Keyword research is critical to perform before you do anything else to establish a presence with a web site on a specific topic. Where you market online or offline, this critical starter can make or break your efforts to market you, your services or products.

What is Keyword Research?

Before digging deep in the topic of keyword research, let’s cover together exactly what it is. There will be common phrases that you’ll hear, keyword phrases, to describe a particular topic. For example, if I was talking about getting my web site ranked better in Google or Yahoo, I’d coin the keyword phrase ‘search engine optimization’.

So keyword research is the task of discovering what a majority of people, or at least enough people say when discussing a particular topic. The actual quantity of people making mention of a particular keyword phrase is normally translated into the number of people who may also put that into a search engine to query the search engine on that topic. So, its safe to say that if you want to get your web site ranked higher, you may type the keyword phrase ‘search engine optimization’ into a search engine and search for results.

When performing keyword research, we will want to find a minimum number of searches on a particular keyword phrase. For example, if only 10 people per day searched for the keyword phrase, ‘google engine optimization’ but 1,000 people searched ‘search engine optimization’, then it would seem prudent to focus on the second phrase in comparison to the first.

Keyword Research – Qualifying High Volume Keywords

Keyword research does go much deeper though. If you are selling a product or service, you’ll want to find keywords that are keywords that may hint at some sort of action that commits to a sale. For example, ‘search engine optimization’ may be a buying keyword, but ‘search engine optimization company’ is a much stronger buying keyword.

Plus, you will want to find high volume keywords that you can actually get your web site ranked for within the first or second page of the search engines. This requires another level of keyword research to determine if you should actually attempt to do the hard work for the keyword.

This is one place in keyword research where the lines do get a bit muddy. You see, the search engines may offer hints to what they deem important when ranking web sites for keywords but they don’t come right out and tell us. Regardless of what is said, it’s important to discover what set of criteria is important when ascertaining the level of competition for a keyword phrase.

Personally, I’ll look at two major factors when deciding where or not to compete for a keyword phrase when doing keyword research. First will be the actual sites that I find in the top 10 spots of Google. For example, if I find the pages are loosely tied to the keyword, regardless of how popular the sites may be, I may consider trying to rank for that keyword.

Next, I look pretty deeply at the number of back links that have been created for the sites in the top 10. If I feel that there is a lot of keywords pointing to the keyword phrase in question, I may go looking for greener pastures.

In conclusion, if you decide to approach a particular niche to become a ranked and profitable web site within that niche, your very first step to success is taking the time and doing some good keyword research.

Yesterday we started to look at hard proof on the Google Panda Update and what it means to us as web marketers. Today, I’ll be completing my final thoughts in regards to the Panda and how it’s affecting us in other aspects.

Google Panda Update – Duplicate Content

Now, if you line up ten people who do SEO work and ask them about ‘duplicate content’ I can promise you that you’ll find no duplicate content between the answers! There’s a lot of speculation on this front, but let me tell you the truth – from fact.

I run several web sites that syndicate freely available information on my sites and yes I did see a hit to the rankings of these sites. Some of these sites were seeing well into 1,000 unique visitors per day and after the Google Panda update, these same sites are only seeing about 400 unique visitors per day.

So there has been a hit to sites posting duplicate content.

On the other side of the coin, sites that are comprised of strictly unique content and are topic specific are doing very well since the Google Panda update. As a full disclosure, there are other facts involved but the general sense that I’ve seen is that sites that are topic specific that have good original content are doing much better.

Google Panda Update – Miscellaneous Points

Another point that I’d like to mention in regards to the google Panda update is that Google is placing more importance to on-page SEO. That the task of ensuring that you follow best practices for a web page to be focused to a keyword phrase.

You don’t have to go as far as latent semantic indexing – using several like related keywords to give the article more credibility. It helps but it isn’t necessary. You do have to follow good on page seo practices though. Where it used to weigh possibly to 10% of the overall ranking formula, I’m of the belief that we are now talking closer to 30%. So it is significant, in my opinion.

So what does the future hold for us in regards to the Google Panda update? Well, I think that we’ve really only begun to see the tip of the iceberg on this one. Google is throwing some serious cash at server power and it really is only a matter of time before they become a seriously good ranking engine for web searchers.

Ah, but time will tell. If you’d like to discuss the Panda and what it means to your site, please do leave a comment below. Thanks for reading about the Google Panda Update!

There’s been quite a stir in the online world of web sites since the Google Panda update. I liken it almost to the Chicken Little story of ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling’!

