I must admit. It has been awhile on me posting on this blog.  Actually my last post was about the Panda update and how EHow got dinged. So as many people know now, Google has finally rolled out their over-optimization/webspam algorithm update that they officially named the Penguin Update.  It is funny how naming these updates that destroying people’s rankings (sometimes as collateral damage) after an object (in the last few by Google – animals) make it better. Kind of reminds me on how we name hurricanes!

Like any update there are winners, losers, and some sites that get stuck in the dragging nets!  Let’s talk about why this has happened and how to fix (or reduce exposure) shall we?

April 24th, Google stated that the update would be rolled out “in the next few days”. Like Panda, this was predominantly a quality content update. The goal of this update was to reward higher-quality sites and kill pages that were spamming (in their opinion) Google. The sites that got hit were  guilty of some or all (or none) of these top offenses:

• Content spun using spinners
• Content that was thin or low quality – Overall does it bring value to a visitor?
• Questionable linking practices such as cross linking.
• Over on page optimization such as keyword stuffing. – Anybody still do that?

Google also announced that the Penguin update will be rolled out in all languages simultaneously (something they did not do with Panda), and it will affect an estimated 3.1% of queries in English search (Panda affected 12%).  Not sure if you remember but our trustworthy friends at Google said 3% for panda and oh yea it was four times that!  Thanks guys!  Penguin is like panda as it is algorithmic based so this means that reconsideration requests won’t work. You must remove the SPAM, clean-up your site and then wait for a “data refresh” and a recrawl which could be weeks or months!

Penguin is panda rev’d up but is really looking for very noticeable SPAM and sites that are playing in the VERY gray area of link building. Panda is more of a low content algorithm smack.  Let’s not forget that panda is still out there and just went through another update just last month.

I hand it to Google though as they have always been constant with their advise (surely, not the sites they are targeting).  Create high quality content and focus on a positive user experience is what they have said since the beginning of all of this. Quite frankly, it is good advise.

Let’s Assume You Got Clipped

And you feel that your site was caught in the filter innocently (I call this collateral damage), Google has a form you can fill-out. I also highly recommend that you check your Google Webmaster Tools account (for any messages). The buzz in the SEO world is that Google does not send messages on this one so make sure you check you WT often. It was also suggested you use the Google Webmaster Help Forum to inquire about your site. Be careful though as you will be required to give your URL in question!

Most big brands did not get dinged on this as they (bigger brands) tend to have the same characteristics like longer average visits and lower bounce rates, general high quality content, tons of social signals, a naturally built inbound linking profile.

I would check the following if you were hit:

• Does you content provide helpfulness? Would it make a new visitor become a returning visitor?
• Is your back link profile natural?
• Are your back links natural and have a high level of exact match in the anchor text?
• Get you content to a better “authority” level.  Better quality.
• How is your bounce rate? 40% or less please.
• Time on site above 3 minutes?
• Social signals such as tweets and shares need to be maximized if possible.

In May, Google announced on their blog a post called More guidance on building high-quality sites. In this blog post they had listed 23 questions you should ask yourself or a visited site to determine if the content is high quality or not.  I like to take these questions and apply them to Ehow.com to see if they really deserved the pounding they got from Google. So let’s go!

Here are the questions:

questions you should ask yourself and consider when trying to understand why a site was impacted by this update.  I am a golfer so I did a search on Google “How to hit a draw golf shot + ehow.com” and came up with this article http://www.ehow.com/how_1166_hit-draw-shot.html . So now let’s take this article and use Google’s questions to see how it pans out.  Here are the questions:

1. Would you trust the information presented in this article? – The article was written by “an Ehow contributor” so how are you suppose to trust this?
2. Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature? Again, this is written by “an Ehow contributor” and this article consists of 6 bullet points on how to do this.  I wish hitting a draw was only that easy!
3. Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Yes, there are at least 7 different articles that talk about hitting a draw with slight variation.
4. Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site? I could people doing that (if they had something to buy on the site) but I would not as there is no trust badges or phone numbers that would shows visitors trust.
5. Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors? Actually, it is not all that bad.
6. Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? Yes. I mean this is not a golf site or a site specifically designed around golf shots.
7. Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?  No, not really.
8. Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? No, I would rate this content low compared to other golf sites or forums.
9. How much quality control is done on content? Not much.
10. Does the article describe both sides of a story? NA.
11. Is the site a recognized authority on its topic? No.
12. Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care? The content is mass produced.
13. Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? 6 bullet points I would say is hastily produced. Wouldn’t you?
14. For a health related query, would you trust information from this site? NA.
15. Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? No,  I consider these types of sites as Swiss army knives as they have a ton of tools but none of them are very good.
16. Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic? I wish it did as if hitting a draw was only that easy.
17. Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? Nope.
18. Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? Nope.
19. Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? Oh yeah it does but honestly  I blame Google for these types of sites.
20. Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? The magazine would lose 90% of all subscribers if this was in a golf magazine.
21. Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics? Yep!
22. Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail? Nope.
23. Would users complain when they see pages from this site? The ones who came to my site to receive quality information, yes. The others who try to blog spam, no.

