There are several ways you can get listed on the front page of Google for search terms that your potential customers could be using, including:

• Sponsored advertisements
• Organic links to your website
• Links to articles authored by your company or someone else
• Links to social marketing websites
• News and blog listings
• Videos and images
• Google Places (10-pack listing)

Different types of listings can have various impacts on your website’s visibility online as well as the cost of marketing to your target audience.

Sponsored Listings: Sponsored ads happen when you bid on a keyword or phrase related to your niche. People who search for that phrase are presented with a number of results and your ad will exist somewhere on that page. When your ad is clicked on, you’ll have a visitor sent to a page you direct them to. You’ll pay a fee for obtaining the attention of that visitor.

Organic SEO Results: Organic search engine optimized results happen when Google deems a page to be relevant to a search term. Your home page or deep links within your website could be indexed as one of the most relevant results based on a keyword phrase because of linking and other factors. Organic results are ideal because:

a)   They’re trusted the most by web surfers.

b)   They cost the least. In essence, the traffic is free—once you’ve invested time, resources, and / or money to achieve the top organic listing places.

Articles & Microblogging or Social Bookmark: Articles or press releases written by you or by someone else about you could also be listed on the front page as well as links to discussions about your product or service on a social media site, such as Twitter, for instance. If someone “tweets” about you, this could be deemed relevant and important enough to be listed on the front page of search engines.

Google News and Blog Search: Your links can be indexed in various sub search engines of Google’s, such as Google News and Google Blog Search. These results continually refresh based on current listings.

Videos: Videos posted on YouTube or other video sites can turn up on search engine results pages.

Images: Name the images on your website strategically and they could end up in search engine results, linking back to your website.

Google 10 Pack: If your site is properly optimized, it will be listed as a local business listing for people who query relevant search terms in a specific geographical area. This can be advantageous because not only will your site be listed as organic and relevant but the result also shows your phone number and links directly to your site so that people can easily contact you.

Get Found on Google

Getting found on the world’s largest search engine will lead to your getting found on many of the smaller search engines as well. It’s not enough to get listed, though. You need to be listed for specific terms and phrases to increase your chances of appealing to people who are ready to buy. You also need to approach your online marketing initiatives strategically, so that you can carefully manage your brand and reputation as well as capture leads from the traffic you obtain.

Envoca provides design, development, maintenance, SEO, and e-commerce solutions for clients in various lines of business. We’ve helped different types of companies, such as: lawyers, doctors, small businesses, and larger corporations increase their online presence and maximize their website traffic.  Contact us for a request for proposal or feel free to browse our portfolio.

What Happened?

Google changes its search engine algorithms regularly. They continually tweak it in an attempt to keep web search as “real” as they can. By real, they mean that they don’t want people to be able to “game” or manipulate their system. More than ever, they want the cream to rise to the top on a consistent basis so that they can retain their position as the most popular search engine in the world.

During the May update, many websites noted that they experienced traffic drops from 5-15% and this directly related to their long tail traffic. Traffic drops happened to many websites and it could have happened for a number of reasons, such as link devaluation, indexing problems, issues with authority site grading, or other issues. In essence, some of the traffic and indexing you were getting may not longer be listed on Google.

Long Tail keywords have been a great way to gain traffic with a high conversion rate in specific industries, particularly competitive ones, such as law firms.  By focusing on geographically related keywords, for example, you would benefit from specific traffic.  It has traditionally been much easier to rank for a term such as Mesothelioma lawyer, Portland than Mesothelioma lawyer on its own, for example.  But if you don’t have a diverse and layered SEO strategy, Google may no longer deem your pages worthy of their former rankings.

What should law firms do?

