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Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Time to Break Out the Flash? Hell No!

Some news came out recently that Google and Adobe are working together to make Flash-based web sites indexable. So...it's safe to start building sites in Flash now, since Google will be able to index and rank them, right?

Forget about it. Unless you already have high name recognition and receive heavy direct traffic that does not originate from search engines, then you need to stick with the basics.

Google has been able to read the text portion of Flash files for a good while. After reading about the new initiative, nothing really jumped out at me as being any different from what Google already does. They are studying Flash in-depth to better understand how it works and how to index Flash content.

Studying?...

To me, "studying" doesn't mean much. It could still be years before Google can interpret a Flash file the way it can a standard HTML file. Do not rely on advances within Google to raise your search engine rankings. Be proactive, work hard, and stick to the fundamentals.

If you don't know what the fundamentals are, you need to call us. Or spend some time reading through our old blog posts, or any of the free guides on our Resources page. Those are the fundamentals. Content, optimized HTML, and links. Stick with those, and avoid Flash, unless search engine rankings are not important to your business.

If you need some help optimizing your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Flash, google, internet marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web site marketing

Monday, June 30, 2008

Just Say No to Paid Links

In the past, we have recommended using paid links (not paid search ads, but paid links) to boost a web site's external link count and improve its search engine rankings. Although much has been made the last couple of year's about Google's battle against paid search marketers who use paid links, the technique continued to work.

But that trend may have changed.

We recently noticed that a site for which we had been using paid links received a beatdown at the hands of Google in terms of its rankings. They plummeted. Around that same time, we noticed that Google had launched a new form where anyone can report a web site for using paid links. Then I guess the Google decency patrol will investigate and punish the site accordingly.

So...when it comes to something so important, so precious, as your search engine rankings, you can't take any chances. We think the environment for using paid links may have gotten too dangerous, now that Google has made it so easy and encourages narcing on other sites for using paid links.

If you are paying for links, our advice is to reallocate that money toward press release distribution. You will accomplish the result of generating new links, and you will be safe from punishment at the hands of Google. So protect your rankings and play it safe.

Stay away from paid links.

Call Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net if you need some help with your search engine marketing.

Labels: internet marketing, linking, linking campaign, online press releases, paid links, pr, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web marketing

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Beware of False Promises

If you are thinking of working with a search engine optimization company and they tell you they can have your site ranked on the first page of Google within a week...you need to step back and ask yourself what you are really getting. Yes, it is probably possible to have a site highly ranked in Google within one week...

...for a keyword that no one is using!

Here's the deal. It does not matter if your site is number one on Google, if that number one ranking is for a keyword that no one is using to search for your type of business. The point of a search engine marketing campaign is not to achieve rankings...it's to drive traffic. That is the reason we really don't have any kind of package deals right now where we promise X number of rankings for Y keywords. Every web site is different. Every situation is different.

We may end up marketing our services via such packages before it's over with (if that's what we have to do to stay in business), but we definitely prefer to take it on a case-by-case basis. It may be the case that for your web site, for your industry, you only need to be ranked for one keyword to generate a ton of traffic. If that is true, then we focus our efforts on that one keyword. Or there may be five different keyword that, collectively, would drive a ton of the traffic you need. In that case, we will focus on those five keywords.

So don't be fooled by the claims of some SEO firms. Sure...they can probably have you ranked on the first page of Google within a week...but they won't put any money in your bank account.

Please contact Work Media is you need any help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management. We won't make any grand promises, but we will give it to you straight. And we will work our butts off to get you ranked for the keywords that will actually result in customers for your business.

Labels: keywords, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, sem, seo

Thursday, April 17, 2008

How to Promote a Web Site on $100 and 2 Hours per Week

Recently, I responded to a question on LinkedIn (or it could have been Yahoo!) where someone had asked the best way to promote a web site if all you had was $100 per month and a few hours of time. I thought it was an interesting question, but one that I felt I had a good answer for.

Based on our experience, here is what I would do with $100 and 2 hours per week:

With the money, purchase some links from a link broker. You should be able to get quite a few links in the area of PR3, which will help your link count.

With the time, I would suggest writing articles. 2 hours per week is enough time to write and distribute at least one article. Over time, links from those articles will really build up. However, to get the greatest distribution possible, I would also highly advise that you use an article distribution service. I suggest articlemarketer.com. However, you will probably need to subtract $10 or $20 from your $100 monthly budget to pay for that.

To make this work, you need to have one or at most two specific keywords in mind for which you want your site to rank. That keyword then needs to be used in your paid links and in at least one link in the article (or the article author box).

