Coming to a TV near you.  Check this out.  Soon your online advertising dollar might be heading to TV.  I’m really excited to see how all this works.  Soon you will be able to watch TV, surf the web, watch online content, search for your TV shows, movies and more.  It’s been tried before, lets see if Google can make it work.

If you have a new website or one with no inbound links you should start a link building campaign.  Why? Google and other search engines are not just looking at site content, and meta tags, they are looking at “relationships” between your site and others.  Link building is now an important part of SEO.  Without quality links your site may struggle in the search engine rankings. 

Building links is not necessarily about quantity but more about quality.  Search engines look to see if  links are coming from sites known as “link farms“ whose main purpose is to link to other sites to increase their link popularity score.  These may be considered spam.  Links relevant to your site, and links from sites with rich content are quality links and carry a lot of weight with search engine rankings.

So how do you start getting quality links?

1. Have a website people will want to link.  It should be professional looking, easy to navigate, contain good useful information and have frequently updated content. 

2. List your business on sites like Google Places, Yahoo Business, Yellowpages.com and dmoz.org (open directory project).  It is important to choose the right category for your listing and to follow the submission guidelines.  DMOZ  can be pretty selective and it can take up to two weeks or more to review your submission.

3.  Ask business associates to link to you.

4. Establish relationships with non competing businesses in the same field.  Look at their website and get a sense of who they are before you ask for a link.

5.  Write good quality articles on topics related to your business and submit them to sites like ezinearticles.com and other trusted article sites.  Blog and participate in forums and write content that people find useful and will value as a resource.  Interact with people in your industry and they’ll  start linking to you.

Link building requires time, creativity, dedication and persistence.  The natural growth of your site with good traffic and referrals along with link building may just help you move up in the search engines.  Remember content and links are king and queen.  Which is which?  Seems it’s a matter of opinion.

If you are looking for ways to increase your business website traffic, you might have overlooked registering your website and business with the Google Business Center. 

Google is the most used search engine in the world.  By registering with the Google Business Center, you can list your hours, what you specialize in, methods of payments accepted, and much more.  You can also post pictures and videos of your business.  This also gives you a chance to respond to negative reviews your company might have received. 

Registering is fairly simple.  You request to register and Google will either phone you with a Pin Number to enter, or they will mail it to you. 

To find the Google business center, just search “Google Places”.

I am sure everyone would agree it is easier to build trust with customers when they can see who you are and where you work.  It’s reassuring to them to see your office or store, where its located, how it’s run and see the employees who work there .

 But how do you build trust with customers when you are one of millions of businesses online? When you are online that physical presence isn’t there so you have to find other ways to earn their trust. How do you do that with your website?

A lot of people are skeptical about what they see on the internet. The first thing you need to do is show you are a real person and business. Right upfront it should be clearly presented that you are a business with solutions to their problems, and that your services or products will benefit them.  Information should be meaningful and easy to access.

Show you have nothing to hide by providing your contact information, a place for comments or feedback, and add testimonials and a list of your accredited affiliations. When asking for information from customers ask only for information you really need. If people are asked to give too much information they get suspicious and leave. 

The best way to earn customer trust is to have an online presence that lets them know you are there to help them.  Customers are smart and know if you can’t give them what they want or need they can go to a competitor. When they trust you they are happy customers, who will come back. They will refer people to you which will add more visitors to your site and the more visitors you have the better chance for conversions. Trust is everything.

I received an invitation to attend a conference today for Stores On Line.  Naturally I wanted to research them and see what they are all about.  Wow, talk about negative press, they get a ton.  I found several websites dedicated to berating them.  Also there have been news reports.  Once I followed one of the news reports to You Tube, I found several more.

Here is the news report:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX3GBrl2IRk

I also found a website that had several reviews:  http://www.storesonline-reviews.com/

While going through these, I noticed that many of the people were paying up to $8,000 to get started and then support fees on top of this.

My advice, stay clear.

I had one of my clients call the other day and he was contacted by a company that promised him first page rankings in the local searches. 

Most of us have had emails from people wanting to get us on the first page of Google (we know most of these are scams), but this was something more sophisticated.

The company is called AdzZoo.com.  I decided to check them out for him.  They promised first page ranking in certain mile radius of his business.  You could select 10 mile, 20 mile or 50 miles areas.  The bigger the area the more the monthly cost.  The smallest area was around $200 per month and the 20 mile area was around $300 per month. 

I called the main office to inquire about their methods.  What they do is make a subdomain of their own URL.  Something like  www.yourwebsite.adzzoo.com.  Then they make a landing page for you with this address.  In other words they are promoting their own website with your money.

Then they purchase a pay per click advertising program from Google for this subdomain.  When people go there they can click to get to your actual website.  This kind of roundhouse way to promote your site is not nearly as good as you could do running your own Adwords Campaign, or have us set one up for you.

When they set  up your adwords campaign, you don’t know how much money is actually going to the “click throughs” and how much is going to AdzZoo.   They put in a cushion for themselves.

I have researched local SEO quite a bit.  Once you are submitted to the Google Business Center and your website is optimized and submitted to the major search engines, you don’t have to keep spending money every month in order for this to keep working. 

There are other ways to keep promoting your website on a monthly basis:  adwords, link building, blogging, social networking, etc..  Your monthly allotment for Internet Advertising would be much better served in these areas.

I should also mention that when I went to the AdzZoo website, one of their main videos was to recruit people to sell their service.  Telling you how well you could do in this large market of small businesses that need their services. 

If you have any questions about this or any of our services, please let me know.

Thanks,

Randy Kauffman
President, SCS

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the art of making a website move higher in the search engines, like Google, Yahoo, etc..

The people that would like to scam you out of your hard earned dollars never stop.  The proliferation of SEO scam emails is unreal.  It seems like everyday I get one, promising to get my website on the first page of google.  Here are a few things to watch out for.

1.  Anyone telling you that they can get you a first page ranking for a monthly fee, but only as long as you continue to pay them.

Proper SEO entails several factors, title tags, proper keywords, alt tags, relevant copy, building meaningful links, social marketing and much more.  Once these things are done, if you stop paying a monthly fee, they will not go away.

2.  If you get an email from some SEO expert with no website URL, be cautious.  Any SEO company should want you to investigate their website in order to give you more information.  Also look at their email address.  If it comes from a gmail or yahoo email account, this is another warning sign.  How can anyone be an expert in SEO when they don’t even have a website?

3.  Free Trial Service with access to your website.  DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!  Never let anyone have access to your files unless you are absolutely certain they are accountable.  You might as well give them access to your bank account.

4.  A company tells you that they will submit your website to 1,000 search engines.  Let’s face it Google does more searches than all of the other search engines in the world COMBINED!  Work on google first, then Yahoo and MSN.  With these three you have covered 98% of the market.

5.  Flat-Rate and Low Monthly Fees.  Good SEO is not cheap.  Several companies charge hundreds of dollars per hour all the way up to $1,000 per hour!  SEO takes a lot of time.  It can take months before the results start to show.

There can be several other things to watch out for.  If you have any questions, or would like to post your experiences, please do.

This is an area that many businesses should pay a lot more attention to.  Search Engine Optimization will get your website to show up high in the search engines like Google for certain “keywords”.

80% of all people use the “organic” search to find what they want.  Only 20% use the sponsored links.