Happy New Year from BigSERP!
We wish everyone a healthy and prosperous 2009.
Check back with us in early 2009 for a design revamp and some more great insight on the search engine marketing industry.
Thank you for your continued readership.
SEO Blog, Tools, Glossary, Internet Marketing Consulting
After racking up over 10 years of experience in Internet Marketing and Web Development I decided to take a division I started for a local Web Design firm and break it off into its own entity. This was June 2010 and this entity came to be known as imFORZA.
When I’m not working with my amazing team at imFORZA you will probably find me traveling, reading, playing with some new gadget or application and/or trying to help others turn their ideas into tangible, successful realities.
by Vinny
Happy New Year from BigSERP!
We wish everyone a healthy and prosperous 2009.
Check back with us in early 2009 for a design revamp and some more great insight on the search engine marketing industry.
Thank you for your continued readership.
by Vinny
We just wanted to let you all know that BigSERP is currently undergoing a massive redesign and overhaul, which has been one of the main reasons there has not been any recent discussions or posts. Worry not though, during this time we have not just been sitting on our hands waiting for the new design to be completed. We have actually been collecting a vast amount of useful information from Search Engine Marketing conferences, case studies and invaluable interactions with search marketing specialists in our industry. All of which will be available right here on BigSERP.com very shortly.
With that said, we would like to thank you for your interest in our expertise and spin on what is going on in the search engine marketing world and kindly ask that you continue to check back periodically because we are very close to our new site launch and many great articles and tools to help you.
As always, if you need any advice, help, tips, tricks, hints or if you just want to toss some ideas around then please feel free to drop us a line.
Thanks!
by Vinny
A common question we get with clients is why specific content pages might show up in the search engine results pages (SERP), but not the home page. The answer to the question actually first needs to nip the whole idea that having your content pages showing up on the first page of any search engine is bad. There’s no reason to prevent the search engines from indexing your site’s content pages, so you shouldn’t try and stop them; valuable traffic frequently enters websites on content pages in the search engine results.
As much as it would be ideal to have your polished branding be the only entry point into your site, the reality of it is that there’s no way to make your home page specific to all the phrases you want to show up for. That’s what the SEO content pages are for, to increase your chances of being ranked on all those specific key phrases. That’s not to say you can’t target 1-3 specific phrases for your homepage, in fact we encourage it through use of the title, META, h1 tags, bold emphasis, URL optimization, content, etc. But you can’t expect your home page to ever be the most relevant result for the dozens of phrases you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. If you don’t want the specific content pages to show up in the results anymore, they can be removed from the site and eventually the search engines will phase it out of the natural rankings. But you will lose any ranking associated with it, because that’s a page that the search engines value highly enough to rank for a reason.
Pay-per-click is the only way to force the search engines to connect a phrase to your home page. Optimizing your home page for the 1-3 phrases that are most critical to your business is the best way to go about promoting yourself to the search engines for natural ranking.
With interactive Flash and offers to convert by it, any home page could be an effective landing page. But the reason why we send people to a landing page is because it is more simplistic with its navigation and more aggressive in its approach to lead generation. If you’d rather just have qualified eyes on a site with PPC, you could send your PPC traffic there, but you probably won’t get as many people filling out the forms. Which we know from years of experience that if you aren’t getting inquiries, you probably won’t be happy with the results from your search engine marketing campaign.
Need help building a killer landing page that will yield a much higher ROI than just sending your PPC traffic to your site’s home page? Fill out the contact form on our site and we’ll be in touch about how we can help you out.
It is a myth that submitting hundreds of search engines makes any difference in the search engine rankings. If you’re marketing with us, when your site goes live we submit it, as a courtesy, to four major engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and DMOZ. There are other smaller engines that you can submit it to, but these four account for over 90% of the search volume on the internet so they are the only ones we bother with. Aggressively re-submitting your site to any of them also makes no difference; one time is all they need to include your site in their indexes. Multiple re-submissions can actually get your site blacklisted from the engines if done to an extreme.
Online marketing can yield the highest return on investment (ROI) of any form of advertising for your business. Knowing how to get started without sinking a lot of money down the drain can be risky, however. Finding reliable SEO/SEM experts to provide you with sound online marketing advice is very important.
How do you know a firm is reliable? Here are several factors to consider:
These are three things that will help you decide who to go with if you need help running your online marketing campaigns. For additional information on internet marketing and how it’s set up professionally, please use our site as a resource. And don’t hesitate to contact us using our form if you have any questions; our initial consultation is free.
You may have heard the term “landing page,” or may be quite familiar with it already. Either way, you must know this about them; landing pages can make or break your PPC/SEM campaigns! No matter how well your Adwords text ads target the right key phrases with the right marketing language, if your visitors end up on the wrong page when they click on your ads, then all is lost from a business standpoint.