So not to bad actually.  19 out of 23 meet the need that Google has establish as a thin content driven site!.

Search engine marketing depends on good reporting and analytics of the data.  Without this you are dead in the water. This will lead to a bad client experience and lost revenue for you. Many paid search firms tend to use the standard reporting for each search network and pretty it up some.  That is fine but what you do with the data, how you develop your strategy around this data and analytics is what it really is all about. Here are some best practices that I like to use on my clients in terms of SEM reporting:

Developing a Paid Search  Reporting Strategy

Having a plan on reporting is everything.  You need to set this strategy based on your client’s needs while having good communication with your staff and holding this staff accountable. As part of this process, timetables need to be established and the tasks associated with it.  The key is to really think out your reporting strategy prior to implementation. Nothing is worse than rushing through this just to spend more time on adding things to your search reporting a few months down the road.

Staffing (If Your Have a Staff) Correctly

Most small paid search shops might not have staff or are using support staff to help them in they day to day management.  Nothing wrong with this but honest assessments of skill sets will give you clearly on planning, management, reporting, etc. Making sure you have the right roles for each individual in place is key to optimization.  Motivation  of the staff is very critical.  Get them to be creative and think of the big picture  and not just their segment they are working on.  The client needs you to be looking at this big picture for them even though they will not come out and ask you too. But do they really need to?

Data Review

I have seen many paid search marketers use a data dump into excell as their primary way of analysis.  You can not perform quality reporting and optimization of accounts with out it.  Finding challenges and opportunities is dependent on your data review. Some reports have shown that SEm professionals should spend around 20% of their time in reporting and reviewing data, but I would up this to at least 33%.  You need to put the time into this area in order to get the right insights to act on.

Get Granular

Establish KPIs for each search network, look at the budget distrubution, and segment between content and search networks. Look at the historical data for those longer term campaigns and develope a baseline of KPIs such as:

• Top Search Ad Groups
• Top Paid Search Keywords
• Conversions
• Cost Per Clicks
• Search Campaign Age
• Average Positioning

Increase Reporting Intervals

Intervals can be feast or famine.  With daily reporting you tend to get overwhelmed or “data blind” and not much will come out of it in terms of actionable items.  Monthly reporting is just not enough.  I have always liked to have my reporting interval set at every two weeks unless there are special circumstances.  This interval gives me the ability to look at day of the week and time of day periods clearly and not make any “knee jerk” reactions.  It also gives you the ability to optimize the account to help save the month or quarter if need be.  I think every two week reporting is the sweet spot.

Customization

Nothing says I do not care about you like a canned report.  What metrics work for one client do not have to work for another. Let take a look at a perfect example.

Company A has hired you for their paid search marketing.  There goals are in the following order:

• Branding
• Newsletter Sign Ups
• Product Inquires

Company B has hired you for their paid search marketing.  There goals are in the following order:

• Product Inquires
• Product Sales
• White Paper Downloads

As you can see from the different companies goals your paid search marketing metrics are going to be different. Company A will be more click focused while Company B wants more CPL or CPA focused.

I always find talking about bid management for your PPC campaigns as interesting. I do not know, call me a geek but with pay per click marketing being so dynamic it only makes sense to be on top of your PPC bid management game.  Here is a two part series which will list of some advanced PPC bid management strategies you can us to maximize your search marketing dollars.

Long Tail Keywords

I never thought of the day that I would be saying to cut back on your long tail keyword phrases being used but just because you have a ton of keyword phrases in your Ad Groups does not mean more sales.  I am not saying to cut all of them out but it makes more sense from a resource standpoint to cut back on the long tail keywords you have and focus on the terms that are generating income for your business. When you really look at your overall campaign you will see the 80/20 rule at it’s best. Optimize the 20%! This is going to give you the max Quality Score you can achieve because your click through rate will remain higher.

