We all pay for services of one kind or another.  We pay to have our trash picked up so we don’t have to haul it to the landfill ourselves. We may pay to have our yard mowed or our snow shoveled. We pay to have our hard drives cleaned up, our hair cut, and our tax returns completed.  All of these are services that are considered time savers as a result of our own cost-benefit analysis.

Link building and quality content are both critical parts of any successful SEO program.

Strong link building takes time and effort; getting high quality sites to point their golden fingers at you (aka links) is part of the hard work that an internet marketing professional knows how to do effectively.  The same with content – exceptional content is the coin of the realm in search.
(more…)

What’s the difference, and why should you care?

You’ve heard the terms used interchangibly – “search engine marketing” and “search engine optimization”.  Are they the same? Most definitely not!

From your phone company to your newspaper to the guy down the street, they all seem to have a “quick, cheap SEO product” to sell you. They sound good…they throw terms at you like how you can “improve your organic search”, “get verifiable results”, “behavioral targeting”, and so on. They make you want to stop all other marketing and partner with them before you have time to take a breath. But do they really know what they are talking about? (more…)

We’re all hyper-sensititive to the importance of local search via those eye-popping local marker tags in the organic listings – as are our SEO and internet marketing clients. Yet  it seems that even the most seasoned SEO’s and internet marketing professionals continue to gloss over the why’s and how’s of  the actual results that are appearing – in a seemingly arbitrary fashion - in “Googletime” as I prefer to call it, within the prime real estate of organic search results.

So, yet again Google is the fickle friend. Always there, ready and willing to help, but (more…)

I just read a blog post on link building through article marketing that was spot-on.  The topic of “Article Marketing In A Post Panda World” by Michael Gray takes an unencumbered look at the value of article sites like EZinearticles, Suite 101, Helium, etc.  The question remains whether article submission to these locations remains a valuable tool for SEO in gaining backlinks – “link equity”, as he refers to it, since the onset of Google’s content crackdown.

With so much emphasis once again being placed on content, we return to home base where search started. Quality content has always been the cement that is the base for successful optimization, providing relevance and authority for any website. Just as quality merchandise, customer service, access and pricing are key indicators for what makes a ‘brick and mortar’ business successful, (more…)

Without further ado, Google has made the decision to jump both feet into the social media maelstrom. The search giant’s announcement this week to launch  the Google +1 program brings up a host of questions about where they’re headed next.  How will the Google +1 affect search engine optimization?

Google is the Goliath of search. It has muscled and finessed and “algorithmed” it’s way to the top.  It enjoys an unfettered view from the very pinnacle of internet search.  It’s the authority. The “hammer”.  The engine that everyone looks up to, trusts to do the hard work, and expects the real results from. 
(more…)