A storm passed through the sunset at Lake Havasu

Blogger Buzz: Getting to know the Blogger Community

Blogger Buzz: Getting to know the Blogger Community

A great question and as we say in Italy… “Con niente non si fa niente” ; with loosely translated means; ‘ with nothing , you can do nothing. This is incredibly relevant to SEO and life in general. As I will discuss in this important SEO release; quality SEO takes some time and most importantly consistency.

How long it takes to get ranking on your site depends on quite a number of factors.

• How long your site has been online for

• How many incoming links you already have

• Where the above links are placed

• How competitive your keywords or market is

• How well you optimize your pages

• The amount of time you spend on SEO

• Your current marketing budget and the % given to SEO

New Websites

Typically if your site is brand new and you are willing to spend a minimum of 8 to 10 hours work per week on SEO. Even using such a small budget of few hundred dollars, we can start to see some good results within two to three months. Of course if time is of the essence and with less restrictive budgetary constraints, we can up the hours spent on your site. The more time we spend the more we can expect definitive changes after as soon as one month.

What’s different about my approach to SEO? Let us start off with the most important aspect of my arsenal; consistency. Only with consistency can we also achieve my secondary directive; up to date solid techniques. By keeping my SEO strategy in line with the dominant powerhouse search engines (primarily Google™, Yahoo, ™ MSN™) you end up with results that will stand the test of time. There are a lot of gimmicks out there promising SEO rankings in a few days, these lessons in futility don’t last and may hurt your ranking in the long run. With new Google™ algorithms adapting to “SEO trickery” they are now punishing accordingly (severe rank cutting / blacklisting). Don’t make this common mistake and throw your money away, ending up with a lower ranking than you started and less novel traffic to your site.

It’s also important to give SEO the precedence it deserves in the fiscal planning of your company. If you have a small budget to work with there will of course be a trade off in terms of hours working on SEO, which means longer wait time on results.

Established Websites

If your site is established to some degree, hopefully you will be indexed already on the major search engines, obtained some inbound links and done some preliminary marketing.

This puts you in good stead to move forward a little faster in the rankings stakes. Although once again being dependent on chosen keywords, you should start to see upward movement of rankings within just a few weeks.

This does not mean that you will reach first place within this period but it does give some estimate to how long ranking may take for given keywords and phrases.

Alessandro Colangeli

How to create a successful recipe for my online business?

Well If you are looking to expand your business online the first thing one would do is research. Now If you have already done this you have quickly learned that everyone knows best and everyone has the perfect solution and half of those people end up being scams. When you are done, you have more questions than you started with and an empty pocket because you outsourced everything to different people.

First off let me start by saying getting a specialist in SEO on your side is one of the most important things you can do as a business owner. However do realize that it is not the only thing you need. There is something that a lot of business owners overlook when it comes to getting yourself noticed online. That is your reputation online.

According to ABC and USA today 80% of all new business is now being generated through reviews.

Step back for a second and let that soak in. That means if you are receiving a lot of negative feed back online you are only reaching 20% of you potential online customer base. In addition google released an algorithm late last year that now punishes businesses for having negative reviews pushing them farther down in rankings.

Think of it like this SEO is building roads to your business and reputation management makes you look good when people find you.

Pro-Insites has been developing strategies to work with this since the beginning of the industry. If you haven’t already give us a call and see how we can help.

“Knowledge is power” and our knowledge is free.

Manage your Business’ Reputation, Don’t let it manage your Business

As the influx of businesses into the online realm continues to increase, more and more business owners are awakening to the impact that this vast “World of Mouth” is having on their bottom line. I read an article yesterday where roughly 250 marketers were asked how many of them believed they should be leveraging SM/RM to their advantage. As one would expect, nearly every hand came up. When asked how many had actually implemented a strategy, only about ten hands remained.  This begs the question, why?

When handled properly,

Social Media/Reputation Management

can be one of the largest assets to your marketing arsenal.  Improperly implemented, one can generally hope for menial results at best, and a quagmire at worst. In speaking with clients, one of the running themes of discussion I run into, is the mindset of “I know I need to do something, but I don’t know what to do, how to do it, and if I did, I don’t have the time, resources, or desire to do it myself or hire more staff to handle it, so rather than open pandoras box and risk causing more harm than good, I have chosen to do nothing.” This is completely natural! Conditioning and trepidation can be powerful adversaries! Envision a child going to the dentist…

So… How does one avoid the pitfalls that plague the less successful ventures into this arena? How can I make this dentist visit not only painless, but pleasurable? You’re reading this, so in doing your research you are already ahead of the power curve. Things are changing online every day, so one needs to be up to speed with not only what is hitting hard now, but what WILL BE hitting hard down the road. Do your research, find what directories affect your specific business most. This is a good place to start. Case in point, a restaurant would probably be more concerned with directories like Menuism, Urbanspoon, Zagat, or Menupages. Doubtful an automotive dealership would find any of these sites useful, however would find dealerrater, ratemydealer, etc. much more effective.

Now, you’ve narrowed the scope of directories pertinent to your target market down to a handful of sites. Now what? First things first,

CLAIM YOUR LISTINGS!

