Can DIY SEO Work For Your Business?

By Carl Weiss & Hector Cisneros

Courtesy of Flickr

If you own a small business and have a website, or plan to launch a basic business website in order to get more visibility, no doubt you’ve heard about the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website. This is especially important if you plan on selling goods directly on your site.  The rub is that many times web designers spend more time fretting on form rather than function.  As a result, many websites we’ve surveyed don’t have many of the On-Page SEO elements that are needed to get properly indexed by the search engines. 

Google’s Secret Ranking System - Harder for You, More Profits for Them

By Hector Cisneros

Courtesy of Flickr

Anyone that advertises on the internet today is aware that Google has changed it's search ranking algorithms several times this year. In April many website owners found that they had suddenly lost their page one ranking. Many fell off the first four pages altogether. Google’s Penguin and Panda updates altered search so that you could no longer get page one position with black hat techniques alone. Google announced that they were doing this because they want page listing to be decided based on the value provided by the page’s content, not by gaming the system with technical tricks. Google wants a true popularity contest based on good content.

Their new algorithms make it much harder to use black hat tricks to get on page one. Keyword relevance, content relevance plus timely and consistency are now king. Positive feedback and social media usage now denote "more meaningful value." What this all means to the average business owner is that it’s much harder to get on page one than ever before.

The Tao of SEO

by Carl Weiss

Courtesy of flickr.com

When it comes to search engine optimization, most people think of it as some kind of religious cult where members speak in tongues, intoning such mantras as “SERPS,” “Meta Data,” “Linkbait,” and “AJAX,” as though they were trying somehow to transmute lead into gold.  Worst of all, there is so much conflicting data out there regarding the ever changing world of SEO that keeping current is almost a full time job in itself.  Add to this the fact that no sooner do you get a bead on what the search engines want, when they up and change their algorithm (as Google recently did with their Penguin Update), making the analogy to sorcery even more poignant as your listing disappears like a puff of smoke.  So, if you don’t want to have to start the process from scratch every time the search engines decide to do a little spring cleaning, this is what you need to know: