Researching SEO Marketing Companies

I cannot overemphasize the importance of conducting thorough research about an SEOcompany before you hire one.  I have seen the damage that deceptive and unethical SEO companies can cause not only to a business’ website, but to their company as a whole.

Nobody Can Guarantee Rankings on Googlcompany before you hire one. I have seen the damage that deceptive and unethical SEO companies can cause not only to a business’ website, but to their company as a whole.

While there are laws in place to protect business owners in general from fraudulent companies, laws governing the Internet and search engine world are currently in their infancy.  Visit the Federal Trade Commission’s website at www.ftc.gov to read up on scam alerts or file a claim.  Most “black hat” SEO companies that engage in practices that are a clear violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines do not advertise or disclose their sinister behavior, so ask a lot of questions and follow your instincts.  Here are a few questions you should ask potential SEO companies.

Questions to Ask SEO Companies Before you Hire

• Does your company follow Google’s best practice guidelines for webmasters?
• If they say yes, ask “can you guarantee your adherence to Google’s webmaster guidelines in writing?
• How long have you been in business as an SEO agency?
• Does your company have any other affiliate websites or alternate business names?
• Can I see examples of your clients’ sites along with the keywords you are helping them rank for?
• What specific experience do you have in my industry?
• How often will your company communicate with me?
• What type of reporting do you use and how often?
• Can you provide me with detailed documentation of every change you make to my website?
• What type of SEO strategies does your company use and value most?
• Have any of your clients’ websites ever been penalized, or de-indexed from Google’s search results?

Keyword Research for Your Business

Keyword research is essential before you begin building or optimizing your website.  While some keyword terms for your business may be obvious, you need to conduct research to see which terms are used most often in your particular market area.  There are a few essential tools you will need to conduct research for your business.  The best free tools come from SEOMoz, which is the best and most respected SEO organization not only in the United States, but across the globe.  Go to www.seomoz.org and register for a free account.  Then you can take advantage of many of the free tools they have available.  Their keyword analysis and SEO toolbar are absolute essentials for keyword research, tracking, and link building.

The first thing you should consider is what your goals are for the business and its website.  If you are a merchant, you should ask yourself which products are most profitable, and which would you like to promote most?  Attorneys should consider what type of cases they prefer taking, and more importantly which ones bring in the most money.  Then you can begin conducting research for keywords that represent these valuable service and product areas.

Competitive Keyword Research

You see your competitors’ website ranking for the keywords that you also want to rank for.  How do you figure out which keywords they are targeting? Look at their websites to see which keywords they are in their page’s description, URL, and titles.  If their home page is ranking for valuable keywords, see exactly what those keywords are.  You should also see which keywords they are targeting for their internal pages and what categories they have broken these pages into.

First, do a Google search for obvious keywords.  If you are a local business, include location keywords in your search like “Dallas Criminal Defense Attorneys”.  Notice that the home page description of the pages on the right that have top rankings for these keywords have included them in their website’s description.  The local listings that appear after organic results also have these terms either in the site’s title or in the listing’s meta description or categories on their local listing.

Now it’s time to start researching the anchor text (or clickable text) links that your competitors’ sites are using.  The keywords that they are using anchor text links for are a good indicator of what keywords they are targeting.  Using www.opensiteexplorer.org , type in your competitors’ website address and see which anchor text links they are using and how often.

Once you have a list of your top competitors’ keywords, you can start building your own list integrating some of the keywords they are using and also some new ones that they are not targeting.  It’s a good idea to use a mixture of both highly competitive keywords and less competitive keywords that will not be difficult to rank for. The keyword phrase we used above (Dallas criminal defense attorneys) is a highly competitive search term in almost any area.

To target less competitive keywords that are easier to rank for, think of specific types of cases or products that you would like to rank for with adjectives attached to them.  For instance, one type of case that criminal defense attorneys defend clients in are felony charges.  You could target phrases like “Dallas Felony Charge Lawyer” or “Felony Defense attorneys in Dallas”.  These longer search phrases (or long tail keywords as we like to call them) have less competition, but often have a much higher conversion rate.

Don’t forget to perform Google searches.  As a small business owner without all of the fancy reporting and analytics reports, you need to try and work with free or low cost tools whenever possible.  Take full advantage of all that Google has to offer by signing up for webmaster tools and setting up Google Analytics for your website.  You can also set up alerts from Google and get an email when your company or brand name is mentioned.  Go to www.google.com/alerts to set up these alerts for your company name, and web address.

Google+ Local and Google+ Business Pages

Google+ Local pages are designed to help users find local businesses in their area when they perform a search. If you have a local business such as a retail store, restaurant, or hair salon then you definitely want to take advantage of a free Google local listing.  You DO NOT need a website to have a local Google+ listing.  Even if your website is not up yet, you should make your local listing immediately and then you can add your website’s address later. To create a local Google+ listing for your business go to http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/ and create a page for your business.  If you need help you can visit Google’s help page for creating a local  listing or use our use our Google Plus and Local guide for small businesses.

If you are not a local business, but serve clients nationally or globally, you can still create a Google brand or company page here.  Google+ Business pages have many social features that can help you engage and communicate with your customers.  If you have a local business then you can create both.  After creating a Google+ local page and a Google plus brand page, local businesses can verify and combine their pages to make one page that serves both as a local listing page and also as a brand page with social sharing and engagement features. Google has announced that it will streamline these pages in the future but for now, you have to create both pages and then combine them to get one page with all of these features.

Once you have created your Google listing, I would highly recommend integrating your business’other social listings with your Google+ page.  You can add custom links from your business’ Google+ profile page to your company’s other profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and YouTube.  Then you can link from your other social sites back to your business or brand’s Google+ profile.  Here’s a helpful link for adding a Google+ tab to your Facebook page.

Getting Started

Hopefully you should have enough information now to get started on building your site or hiring a company to help you build and optimize it for Google.  Again, make sure you conduct thorough research about SEO companies you’re considering hiring.  And whether you’re building and optimizing your own website or hiring a third party to do it, make sure you read and stay current with Google’s best practices guidelines for webmasters and keep this quick Google SEO starter guide handy for referencing.  Let me know if you have any questions or if I missed something you think is important about SEO for Google.  Good luck business owners!

Most of us do Google searches every day, and if you are anything like me you do them dozens of times a day.  I don’t consider myself to be more inquisitive than the average bear, but I do find it convenient to have such a large honey pot of information at the touch of my fingertips.  Have you ever wondered how Google decides to rank websites on Google?  You’re not the only one.  Google did not give me insider information about how they rank websites, but I study search engine optimization (SEO) because I love it and I get paid for it.  SEO marketing is the practice of improving a website’s ranking for the keywords that the website owner wants it to when they do a search.  Here’s the lowdown on Google’s biggest ranking factors followed by a brief explanation of each one.

Major Google Ranking Factors

• Website Quality
• Popularity
• Titles, Tags, and Descriptions
• Freshness
• Fulfillment of User Needs
• Links to the Site
• Social Media Signals

Website Quality

There are many arguments about what makes a website a quality website.  However, the general consensus is that a quality website is user friendly, easy to navigate, easy on the eyes, and owned by a clear and reputable person or establishment.  Quality websites are void of typos, load quickly, and have clean, organized designs.  Also they do not have excessive keywords stuffed into their content, nor do they have gluttonous ads pasted all over the page.

Popularity

A website’s popularity is determined not just by how many times people view it.  Their popularity is also determined by how long people stay on the page when they view it, and if they engage with the website using a contact form or complete a transaction.  The number of pages people click through while on your site and how quickly, called click through rate (CTR) is also a factor in determining popularity.

Titles, Tags, and Descriptions

Without getting too technical, I will just say that each page on your website has a title, tags, and a description that shows up in search engines. When people perform a search with keywords that are in these parts of your website, it is likely that they will rank for them (but not guaranteed).  Tags are pretty self explanatory.  Each website and webpage has tags inserted into it that let search engines like Google know what the page is about.  These tags give Google a gentle nudge letting it know that this website should rank when users type in related keywords.

Freshness

This sounds odd I know, but freshness just means how fresh the content on the website is.  Is it an old blog post from 2005, or is it a website with a new page added and a constantly updated blog.  If a page is updated regularly, it is seen to Google and other search engines as a site that is concerned with giving users what they need.  It shows Google that you care about the content on your website and are constantly striving to make it better and current.

Fulfillment of User Needs

User fulfillment has to do with how satisfied customers are when they click on a particular website after finding it in search results.  Does a user find the website useful when they get to it?  For example, if you did a Google search for “Kitchen remodelers in Houston” and the first result you clicked on was a link to a DIY blog written by a novice remodeling guy would it fulfill your request?  No, it wouldn’t.  That’s because 9 times out of ten people who search with those keywords are actually looking for a list of remodeling companies in Houston, or a site with reviews for local remodeling companies.  Websites rank well for keyword terms that fulfill their intentions.  The same could be said for a search of “buy Lady Gaga mp3”.  Although YouTube videos of Lady Gaga performances are somewhat related to the search term, they will not rank as high as sites selling mp3s from this artist.

Links to the Website

The volume of links that are pointing to a website also play a factor in its ranking.  The clickable highlighted text that you find throughout the Internet is called anchor text.  When anchor text such as “Houston kitchen remodeling” points to a remodeling company website in Houston, it increases the website’s ranking factor for searches using those and other related keywords.   I must issue a caveat with this ranking factor, however; the anchor text links need to be from quality websites to help their ranking.  Excessive links from low quality sites (spam links) can be detrimental to a website’s ranking.  Also, links from websites that are completely unrelated the website’s niche or subject matter also offer no value.  Beneficial anchor text links are directly related to the popularity of your website and the quality of your website.  Websites will not link to your page if it does not have quality content that is relevant to their users’ needs.

Social Media Signals

Social media signals are becoming increasingly important to a website’s ranking.  Search engines take cues from tweeted links and shared links when determining the popularity of the website.  Facebook business pages not only help engage customers, they now help users find out what restaurants, doctors, and stores their friends patronize.  When a business’s page is shared, talked about, or liked, the search engines notice and Google rank is positively affected.  Many people don’t realize that they are even sending social signals to a website when they like a picture of a cute kitten or oblige to share a page for a good cause.  All of these social signals continue to play a small but significant role in a website’s ranking.

I hope this helped satisfy your curiosity about how Google ranks websites. Please feel free to leave leave comments and ask questions!

Author: Jennifer Long

Removing and Disavowing Bad Links

Your new SEO team should be able to pinpoint the reasons for your website’s penalty, although they will have to do a little trial and error to find the cause.  Removing low quality links pointing to your website is a good start, but the process is grueling and time consuming.  If there are bad links pointing to your site that your SEO team cannot get removed, there is now a way to deal with those pesky skeletons in the closet.  Google has a new disavow tool that makes it possible to request that search engines ignore these bad links.   However, Google takes the links you want to disavow as a suggestion, and does not always discredit them.

Use Keywords Naturally

In addition, your SEO team will need to clean up the links on your website’s pages.  Removing keyword spam from your website is also on the list.  The amount of time necessary to get your website back up in the search results varies by the reason for the penalty, and the degree to which your site is in violation of the rules.   The legal industry is extremely competitive, and many websites have suffered penalties because of webmasters stuffing too many keywords into websites.

Use Social Media

Waiting for your website to start bringing in traffic again is frustrating to say the least.   However, here are other means of attracting leads website gets an overhaul.  Former clients usually refer friends and family to businesses that they have used before (if they had a good experience that is).  This is why it’s also important to keep a relationship with former customers if possible. Simply keeping in touch with your clients using Facebook and Twitter, or sending a calendar during the holiday season can help maintain trust and loyalty that keep the referrals coming.

