August 18th, 2010 by admin
Our clients often get bombarded with email spam from India and even domestically here in the US offering them amazing SEO rankings guaranteed for very little money. Our clients sometimes ask, “why should I pay more for a US based agency like GlowHat to handle our SEO campaign?” Yes, it’s true just like momma said, if it sounds to good to be true it probably is, this also applies to all the amazing offers you might receive about offshore or cheap domestic IT labor, and esp. for such a critical customer facing marketing activity such as SEO.
With IT tasks such as programming you might be able to get away with using cheap offshore labor, but often even that is a major headache for companies as the work output is often low quality poorly commented buggy code. SEO is not just an IT activity it encompasses every aspect of your online presence and is not something you want to give to the lowest bidder. Many of our new clients actually are those damaged by choosing price over quality of SEO work, and we end up spending months undoing the damage done to their site and it’s rankings. It’s better to think of SEO as the optimization of your entire online presence and is more a marketing activity then an IT activity.
Their are two main different approaches to SEOs, once you understand this you’ll be able to understand much better what type of SEO vendor you’re dealing with.
- SEO quantity based, i.e vendor focuses on providing you with hundreds or thousands of spammed links, claims quick results, is suspiciously cheap, guarantees you’ll be #1 in a couple weeks etc
- Very risky, often get sites penalized or worst yet de-listed from the search engines, all it takes is one automated or manual review of your site and all your efforts and organic rankings can be erased. The low quality SEO Spam that the India type vendors do can cause more harm then good.
- Looks un-natural and is easily detected and flagged by the search engines. Keep in mind search engines like Google have the best and brightest minds working for them, they know what you’re doing with your site, trust me, any spammy low quality SEO efforts will be easily detected.
- Very low priced campaigns, but the real cost damage in terms of lost opportunities, brand damage, search engine penalties far outweigh any actual possible benefit. To pay someone any amount of money to harm your site’s SEO and organic rankings would not be a wise choice.
- What is the real cost of the lost opportunities that your not getting because your rankings are marginal or phrases nobody uses?
- Can damage your Brand online when you spam the Internet, spamming the Internet with poorly written English grammar, which results in very little traffic being driven to your site.
- Brand can be effected by poorly written content being syndicated out.
- Can get you permanently banned from important sites and services.
- Complaints from other site’s which where spammed by your vendor
- Often called “BlackHat” or “GreyHat” SEO by most experts
- Focused producing certain volumes of links, i.e we’re going to get you 500 directory links, and 500 article posts etc Spammy approach that focuses on volume over quality
- Goes against the TOS Terms of Service of the search engines, and their guidelines.
- Ranking will be unstable and in the long run will lose rankings over time. It’s not uncommon to see some initial ranking improvements with spammy blackhat SEO tactics, since the search engines see a sudden flurry of activity, but once their full algorithm and scoring really analyzes your site over time, your rankings will fall back down again.
- Totally ineffective for competitive phrases i.e your main key phrases that would drive the most traffic
- Spammy SEO is becoming less and less effective as the search engines get better and better at detecting plainly obviously attempts at artificially posting a site’s rankings.
- Offshore SEO groups do not build relationships with quality sites which would greatly improve your rankings but simply spam low quality easy to get links, they approach SEO as they would a technical programming problem, vs. a critical marketing activity.
- SEO based on quality, vendor focuses on quality of effort, and most importantly high rankings that are stable, and for phrases that matter most to make a difference for your leads or sales. The practice whitehat SEO and follow the search engine guidelines. Like a good piece of internet real estate, they focus on quality, quality, quality!
- Considered “Whitehat” SEO which the search engines actually encourage
- 1x quality authoritative link can be more powerful then hundreds or thousands of typical low quality spam links, esp. for your most important and competitive search phrases. It’s not the volume of links you build but the quality. I have sites that have 30 back links we worked very hard and took months to get and we outrank competitors that also worked hard at spamming with 1000+ sites but yet we rank higher then them and our position is stable where they aren’t even on the 1st page of the search results half the time.
- Quality based SEO, will keep your site out of trouble and avoid getting penalized
- Quality SEO is much more effective in producing high rankings
- Search Engines actually recommend you do whitehat SEO on your site, because it often makes their jobs easier of understanding what your site is about, and making it easier for the search spiders to crawl and index your site.
- Quality based SEO does not go against the search engine’s TOS
- Search Engines Love quality sites and reward them with ranking them first, they do everything in their power to look for low quality sites and filter them out. By using a offshore low quality SEO vendor you’re basically flagging your site and letting
the search engines know, that quality is not your first concern.
- The search engines really could be better called “quality engines” looking for the best sites out there to display first. Effective best practice SEO focuses on quality, that’s why there’s things like the Adwords “Quality Score” and “Page Rank”, “Trust Rank”, “Authority” etc. So it makes sense to have your SEO campaigns efforts and goals in alignment with quality efforts.
- Quality efforts are much much more future proofed, meaning your organic rankings will more stable and reliable, with spammy SEO it’s not unusual for a new Google algo update to totally wipe out entire businesses that where doing low quality SEO, once the search engines made a better way to filter for the latest and greatest blackhat spam techniques these site’s meager rankings where gone.
- GlowHat’s multilingual capabilities also are not something easily outsourced to India
- For many client’s we also handle their PPC campaign, we synergistically combine our interactive marketing efforts to create a fully aware and integrated SEO/PPC campaign.
- SEO isn’t just about spamming links out on the Internet, or stuffing hidden keywords into a site, it’s about adjusting and tweaking many different elements of your entire online presence, not something you want done in broken English, low quality cheap SEO vendor, who in most cases is just a data enter level worker that doesn’t know about design, usability, programming, content writing, information architecture, HTML, web server and database administration. You really need a very intelligent team who are experts at all the key website duties, as SEO is about “optimizing” everything not just one isolated activity.
Conclusion
To get quality SEO work done you need really do need native English speaking, writing, culturally aware team to get the the desirable and harder to achieve higher quality links that will give you stable, long term rankings vs. the “India shuffle” where they spam the Internet, google sees the velocity of links increase, you perhaps get a little bit of increase in ranking, but it’s temporary as your rankings slip back down because they links they build are non-authoritative spam links based on quantity vs. quality. What we’ve noticed is that all of the offshore SEO groups do not build relationships with sites, but simply spam them, they approach SEO as they would a technical programming problem, vs. a critical marketing activity. If you want to get a super hard, but super valuable high quality link that will really help towards the site rankings, it often requires making phone calls, and emails written in perfect English, that offer value, and intelligent and not automated spam that the India people send out. We have people doing guest blog and article writing, optimized press released, intelligent blog commenting etc. all of these tactics require English speaking SEOs can offer that critical value you need to win over authority sites and outrank your competitors. If you want to get a super hard, but super valuable high quality link that will really help towards the site rankings, it often requires making phone calls, and emails written in perfect English that offer value are intelligent and not automated spam that the India people send out. We have people doing guest blog and article writing, optimized press released, intelligent blog commenting etc. all of these tactics require English speaking SEOs can offer that critical value you need to win over authority sites and outrank your competitors.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 10th, 2010 by admin
There are many reasons why a company should consider outsourcing their SEO Search Engine Optimization, here’s a list of the top 10 reasons to outsource your SEO. In general for most small to medium sized businesses outsourcing their SEO makes sense because SEO is a highly specialized skill, and is time consuming and tedious.
- Better results- Hiring an SEO agency to outsource your site’s SEO work can help you achieve much better rankings then if trying to do it yourself, they’ll get you ranking higher, with less effort, in less time, and overall, less cost to you. Outsourcing your SEO really makes sense when you consider the fact that ranking high is not easy, esp. for key phrases that are competitive. There’s also a very good chance your competitors are using an SEO agency with experts helping them rank higher.
- Affordable Expert- An SEO company can almost always provide your site’s SEO more effectively and faster and at a lower cost then hiring someone in-house. And most SEO employees if they’re any good will most likely work as a freelance agent, or start their own agency. Most people that would be an SEO employee that are talented would expect to be paid very well as they know their skills are very valuable.
- Cost effective-SEO specialist fees are more affordable than the salary of a full-time employee.
- Save time- SEO is very time consuming and tedious, it’s something that could easily distract you and pull you or key personnel in your company away from your core tasks.
- Higher ROI- SEO gives you some of the highest possible ROI’s i.e best bang for your buck possible compared to any other form of advertising besides word of mouth or referrals.
- Focus on your core services- SEO can be time consuming, tedious and frustrating, taking you away from your main tasks that you want to accomplish each day. SEO is the perfect task to outsource.
- Use latest techniques and knowledge- Any worthy SEO would keep current on new industry developments and changes and be able to apply this cutting edge knowledge to your SEO campaign, so you stay ahead of the curve.
- Continuous effort- Effective SEO work takes a continuous effort to gain new rankings and maintain existing high rankings, and your competition is always on your heals ready to take over your high rankings or continue to dominate and keep your rankings from rising. You have to ask yourself if you or someone in your company is ready to spend time everyday working on the web site’s optimization consistently.
- Link sources- Most SEOs will have relationships already developed with other quality websites where you can either syndicate your content on and or get links from, this network they have developed can be very helpful in helping build traffic and rankings for your site.
