photo credit: Tony Webster

Most of them are pretty worthless: They either nave no PageRank, no traffic or allow no dofollow links (unless you upgrade and pay between $1 and $50). But there are some press release distribution sites that have PageRank, good traffic and allow links that are dofollow.

If a press release service is not syndicated by Google News, it’s plain worthless. I’ve submitted to them just to have some more meat for the story. If I would have only used services that submit to Google, you might have take that fact for granted.

By the way, there is one secret weapon in regards to press release services. It brings you the PR News Wire distribution (at least the online part) for only $350 as opposed to $650 directly. Just give me a call to find out more

photo credit: stefanopa

A few days to 1 Month
Google discovers your site and starts to index a handful pages. If your page can not be found in Google after a month, you must have committed some serious blunders.

2 to 3 Months
In the first few months Google starts to index your web site. Not all pages are indexed yet. Google determines a crawl schedule. It is very important that you add fresh, unique content at least on a weekly basis and add backlinks from relevant pages. Depending on your niche and on your efforts, the PageRank should be between 0 and 4 by now. Yes, it is true, PR4 is possible after 3 months.

6 Months
By the end of the 6th months, all your pages should be indexed completely and Google digests your backlinks to determine your ranking. Some of your keywords start to nip from the first page. You should continue to add relevant backlinks and unique content on a regular basis. The Pagerank can improve slightly.

12 – 24 Months
Now you should see a marked increase in traffic, as well as a much improved PageRank and some stable ranks for your keywords. A PageRank of 5 to 6 is possible now. If you are doing at least some things right, Google should trust your site now. But careful: don’t stop the engines now or your site will crash badly.

Another thing: Don’t expect to get a page one listing for any meaningful keyword by “investing” a couple hundred dollars. That will not happen! For any industry you will find some guys with very deep pockets. That means you are competing against real SEO budgets.

However, the power of the Internet makes sure the competition is healthy. This means that a store that’s only a few miles from your store and is nearer to a major city doesn’t mean that it will be ranking higher than you. The only way this has any of affect at all is when your store is at a large distance, over 20 miles. Then in that case, the distance becomes a factor.

You might be surprised and at the same time happy to know that it doesn’t take anything different to boost your ranking in Local Google search, it’s pretty much the same. For example, the crucial aspects such as on page and off page SEO will still play a major role in the ranking of your website. If your locally targeted website contains content that’s SEO optimized with the right keyword density, then it will definitely be ranking higher than the others.

As with any regular search engine optimization, when you use the right keywords on your site, your rankings will dramatically improve in Google’s local searches. Just make sure your address appears at various places on your website, so that it can be crawled. Also have your city name inserted in important places such as the headings and of course, the title tags. When you do this, the chances of your site coming up when someone searches using your local keywords get strong.

If you’ve tried Google SEO for a while now, you know how much value Google gives to anchor text, so it’s important to have your related local keywords in your anchor text when linking to any external site that’s relevant (Example: SEO Services Tampa). Keep in mind that Google gives high emphasis to the position of the text appearing on the page. If all your targeted keywords are brought together and aren’t spaced out, it may affect your local ranking.

Finally, you also have to keep in mind what kind of rating your business has in the offline/real world. For instance, if you own a 5 star hotel, it will automatically be ranked higher than a 3 star hotel. That’s how Google works. All those sites that have a good reputation and a well known business are going to get a higher rank in Google local searches. Apart from this, manually adding your business to Google’s local search by going to their site is a good idea. This can give you a faster ranking. Remember, the longer your business stays on their listing, the higher it will be ranked. Businesses that aren’t long term and don’t stay around for long don’t get to rank well.

photo credit: davedehetre

Keyword Stuffing

This is undoubtedly one of the biggest and the most expensive mistakes one can make. You can also call the act of keyword stuffing “over optimizing”. A lot of people and web designers feel that when they add a desired keyword into the content of a page and its template, they will increase the chances of getting ranked higher. However, one must keep in mind that the search engines are intelligent. They look for a natural flow of keywords within the content body of the site. If you try to stuff your page with keywords, then it will be detected by them very easily. It’s usually fairly easy to satisfy the search engines: Just write naturally. The keyword density will most likely be fine. If your site offers good, fresh, quality content and the keywords are relevant to the theme of your site, then the search engines will reward you with a good ranking.

Build It, and It Will Rank

It’s hard to believe but there are still people out there who have this assumption that all they need to do is get their site indexed, search engines will rank it automatically in good positions over time. But they forget the fact that by injecting even the basic SEO practices into their website, they can rank better than the others. If a site is badly optimized, the chances are high that it will never be able to get a good ranking. Getting top search engine positions is not difficult, you have to do your homework first and implement the optimization process as much as you can, in a natural way.

Just Depending on Social Media

As we all know, social networking sites have gained a lot of popularity in the recent few months and there’s a big buzz around these, especially Twitter and Facebook. The reason is that they have spread by word of mouth and have made their way into people’s lives, becoming a need to them. But are they any good when it comes to link building? The right answer is they are worthless for SEO purposes. Facebook and Twitter might spit out quality traffic from time to time, but the backlinks you get from them are “No Follow”. This simply means that you won’t be getting any leverage from the links on these social sites. If you have been dependent on such sites to give you link juice, then you better start looking elsewhere.