The Google Panda update is more of a series of updates then a single update. It first started to be deployed early in 2011. As of now we’ve probably seen most of the effects it has caused. In today’s article I want to take a real look at real situations and stay away from idle speculation.

Here’s the info I found regarding the Google Panda Update on wikipedia. Yep, pretty thin.

First and foremost, the Google Panda update has really changed the game in a few key areas:

• Quality of sites
• Quality of back links
• Ranking duplicate content

Google Panda Update – Quality of Sites

Google did a really good thing when it made changes to its algorithm to favor some sites over others. This change in some ways is a tad unfair but in other ways it really was what was needed. The whole idea behind this change was to favor sites that are very topic specific and penalize sites that are topic general.

What is not fair about the Google Panda update is the fact that Google is manually weighing some sites as strong, general sites as authority sites. But then Google decides that others general sites are not authority sites, thus not getting the preferred ranking favor of Google.

Sites like EzineArticles.com took a very big hit in the search engine rankings. This truly was an unfair blow to Ezine as they have always been absolutely strict to only publishing original content. In my opinion, they are the most strict with Google News site only being more strict. So, I’m not sure what’s going on there.

Other sites such as Amazon or Wikipedia on the other hand, haven’t seen anything but search engine gains since the Google Panda update.

Google Panda Update – Quality of Back Links

Well, the truth is out. The voting system for ranking in the search engines is the number of back links pointing to a web site. Spammers learnt this lesson quickly and well. With the latest Google Panda update, Google now is weighing easy to gain, spammy back links with much less ‘quality’ weighting in comparison to other forms of back links.

In late 2010 and early 2011, you could use tools to create quick and dirty forum profiles with a keyword rich back link to your site and it was weighted with much more authority since post Panda. Also sites that used this method pretty much exclusively saw their rankings dissappear of the past six month since the first part of the Google Panda update started.

Other types of back linking have gained more weight in this update too – ah but you need to figure them out yourself!

Be sure to catch tomorrows part 2 on this article that talks about the Google Panda Update!

Corporate seo services can be bit different than standard seo practices that you’ll normally find advertised on the web. Whenever you are performing search engine optimization services for a public company or a corporation you always have to be very aware of the fact that would’ve you do leaves an impression about the company behind you.

Nothing will be worse than to have a bad corporate seo services company perform search engine optimization services and a spamming or black hat fashion and leave a negative feeling. It’s much harder to fix ones reputation when this occurs than to do it correctly the first time.

Plus when doing corporate seo, consider the fact that reputation management services to fix damaging posts normally cost three or four times the amount of just standard corporate seo services.

Corporate seo – Stay Away From Bad Providers

So how can you watch out for the wrong service provider? In today’s day and age, that is actually getting harder and harder to do. Tools that make spamming the Internet are available by the hundreds. I’d actually recommend that you see if they have any test cases that they can show you on work that they’ve done.

In a lot of situations, and I can relate to this particular situation, it’s really tough because most company want to sign a nondisclosure agreement with you as a corporate seo provider. I’m of the belief that you just need to sit down and talk to prospective service providers.

In a lot of cases as you talk to them you’ll get a gut feeling to whether or not they are the right person to work with. If anything allow them to perform a small campaign for you on something that is not life-threatening to your corporation.

Corporate seo Service Provider Checkup

If they conform that campaign effectively and efficiently than maybe allow them to go to the next step. Once they finish the first campaign, get a reputation manager that really knows how to investigate a website and get them to take a look at what you asked them to do.

They’ll be able to tell you with a bit of investigation whether or not the campaign that they perform for you could be damaging to your reputation going forward. So initially when you start working with somebody new it is a bit tricky. I wish I could tell you that most of the people who perform corporate seo services do the right way but unfortunately that is not the fact. From my experience I find that most of them do not.

If you’re looking to perform some corporate seo services of your own do yourself a favor and ensure that you are on all the major social networks. This includes Google plus, linked in, twitter, and Facebook. Building a strong brand between these social networks is a good start when you consider corporate seo.

Search engine marketing consulting – who do you trust? Just about everyday, you’ll find that you get another three emails from ‘experts’ who can rank your web site through the black art of search engine optimization.

There are a lot of ways to perform search engine marketing consulting, but very few that actually work. Also what is your objective? Do you want to get a page or web site ranked well in the search engines or do you want to dominate the search engine rankings for your business name? Both need different forms of optimization.

The real danger is you really don’t know if their techniques are tried and true. Some do work and some don’t. Think snake oil. I may sound a bit critical, but I’ve questioned a few of these people and the techniques that they use are a bit shakey.