Grab Visitors Sooner In The Buying Cycle

Yes, web consumers go on the web to buy but more than ever they are using the internet to window shop.  Starting incorporating keyword phrases that emphasize value, incentives, or savings. If the majority of keywords you focus on are designed for the visitor ready to buy you are cutting out the ones that need to be incubated. Look at testing ads, keywords, and landing page copy to reflect value such as “discount”, “sale”, “free”, “coupon”, etc.  Do not forget to use your negative keywords as well. The more impressions you can shut down that will never receive a click, the better your Quality Score will be.

Choose The Right Bid Options

Google has four bid options to choose from and they are set at the campaign level. You need test each one to fine the right paid search bid option that is right for your business or client. Set maximum bid is the one that Google defaults on all accounts. Bids can be set at the ad group or keyword level; however, you will rarely pay your maximum cost-per-click (CPC). Actual CPCs will vary widely by keyword or day because of Adwords’ ad rank formula and the AdWAords discounter. (Ad Rank = Quality Score (QS) x maximum CPC. It represents where your ad will show up in the search results.)

The biggest advantage to set maximum limits is that it’s compatible with all of Adwords’ advanced features. It is also the only option that is compatible with position preference and advanced ad scheduling. If you are bidding by position or changing bids by time of day, this option is your best choice.

The big drawback of using set maximum limits is that your actual costs and CPCs can and will vary from day to day. This gives you little control over what you actually pay. Set maximum limits is also a very time consuming bid strategy option and does leave you open to higher costs.  If you have keywords that you know you can spend a certain amount on you may need to get your max bid higher than that so that your true bid cost is at your acceptable CPC. You also are at risk to pay the max CPC!

Preferred cost bidding gives you the ability to set your average CPC you are willing to pay, not a maximum CPC. Each actual cost per click may vary, but overall your average CPC will be close to your bid price. When you use this bidding process, Google automatically calculates the maximum CPC and it won’t show you! In order for the bid strategy to work you must exactly know what you want to pay per keyword or ad group.

Of course the biggest disadvantage to using preferred cost bidding is that you don’t control your maximum CPC; you only control what you want to pay. Also you lose the ability to have a position preference and scheduling your ads.

Budget optimized is designed to keep you in a monthly spend you can afford. Using this bid option will change your keyword bids to maximize your traffic. This is done by Google’s automated system and is designed to spend all your money you had indicated that you are OK with spending. It is great if you care about really one thing, your monthly spend.  If you care about what keywords are returning the best ROI and using them more this is not the bid option for you.

Pay per action is for Ad Sense network advertisers only and you pay only when the desired action is taken such as a lead form competed. The major advantage is that you, the advertiser are only charged when this action is taken. This is a great bid option when you need to create more branding opportunities for your business or you know what your action cost has to be less than. Publishers also know what your willing to pay and conversion rates so if they feel they will not make money from you they will not allow you on their site.  This can really hurt you from getting listed and taking advantage of this bid option.

Beat Your Brand Up!

It does not take a Phd to realize that brand terms convert the best but seem to be cut out the quickest when budgets need to be trimmed. To me this is the dumbest thing you can do is to stop your brand terms or even your trademarked terms.

So why would you want to keep your brand terms in play when you need to cut back? Here are some reasons:

• You control the message better than a organic listing.  Organic listings, great as they are, do not give you the ability to say exactly what you want when you want.
• Keeping your competition out. Since last year Google has allowed the use of your competitors to bid and use your trademarks.
• Keeping affiliate costs down – If you use affiliates to drive your business they will surely use your brand terms. If you are using them this helps from them bidding on these terms.

Part 2 coming soon!

And you thought that Google did not want to run the world! Google has decided you should be able to search for content based on reading level. To help you along they’ve categorized the Internet into 3 different reading levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced. How did they do this you ask? Well leave it to Google to take a simple yet brilliant path to solving a problem. Google actually just hired teachers to grade Web sites.

Images by Search Engine News

As you can see from the image above, they have used a grading system to create a statistical model by which they can compare other Web sites. Nothing better than to  support any project where Google solves its problems by paying the hard working and underpaid teachers of the world some extra money. To work out the advanced reading level, Google looked no further than its own Google Scholar search. This is filled with peer reviewed articles usually written by master’s students and PhD’s.