If you’ve felt traffic take a dip (or worse, a nose dive) or are not sure how much this change has impacted your website or blog, things to do to improve your situation could include:

• Check your analytics. Your website traffic reporting needs an assessment with a comparison of before and after the May Day timeframe to see if you are impacted. Data gathered from those reports will not only show what’s happened but can be very telling to an expert set of eyes in terms of the best SEO strategy to use in the coming weeks and months.
• Improve the content on your pages. Content has always been and always will be vital in terms of gaining search engine results and engaging visitors toward your desired call to action.  Yes, keywords are important but content quality is even more important and Google does supposedly still pay attention to latent semantic indexing.
• Create off-page linking campaigns. Link to specially selected pages on your site from off the page.  Practice area pages should be linked to from local sites. Categorizing your firm from practice area increases the validity of long tail keyword uses. Then, link to practice area pages from regionally relevant sites with authority, such as telephone directories, nationally recognized topical directories, etc.
• Create on-page linking campaigns. A legal blog is the perfect way to do this. For each post, optimize for long tail keywords that have been selected through research and traffic analysis. Then, build a linking campaign around each post. Include authority links, links to other relevant pages on your blog, and then bookmark the posts through social media optimization as well.
• Optimize on and off your site in terms of establishing online presence in general. Do this through article marketing, guest posting, creating profiles and interacting on professional networking sites, as well as via other social media optimization practices.

Search engines index individual pages and look at a multitude of variables when they crawl each page. Quantity, quality, relevance, authority, interaction, and popularity are all vital aspects to successful ongoing search engine optimization regardless of whether you are a law firm looking to increase online leads or in another line of business. If you need help, talk to us.

1) Place your firm’s phone number in the header of your site. Make it stand out with large fonts in a contrasting color.

2) Include your physical address & local phone number on each page of your website. This can often be quickly added to the footer of your site.

3) Add photographs of your staff, or at least your law partners, to your website—a good professional photo on the about page helps engage potential clients and build trust.

4) Optimize your Feedback Form.  Include a feedback form on each page or your site.  Test the call to action above your form.  In our experience the text above your form  has the single largest impact on your pages conversion. On the site, PA Workers Compensation Law, we tested 3 headlines and sub-headlines with an impressive 14% stretch between the best and worst converting call to action.

5)  Encourage Action on Your Feedback Form. Tim Ash’s book on landing page optimization recommends website owners change the button on your feedback form from the standard “submit” to finish the sentence I want to… “Get a Legal Quote”  or “Talk to a Personal Injury Lawyer.”  We prefer larger orange buttons as well.

6)  Update the <title> tag and your <h1> tag on your website to include both your area of practice and your physical location For example, consider “Personal Injury Lawyers in Plymouth Meeting” or “Medical Malpractice Lawyer Pennsylvania”.

7) Get links to your website. We talk in detail about the legal directories which have the best impact for lawyers.   Most lawyers can come up with 10 links to their website by just emailing a few friends.   You can also get links to your website by posting guest blogs on another attorney’s legal blog or writing informative articles elsewhere on the web.

I have a bonus recommendation!

If you have not done so, have a legal marketing professional work with you to claim your business profile on Google Maps.

These recommendations will help you quickly convert your website content into paying clients!

As an online marketer, I am constantly approached by people who have a great idea for their small business, but terrible ideas on how to establish themselves online. Usually, a good business owner will have the energy, resources, and drive to take their business online, but they lack one key element. Experience.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

At this point many businees owners try to take their online marketing efforts into their own hands an the result is something similar to a high school science student testing out his home made jet pack…disaster. Everybody has been to that website. There is often blinking text, annoying animated graphics, and a picture of some creepy guy posing for the camera with a mullet (feel free to check out this website if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

So, as a favor to all small business owners who would like to take that very first step of buying a domain name for their website, I have compiled a list of rules to follow. Hopefully, this will prevent colleagues from performing the infamous “facepalm” gesture (as seen above) when you tell them the name of your “awesome” new site.

1. Short is Better

I promised “rules” so here they are. Try to keep the url at 3 words or less, but more importantly, I usually say 5 syllables or less. Despite the fact that your website or blog lives on a computer, mere humans eventually will utter is name. If you thought ReallyGreatDiscountCowboyFurniture.com was a good idea for your site’s name, think again. With domain names, less is more. Even less is even more.

Envoca.com is better than EnvocaDesign.com. Why go shorter? It leaves less room for a spelling error and frankly people are lazy. Plus, you can always go buy up those variations or your domain name and just have them redirect to your shorter url.

