SEO Blog

GraphicSEO would like to extend our thanks to all of the brave American Troops & Agencies serving in Iraq, Afghanistan & all over the world in the fight against threats both domestic & foreign. Memorial Day is a time to remember & honor all of those who serve ; have served our country. We would like to point our readers to many ways they can help our troops. If you want to do more than putting a bumper sticker on the back of a car & supply them with items & articles they actually need. I’ve compiled this list from AnySoldier.com, also, I have friends that are currently serving our country.

Phone Cards: Our troops have family members: Wife, Kids, Mothers & Fathers & other important family members. Both want to rely information that they are doing well & keep abreast of family events. While, some soldiers use things like MSN messaging to do video chats to love ones(which is free), some families don’t have or can’t afford a computer, thus, they use phones. If you want to send a soldier a phone card here is one vendor: Millitary Phone cards

Books, DVD’s & other fun items: Help our troops fight boredom by sending novels, DVDs, CDs & players for those items, hell if you can afford it Laptops I’m sure will be greatly appreciated too. When your not working you enjoy these items, as will they. Please, note though its very important items like CDs & DVDs have something written on them so they are not stolen & sold back to our troops.

Their are many other items as well. So, I urge you to take a look at what to send compiled by anysoldier.com. That site is doing wonderful things and can educate you on how, what, where to send, please, on this day of remembrance at least check them out & give.(Just don’t remember on Holidays, remember always)

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Happy Independence Day everyone. Graphic SEO is committed to supply you with useful information on our blog about the latest in search engine marketing(SEM)/ Search Engine Optimization. In my last post I talked about Flash being indexable by Google & Yahoo! now. Well, we don’t have any data yet on the matter, but, I can offer the community some insight on what they can do as a whole in order to get to the bottom of optimizing for Flash.

Graphic SEO is using this as a metric & in turn, other SEO companies should follow course as well. What we have done is start up a small website, we have developed a small application. It pertains, of course, to Search Engine Optimization. If in fact Flash is crawlable their should be absolutely no use of title tags nor description tags used to describe the application. This is done because we are merely only testing to see if the app is crawlable, not so much really optimizing it with the same methods used on every other website. So, we give the spider the least amount of information as possible other than telling Google the application is their, with a few links generated(we will see if this does more to hurt the data or is just necessary).

The main thing when building your app is to make the thing a large application, fully functional, code optimized for effectiveness at run time & loading purposes. The main reason for making it a large application is simple, in the past Google had issues with the time & size trade off. If it took to long to crawl, the spider wasn’t effective enough to crawl an entire site, thus, it was scrapped & considered a failure.

Our, purpose is simple, make a small site with a flash application. Point a few links to it, optimize for a extremely easy key word & see where it lands on Google & Yahoo!. If Google & Yahoo! can crawl it effective enough, we will them optimize the code for a little harder keywords & analyze data, use other methods we will then employ with other sites. We, will be releasing a white paper on the topic in a much more detailed manor if you guys who read this vote for this on Sphinn & get it to the front page. Then we will reward the SEO/SEM community with our data. Quid Pro Quo!

Big news today as Adobe helps ‘reveal’ Shock Wave Flash sites. While, flash was previously only indexable through text links based within its code, it remained for the most part invisible to search engine spiders. Relax Graphic SEO will be doing heavy research into this new feature added by Macro Media. Until, then I would like to pop everyones bubble for the time being though.

So, Adobe Flash is now being released with updates that allow for the content presented by websites that host applications & entire sites in nothing, but, flash to be easily indexed. The only problem still remains & unseen is the question of: when. I don’t think this would be an immediate response from the search engines , if only because they will need to update the algorithm. Not, that the companies haven’t been talking to one another, thus, a even quicker response to this technology is possible.

Let’s go over the major three quickly, MSN, GOOGLE, YAHOO!. All but one of these search engines have made a news article about the technology & even the speculation in this area is a little fuzzy.

Google has stated:

“

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

“

Now, I just don’t believe that this algorithm has reached any sort of maturity, thus, these results in my opinion will not yield what webmasters have dreamed of for a long time. Just like the regular GoogleBot, it gets revamped and improved. Thus, I think this new algorithm will take some time for webmasters to really notice what is going on, what will be seen as a black hat tactic s, what will be allowed. So, right now until more dirt is uncovered about the algorithm & what tricks work we are facing a new & exciting time to be in SEO. Whom, will be the first to uncover some tips, the tricks & write the book, which one of these will yield good results? Same, goes for Yahoo!.

MSN seems to be the beaten step child in the matter, for they are awkwardly silent on the release of this information, even though they have been able to integrate mobile flash. Like others have speculated they may not even care, if only because of Silverlight. Which, is great if only due to its semi-open source nature. Not, that one can’t find data on Flash & other Adobe products, but, we all know it is closed source.

I hope this was informative. Remember, if you are like me & don’t like waiting for Flash to load, just include this nice little Google filter… -file:.swf…. This should take care of it. In this new era, we will hopefully see much improvement of flash files & see a influx of web developers willing to use it for promotion of their sites. Can you see the counter scandel happening all over again? Have a good day, get ready for the 4th as we kick off what will hopefully be a better turn out for donations for supporting our troops through tangible items they need.

Well, some of the secret sauce is going to be flowing tonight, but, heck I like my readers. O.K. so maybe the former was a bit of an exaggeration. None the less this should prove useful to some sites that are in desperate need of it. So, sit back make a nice drink: 1/2 cup Vodka, 1/4 orange juice, Tsp. nutmeg(very good. Cheers to a person whom would rather to remain nameless on a blog like this, may the forest not need so much pruning).

What superior content will fetch you

Lets just nail the most important part of on-site development & get it out into the air. When, you get down to becoming number one for multiple keywords their is one king among many barons. That is without a doubt. Content.. That is the most important aspect to a successful website, with out solid content their is no way to distinguish yourself from your peers & the full potential can never be truly reached. If you sell widgets, why not give as much information about widgets imaginable? So, you sell light bulbs sounds pretty boring? But, the sheer amount of technology that goes into an average light bulb is astounding. Thats just a basic bulb, you can talk about what makes a particular brand’s filament superior over another. What the early filaments where made of to bulbs that last three years & are energy efficient. And all you really have to do is make sure their is plenty of opportunities for a call to action.

What good content includes

Aiming more towards content one should examine your rivals site for keyword density, maybe its 10% maybe even 5%, providing more useful content will only go to further ones chances in reaching higher in the SERPs over them. Hell, keywords your not even aiming for will soon start to pop up, while, these keywords may be long, some may be even as short as two words. Regardless, the sites that follow this simple instruction will have much less to do then ones that do not following this golden rule. Make content, this is for your searcher ,thus, you will rank higher & provide a needed service.

Title Tags & description SEO.

Moving down the list. The title tags & meta description. Make these terms useful for people whom are going to be looking at your site, your target audience, but, hell even for people with an intellectual pursuit will thank you if your site proves useful & you’ll receive link love & link juice from sites with a good PR(over-blown, but, looks good). While, we are talking about titles don’t forget formating your page with h1 to h3 tags proves useful for breaking your site down in a logical way. It will aid people & machines .

Conclusion on on-site SEO optimization

I know many readers out their will view this post & say.. Well, it wasn’t so helpful.. I knew this stuff… You left out major points, extremely valuable points like URL structure. The only thing I have to say, their is more to come & much more to read. If you feel you have a good grasp of what it takes & your looking for guidance & an (advertisement to follow) ethical SEO firm free evaluation . We, will examine your site & give you even more pointers & maybe gain your trust to help get your site to the next level. We are not the only SEO blog in town, so hit Google & do some research. Have fun & happy searching!<

By:Adam

Well, it would seem that the great debate over SEO/SEM in-house vs SEO/SEM outsourcing won’t go away. I would like to hammer the nail into the coffin of this debate. Its just amazing that a company will think their SEM team will out perform a professional firm. But, we will humor those who still choose to do the former.

The crux of the debate is really about dollar amount, no ifs-ands-or-buts about it. Some companies will only put 1-5% of their advertising budget into an online marketing campaign, which, is acceptable in some cases of a small business. Given that business doesn’t feel that online marketing can yield results due to past experiences with in-house SEM management or inadequate outsourcing of the job to inferior SEM companies. With such a small amount actually being spent toward online advertising, large international companies & others feel that its an acceptable loss. That logic to me is insane, if you feel that way, hire a bum on the street to ware a sign & pay him/her the 1%. After, all the 1% is an acceptable loss.

Well, your company has signed up with a SEM Company, its been about six months & you see results, however, minimal. Although, this isn’t acceptable by any means & the ad networks being deployed are proving effective enough to generate clicks to the web site. Is the real problem a lack of creativity? Are the ads themselves annoying to the buying crowed. I’m sorry to say, but, having ads that trick the person into clicking on the site doesn’t equate to a good campaign. They seem annoying & who’s to say that they where more interested in ‘closing’ the ad, then actually finding out about the product(s) being sold. Having a game as a banner ad in itself isn’t terribly effective either for the same reason. The suffer could just be more interested in playing rather, than buying. It will get your paged viewed & you may even see a small ROI from it, but, creativity on the landing page & the banner itself will generate more fruitful clicks that are not throwing good money at bad ideas.

It only goes to further the point at the in-house debate are they looking for clicks or are they analyzing those results with some human ingenuity to lower the clicks & increasing buyers. Looking over logs can be a daunting task, looking at where those clicks are coming from can yield better results. Are they generated from one particular ad network, are they coming from one particular geographical area are their seasonal factors to equate for, can you generate a better targeted customer? A program that you pay $10,000 for your in house team can be useless if they solely rely on program to do the thinking for them. Then, again if you are paying them an hourly wage you probably are loosing money off the bat.

Is the in-house team only performing SEM work, what I’m trying to get at with a firm they goal of SEM/SEO work comes down to getting you to the top for keywords that are generating the sales, rather, than having to pay for every single click if its to supply you with a buyer or just a curious seeker. Once, you have reached the top in most major search engines for a well performing keyword better results can be expected, partially due to the fact the initial cost has already paid for itself after a few sales. Not, that one should get laxed once this has been achieved.

When, it is seen which keywords are obviously outperforming the others in terms of sales optimizing for the keywords will probably take a little bit of work. Of course this could also be relatively easy. While, some will call the SEO work: generating links, managing the image through what is posted on other sites does take work of excellent SEO professionals. This is one major point on which I have to disagree with others in the industries who would trivialize this process. One, of the main points with excellent link building, not only will it help you in the SERPs, but, you should see a few clicks coming from those sites if they are worth their salt, not just building a massive amount of incoming links. This is what a company should expect from outsourcing the SEO/SEM work.

If anything I hope I at least convinced one company’s CEO or CEM that outsourcing SEM/SEO work is imperative to a good campaign. Building from a perviously executed SEM/SEO plan that wasn’t thought out well enough, can be a challenging experience. Going with an in-house team only because of falling pray to a quick talking SEO company shouldn’t discourage a company from finding an ethical, reliable SEO/SEM firm.(ah hem, the plug) If you want to experience what an excellent affordable SEO firm can do click the link, fill out the evaluation.

Graphic SEO offers affordable SEO services. Why is SEO affordable, why does it more often than not trump PPC? Well, if your in the industry, you probably already know.

So, why is ranking high in search engines for keywords such an important step for a business to embark on? Well, the main reason is very simple: cost effectiveness. When you get down to brass tax, any sort of advertisement being placed on Google or Yahoo! for a keyword search is negated if your company is ranking organically in the search engine. The trend more often than not is you will see even more hits being ranked organically. Better yet, you are not paying for every single click on the keyword.

Now, if it can be found to be advantageous to do a PPC campaign a long side a keyword you are top 10 or even number one for organically. If for no other reason then you are gaining that much more ground for being placed on relevant web sites, but, the ultimate goal at times for many companies is nothing more than to pay for the keyword at first for advertisement purposes, then advertise for other keywords once that keyword has been met organically. Even when organic link building is being preformed & other companies like what your page has to offer, thus, giving you a link on the page, sometimes, that link may not always remain on the front page. So, if anything the PPC campaign keeps your companies branded keyword on the front page of many sites to a wider audience.

The only other item this professional would like to add is this. With a strictly PPC or other Internet marketing techniques that rely on a pay per click system, any upward trend in users visting your site, your marketing budget will deplete that much sooner. Thus, a monthly or annual budget even for a small business, in some cases, can dwindle rapidly. Unfortunately, along with a revenue plunge, it could be harder to see a return on investment. Additionally, a company could see a higher ROI being ranked daily & doing a PPC campaign.

So, I hope this article does help out a business or two looking for advice, or even the novice, new hire to a SEO company. With, than I hope everyone enjoys their morning.