SEO: develop your site/blog for more exposure in search engines

Google, like it or not, is a global ally in your online marketing plan. To take advantage of 'em, isn't going to cost you a dime in cash flow - if you follow my three tips. 

For example, it'e easy to find me - just google "seo ashland oregon" (without quotation marks) and I am the third search result listing on the first page search results.

Or, google ashland oregon taxi, and my client, Yell OH Taxi, is the first search result on the first page of search results. 

Want a global result? Google gold wash plant for sale. My client,goldtowner.com, is listed on the first page of search results.

Finally, here are my three tips to get your SEO mojo expanding.

Do all three, not just one or two, to improve your SEO (search engine optimization). Google has just updated the mechanics of its' search engine methods (aka Panda algorithm) to help small businesses. And, the good news is they are going to keep making positive change for us small businesses - this is just the foundation work talking place now.

Okay, here you go with my free techniques to benefit your SEO ....

#1 Gmail Centric
Hey, I know gmail reads your email so I no longer use it for my personal email. But, for business, you gotta have one gmail account to firmly boost your SEO. It's easy to forward your gmail content, automatically, to any other email service - for free - click here to learn. So, I am assuming you now have one gmail account established, to move forward with my next free SEO tip.

#2 Get A Google+ Page
This is a free page, and I mean page, to detail your business. It includes your description and link to your web site and/or blog. Once you are logged into your gmail account - click here - to get your Google+ page.

Now, just a note about Page Rankwhich I have covered in detail in a previous newsletter. This ranking is a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being the best rank to have. A site or blog ranked 10 means lots of links from different geographic locations and lots of visitor traffic. For example, Facebook is a 10 and so is youtube, twitter, linkedin, and of course google+. Just by creating a google+ page and adding a link to your web site, you have told Google that a 10 ranked site now links to your site, which helps pull up (IMPROVE) your page ranking.

Believe me, I don't make this stuff up. You are receiving the nuts and bolts of how SEO works out there in internet land. SEO is not a mystery; it's a science.

#3 Google Maps
When you are logged into your gmail account submit a request to add your biz to Google map(s).Click here to get started adding your location.

It's fine if you don't have a store front but you do need an address, even a private mailbox will do. By placing your biz on Google maps you'll accomplish 1) adding another web site link of a 10 ranked site, 2) enable your business showing up on Google maps when someone is looking for your services/products, and 3) includes your product and service info into Google databases.

Make sure you "verify" your map listing by receiving a postcard from them in the mail. If you skip that verification step then you will not appear on the maps.

You now have three proven techniques to improve your SEO strategy, with the goal being your biz receives more exposure.

Have a question? What to soar in the search engines? Send an email and we can connect to discuss your situation.

Blessings, Steu

See sex through your partners eyes - scary but true - technology takes us to new levels

Forget mirrors on the ceiling or handheld cameras, couples can now use the wearable technology to record their most intimate moments.

The app also lets couples see sex through their partner’s eyes by streaming the view from their respective device.

It was developed by Lebanese product design student Sherif Maktabi during the Wearable Hackathon event in London in November.

Explaining why he created the app, Maktabi said: ‘We want to change the way people experience things.

The app is controlled via voice commands. For example, saying ‘Ok glass, it’s time’ begins the recording and streaming process.

Wearers can then either film their partner during sex, or swipe the side of the device to change the view and perspective.

This includes streaming the footage being recorded by the camera on their partner’s device.

Once intercourse is over, wearers say ‘Ok glass, pull out’ and Glass will create a video of the event.

This video can be replayed for up to five hours before being automatically deleted from the app.

Read more (video): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2543203/Google-Glass-goes-X-rated-App-lets-wearers-partners-eyes-having-sex.html#ixzz2r3NSc0ng 

Search Engine Optimization make sure that people who need your products and services can find them in search engines. See some real SEO results - click here.

SEO Six Weeks: Client Captures Real Estate On First Page Of All Three Major Engines !

Kwik Block, when they hired us to do their web reputation campaign, had a web site that was only found in search engines by searching on the company name - Kwik Blocks.

They manufacture and sell a plastic clamp that is used in two dozen industries with clients scattered around North America. Their objective is to have potential industry clients find their clamp in the search engines and contact and/or buy Kwik Block clamps.