- In-house resource- Many Search Engine Optimization firms will often provide other interactive services like web design, copy writing, web development, graphics etc. this can be very useful especially for smaller companies as SEO overlaps into many aspects of a website, and a full team of experts to help improve specific aspects of your site can really help with SEO and the site’s usability, and usability can also help with the site’s SEO as the search engines do measure how long people spend on your site, how fast the site is etc.
Posted in SEO Analysis and Reporting, SEO Campaign Managment, SEO Time Managment, SEO company comparison, SEO strategy and planning, SEO-Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized | No Comments »
April 20th, 2010 by admin
“The Sole Purpose Of A Businesses is To Help Others Reach Their Goals”
If you reduce the purpose of a business down to it’s very core, you’re left with this one basic concept, that a business is meant to help other people or businesses reach their goals. It’s seems so painfully obvious, but why do so many businesses forget this basic idea?
Maybe it’s because they’re putting their needs ahead of the customer’s needs, or just caught up in the details of trying to help other’s reach their goals and at the same time make a profit doing it. Now of course most people start a business because they want to help themselves primarily, but a business’s ability to help their customers reach their goals will determine their overall success I believe. If you have a restaurant and you don’t do a good job of feeding people with satisfying food, don’t expect to be around long. Good business is where you provide a good product or service and satisfy your customer and help them reach their goals with your products or service, and by doing so you can become rich and reach all of your own goals in the process. It’s so simple, yet many companies just dont’ seem to get it. I mean most “get it” but do they take it to heart and apply that mentality into everything they do? Also a business should never stop improving it’s ability to help it’s customer’s reach it’s goals, that’s a quick way to get passed by the competition.
Here are some guesses as to why I think businesses lose their way
- The business is greedy and self centered
- The business doesn’t understand that they’re a “goal machine”
- The business is satisfied with “good enough”
- The business is incompetent and can not produce a valuable product or service
- The business is struggling financially and is having a hard time focusing outward
- The business is struggling in other ways internally that is holding it back
- The business is inefficient and can’t deliver said product or service at a profit
There are many possible reasons why a company isn’t helping people reach thier goals effectively, but there should be no excuse, either help people reach their goals with your business or close your doors as you’re not doing yourself or your customers any good otherwise.
Balancing your own needs against other’s needs
Now of course there has to be balance, you can’t just give away your products and service for free, or not charge enough. Not charging enough is actually a common mistake especially for new business that are undervaluing their products or services. I think the problem is where this balance has shifted too far towards the customer or the opposite too far towards the business providing the product or service. There has to be balance, and this balance is what I call “value”. Value is the core idea that we take to heart at GlowHat and strive to deliver the best possible service for lowest possible cost and still make a good profit so we’re healthy, stable and growing.
You can also say that good business is where all parties involved in a transaction benfit from the exchange of good or services, and this includes, workers, vendors, and the enviorment, not just seller/buyer.
Posted in Business Management | No Comments »
April 18th, 2010 by admin
It’s hard for me to pick the top 10 SEO search engine optimization mistakes, because really there are hundreds of things that can effect search rankings that we test for and monitor, I tried to make a list of the top 10 most common problems the GlowHat team runs into on an everyday basis.
- Targeting the wrong keywords, the wrong audience, too large or small of a phrase etc.
With all the time and effort it takes to do quality white hat SEO, it would make sense to not be wasting your precious time on optimizing phrases that won’t help you reach your goals. If you’re unsure then why not test the search phrases with a small PPC campaign etc. and confirm that they drive the types of site traffic and conversions you’re looking for. Also you have to be realistic and efficient, it doesn’t make sense to target phrases that are too generic and competitive, and would take you 10 years to rank on the first page for. Also don’t pat yourself on the back because you’re now #1 in Google for “Needle point supply SomeHickTown, AK”, the key is to target phrases that have the most traffic and least amount of competition first, then work your way up to more difficult but higher traffic generic phrases later on or never, if you have a niche site. As the generic phrases can be a huge waste of time, they’re the “sucker” phrases. Let your unschooled less savvy competitors toil away on these while you own all the secondary and long tail phrases in your market.
- Lack of content, don’t expect to get visitors or rankings on your site if you have no textual content about it.
Realize that search engines look at the text on your pages as the first step into deciding on which site and which page to show first the in the SERPs search engine results pages.
SEO is like the process of polishing your silverware and helping it look the best to the search engines, now if you don’t have any silverware, what will an SEO polish? But you’d be surprised at the number of sites that try to rank high, but offer very little in the way of quality unique content on their sites that targets the phrases they’d like to rank for. They think somehow by magic their site will suddenly explode with site traffic and high rankings. Just like in the real world, SEO takes hard work, it’s not easy to make dozens, hundreds or even thousands of unique useful pages of site content, but it’s worth the effort and will pay off in the long run.