Professional landing page designers know how to make a highly-relevant, attractive page that delivers specific, attractive offers that will make your potential clients interested in what you have to offer and cause them to respond. Different industries require their own unique tactics to convert, and having someone certified in setting everything up can make the difference between sinking thousands of dollars a month in SEM or getting a great ROI from your PPC campaigns.
Landing page design is an art form, requiring knowledge about human tendencies, effective marketing strategies, and technical expertise. In concert, all these things make your pages look great and give them a lot of value (a high “quality score”) to the search engines. Google and Yahoo take into account how good your landing page is; if it’s not coded right, or set up with relevant information to the keywords you’re bidding on, your campaign will be punished by higher costs for your terms. But well-made landing pages actually drive down the cost of your bids. This will make your advertising more cost-effective, and therefore give you more bang for your buck.
We’re of course happy to provide you with a free initial consultation if you’re wondering about having some landing pages set up professionally. One of our specialties is custom landing page design, so fill out one of our forms and we’ll be in touch soon.
Are you inundated with online marketing ads promising first-page placement for ridiculously low monthly fees? Well, chances are if you’ve done enough investigating to find this page, you are not likely to fall for that trick. Those types of services are usually provided by “black hat” SEO companies which will give you a great short-term gain only to be slapped down in the SERPs soon after by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other major search engines because of the shady techniques used to gain those temporary high positions.
Most “black hat” companies are a series of affiliated “link farms” and “junk web directories” that use the marketing power of hundreds of low-quality sites (some with a temporarily high PageRank) to artificially inflate the number of inbound links to the sites they are promoting. These one-way inbound links that establish the receiving site as the authority, act as votes in the eyes of the search engines. The more votes your site receives, the higher in the SERPs you can expect to climb.
But like a corrupt election campaign, anyone creating fake votes from ineligible sources will eventually get punished. The punishment for link schemes can be quick, harsh, and meted out with no notice whatsoever. One day, your business operation can be on the first page, and then the next, be taken out of the search engines altogether permanently. This amounts to blacklisting, and it’s very hard to get reincluded once your site falls out of favor with the search engines. That is because they know you were doing something wrong.
With so much on the line, of course you want to get up there in the search engines, but also do it the right way. The “white hat” way. We know all about safely building your online presence (and position in the engines) by making your site an online authority in your industry. Link building campaigns are not simple, and have a high-cost associated with them, but they are critical to your internet business. If you’d like more information on “white hat” link building solutions, please take us up on our free initial consultation.
It’s very important that you have a lot of content on your website, whether your site is for a book store or something more visual like an art gallery. The reason is that the search engines can’t see content that is not written out! And how are they going to index your site for the things you want to show up when you are virtually showing them a set of relatively blank pages?
Our goal with SEO content is to establish your website as an authority, one that the search engines will happily promote, by making your site a great resource to web surfers. By installing lots of pages of uniquely branded relevant content, your business will be taken seriously by Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines.
For some businesses in some industries, all it takes are several pages of finely-tuned SEO content to see first-page results on the SERPs. By targeting specific key phrases with their own pages of content, we make sure that the information on your site not only educates your visitors (and helps persuade them to choose you for their needs), but that it also is indexed properly by the search engines so that more natural (organic) traffic will reach your site in the long-term.
SEO content is a “white hat” technique that only adds value to your site. We don’t recommend (or engage in) keyword stuffing of your content. The search engines are getting very good at figuring out what kind of content is copied and pasted, derived from other pages, etc. So those who have the best writing in their industry are usually rewarded, so long as that content is installed on your website properly, which is an art form in and of itself.
If you have any additional questions about SEO content creation, we are happy to provide you with a free initial marketing consultation. Simply fill out one of the forms on our site.
If you are running your business online, and are tempted to dive into search engine marketing (SEM), we strongly recommend that you choose a professional pay-per-click (PPC) management firm instead of trying to run the campaigns yourself. There are going to be some rare cases when having a great deal of expertise in the setup and maintenance of SEM campaigns and landing pages will not be necessary, but a reputable PPC marketing company will set up your accounts properly, ensure that you aren’t wasting your money, and are targeting the traffic that is going to get you the best possible return on investment (ROI).
If you want to run the campaigns yourself, at least have a marketing firm set up the accounts for you. Their thousands of hours of trial and error with marketing campaigns will help you immensely from the targeting of the best keywords for your business to the creation of offer-specific landing pages which are built with the latest in marketing techniques and layouts.
If you feel totally comfortable setting up and running the campaigns on your own, then do yourself a favor and at least have some professionally designed landing pages or landing sites set up. They will maximize the number of conversions from your PPC/SEM traffic.
For more information on professional PPC management practices and services, please contact us using the forms on this site; we will happily provide you with a free initial consultation.