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By jnavary, April 25, 2011

Search engine optimization is a series of processes targeted toward improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website and its various pages from search engines via natural/organic/algorithmic search results. Employed as an internet marketing strategy, website SEO works within the parameters of how search engines work and what people search for. The optimization of a website primarily involves ensuring that the content and HTML associated coding maximize their relevance to specific keywords both for the search engines and for visitors to the website. As such, there are countless mistakes which can be made in the process of search engine optimization. The following are some of the biggest mistakes made in the SEO process:

* Taking shortcuts – Assuming that you know what keywords people are using to search for your company, products, and or services and including them in your content is unlikely to yield traffic. People making this mistake commonly use terms which are either too broad or too narrow and then wonder why their site isn’t performing. Instead, have an SEO company do an extensive study on where the opportunities lie in key search terms to maximize the performance of your site.

* Going Black Hat – SEO, done properly, is a time and labor intensive process. When companies start promising or guaranteeing first page results within days, be careful. If they’re using Black Hat techniques you may get some traffic but could you also get penalized or taken out of the search engines’ indices altogether.

* Writing content for search engine crawlers – Stuffing keyphrases into your content because they make your pages look relevant to the search engines will work against you if your content reads awkwardly because of it. Massive traffic numbers can quickly become irrelevant if visitors are bouncing off of your site after reading a couple lines of disjointed content. You will get a much better response and have a much stickier site by using keyphrases that fit into the flow of your content, even if they generate a little less traffic.

* Presenting a poorly constructed landing page. You have about five seconds to keep a visitor on your site once they’ve landed. If they don’t immediately see what they’re looking for on your landing page there’s a good chance they’ll bounce off and go looking elsewhere.

* Settling for amateurish content – Your conversion process should begin the second a visitor lands on your site. If your landing page has done its job, your visitors will be looking at your content soon after arrival. If your content isn‘t developing trust and authority immediately, you’re in trouble. Misspelled words, syntax errors, rambling text, and the like will have your visitors seeking out your competition with click of the “back” button. Instead, go with professionally written content supplied by your SEO consultant. It will be worth its weight in gold.

* A convoluted path to conversion – You can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by confusing a potential buyer so much that they give up trying. Instead, make your conversion process as simple as possible.

…and the biggest mistake:

* Ignoring SEO altogether – In the summer of 2008, Google announced that had indexed a trillion pages and wasn’t finished yet. The only way your site is going to make financial sense will be to drive traffic to it with a well-executed search engine optimization strategy.

Your optimized website must work both for the search engines to bring traffic to your site and for the visitors that arrive after finding you. Striking a working balance between the two with a professionally optimized website will drive traffic to your site while conveying the necessary credibility, simplicity, and trustworthiness to your visitors which will then lead to your main objective; conversions.

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By jnavary, March 21, 2011

The best and least expensive promotional tools for local small businesses:

#1. The Business Card
In today’s world of low cost, quality color printing using digital imaging, small business owners have no excuse for not having hundreds of this number one promotional tool. Why is your business card the most important marketing tool you’ll ever invest in? Because people remember people. Give out your card to every new person you’ve discussed your business with.

#2. Build a Website
Local people want to learn about you, your services, your products, and to see your work. If you don’t have a website, people will not take you as seriously as the business owner that has a strong visual web presence.

#3. Email
Email lets you send text, photos, video, sound and information about your business.
Can your phone message, yellow pages listing or print ads do that?

Consider collecting email addresses from all of your clients and customers. Then mark one day every month on your calendar and send them an email with information you know they would appreciate.

#4.  Search Engine Marketing
In a dollar for dollar comparison to other forms of advertising, Search Engine Marketing it is the hottest, most cost efficient medium for attracting new business. Search Marketing is what we do best at Virginia SEM.

Search Marketing has become the single most important factor when developing your online presence. Unlike many of our competitors providing “canned” services, Virginia SEM will work closely with you to design a marketing plan that is properly customized to meet your local business needs. Part of this process involves the practice of Search Engine Optimization, more commonly known as SEO.

Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO involves many different approaches for promoting your website in the major search engines. To be successful on the Internet you must be listed and ranked high on the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and positioning should always be
the first and most important concern of any web marketing strategy.

The Virginia SEM Advantage: At Virginia Search Engine Marketing we are different from many SEO consultants in that our background is in internet marketing rather than the “techie” world of computer programming, software development, etc. We entered the internet marketing arena full-time in 1996 selling our own products online. We know that it is essential to work with our clients using plain English and avoid confusing “tech-speak”.