2. Keywords Are a Want, Not a Need

In the early days of SEO (mid to late 90’s) search engines placed a lot of imortance on the keywords in your site’s URL. StevesKnives.com always ranked better than StevesCutlery.com for the keyword “knives”. Today, this is not so much the case. Sure, Google will often favor exact matches on a domain name but having a website address of http://www.KeywordKeywordKeyword.com just doesn’t help as much as it used to. Therefore the rule is, “If you can fit keywords into your domain name for the site then great, if not, no big deal.” Try googling the phrase “shoe store“, you’ll see what I mean.

3. Avoid Hyphens

Once again, this rule comes back from the 90’s. Back in the day, when having a keyword in your address meant a lot, spammers took hyphens to the extreme. For spammers, not only would you set up KeywordKeywordKeyword.com, but also Keyword-Keyword-Keyword.com, and Keyword-KeywordKeyword.com. You get the idea. The reason real websites generally didn’t use hyphens at the time was because of website users.

For example, when you give someone your phone number you don’t say “five zero three dash four eight one dash…” You just say the numbers. Well, people do the same thing with websites. If you own a website at Great-Scooters.com and someone tells a friend about it, they will almost always go to GreatScooters.com, find that there is no website (or a competitors website), and you will lose business.

4. Stick to the .COMs

Unless you are a company outside the states your url should end in “.com”. Always. This rule is similar to the hyphen rule in the sense that when someone says “CoolSite.net” the second party almost always goes home and types “CoolSite.com”. The only businesses that can break this rule are the cutting edge tech websites that employ domain hacks such as del.icio.us, whom by the way, also uses delicious.com. Tech websites often have a user demographic narrow enough that they can get away with this sort of thing but your average online business does not.

5. Forget Acronyms

This rule comes down to an issue of branding. If your car dealership’s name is “Super Duper Discount Dodges”, do not try to get people to go to SDDD.com. At face value it has absolutely nothing to do with your brand. The exception to this rule is if your company name is “The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” but your brand is know as “ESPN”, then that would be the case where you should set up ESPN.com. Aside from that, finding .COM domain names with 4 letter or less that are still available is almost impossible these days.

6. Shamelessly Push Your Brand

If you have put any effort into developing your brand up until this point, then now is the time to push it. Generally speaking, CorporateSuiteShoppe.com always gets more traffic and makes more sales than SuitesForLease.com. Brands that do well offline will always do better online if they use their brand to their advantage. Experience tells us that this is true more and more.

So, hopefully this has been helpful to anyone trying to venture out into the world of online marketing. If you have any specific questions as to what you should call your future website, feel free to contact us online here, or you can find me on twitter as @garrettgillas.

2010 is looking to be a whirlwind of a year for online marketing. With the internet appearing on more devices, as well as more types of devices, than ever before, businesses have and expanding variety of mediums to promote their business with. As always, there will be a select few that lead the pack by drawing hungry traffic to their websites like a pack of stampeding Spanish bulls. The following is a list of people and services to watch that I believe will make a tremendous impact in the next 12 months.

The Cheezburger Network (& founder Ben Huh)

If you have ever seen those cute images of cats with funny captions (like the one above) on the internet, chances are you’ve seen Ben’s work. Ben Huh has almost singlehandedly taken fragments of online culture and organized them into digital cash cows. Owning popular sites like icanhascheezburger and FAILBlog, Ben is able to forecast the types of online humor that people respond to. Following what The Cheezburger Network is up to gives online marketers the edge when deciding what types of content will be popular on their own sites and what will inevitably “#FAIL”.

Reason to watch: Capable of making just about anything with traffic profitable.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

If I had made this list last year this blog would have made the cut then as well. The Google Webmaster Central Blog is by far the best place for beginners to start leading about making websites “search engine friendly”. This blog is also where Google officially announces any news or changes that they might make to their core search service, which quite frankly, happens very frequently. Also, you might want to check out the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel for instructional videos as well.

Reason to watch: Most reliable SEO information for beginners.

SEOMOZ

CEO (and SEO) Rand Fishkin has been doing an excellent job at providing search marketers some of the best advice and tools on Search Engine Optimization. The blog at SEOMOZ features some of the most solid advice around and also features a wide selection of articles written by guest writers. Look to Rand in 2010 as we learn how to leverage the latest changes in real-time search and how to manipulate from them.

Reason to watch: Best SEO blog.