Building Links Unethically

This is a serious issue that is growing day by day due to heavy competition. Many websites nowadays are trying to improve their rankings by unethical link building. There are unethical SEO companies out there who promise to give websites a large amount of links fast and easy. Even though they do deliver results and the links are indeed generated, the manner in which it is done is totally unethical and this could ultimately have your website banned from the search engines for indulging into unethical practices. If you’re outsourcing your work to a SEO company, make sure you know how the links are being generated, so that you avoid to get into trouble.

SEO or How to Get 'em boats out of da 'arbor                         Photo © CMJ Stock

When you are surfing the web, you may have noticed many websites with huge content on board yet with a few visitors. (You can get an idea how much traffic a web site has by checking it out at alexa.com.) Have you ever though why this is the case, I mean the little traffic? The only thing that they are lacking (assuming that they have sufficient and proper content) is search engine optimization. If that content and the website is correctly optimized for the search engines, it can drive a huge amount of traffic.

The search engine optimization aims at preparing the website to attain a better rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that the search engine optimization will involve refreshing every aspect of the website. Beginning from the URL and content, you will slowly be building links and will be working on submitting articles to article directories (Best bet here is www.ezinearticles.com) containing links to your website. All this is part of search engine optimization (SEO) and it is extremely important for the success of any online business. You will not get sales if you have not enough targeted visitors coming to your website.

Remember that believing that the visitors will come naturally to the website is a false concept. All you need to do to reject this belief is to make a search related to your keywords. How many pages do you see? A million or a thousand? Whatever the figure is, it is still huge. You will have to do things and you will need to put in effort in order to stand apart from others. Any natural or organic traffic will not come to your website if you are not located on the very first page of the search engine results.

If you have optimized your website, you might like to say that it cannot do anymore than what it is already doing. This again is not true. You can always improve anything and your websites is no exception. You can hire a search engine optimization professional and you will see the difference. Remember that hiring a professional is a job in itself and you must make sure that you are hiring the right person. Never believe in hiring the very first person who comes your way. Always perform tests and conduct interviews. Make sure that you are getting the best for your search engine optimization campaign.

Make sure that you are always adding excellent content on a regular basis to your website. All your search engine optimization efforts will dead end if you are not paying special attention to the content. Also make sure that the content is unique and is not copied from anywhere else (If in doubt, run it through copyscape.com).

Photo Credit: CMJ Stock

How long does it take until you see results? It is very difficult to give a general answer on this. Once I start on a project, you’ll usually see some kind of movement within the first 3 to 4 weeks. But that does not mean much. You will see a handful of visitors and your ranking for your targeted keywords will go from maybe nowhere to number 30 or 40.

A few weeks later,  about 6 to 8 weeks you should see some further climbing up the ranks. Your main keyword or keywords will by now probably be sitting on the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Depending on your market, that can already mean some kind of traffic, but usually it’s just a trickle.

“Since there are only 10 places and many millions of websites you can’t just expect to be lucky enough to appear on the first page for your target keyword and phrases. It takes planning, hard work and a certain amount of expertise. That’s where SEO comes in. Optimizing your website involves work both on and off of the pages. It is important that your site is built to a high standard, all the links must work and the content has to be both keyword rich and relevant.” Via google-pageone.co.uk

After 3 to 6 month, with ongoing search engine optimization work, you should see your main keyword appear on the first page of the results. And another 6 to 8 month later should be rewarded with some solid top rankings. This could mean Google #1, or at least on page 1 and within the  3 to 5.

But all this depends on so many factors, that it is very difficult to give an answer that is true for the majority of the cases. Or to state it different: I have seem sites going from nowhere (just registered) to solid top rankings with several weeks and on other sites it too almost 2 years of solid work to achieve similar results.

So, what do we learn from that? Doing the right things, doing just enough of it and your site will be at or near the top. If you want to get an idea what it takes to achieve excellent results, I suggest to read Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist. If you calculate several months and don’t freak out if the phone does not ring off the hook after a week or two, I can work with or for you. If you need miracles over night, go fishing elsewhere (and hope to not get caught with your pants down…).

photo credit: Christopher Jeschke Stock Photo Blog

Google Top Ranking - Soar Above Your Competition

First you start with you own web site. You create a page on your site and make sure that the keyword in in the name of that page. If you ant to rank for “blue widgets”, your site should already be about “widgets” and the domain would ideally contain the term “widgets”. The full URL of your page would then be something like widgets.com/buy-blue-widgets.html.

On the page itself you would make sure that the title tag would be something like “buy blue widgets” and that the Meta description tag would contain a nice and concise description, also containing the words “buy blue widgets”.