- Not putting your content on your own domain/hosting.
Free hosting and blog sites aren’t “free”. In reality when you setup a site on a free hosting space like your local ISP folder or free hosting sites like Geocities, wordpress, blogger, typepad, etc http://ISPcompany.com/users/~me/ etc the search engines will credit ISPcompany.com with any content or links, worse yet there’s a good chance that through your TOS or user agreement they might actually even own the rights to your content.
- Only linking to your home page.
Deep links help bring in traffic and rankings to the rest of your site. This issue sort of goes hand in hand with the other of not having enough content on your site and being overly focused on your main keywords. Site owners often don’t realize that every single page of a site is potential “home page” a landing page that the new site visitor that has never been to your site before will first find you by. They might type in a long search phrase and the keywords all happen to be on a page you made, they might not ever see your home page. Take the blinders off and look at your whole site’s visibility online not just your home page. Yes your home page is normally the most important page of the site, but it’s not your only “home page”.
- Not redirecting YourDomain.com to www.YourDomain.com i.e Canonicalization
We see this all the time, even with big sites that have been around for years, they forget to pick which URL will be their main URL and redirect traffic from the other one. What this can do is cause duplicate content issues and also reduce the SEO power of your site, as its getting slit in two with some SEO power going to the “www” version and the rest going to the non-www version.
- Lack of site links
links drive traffic to your site and send a powerful positive SEO signal to the search engines. For competitive phrases, site links are probably one of the most
important factors the search engines look at in ranking a site. The whole reason why Google is Google is because of site links and scoring sites based on site links.
On page SEO factors are still critical but once that is straighten out on your site then typically link building is the area of focus that will help increase your site rankings.
- Focusing exclusively on main keyword rankings
while neglecting secondary and long tail phrases. Humans like to simply things, and even though the internet and SEO can be complex people still like to put their blinders on fixate on their most generic phrases. It’s easy to put all your attention on a couple of your main phrases, not realizing that they’re so generic they don’t really produce that much bossiness for your site. Often it’s the longer phrases the unexpected combinations of phrases that people are finding your site on that are turning into conversions.
- Poor URL structure
having long URLs full of parameters in them is bad for a number of reasons, in regards to SEO it can prevent the search spiders from crawling your site.
Bad http://www.yoursite.com/category.asp?as=2xs&adfs=ss&id=48s,sik8&data=8s7d8&q=where%20to%20eat&sig=true&guid=8s8ax091lknk
Good http://www.yoursite.com/shoes/nike-running-shoes.html
- Duplicate content
There are several types, the most common is same exact page, but two or more different URLs on your site.
- Same exact page but two or more different URLs on your site, is common in dynamic sites that add parameters and are database driven like shopping carts and CMS systems.
- Same URL that serves up two different pages
- Same exact page is found on completely different sites, might be one or more.
- A page on your site that has a high percentage of similar content, and a lack of unique content on the page.
- A page on someone Else’s site that has a high percentage of similar content.
- A slow site, and or excessive downtime
This can reduce the frequency, depth and speed of search engine spider visits.
There are hundreds of variables that the search engines look for when deciding on how to rank a site, that we test for, if you’re interested in having us review your site visit our free SEO report page and fill out the form and we can provide you with a more in depth look at your site and the possible SEO issues holding it back from ranking highly.
Posted in SEO Analysis and Reporting, SEO Campaign Managment, SEO Time Managment, SEO company comparison, SEO strategy and planning, SEO-Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
April 11th, 2010 by admin
“High quality SEO is a excellent investment, where bad SEO can be a terrible cost”
If you’re shopping around for SEO services, you’ll probably see a wide range of prices and rates quoted to you. Like anything you get what you pay for, on the bottom end you get low quality spammy SEO work done that will give you little if any improvement in rankings and could actually get your site penalized or removed from the search index. And SEO is only getting more and more competitive, which I think is good because it will help weed out the low quality vendors hopefully. We position ourselves to be in the low middle of the rate scale so that we’re within the budget of small to medium sized businesses, and we focus on constantly improving our process and knowledge so we can deliver enterprise quality level SEO at small business prices.
The cost of making a bad choice can be high, when you really think about it.
- SEO takes time, are you willing to wait around for weeks and months for a low quality unproven vendor to not get you ranking higher?
- Bad SEO work can actually have the opposite effect on your rankings
- Or worse yet, could get your site penalized or banned removed from the search engines
There can be quite a range of SEO rates and abilities to choose from, at my company we position ourselves as extreme value performance based providers, we want to give our clients the most possible for the budget. You’ll want to do your home work and do some comparison shopping, it’s very easy to get confused with so much hype and exaggeration out there.