Outside of the ability to filter or label results with a reading level, many people have been searching with the “site:” search command with the filter on to see the reading level of certain sites. When you’re seeing this type of information about your sites, stay focused on your target market and don’t create busy work. While this tool could tell you how “dumb” or “smart” your site is, it is questionable whether you want a lower reading level on your site, or a higher reading level. Of course, if you’re getting a “genius” reading level and your target market is preteens – a little adjusting might be in order.

Source:Search Engine News.com

In an older post, I talked about how Google was warning their visitors about any Malware issues they were experiencing. Google went back and tweaked this and have added this into the search results that tells users when a site may have been hacked or compromised. Google’s goal is to return quality results and a good user experience. That means filtering out sites that have the potential to be infected with malware. It makes perfect sense to add an easy way for users to see if a site has been compromised or not.

Visitors will completely avoid your site if they see this type of alert on your listing. So, act quickly if you have this notice within your site’s listing. Once fixed, Google will remove the alert within a couple days. You can also request a review to speed up the process

Few weeks ago it was “officially” claimed by both Google and Bing (Yahoo) that look at social media data to help determine the rank of a web site. So let’s all go out and go social media nuts right? No, but you will need to incorporate a social media strategy for 2011 and beyond if you want to succeed in the SEO world.  Google claimed they use data such as how many times something was retweeted, followed on Twitter and liked or linked to within Facebook. With the focus on all things social, the fact that it’s beginning to effect organic search comes as no surprise. It just solidifies exactly how important and main stream social media has become. Face it – we live in a social world now.

This confirmation from Google needs to directly translate to your business and your marketing plan for 2011. So, as you’re laying out your plans be sure to include activating, maintaining and/or growing your Twitter followers, Facebook Friends lists, social bookmarking articles, LinkedIN profile and blog.

Social Media Marketing Grows Search Engine Optimization

The idea is that you and your company have a personality and you need to use it to reach out to the ever growing social media market. We could go on and on about the importance of social media on the growth of your company, but if you aren’t convinced by now you better be.  I think most businesses know they need to has a social presents but have a hard time to find what it does for the business and the worth of it.  At this point, I explain to my clients it does not matter what type of business you are you need to be doing it.  It may not give you 100 new leads or sales but it  keeps your current customers and potential customers close to you. Close is good and close means more future business.

If you were one of the social media believers, then this is a great boost for you and your business. However, if you haven’t set up your social media marketing  plan, then now is time to catch up. As it stands now – the current impact that this social data will have on your organic search results is still small. Remember that the major search engines use hundreds of factors in determining how a web site ranks however, building your online brand is about much more than search engines rankings. It’s about connecting with your target market and growing your customer base. Social media is the perfect tool to accomplish that in 2011.

We will be talking more very soon on detailed social media strategies so stay tuned.

XML Video Sitemaps

Video has exploded and has quickly surpassed other formats when it comes to reaching out to your audience successfully. This is mostly because it’s getting so darn easy to watch videos online by home internet service getting faster and faster with higher bandwidth connections and more advanced smart phones.  I-Phone users know this quite well as Apple offers a YouTube application as a default application.

With all of these people swarming onto the net with their video players rolling it’s easy to say that SEO video content is undoubtedly a marketing tool you cannot afford to ignore.

Don’t believe me? This is what Web Site Monitoring says about YouTube’s…

• YouTube viewers consume over 2 billion video views per day, double the prime time audience of all three major US broadcast networks combined.
• 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute at YouTube.
• Average person spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube.
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all 3 major US Networks created in 60 Years.

If you’re not making use of video SEO  in some way you are missing out on a major money making opportunity. So let’s find out how to do this.

Do I Host or Post?

Many people have come up to me and asked me this question and it really depends on your resources. Hosting a video on your site is a decision that requires some thought. The biggest factor to making this decision is the large amount of bandwidth a popular video can consume. The load could lead to your server shutting down, or cost you in overage fees with your web host.

Here is a real world example – A 10MB video viewed by 100 people will use up 1GB of bandwidth. Many small hosting accounts allow you 20 to 40GB per month range and overage fees that are very substantial. In many cases using a service like Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront are very cost effective solutions to deal with the bandwidth usage issue if you decide to host the video on your site vs uploading to a video distribution site like YouTube.