You need to find someone performing search engine marketing consulting that is a combination method.  Here’s my recommendations if you are looking to find  someone in search engine marketing consulting.

Search Engine Marketing Consulting – The Questions To Ask

First and foremost, make sure that the search engine marketing consulting company you decide to hire isn’t using spammy or questionable search engine marketing practices. This is a long term recipe for throwing money away and potentially getting your site de-indexed by the search engines.

Next, ask them if they are using methods that are favorable to the latest algorithm changes with the search engines. Since most of your traffic is probably going to come from Google, ask them about the latest Google updates. If they immediately say that their techniques work, ask them if they happen to be using forum profile spamming. You’ll be amazed at how many still do. This is a technique that was quite powerful, though very spammy about a year ago. This technique is virtually worthless now.

Does the search engine marketing consulting company you are looking at provide you with a battle plan? In other words, do they show you what they will be doing to take things to the next step? They will have some parts of their technique that they will want to keep private, but if they won’t disclose anything, you would serve yourself better by moving on.

Next, if they have a battle plan, do they use three or more methods to boost your rankings? With the latest search engine algorithms, variety in style means a lot more long term success.

Finally, is the search engine marketing consulting company going to get you some quick wins? Then provide you with long term strategies?

Again, like any plan, this is critical. You don’t want an unscrupulous search engine marketing consulting company causing more damage than good.

Search Engine Marketing Consulting – Take Your Time

I think the best recommendation that I can give you in regards to search engine marketing consulting companies is to take your time. Like the snake oil vendors of the old time wild west, they promise the world and give you a bottle of stinky water.

Oh, and if the price seems too good to be true – it isn’t. They may be dangerous to your long term rankings by using their services. Being a search engine marketing consulting company, I know what it takes, how much it costs and how long it takes to obtain solid, long term rankings for corporate clients.  I hope that this helps you when you receive an email on search engine marketing consulting.

Social media marketing has become a huge buzz word for business in the 21st century. With all of the current advertising efforts just not working as well as they once did, businesses are flocking to the Internet with high hopes and fat wallets to cash in on social marketing.

The whole idea is finding the customer right were they are looking for the information that you may be selling. This is very intelligent as you can sell directly to your target audience without the added expense of marketing to the other 99% that have no desire to purchase your product or service.

This is also one of the main reasons that these social media platforms have taken off. Just look at Facebook for a good example. They can sell advertising at a premium because of the fact that they have built sophisticated algorithms that targets advertising to location and/or topic.

Social media marketing, being so big has also caused a lot of confusion to many businesses too. What is the best way to spend those advertising dollars? That’s a loaded question. But let’s take a look at what you needs may be and then build you a plan.

Social Media Marketing – Your Time Frame

If you have a limited amount of time to get your message out then paying for social media marketing is the way to go. Literally within 1/2 of one hour, you could have the word going out. I’d personally recommend taking a little more time to qualify your paid social media marketing, but it can be that quick.

This is a very good method if you have the right budget for it. Don’t be surprised when you don’t properly analyze your paid social media marketing campaign and find that you are paying several dollars per visitor. I’ve personally done several pay per click campaigns and I can tell you that it is like a stick of dynamite.

It’s very good for moving a big rock very fast, but if your wick is too short, you’ll blow off your hand at the same time! Overall though, it is the fastest way to get the word out. I’ve sold books that were published to e-print within days of completion. This isn’t possible with any other advertising medium with the exception of widespread offline advertising.

A very big disadvantage of paid social media marketing is the fact that it’s is something that I call bird cage advertising. Like conventional newspaper advertising, it’s really only effective as long as the ad keeps showing up. The day you stop advertising, that could be the end of the profits too. So you are not building any lasting effect on the web.

Social Media Marketing – Patience and Good SEO

The second form of social media marketing is posting to many social media platforms. You will at times get some pretty fast wins but most of the time, you have to spend from one or two months to up to one year to get the ball really rolling on your social media marketing campaign. The great thing about this form of marketing though, is once the ball is rolling, it keeps rolling.

You’ll find that your efforts from yesterday keep paying you today and tomorrow. The momentum takes time to build and will be different from market to market, but the overall effect is the same.

With professional assistance, you can build a lot of great brand awareness for your product pretty quickly though.

Another nice side affect of this type of social media marketing is the fact that once you get your brand to a desired level of market penetration, it takes very little to keep it there. And it’s very hard for your competition to kick you out once you’ve properly rooted yourself in place within the search engine rankings.

The disadvantage of this form of social media marketing is time. If you don’t have 3 to 6 month to wait, then this isn’t the way to go – at least in the short term.