There are other factors that affect your rankings, of course - the age of the domain name, the competitiveness of the industry, how well-optimized your site content and code is - but a strategy as described above will make a significant difference, all else being equal.

If you need some help with search engine optimization or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: article marketing, article writing, articles, linking, linking campaign, search engine optimization, search engine rankings

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Keyword Relative Value: a Simplified Way of Measuring Search Engine Visibility

This week we published an article on our web site discussing a concept we have developed called Keyword Relative Value. The article can be accessed via the link below:

http://workmedia.net/articles/Keyword-Relative-Value.asp

To quote from the article:

We developed a formula intended to attach a numerical value to a web site's search engine ranking for a specific keyword. The resulting number, called the Keyword Relative Value (or “KRV”), places a value on a keyword for a particular web site based on two parameters: the amount of expected traffic for the keyword and a site's ranking in a particular search engine for the keyword.

Here is the KRV formula:

KRV = ROUND(T*(SQRT((1/R)^3)),2)

where T = the expected traffic for a keyword and R = a web site's ranking for the keyword in a particular search engine.

The above formula derives the value for one particular keyword. A much more instructive exercise is to calculate the KRV's for a group of keywords. We call this the Aggregate Keyword Relative Value ("AKRV"). The formula for AKRV is as follows:

AKRV = X(ROUND(T*(SQRT((1/R)^3)),2))

where X is the number of keywords that have search engine rankings.

The point of these formulas is to boil your web site's search engine visibility for a common set of keywords down to a single number. You can then track this number over time and compare it to your competitors to gauge your visibility against your competitors. We believe this concept is a powerful new tool to give web site owners a stronger sense of how well they rank in the search engines, in an easy-to-understand format: a single number.

To learn more about KRV, please read the article linked above.

If you could use some help improving and understanding your search engine visibility, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword relative value, keyword research, keywords, KRV, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, sem, seo

Monday, March 03, 2008

SEO Linking: How to Find the Links that Matter the Most

An excellent source of links to your web site are the sites that already link to your highest-ranked competitors. Do you want to really get in-depth in researching what web sites link to your competitors? Then follow these steps:

1. If you don't have the Firefox browser installed, go download it: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

2. Install the SEOQuake plugin. You can download it here: http://ff.seoquake.com/

3. Go to http://search.yahoo.com and search for the links Yahoo! has recorded for your competitor's web site. The search query will be in this form:linkdomain:websiteaddress.com -site:websiteaddress.com -site:www.websiteaddress.com

You will be returned a list of web sites that point to your competitor's site, excluding links from the same site.

4. Turn on SEOQuake if it is not already. This is done by clicking the small SEOQuake icon on address bar on the right-hand side of your browser screen.

5. Sort the links by PR or by age by clicking on the down arrow next to "PR" or "Age" on the line that starts "Sort:" directly above the first search engine result.

Now you will have a list of sites, sorted by age or importance, that link to your competitor. These may be excellent candidates for linking to your site as well. Certainly target the sites that appear to be involved in link swapping, because you can get a link from these sites very easily by just providing a link on your site back. Then go after the ones that may be more picky.

Building up links to a web site can be very frustrating and time consuming. If you could use some help with anything related to SEO or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, link research, linking, linking campaign, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web site marketing, Yahoo Search

Friday, February 08, 2008

Do Not Fear the Missing Google Rankings

We have recently begun being more aggressive promoting our own web site. We have very strong rankings for search engine marketing related keywords that contain the word "Nashville", which is generally where we advise businesses with a brick-and-mortar location to begin. It is often very difficult to achieve high search engine rankings for broad, non-geographically targeted keywords. So generating rankings for keywords specific to your home market is a great way to begin driving traffic to your site that consists of very strong prospects for your service. It has definitely been beneficial to Work Media to be near the top of the rankings in Google for search terms like "Nashville search engine marketing firm". In fact, just out of curiosity, I just typed exactly that search term into Google and we have the top-ranked natural listing and the number one paid search listing. Now that's good shelfspace.

Anyway, we've decided it's time to start promoting our site for more broad terms, not specifically related to Nashville. We have a ton of content on our site and the site is reasonably well optimized, so the main thing we're concentrating on is off-site optimization (i.e., getting links pointing to our site). We've been working on it for a few weeks and have already begun seeing results. But one odd thing happened which we have seen happen a lot. So we thought we would tell you about it so if it happens to you, you don't freak out.

There is one keyword in particular we are keen on ranking for, so it is the main one we have concentrated on in our linking campaign. When we started, we ranked a little past 100 for the keyword. A few weeks after beginning our new efforts to rank for this keyword, we disappeared altogether from the Google results. But we were not worried - we've seen this before.