Then you would write a nice article on “buy blue widgets” that would contain the phrase “buy blue widgets” and natural variation thereof sprinkled nicely into the text (naturally, no stuffing please). The title of your article would have “buy blue widgets” in h1 or h2 tags.

In the navigation you would link to other documents on your site about widgets and you would also link to industry or history resources on “buy blue widgets” on other sites.

Then you would build links from other pages on your site pointing to the “buy blue widgets” page, using the anchor text “buy blue widgets” and natural variations thereof. You would also build a nice video on how to use blue widgets and put it on your “blue widgets” page.

This are the main on page SEO factors and should be sufficient in most cases ( I assume that you make sure the page loads fast and the html code is readable by ‘dem’ stupid browsers).

Now you go into the off page SEO. First you check your competition. You can do that directly on Google or you can use something like nichewatch.com for example (It’s a free tool that shows you the competion for any given keyword).

Then you get a link from every (or as close to every) page that ranks well for “buy blue widgets”. With some pages it will be easy, as they might be articles on a public article directory, or on dmoz.org or other directories. If you can’t get a direct link from a particular page, you can either out-create the link or knock the page out of its place.

By out-create the link I mean that you create more links from other pages that also rank for that keyword or get links from pages that at least rank well in that niche or industry.

You might be wondering how to knock out a page from its Google listing. In short: you duplicate their link profile and then add a few more. Stay tuned for a detailed article on how to de-throne a Google listing.

Once you are par with your competition, you can throw in some additional dofollow links with your anchor text and you’re all set. If you need to find dofollow blogs, I can recommend the DoFollow Blog Directory & Compendium.

photo credit: aresauburn™

If you happen to do business in Tampa or the Tampa Bay Area, you might be searching for a company that can deliver SEO Services in Tampa. Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Here are a few of the SEO Services that I can offer:

- On page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

• Suggesting correct usage of  Title Tags, Meta Description Tag, Meta Keyword Tag, H1, H2, H3, H4 Tags
• Suggestions regarding site navigation and layout
• Proper usage of keywords in domain name, URL etc.
• Internal links
• Outgoing links

- Off page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

• Link building campaigns
• Local listings (be found on searches for your keyword followed by Tampa, Clearwater, St. Petersburg etc.)
• Blog development and blog writing
• Press release writing and distribution
• Directory submissions

So, if you are looking for SEO Services in Tampa or any of the cities in the Tampa Bay area, like Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Bradenton, Brandon, Largo, Lakeland, Palm Harbor, Sarasota, Spring Hill, Town ‘n’ Country, please contact me.

photo credit: zipckr

By exposing your content to this particular audience you will increase your authority status, as well as getting additional traffic and some links that contribute to your site. make sure that the content that you create on an outside web 2.0 property is really stellar.

Each of these web 2.0 sites has a unique audience and they can either add value to your site (by voting, leaving comments etc.) or they can completely trash your site. So, make sure that you deliver a high value to these communities and you will be rewarded handsomely, not only by them, but also by Bing, Google and Yahoo.

What are Web 2.0 Properties?

Caroline Middlebrook defines this in an excellent post Link Building #2 – Web 2.0 Properties:

An Internet property is basically any kind of web page and web 2.0 is generally thought of to be interactive in some way allowing people to contribute to the site, rather than just read from it. A blog is web 2.0 (for the blogger), Facebook is web 2.0, Flickr is web 2.0 and social bookmarking sites are all web 2.0. It’s a broad word that encompasses many kinds of sites but what we’re interested in here are web 2.0 sites that allow you to have a slice of the Internet property for yourself – somewhere where you can create your own web page.

Here is a list of some Web 2.0 properties that you can use to create content on and in turn get backlinks for your SEO project:

squidoo.com

wordpress.com

blogsome.com

livejournal.com

weebly.com

blog.com

blog.co.uk

jimdo.com

blogger.com

blinkweb.com

freewebs.com

If you know of other High PR Web 2.0 properties that should be added to this list, please leave a comment.

As Nick from seoconsult writes:

Internal linking is an important part of SEO which can often be overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s far easier to solidify your internal links than it is to nurture links from external sites. A site with the right internal structure can score a higher ranking than a badly structured site with external links. Also, internal links are guaranteed to come from the page with the most authority on your business – your own.

If you have Blog that is powered by WordPress, you are lucky: There are several plugins that can help you build more internal links on the fly. It is called SEO Smart Links .

How does it Work?

SEO Smart Links scans your blog for keywords or phrases that match the titles of your posts and pages by default (and you can enable categories and tags matching too). These phrases are then turned into the links. The matching is case insensitive and the original case is preserved.

So If I mention “What Do I Have To Do For SEO With Bing?”, which is the title of one of my posts, it will be automatically converted into a link. This plugin improves your site’s interlinking markedly.

If you do not use wordpress, you still should consider building internal links. Just go over some of your older pages and add some internal links. While doing this you may also want to just add some updates here and there, which will be very favorably noticed by Search Engines.

Actually keeping your site up to date and adding new content on a regular basis is one of the most important SEO factors. If this seems too time consuming for your team, you can easily outsource this using services like odesk.com.