Social Media Marketing – Blending the Two

Here’s where you’ll find a lot of power. If you want the short term win with the long term gain, then consider a properly constructed pay for social media marketing campaign coupled with posting to social media platforms. With the right plan, you can do quite a bit. Within hours you can start generating sales and while this part is creating profits, move those profits to the manual posting of social media marketing to give you long term bang.

Do you need a social media marketing  professional? Feel free to click on my contact me link at the very top of this page and send me your contact information. I’ll be sure to give you a call and offer you some cost effective options when it comes to social media marketing.

The process called SEO or search engine optimization is the action of raising your rankings for search terms that people will typically type into search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Ideally, you would want your web site to be in the very first position in the search engines, as you’d get the most traffic from it.

Unfortunately though, that didn’t seem to happen. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and get very good rankings, but without continued SEO they will fall. The listings in the search engines are dynamic in nature and a change in the way the search engines rank web sites can cause your web site to totally dissappear from the first page.

Also, Google, Yahoo or Bing may show 1,000′s of listing for a search term but how many people rarely go beyond the first or second page of results? From reading around the Internet, most estimate that less then 16% of all web searchers will go beyond the seond page of results! So if your web site is on the 3rd page, you might as well not have a web site!

So if your web site is on the 3rd page, you might as well not have a web site!

What Is SEO?

The next question will probably be ‘what is SEO’? In other words, how to do you do search engine optimization? There are two types of search engine optimization that need to be performed, onsite optimization and offsite optimization.

Onsite optimization is the process of making your own web site as focused as possible to the search terms that you are trying to get ranked for. This also includes ensuring that your web content has clear navigation and the pages between your sites are properly interlinked.

Offsite optimization is a process of properly syndicating your web site with it’s relevant search terms onto many high authority web sites in a non-spammy manner. This is a continuous process that doesn’t end because there could be a hundred others who want to the same convent position of page one of the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization Is Always Changing

To make matters even a little more difficult, the process of search engine optimization is constantly changing. This is because unethical people discover ‘loop holes’ in the search engine ranking engines and get themselves propelled to the top of the rankings and the search engines in response close those loop holes to reduce the amount of ranking manipulation.

This will affect us too, even if we don’t participate in these unethical practices. The effects may be very short term, but we need to stay ahead of the common practices to syndicate a site to ensure what we are doing is not only effective but ethical in the eyes of the search engines as well.

Is SEO Worth the Trouble?

Very good question! I would have to say YES!!! If you’ve created a great web site that works well at converting clients from online searchers to offline buyers, and you couple that with great search engine optimization to get your website to the top of the rankings in several search terms, this can translate into a tsunami of traffic to your web site!

Even in very small markets, the numbers can be very good. It’s not unusual to see 50, 100 or even several 100 searchers for a term that relates to your business and city name every month, month after month.

Let’s say for our example, 100 people search a particular phrase.

Out of those 100 people, we only get 10 to come to our site and decide to purchase our product or service.

Let’s say that every sale for us is worth $50 in gross profits after expenses. That equates to $500 in profits per search term per month!

Now, we would want to be optimized for not just one term but 10 or possibly 20 terms. Let’s say for our example, we have 10 search terms each bringing in ten new clients per month, each generating a profit of $50 each.

That brings our profit numbers to $5,000 per month!

So, yes, a web site that is properly search engine optimized and converts well will be very profitable. If done properly, you’ll find that people who call you will be not ‘cold leads’ but ‘warm leads’. They contacted you! They want your services! Selling to this crowd of people isn’t selling any more. They’ve already sold themselves to call you and you are acting as a trusted adviser.

So my question to you is, are you ready to move to the next step? Do you want to see your web site on the first page of the search engines?

In the realm of Internet marketing, you’ll hear the phrase, SEO or search engine optimization. The bread and butter of success on the Internet when drawing upon the organic or free listings with the major search engines, such as Google, Bling (formally MSN) or Yahoo rests upon the SEO efforts dedicated to a web site.

You can have a terrible web site, with no relevant information and still dominate a particular term in the search engines. To prove my point, search in Google the term ‘click here’. You will find the Adobe Reader download page to dominate position number one for this keyword phrase. The funny thing is that the term does not show up on the page referenced anywhere!

Why is that. Well, by fluke or fault, the Adobe Reader download page has been absolutely dominated by the phrase ‘click here’ to get the Adobe Reader software. You see, Google for sure uses a type of voting system at its core to determine the absolute rankings of web sites for a searched term.

