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By Marshall Adler in Featured

Online competitive intelligence tools are fast becoming a popular resource for Internet Marketers, Entrepreneurs and Small Business owners. As the need to stay #1 in your field increases, so will the number of people who continue to seek out new ways to spy on competitors.

I know many of you who read this may be experienced marketers and will probably already have your own set of online competitive intelligence tools and that’s totally okay. I wrote this article to name essentially my favorite top three tools and online resources for spying on the competition.

1. Altavista – A Rarely Used Search Engine Anymore!

I find it interesting how Yahoo, Bing & Google have practically taken over the entire Internet. Nearly 7 out of every 10 web users have at least one or more of these major engines as their “go-to” starting point for most searches. The others use Ask.com, Aol.com etc.

But AltaVista.com was popular back when I was in 9th grade (I’m 27 now) and I used to love searching for things on there. Now I actually use it a lot more because I discovered something quite amazing.

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.

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

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

Reverse SEO fits seamlessly within the context of your online reputation management (ORM) program.It is the quickest, most effective solution for dealing with bad press that has surfaced on the search engines about you or your company. By pushing negative listings from the front page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, reverse SEO shields you from the damaging commentary of others.

Negative publicity online has become one of the most frustrating challenges for companies. It is typically anonymous. Names are often unattached to forum threads, blog posts, and even entire websites. Therefore,it is difficult to track and address the source of the complaint. Moreover, the growing popularity of social networking platforms has made it easier than ever for anyone with a mild grievance to give weight to their grudge. If you or your company have been the target of bad press online, it may be time to launch a reverse SEO campaign.

In this article, we’ll clarify how negative publicity gains traction within the search engines, and how it can lead to a public relations nightmare. We’ll also provide a working blueprint for executing a reverse SEO campaign and controlling the damage.

Controlling Bad Publicity With Reverse Search Engine Optimization

To appreciate why reverse SEO is effective, you should understand how negative press takes root within the top search listings in the first place. Google, Yahoo, and Bing rank pages based on a large number of criteria. If a website and its individual pages satisfy the most important of those criteria, those pages will rank well.

A lot of the bad press that targets companies (possibly even your own) is placed on websites that meet key ranking parameters in the search algorithms. That means the negative publicity can climb into the top positions and gain exposure. When people search for you or your company, they’ll see the bad press. That damages your reputation.

Reverse search engine optimization is an ORM strategy that pushes negative publicity from the top search positions. By moving the bad press off the first page of listings, reverse SEO limits its exposure and stifles its impact.

Ingredients For An Effective Reverse SEO Campaign

Like search engine marketing, reverse SEO uses a methodical, multi-pronged approach to protect your online reputation. The first step is to identify the sites and pages that contain negative publicity about your company, and are ranking for important keywords. Those keywords might include your name, that of your company, or key employees.

The second step of reverse SEO is to analyze those sites and pages for their respective ranking authority. That will help you determine the effort and tools you’ll need to use in order to move them from the first page of listings within Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A negative PR blitz that is spreading across the social networking sites is more difficult to remove than a single blog post that is on a non-authoritative domain.

The third step is to gather the necessary tools and execute your reverse SEO campaign. Utilization of optimization tools such as press releases, a new network of competing sites and blogs, social media profiles, and social bookmarking programs. Reverse SEO may also include heavy content syndication to build high-quality links. A search engine marketing specialist will have these tools at their disposal.

Reverse SEO Begins Before Negative Press Emerges

The best time to launch a reverse SEO campaign is before bad publicity appears in the search engines. This is due to the way that the pages link. A page will rank well within the search engines if there are enough thematic links pointing toward it. However, once it ranks, it will gain exposure. That exacerbates the problem.

Negative press can spread rapidly as people attach the press to their own blogs, sites, forums, and social media accounts. That creates a growing portfolio of links pointing toward the damaging press, cementing its position in the top listings. It becomes more difficult to address. By launching a reverse SEO campaign upfront, you can prevent the negative publicity from gaining exposure in the first place.

Protect Your Online Reputation With Reverse SEO

Reverse SEO should play a key role in your online reputation management program. It is far too easy for unsatisfied customers, resentful employees, lazy journalists, and malicious competitors to tarnish your name. And when it happens, it is usually done under the cover of anonymity. Anonymity makes the complaint or grievance impossible to address in private.

Launch your reverse SEO campaign now – before trouble strikes and the damage begins to gain momentum in the search engines. In a year’s time, you’ll be glad you did.

Rostin Ventures principals have extensive experience in restoring reputations online, using Reverse SEO among other tactics to provide positive Online Reputation Management Services (ORM Services). When an individual or company name is being searched in Google, Yahoo, Bing and an undesired page or website appears, Rostin Ventures can push the negative page back in the search results where it will rarely, if ever be found.

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

Backlinks are a key component in search engine optimization. Search engine consultants talk about the importance of backlinks for achieving higher search engine ranking. That’s because the more one-way backlinks you have leading to your website, the more important the search engines believe your page to be.

There are two types of backlinks: one-way links and reciprocal links.

One-Way Links are basically backlinks that only go one direction. Maybe it’s a link that goes from your website to another website. Or maybe it’s a link that goes from another site to yours. Either way, it’s only going one way.

Reciprocal Links are backlinks that go from one website to another, and then back to the original website.

It’s important to differentiate between one-way back links versus reciprocal links. Many search engine optimization experts believe that one-way back links are more valuable than reciprocal links because they’re much harder to earn. The thinking is that since they’re harder to earn, they must be more valuable, which means other people think very highly of your site. If people think highly of your site, it must be an important site, which means the search engines will give it a higher ranking than those sites that do not have a lot of one-way backlinks.

As search engines like Google grow and improve, they’re putting more emphasis on how popular a website is, not whether they use all the right keywords. This popularity is measured through one-way backlinks. They’re like votes to Google, and search engine ranking is more like a popularity contest: have a lot of links to your site and your site achieves a high ranking. The easiest way to find the number of backlinks that lead to your site is to visit Google or Yahoo! and type in the following command:

link:www.yourwebsite.com

You will be shown a list of all the websites that have backlinks to your own domain. If you want to see who has links back to a particular page on your site, then type in the whole URL to that individual page.

Although no one can be sure of the exact algorithm Google and Yahoo use to rank sites, it’s commonly believed that if a website has more backlinks, it will achieve a higher search engine ranking. There are other factors that go into the whole search engine ranking, but backlinks are one of the more important ones.

But it’s important you have good quality backlinks, not just links that appear on any page you can find, like a link farm or sticking a comment on a page that has nothing to do with your website at all. That is, if you sell hammers, don’t put any backlinks on a page that sells children’s shoes.

That’s because search engines like Google have started cracking down on link farms and backlinks spammers. The search engine spiders know how to tell the difference between backlinks on a link farm and links on a quality website. If you are caught spamming, you will be dropped in the rankings, or possibly even dropped completely from Google’s index.

So you need to pay attention to the quality of your backlinks, now more than ever. One way to do this is to make sure you use the proper anchor text in your backlinks. For example, do not ever hot-link the words “click here.” What you’re basically telling the search engine spiders is that the website is about Click Here. Instead, use the keywords about the site that the backlinks are leading to. If you’re creating backlinks to a site about hammers, put the word hammers in your links. “Click here” isn’t about hammers.

In short, if you want some great search engine results, be sure to include backlinks as part of your search engine optimization strategy. You’ll see it pay off with improved search engine rankings.

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 Media Optimization, Online Reputation Management, Social Marketing, Link Building and web 2.0 communities and resources.

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.

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

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.

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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