Stay Positive

Unfortunately many smaller businesses do not have the luxury of getting referrals
from former clients. And if they do, PNCs are going to go straight to the Internet to research them before they contact the business.  If your website has suffered a ban or penalty, a reputable legal SEO team should be contacted right away to start the re-inclusion process.  It can take some time to recover from a penalty, but calls will be worth it in the long run.   Try to stay optimistic.

Paid Advertising as an Alternative

While your website is undergoing some much needed tuning up, a good option to bring in Internet referrals until your website starts ranking again is paid search advertising.  Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns through Google can be a highly lucrative investment.  Most Internet marketing firms manage PPC accounts for their clients.  You might even find that you are getting more referrals than through organic search results, because your website appears before the regular search listings.  What’s more, your website will start showing up in search results within hours.

Moving Forward

If your website suffered a penalty or ban, you need to start shopping around for a new SEO company.  Look for companies that are “white hat”; this means that they follow the best practices guidelines of Google and other search engines.  Ask to see their current clients’ websites and do some searches to see if they are ranking well.  Also, ask if any of their clients have suffered from penalties and bans.  However, they may not tell you the truth so make sure you research the company thoroughly.  Be extremely careful hiring an SEO firm; many clients of the best known SEO firms have suffered penalties and bans from Google’s algorithm updates.

Author: Jennifer Long

Internet marketing is a booming industry, with tremendous growth expected through the next decade.  There are many highly competitive industries in the SEO and Internet marketing industry; legal SEO marketing is among the most competitive for attorneys.  This is because most people type in keywords pertinent to the legal service or representation they need, and every lawyer wants to be on the first page of the search results when potential new clients (PNCs) search for them.  Unfortunately, many law firm and attorney websites have suffered penalties from Google’s Panda Update.  Website penalties can push your website back into the far reaches of search engine results for the keywords that you are targeting.  A website ban can cause your site to be erased from search engine results altogether. All of this damage can be caused by a careless legal SEO company.

Losing Legal Clients

The loss of a law firm’s website as a means to attract PNCs can be devastating for an attorney’s practice.  While a select few firms have a strong enough reputation to attract clients even without a web presence, it is unlikely that even the most famous attorneys could keep their firms out of the red without one.  Unlike other industries like the retail or automotive industry, lawyers rely on search engine traffic almost completely for PNC referrals.  In addition, there are strict guidelines governing legal advertising that are unique to each state.  This is why it is so important to hire a legal Internet marketing company that abides by the search engine’s best practices guidelines, and that are experienced with legal marketing. It’s amazing and disturbing that a single search engine (Google) has the power to cripple thousands of law firms almost overnight with just one algorithm update.

Website Penalty Check List

• Check for Nofollow Tags

• Search for Domain Name

• Search for Your Company Name

• Search “site: Insert your domain name”

• Check if Internal Pages are Ranking

If you are performing searches on Google with keywords that usually pull up your website and your website is not visible, there are a couple of things you need to do. First, you need to check your tags to see if they have been changed to “nofollow”.  This is a common mistake that is easily fixed.

To check your tags, go to your website.  Right click on the page, and select “view source code”.  Next, hold down the control button and type “F”.  This brings up a search window that allows you to search the page.  Then type “nofollow” into the search field.   If there is a match for “nofollow”, or several matches, then your page has been de-indexed by search engines because of these tags, probably not because of a penalty or ban.  These “nofollow” tags tell search engines to remove this page from search engine results. Ask your Internet marketing team or webmaster to change the tags to “dofollow” and your problem should be fixed.  Please note however that it takes one to two weeks to get re-indexed and start showing up in search results again.