Sure enough, after a few days, we were back in Google's results for the keyword, this time ranked in the 60's. Nowhere near where we hope to be, but a real nice jump from where we started.

When a web page suddendly begins to have lots of new links pointing to it, that page tends to disappear from the rankings, only to reappear later, higher ranked. Our theory is that when Google picks up on a lot of new rankings for a page, it temporarily removes it from the rankings in order to do some additional analysis on the page. This analysis probably includes Google asking questions like: Are the links relevant to the site? Is the site strong in content? What do we know about the site?

Since our site is very strong in content, well-aged, and has been indexed for a long time, we think Google performed the analysis and made the determination that we were not trying to spam our way into its index. It then re-ranked our site accordingly, taking into account the new links we have.

This is all just a theory, really. But we've never been ones to stress out over trying to figure out exactly how Google's algorithm works. We just follow the basics...and it works every time. So if you undertake a linking campaign and find your site suddenly disappearing from the rankings, don't worry about it. Unless your site is junk, in which case it may not make it out of limbo. So make sure your site is strong on content.

If you need some help with your own site's search engine optimization or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, internet marketing, linking, linking campaign, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, search marketing, seo, web site marketing

Friday, November 09, 2007

Search Engine Marketing - You Get What You Pay For

Work Media is in business to provide top quality search engine marketing services - both organic and paid - for a fair rate. Unfortunately, our fair rate often seems very high to people we talk to who don't realize how much work is involved in the process. We often find ourselves bidding against competition that is much lower in price - ridiculously so. To those who are considering very low cost search engine marketing services, we just have to say - Be Careful!

There are a couple of ways SEO firms can offer super low prices. One is by just not doing very much work. SEO is a time intensive, manual process. There are some cursory things you can do related to SEO, but to get real results you have to put a lot of work in, and that work has to continue month after month. The second way to offer super low rates is to contract the work out to foreign companies. The problem there is that there always seem to be language issues. It does you no good to have your pages rank well if the language on those pages is not proper and convincing. Too much is at stake to leave your site to firms that don't take great care in crafting pages that both rank well and convince the reader to perform some action.

Another way to get really low cost SEO services may be to have it done by your son, daughter, kid down the street, etc. This is often the case when it comes to the initial design of a site. But here's the deal - there are a whole lot more people who can design a site than know how to promote one. Often, a design created by someone with no search engine marketing experience will look great but be lousy from a search engine perspective. In most cases, there is absolutely no correlation between knowing how to design a web site and knowing how to get search engine rankings.

Search engine marketing is serious business. That's why we do not try to compete on price. We compete by providing professional quality service and getting results. When comparing services between providers, we advise you not to look at it in terms of what each company costs, but rather in terms of what each company can provide. Are you wasting your money on something that won't give you results, or are you investing money in something that will increase your business?

If you could use some help with your search engine marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Fight the Power - Dealing with the Search Engine Ranking Shakeup

Recent search engine updates are causing havoc. They are completely wrecking people's lives and causing babies to starve in third world countries. They are probably responsible for the draught in the Southeast U.S. as well as the California wildfires.

Okay, so we exaggerate. But a lot of people are doing a lot of hand wringing because of changes happening in the search engine indexes. In Google, for example, many sites have experienced a drop in their PageRank, which, as you know, is a measure of the value Google places on a web site. Work Media has experienced our own drop in PageRank. So if your PageRank has fallen does that mean you are going to lose your rankings?

Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, it is completely out of your hands. So don't worry about it. Rather than worrying, get aggressive with your promotion. One of the main reasons for Google's current update is to devalue sites that have a lot of purchased inbound links. Google does not want you buying links. It wants you to get them the old fashioned way - by having interesting content that people want to link to. So do it! Write articles. Do press releases. Add your site to directories. If you don't have time, hire someone to do it.

Another way to fight the effects of search ranking shuffling is to fill your site with new, constantly changing content. Search engines still love content. You can't have too much of it. A blog is an excellent vehicle for doing this. A technique we really like is to use our own blog RSS feed to place content on our site that changes every time we update our blog.

You may also have to be strategic with your optimization in terms of keywords. Don't automatically assumed that the keywords that are most used are the best. If you can uncover some keywords that people use that have little competition, then those may be better keywords to target.

If you keep on creating new content, are strategic with your keyword selection and optimization, and adding new non-purchased links to your site, you will be fine. Google won't be able to deny you.

If you have lost search engine rankings and need help getting them back, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, internet marketing, linking campaign, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

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