So what is the benefit of hosting your own videos?  Well, the traffic is yours, not a video sharing site and you can wrap your videos with lead forms or calls to action that promote sales where you cannot do that with sites like YouTube. I am a big believer in posting your videos on your site if you can afford it but if you cannot then you need to at least have them on YouTube.

Posting your video using Video Distribution Sites such as YouTube, MetaCafe and others do offer great benefits because it is very easy to upload files, share videos, get lots of traffic and views for no cost, and free! But there are some disadvantages like adverting on top of your videos, lower quality, length of videos limited to 10 minutes max, no benefit from linking, few statistics available to show video engagement, and little to non organic traffic pushed to your site.

So why not get the best of both worlds? I like to use both in combination with each other.  Put “teaser” videos (no more than 3 minutes long) on video sites like YouTube and have the full video on your own site. This technique allows you to get exposure and traffic from sites like Youtube and still tap into the video results in organic search, drive traffic directly towards your site and gain the ability to generate links more effectively.

So how do you set up your videos to get maximum SEO benefit? Let’s take a look.

Keyword Enriched File Name – Your video file name should contain keywords when possible. File names like abc123.mp4 describe absolutely nothing important to a search engine, where as embedding keywords like video-SEO.mp4 will help the engine identify what the video is about. Just like image files, search engines have a terrible time figuring out the content of a video file is and must rely on external signals to define what the movie is about.

Push the visitor to the conversion point – At the end of the video steer the viewer towards your intended goal. First you need a pre roll and post roll that has your domain name, phone number, or email address.

Small bites please – Having multiple video files lets you target more keyword combinations, and it is easier for viewers to zoom in on the specific content they’re interested in. Also remember that the majority of YouTube videos are under 3 mins so the more you can keep their attention the better. Also do not wait till the end to talk about problems or FAQ’s as the more descriptive the better for your viewers.

Text is now the in thing – Make sure the text is keyword rich as OCR Technology is making great strides.   In 2009 Google purchased reCAPTCHA, you know are those funny looking letters you see when you fill out forms, asking you to enter in the letters into a box, in order for you to validate that you are indeed a human? They purchased them not for the CAPTCHA feature, but as a way to improve their OCR technology, the technology they use to understand scanned words. reCAPTCHA has a pretty large database of letters they collected matched to what actual humans thought those letters were.

Make your voice and audio tracks clear – This is not just for the benefit of your audience. YouTube is working on video transcription, which will lead to them being able to index content in your video. Google owns YouTube – the technology will likely make it into the crawler at some point, so make it easy for them, and of course, mention your keywords from time to time.

Non date based content – Avoid specific references to time and dates in your videos unless it fits the theme. Doing so can make the video seem stale and out of date when it’s not necessary.

In part 2 I will talk about video site maps and mRSS feeds.

Over the past week I have had many questions sent to me about link building and how difficult and time consuming it is. I even had one person say I was mis informing the visitors who come to my site by saying that link building strategies are mandatory to your sites overall SEO health.  So I figured I would talk more about it and convenience this one visitor on how building links is necessary.

So why build links?

• Boosts your rankings by what other people say (link) and at the end of the day search engines give more relevance to what others says about your site over what you say.
• You drive highly qualified traffic to you site.  These visitors are pre qualified and are in a good frame of mind to react to your product or services. Links are not just about rankings.
• They build trust. Any link from a trusted site will make your site more trustworthy. This is a real good thing as for every trusted site there are hundreds that are not trustworthy.
• They connect you to the authoritative people and sites within your industry.  Kind of think of it as the original LinkedIn.
• Links attract more links.  Kind of think of it as the rich get richer!
• They position you as a leader in the space or industry. They also make you harder to move out of the top search engine spots and make it near impossible to receive top placement if you don’t have them.

How to find links?

Let’s talk about the challanges before w go into how to find quality links.  The challanges are:

• Finding
• Evaluating
• Organizing
• Analyzing

Finding quality sites is not that hard really but it is time consuming and this is what trips people up. Start with competitor sites and use tools such as Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and SEOMOZ’s Open Site Explorer to find the sites you may be able to get a link from. This types of sites linking to them would be:

• Directories
• Business Partners
• Trade Associations
• Paid Links
• Guest Blogs
• Article Marketing Sites
• Product Description Sites
• News Sites
• And More.

