What Can a Professional SEO Consultant do for Your Web Presence?

When doing business online search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO is the most vital thing that can be done for your business website. Long gone are the days of “if you build it, they will come.” It doesn't matter how many graphics, videos, or widgets your website contains. Without serious efforts to optimize that site for search engine recognition, very few people will see the results of your hours of labor.

Search engine optimization is literally optimizing your website so that the search engines are more likely to recognize it. You may not want to invest the money needed for a professional SEO campaign and management. It pays though to at least acquire the services of a professional SEO consultant. But, what can he or she offer you? Below is a small sampling of the services you may receive from a professional SEO consultant.

Review the website. This is the first step. If you do not have an existing website he or she can make some suggestions about what you want to include and exclude from your website as well as offering tips and strategies for creating links, keyword recommendations or suggestions, and note where you may want to spend a little money on the programming side of thing to make your website more friendly to the search engine spiders that like to look around your website and its coding.

Suggest changes. This is the second step. He or she will suggest that you make changes in your website, your marketing efforts, and in the content you include on your website. Every piece of your website, no matter how insignificant it seems to you can have serious rewards and/or consequences when it comes to SEO.

Revise. The final step for a professional SEO consultant will be to revise the website (if that is what you wish of your consultant). Making the changes he or she suggested is a great start but your SEO efforts should rarely be limited to the website alone. There are other steps in the process that will need to be made. He or she can let you know what needs to be done but in a consulting capacity will not be the one to actually take those steps.

A professional SEO consultant can make a huge impact on the page rank of your website in various search engines. It pays to use this valuable service if you plan to build a larger Internet presence or really wish to do business online at all. Magnetiks can meet all of your professional SEO consulting needs. Contact them today and see what they can do for your web presence.

Why Do You Need An SEO Agency?

Many businesses underestimate the work that is involved in not only creating a website but also in making every effort to ensure that the website is a success. Websites do not come out of the gate in the number one spot in all search engines. There is a lot of hard work involved in making that happen. Unfortunately, the learning curve for this work can be quite long and, in some cases, expensive. If you would rather concentrate on the business at hand rather than trying to learn the language, works, and mysterious ways of search engine optimization then you would greatly benefit from putting an SEO agency to work for you.

Below are a few of the many reasons that an SEO agency is much better for business than trying to go it alone.

Efficiency

An SEO agency is in the business of improving the rank of all manner of websites in the search engine rankings. This is what an agency does. What this means for you is that they know how to get the job done at a much faster rate than you'd likely be able to accomplish on your own. They've also learned a few shortcuts along the way that are effective but not widely known. Put their expertise to work for you and you will enjoy the results of effective SEO without nearly the effort that your competitors are putting into it.

Return on Investment

If you sit down and assess the amount of time it will take you to learn solid SEO practices and stay on top of them from month to month so that your website doesn't begin a sudden downward spiral after enjoying one month in the top spot you will probably find that you are spending quite a few labor hours, OK, really, a LOT of labor hours each month just learning and reading about SEO without actually putting anything into action. That time could be much better spent doing what you know best and leaving the learning to someone else's time clock.

Skills

Chances are that your business is not SEO. You are skilled at something other than optimizing websites for search engine performance. You probably hire a lawyer to handle your legal problems, a plumber to deal with your pipes, and a marketing expert to help with your advertising. Doesn't it make sense to hire an SEO agency to deal with your SEO headaches? They have the skills to do the job so that you can get back to doing yours.

Put the work of a solid SEO agency to work for you today. You'll be amazed at how fast you can begin to see real results and how painless it is when someone else is doing the hard part.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

One of the keys to achieving high placement in the organic search engine results is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) of the keywords you are trying to rank for. Calculating KEI values provides a system for evaluating the effectiveness of keyword phrases. Keywords and keyword phrases with a high KEI increase the probability of obtaining high rankings.
 
What does all of this mean?
 
Keyword phrases with KEI values above 400 are worth their weight in gold. Phrases with a KEI of 4 isn’t bad but we recommend that sufficient KEI research be done to achieve a list of long- keyword phrases with a KEI value above of 20 or greater..
 
The larger task is one of implementation.
 
