Internet Marketing Services and SEO

I am going to copy part of this blog post word-for-word because I think this has the potential to be very important over the next few years, if not already:

from Searchenginejournal

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What Social Media Can Bring to Search

The examples of Yahoo user reviewed restaurant searches or the ranking of videos in Google search are current uses of social media’s measurrestaurantsable variables of reviews, ratings, comments and/or video plays being a critical part of these searches, but social media goes far beyond restaurants and videos.

Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:

* Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
* Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
* Defining Quality : If someone takes the time to bookmark a site, it usually has some quality to it.
* Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
* External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
* Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algortihms can classify these sites with their peers.

In addition, by indexing the social measurement variables such as commenting and votes at Digg, Reddit, Netscape and various niche oriented (all of those Pligg powered hubs), search engine algorithms can also benefit from social news sharing sites by:

* Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
* Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.
* Commenting : The number of comments can be compared to the number of votes, the higher the comment to voting ratio, the more relevant the news story or site was to the user; therefore, more relevant to the searcher.
* Relevant Sites : Techmeme and Netscape (and hopefully soon Digg) suggest relevant pages and sites to the stories which make their ‘popular’ categorical pages via intra-linking or blog index monitoring. Engines can learn from these projects to help users find alternative or relevant selections in their search results.

To the best of my knowledge, no search engines are currently implementing all of these theories into their current algorithms, but we cannot overlook that Google has been a partner of Digg for years, Microsoft will soon be, Yahoo owns Del.icio.us and AOL runs Netscape. These social services also offer API’s and are completely open to search spidering, which makes these variables mentioned above available to search engines for the taking.

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If you want to discover the possibilities of SEO for your Indiana company, we are the premier provider of Indiana search engine optimization services. We have been building on our knowledge of organic SEO since 1997, and we love helping businesses succeed by improving the search engine rankings for their website. We work with you to discover the best keyword phrases to focus on in terms of their competitiveness and potential for bringing qualified traffic to your site. We use some of the best keyword tools on the market, and we can be as aggressive as your budget allows. So whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a small business in Warsaw, contact us for a custom quote from our Indiana SEO company.

Based on our experiences with small business SEO clients, we have decided to make our affordable SEO services even more so. We have started a program in which small businesses who are new to SEO can get Page1Promotion’s organic search engine optimization services at a discounted rate for the first month.

Why are we doing this? We really enjoy helping make small businesses successful - this goes back to creating and optimizing our first e-commerce site in 1997. One thing we have found is that many small business owners don’t think they can afford SEO services. When they see the results of a new SEO campaign during the first month, they’re often blown away by the increase in traffic to their website. So if your small business has a website that isn’t working for you, and you think you might want to explore the possibilities of SEO, contact us and we’ll show you how our affordable SEO services can benefit your company.

As we go forward with this SEO blog, our intention is for it to be a resource for a wide range of our small business internet marketing clients. Larger SEO clients will likely have some familiarity with some of the concepts of SEO. However, we’ve found that many small business search engine optimization clients are completely unfamiliar with SEO-speak, and they’re actually fine with that - it’s why they call us!

But knowing that clients large and small will be keeping an eye on this blog, we will be starting the SEO Glossary on our main site. If you read through this blog at any point and your eyes glaze over because you have no idea what you just read, take a look at the glossary…

Website marketing strategies will continue to evolve in 2008 as web search behavior evolves. I recently read a blog post that said indications are that more searches are started on non-traditional (social media in this case) sites than on Google & Yahoo. With the number of new social media sites popping up, it wouldn’t surprise me if that claim were true by the end of the year. Due to the increasing “commercialization” of search engines (and the public’s awareness of their financial success, i.e. stock price), people may use their favorite social media sites more and more as a search engine. The perception may be that fewer people have something to gain by reviewing something in a social media setting than by an advertisement on Google or Yahoo. For those seeking search engine ranking help from a SEO consultant, this is important. Depending on the product being marketed, website marketing strategies may soon include social media marketing as the #1 priority.

In just 3 short weeks, we’ve been incredibly surprised by the improved search engine rankings we’ve seen for our site.  We attribute these ranking increases to content creation, on-site optimization, initial link building, and internal linking.  The thing is - these procedures are identical to what we would do for a client site if we were doing a complete SEO campaign.  We are in the process of beginning a social media experiment for the Page1 site, and we expect to see even more improvement by the end of January.  Contact us for more information on search engine optmization for your company’s website.  We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Today, as the internet continues to become more integrated with our daily lives, I realize that many (maybe most) small businesses still do not understand the value of expert search engine optimization. A good SEO consultant can perform SEO on a small business website and make a huge difference in the company’s bottom line. I have found that when a company finally realizes the value of appearing at the top of Google’s rankings for their target keywords, they are more than willing to pay for our services. This is the main reason that we decided to offer SEO to the first 20 qualified clients for a discounted rate ($500 for 5 keywords for the first month).
The biggest hurdle in selling these search engine optimization services to new clients seems to be their assumption that a new SEO campaign will immediately propel them to the top of the rankings. This may be the case for some less-competitive keywords, but ranking for highly competitive phrases will take time. There are several factors that come into play: age of the website, level of competition, current link popularity totals, etc. But those clients who are willing to take the “risk” of investing in a new Search Engine Optimization Campaign will be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Improved search engine placement can be achieved through link building, but there are many misconceptions out there. I often receive calls from prospective clients asking whether they should trade links with other websites. Often they are concerned with this hurting their website rankings or, at the very least, that the new links will be useless. On the most basic level, let’s consider 2 websites selling diamond studded screwdrivers. Both sites were created at the same time, both have basically the same content, both sites’ homepages have “diamond studded screwdrivers’ in the title tag. The owner of ‘Site A’ obtains a link from his brother’s sports blog. The anchor text of this new link is “diamond studded screwdrivers”. ‘Site A’ will soon rank higher in Google’s organic search results for that phrase.
So is a link from an unrelated site valuable? Yes, with all other factors being equal…

We wanted to share this post from SEOmoz that does a great job of explaining the different pricing strategies for SEO services.

At Page1Promotion, we currently find that the monthly retainer model works best. Many of our clients are concerned about whether they will see a high enough ROI fast enough from a new SEO campaign, and billing monthly for SEO services allows clients to “pay-as-they-go” so to speak. As you can see, the “Low-end” of monthly retainer fees are shown as $2,500 and up, but at Page1 we offer high-quality SEO services for as little as $500/month.

When you choose Page1 as your search engine marketing and placement experts, we will assist your company in significantly improving your current search engine rankings for a variety of keyword phrases and increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.  As an internet marketing consultant, our job is to greatly improve your exposure on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Every new SEO project is unique, based on each client’s requirements, but most search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns include the following:

• Website analysis
• Keyword research
• Competition research
• Onsite optimization
• Link popularity building
• SEO copywriting
• Web analytics and Ranking reports