Posted in SEO strategy and planning, SEO-Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
April 11th, 2010 by admin
Is there a relationship between the link profile and what the site’s or page’s max keyword density before the page starts experiencing a filter? It appears to me from having worked on many sites over the years that I’ve observed sites being assigned a “penalty” or filter of +20-50 positions when the page crosses over a certain keyword density, many other SEO experts have also observed this behavior as well. But I’ve seen the very same pages also climb back up to their previous position when the link profile of the site has had current activity. My theory is that the search engines raise the allowed keyword density of a page as it appears to be more authoritative and has a stronger profile. This would make sense as you wouldn’t want to filter a very popular site because they used their keywords too much accidentally, but you would probably want to filter out an unpopular site that appears to have a much higher keyword density then it’’s competing sites, at least that’s what I would do if I where Google and esp. since Google looks beyond just the number of occurrences of words or combination of words but looks for a “theme” on the page with LSI Latent Semantic Indexing, Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.
So with this in mind, I think it really makes sense then to look at other competing sites in your market and make sure you don’t go over their keyword density for any one particular word and make sure you’re using variations of your main phrases and not being overly focused on one phrase esp. if you have a weaker link profile. Also you’ll want to monitor your rankings closely to watch out for any sudden big dips that came out of a page being edited, we monitor all of our critical pages and phrases and we get alerts if something has changed suddenly for not apparent reason other then some page text changes.
So in essence, make sure to use a wide array of related phrases that are closely related in meaning, and that goes for on page, off page SEO factors. Again this is a perfect example of how the search engines are getting better at filtering out low quality sites, and how Google should really be called a “Quality Engine” vs. a “Search Engine”, as their goal is to return the best content possible to the person searching, so help them. The purpose of SEO is interpret what the search engines deem as signals of “quality” then to implement them the best way in the SEO campaign, presenting the site to Google in the best light possible. As Matt Cutts from Google said it, think of SEO as like polishing your resume’ , you’re not using tricks you’re just following best practices and sending the correct quality signals to Google.
Posted in SEO-Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
March 29th, 2010 by admin
I’ve noticed that more and more clients, and colleagues keep referring to Alexa. They’ve been around for years but apparently they’re everybody’s new favorite benchmark for success. We look at Alexa, but only as one little clue, and understand that their figures must be taken with a grain of salt, or really a bucket of salt haha. For most small to medium sized businesses i.e the majority of our clients, Alexa is a very bad way to measure, even for big sites it’s usefulness is limited because the quality of their data is very poor, the way they collect data has major problems.
If you’ve never heard of Alexa before, Alexa i.e alexa.com is a site owned by Amazon which gives web site statistical data to web users and developers. Alexa is well known for their toolbar that gives a you search, site stats, and a handy dandy pop up blocker. (if you want the best ad blocker get the “Ad Blocker Plus” firefox extension)
The way Alexa gathers data is by their toolbar, but who installs the toolbar? Mostly online marketers, web workers, etc. people that want to know the Alexa rankings of sites they visit, or the unlucky few that have this useless toolbar pre-installed in their web browser, which few do. Most of your real site visitors won’t have the toolbar installed and those that do are mostly competitors etc and people that don’t represent the majority of your site visitors. When compared to actual site traffic you’ll see that Alexa is WAY off. I’ve had clients that get thousands of visitors per day and Alexa didn’t have any data for them lol, that’s ridiculous, then I’ve had clients that are in a niche and only get a couple hundred visits per day yet have full Alexa data. Just goes to show you how far off Alexa rank is and now meaningless it is. Maybe for a high tech related site that is very popular Alexa means something but for most of our client’s sites it means very little and is just a distraction.
We’ve also done tests in the past where we installed Alexa toolbar on a couple machines and would visit a site everyday and then saw our Alexa ranking rise from no where to a half decent ahha, I’m sure with a little programming “magic” I could make any site look like an Alexa super star.
We look at Alexa, but hardly take it serious, unless it’s a site targeted towards an audience that would likely have Alexa toolbar installed like a web design related news site etc, we just use it as one of many signals to look at when reviewing sites, because Alexa ranking by itself means very little.
Posted in SEO Analysis and Reporting, SEO company comparison, SEO-Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
February 26th, 2010 by admin
A common problem on the Internet occurs when businesses and organizations have one name and then their domain name is another. Sometimes these are very different names or ones that are vaguely related. News Flash: It’s 2010! Your prospects and clients are seeing your website, email address, and domain name offline more now than ever!A domain name is so practical to remember since it’s both a way to identify your company and a way to get into contact with you. Clients and prospects are going to see your domain name as being synonymous with your company name for all intents and purposes. Having differing company and domain names can confuse potential clients, especially if they’re learning about your company for the first time.