After completing KEI research and arming yourself with quality keyword phrases the question with existing sites is how many pages will be edited? At a minimum I recommend the home page and all pages that link from it. If all of the 11 tags and attributes to which Google pays the most attention to need to be edited then this could easily average an hour if not two hours per page. At what point does that become too expensive?
 
Implementing best practice Search Engine Optimization or SEO on a new page or as the website is developed only requires only 20-30 minutes per page. Obviously, it's more cost effective to implement KEI research during the initial site build rather than having to retrofit later, especially if the tags and attributes weren't included with the initial page build.

Magnetiks Search Marketing effectively implements KEI research into the Internet Marketing Strategy of our clients, for more information, contact the SEO experts of Houston, Texas at (281) 362-9855 today!

Why Write a Press Release?

A proper press release is a pseudo-news story that is written in third person. It should demonstrate to an editor or reporter the newsworthiness of a particular person, event, service or product.

Press releases are often written as news becomes available but can also be a part of full press kit. The publicity gained from writing a press release can be much more effective than graphic ad banners and other forms of expensive advertising.

Why should I bother with publicity? Can't I just buy lots of advertising?

As important as advertising is to a marketing program, it cannot replace publicity. The reasons:

• Credibility: Advertising is clearly understood by the audience as coming directly from the sponsoring business and, as a result, is usually taken with a grain of salt. An article initiated (or "placed") by publicity efforts is viewed as the product of the reporter who wrote it - an objective, third party observer whose positive comments about your business will carry great weight.

• Cost: A big advantage - advertising space costs money, publicity space is free. Plus, publicity helps extend your advertising dollars by reinforcing ad messages.
• Crisis: In business, things don't always go as planned. Product recalls, tampering, theft, financial crises and other unhappy events do happen. An active free publicity operation allows you to respond quickly and efficiently.
• Chronic Ad Fatigue: If you're like me, you are sick, sick, sick of advertising. It's everywhere you turn, online and off. For me, those cruel ad boys crossed the line when they stuck advertising on the wall behind home plate at Yankee Stadium (is nothing sacred anymore?). Consumers have responded in the only way they can — they're tuning it out. Look at what a flop banner advertising has been on the net. Web surfers are ignoring banners in droves. Instead, they're moved only by one thing…
• Content: People don't want ads, they want information! And when you generate free publicity, you're telling your story as part of a newspaper article, a television news story, a magazine feature or a radio interview. In other words, you're in the place where people are actually looking, not ignoring.

Source: http://www.publicityinsider.com

Using Internet marketing strategies to achieve branding goals

Internet marketing is all about measurable results, not generic branding concepts. With that being said, if you have a branding goal in mind there is an effective Internet marketing strategy you can pursue.

Branding refers to the notion of creating an identity for your product or name brand with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the market, they have created such a strong brand name that many people use the word “coke” instead of soda even when they prefer a different brand. In the world of traditional marketing, everyone respects the marketing team that can accomplish this level of branding.

The Internet, however, is a different media and a similar strategy would fail miserably if followed on the Internet.

The Internet is such a large entity that branding can be expensive and difficult unless you are the first major player in a niche. For example, EBay and Amazon were the first major players in their fields and to this day that has given them a huge advantage over competitors that followed after them. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant competitors, your branding goal is going to be met with limited success at best.

However, if you plan to stick with your branding goal, the most cost effective and ultimately successful Internet marketing strategy at your disposal is a search engine optimization or organic SEO campaign.

Search engine optimization is simply a dedicated effort to get the pages on your website ranked in the top 10 listings on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing for the keyword phrases your prospects use to find the services or products you provide in your business area.

To meet your branding goal, you first need to identify all the phrases your potential customers use to find the services or products you provide, then create optimized web pages for each of these phrases and get those pages ranked in the search results.

This strategy has two benefits:

•    It will produce free traffic to your site.

•    Your branding goal is met because the site appears in all the top 10 rankings for your selected keyword phrases. This creates both brand recognition and credibility.

For more information on how our Internet marketing strategy can help you meet the branding goals for your Houston, Texas business call Magnetiks Search Marketing today at (281) 362-9855 today!

Online salespeople need to be in front of the right people at the right time.

What good is a salesperson that is never seen or heard from?