If you’ve tried this and there are no “nofollow” tags on any of your website’s pages, then you need to do a search for your domain name.  Go to Google and type in “insert domain name”.  You should be the first result for a search with your domain name, or a search with “your company name”.  If not, you are probably suffering a penalty of some kind.  However, your website should still be showing up back in the search results pages.

If your website is not showing up at all, you need to try typing “site:insertyourdomain.com” into Google.  Your website should show up here.  If your website is showing up but is not on the first few pages, your website is suffering from a penalty.  If it doesn’t show up at all, your website has been banned from the search engine results.

Moving Forward

If your website is suffering from a ban or penalty, it’s time to hire a new SEO company.  Start doing some research on legal Internet marketing companies, and ask some fellow attorneys in your industry for their feedback on the companies they use.  Look out for the big name legal SEO companies; many of their clients have suffered penalties form the last few updates because they didn’t follow Google’s best practices guidelines.  It will take some time and effort to get your website’s reputation back up, so just remember to have patience.

Look out for my follow up blog about how to recover from a website penalty.

Written by Jennifer Long

I immediately went to Facebook to try it out when I saw the news about it.  I’m an SEO gal and this thing is rumored to rival Google for goodness sake!  On the Facebook homepage there is a link to try it out, which I clicked on.  Unfortunately, I was not able to try out Graph Search because it is not available to me yet.  I got a message saying that I would be notified when the tool was available for use on my account.  This explains the  “very early beta” caveat. There is a waiting list, sigh.

According to Zuckerberg, Graph Search is completely different than a regular search engine like Google or Bing.   With Graph Search,  users are searching for answers to specific questions based on their Facebook friends’ likes, opinions, and relationships.  Unlike conventional search engines where you type in a word and get a list of websites related to that term, when you search on Facebook’s Graph Search  you get an answer to your question.   Because the searches are so customized users will never get the same answer for a search term even if they have exactly the same friends.  This is because although friends might be the same, each individual’s relationships with those people are different.

Statistically speaking, most people turn to Google to search for everything.  And in Google’s search results are a lot of reviews and recommendations websites.  Sites like Yelp and Trip Adviser might be in trouble because people visit those sites to see reviews and opinions.  Yelp is one of the most popular sites to visit for restaurant reviews, pictures, and suggestions.  Trip Advisor is to the travel industry what Yelp is to the restaurant industry. People visit Trip Advisor for advice on vacation ideas, travel brokers, and hotels.  Graph Search has the potential to steal much of these popular review websites’ traffic.

Users on graph search can do drill down searches by asking specific questions or giving commands.  Then they can refine the results with other subsidiary commands and questions.  For example, a user could  search “best restaurants” and get a set of results based on their likes and their friends’ experiences. Then they can refine the search to a specific location by adding “Houston”.  Then the results will filter down to just restaurants in Houston.  Then the user can put in another term to further filter it like “healthy” or “romantic”, and Graph Search will filter them even more.  These filters can also be applied to searches for recruiting employees and finding photos.

Although I do visit my Facebook page a few times a week, I am not a daily Facebook user.  So for me, this tool is valuable, but not as valuable as it is to heavy users.  I don’t see Graph Search replacing Google for most of my searches any time soon.  For heavy Facebook users (you know who you are I just saw your latest status update), Graph Search will likely replace most of their Google searches.  According to this article there are now over 1 billion active Facebook users in the world.  Even if only a quarter of them replace Google with Graph Search, Google is sure to feel the blow.  If you didn’t consider Facebook important for search marketing before, you have to now.

by Jennifer Long

Wow, it’s like that Facebook?  One bad quarter and you’re selling users out for a dollar?  Facebook is officially vying for the McDonald’s of Facebook title. Maybe sometime soon Facebook will start selling access to strangers’ photo albums.  Of course, they would be “view only” in alignment with Facebook and user privacy policies.  We didn’t see this type of user betrayal coming.   However, given the historically scandalous founders and policies of Facebook, we should have seen it coming.  Facebook has long been approaching but has now crossed the threshold of a very dangerous slippery slope.   Now that they can prostitute you and your information, the sky’s the limit. And as they say, pimpin’ ain’t easy.