Think of it as a way for a site to cast a vote to another web site for a particular phrase. For example, if you found a new soap to do absolute wonders with your stains in clothes, you will become an evanglist for that particular brand. In other words, you will mention the name of that soap to many other people.

This gives these other people a feeling of confidence that the soap will actually perform as advertised. What is better then unbiased recommendations?

Unfortunately this same voting system that the search engines like Google uses can also be manipulated by smart search engine optimization experts. By creating artificial counts of votes of confidence to a web site, they can raise a web site to the tops of the search engines.

The search engines truly do depend on the fact that this is a slow process and many would be web site advertisers would soon bore with the whole idea of creating link after link. This is why you’ll hear the term link acceleration.

If a web site is naturally gaining votes or links back to it, then the site should naturally show a pattern of growth or link acceleration that if fairly consistent. The search engines will also take this into consideration when counting votes.

So, there really is a lot to even this single aspect of search engine optimization. If you are looking for an expert who knows the search engines and how to advertise a web site to the benefit of clients, then you need to take to someone with substantial experience in SEO work.

With over three years of full time experience and well over 300 web sites that have been researched and ranked in the search engines, you can feel confident of the services that my company and I can offer to you.

Leave the heavy lifting of Internet advertising to us and let us show you how you can successfully use the Internet to increase your business revenues.

It’s easy for me to think that the Internet is the perfect medium for business in today’s day and age. I use the Internet each and every day to continue to grow my business.

But how do I show this to a prospective client who is firmly grounded in the flesh and blood world?

Recently I had the privilege to help someone reduce their money telephone bills for their business and I noticed that they are being charged more than $400 per month for advertising with them. This had to be their yellow pages listings. Wow, almost $5000 per year to be in the yellow pages.

Funny thing is, the yellow pages is starting to go the way of other extinct animals. As it gets easier and easier to find what we want online, the extra work to find what we need in the yellow pages begins to pale.

If you are trying to grow your business, you know first hand how important it is to get your name in front of prospective customers and how expensive that can be. Let me offer you a bit of free advice.

Get into the head of your customer for just one moment. What would they type into a search engine to find you? If you are a plumber, maybe it will be ‘good plumber your town name‘. Or if you are a computer professional, like myself, maybe they will type in ‘computer repair your city name‘.

Now the funny thing is, you will notice very quickly that very few businesses will try to create a site that is oriented on that search term.

I was recently talking to a used book store and they were very frustrated over the fact that a previous web developer had created a web site for them and they were not getting any traffic or even being ranked for ‘used bookstore Okotoks’. (Okotoks is the town that I live in.)

I took a really fast look at the site and did a quick search of her site for that search term. The results? Didn’t show up once on her site! I told her that the fastest way to get ranked for this would be to create a web page on that search term. Something like, ‘What to Look for in a Used Bookstore in Okotoks’.

The competition on the phrase was pretty much non-existent, so she could be ranked very quickly for that phrase.

But back to the question in mind, ‘But why the Internet’?

People today are searching on the Internet more and more for your business, but if you aren’t there and your competitor is, then they will get the business.

It doesn’t matter how much better your services are. It doesn’t matter if you are cheaper. It doesn’t even matter that you’ve spent $$$$ on yellow pages ads. What matters is that they found your competitor and not you when searching on Google.

So, what are you going to do today to help your business get noticed on the world wide web?

If you are operating a business, you need to seek out a professional who really knows how to harness the power of the Internet.

I’m not going to go into why’s to this statement, but today I’m going to show you how powerful this statement can actually be.

A little while back, I posted a new article entitled “Today’s Business Skills and the Internet“. Knowing the skills required to rank this article quickly, I decided to put this to the test.

Many will tell you that it can take hours, days or even weeks to seek your content ranked by the search engine’s like “Google”.

If things are done ‘right’, then it should only take minutes. Yes, you heard me right, minutes.

Now this isn’t always so, but the important factor is getting Google to take notice of your site the minute news breaks. If there isn’t too much competition in the terms you’ve choosen, then your dillegent work can be rewarded very quickly.

Remember the article that I made mention of earlier? Here’s a screen shot from Google just minutes after posting the article:

Click on image to see a full sized version

As you can see from the screen capture, that this article was ranked in the #1 position for it’s title within 18 minutes and this particular phrase has more then 35 million competiting pages!

I’ve provided this time and time again. If you know how to target your services, you will be richly rewarded. I didn’t perform any trickery to get this ranking so fast, but I did execute a fine plan over the long term to get my rewards.

Your business too can experience this type of success. If you are interested, please feel free get in contact with us by clicking here.