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.

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.

1. Bing Webmaster Center

The first problem that webmasters usually have with new sites is getting them indexed in the first place. When you submit a site to Bing it can often be slow to index it at first. Often, only part of the site will be in Bing’s index at first. This can be terribly detrimental to a site’s success if a critical launch date is a priority. Luckily, Bing’s webmaster center has an area where users can submit their own XML sitemap (more info here). This allows Bing to crawl a website more quickly and thoroughly.

For example, MTCutters, who sells High Speed Steel Tool Bits, came up #1 for their targeted phrease  ”Line Bore Measuring Tools” in Google the day after launch but not in the first page for Bing. With Bing Webmaster Center we were able to upload a sitemap and see it indexed the next day.

2. Utilize Bing Maps

In case you haven’t checked up Bing maps lately, Bing has been “Stealing The Crown” from Google when it comes to proving an online map service. Their new map beta is most impressive and we can expect them to take market share here if Google doesn’t do something quick.  Make sure that if your website has a physical address that it is listed on Bing Maps. All that this entails is typing in you business name and state into the search bar and see if it comes up.

3. Target Long Tail Opportunities

Bing makes it a little easier to be found using long tail keywords because of it’s “Related Searches” feature. Bing tries to help it’s users narrow down what they are looking for by suggesting more specific phrases that they might be looking for.

For example, Tape Man Blue, an online distributor of Blue painters tape, who was doing 100% of sales from Google and direct traffic. After we looked at the phrases that Bing was suggesting, we saw a 6% increase in sales from Bing within 2 weeks and allows us to diversify traffic for this online retailer.

4. Check Your Outlinks

This is actually a lesser known trick in the SEO world. By using the search operator “linkfromdomain” on bing, we can see all of the pages that a given site links to. By typing “linkfromdomain:envoca.com” into the search bar on Bing (Bing is the only search engine that supports this) we can see the quality and relevancy of sites that we are linking to. This is important for quality control purposes because it is quite common for sites to become hacked or spammed in such a way that they link to “bad neighborhoods” on the internet which will almost always make your site rank lower.

Also, if your site is having difficulty ranking for a specific subject or keyword, use this tool to make sure that the sites you are linking to contain that same subject or keyword. Search engines often judge a sites context by whom it associates with.

5. Tweet it

Bing and Google are currently racing to be the first and best at the “Real-Time Search” game. Bing is trying to establish itself as the engine that indexes social networks like Twitter and Facebook the quickest. One trick we often use to get a new page quickly indexed on bing is to post a link to it on twitter (see the image at right). Because Bing is clamoring to quickly index our tweets, they are also indexing links just as fast.

If you have any questions about the information above or optimizing a site for Bing in general, feel free to email us your question or post in the comments section below. We will be glad to answer any questions you might have.

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.

Let’s take a recent project we worked on for Sonus-USA, who offers wholesale car detailing supplies.

Step 1: Visit Google and look at the keyword completion tool.  First off we start by creating a list of common keyword within a theme. We begin entering “detailing products…” and Google tells us that users are searching for ” detailing products manufacturer” and “detailing products wholesale” both are added to our list.

Step 2: To get additional ideas for keyword, we visit the wonder wheel tool under search options.  As shown, this tool shows related keywords such as “detailing products distributor” and “wholesale detailing supplies”.  Building additional phrases to our list.

Step 3: We create tight groups of related keywords which we can place into Adwords, assign to related on site content and use within our content.

Step 4: We take our list of keyword and enter the related terms into Google’s Insights for Search. This research tools gives the keyword comparison we said was so important. We see that “car detailing” is searched for 40% more than “auto detailing” and “car wax” twice as much as “car polish”. We also see the list of breakaway keywords which can be additional keyword ideas.

Once we have our list of keywords, researched and have a comparative analysis done, we’re ready to continue with integrating these topics and keywords into our onsite and offsite optimization.

“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”.

Inconsistency Leads to Fragmentation

This is the most common error we see where inconsistency has lead to fragmentation for companies because sometimes they add “inc.” to their name or change their address from suite #123 to ste. 123. These differences water down your brand where Google is getting better at this, it still takes time to merge nuances. Look at the example below.

Change in business name, phone number and address are creating different listings, if merged together, this listing would be much more powerful with the combined feedback score, website citations. Until your local business is standardized, this fragmentation will continue to negatively affect your online local presence.

The trade show was open so I got a few minutes to chat with the folks working on Bing’s up-and-coming mobile search platform as well as WYS from Google who is known online as “that guy who does the Google webmaster videos with Matt Cutts.” In the afternoon I got to sit in on a panel that included 3 of the top 5 people involved in SEO in the world namely Bruce Clay, Michael Gray, and Aaron Wall. Then in the evening, WebmasterRadio.fm put on their Search Bash after party where the industry’s movers and shakers were able to well…move and shake together.

The Latest and Greatest

The most useful session for me so far has to be the panel on SEO tools I got to attend where the top industry experts shared what they are using for deploying, monitoring and maintaining their own personal search campaigns. Aaron Wall’s set of tools is continuing to be one of the most impressive set of SEO resources that are currently available as a side note at one point Bruce Clay admitted that he uses some of Aaron’s tools quite frequently. This was amusing since both parties are directly in competition with one another in some areas. Michael Gray’s presentation of tools was more diverse and gave a lot of good advice on avoiding some of the pitfalls that more intermediate to advanced SEO’s fall into.

The Future of SEO

One thing that everyone seems to be emphasizing is that the saying that “SEO is dead” could not be further from the truth. The obvious trend is that the search landscape is definitely changing and will continue to change drastically in the next couple years. The thing to remember is that search engines will always rank sites and that as long as that is happening there will be a need for SEO’s to get your site to the top of those rankings. The industry leaders will simply be the ones who optimize their clients for these new mediums first.