Instagram is the new kid on the block; a popular youth with all the right friends, eager to make a lasting impression.   And Instagram has achieved super star status, quickly attracting over 30 million users since its launch in 2010. Apparently being popular wasn’t enough for Instagram.  .  The following excerpt from Instagram’s original privacy policy change on December 17, 2012 explains why so many decided to jump ship:

“To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

Although both Facebook and Instagram quickly retorted to the angry mob of users ready to lynch them in the public court of opinion, many are still skeptical of both companies’ intentions. Many Instagram users continue to leave colorful remarks on Instagram’s site just before shutting down      their accounts. Despite Instagram’s privacy policy reversal announcement late last night, made itself known as a predator to users.   It’s not surprising that so many people are upset.  Not many could have foreseen the hijacking or sale of their personal information, and no one would have guessed both would happen in the same week.   Even Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook expressed surprise about Instagram’s privacy policy changes.  Hmmm, but don’t they own Instagram? Users are keeping a suspicious eye on Facebook and Instagram like they would a soul-sucking ex; once bitten twice shy.

Because laws concerning user privacy on social media are pretty much non-existent, it seems like both of these social media monsters are trying to see how far they can push the envelope.  And why not?  They are pioneering the social media world, forcing lawmakers to play catch up.  Although it is alarming that both companies are assuming such an aggressive posture toward the ownership of users’ information, it should not come as a surprise.  They are both in business to make money at the end of the day.  When you signed up for your free account, didn’t the old adage “nothing is free” cross your mind?  Well, it should have.  You gave them your personal information willingly.  Cyber, privacy, and copyright law makers are scrambling to keep abreast of the ongoing developments in the social media world.  For now Facebook and Instagram are writing their own rules with a pencil, just in case the government wants them to make any changes.

Blog by Jennifer Long, a Houston SEO and legal Internet marketing specialist.

Now Pinterest is making it easier to brand your business, offering profile widgets, board widgets, pin it buttons, and follow buttons for your website.  They’re even offering case studies to help businesses with their branding and marketing strategies, as well as website verification to build trust with visitors.  Unlike regular Pinterest accounts that only let you use a first and last name for your account, Pinterest business accounts allow the whole business name to be used.  All of these new features are sure to increase customer engagement and traffic overall.

While the way that business accounts create content is no different from the way regular accounts create content, the ability to place board, profile, and product pins on other third party sites differentiates them enormously.  Businesses need to convert their accounts over to start reaping the rewards of Pinterest business accounts.

While Pinterest’s new business accounts are a no-brainer for established businesses that have their own websites, the new platform is going to send small mom-and-pop sellers rushing to get their own website up and running.  While the regular accounts made everyone fight on the same playing field, the new business accounts will make established and verified websites look much more authoritative and trustworthy.

Right now you can only verify straightforward websites (not sub domains), but Pinterest says they are working towards opening up other opportunities for small businesses as well.  Pinterest is also giving business accounts access to case studies from companies like JetSetter and Etsy who used Pinterest to build traffic and brand awareness of their sites.

In addition, Pinterest is giving businesses a guide for best practices as well as one describing how to use the Pinterest brand to market your business.  Their comprehensive internet marketing tools are a wonderful addition to what was already a great platform for businesses.

PInterest’s new relationship with businesses is an obvious step towards monetizing the site.  It has to happen for the website and company to survive, as investors have already poured over $130 billion dollars into this budding social media giant.  While Pinterest’s business plans have not yet been released (nor has any indication that there is a business plan in place), it would make sense for them to use a combination of affiliate sales and paid advertising to bring in revenue.  One thing’s for sure; Pinterest followers and users aren’t going anywhere.

Written by Jennifer Long

As a Houston SEO professional, people often ask me how they can best help improve their website’s ranking on Google.  While I can try to offer as much insight as I can in passing, the truth is that SEO and SEM are long-term Internet marketing campaigns that require a lot of time, strategy, and diligence to master.