Unlike most of our competitors, we are located right here in the Richmond-Petersburg metropolitan area. Many SEO “consultants” are physically located hundreds or thousands of miles away. A high percentage of these larger companies sub-contract their SEO work to independent workers in overseas locations such as India, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. We are a Virginia small business working to help other Virginia small businesses succeed. We are a phone-call away and are available to meet face-to-face with you to discuss your marketing plans.

We specialize in best-practice solutions for competitive rankings. In fact, no matter how much splash your web site has or how great your content is, if you don’t appear in the first couple of pages of a search engine’s search results, you won’t even be noticed.

Virginia SEM  Marketing Guidelines – Basic principles:

• Publish content for users, not strictly for search engines. Don’t deceive your customers or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings while providing nothing of value. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my customers? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in fraudulent linking schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking through “black hat” marketing techniques. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• We use honest and proven SEO tactics to help achieve better positioning and ranking for you in search engines. The end result should produce increased traffic to your website and improved conversion rates for your business.

Remember…

It takes more than a website to be successful on the web.

If your target audience cannot find you on the web, why build a web site in the first place?

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By jnavary, February 19, 2011

A Brief Introduction To SEO

The definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) published by SEOMoz is a good starting point. They define it as follows:.

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines

Regardless of how well a site is constructed, the site has to be found. Most visitors use search engines to look for websites containing the key words and phases of importance to them. SEO can deliver exceptional benefits because research shows that less than 40% of the people who use search engines are able to distinguish between sites that have paid for high rankings versus those that rate highly due to excellence.

Actually, the best way to boost site traffic is to balance advertising with natural’ or ‘organic’ search engine rankings. The term natural search means the merit and relevance of the keywords rather than the amount of money paid to the search engine for rankings.

The importance of keywords and phrases

Search engines use “spiders” or “bots” to crawl through the content of websites and the

Search Engine Optimization

results are indexed in databases that are interrogated when a search query occurs. Because queries can be imprecise, there may be considerable variations in the number of hits and the order in which they occur.

It is an essential task of SEO to build keywords and phases into the web site that cover all contingencies including commonly misspelled words, so that the desired result occurs even if the query is literally incorrect.

Site navigation is also important because the spiders can only crawl where the site allows them to do so. This means that if your web designer has got carried away with Flash, wonderful twirly introduction screens, the key information can be hidden. The same applies to logins, drop-down menus and other bits of code where the spiders cannot find them.

These comments certainly reflect the view of the author that website development is a job for information management specialists, not graphic designers.

The all-important site content

The quality and originality of your content will ultimately mean success or failure of your Internet marketing venture.

If your visitor has found your site through a keyword search, it is now critical that the information provided matches their needs in a relevant manner. Otherwise, your visitor will probably leave immediately and look at an alternative site listed in the search results.

The underlying principle of good content writing is to know the characteristics and needs of your target audience so that your values and benefits may be communicated in terms they will understand and relate to immediately. The text must be well-written, grammatically correct and should be displayed in a format likely to appeal to your specific audience.

Too many small business owners fancy themselves as copywriters or think that a family member can do the job. This is very dubious logic and if there is any doubt, it will pay to use a professional. The cost is small relative to the potential benefits.

The same applies to how the information is structured. Business owners are usually so familiar with what the business does, they may not anticipate how much and in what sequence the potential buyer might want the information. A professional developer will structure the information, moving from general to detail with clear navigation.

Link Building

Page titles, content descriptions, code validity, metatags and many more aspects of website development are fundamental “must haves” but even these elements are not as important as SEO Link Building. This is the way a search engines decides how relevant and popular your site is, by looking at the number of other sites that link to you, the type of content and the importance of the third party site itself.

The ideal links are those that have similar content but will not drain your own site traffic. One-way inward links are far more important than complementary two way links, but either is better than none. Non-commercial links can work well as long as they are relevant, so web resources, market information and even humor can work well, especially if it helps to turn your site into an effective “portal” to information in your category.

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By jnavary, February 10, 2011

Search Engine Optimization

Everyone loves successful search engine optimization, because you can get lots of traffic…and…it’s free! The problem is, that no one really knows how Google decides where to rank your site and when it will show up. Any expert that tells you that they know exactly how Google’s ranking works and/or guarantees that you’ll get into the top spots (for a fee, of course), is being less than truthful. Even so, there are proven techniques that you can employ to get your site into the top of the listings. We believe in being very transparent about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, so we’ll show you exactly what we’re doing, and why it helps to skyrocket you right to the top!

Business owners have big challenges when it comes to search engine optimization:

We use proven techniques to overcome each of these barriers. Call us today to let us build a customized SEO solution for your business.