Now, you will learn how to pick the winners!

If you just go to Google.com, you can enter into the search field:

“keyword phrase”

This will indicate how many pages mention it in their pages. Take note of how many resulting pages showed up.

Now do a search for:

intitle:”keyword phrase”

If the results here is 10% or less than that of the exact search phrase, then it’s good. However, it also needs to be below 40,000 results. If it’s higher than that, you will have a very hard time ranking for it. It’s best if the results are below 10,000, but it’s not always the case.

It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. No way. There are keywords we rank for that would seem to be, but we beat the life out of our competitions.

FIGHT TO WIN!

The point in doing all of this is PICKING your battle. It’s like having a row of competitors and then you choose to fight only the scrawny little guys that can’t defend themselves. I know, it sounds very mean, but by the time you’re done knocking all of them out, you’d have gained some experience in fighting.

Yeah, I know, you’re not going to be a pro, but you’ll have plenty of exercise and warmed up for the intermediate fighters. That’s when you start taking them on and knocking them down on their butts.

Seriously though, wouldn’t this make more sense than to dive in and fight the best of the best without any prior experience? Besides, without the credibility, you wouldn’t even be ALLOWED to fight them.

Alright, back to the real SEO talk.

Of course, the number one way to fight your competitors is to build a lot of high quality and valuable backlinks. A backlink is simply some other website linking back to your website. Link exchanges are actually no longer encouraged. Instead, you should consider techniques such as article marketing, blog posting, forum posting, bookmarking and web 2.0 profile backlinks.

There’s much to say about all this, but I guess we’ll have to save it for another day.

If you are looking for a way to take your business to the next level, consider what starting a blog might be able to do for you.

Blogging for business owners has a lot in common with all other types of blogging, but it has its own unique pitfalls and strengths. The key to having a successful blog as a business owner is keeping your goals clear and concrete at every step of your blogging adventure.

It can be all to easy to get sidetracked, especially if you are just learning about the exciting possibilities of blogging technology, but if you want your blog to succeed you need to stay focused.

Write up a plan for how often you will update, how you will promote your blog and retain readers, whether you will feature photographs or video, and other aspects of your blog, and then stick to it with the same kind of determination that you used when you built your company.

Having an updated blog not only shows that you are current with your prospects but it helps with your search engine optimization and marketing. Each post you make actually becomes multiple, crawl-able pages. Not only that, your blog acts as its own search engine, it’s internal back-linking system and link directory.

It’s THAT powerful.

We’ve talked about having a blog before; so, if you still don’t have one, GET ONE. You’re falling behind and you don’t even know it. If you need help, contact us and we’ll have you setup with the best WordPress plug-ins possible to help you with your SEO/SEM goals.

If it is possible you should always use relevant anchor text in your home pages instead of just using the plain old and very boring “HOME” link.

Home page is the most important page in your website, so it is fairly important that that this page has a good backlink from each and every page in your site. This is one good idea and an easy way to create a good internal link arrangements and this also makes the search engines easily indexed your website.

You should always keep in mind that this linking is not just for the Home page in your site, but also to the other important pages in your website. A good example is if you have a blog site, then you want to increase its ranking for some particular and specific article, all you have to do is to give it a side – wide link on all of your previous blog posts.

It is good practice to do this on a constant basis so that you have a strong internal linking system in place. The better structured you are the easier it is for search engines to index your pages. The more indexed pages you have, the higher chances of traffic you’ll receive.

Just remember that there’s more to it than just internal linking and on-page search engine optimization. Search engine marketing is still one of the largest factor in your search engine domination.

As the reports was saying, Bing’s paid click share were because of its strong performance on its Trade and Finance search verticals part that is gaining eleven percent and twenty two percent click shares. As the summer just passed, vacation and travel searches were made by vacationers it is more expected that there will be a lot of searches for very second in the internet world, since net is the fastest way of exploring every part of this world.

The main twist now is: The users actually used Bing for making a search instead of their old and trusty search engine.

This may be shocking news to Bing’s competition and that will be Google. This will start up much bigger flames that will make more adjustments for Bing and Google.

As for Bing’s new found success, they can only make this better and brighter. A good middle start is not that bad and this only shows that Bing has something to say to the world and that it will even show us how good they get.

This is one great start for Yahoo! and Microsoft deal. We can only wait for what’s more to come.

Just so you know though… we’re rooting for Google.

According to an Internal Engineer; Douglas Merrill: “Our position is that search is a very hard problem. We still have a lot of work to do.”

He said that 70 percent of Google’s best is still undergoing improvements in terms of search, as to other developing services.