There are many situations that can occur Online where customers only see your domain name and not your company name. Because of this, the customer may refer to your company by the domain name and not by the actual company name. If the names differ, it can cause confusion. Some of these situations are as follows:
- PPC search ads – When setting up AdWords, the domain name is a required field. However, there is NO field for your company name. The only information that is given about your company in the ad is the domain name, not the company name. This isn’t the case with just AdWords, but also in Yahoo and Bing. There are ways around this, however. You could put your company name in the title of the ad or in the body, but with the limited space that can be better used to get potential customers to want to try your product or service, this is not really possible.Unless all you’re looking for is brand exposure, forcing your company name into ads won’t be too successful.
- Web directories - There are many places on the Interner that list websites for free or for a small fee. These places are known as web directories and they often do not show your company name, just your domain name.
- Email - When you send someone an email from company email address, your domain name will be prominently shown.
- The Real World - If you put your domain name on any physical material to be distributed and/or used for advertising purposes such as brochures, billboards, cards, and the likes, it can look bad and cause confusion.
- I’m sure you can think of a few more mediums where the conflict between your domain name and company name can cause confusion in your customer base.
There are many marketing, advertising, and sales companies making this mistake and they should know better. This can happen when there is an older, established company that wants to break into the interactive world, but they did not grab the domain name that reflects their company name when it was available.
A good example of this problem is if your company name is something like Joe Smith’s Heating & Cooling, but your domain name is SmithHVAC.com. Because of the difference in the company name versus the domain name, your prospects, leads and existing clients may think your company name is Smith HVAC. The problem is only magnified when your site’s logo/id says something different than your company name.
At GlowHat, we often run into this problem in the course of helping our clients develop strategies and market their sites on the Internet. We have helped many clients in both making them aware of how this problem can be a detriment to their marketing efforts and in fixing this problem. By fixing this problem, we have helped many clients minimize this major branding problem.
- 1. The Internet continues to grow and as it does, it becomes a larger part of our daily lives. Mobile and social networks are growing rapidly and have become a large part of mainstream lifestyles. Many people no longer look in phone books or read newspapers for information. Instead, these people are going Online. A domain name is both a “phone number”, a business name, and a brand all wrapped up into one nice and neat package. At one time, having a website was something that was just a little extra bonus that a business provided. Now, websites are nearly a requirement for a successful business.
There are many reasons that a mismatch in domain name and company name can occur:
- 1. When an older, more established company decides to make the move to the online world, the domain name that matches their company name may be taken.
- 2. A new company or start up that falls in love with company name finds that the desired domain name is not available. Because of this, they may be forced to settle for a less than ideal domain name.
- 3. A company might have the idea domain name, but not renew it in time and thus lose their domain name. Because of this, they may be forced to obtain a domain name that doesn’t match.
There are many solutions to this:
- By choosing your domain name and company name simultaneously, the chances of having a conflict in names are reduced to zero. While this may sound easy, it can be fairly difficult to come up with a good sounding name that is available. At GlowHat, we have our own proprietary tools that we use to help clients find a domain name that fits their needs. By doing an extensive search through thousands upon thousands of domain names, we can find a short, easy to remember domain name with a good sound that is a good match for your business. In our search for the perfect domain name, we also look for any trademark or service mark conflicts that could cause an issue with any potential domain names and company names we find for you.
- Re-Branding - If you’re a small company that either has very few clients or is not well known, this can be a great time to re-brand. We can use the aforementioned process to also help you secure a great domain name. Re-branding is great for companies who wish to have a catchier name and a great website to go along with the new name. At GlowHat, we can do this!
- Expired domains -When we search for domains, we also look into domains that have recently expired or are about to expire so we can snatch them up for you the second they become available. We leverage a few partner services to do this for us and we use more than one method to ensure that we grab the name before others do.
- Existing domains – If you have a great domain name in mind but it’s taken, we will negotiate with those who own the domain name. There are many people who purchase domain names and never use them and leave them parked. Our job is to assist you in getting the best possible price for the best possible domain.
If you have noticed prospects and leads getting confused about your company name and domain name discrepancy? Are you a new business owner who wants to make sure there are no problems between the business name and domain name? Let us know! We would love to hear about your experiences. We will let you know how we can help!
Posted in Online Branding, SEM-Search Engine Marketing, SEO strategy and planning, SEO-Search Engine Optimization, SMO Social Media Optimization, Social Media Marketing | 12 Comments »
February 10th, 2010 by admin
Over the last month, we have been doing a lot of competitor analyses. We did this to make sure that we can offer our customers the best prices on search engine optimization. While doing this research, we came across some pretty scary things that many of these other SEO companies do to their customers. Because of this research, we can quickly pick out which SEO companies are bad apples in a matter of seconds just by checking out their websites. We have noticed several things that these bad apples have in common which allows up to quickly pick out which companies really want to help and which want to give customers a run for their money. Here is a list of 14 things to watch out for when shopping for an SEO firm:
- They sell tiered SEO packages. An SEO package is code for “the more you pay, the more we care.” While the better companies structure their packages based of performance, the less than legit companies base it on quantity. A package based on quantity makes the order convenient and easy for the SEO company. It allows them to make a profit without having to really do any work. If you are interested in learning more about how companies can use packages to earn a profit without having to care about their clients, check out our post on SEO Packages.