The image at the links below was captured on the search engines, 9 January 2014, when searching on the term "universal plastic pipe strap," which was a key phrase being used in the clients' SEO Strategy. The SEO campaign was begun the end of November, 2103. The red check marks in the search results indicate the client links we created on the first page of the search results via the youtube video we created, client images, and client web site links. Click to see Google SEO Results, Bing SEO Results, and Yahoo SEO results.

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is essential to the vitality of your web presence. Without a defined SEO strategy that is researched and molded using the most current techniques, your web site and/or blog will not have a chance of surfacing to the front page of search results. All SEO work that we provide is guaranteed with a 100% refund if your SEO objective is not delivered.

Why SEO Doesn’t Work, Is Your Web Site Or Blog Receiving The Traffic It Deserves?

Why SEO Doesn’t Work

Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts will tell you that SEO is not an exact science. But, those who have been doing this trade for a few years have the results to back up their claims. Undoubtedly, anyone can see improvements in their web site reputations within 90 days when the SEO efforts follow these three steps.

1. Research Key Words

These words and phrases are going to be associated with your business. In other words, this will be how people find you. Make sure your phrases are not attached to your business name since 1) potential new customers probably dont know your name anyways, 2) by default a decent SEO effort will naturally promote your business name, and 3) the goal of SEO is based on trending words being used in searches by users - NOW.

Use Google Trends or Good Analytics or Google Key Word Research or Bing Key Word Research to analyze your key word strategy. These are all free SEO tools.

As an example, a phase one of your SEO strategy would be to use your existing marketing slogans. After you are getting some visibility on those switch to using a more SEO driven tool approach. This will help build your confidence and get you some air time on search results pages.

2. Implement Key Words (but not over emphasize)

Use your key phrases on your content and in your meta tags. One workable strategy is using one phrase to start a paragraph. then filling in the remaining paragraph with support material and a summary sentence. My oh my ..... my English teacher would be proud of me here - so make yours proud too. After all, this is a basic paragraph structure super sized for SEO.

When possible make a hyper link from those key phrases to another blog post or page on your site. And, don’t forget, when you make links to your site from another site ..... use one of your researched key phrases to get you some search engine boost.

3. Work your “Reach Out” strategy

To grow your web presence is to create a circle of influence. This is easily accomplished by enhancing your web reputation using free tools and proven strategies. One method is publishing educational articles at places like ezinearticles.com about your services and products. Another is finding web sites or blogs that have similar interests to your biz and doing reciprocal links with them: you link to their site and they link to yours. The third, probably the most important is blogging. Sure you can pay someone to do it, but where is the fun in that?  The easiest way to get traction in search engines is blogging daily with rich content that is educational, has pictures, and uses your key phrases/words as labels. Here is an example of a well done blog: GoldTowner - alluvial mining consultants.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com

Google Trends: Easy SEO Tool To Examine Key Words/Phrases

Google Trends is a simple, free, SEO tool that web site owners can use to complete a quick data view on what key words and key phrases have been used over time.

Say for example you are a miner and what to see which of the following phrases is used most often:

- placer mining
- gold mining
- gold prospecting

The graph above shows the trend of those three phrases. Great quick time data. 

Goole just completed adding youtube history back to 2008 to the mix. Any search you preform can include Google and YouTube or either one of those.

YouTube is a powerful search engine all by its self. If you aren't using videos on your side you may want to consider adding them.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com

Three Easy Steps To Measure Your Organic SEO Traffic; a secret to internet marketing

Three Easy Steps To Measure Your Organic SEO Traffic; a secret to internet marketing

Organic liks are the bread and butter to expanding your web site traffic. They are not a quick fix like the golden arches, but the rewards are very significant.

Organic linking is the development of hypertext links between web sites with or without an explicit agreement to exchange links. Organic links are more likely to appear in a context relevant to the subject of the target document, which makes them useful for search engines like Google search that rank pages according to their links.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to measure to overall success of your SEO campaign is to look at your organic SEO traffic. Rank just isn’t a good SEO metric for a variety of reasons including the increased personalization of search, the impact of social signals on the search results, the effect of local SEO on search results and more. A site’s rank changes too frequently to be a viable method of measuring your long tern SEO success. Looking at your organic SEO traffic, however, can give you a much better idea of what is going on.

How do you measure your organic SEO traffic that is a direct result of your SEO efforts?

1. Start with a traffic overview.

Using your analytics tool (I prefer Google Analytics because you may as well get the data directly from the horse’s mouth), start with an overview of all the traffic that has come to your site in a given period including SEO traffic, PPC traffic, direct traffic, branded traffic and so forth. This number is the total amount of visitors that have come to your site. Google Analytics does a good job of breaking it down into traffic sources so you can see exactly which sources are sending the most visitors to your site.

