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Understanding the Many Facets of SEO Consulting

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

SEO consulting has become an integral part of Internet marketing success in today’s saturated web world. As corporate America inevitably shifts to a focus on online information and transactions, the reputation of a company can be made or broken in a matter of mouse clicks. As a result, the importance of being “found” online and being found the right way cannot be overstated.

Many companies understand the need for optimization of their webpages, but know little about how to make it effectively happen. Half-hearted optimization attempts or those created by employees who are untrained in the area of SEO can easily sink a business rather than help it rise above.

A certified SEO consultant can help a business design a plan for their website and their company, helping them to rank on the first page of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, in addition to any number of smaller and more specifically-focused search engines. However, SEO consulting is not simply limited to being #1 on every page. There are multiple facets to any solid SEO campaign, and every business would do well to meet with an SEO consultant to discuss which parts of keyword and website optimization would be most beneficial to their unique goals. Perhaps the best way to understand the impact of SEO consulting is to briefly examine five of the ways in which a consultant can help grow a business by effectively managing a client’s online presence.

First, SEO consultants can take a look at a company’s local presence. How well is the business known in the neighborhood and the community? If the answer is not at all and its target market is its immediate surroundings, then it may be best to undergo a consultation for a local SEO campaign. Specialists can help to get the business listed in multiple local directories, as well as the larger national directories, to get the process of positive recognition started. The most loyal and dedicated customers can be some of the best supporters of a business, both by word-of-mouth and online.

However, local optimization is often not enough for many companies – merely an excellent first step on the long road to online success. SEO consultants can also examine a business’s national footprint, and determine how to most effectively increase their online profile. Using the latest Web 2.0 technology, a solid SEO consulting program can drive the right kind of traffic to a company’s website – the kind that is interested not simply in “window shopping”, but that has a strong chance of converting and re-visiting.

SEO consulting can also take the form of customized packages, such as a focus on individual product submission to search engines for companies that are heavily involved in E-commerce. For these companies, hiring a consultant to enter each of their products individually into engines such as Google can dramatically increase sales volume.

While SEO consultants typically focus on ways to drive traffic to a company’s webpage and to make sure that information about the company is easily available, there are situations in which reverse SEO consulting can be useful. In these instances, incorrect or damaging information about the company may have become public or highly ranked, and an SEO consultant can help to ensure that this misinformation is pushed to the far recesses of major search engines, and supplanted with updated and corrected data.

Search engine optimization and the submission of the relevant details to major search engines are practices that require planning and research. Finding the right SEO consultant to provide effective services at a reasonable price can vastly improve a company’s Internet presence.

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With 20 years in marketing, 10 in online marketing, Principals of Rostin Ventures are on the cutting edge. Combining Social Media Optimization with more traditional SEO and SEM methods, Rostin Ventures is a consulting firm specializing in enhancing clients’ online presence and managing their public relations online. SEO, SEM and ORM, Online Reputation Management, are combined in this successful formula. http://www.rostinventures.com

Social Media Optimization- Four Rules for Success

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

Social media optimization is a way for organizations and individuals to generate publicity through social networking tools like Twitter and LinkedIn, online communities like Facebook, and automated tools like TwitterFeed and Ping.fm. The term “social media optimization” was originally coined by SEO consultant extraordinaire, Rohit Bhargava, the senior vice president of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and author of the Influential Marketing Blog. (Bhargava’s work was so groundbreaking, Jeremiah Owyang, another social media optimization expert, even dovetailed a few of his own rules to the original work.)

Social media optimization is basically a way to promote your blog, website, or even your company’s brand, through social media, without being obnoxious or overtly commercial. Sure, you can blanket sites like Twitter with “Want to lose weight? Download my free report, ’19 Ways to Lose Weight Fast’” repeatedly, or brag about your latest affiliate paycheck, but that’s not going to get you any followers. At least none worth talking to.

Bhargava terms these people”Twankers” (people who use Twitter for one-way broadcasts about their own greatness) and “Twidiots” (people who only tweet insignificant things like their latest press release or what they had for breakfast). If you’re just having one-way conversations and telling people about the minor, mundane details of your company, you’re not providing any value, and your SMO efforts will be wasted.

Whether you are an SEO consultant or you are new to social media marketing, there are a few rules you need to follow in order to be effective. Bhargava’s five rules of social media optimization included important things like increasing your linkability, helping your content travel, and encouraging the mash up. To that, we would add our own four rules.