I have been approached by many small business owners who simply don’t have the budget to hire an Internet marketing firm.  When I try to give them a quick 45 second break down of what they need to do to improve their blog or website, they almost always have that distant look in their eyes like they have been meditating for the last 30 seconds.  So here it is; a breakdown of the most essential SEO tactics for small business owners.

Title Tags and Meta Description

Okay, your title tags are what will show on the search engine results page, and are heavily weighted to reflect what a user types in.  If you are selling flowers in Houston, they should definitely include the words “flowers” and “Houston”, not just your company name.

If your website has internal pages, spread out your keywords, targeting specific flower related services and categories that people would look for. For example,  “flower delivery”, “funeral arrangements”, “wedding arrangements”, etc.  This way when users search for “Houston wedding arrangements”, search engines will know that this page on your website is relevant and should show up as a result.

Your page’s meta description shows up under your website’s title tags, and should be descriptive enough to let users know that you are selling flowers in Houston.  However, be aware that only the first 140 characters are shown, so make it short but sweet.

Add Content to Your Website

Content is descriptive information on your website related to the goods and services that you provide.  You need to build trust with your users, so having as much information here as possible is the first step in creating it.  Also, search engines love content.

Adding a blog to your website keeps your content fresh, which search engines always love.  Remember, blogs don’t need to be full-blown research articles.  Keep them casual and topic oriented, and users will eat them up.

Know Which Keywords to Target

Who is your audience?  What would they type in to search for your particular products or services?  Say you are a local artist, and you want to attract people interested in buying art exclusively from Houston artists.  Target keywords specific not only to your genre of art (abstract, boho,etc.), but also to your location.  Examples of good keywords for a local Houston artist are: “Houston watercolor portraits”, “Abstract watercolor art Houston”, and so on.  Be as specific as you can, tailoring each keyword to fit the unique products or services that you offer.

What to do With Your Keywords

So you have a working list of the keywords you want to target.  What to do next?  The holy grail of SEO is anchor text, those little blue words you see so often on the Internet that take you to a new website when clicked.  Your need to write blogs and articles about your work or industry, building anchor text links with your keywords that point to your website.

WordPress is a great blogging site to use, as are Blogger, Tumblr, and Posterous.  Pick one or two of these sites to begin with, practicing their layouts to become familiar.  Once you have become familiar with them, start blogging about things relevant to your industry and products. Build relationships with others in your community as well, leaving comments and responding to comments about your posts.

Keep it Natural

Don’t ever key word stuff or spam sites just to get links.  Yes, I said that anchor text is the holy grail of SEO.  However, you only want good links that are natural.  Don’t try to stuff a bunch of keywords into your article just to get links.  Readers and search engines will both recognize this, and discredit you.  Google may even penalize you, which is very hard to recover from.

Keep your content natural and current.  Let your voice be heard all across the bloge!  This should make your site gain in popularity, also increasing your website’s ranking on search engines.  Good luck small business owners, now get to work.

The two sites, while very similar from a user’s perspective, launched beta invitation-only versions at almost exactly the same time.  Furthermore, The Fancy has far more e-commerce capabilities using its parent company Thing Daemon (ThingD) to organize billions of images in its database.  In a tumultuous world of social media and Internet marketing, Apple’s acquisition of the fancy could spell trouble for Pinterest.

Fancier than Pinterest

PInterest is in serious trouble here because they are not even generating any revenue right now.  Here is a direct excerpt from The Fancy’s help page:

“Right now, we are focused on growing Pinterest and making it more valuable. To fund these efforts, we have taken outside investment from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. In the past, we’ve tested a few different approaches to making money such as affiliate links. We might also try adding advertisements, but we haven’t done this yet.

Even though making money isn’t our top priority right now, it is a long term goal. After all, we want Pinterest to be here to stay!”

