What's Up With SEO?

Courtesy of  Pixabay

A  Principled Guide To Search Engine Marketing

By Hector Cisneros

When it comes to working the web to win, there have been a lot of changes over the years; 

none more so than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Since Google's most recent update  called Hummingbird, many website owners and a number of professional optimizers have found themselves in a quandary when it comes to generating Page One search engine results.

SEO used to have a very specific meaning. Today, if you ask 100 different SEO experts what SEO means, you will get 100 different answers, many of which are still rooted in the way Search Engine Optimization used to work. There is an old saying that goes something like, “If you ask a carpenter how to build a house he will tell you use wood, a hammer and nails. If you ask a mason how to build a house, he will say with brick and mortar. Well Internet marketing experts also follow this line of thought. They base their answer on what they do (their particular niche of expertise) or who they have asked (Google, Yahoo, Bing, or third party research results). This article will aggregate what is known from many sources and provide answers that haven’t changed (even after Penguin, or its new successor, Hummingbird). If you are looking for a leg up on what it takes to climb up the ladder to Search Engine success, read this article and pass it along to your friends so that you, too, will know “What’s Up with SEO?”

English: A Saw-billed Hermit (Ramphodon naevius) Deutsch: Ein Sägeschnabel-Schattenkolibri (Ramphodon naevius) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Team Tech! The Next Wave in Internet Marketing

By Carl Weiss

Courtesy of Flickr

Ever wondered how large companies market their business on the internet? They hire a team of professional to get their message out day in and day out. What if there was a way for your small business to take advantage of Team Tech! Well there is and in this article we will be covering the Secrets of Team Tech and how to take advantage of them.

Working the web is no game for wimps.  It use to be as easy as posting your page information, making sure your meta tags were setup and you had created a few back links with other relevant websites. Those days are gone and today it takes guts, determination and staying power to play the game to win. 

Teams Win in the Search Engine Game

By Carl Weiss

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I often use analogies when I talk about advertising and marketing. Words like war, battle, game and winning all come to mind. Like most Americans, I enjoy a good football game. The rules are well-defined. We have professional referees keeping the game honest and of course, you have the players and their performance that makes winning or losing happen. In contrast, the search engine game has unpublished rules, Google is the referee throwing hidden flags and there are lots of players are trying to cheat the system.

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.

A Movie in Every Mailbox

Courtesy of www.instantvmail.com

By Carl Weiss

Want to get your message to the masses? Looking for a cost effective way to create leads and sales?  Why not try sending a video via email? While you can’t actually embed videos in every email, you can attach them to online newsletters such as Constant Contact.

With billions of videos being watched online monthly, it seems logical that businesses will want to maximize the marketing potential of video in such areas as email, newsletters, blogs and social networks.  What’s even better is the fact that a number of popular platforms are adding ways for their users to put a  movie in every emailbox.