The goal is to find relevant and authoritative sites, not just any site to get a link from. They key is to find links from different domains giving you a diversified linking profile. This is what the search engines want to see. Remember, it’s about the number of different  domains linking to you not the amount of links. Another good way to find good linking opportunities is to perform keyword searches on your favorite search engine. This will give you sites that have generated a diversified linking profile and in the search engines eyes are highly authoritative.  People love to write and link about high authoritative web sites!

So what makes a site good to get a link from?

• Is it related to your industry?
• Is the links followed by the search engines?  Links that are no followed are just not as good as followed links.  There are many tools out there to help you find no followed links but one I like is the SEO Book and SEOMOZ’s toolbars that incorporate this feature.
• Are the pages with the outbound links indexed in the major search engines?
• Does the site invite guest articles or blog posts?
• Does the site itself have a good linking profile?
• Has articles from the site been published anywhere?
• Does it have quality content?
• Does the content attract comments?
• Are the links within the body copy of the article?
• Do the links go away or are removed?

Sounds to good to be true right? Well, honestly it is not quantum physics but there are plently if things that can trip up the link builder such as:

• Reason for linking not strong enough – you have got to get personal with your requests. Canned requests get you no response and no responses will burn out the people link building.
• Not enough time researching link prospect – does the link builder real researching the site to see if it is owned by a sister company that shows the link as a backlink?  I see this happen a lot.
• Not linking to relevant websites – many link builders get see a directory or a form and run to fill it out without seeing if the linking site is a industry fit for your site.

So what does link building mean?  Everything really as good rankings start and end with links. The number and quality of links pointing to a website is the most important factors in your online success. While on-page SEO, good spider crawl-ability, and quality content helps, it is the links that ultimately matter the most.

Let’s be honest – where there is demand, there are scams and there are plenty of bad SEO service providers out there.  Everyday more sites are going live by small business owners looking to make their dreams come true. These also brought about new and a myriad of services that help these businesses achieve their goals. And one of these are firms offering various seo services. It is a fairly young industry and therefore most of these companies are under a decade old. But that does not mean they do not know what they are doing.

When your business is based on a website and relies heavily on the web to get your conversions or to get people to find you, definitely you need the help of search engine optimization or seo. Especially in the organic results where most of the really good traffic actually comes from. If you want to succeed in your own online business, you certainly want to rank at the top of these results.

But achieving it is not easy especially if you are in a highly competitive industry or what they often called a niche. You need all the help that you can get. If you know next to nothing about seo, you can educate yourself about it through free and paid means. But it is best that you leave the task of doing your website’s seo to a good seo company who has the experience and the expertise to get the job done for you. You pay an extra for this but think of it as a great investment and from which you will be reaping equally great rewards for the years to come.

Here are a few of the seo services that you can expect to get from a quality seo firm.

Keyword Research

I can not stress this enough that the success of your online business is Dependant on the  keywords you target. Think of it as the foundation of your soon to be built new home.  Keywords are the starting point with any search engine optimization even from the domain name choosing! You need to know what keywords you should be targeting to help you get a high ranking in the organic search results. You need to know what keywords your potential customers will be searching for and definitely aim for those keywords. Your seo company do this seemingly tedious process for you and come up with the best keywords for your website or business. On this part, you may have to cooperate with them so they can have a better understanding of your business and from there work out the initial sets of keywords where they will be basing their research.

Link Building

If keywords are the foundation of your new home then links are the frames of the walls! Link building  fuels your search engine optimization. Because the best way for your website to rank for a certain keyword you need a good link building strategy built for it. It is all about the anchor text that carries your keyword. It is all about linking to relevant websites. It is all about getting links from reputable sites and so on and so forth. Your seo company should be able to provide you an effective link building campaign to give your site the boost it needs. If they insist on not providing this service or outsource this run Forest run!

Social Media Marketing

The internet is all about connecting with other people and usually this is referred to as the social media. More and more seo firms today are offering social media in addition to their other usual seo services. Find an seo company that has a good grasp of Web 2.0 and the social media and has a track record of working within that sphere. You need to have a basic SMM strategy to move your awareness forward.  I believe social media marketing has a place in all Internet marketing strategies. How much depends on a few factors such as current brand awareness, expectations from SMM, how important is visitor retention, and other factors.  A good SEO firm will take into consideration these factors and present the right SMM strategy for you. If they try to sell you that SMM is the keys to the castle, they are tipping their hand that they are not very good at SEO.