Hmmm, I don’t consider myself a business genius by any means.  But, shouldn’t you have at least one business plan in place no matter how general, if you expect to gain value?  I’m not knocking Pinterest, the site is cool and their vision is benign yet optimistic, if maybe a little naïve.  The reason The Fancy has the upper hand should Apple buy it is because they had the foresight to form and integrate a plan to make money and stay profitable.

Fancy the New Amazon?

In a Hypebeast Interview , Joseph Einhorn (The Fancy CEO) stated that they want to be the new Amazon.   Their e-commerce platform enables users to not only follow products, styles, and trends that they like, but to buy products directly related to the things they are interested without leaving the site.

Entrepreneurial users can click on an icon that says “I want to sell this”, receiving a 2% affiliate commission on their sale.  Fancy takes 10% every transaction that occurs on the site as well.  With or without Apple, The Fancy is poised to revolutionize the online shopping world through its seamless integration of social bookmarking and e-commerce.

Apple Tickled with Fancy

Apple is no stranger to the e-commerce world.  Their first big leap into it came in the early 1990’s with the launch of the Apple ITunes store.  From there their e-commerce presence went viral.  Apple’s interest in Fancy is easy to understand.  The ease with which users can buy and sell products without ever leaving the website is brilliant, and certain to take off.   Also, there may be a huge opportunity for Apple to start selling music on this platform, which would be much easier for users than the current iTunes setup.  The possibilities are endless for Apple if it acquires The Fancy.

Will The Fancy Sell?

Anything’s for sale if the price is right.  That’s the question of the hour: will they sell to Apple?  Will The Fancy even remain privately held for long?  It all depends on the offer that Apple allegedly made, and whether Joseph Einhorn and his partners are willing to let go of their r beloved fancy.

Joseph Einhorn is not a green businessman.  The Fancy is his third company, and at the age of 30 he has managed to gain business acumen and wisdom that even seasoned investors and inventors could only dream of.  Regardless of whether Apple acquires The Fancy or not, we haven’t seen the last of either of them.

The reasoning behind their decision is that responsive website designs are more user friendly because they respond to the type of device or screen size and adapt the page accordingly.  Devices with smaller screens can view text larger while scaling down picture size, which make websites easier to use.

There must be many companies and web developers out there who are not only upset by Google’s preference, but whose clients will have to pay a high price to reformat their websites.  There was a rift in the web development and mobile SEO world as to what format Google prefers.  Now that it has been made perfectly clear, businesses that paid to have mobile-dedicated websites made will have to eat the cost.  If they wish to have a well-ranking site, they will have to pay a developer to insert CSS3 media queries into their website’s design, allowing their one true website to simply adapt to the user’s device medium rather than redirecting the main website to a mobile only website.

Dedicated mobile websites are often the same web address, but with an “m” inserted before the domain name.  The SEO concern with mobile-dedicated websites is that they detract from the link juice of the main website.  Having to maintain, update, and work on two completely different websites creates twice the work and costs twice as much.  This is why mobile responsive websites are a big winner for SEO.  Although the initial costs of using the CSS3 media queries to detect the type of device and screen size may be hard to swallow for some business owners, the long-term benefits outweigh the risks.  Using a mobile responsive website design is essential for websites and allows a concentrated SEO focus on a single URL.
Google’s official  Building Mobile-Optimized Website Guidelines release breaks cell phones into two categories: feature phones and smart phones.  Feature phones are simpler, less modern phones that cannot view pages that load on a desktop.  Smart Phones have more dynamic reading capabilities, and can read at least some (and some newer versions all) websites that are viewed on a desktop.  Although responsive mobile website designs are their first choice, Google also states that if your users could be better served using different HTML.

Google has always based its decisions regarding best practices on one thing: end user experience.  The fact is that Google wants to provide the best experience for users no matter what type of phone or device they are using.  Whether it’s a Nintendo DS3, an iPhone, or a Nook Google wants you to have the best experience possible.