investing in online advertisement will potentially reach more prospective customers through SEO than other forms of advertising such as print ads. Whether you are contemplating optimization on your website or thinking about running your own SEO campaign, here are a few reasons why you should hire an SEO firm to help land you in front of more potential customers looking for your product or services.

1. They have the Expertise
Even though the stereotypical web developer/SEO professional is thought to play video games all day and work at night in his mother’s basement, they should still be respected as a professional. After all, do you know how to change a cascading style sheet or create a dynamic sitemap? A main reason you hire an SEO Firm is for the same reason you hire an attorney to write up your legal documents or represent you in court; they are the expert! I personally do not change the brakes on my car or put a crown on my own tooth. Granted, I could learn how to do it on my own but I know it will save me in the long run to hire someone who specializes in these services. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a few companies out there claiming they know SEO and how to get you on the first page of Google so they can get a piece of the pie but choosing a good SEO firm comes later…

2. An SEO Firm will save you time
When you hire an SEO firm to handle your online marketing and SEO, it will save you loads and loads of time! I cannot stress enough how much time goes into a worthwhile SEO campaign. SEO firms have years of experience under their belt (hopefully) and a full knowledgeable team to work on optimizing and marketing your website for you.

Like anything, there is a learning curve to search engine optimization. I would be ignorant to say it has the steepest learning curve of any profession but I honestly believe it is in the top 25%. The time an SEO professional has but into gaining all of the knowledge they have gained is shocking! The lucky thing for someone who hires an SEO firm is they have already previously put in the time learning which ensures the website will rise in the search engines much quicker than someone who tries to optimize themselves. There is also a pretty good chance the SEO Firm will be able to utilize the connections they have with other professionals to help speed the campaign along.

Not only will the SEO firm you hire know the latest tricks to optimization, they also know what doesn’t work. As an SEO professional, we have learned through trial and error what effort to consume our time with.

3. It’s all in the numbers
Can you imagine paying employees that you cannot track the work or hours they put into their job? You would not be able to justify if paying them has been profitable for you or your company. The same holds true for hiring an SEO Firm. All of the good SEO firms have a tracking system on the website they are optimizing. In this tracking system you will be able to see daily visitors, what keywords they are typing in to find your website, what search engine or source they came to your website from, how long the individual was on your site, where the location of your visitors are coming from and the list goes on and on. SEO firms also have access to very useful web based tools such as a keyword tool that will tell you the monthly volume of searchers typing in certain keywords or keyword phrases. This is extremely beneficial to recognize and understand what keywords should be targeted in your SEO campaign.

If a business owner runs their own seo campaign are they going to create monthly reports to keep track of progress? Is a business owner going to focus on key point indicators such as bounce rate and new visitors in their SEO campaign to ensure prime results?

4. You Get to Focus on your own Business
Probably the greatest part about hiring an SEO firm to help with your online marketing is you get to concentrate on your own business; what you are good at! I have previously stated how much time goes into an SEO campaign and the truth is for the first six months you need to be constantly working on building links, writing articles and creating PR for your website every day. You have to admit, if you had to just concentrate on running your business and manage your staff efficiently while the leads came in you would be sitting pretty happy. There is no reason for a business to be concerned with trying to manage their online marketing and the day to day activities as well; that is hard enough.

Rely on a professional with years of experience and the time and team to fully optimize your website. Although the thought of not spending money on something you think you could do yourself is nice, hiring an SEO firm will pay for itself and then some in just 4-6 months!

If you would like more information on how an SEO Firm can help your business grow with Internet Marketing, check out SEO Information or send me an email: nick@thisisiniquitous.com. I would love to answer any questions you have!  (303) 999-7963

For More Articles like this:  Do It Yourself SEO | Optimizing your Google Profile

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Page Rank Explained

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Google Page Rank (PR) is a measurement of relevance / popularity.  Each page in your web site will have its own ranking.

The scale of Page Rank goes from 1-10, although it is possible that your pages could have no ranking at all.  Generally this means that they havent been indexed yet.

So how do you improve your Page Rank?

The simple answer is to get good back links to your site from pages that already have a good page rank.  Each time Google links out from a page with a good PR it passes a peice of that Page Rank to the destination page.  Due to this it may be better for you to get a back link from a page with a PR of 4 that has 10 back links on it, than to get a backlink from a page with a PR of 6 with 70 back links on it.  This is because the PR is distributed across the outgoing links equally.