This step is invaluable to the security and efficacy of your listings, yet is often overlooked. It costs nothing (I’m not aware of a site yet that charges for this), takes 5-20 minutes depending on site, depth of info, and user proficiency. Once claimed, your listing automatically ranks higher, and on many directories, enables you to respond to reviews, add pictures, video, and relevant information. All of this helps! If you can, and this is where the man-hours really start to rack up (if you’re dealing not only with directory sites like Google, Citysearch, etc., but your social media as well it does get a bit intense!) keep your information up to date. One useful tool I’ve found for keeping tabs on all my social media is Hootsuite.com. It brings all of your SM pages (FB, Twitter, Linkdin, and certain blogs) onto one dashboard that you can log into. It consolidates your updates, allows you to schedule posts for later dates, and plethora other options that really help streamline the process.

So we’ve addressed some things you can do yourself, for free. In my next article I’ll address some common mistakes made when dealing with Customer Reviews and some possible courses of action!

Common Sense SEO

So let’ talk a little more about common sense.  

Search engines use algorithms and algorithmic principles (rules) to decide how websites are ranked. Now many people think that the experts at the search engines walk around in white coats making rules and mathematical theories that no one could ever possible fathom. This is very incorrect.

Looking at algorithms as an indecipherable foreign language is a common misconception. To a very large extent nearly all algorithms are based on general or basic marketing principles and can be used to boost novel and relevant traffic to your site.

What happens if you walk into a very untidy shop, the shelves are cluttered and messy, prices cannot be found, the person at the front counter is having a cigarette? How long would you last in there? Would you buy anything? Assuredly not…

Search engines view websites exactly the same.

This holds true for inbound links. If you were in a fast food chicken shop and they had some type of advertising for lounge settings, would you find that odd? I would. Do think the store selling lounge settings would get many referrals from the shop? I certainly doubt it.

In the above instance, when we see outbound links on websites that have nothing to with the theme of the website, it is just as odd. The search engines know that the link is there only for SEO as they certainly aren’t going to get any referrals.

Walk into the same fast food chicken shop, then visit ten others and they all have advertising for the best ‘wholesale chicken store’. Would this be more appropriate? Do think the ‘wholesale chicken store’ may get some referrals? Do think it is worthwhile for the ‘wholesale chicken store’ to be advertising in such places. Absolutely, and the odds of having relevant referrals as a result are increased exponentially.

Search engines think the same things, what works offline as a marketing strategy can be applied to online marketing; the only difference is paradigm we operate within. The very same marketing practices that are taken on board with search engine rules and algorithms. This is why, if you do your marketing and SEO with common sense you can’t go wrong. At Pro-Insites we take this common sense organic approach to SEO.  When you partner with us to boost your SEO and develop your company’s online presence, you can be assured that we develop tangible results, by using sound, tried and true, marketing strategies.

(In our next installment we will discuss using blogs and backing linking to bolster your online presence and increase your ratings)

Costly SEO myths and misinformation

When it comes to SEO, myths and misinformation can cost you a hell of a lot!

• Lost rankings.
• Lost time.
• Marketing budget costs.
• Loss of profits and sales.

As stated previously, when working in a small business, time is precious. At ProInsites we realize that it is therefore imperative that we get some of this misinformation about SEO out of the way so that you may focus on SEO that will produce results and income for your business.
1. SEO is difficult.
You may have heard the saying, ” SEO is not rocket science” or you may have been told that ” SEO is  extremely difficult and one needs a computer science degree to do it”.
Well, the first comment is the closest description although an additional part was left off…
“ SEO is not rocket science however it is time consuming!”

Quality SEO can be accomplished and when a business is willing to devote some money and time to it. It is no different to any other service that requires skill and knowledge to execute. At ProInsites we only implement quality SEO because we acknowledge that a certain amount of time must be put in to achieve results and obtain a level of proficiency.
As for the people saying SEO is too hard, have you noticed who they usually are?
You guessed it, the big companies or individuals who are charging mega bucks for their SEO services. They certainly don’t want every company learning SEO or developing quality standards that they can’t compete with? That would mean loss of business and them having to decrease their outlandish fees! Wouldn’t that be a pity.
2. SEO submissions.
The days of submitting your website to the major search engines is long gone.   To get your whole site indexed and rolling forward we will simply submit one of your pages to any of the major social media sites, submit a press release using a PR service or build an xml sitemap and submit it to Google sitemaps.
3. Submit to thousands of search engines.
This one I truly love! Thousands of search engines usually mean hundreds of tiny search engines and directories no one uses plus thousands of ‘Free For All” (FFA) pages that will quickly deflate your rankings on any search engine.
Apart from some search engines based on your business theme and local search, the only search engines you need to be on are these top 5.
As you can see from the statistics from 2007 they make up over 90% of all searches done online using a major search engine.
4. The goal is to get as many top rankings as possible.
As discussed earlier, the goal is to get the maximum return of investment for your SEO efforts.
(In our next note of the SEO series, I will share how to keep your rankings in place using SEO long term strategies)