What Is SEO ?

The Real Meaning of SEO

Published on November 22, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Even after years of active promotion and implementation business owners and managers continue to misunderstand SEO. SEO, the acronym for search engine optimization, refers to the practices used to affect specific search engine rankings for targeted keywords or phrases. Search engine optimization is recognized by Google as a good and legitimate service however certain techniques are objectionable and unacceptable.

As with any professional service, SEO has both good and bad practitioners. Whether SEO is good or bad is determined by the style of implementation and purpose of its use. A total SEO strategy should include on-page and off-page SEO work. Any work should begin with keyword and competitor research to create an effective strategy.

The Various Ways to Define SEO

As an ethical Atlanta SEO company we work with only legitimate businesses, and therefore seek to place their website for relevant terms. Anyone doing search engine optimization should first and foremost consider the search engine! To this point we strongly recommend becoming familiar with, and adhering to, Google Webmaster Guielines.

SEO - The Laymans Definition

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a generic term for the many methods used to get a website ranked on search engine results pages (SERP's) for specific keywords or search phrases.

It is important to understand that SEO is not a commodity which may be purchased in truly tangible measures. To better understand this term as a consumer, you can think of it as if you were buying home remodeling services. There is a lot that can be done, and each job has its own level of finished quality, time required to complete, and value. SEO work can include specialized website coding, optimizing text or images, link building, content marketing, social media marketing and much more. Each of these areas can be further segmented into specific tasks and needs. All of these tasks can be completed and implemented in varying degrees of quality.

SEO - The Technical Definition

SEO from a technical perspective includes implementing and optimizing code and content elements. This work certainly requires technical coding but also marketing concepts, user preferences and search engine algorithms. While forums and articles can give some technical pointers it takes years of practice and constant study in oder to become an SEO expert. Technical considerations include page load time, block level SEO, using unique page titles and descriptions, alt tags, title attributes and new tools such as Google's tag manager.

SEO - The Marketing Definition

From an internet marketing perspective SEO is the Holy Grail for driving higher volumes of relevant traffic to a website. For the marketing person SEO is a method to get a website ranked and also a process to build branding. To a marketing person this includes content marketing, articles, press releases and distributing white-papers. In a marketing perspective SEO is about implementing brand building content that also improves organic ranking.

Optimizing content for websites and articles includes an understanding on block level SEO, authorship, latent semantic indexing (LSI), and payig attention to word counts, non-spam writing tactics and proper link building methods.

Figure Lie and Liars Figure is a saying I use to alert business owners to some common tricks of unethical hustlers. The person or company working on your ranking should give you progress reports. Typically these reports are a list of keywords where your site is ranked with the actual ranking. Here's where the lies and deception often start. You may be excited about your reports that show a steady increase in ranked terms. You think your SEO company is doing a great job right? Maybe not. Have they shown you the amount of real world search traffic for these terms? Are you ranked for a lot of terms where there is no traffic and that won't generate leads? You need to have a good understanding of what your SEO companies strategy, tactics and goals.

How Search Engines View SEO

Search engines look at SEO in both a good perspective and a bad perspecive. The good perspective holds that ethical internet marketing professionals employ coding, links and content that actually assist a search engine in knowing how to classify and on what SERP's to display a website. The bad perspective is that certain SEO practices may be leveraged in order to manipulate SERP's and thereby provide what may be low quality content.

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SEO Providers Are Not All Alike

Because consumers do not understand "What is SEO?" or what is required to do quality work, they often rely on price or a slick sales pitch. Because consumers do not understand what they need there are a lot of people who have read forums and blogs enough to speak as though they are knowledgeable. The quality and effectiveness among people offering SEO varies as much as day and night.

There are a LOT of "website designers" and freelancers who pitch SEO simply because they can make some money. A business owner, thnking of SEO as a commodity, can falsely believe they got a great deal because they "got a guy to do our SEO really cheap". Any competitor who hires a legitimate SEO company will slaughter the owner who goes cheap. So, the next question is, "how do you find a good seo company?". Click the following link to learn more about how to hire a good SEO company.

Our SEO Tool Recommendations For 2013

The Best Search Engine Tools In 2013

Published on October 9, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

SEO discussions seem to always include mentions of "the best SEO tools". I think it is safe to say that people tend to assign "best" to whatever works for them. Accordingly, the term best is very ambiguous thus it would be a mistake to immediately embrace such casual proclamations. This article is intended to provide some insight on how to find good, useful SEO tools.

