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Have you noticed a significant change to your website’s search engine placement of late? If so, it could very well be attributed to the recent Penguin update by Google. In a nutshell, this is another update designed to further reduce the amount spammy websites that appear on the search result pages. Does this mean that if your site was affected that it’s considered spam? No, not entirely. But what it may signal is that the links from other sites that are pointing to yours may in fact be of a questionable nature… at least in the eyes of Google’s new algorithm. One of the leading indicators for page rank is backlinks. And the links that point to your site is called your link profile. This might consist of a very few or several thousand. The more quality links that point to your website, the better your chances of improving its placement. With the Penguin update, it seems that the sites that are used to facilitate these links have now come under tighter scrutiny. It has always been Google’s policy to reward natural backlinks and to discount, or even penalize your site for those that are not. And like the usually unenforced law that states it’s illegal to spit on the sidewalk, this policy has now been promoted to a more severe status. So while its always been a ubiquitous practice with minimal consequence, the new course sets out to change this. Here’s what we believe are the causes and some solutions. Bad Neighbors – Links from sites with “bad” reputations, such as those with malware, numerous pop-ups, cloaked pages, etc., will have severe repercussions to your backlink profile. Paid Links – To help increase ranking for a particular keyword, a link is purchased using the keyword as the anchor-text. The anchor-text is the actual word used as the link. Using paid links has always been against Google’s guidelines, so in this case the solution is to remove these from your link profile. Guest Posts – This is and has always been an acceptable practice. In fact, it’s still one of the most effective techniques for building good backlinks. It consists of writing a good quality article on a relevant topic with a few backlinks. The potential problem this now creates with the Penguin update is that the site used for the quest post is under the same scrutiny. So if its determined to be a site whose purpose is to provide backlinks more than to provide real useful information, the detriments can flow back to you via the link you worked so hard to establish. The same is true for the flipside. If those who post on your site provide good articles, but whose backlinks point to low-quality sites, your site will be deemed an attributor. The solution is to request backlinks from questionable sites be removed and to more closely evaluate the backlinks contained in your quest posts. Article Sites – These have been around a long time, and up until Google’s last Panda update, have always been a regular part of many SEO’s arsenals. The Panda update which was recently refresh on April 19th demoted backlinks from most of these while the Penguin update has furthered this policy. The solution is to remove these in lieu of quality guest posts. Comment Spam – Anyone with a WordPress site should be very familiar with this tactic. It links within the comment signatures that use exact keywords that point back to the target site. The solution to this is stop doing it. Unfortunately, these may not be so easily removed since they reside in active and archived blog posts of other’s web properties. Again, none of this is new. This has been Google’s link scheming policy since the beginning. Here is a must-read book about the Google Panada Update  

For information, please see Google Penguin Update: 5 Common Issues

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After months of neglect of my own website, I decided it was time to clear my desk, shut down email, pour a cup of coffee and get to work…. work that took me into the wee hours of the morning… through the weekends… whatever it took to get it done while also keeping my client’s sites firing on all eight cylinders as well. What you are seeing now is the end result. As a professional SEO, I fall into the same category of most SEOs who, like myself, get so wrapped up with client projects that we tend to let our own websites fall by the wayside. This became blaringly apparent when I decided to take a look at the material. What I saw made me cringe! SEO is so fluid and so fast-changing that to keep up you must stay on your toes daily. So to keep the information as up to date as possible I have established a protocol of frequent updates. I hope to make it as informative and as useful as possible and to be able to teach you what I’ve learned and continue to learn on a daily basis!

For information, please see Neostead New Website Update

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Your online medium for driving brick-and-mortar sales Many small business owners wonder whether they should worry about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for their websites. This is like a brick and mortar store wondering whether they should put the name of their company on the front of their building; if they don’t, how will people find it, even those who are looking for it? Any small business owner who is serious about selling their product or service, needs to be serious about their presence on the web. Small businesses who will spend hundreds of dollars of precious capital on local advertising, but neglect a basic, professional website with ordering information and good SEO, might as well be trying to knit socks with one hand. Sure, you can do it, but it’s a heck of a lot harder than it ought to be. You could argue that good SEO and SEM are even MORE important for the small business, not less. As commerce moves online in ever-greater waves, having a shoddy, hard to find website—or, worse, having no website at all—is the best way NOT to build a solid customer base that there is. Some small businesses are concerned that SEO and SEM are too expensive. This is a reasonable concern, unless the business in question is spending valuable capital trying to draw in local customers, when for the same amount of money, they could be drawing in customers from all over the internet, and therefore all over the world, and increase their business exponentially. True, some SEO companies charge very high prices for the services they offer. Some of this (in my opinion) is due in part to supply-and-demand. That is, good SEOs with the resources available versus the current high demand from business owners and managers looking to get onboard. But a little online comparison shopping will quickly weed out the most expensive and, I should add, the least expensive. Cheap SEO companies probably won’t offer you all the services you need, or won’t perform services adequately. The remaining SEO companies are your best bets. In the end, the cost of online marketing really isn’t any greater than local marketing—but the rewards are huge.