The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman)

This SEOMOZ veteran has basically taught us a masters class on what it means to create viral media in the last couple months. The comics an quizzes found on The Oatmeal have been a popular featured item on the news site Digg as well as twitter and the rest of the blogsphere. Although the content may be juvenile and ofter crude in nature with posts like “6 Reasons Bacon is Better Than True Love” you can bet that Inman will make the masses laugh out loud while wasting time at work.

Reason to watch: Linkbait Expert.

Twitter

Despite all of the hype that we have been hearing over the past year or so around twitter, expect to hear more of it this year. 2009 was the year of fruition and widespread adoption of Facebook. Everyone and their grandmother is on Facebook now (mine is and she’s 71). Expect to see the same thing happen for twitter this year. What does that mean for us? Expect to see more companies using it as a marketing tool. This means designing and setting up accounts, initiating and monitoring communications, reputation management, content creation and delivery, and much more. Anything that is of any importance or interest appears on twitter before anywhere else. It is a better form of consumer communication than just about anything else currently.

Reason to watch: It’s “the nervous system” of the internet.

So these are 5 of my major rescources to watch and utilize in the next year. If you are interested in what didn’t make the list or how to utilize these resources, feel free to follow me on twitter or contact us by email.

One of the more crucial factors in getting a site to rank well on search engines that is often overlooked by webmaster is the process of

Not to say that a site can rank for a keyword solely based on how many links it has, content is still the #1 factor in determining what keywords a site will show up for in search results. However, the main purpose of acquiring links to a site is to make it rank higher in the field in which it is already established. This is often referred to as link authority or Google pagerank.

How Links Affect Pagerank

Google’s pagerank measurement tool is a feature embedded in the popular Google toolbar which rates a site’s authority on a scale of 1 to 10. There have been many attempts by people outside the Googleplex to determine just exactly how many links one needs in order to achieve a certain pagerank. Below is a table that illustrates an estimation of how many links you might need to achieve a certain pagerank.

By looking at the chart at left we can see that in order to achieve a pagerank of 5, a site would (in theory) need 555 links from sites with a pagerank of 3 or as few as 3 links from sites with a pagerank of 6. Thus we can conclude that not only is it good for a site to have a large quantity of links, but that it is also helpful if the sites linking are of a high pagerank themselves.

Aside from that, search engines are also concerned that sites are receiving links from a variety of sources. For example, if a Real Estate website has 100 links pointing to it that are all from twitter profiles, it might appear that a spammer is at work trying to promote the site. However, if a competing Real Estate site has 10 links pointing to it from sources such as a chamber of commerce website, an associate’s real estate blog, a home finder directory, etc… it will always rank higher than the site with 100 spammy links all from the same source.

Link Diversity

SEO guru Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ gave an excellent presentation this week on the importance of link diversity and how it affects your site.

Here at envoca, we make it a top priority to make our client’s sites appear as authoritative and trustworthy as possible so that they can rank high in search results. One of the services we provide is “SEO overhauls” for existing websites that need to be revamped in order to generate more traffic from Google.  If you would like to know what we can do to make your site get more search traffic feel free to contact us by email or give us a call.

It seems that Bing was the first to release a product to the public capturing the concept of “social search” by offering the website BingTweets.com which offers a mashup of Bing search results alongside what people are saying on twitter. Then, this past week, Bing officially announced that it would be partnering with both Facebook and Twitter to provide search results followed by Google making a similar announcement quickly thereafter.

With both Google and Bing gunning to be the first at implementing social networks into the core of their search algorithms, we can expect to see major changes in the way sites rank when people search for them. Without a doubt this has the potential to be the biggest game changer in online marketing in over a decade.

To find out more about Google’s entry to the social search arena, search guru Matt Cutts explains below how Google’s new experimental social search feature works.

“Why do I need SEO?” is a question that we at Envoca seem to hear a lot these days. Search engines like Google and Bing are making it easier and easier for normal people to get their sites listed so why should anyone hire a Search Engine Optimizer?

The truth is that while getting listed on search engines is easier than in the past, getting found by potential customers is harder than ever. The basic truth is that the more people that start to market themselves online the competition there is. As this happens, you site gets pushed down the list of millions of results that Google returns when people search for your product or service. Ever wonder who all of those sites belong to? People that haven’t invested the time and money in genuine SEO services.