2. Segment down to organic traffic.

Now the trick is to weed out all the non-organic SEO traffic, so the next report you should pull should be strictly search traffic. It’s important to make sure that you are only looking at non-paid traffic so you aren’t lumping PPC visitors in with your SEO visitors.

3. Remove branded keywords.

At least in Google Analytics, when you zero in on the SEO traffic, the report also pulls a list (up to 500) of the most used keywords to find your website. You can export this data into an Excel spreadsheet and organize it alphabetically by keyword. In order to determine your true organic SEO traffic, it’s important to remove any and all branded keywords from your list. While SEO can definitely help build your online brand and introduce it to whole new audiences, pure SEO traffic comes from non-branded keywords that drive visitors who have never heard of/interacted with your site before over.

The keywords and numbers you are left with are your organic SEO traffic numbers! In order to determine if your SEO is working, you can compare these keywords/numbers to the same time period in the previous year before you launched your SEO campaign. In addition to sheer percentage growth, it’s also worth comparing your keyword lists. What new keywords, either ones directly targeted on the site or long-tail variations of them, are popping up in the new data that weren’t there last year? Every new keyword that drives visitors is a results of your SEO efforts.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com

Matt Cutts Answers, "Do you have to know SEO to get Google to place you well in search results?"

Matt Cutts is the SEO Guru at Google. This short video reinforces the basics of SEO: unique titles on every page, make content crawlable,  minimize embedding content, useful themes related to your content, and well structured URL's.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com.

Is Your SEO (aka Internet Marketing) On Auto Pilot?

Is Your SEO (aka Internet Marketing) On Auto Pilot? 

Let’s be clear, to qualify your site as having an existing online marketing program or internet marketing plan there must be - at a bare minimum - these characteristics:

1. A key word phrase implemented on individual web pages
2. You have an active blogging presence
3. You are regularly posting in social media networks
4. Your pages offer at least one connection opportunity to visitors
5. You provide visitors opportunities to satisfy that “impulse buy” factor with your online store

There are plenty of SEO tools and software programs out there that can help automate some of the aspects of your SEO program, freeing up your valuable time so you can focus more on other SEO-related tasks like content creation and blogger outreach that can’t (and shouldn’t) be automated. I’m all for finding new ways to be more efficient and maximize the return for my time, but site owners need to be careful that they don’t get mistake efficiency for complacency. 

The bottom line is this, you want to streamline your SEO program, but don’t put it on autopilot.

What does SEO auto pilot look like?

1. Only going after easy link exchanges
   Link building is still a valuable component of any SEO program, but Google’s crackdown on web spam in 2012 means good link building isn’t as simple as building links wherever you can find them. Easy links might look nice on a monthly report  but their long-term value usually doesn’t amount to much. 
2. Not updating web page content regularly
   Leaving the same content spread on your pages stagnates your web reputation. In the short term it is good for your search engine results, but even your ranking there will suffer if your content never changes. Whatever your content is, it has to be informative and educational. Of course, making it entertaining is likely to produce some short term interest.
3. Redundant outreach program
   Using the same email to blogs hosts to request guest blog spot is almost something a software program can do. You want to create personal relationships with folks who allow you to do guest posts. By sending the same email to each blog owner there is no personal touch and that is not the web reputation you want to promote.

What are three actions that will stream line your SEO and internet marketing program?

1. Remove all non-relevant links to your on your web pages.
   Only exchange links with sites and blogs that have content matching or aligned with your content. This type of link building takes time but the payoff is BIG in your page rank score and in determining how you will appear in search engine results.
2. Update your web page content regularly.
   Once your site is soaring in the search engines then it’s time to revise the content around different themes (phrases and concepts). This is easily accomplished without losing the rankings from your existing page content. The goal is to attract new visitors and build a consistent stream of reoccurring visitors which is only achieved with fresh content.
3. Create a diverse organic network
   Your material must be located in other places along links back to your site pages. This tells the search engines you are the web and it also gets you in front of new audiences. When you are creating personal relationships with other site owners and blog owners you are building an organic network that is a very powerful tool in
   delivering your message(s) around the globe.