Trust Only The REAL SEO Experts

My personal belief is that less than 25% of online SEO tips are original and of high value. Anyone trying to learn about SEO should be skeptical when watching SEO videos on Youtube, reading forum posts and spun articles, and being hit with SEO software ads. Regular contributors such as Rand Fishkin and his Whiteboard Friday are the types of people and SEO resources to follow.

The best SEO tool is a mind that has a well developed understanding of SEO. Simply knowing what to do is dangerous. You need to know what to do, when to do it, and why it is so. This means taking time to understand search engines, algorithms, coding, content development, and commit to continued education.

Local SEO Tools

Due to the importance of local search listings to many businesses we need to include some information on local SEO tools. A good free local SEO tool is Brandify. With Brandify you get a decent evaluation of your local search presence, tips on improving local search, and a progressive scoring to evaluate your work.

Signing up for paid services such as Whitespark or BrightLocal can be useful. These services can help you to evaluate local ranking for specific keywords, find quality citations, and conduct local search competitor information. A lesser known but respectable tool is DIYSEO which offers a free trial and paid subscription services.

Organic SEO Tools

SEO Keyword Research Tools

All good SEO programs include front-end keyword research efforts. If you fail to identify the exact and relevant terms, and then determine which have the higher search volumes your SEO work is doomed to mediocrity or failure.

A list of the best SEO tools includes SEOmoz and Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, SEMRush, SpyFu, and Market Samurai. Google Keyword Tool and the Microsoft SEO Toolkit are other SEO tools to consider. For links to these sites you can check the footer of our main SEO information page. If you are serious about doing quality SEO work, you should be prepared to invest at least $300 a month for paid services.

Creative SEO Tools

If you are a creative person with good instinctive skills, observation skills and can read trends there are some other tools to consider. Google Analytics can provide interesting information on how users find your site, thus "showing" how they are not finding your site. Sites which provide search trend information can provide you with timely information on how to reach qualified traffic.

Evaluating SEO Tools

The first tip here is to ignore any "Fast and Easy SEO Results" software, programs or services. There are no shortcuts in proper and ethical SEO work. Services that are recommended by SEO experts such as Jill Whalen, Rand Fishkin Wil Reynolds, Bruce Clay and other top tier practitioners will lead you in the right direction. When you develop a shortlist of services, begin to evaluate the breadth of the services, compare the volume of accounts and information you can manage, and compare service fees. Don't be discouraged by rates of $1000-$3000 a month because a quality service will truly enable you to be very successful.

SEO Strategies In 2012

SEO Tips In 2012

Published on September 24, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

When a domain name and website are new they lack any existing off-page SEO elements. The SEO process for a new domain and website presents unique challenges and opportunities. Success for achieving high organic placement for any particular keyword or search phrase requires a level of work (skill + hours) to not only “define the site for search engines” but to also outpace and out maneuver your current online competitors. Specific and deliberate efforts will need to be made for each and every of your desired target keywords or search phrases.

SEO Opportunities

A new domain and new website have no history with search engines. Although this means an initial flat-line for organic rankings, it does assure that there are no problems with past SEO work which may be deemed by search engine algorithms to be “black-hat” or non-compliant to desired standards. Starting with a clean slate is a great opportunity however you need to have patience and be willing to invest a very substantial amount of work to sculpt your online ranking.

SEO Challenges

Search engine algorithms are ever evolving in their ability to gather and process information about a website. Algorithms process over one thousand factors to determine the order in which sites should be ranked for a given keyword or phrase. A new website is challenged with building a properly structured profile of “SEO credentials”. Because a new website is starting at ground zero, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done to become competitive with very well established and ranked websites.

A factor that is of value, but cannot be managed, is the “domain age factor” for your domain name, the age of backlinks and the age of online content that is associated with the domain name (URL). Typically, SEO work will yield even better results after the site has been online for at least one year. . It is worth mentioning that if you purchase a domain that has been used before it WILL have a history with search engines. Sites that have been banned for black-hat SEO have destroyed all value for the associated domain. Any site that is subsequently using this domain will suffer from the bad history of that particular domain.

Important SEO Elements

Unique Content is extremely important. Any scraped content (copied from other sites) is not only illegal but it will affect your site with a duplicate content penalty. You should write all original content or, if you are using a web design company or SEO company to write your content, get a written statement that they are providing all unique content and not violating any copyright laws.

