Custom Web Design

Another Success Story

I recently took a consulting job with a car title loan  company to focus on their SEO efforts.  This was different than my past consulting efforts. In the past, I would take on a client and put in x number of hours per month on thier website.

With this company, I agreed to work 3 hours per day in their offices for a set amount.  This has worked very well as I have been able to focus my efforts every day for 3 hours to achieve the results we have set out.

Today, we achieved our first big success as we obtained the #1 organic position for the term “title loans” in google and AOL. 

Every time you take on a client, you never know how long or how fast you can achieve your goals.  You have an idea based on your experience, but you don’t know what your competition is doing or other aspects that are beyond your control.

Every SEO “expert” goes through phases wondering if they are ahead of the curve or behind the curve. In this case I don’t think I am either ahead of the curve or behind the curve, but this result gives me added confidence that by applying sound principles of SEO, I am able to affect the organic results of my clients.

This keeps me going and belieivng that even though you can’t guarentee results, your efforts will be worth the investment companies invest in you on their behalf.

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SEO Highlights and Year End Summary 2007

Every year I like to write and article about the latest and greatest on page SEO techniques. One reason is because people are really not interested in reading a year old blog post and also because things do change. Not as much as they used to change. Since the advent of Google, the big changes have tapered off, but now it is the little changes which differentiate the professionals from the know it all’s.

I think one of the biggest changes I have seen is a grey hat technique which was never widely used because it really was a coding trick, but is now definately a black hat trick today.  That change is having separate stylesheets per page and then naming the stylesheet after the key words on the page. For example,  if you wrote a page about “crystal chandeliers”, you would also create a unique stylesheet for that page and name it crystalchandeliers.css.  As I said before, I never really saw it widely used, but it was the latest and greatest technique created by SEO experts in the field to figure out a way to beat the system. 

The fundamental techniques have really not changed in 2007 and I don’t see them changing in 2008. They remain as follows:

1. Proper Keyword Research
2. Title Tags
3. Unique Content
4. Alt tags
5. Site Map

On a secondary level to the main fundamental techniques, you see additional techniques which shouldn’t get you in any trouble:

1. Using your keyword in the name of the URL
2. Meta Keywords
3. Meta Description
4. Table Atributes
5. HREG Tags
6. Keywords used in naming the image files on the page
7. Bold tags around keywords

What 2007 did see was the establishment of the blog as a must have item on every website. Not only for SEO but also as a tool for users. It will be interesting to see what 2008 brings. Offsite SEO will most likely see the importance of online social networking as an SEO Tool, but how it plays out is still up in the air. Stay Tuned….

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MSN and Yahoo - Search Engine Consolidation

As many people have read this past week, MSN has made a bid for Yahoo. Not to be out bid, Google has joined the fray with their own bid for Yahoo. Which is a better deal for the consumer and how will it affect the marketing of websites on the internet?

My first thought on the merger was that the sale of Yahoo would be a great monetary boost to Microsoft. This would be done through the consolidation of their competing PPC services and unique searches as well as other operational areas. That being said…..the biggest obstacle would be the integration of cultures and how to continue to manage competing websites.

Yahoo’s user culture and corporate culture are very different from MSN, and more importantly, anything Yahoo would do in the future would be second to Microsoft’s primary business. This can’t be good for Yahoo users, the Yahoo corporate culture and the search engine industry.

Having said all that, how could this merger affect the marketing of websites on the internet. Well, I think that overall, it has the potential to attack Google right where it hurts, their bread and butter of search engine traffic. The biggest obstacle SEM and SEO experts have had in the past in regard to putting effort forward to rank well in either Yahoo or Google or to focus efforts on their PPC programs has been traffic. Without the traffic, the efforts don’t justify the returns. By combining the search results and PPC programs, there can be a justification of putting forward the effort.

I have always felt and many people would disagree with me, that MSN has the best search engine of the big three. The reason is very simple. It is the newest engine and as a result integrates many of the additional models that exist on the internet. For example, Google heavily favors websites with backlinks. This has been the basis of their model from the beginning and this focus has allowed them to flourish.

Yahoo on the other hand launched their own search engine in 2004 and were able to build a better search engine by not only focusing on backlinks, but also by giving credit to well designed websites. A year later, MSN launched their own search which not only integrated the value of backlinks and the value of properly built websites, but also gave credit to web activity through blogs and other forms of online activity. This is not to say that over time Google has not continued to improve their search results, but because the core of their search is based on backlinks, this continues to drive search results today and has hurt their overall search results in my opinion.

So, if this merger happens and I think that is still a big IF, and Microsoft is able to integrate Yahoo in a way where they can consolidate some areas while at the same time keeping Yahoo independent, this can be a big win and they can create a better platform to compete against Google. Otherwise, Google will continue to be the dominant player in the search industry, and SEO and SEM professionals will continue to focus their efforts on Google with Yahoo and MSN being an after thought.

Clearly this is a bold play by Steve Balmer, but he and Bill Gates have done it before with Explorer. The question remains whether Steve can accomplish this without Bill now that he has partially retired.

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