Building back links is an important part of any Search Engine Optimisation Campaign.  If you need help or advice on building up back links then please get in touch with UK Search Engine Optimisation Company, eSoftware Solutions

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SEO and the Legal Vultures

Monday, May 18th, 2009

I’ve just read an interesting article about SEO’s having a liability strategy.  For me this is a very interesting topic.

If, like me, you get regular emails promising this, that and every top position in Google you hopefully treat this with nothing more than a quick glance and a ‘delete’.   One thing that I’ve learned over the years in Search Engine Optimisation is that the only guarantee you can offer people is that you will carry out the tasks required to improve the ranking of a web site.  It is impossible for any SEO to guarantee that they will be listed on any particular page, in any particular position and I urge all SEO’s to make sure that this message is clear when talking to the client.

If you think about it, simple common sense says that if 30 web sites (pages) are being SEO’d then not all of them can appear on the front page, however common sense in business is sometimes (unfortunately) overlooked.

Make sure that you have a good contract drawn up with your client and in your proposals go into detail about what activities you will perform each month.  Provide your client with a monthly activity report explaining what you have done, and show a breakdown of rankings for your keywords.  Hopefully, if you are doing things right, the monthly report will show a steady improvement on rankings and your client will be happy.

One other key point is to let your client know that SEO changes dont happen overnight and that it can take 2,3 maybe even 6 months or more for changes to take effect.  There are so many factors to take into account that no single SEO project is the same.  Factors such as the age of the domain, the current page rank, number of backlinsk, content etc etc all have to be considered. 

It can be painful being an SEO sometimes, but when you start to see results its extremely rewarding to see a happy client.

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Optimising your web pages – 5 quick tips

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

Are you looking to optimise your web pages to try and get a better ranking for your keywords?  Here are five quick tips to get your started:

  1. Check your keyword performance using a tool like Wordtracker or Googles keyword Tool.  It is vitally important that you optimise your site for keywords that people are actually searching on
  2. Dont forget to make good use of your keywords in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags on your web page.  These carry a decent weighting in terms of your pages relevance.
  3. Write your copy to accomodate your keywords, however make sure that you write it for humans and not the search engines.  Google uses technology known as LSI so you can use words that are relevant or associated to your keywords and Google will establish the relevance
  4. Make correct us of h tags.  By this I mean put your headings in h1 tags, your subheadings in h2 tags.  Dont think that you can get away with just using classes to format your page.  Its not good HTML and the search engines dont like it
  5. If you have to use Flash make sure that you provide a non-flash alternative, and where images are concerned make good use of the ALT tags to include your keywords

The above tips should give you a good solid ground in optimising your web pages.  As any SEO will tall you the content of your page is the key and if you right clear, engaging and relevant content then you could well find that your natural links will start to grow on their own!

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The evolution of Search Engine Optimisation

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

I found this good article on another SEO blog via Twitter http://twitter.com/seodenver) - and thought it would be informative to our readers

A search engine is basically an information finding system in a computer that helps one find out information they are trying to find. They dramatically cut down the time needed to find the information one is looking for.

The concept of optimizing a website for the search engines began in the mid 1990s when webmasters saw the benefit on high ranking of their sites.

In earlier years webmasters were able to manipulate their websites with the result of them being able to get high ranking in the search engines regardless of whether the content of their web page was actually relevant to the targeted keyword or not.

Over time the search engine computations of the relevance of a particular web page to a particular keyword or set of keywords became more sophisticated so that the search engine could tell what web pages were relevant to a keyword being searched for and what web pages had just been manipulated just to gain traffic. This was done by those computing by being able to determine the quality and strength of incoming or inbound links to a web page. This system however was still not foolproof as webmasters were still able to manipulate by exchanging, buying or selling for the higher quality links to their sites. From that point on other factors were entered in to the computations the search engines use in ranking pages. This information is not available to webmasters and the public at large.

There are companies that are search engine optimisation companies. The service they sell to the public is to optimise their website to give it the best possibility of higher ranking with the search engines. If their techniques are too aggressive the effect may be detrimental to their clients to a point where their websites could be banned from search results. Not something you would want to pay someone for.

Some of the search engines have made efforts to communicate with the search engine optimisation companies to get their efforts aligned for everyones benefit. There are those who use search engine optimisation (SEO) to conform with the desires and wishes of the search engines and there are those who seek to get around the search engine rules and guidelines to get what traffic they can until they are caught.