In summary, three essential fundamentals to an outstanding SEO and internet marketing program include 1) building and enhancing your organic network, 2) providing rich content opportunities to educate visitors, and 3) offering multiple connection strategies to your visitors to bond them with you.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com

Stop Procrastinating: 10 FREE SEO Actions To Take To Jump Start Your Web Presence: Internet Marketing For Your Web Site

Stop Procrastinating: 10 FREE SEO Actions To Take To Jump Start Your Web Presence: Internet Marketing For Your Web Site

The way of the future for almost any business is online marketing. Sure the older generation is more accustomed to using the yellow pages but even that is changing.

"For the first time, half of American adults ages 65 and older are online.' PEW, Jun, 2012



"These are the most popular online activities across all generations .....

• Email
• Search engine use
• Seeking health information
• Getting news
• Buying products
• Making travel reservations or purchases
• Doing online banking
• Looking for religious information
• Rating products, services, or people
• Making online charitable donations
• Downloading podcasts"

PEW, 2012

Ready to get your marketing effort in full swing? 

Here are ten PROVEN SEO TECHNIQUES to boost your web reputation. And, don't forget, this doesn't happen overnight ... it takes time. For example, don't setup your blog and expect to be receiveing instant feedback or 5,000 visitors a month. 

... you have to work it the old fashion way - sweat equity.

1. The most obvious - setup a free blog and make start posting - at least - once a week. If you are serious about marketing then do one post a day.

2.  When you produce a blog post use the labels to accent your marketing slogans, product/service features.

3.  Distribute your blog to your social networks: Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter at a bare minimum.  This can be done freely or you can use a paid service to do the distribution automatically when you publish your post.

4.  Produce a wikipedia page for your organization. Keep n mind this is not a sales page. It is an information page to give you street cred.

5. Join social networks and make new friends - expand your sphere of influence. Click here to see 10 most popular, or a listing, or as an info graphic.

6. Find a forum that is related to your product or service and join it. Answer some questions and get your name established. Meet new friends. Click here for a list. Or google/bing your interest plus the word "forum." For example, if you were selling red wagons you would google or bing "red wagon forum" or "kid toys forum" or "wagon wheel forum"  .... you get the idea.

7.  Add your web site to your email signature. If you don't know how then google or bing this phrase "how to set up email signature in xxx" and fill in "xxx" with your email service - gmail, hotmail, yahoo .... you get the idea.

8. Get a customer testimonial and add it to your web site. Better yet, add that testimonial to your email signature. 

9.  Make a video and put it on youtube. Then embed or link that video into your blog or web page. Not sure how to do that? Google or bing this phrase "how to embed youtube video on web site." Youtube has a high pagerank so connecting that video to your stuff will help improve your pagerank - guaranteed. The higher your pagerank the more visibility in search engines you will have.

10. Complete a request to Google Local Places and Bing Local Places to add your business. This will get your biz displayed in the search results with a thumb tack in the local map on searches that match your key words.

Folks there you go - then FREE steps to jump start your marketing. Get'er done and have some fun too!

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future. He can be reached at 406.285.1778.

SEO: No business can afford to be missing out on potential customers, a case study on a real business

No business can afford to be missing out on potential customers. The power of exposing your business to a receptive audience on the internet just keeps expanding.  It has been proven in many ways that performing search engine optimization (SEO) and integrating  internet marketing strategies are best practices for any business web site, but do they work and how?  This article covers a real business that implemented these practices and the results achieved in a specific timeframe. 

The Business

Pristine Detailing Services, www.pristinedetailingservices.com,  is a family owned business in Souther Oregon thats been around for several years. They are professional vehicle detailers with an actual brick and mortar shop where they get ‘er done. Their comprehensive services are unmatched in the local area and they have an excellent reputation from their clients. They offer more that just “wash and polish” services as they remove minor scratches and paint buildup, rejuvenate headlights, do steam cleaning, and a whole lot more to revitalize any vehicle. Pristine Detailing in Ashland is recognized nationally as they qualified to be members of the Air Force One Detailing Crew. Additionally,  they were selected to participate on the detailing team for the Museum of Flight in Washington to detail a B-29 Super Fortress. Your get the picture, theses folks are no ordinary detailing shop.

Before Implementation

Pristine had a static web site of a few ages which they put together in their spare time.  Suffice it to say that their old site was never indexed with the search engines so it cannot be found at the internet archive web site.  

On that current site the best practices were invisible. They had no social marketing links.  The content was not capturing the attention of visitors which was evidenced by a pagerank of zero and only five backlinks. There were no invitations or opportunities to visitors that allowed a free connection, i.e. subscription. Lastly, there was no e-commerce ability in place.