Many people simply think that they can buy a book or read a blog on “How to Get Your Site to Rank #1 on Google” and suddenly their site will get tons of traffic. This could not be further from the truth. Saying that “Anyone Can Do SEO!” is not an entirely inaccurate term. It’s kind of like saying, “Anyone can rebuild an airplane engine.” or, “Anyone can be an astronaut.” or better even, “Anyone can lose 50 lbs in 2 week guaranteed!”. While none of those statements are entirely inconceivable, they are all fairly misleading. Some sources will even tell you that all you have to do is insert a secret line of code containing keyword into all of your pages and you will immediately see results.

Real Search Engine Optimization

The truth of the matter is that real agency’s that offer SEO services have to do a large variety of tasks to optimize a site to rank well. These tasks involve extensive competitive research, a variety of modifications to the actual website in question, as well as implementing many external features completely outside of the website itself.

Any good search engine marketer will be happy to give you a run-through of the process step-by-step, just as any good auto mechanic will be happy to tell you exactly what he is repairing and why. If you have any specific questions on what your site might need to rank better on Google feel free to give us a call at 888-301-9525 or email us.

1. Verify the Site

This first task is actually easier than it looks. In order for Google to know that you actually own the site, it is required that you prove it by copying a chunk of code into the top section of your homepage’s code of the site in question. You will need (FTP) access to your site’s code in order to do this or, as an alternative, you can simply name one of the files on your site the big, long string of gibberish that Google gives you.

2. Submit a Sitemap

This is another step where you have to work with code but don’t necessarily have to know how to read it. All you need to do is submit you site to one of the many automatic sitemap generator websites and upload the XML file that they give you to where your website is hosted. After that, you will need to tell google where it is by entering the location in webmaster tools (see image).

3. Adjust Your Settings

This step will hep you let Google know how you want it to handle your site. If your site is specifically for a certain country, select one in the “Target users” area. Tell Google if you want your website displayed with or without the “www” by using the “preferred domain” feature. Lastly, if your site has a lot of pages or is new on the internet you might want to increase the crawl rate by using the slider bar provided. You will notice that if you have not verified your site by completing step 1 above, you will not be able to adjust these settings.

4. Check Your Sitelinks

If your site is already getting a fair amount of traffic, you might notice that when you search for your site online, Google will display several internal links for your site below the main one. These are called “sitelinks”. If you would like to change these you can do so by clicking on the sitelinks tab on the side of your webmaster tools account.

5. Crawl Errors

This tab will help you determine if you have accidentally removed any of your files from Google’s index. This is usually not a problem but if you have been tinkering with your robots.txt file this will help you identify any potential problems.

6. HTML Suggestions

The HTML Suggestions panel is where Google helps you identify flaws in your code that might be keeping you from appearing as high as you would like on their search results. The most common mistake that new website owners make is either forgetting to name their pages with the <title> tag or accidentally naming all of their pages the same thing. This panel will help you identify this type of problem and perform corrective actions.

Managing Webmaster Tools accounts is one of the many web design services that we perform here at Envoca. If you have still having trouble with webmaster tools after reading this guide feel free to email us with any questions that  you might have.

Staying Ahead of the Curve – The Hydroxycut Recall

On the morning of May 1, 2009 the FDA announced that the popular diet drug Hydroxycut was to be recalled due to severe cases of liver damage and the risk of death. Several of our clients are law firms who handle pharmaceutical injury lawsuits and wanted to be able to take the cases of people injured by this drug as soon as possible. We have found that these days, when people need a lawyer, they look on the internet to find one. Therefore, it was important to us to make sure that people searching online for a Hydroxycut lawyer found our clients on Google as soon as possible.

Because we are heavily interested in serving our clients, we receive notifications directly from the FDA and the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) regarding product recalls that could directly affect our clients. So on the morning of the recall we immediately began working on getting the information that consumers need regarding the drug recall and their rights online. Within 24 hours we had successfully created a series of resources across multiple websites that helped Hydroxycut victims find an available personal injury lawyer, depending on their case and the state that they lived in.

With the combination of quality copy writing, SEO practices, PPC ads and a quick turnaround time we were able to put our clients well ahead of the competition. Most competing law firms had to wait several weeks for production after having to “put a call in to the web guy who should have something by the end of the month”.