He also stated that:

“It is not enough to have the information, the information itself should also be right and sometimes the problem is figuring out what users mean and not what users said.”

As today, some of Google’s improving actions are: mobile web search, personalized search and even their language translation features. Most of all is finding a way to fight off SEO spam.

If they are to keep their eyes and focus on search functionality, the Internet world is only showing its belief that there is no search algorithm that can be “too perfect or even too good”, while recognizing the continuous progress of the competitors on the way up.

This only shows that even the mightiest and the strongest most powerful Google will have to work hard and must maintain its place in the top. By this, they would have to find ways and improvements to stay on upper floor against Yahoo and Microsoft.

This was an event that was not recorded on video and may go down in history as one of the lost archives. Today was also Kevin’s first time speaking in public. Despite his soft voice in the noisy atmosphere, he spoke loudly with confidence.

One of the members said, “Thanks again. You sure fooled me. I would have never guessed that today was your first public presentation. You came across as a seasoned speaker.”

One thing that stood out the most was when Kevin had everyone raise their hand only to slap themselves. It wasn’t out of disrespect, but to wake them up. We can’t divulge on what it was about because it is members only. You’ll have to be at his future meetups or ask him directly.

Kevin hopes to have a good turn out on the next meetup, which will be on August 26th. The topic for that day will be about hiring your own marketing firm, without the actual costs.

It’s one of the fastest growing phenomena we’ve ever seen and you need to get in on it fast!

ComScore reported in March, 2009 that:

• 76.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours), up 15 percent versus December.
• 100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (62.6 videos per viewer).
• 54.1 million viewers watched 473 million videos on MySpace.com (8.7 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, up from 3.2 minutes per video in December.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Megavideo was 24.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

And oh, video views had reached 14.8 BILLION!

Here’s a study conducted by the Kelsey Group on how effective video marketing is:

A recent June, 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal mentions that online video is now the most dominant performing formats for online marketing.

So what are you waiting for?

Of course, having professional videos can be very expensive. If you don’t want to shed a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars for professional commercial videos of you and your company, then consider our affordable mini-commercial videos!

Here’s a sample of ours already uploaded to YouTube:

We’re on the verge of releasing this new service. If you would like to have a 30-second mini-commercial video, it can be yours for only $10. If you want one that is 1 minute long, it can be provided to you at $25. This won’t always be the price. This is just a preliminary/prelaunch price. It will double later.

NOTICE: This is without using Animoto, because unless you have a business account, which is $249, and you get a business quality video, it is against their TOS! Of course, if you’re a big time client of ours, we buy an Animoto account for you!

Later on, if you also want your videos to be submitted to the major video sites, it’s only a $10 service fee. Most video marketing submission services are about $99+/month. If you’re not doing a whole lot of video marketing, this is a very cheap way of doing it rather than paying a monthly fee just to promote 2-3 videos.

If you’re interested, please request a free analysis or give us a call at (800) 498-7134. We’ll then lock you in. This is a first-come, first-serve basis until our quota is met. We can’t accept more than 10 videos at this time. We’re looking for testimonials as well, that’s why we’re willing to do it so cheap up front.

Are you thinking of a redesign because you’re tired of the same old look?

If so, it is not yet the right time to do a redesign. You might be tired of the look, but a lot of your visitors might rely on seeing the same thing so it is easier to navigate and reference to. Of course, you could also give them a little warning that changes are about to take affect.

On the other hand, if your website is not converting from visitors to members, subscribers or sales, then perhaps it is time for a redesign. It’s hard to know whether your site is converting or not unless you track the number of unique visitors and finding out what they do on your website.

The primary purpose of a website is to capture a lead. If your site is falling behind in that department, then it may be time to re-structure your site, change the content and perhaps even change the design of your website. However, you must take precaution and make sure that the navigation is similar or enhanced.

If you can do it yourself, obviously, you wouldn’t be reading this. If you need help with it, we can certainly sit down and discuss your objectives and goals. We will then sketch up a model you would be happy with and make sure that it is converting higher than it already is now.

We say “even more” because there was a prospect we did a free analysis for. We discovered that when you go to their domain.com site, it was fine, but if someone typed in www.domain.com, the page was literally non-existent. This can really hurt you through the search engines and through customers who ended up on the wrong domain.

To prevent this from happening, you can use a .htaccess file that would tell the browser what to do when they land on either domain.com or www.domain.com.

We prefer to send www.domain.com to domain.com using a .htacess file. If you’re not sure how to make that file, just create a new text file and rename it to “.htaccess”. Make sure you’re also able to edit the extension. If you have trouble with it, you can usually do it through your hosting cpanel via file manager.

If you have a WP blog, these are the codes you’d use in that file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.domain.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
</IfModule>

Just replace “domain” with your domain name.

Here’s how you do it if it’s just a regular page (not a blog):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps.

So what is this “one thing?”

Oh, so now you want to know what it is, do you?

Well, it’s this “one thing” that allows you to add new content to your website with very little effort. It’s this “one thing” that helps you rank better in the search engines. And it’s this “one thing” that could help separate you from your competitors.

WHAT IS IT ALREADY!

Okay, okay, this one thing is simply a blog!

What? You thought it would be some type of secret?

No, it’s just something not a whole lot of companies know. By adding a blog to your existing website (especially if you had one designed in the 90′s) that are stale and stagnant (no new content for the past 14 days) then you MUST get into gear and have a blog installed into your site.

If you love your site design, then get the blog integrated into the design. It will be the best thing you’d ever do for yourself and for your company.

I already mentioned the benefits so I’m not got going to say it again. You really are missing out on all the potential keywords to rank for by not having a blog and I have to tell you, the majority of the company sites out there simply do not have a blog.

If you need help with your blog installation, integration and marketing, you know who to contact.

Here’s the email I go. The actual link has been removed.

Dear Client,

Your Yahoo Marketing Solutions account has expired. You must renew it immediately or your account will be closed. If you intend to use this service in the future, you must take action at once!

To continue click here, login to your Yahoo Marketing Solutions account and follow the steps.

Thank you for using Yahoo Marketing Solutions!
Yahoo Marketing Solutions Services DEP.
Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a respons.

I love how it ended with “you will not receive a respons.” Such a simple spelling mistake. These e-gits!

There are SEO firms and websites out there that offer to give you the Google SEO Starter Guide if you sign up with their newsletter. Don’t fall for it. You can just go to Google’s Official Webmaster Central to download it.

Google Webmaster Central describes it as a “compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.”

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

And as mentioned, if you want it in any other language other than English, please go to this post.

If you look below, this is the result we got for “texas search engine marketing” based on a broad match:

Looking at the broad results, there’s 1,900 searches, but if you look at the actual “phrase”, there’s only 590 queries for the local marketing, which is English and in the United States:

Now, why in the world would the local results be higher than the global search volume when there are more people in the world than the U.S.? Good question.

The answer to this question is simple: The local search result is based on the most recent month!

When you look at the global search volume, you’re not seeing whether some months got 1,000 visitors while some months had barely 10. And unless you track the local search volume every month, you don’t know whether “texas search engine marketing” only got 60 searches in February, 100 in March, and 80 in April.

Some months, people just tend to search for something a little more than usual. That’s why it is possible for local search results to be higher than the global average over 12-month period.

By-the-way, out of 7.7 million results, we’re ranked #6 for this keyword phrase .

So here’s the ad that I saw:

Okay, yeah, I also looked because it’s my home town, Grand Prairie, Texas. I was wanting to see how folks in my neighborhood are making money and maybe we could meet up some time.

Anyway, this is the page I came to (daily-job-news.com):

Noticed that I underlined my city, Grand Prairie. I thought to myself, “I bet you this isn’t even real”. I decided to view-source and see the page properties.

Here is what I found:

The web page is claiming that “Mary Steadman” is from Grand Prairie and is making so and so much money. However, how can it be true, when the city name is simply a javascript that displays the city name based on your IP address? So Mary Steadman could be from Chicago, Denver, Sacramento, New York, Okinawa and anywhere else in the world. Either way, that alone tells me that it’s a straight up scam.

It’s not strategy, it’s lying. Stay far, far away from this one folks. You don’t have to take my word for it, just do a search online.

So the next time you see a program/site that claims someone is from a particular city or whatever and is making a lot of money, this is a DEAD give away whether it’s legitimate or a scam. Good luck!

Supposedly, if your position in the SERP (search engine resulting pages) slip or fall, it is most likely due to duplicate content. It’s a total myth. That is not the case at all. It’s actually a lot of varying factors, but that is not the topic for today’s discussion. Today’s discussion is simply whether Google penalizes you for duplicate content or not.

Well, straight from the horse’s mouth (I like saying that a lot):

Duplicate content. There’s just something about it. We keep writing about it, and people keep asking about it. In particular, I still hear a lot of webmasters worrying about whether they may have a “duplicate content penalty.”

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

Source: Google Webmaster Central

I’m sure the belief of duplicate content penalty will still continue to circulate for many years until that idea is finally lost to the ages of time. People once believed that the world was flat. People today still think Michael Jackson is black. It just takes time.