When checking the search engines the web site of Pristine Detailing was invisible. They could not be found by their biz name or any key phrase on the first two pages of search results. A recent report found that 93% of all internet traffic comes from a search engine (Forrester 2006).

Mark and Travis had one saving grace working for them in the search engines, which demonstrates the power of social marketing. In this case they didn’t do that marketing, one of their customers did it for them. Nicole was so satisfied with the work on her family car by Pristine that she went out to YELP, www.yelp.com, and put in a five star review about them. Her review was the first entry on the first result page in Google for their two key phrases: auto detailing ashland and pristine detailing. Unfortunately, clicking that YELP link took the user to YELP and not to the Pristine Detailing Services site.

“42% of users studied selected the topmost search listing from the results. This was far and away the most-clicked single link position in the study. However, it is still interesting to note that the majority (58 percent) of all users studied did not select the top search result.” Nielsen Norman Group, 2005

Building A Web Presence

Mark and Travis have a couple of CDs packed with photos displaying the before/after look of their work but no where to put ‘em. They decided the best approach was using the web site as a show case using those photos. And, they wanted to get on the first page of the search results. At that time when you googled “pristine detailing” they were not even listed in the addresses with a thumbtack on the map that Google displays for matching search results.

Summary

The current web site content is designed around photos of the vehicles they have serviced.  The site design uses colors and textures that represent a quality, subtle look. Today, site visitors get educational information starting at the home page where there are several videos to choose from. To satisfy social networking, buttons for FaceBook, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube, and a Blog were added  Their blog is connected to the Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter accounts to insure every post is distributed automatically. With their upgraded site they now have an  assortment of features available:

1. Gift certificate sales can be purchased
2. Testimonials are available from every page
3. There are two galleries:videos and pictures
4. Educational articles are available: FAQ, Odor and Germ Control
5. Ability to receive payments on line is in place

SEO best practices were built into their new web pages and standard internet marketing techniques were implemented. A major result was they obtained search engine results ranking on the first page - in Goolge, Bing, and Yahoo -within 90 days of publishing the new site on their two key phrases. 

I don’t suggest measuring search engine results by googling a business name because potential customers don’t know your business name; they are more likely to find you by your services, products, or marketing slogans. However, it’s worth noting that pristine is a common key word with auto detailers across the country. Even so, today they are easy to find found by “pristine.” For example, when you google or bing “pristine ashland” they are the first result.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future. He can be reached at 406.285.1778.

Negative SEO: how can you hurt yourself with SEO? (video by Matt Cutts)

Negative SEO

First, no worry to most everybody on this one.

The majority of mom and pop web sites are not even close to stepping on this land mine. The sites that need to worry are the ones building links to their site, from other sites, on a rather massive scale.

As Matt alludes to in this video, links to your site pages from other web sites and blogs does help improve your page rank. But, when too many links are linking to you from mysterious sites then you are in the land of negative SEO. Google has a special team, which Matt heads up, that deals with these kinda SEO challenges.

Bottom line, get links to your pages from other reputable web sites and blogs but don't try to fake it. Matt's team will catch you.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future.

SEO: You really don't wanna buy links and here is Google's Matt Cutts to tell you why (video)

This post explains the why Google will penalize your site for buying links to accomplish search engine optimization (SEO) or any other reason you can think of.

What is the difference between buying advertising to promote your site and buying links that link to you site?

Buying ads is a way to get potential buyers to notice you.

Buying links is a method to deceive search engines that you have more popularity than really exists.

Matt says it much better than me ....

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future.

SEO: Google says do it naturally. Search engines are contextual - listen to Matt Cutts explain it (video)

This post has tips about how to naturally do search engine optimization (SEO) on your site - from Google.

Google's Penguin update penalized websites by people who confused spamming with search engine optimization. Buying hundreds of links on other websites is not search engine optimization.

Using tools that automatically create hundreds to thousands of backlinks on forum sites, blogs and other pages also has nothing to do with search engine optimization (SEO). These tools and services are spamming machines.

The rankings of websites that used these tools to get high rankings dropped dramatically after Google's recent updates.

Google's Matt Cutts said in a video that only 25,000 of the 700,000 messages that Google sent out in the first two months of this year were related to links.

600,000 of Google's notifications were about black hat SEO methods (for example cloaking).

Should I incorporate synonyms for important terms into my site? Watch the video from Matt below for a detailed answer.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future.