- They don’t rank. If the company doesn’t rank for competitive phrases, then they aren’t very good at SEO. Period!. It’s a good idea to ask the SEO company for examples of keywords they rank for or have helped other clients rank for. The good thing about SEO is that anyone who sells their SEO services should be able to prove how well they perform. If the company refuses to give out this information or they offer a list of phrases they rank for that each contain three or more phrases, then they probably aren’t legit. If the keywords they give have less than 5 million search results, then they are choosing keywords that are not competitive. If this is the case, then it’s a good idea to find an SEO company that can rank for more competitive keywords.
- They only monitor rankings. Another question to ask an SEO company is how they measure the campaign to see if it is working or not. If they respond just by saying that they monitor rankings, that’s not a good sign. No matter how high you rank for keywords, this doesn’t make a difference unless you actually get the conversions and performance you need. A good SEO company will not only monitor your company’s rankings in the search engines, but will also study the traffic data and focus on your conversions and performance.
- It is also important to ask what methods they use to make necessary changes in order to update your on-page SEO and what they do to get links. Finding out how they add content and where they get it is also important. A good SEO company should focus on creative thought to find ways to add value to your site. It is important to find a site that is interested in talking with you about content concepts and finding out what exactly you want out of your SEO campaign. A shady SEO company will care little about creativity, but instead rely on methods that they’ve created over time and use as a one size fits all template. Each website has specific needs and in order to meet these needs, a company should custom tailor an SEO campaign that meets these needs.
- Ask them to show you one of their otherclient’s sites where the SEO company changed or added content. When viewing one of these sites, look out for low quality writing with overstuffed keywords. Many SEO companies will churn out tons of articles that, because of their poor effort in writing quality content, aren’t written for an actual audience other than search engines. If there are many articles on these sites that are poorly written, don’t make sense , or is made up of nothing but rehashing the same idea over and over again in different way, then this is a warning site of a bad SEO company. Another thing to look out for is duplicate content which are articles and psots that have been copied and pasted from another site.
- Billing – How is the company’s billing set up? Do they require payment in full before starting the campaign? This is a bad sign. A good company will charge either per service as they are needed to get your site ranking number one. There is no ‘one size fits all’ method when it comes to SEO. That being said, there is no way for them to know what will be needed for your site upfront. A large part of SEO is testing and finding what works for a particular site and niche. Those who charge a flat, upfront cost generally don’t custom tailor their SEO efforts on a per client basis, but instead reuse the same method over and over again without putting in the required thought and creativity needed to help a client have a successful SEO campaign. There are a few parts of SEO, that can be charged as a flat rate, but when it comes to the whole job, there is no way a ‘one size fits all’ method can work. This is why it’s important to be wary about those charging a flat rate for SEO services.How They Link- Ask the company how many back links they plan on obtaining for your site. If the company says they plan on getting hundreds or thousands of backlinks, you can be guaranteed that the company may be doing volume SEO. This can actually hurt your efforts by making your site look spammy to the search engines. If the company tells you that the quantity of links is more important than the quality, then the company doesn’t have your best interests in mind when it comes to SEO. A good company will realize that the quality of links is very important and that they need to be wary in their effort of obtaining back links to make sure that your site not only has quality back links, but that they look natural to the search engines.
- Information – Ask the company if they’ve written or produced any information about SEO. Many good companies have written articles on the subject. Ask them if they can refer you to any oblog posts, books, videos on the subject that they have created. Take a look at their material. This is a good way to see if they know their stuff and to get an idea of how they work. If after reading it, you don’t get a positive vibe from the company, you know to avoid them.
- References – It’s a good idea to ask for references. Remember that YOU are hiring THEM. If they value your business, they will provide references. It’s also a good idea to ask what their client retention rate is and how long they keep clients. If you can get a hold of any of their clients, ask how their experience was with the company. Make sure that these are actual previous customers and not those working at the company themselves. While this can be difficult to identify, there are some ways to check this out, such as running a WHOIS on their domain. Also, while you’re on their website, take a look at their keywords. Search for their keywords in top search engines to see how they rank!
- Contract – Find out if they require you to be on a contract with them. If so, see if they are willing to allow you to try a month of their service before being locked into a long term contract. Many reputable companies allow this so they can give their potential customers peace of mind. There are few things scarier than diving into a contract with a company without knowing how well they perform.