• Focus on a few networks, not many. Many social media optimization beginners make the mistake of joining as many social networks as they can, and getting a few followers in each. The problem is you’re getting 10 or 20 followers in 10 networks, rather than 400 or 500 in 2 networks. If you take this narrow route, chances are you will attract the same followers in each one.
• Find people in allied fields, not just your own, to improve your social media optimization. Think referrals, not customers. If you’re in the financial services industry, don’t just focus on finding people who need to invest. Connect with people who can refer those same people to you, like lawyers, real estate agents, bankers, and anyone else who has clients who will need the financial services you offer.
• Provide real value to others. Telling people how they can earn money while they sleep, or “Lose Weight Fast!!!” is not valuable. Steering people to a site that features recipes for people who are trying a low-carb diet, or writing a blog post about the top three fat-burning foods is valuable social media optimization. Refer people to helpful websites, even if they’re not your own. And don’t be nervous about asking questions of your own. It makes you look like a real person, and not just a know-it-all.
• Commit to a social media optimization program for the long haul. It’s not enough to just use it a few times and be done with it. This is an ongoing process. You wouldn’t take the time to cultivate a new friend and then never hang out with them, would you? Some of these contacts will become your friends online. Ignore them, and you’ll waste all the effort you put into your social media optimization and developing those relationships. Remember, social media marketing is actually about building real relationships, not just broadcasting one-way information. That’s what a TV is for.

By starting a social media optimization program, you’ll accomplish two things: 1) You’ll become a thought leader in your chosen field, and 2) your expertise will lead to more and bigger clients or job opportunities.

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Rostin Reagor Smith, RRS, is on the cutting edge. With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, they have combinined Social Media Optimization with more traditional SEO and SEM methods. RRS is a consulting firm specializing in enhancing clients’ online presence and managing their public relations online. SEO, SEM and Online Reputation Management are combined in this successful formula. – Julie Ann Ross

SEM SEO Experts Avoid 10 Years of SEO Consulting Mistakes Using Black Hat Marketing Techniques

By Rostin Reagor Smith in Featured

SEM SEO Experts are finding ways of establishing higher ranking in search engine results by serving quality content to users. Over the past 10 years, SEO techniques have evolved with the demand of the search engines to serve quality search results to users requesting information. It all comes down to user experience and what online marketing professionals are doing to contribute to optimal search engine results. This evolution in demand for higher quality search results has forced SEO Consultants to develop new strategies for higher ranking. These online marketing professionals have learned from history and are achieving higher rankings for their clients by avoiding black hat marketing techniques. Whether you enjoyed history class or slept through it, you cannot afford to miss this lesson. Sleep too long and you may miss some important pointers from our marketing predecessors.

Ten years ago, the online marketing industry was comprised of traditional marketing professionals with a desire to bring their products to the online market. Most companies interested in marketing products online were marketing to consumers in ecommerce environments. A major consideration in any marketing plan included online traffic generated from search engines. In order to increase search engine traffic, black hat marketing techniques were used frequently to market products online. Keyword stuffing was a frequently used technique by SEO Consultants to achieve higher search engine ranking. Attempting to gain high rankings for a specifically targeted keyword or phrase, SEO Consultants would employ a keyword density of up to 50% to secure first page, first position listings in search engines. Needless to say, the results found by search engine users were less than optimal and the search engines were not serving the quality search engine results they were seeking for users on Yahoo, MSN, or Google.

Another tactic used by online marketers of the past was the establishment of link farms. That practice continues today. Over the past 10 years, SEO Consultants have used link farms to establish higher search engine rankings for their clients. Considered by most experts as black hat marketing techniques, link farms are a bank of links on a page which is established without a relevant theme or associated content to the link farm page. Since search engine optimization professionals realized a large factor in ranking depended upon the number of backlinks to their site, SEO Consulting firms of yesterday were allowing clients to establish links to any page online, regardless of the theme of the website. Today, search marketing experts are finding ways to establish backlinks from relevant theme associated content. By establishing relevant links within a theme or category, a website will be perceived at a higher value to the search engines for that particular category. SEO Consultants of today are finding that a higher perceived value within a category by Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, gives a website the ability to rank higher in search engine results.

Pop-up advertising and Spam are black hat marketing techniques once used by experts in online marketing to achieve higher search engine ranking. Today, search engines still use traffic as a factor in search engine ranking. However submission of identical content within comments on websites, creating identical pages linked to website content, or employing advertising companies to spam online users with pop up or pop under ads just to increase website traffic, will no longer assist websites in higher ranking. Quite the contrary, search engines are penalizing websites which employ black hat marketing. The penalty for using spam techniques can be as minor as a lower value to the search engines and associated search results ranking. The penalty of using black hat marketing techniques can be as severe as delisting with search engines for 6 months or longer.

Studying history gives us the opportunity to learn from our predecessors. The growth of the online marketing industry has established an incentivized environment for increased knowledge in the field of search engine optimization. These new consultants are including optimization of social media content, web 2.0 content and applications, article marketing, RSS feeds, podcasts, and video marketing to communicate directly with consumers at a level expected by the online market. The days of serving irrelevant content to online users and expecting to benefit from the dissemination of that content no longer exist. SEM SEO Experts of today have modified the practices of yesterday to offer techniques to their clients which are ranking higher with the search engines. These new techniques are more effective because they offer users the quality content for which they are requesting information. We are not only learning from the mistakes of our industry’s past, but the evolution of these new practices of online marketing professionals is providing a higher quality online experience.

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With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith has refined the SEM SEO Expert Formula. Hundreds of case studies have combined to build the formula that drives search engine ranking through social marketing and web 2.0 communities and resources.

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