Blog

When running a business division or an entire company, it's important to know how effective each of your marketing dollars are. After all, each dollar needs to be held accountable for producing revenue or it may need to be diverted to another marketing channel that is measurable. Some web marketing channels, such as online advertising with Google Adwords, are pretty straight forward to measure: $### in ad costs produces ### visits which turns into  ### leads or sales which means each lead or sale costs $###). However, when pursuing search engine optimization to increase the rankings of your...

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Getting links to your website is an important part of increasing your Google rankings- but it's not easy to do. We're always working with our SEO and link building clients to come up with unique ways to get links. In some cases, creating a photo slideshow that can be shared within your market can be a great way to do this.

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In order to increase your Google rankings, it's important to always be pursuing link building- that is, you should be constantly getting links to your website so that Google can see that you're an authority in your niche. The problem here is link building is not easy to do. Link Building Opportunities Are Everywhere While basic link building tactics like directory submissions might seem obvious, finding ways to outsmart your competitors and get unique links can be challenging unless you know where to look. When we work with our SEO clients, we take the time to look deep into every aspect of their...

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Although you're familiar with Google and probably use it quite a bit, you may not know exactly what determines the Google ranking for your website. This is a common question clients ask us, so we thought the blog would be a great place to provide a simple explanation. There are really two factors that determine whether or not Google ranks your website on the first page: Does Google understand what your website is about? Does Google consider you an authority in your niche?

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Google uses human raters to manually review many websites in order to ensure their search results are truly relevant and helpful to searchers...not everything can be sifted through with their almighty algorithms. Last week, a Google document was leaked that's essentially instructions and guidelines for rater team members to do their job. This means SEOs now have a better understanding of how Google evaluates sites.

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When pursuing any type of marketing campaign, it's important to measure both short term and long term results- otherwise, you won't know which marketing campaigns are making money and which are losing money. Many new clients we meet with that are interested in pursuing search engine optimization are unsure how to measure an SEO campaign. You may think that your website's rankings are the most important factor, but that's not really the case...

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Part of having a successful website is ensuring that you regularly publish new content to the site. In most cases, this new content comes in the form of blog posts such as the one you're reading right now. However, many business owners feel that they don't have the time to be regularly writing blog posts each week (or multiple times per week if possible). This is a common challenge we see with clients that are new to blogging, and we recommend a few different strategies to publish frequent content without requiring lots of your own time.

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A large focus of pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) to increase the Google rankings of your business involves studying the market and competitors. Specifically, it's important to identify why certain websites rank on the first page of Google in your market and how they differ from your website. Think of ranking on the first page of Google as a "club"- the websites that are ranked are in Google's "first page club" for specific reasons and your website may not be there if you don't look similar to Google in terms of the metrics Google considers when ranking websites. Here's a glimpse of the analytical...

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While going to trade shows and conferences can help you network with others in your industry, it can also be a great way to gain website traffic and links to your website. "Live blogging" is basically providing real time commentary about an event while you're there. You can do it via Twitter, but for this particular example you should be using your blog instead since you want people reading about the event on your website and linking to your content.

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I'm an SEO adviser and admit that I really do enjoy the various aspects of SEO (even the technical parts). However, the whole world doesn't feel this way about SEO and I realize that some aspects of SEO seem downright confusing to some clients. The "301 redirect" is one of those confusing things, but I'm going to explain it for you...

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