In a recent blog post Google gives their advice on some ways to build up nice quality links pointing to your website in order to get on Google’s good side.

“Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.”

I’m really glad Google has addressed this because I still see people trying to purchase the mass directory submission services that simply blast out your information to a large amount of useless directories that virtually give off no linking power at all. Google recommends finding industry specific directories that are relevant to your business or your industry and focusing on getting your company listed in those websites.

“It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.”

Basically what Google is saying is that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Link building is an effort that takes time and strategy and trying to cut corners and buy links is a bad idea and should be removed from your marketing plan.

A great emphasis will also be put on having a variety of tools and communication efforts on the cloud. As security tightens across the board people will want to be able to access their information regardless where they are or what computer they are using. Either way Google as a whole in 5 years will most likely continue to amaze the business community with their developments.

There is no right or wrong path when it comes to deciding on an personality to apply to your internet marketing efforts. The best approach is the one that comes naturally to you. If you hold certain traits and characteristics as a person apply those to your online marketing or branding efforts. Don’t make your internet marketing campaign a chore. Marketing and branding your business should be exciting and fun and if you approach it that way you could find yourself growing your business very nicely while burning the image of your brand in your audiences mind.

A personality is what gives a business their stamp in front of their audience. A business having some sort of personality is much better than a business having absolutely no personality whatsoever. For some businesses that is how people remember you by. Give your audience something to snack on when conducting any of your internet

Don’t Base Your Entire Decision On Price

This theory can go in both directions. With many things in life if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Do you really think you are going to effectively market your business and beat out your competition on $49.95 per/month? Chances are no. This doesn’t mean that you have to go and spend $2,000 per/month either. Be realistic on what it takes to market a business online. There are distribution costs associated with some efforts, time to write articles and press releases along with the time and energy to constantly put together an ongoing SEO strategy that is going to help you grow
your business online the right way.

Research The SEO Services Company

Do a little bit of research on the companies you are thinking about working with. Find out everything about them. Search their company names online and see what you come up with. Take a look and see if other companies have done any write ups on them or what type of information is lurking in the search results for their company name. If there is nothing in the search results scratch them off your list.

Don’t Make Your Decision on Whether the SEO Website Ranks

If you search for “SEO” and you don’t see them on page 1 don’t rule them out as a company just yet. There are only ten parking spaces on the first page of Google and they can’t fit thousands of companies into this space. You have some SEO companies that have had their websites for ten plus years so it will be difficult to move them out of the way in the search results. Plus keep in mind that in our industry “most” SEO companies know exactly what they are doing so we have to compete against an industry that practices what they preach.

How Many Employees Does the SEO Services Company Have?

Think about it for a minute, if they have 40 or 50 employees chances are they have many business processes in place along with policies and protocols that are iron clad. Chances are you will hear “Sorry that is just policy” at some point during your SEO campaign. If you go with a firm that has 10 or 15 people you might have a bit more flexibility with pricing and special requests that the large firms won’t even budge on. I’m not saying every large company that offers SEO is bad to work with but you have to watch out for everything out there.

Not Every Hosting Company and Web Designer Knows SEO

Just because your hosting company or web designer claims they know how to do SEO, that doesn’t mean that they actually do. A hosting company’s primary focus was to host websites and along the way they realized that if they open an SEO division they can become slightly more profitable. Same goes with web designers and developers. Just because the recession came along and they slapped up an SEO page on their website does not mean they are trained to execute it properly.

Make Sure the SEO Services Company Speaks English

Would you really want someone who barley speaks English working on the marketing for your company? Since search engine optimization is an effort that really encompasses the art of language you need someone that completely 100% understand the language and also things like industry slang that could be a very important keyword in your vertical or niche. Someone doing search engine optimization on the other side of the world that barley speaks English is not going to get that part of the task right and you will not be running at full steam when the job is done – that is not an opinion that is reality.

Take the time to really analyze the SEO company you are going to work with before you do so you can avoid any shotty work or getting burned along the way.

Let’s take a look at some of the largest SEO mistakes a website can make that will ultimately hurt their SEO efforts:

SEO Sin#1 – Mass Submission:
A mass submission of almost anything online is just not as effective as it once was. There is no easy way of marketing your business online. There is a tremendous amount of activity in the search engines now than there ever has been and it takes a strategic approach to push your way through all the noise in the online space. Internet marketing is all about being strategic and placing things where they will deliver the most bang for your buck. Whether that buck is monetary or simply your time, it is important that your online effort also delivers some targeted traffic to your website.

SEO Sin#2 – Over Stuffing:
Your SEO is not Thanksgiving so don’t over stuff yourself. If you are launching a business profile don’t jam 16 keywords into the title. If the keyword is part of your business name that is fine but to leave a sentence of keywords in your company name, description or anywhere else for that matter is a horrible approach. Sometimes you can achieve this task tastefully but often times greed sets in for most. Same rule or principal applies to almost anything you do online. Whether it is a meta tag, h1 tag or even your Facebook fan page you have to keep it clean and tasteful. People can often notice when someone is over optimizing.

SEO Sin#3 – Duplicate Meta Info:
Sometimes I come across websites that have the same meta information going across the entire website. Your meta tag information is descriptive information relating directly to the topic of that page and should never be the same across the board. From an SEO standpoint this is horrible because it does not give your pages the ability to individually rank in search results.