It is a good practice to mix a campaign using search engine optimisation with one of a good paying campaign. The reason for this is that the computations that the search engines use do change and one may see a drop in unpaid traffic due to this factor. It is also a good practice to avoid search engine optimisation companies that make false promises they can not deliver, that guarantee a top rank with Google, that are secretive, that are nondescript about where your money goes, etc.

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Google Webmaster tools gets a makeover.

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Webmaster tools is a pivitol tool in the arsenal of goodies used by SEO’s in any Search Engine Optimisation campaign.  It provides the information that we need to use to understand how the sites we are working with are a) Seen in the eyes of Google, b) Performing in terms of backlinks and c) Performing in terms of impressions and click throughs.

Google have responded to comments and suggestions and Webmaster tools is undergoing a radical makeover.

Highlights include a one stop dashboard (excellent!), up to 100 queries to track for click throughs, multi user site maps, help in 21 languages(!) and improved navigation.

Google have released a short vide on you tube as a brief introduction to the newly designed interface.

We’ve had a quick play around with the new site tonight and we are fairly impressed.  The same data is available as before, but the presentation allows site administrators to find the information they want more quickly. 

We understand that the new and old versions will both be available during a transition period.

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SEO is easy? Of course, but only when you know how.

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

I’ve just read a blog post (quite an old one) of a friend of mine.  His post is centered around the statement that SEO is easy.

Having sat and pondered on this I can see where he is coming from, but then everything is easy when you know how.  Isn’t it?

To simply present a statement that SEO is easy with a bullet point of 7 or 8 items of what you need to do is desperately scratching at the surface of what SEO is all about.  Its all very well me telling you to create rich content, and change your META tags but how do you find good web site and article directories to submit to.  How do you know which directory sites will get you penalised  or not?  I’ve often sat down with people to talk about SEO and the anything beyond the basics of what they can change on their actual site is responded with a blank expression.  Its unkown to them and out of their comfort zone, so therefore its not easy.

There are also many different factors that present issues with people doing their own SEO.  Timescales being the main obstacle.  Google wont crawl your site reguarly until you start feeding it with content worth crawling.   Until you get regular visits you may not get updated in their index until 2 or maybe 3 months have passed.  Most DIY SEO’s give up after not seeing results between 4-6 weeks – be persistent.  Its important that you understand that your SEO campaign can take 12+ months to blossom – dont expect results overnight.

Taken all that into account, with timescales and the volume of work involved, especially for a competitive keyword or phrase, we have to conclude the SEO isn’t neccesarily that easy and thats why Search Engine Optimisation companies exist.  If it were easy everyone would just get on and do it themselves…. right?

If you want to read the original post you can view it here.

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Localised Search – are you missing out?

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Many companies look at Search Engine Optimisation as a way of bringing in more enquiries / sales for their business.  It is widely known that search trends suggest that anything page two or beyond on the search listings hold very little value, and the ideal place for any business is the top 5 positions on the first page.

But are you targetting the right audiences, or are you missing a trick.  As the WWW provides companies with global reach, its sometimes easy to forget your local clients.  This is where localised search can help.

More and more, people are using search engines for local services.  How is this done?  Just by adding a town or city into the search phrase!

So if you are a London based courier company, you should absolutely be considering SEO for key search terms like London Courier, and the chances of you getting  good listing are much higher than simply optimising for Courier!

Still not convinced?  We have just launched our 6 month localised SEO package so why not get in touch us (info@esoftware-solutions.com) to find out more about localised search.

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Microsites – When are they black hat, when are they ok?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Ugh, ok, so I’m raising the ugly head of black hat Search Engine Optimisation again.  It’s not really a topic I like to talk about but I feel this is a grey area.    The area I am talking about is Micro Sites.

I recently read a proposal from an SEO company that was written about 12 months ago, and the main focus seemed to be built on building 40+ micro web sites based on the agreed choice of keywords that would all link back to the main web site.  Great idea in theory but a totally unacceptable method of SEO in my eyes that does nothing more than litter the web with useless SPAMMY content.

Now, I met with a client this morning and we discussed the possibility of building 4 or 5 micro sites based on products that they sell.  Now from a marketing point of view this makes sense as the sites can focus on these products specifically and they can genuinely link back to the main web site.  I beleive that these sites will provide added value both to the customers and to the client but I am also aware that this isn’t exactly 100% approved by Google – or is it?  Am I reading into Black Hat techniques too much and at the end of the day does it come down to common sense and knowing when you have crossed the line.

Discuss……

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