That is what a website without search engine optimization is doomed to be. Good salespeople know that they need to be in front of the right people at the right time for sales to take place. The nice thing about search engine optimization is that your prospects are actively seeking your product or service. No longer do you need to mail 100,000 pieces of mail to 999,900 people who could careless or do not need your service. 

When you optimize your website with the specific keywords that people are looking for then you create less frustration for them to find you.

People using search engines:

1. Actively looking for you
2. Have a greater percentage of using you once found
3. Must find the information to solve their problem
4. Decide who they contact based off of web presentation

If you want your online salesperson to be found and generate revenues for your business then investing into a healthy search engine marketing strategy is a must. Today's generation will never know what a phone book is so when they go to the web will they find your business? 

 If you need help with search engine optimization in Houston Texas then feel free to call us at 281-362-9855

Using the Hub Detector to Find Relevant Links

So my question boils down to is it better to be submitted to 300 free directories or one directory that is considered an authority.

To the client, the wow factor is of course that 300 is always better than 1 but to the SEO professional is not about quantity but about quality.

For example, we use http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php created by www.seobook.com

With the hub detector which is what I like to call it, I searched for a specific keyword phrase. The hub detector then goes out to the search engine of your choice and finds out who is linked to them which pulls the data together to give you a report of the top sites that have web sites that are linked to them as well as the other top sites.

I did a basic search for "personal injury lawyer" using Yahoo & Google API for www.texastriallaywers.com and this is what it returned.

1: www.yourlawyer.com
2: www.lawyers.com
3: www.lipsig.com
4: www.totalinjury.com
5: en.wikipedia.org
6: www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com
7: www.californiainjurylawyerblog.com
8: onward.justia.com

From the list above you tell that numbers 1 through 8 correspond to the websites listed above. Now you can determine that sites 4,6,8 have the top 3 links in common because of X.  Of course the hub detector can find you more accurate results by changing the search parameters,  but this gives you a great starting point to find out who you need to have linked to your web site that your competitors also have.

Like all things you will still need use common sense.  All because it is linked to them does not mean this is final factor in determining if you would like them to link to you.  You still need to go to the directory and make sure it is legitimate by making sure it is relevant to the search term you were investigating.  And another good check is to make sure their directory pages have pagerank and I also check their alexa rating too.

Most directories you will find will probably be paid but you can still pick up a free gem of a website also.

Happy hunting for relevant links.

SEO Tips – Link building: a treasure chest of SEO Gold

If you’re looking for a great SEO tip that will help you attract targeted traffic to your website then you definitely want to invest into an on-going link building in order to increase your website ranking.

What are SEO backlinks?

Backlinks are links that point to your website and originate from other websites. They can be in the form of your complete URL (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/link-to-you.html), or a more SEO friendlier method such as an anchor text link (e.g. Search Engine Optimization Houston, Texas).

Backlinks are important but why?

The number of backlinks, or inbound links your website has is factored in to the equation search engines use to assess and rank your website. The more inbound links you have, the greater the reputation your site is considered to possess. This can lead to an increase in your search engine rankings as well as your Google Page Rank.

Ok, now I know why but how do I get other sites to link to mine?

There are any number of different ways to acquire inbound links for your website, a few examples include:

1.    Forums - Most forums provide their users with a signature box, this signature box allows you attach links and/or images to everything you post. You can also place links in your comments. Some forums require you to make a certain number of posts before you can place anchor links or links in general in your signature box and/ or comments. However, Do not spam the forum, you will get kicked off by the administrators.

2.    Article marketing – most article submission sites allow the author to place a link or two in the article body.

3.    Social media - On all social media sites you can put at least 1 url on your profile, Some allow you to put as many as you want. Again don’t over do it or you’ll be seen as a spammer. The content which you produce within social media also has areas where you can put your links.

There are many more ways to get your inbound links including blog posting and commenting, etc.

Tip: Google loves it when you place your links in content that is relevant to the page your link leads to. For example if you are blogging about Local SEO Internet Marketing it would benefit you more if your link was to point to a part of your site which was also about Local SEO Internet Marketing. This isn’t essential but it does help.

Looking for more information on inbound links? Call (281) 362-9855 and ask the SEO Houston experts at Magnetiks Search Marketing.