For information, please see SEM for Small Businesses

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Expanding your market beyond the neighborhood. Hello friends, my name is Steve Lawrence. I am the founder of the SEO Houston firm, Neostead Web Development. Beyond that, I am a witness to countless success stories of how good web site design and professionally managed search engine marketing has turned a small start-up business into a major competitive force. With online advertising expenditures overtaking traditional methods, more and more business owners are redirecting marketing budgets to get exponentially more bang for the buck. This window of opportunity, however, is only being exploited by those who have had the opportunity to educate themselves to contemporary marketing trends. SEO in Houston has proven this time and time again. This topic was brought up in a discussion with a colleague of mine, Sharon Dotson, at Bayou City Public Relations who forwarded a report to me that stated more traditional advertising was still being purchased than first realized. What the report did not include were the millions of small business owners across America who were simply not savvy to the modern SEO technological advances, and who have never read, reviewed, pondered or even been approached by a search marketing representative. A Fictional Example Let’s use the fictional Houston business, “Billy Bob’s New Tire Emporium” as an example. Billy still spends 20% of his advertising budget on Billy Bob’s coffee mugs, another 10% on on Billy Bob Bobble Heads for his customer’s dashboards, and the remaining 70% on the local Nifty Nickel advertising circular. Given this scenario, Billy could spend a fortune and never reach beyond his immediate established market. How many Billy Bob’s are there across the country? How often does Billy’s rubber-stained fingers surf the Internet looking for new trends in search engine marketing? How many Houston SEO/SEM representatives have attempted to educate Billy about the phenomenal ROI of targeted SEM? I think you get the point. Gone Are The Days Of Carpet Bombing The fact is, educated business owners know beyond of shadow of a doubt that well executed SEO marketing strategies utilizing the powerfully effective methods of professional web site presentation, search engine optimization, Pay Per Click advertising, and precisely targeted web site marketing and promotion reap rewards far beyond what any other “carpet bombing” method can possibly provide. Still not convinced? Let’s look at a simple Pay Per Click ROI. Billy Bob’s New Tire Emporium Ad Campaign Let’s say Billy Bob purchases the keyword “new tires” for a price of $3.00 per click. And let’s say that over the course of the month 200 people clicked on Billy’s advertisement (remember, his potential market immediately went from a couple thousand who read the Nifty Nickel, to a few million who use Google!). Now let’s say that his conversion rate of visitors who just browsed his site versus those who made a purchase was a mere 2%. The ROI would be as follows: Number of clicks: 200 Conversion: 2% Cost Per Click: $3.00 Average Sale: $800 Campaign Cost: $600 Conversions: 4 Sales: $3,200 Profit: $2,600 ROI: 433.33% As you can clearly see, Billy’s $600 investment reaped a ROI of over 400%. And lest you think this is a pie-in-the-sky scenario unseen in the real world… THINK AGAIN! I see this kind of thing day in and day out. But instead of $600 investments with 400% ROI, many companies invest thousands per month with ROI percentages also in the thousands. And as fantastic as this is for small business and new start-ups, we haven’t even discussed organic search engine placement which is FREE! And this, my friends, is why you should take advantage of professional web design and search engine marketing as soon as feasibly possible. The playing field is indeed level. But only if you’re on it. So contact me right away and I’ll put together a plan to drive traffic to your site, increase your sales, and grow your business like nothing you’ve ever seen.

For information, please see SEO for Small Businesses

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Maximizing chances for success. So you’re just starting your business. You’ve got your business plan all laid out, your domain purchased, and you’re starting to think about designing your website. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about SEO. Why should you worry about SEO this early in the game? After all, you don’t even have a website yet; just a domain, and maybe a concept of what you want it to look like. Why not let SEO come later, once you’ve already established yourself on the web and have something for search engines to find? This line of reasoning confuses SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Yes, SEM is all about spreading word of your website through the internet, and for that, you generally have to have a website. (Although pre-launch buzz can be very useful, if you can find a company who can pull it off.) But SEO looks, not at the engines, but at your site. It asks “What can we do to optimize this site so that search engines will find it easily, crawl it often, and rank it high?” And that process begins with the beginning of the website. In fact, many SEO companies will tell you that the very beginning—when you’re just starting to think about your website, and haven’t actually begun to code it—is the very best time to begin optimizing it. And they’d be right; it’s always easier to start something properly than it is to come back later and try to fix it. Because SEO involves META tags and keyword-rich content, it should be incorporated naturally into a website from the ground up. If you have a webmaster, they may be able to perform some optimization themselves; alternately, you may wish to hire an SEO service to work with you or your webmaster to ensure that your site does everything possible for the best page rank from the very beginning. SEO isn’t less important for new sites; it’s more important. Getting off to the right start requires careful planning and implementation of every SEO technique that can be applied to your newborn website. Obviously some aspects of SEO, such as search engine submittal, will come after you have an actual website to submit. But the fact that you’re just starting out isn’t an argument against SEO; it’s an argument for it.

For information, please see SEO for Startup Businesses

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