Backlinks are a key part of any SEO strategy. The process of building a backlink footprint must be implemented with a strategy that will mitigate the risks of search engine penalties and yet achieve optimal results. Obviously acquiring a large number of high quality links is important however Google’s algorithm is particularly sensitive to link velocity, meaning acquiring “too many” links “too fast” is a signal of “unnatural linking” and will yield very negative results.

You should always avoid any “link farms” or services that provide mass links from spam blog posts. There are many online services that offer outsourced link building and may seem to be legitimate however if you make a mistake in choosing the right company your site may suffer severe ranking penalties. Under no circumstances should you get links from “bad neighborhoods” meaning sites dealing with gambling, porn, etc.

Social Media Signals are a key factor for current search engine algorithms. You should share links between your website and your social media business pages. It is important to note business pages and not from your personal social media pages. Examples of top social media links include Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Frequent social interaction is the key ingredient for social signals. Posting good content and obtaining social approval signals such as a +1, Like, Share and Follow are all something you need to acquire. Hiring an inbound marketing company to develop a true inbound marketing strategy is worth considering.

SEO For Google in 2012

Atlanta SEO

Published on September 18, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

 

Any business in the greater metro Atlanta area knows that the race for top ranking on Google is incredibly intense. Because of the numbers of competitors, and the ample supply of Atlanta SEO companies, it takes a true SEO expert to improve search engine rankings on Google. After the algorithm updates known as Google Panda Update and Google Penguin Update there has been greater concern over how to do SEO for Google and not lose the valuable first page rankings. Certainly, any SEO company should first and foremost pay close attention to Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

SEO for Google

Search engines assess many factors and characteristics of websites, articles and other online content in order to rank them for search results pages. Most search engines have an overlapping number of criteria such as page load time, ample amount of meaningful content and similar items. Google is the most advanced in evaluating a site's quality and value. Doing SEO for Google requires a particular expertise and a commitment to paying close attention to the finer SEO details.

Although Google SEO techniques have long included items such as honing page titles and descriptions, using alt and title attributes and having ample backlinks to your site, the manner in which these things are done has changed. In particular, the Google Penguin update totally changed what is considered white hat seo practices and techniques.

Building backlinks was once as simple as hiring any of the multitude of "link building services" that advertise online. These services often used spammy auto submission, mass link dropping on blogs, article spinning and submissions, and other tactics to rapidly generat high volumes of backlinks. Many of these companies owned and operated "link farms" which is a collection og blogs and sites that exist solely to post mindless articles with backlinks, or simply add page after page of text links. Google made a concerted effort to drop these link farms and black hat SEO sites, thereby rendering useless the links from these sites. This left many businesses with sites that plummeted in rankings, losing lots of traffic and business. Unfortunately, many of these businesses had no idea that their chosen Atlanta SEO company was doing black-hat work. So how do you now do SEO for Google?

Atlanta SEO companies, at least the better SEO firms, are among the best in the country at achieving great results through white-hat SEO practices. The current way to SEO includes the following:

• Fire your SEO company if they use black-hat methods.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to check your site for problems.
• Correct as many problems (on- and off-page) as possible.
• Request reconsideration by Google if your site's rankings have been harmed.
• Be more selective and judicious in how, and from where, you acquire backlinks.
• Get professional SEO help to maximize SEO results.

Finding A Good Atlanta SEO Company

One of the most important considerations when seeking a good Atlanta SEO company is to find a firm that offers more than just SEO (or "just" any one or two things). To develop a well rounded and high performing internet marketing program you need a company that offers:

• Extensive client-side, real world business experience.
• Creative consulting and strategy development.
• Organic SEO services for local, regional and national campaigns.
• Local SEO services for Google+, Yahoo Local and Bing Business Portal.
• Website design and maintenance.
• PPC management, which is a great partner tool for SEO.
• Search engine marketing, article writing, etc.
• Video creation and marketing.
• In-house staff without need to outsource your work

Local SEO Companies

There are a multitude of Atlanta SEO companies to be found online. Taking your list down to the better ones means finding a true company, with an office and a staff - not a freelancer. Checking credentials such as A+ BBB ratings, great online reviews and portfolio will reduce the list to only a few companies. A brief interview will help you to find the company with a style that you like and with whom you would enjoy working.