- HQ – What is the address of the company? If they use a PO Box, they may work from home. While a company based out of someone’s home isn’t necessarily bad, but SEO consultants who actually have a physical location usually have their business as proof that they are there to get the job done. A high quality firm usually has at least a few employees and an office.
- Education – Where did they learn about SEO? Many people working at SEO firms learned from different news sites or blogs. Get an idea where the company you are about to hire has learned the tricks of the trade. A good company won’t be afraid to answer that question. If they have the confidence that they can perform online, they won’t worry that you might be trying to learn from them. Ask them what SEO sites they participate in. Check out these sites to see if they are legitimate and offer valuable information.
- What do they use for reference – It’s impossible to know EVERYTHING about SEO. Ask them where they go when they need help. Even great programmers need to look in a book to find some information. Ask them where they look things up. If they say they don’t use any websites or books for reference, they probably don’t know what they are doing.
- Trade Shows – Has the company you are about to hire ever been to a trade show? What reason did they attend the show? Did they have a booth, were they are speaker, or did they attend the show to learn more? Most legitimate SEO companies have gone to a few trade shows. Ask them about the shows they went to and their experiences there.
Posted in SEO strategy and planning, SEO-Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
February 8th, 2010 by admin
Here’s a list of “SEO Rules to live by” that if followed will ensure you a long and fruitful career in internet marketing, actually in almost any business for that matter, or if you’re a site owner help you have a site that’s highly profitable and successful for the long haul.
- Quality, Quality, Quality- Visitors want to find the best sites, with the best information on them, with the most current information on a topic, or they want the best prices, or the best price for a quality service or product. They want to be entertained by things they haven’t seen on any other site. They want companionship, they want to network and socialize and feel like part of peer group etc. And all the search engines want to do is to help the site visitor get these things, how can you help them both? Make sure the site is top notch, don’t leave anything up to chance make sure every detail is perfect on your site, and make sure it looks good, really good. Humans are very visual and the look and feel of your site and esp. the usability of the site can make a huge difference. A good website design and logo and be a powerful tool to reinforce your brand, where a bad one can tarnish it. And there are many other factors besides just making the site look good in making a quality site, information structure, usability, site speed, security, usability etc. all of these things can make or break a site, one small error in usability for example can make an ecommerce site’s orders be half of what they could be. Quality and attention to detail almost go hand in hand, yet many sites rush through or aren’t even aware of all of these factors influencing the success of their site. More advanced sites will be doing “conversion optimization” tuning each page to drive more leads and sales on the site, doing multi-variant testing etc. constantly testing, measuring, and improving the site’s conversion rate and reducing bounce rates and increasing page views and time on site etc.
- Give the searchers and the search engines what they want, put yourself in their shoes. If you always take this viewpoint SEO and marketing of your site will be more obvious the difference between the right way and the wrong way, pushing vs. pulling your site traffic, black hat vs. white hat, good marketing vs. a hard sale.
- Trust, Do the right thing, be ethical, you make life difficult for yourself if try to trick the search engines or your clients. When it comes down to it the most important thing you have is your integrity, once you lose that then your ability to gain the trust of new and existing clients, friends, family is lost. It’s something people often take for granted until they lost it.
- Attention to details, the devil is in the details, and nothing could be more true then with dealing in technology, don’t assume anything, be very focused and analytical.
- Extreme patience is required, as it can takes months and years of hard work to get ranking, and oftentimes rankings will bounce up and down and can stress you out if you watch the daily fluctuations too closely.
- Email and search spam sucks and hurts everyone including yourself in the long run if you spam. If blackhat SEO’s would start doing a really good job of spamming things then people would stop searching as much and online commerce would be greatly impacted etc. or people would cry out for the government to take over the internet etc. Do the right thing, think about your client, but also about he big picture.
- Content is king, not just design or your site, not excessive sales tactics, not pushing, If your site doesn’t offering anything of unique value, go back and work on it until it does, Sure and steady wins the race- Doing a little content generation everyday and a little bit of SEO everyday is smarter then going all crazy in spurts with the SEO and worst yet when nothing is measured. Put video, blogs, forums, photos, articles etc on your site, keep your site fresh and high quality.
- Measure, and use analytics, study them, try to understand the patterns of traffic on your site, ask questions.
- Test, do A/B testing, and Gasalt testing etc, and test your code, test your changes.
- Take Action and Improve, and go back to step#8 and repeat forever. Don’t just look at your analytics and discover or notice something then tell yourself that you’ll get to it later when you have more time. Do it now, make a list of things you are going to change and test out on the site, with a date that you will review the results and make any further changes.
Posted in SEO-Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized | No Comments »