SEO Sin#4 – Stale Content:
The content on your website is going to be a very important driving force on how people respond on your website. If your content seems stale and just not with it your web traffic is not going to respond very well and neither are your search rankings. Take the time to update your website and copy and make it search engine friendly by utilizing some SEO related keywords naturally throughout your text.

SEO Sin#5 – Duplicate Content:
Not only does duplicate content leave behind a very poor user experience but the ramifications from the search engines could be crippling. Duplicate content, if not managed properly could results in search penalties leaving search rankings in a state of disarray. Your website content should always be unique and compelling. Often times this will happen if you have different versions of your home page on three separate files and do not even know it, such as: www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html.

SEO Sin#6 – Too Much CSS:
CSS is the new html. CSS allows websites to really do some neat things without having to worry about flash or any other non-popular forms of coding. CSS works in sheets that overlap each other and too much CSS can either slow down your page load time or sometimes trick the search engines into thinking there is hidden content.

SEO Sin#7 – Sloppy Interlinking:
Interlinking should be done properly and strategically. Not everything requires interlinking and too much interlinking will cause your audience to tune out.

SEO Sin#8 – URL Structures:
Do your URL structures have a strong of characters at the end of the URL that look horrendous and sloppy? If they do they will react the same way they look in the search results. Clean and tighten them up and you will strengthen your SEO efforts a great deal.

SEO Sin#9 – Flash:
If you still think flash is nice and fancy you are going to have some problems in the search engines. Flash is outdated and tacky and if you plan on building your website in flash it will almost never rank in the search results.

SEO Sin#10 – Lack of Knowledge:
Take the time and study up on the industry before you deem your onsite SEO changes a failure. They are the foundation to everything you will do online so make sure you educate yourself if you plan on doing these efforts online yourself.

It is important to know that onsite SEO is the foundational step to building up your web presence, so don’t commit any SEO sins!

For registration information about the upcoming SEO seminar in Boston, please visit the registration link here:
http://boston-internet-marketing.eventbrite.com/

Brick Marketing has become one of the premier SEO and search engine marketing firms in the United States and the Boston area. What makes us unique are several factors, personal service, reasonable costs and ROI focus. I am personally vested in every client and every project big or small, and that is why I am limiting this training to 10 students with the intention of being able to give more 1 on 1 attention helping participants understand the ins and outs of SEO and link building, so space is limited and will fill up fast. In fact we are only selling 10 registrations for this workshop!

For registration information about the upcoming SEO seminar in Boston, please visit the registration link here:
http://boston-internet-marketing.eventbrite.com/

This SEO seminar will allow you to spend a full day with me as we dive into the world of SEO and link building as well as cover a variety of internet marketing related topics to help you grow your businesses online exposure.

On 9/29/10, the SEO Seminar agenda of topics that I will cover will be as follows:

The Morning Session will cover the following SEO topics:
• Discover SEO competitive research techniques and tips.
• Learn the basics of SEO and the how the major search engines work.
• Extensive SEO keyword research overview.
• Learn how to optimize every page of your website including: Meta Tag, H1, Image Tag, Content Optimization, URL Structure, Internal Link Structure and much more!
• See real examples and case studies of successful SEO.

For registration information about the upcoming SEO seminar in Boston, please visit the registration link here:
http://boston-internet-marketing.eventbrite.com/

The Afternoon Session will cover the following Link Building topics:
• Learn the basics of relevant SEO link building.
• In depth discussion of how to conduct a link audit and how to develop your ongoing link building strategy that will build search engine and visitor trust.
• Discover how to measure the ROI and success of your SEO efforts.
• Personal 1 on 1, SEO audit of your website with the SEO workshop instructor, Nick Stamoulis.

For registration information about the upcoming SEO seminar in Boston, please visit the registration link here:
http://boston-internet-marketing.eventbrite.com/

I hope to see you there!

“Check to see if your site employs a robots.txt file. If so, confirm that the directives block only what you want blocked. If one or more sets of custom directives exist for specific bots, be sure they include all necessary directives from the generic set of directives. Then be sure the file has been validated. Also, check for and review the validity of any REP commands in webpage tags and in HTTP Headers.” Sometimes a website might have robots.txt file blocking the entire website leaving it rather difficult to be found in organic search.

“Whereas a robots.txt tells search bots what not to crawl, a Sitemap conversely identifies the most important content on your site for indexing. A well-done Sitemap can help your site be crawled more effectively, and that can only help in optimizing your search ranking for indexed content.”

Every website should have a sitemap. A sitemap is the architecture to your website that allows the search engines to understand its structure. It is also important because it allows the search engines to index your information much quicker because they are able to read it and crawl it. A sitemap lets the search spiders know that it is time to re-index a website because they have just added new material to it.

An important SEO factor for measuring the value of websites by search engines is page load time. Servers that host sites with huge pages (such as those with too much high-resolution image content), too little bandwidth for their regular traffic, always running near or at maximum capacity, are intermittently unavailable, or are physically located so far away from their target market that their performance is always hampered by too many time-consuming router hops, can suffer ranking consequences due to these problems.

Page load time is a new factor that has become an influence on search rankings. Make sure to keep your website clean and leave your scripts and widgets to a minimum in order to keep things moving fast.