SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

Think about this for a moment – how many ways can you ask someone for directions to a restaurant? I’m sure there are three or four ways we can all think of off the top of our heads, and in reality there are probably hundreds of different ways we could all ask the same question. Now think about the same scenario, except this time instead of asking someone they are typing in the query into a search engine. How in the world you can you apply SEO techniques to help you get the maximum value for queries and ad campaigns without having to design the site around every possible combination?

Hey, let’s face it – you can have the best content in the world and you can still be buried so deep in the search results that you might as well not even exist. SEO companies know that the most important factor in getting a site up in rankings is having good inbound links to the content you have on the website. Amazingly getting good links (emphasis on the good) is one of the trickiest parts of SEO and one which it seems we all are constantly trying to master.

So you’ve worked hard to get your site SEO optimized with quality content that should score you big points in the rankings; or maybe you have signed on a new client who wants you to help them get recognized better out there in the search world by contracting your SEO services. Whatever the case you will probably find in your SEO analysis that a number of “bad sites” are linking to you and the question on your mind is, “How is this going to affect my ranking?”

I remember a teacher telling me one time that if we never knew where we had been then we’d never know where we are going. She was so right. That same advice also holds true for website optimization and measuring SEO results. How many times have you walked onto a project and been told, “Just make it better”. What does “better” mean? How do we know when we’ve reached “better”? Without metrics about a websites performance you could end up spending 75% of your time on the part of the site that only gets 5% of the visits.

It’s pretty amazing that even in the global economic slowdown that most SEO service firms continue to see robust business. In fact, some say that business has never been so good – obviously companies believe in the power of SEO and the benefits it brings their business and their bottom line. It’s because we are remaining so busy that we tend to never look back at completed projects and do a retrospective to see how we could have improved, or assess what we promised the customer versus what we actually delivered.

Let’s be honest – every time we are talking to people about SEO or search engines we don’t say “search engine” or “Yahoo” or anything else; we refer to search as “Google” as if there was only one search engine in the world. With over 63% of the market share it’s no reason why Google has become a synonym for search engine – they practically own the entire market. Yet is it good that one company owns most of the market for search? Are we losing out on innovation and a balanced marketplace since there is no real competition to Google? And, finally, why should an SEO company care?

We all know about skeletons in the closet that can pop out years later and have potentially destructive consequences on one’s career. What’s true in real life is also true on the SEO front – if you aren’t careful when taking on new projects and clients you can have a lot of their “skeletons” falling out of virtual closet with you left to try and stuff them all back in.
Ask yourself this: When a new client or project comes along how well do you research what has been done marketing and SEO-wize before you came along? Many of us leave ourselves wide open to walk into sites and work with clients whose shady search engine optimization practices of the past are haunting them – and you are left to take the blame!

Is it a recession or a depression? It’s getting hard to tell. Each day brings more stories about companies laying off thousands, budgets getting slashed and even Forrester Research saying that IT spending for 2009 will be anemic. That’s why it may be surprising to hear that amongst all of this bad news that SEO spending is keeping pace and in some cases increasing despite the downtrodden economy. What makes SEO immune from the downturn? Could it be that SEO has a proven track record of getting return on investment, or is it just a safe haven to invest in during troubled times? Let’s look at some of the top reasons SEO continues to be funded in this rough economy

What’s worse than having old content, or no content at all for search engine optimization? Duplicate content – the SEO killer! Search engines can penalize your site if it finds the same content on your site that they find at others – they may even stop indexing your pages altogether, a process that some people know all too well how hard it is to get re-indexed! Yet, if your site has user-generated content how do you stop them from posting the same information on your site that they have at ten different other sites?

We all know that great content is the key to search engine optimization, but what many of us don’t know is what exactly great content is. Great content is what makes others not only visit your site to read your information, but also makes them want to link back and reference your information over and over again. Here are some ideas to help you discover what great content is and how you can create it on your sites.