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Small Business SEO Just Got More Affordable

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One of the biggest challenges small business owners face is trying to find affordable marketing solutions that work for their company.  Recently we have been talking to a lot of companies that simply don’t have the money to optimize their websites or can’t swing a big up-front payment to get things going.

With that in mind, we have made some changes to the pricing of our SEO Plans and have added two other options.

First, we have reduced the setup fee on all of our SEO plans.

Second, we have added an SEO Jumpstart plan.  With this plan you will have a one-on-one phone conversation with us to determine the direction you want to go.  We will then conduct our keyword research and optimize the home page of your website.  We will also provide you with a Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis so you will know exactly how to improve your site’s overall optimization.

In addition to the SEO Jumpstart plan, we are now offering a free 30-minute SEO consultation and online marketing review.  This call will be packed with information to help you optimize your site.  We’ll identify the primary issues affecting the ranking of your site and provide you with guidance to correct those issues.

In our December Monthly Marketing Newsletter I set some goals for our company.  One was to help 100,000 small business owners market themselves more effectively.  The other was to add 100 new clients to our roster in 2010.  My hope is that by reducing the prices of our SEO plans and offering some introductory products, more small businesses can afford to optimize their web sites.

Give me a call at 1-877-334-8022 and schedule your free consultation today.

To your success,
Ken Partain

Search Engine Optimization – URL Structure

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Over the weekend I realized that I overlooked an important piece to the on-page optimization in our series last week on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.

The structure of your URL is just as important if not more so than your Title tag when it comes to your on-page content.  The thing you want to remember is to try and use the primary keywords in the naming of your page.  If you are optimizing a site that is already in place, you probably don’t need to worry about renaming the pages, but if you are adding new pages to your site you will want to keep this in mind.

If you are using a content management system or blog software for your site then you probably don’t need to worry about this either because most of them will use the title of your post as part of the URL.  And if you use your primary keywords in the title of your post you’re in pretty good shape.  However, you have to make sure and set it up correctly in order for it to work right.

Here’s an example of a poor URL:  www.yourdomain.com/?id=123.  ?id=123 is the name of the page in this instance.  It doesn’t tell the search engines anything about this page.

Here’s an example of a good URL: www.yourdomain.com/blue-widget-special.  blue-widget-special is the name of the page in this instance and it tells the search engines (and your human visitors) what to expect when they visit that page, a special on blue widgets.

I hope this series has been helpful.  If you have any questions please leave a comment below or get in touch with me.

To your success,
Ken Partain

Search Engine Optimization – Traffic

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This is the fifth article in a five part series title Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.  Yesterday we talked about link-popularity.  Today we are talking about traffic as a ranking factor.

Getting visitors to your web site is not generally considered part of the SEO process though it is the main objective.  Without visitors you don’t have the opportunity to grow your business in the very place most people are looking today.

Although you don’t have any direct control of getting traffic to your website, traffic is nevertheless a factor in how well your site ranks.

Sites can get away without any SEO if they are a popular site and get lots of traffic without the benefit of being optimized.

This can happen if you drive a lot of traffic through offline means, but eventually, if you are providing good content and a great user experience then people will start linking to your site and therefore drive additional traffic.

This system begins to feed on itself and it just continues to grow as you add more compelling content which takes us right back to the first part of this series – your on-page content.

To your success,
Ken Partain

Search Engine Optimization – Link Popularity

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This is the fourth article in a five part series titled Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.  Yesterday we talked about your on-page content.  Today we are talking about link popularity and how to use your outbound and incoming links most effectively.

Linking from one web page to another is what has made the Internet what it is today.  Incoming links to the pages on your website are weighted very heavily in the algorithms of all the major search engines.  If there are no links to your site you may rank for a very few terms like your company name, but that’s about it.

Without links to your site, it is as if you are in outer space.  There’s nothing really connecting you to the rest of the world wide web.

There are basically two types of  links, inbound links to the pages on your site and outbound links from the pages on your site to other sites.  You will obviously have more control of your outbound links, but the incoming links are the main thing that will help your pages rank better.

Outbound links

Google’s PageRank puts a very high emphasis on incoming links when it calculates the value of a web page, which determines where it ranks in the search engine results.

Some people will say that outbound links don’t help with your on-page optimization.  I disagree.  Linking to other sites or other pages is supposed to help the reader have a deeper understanding of the material you are presenting. Each link is there to help the reader in some way. When you are a good steward with your outbound links the search engines tend to reward you for that.  Links added just for links sake aren’t necessarily helpful.

The search engines have extremely complicated algorithms that give a score to each link and they can quickly tell if a link is of value or not. That link is also valued based on the anchor text in that link, the words that are highlighted or underlined, that you click on to go to another page.

You have full control of the outbound links on your site. Use them wisely.

Incoming Links

A lot of SEO professionals would not include incoming links in a discussion about on-page optimization. However, there are more than one page on your web site, or there certainly should be, and each of those pages can have links to other content on your own site. The beautiful thing about this is you have full control of the anchor text used in those links and you can use them to help define the other pages on your site.

You see a lot about building your incoming link profile. The more links you get from related websites, the better your site will rank. I read an article recently from Michelle MacPhearson called Link Mixology: The 12 Kinds of Links Your Site Needs. I think it’s a very good explanation of where and how to build your incoming link profile.

If you need help with building incoming links to your site we offer a link-building program that helps get you started on getting quality inbound links to your site.

Tomorrow we are going to wrap up our series with an article on traffic as a ranking factor. If I can help you further with this topic please leave a comment below or send me an email.

To your success,
Ken Partain

Search Engine Optimization – On-page Content

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This is the third in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.  Yesterday we talked about the coding of your website.  Today we’re going to talk about the on-page content, including the meta tags.

There are essentially four parts to the on-page content of your website.

They are:

  1. Title
  2. Description
  3. Keywords
  4. Content

Title

The Title tag is a meta tag, which means it is not usually seen as part of the content a typical user would see.  However, the Title tag shows up at the top of your browser when a page is loaded.  Behind the URL itself, I believe the Title tag is probably the most important element of on-page optimization.  This Title tag tells the search engines what this page is all about.  The Title tag is also what shows up as a link to your website in search results. In the image below, from a Google search, the text highlighted in green is the Title tag.

wmme-serp-snipit

Description

The Description tag is also a meta tag.  It is basically a short description of the content the reader can expect to find when they click through to your site.  In the image above it is the text right below the Title tag.  Typically about 160 characters will show up in the search results.  So the best way to take advantage of that is to make your description compelling so that searchers will be enticed to click through to your site.  In our example above it simply tells who we are.

Keywords

The Keywords tag is also a meta tag.  Because this tag got so much abuse in the past, most of the major search engines simply ignore it today, but there are some that still look at it to pick up keywords that may not be replicated exactly in your content.

Content

This is the juicy part and what all of your human readers visit your site for.  The content is exactly that; your article, your blog post, your video, your pictures.  They all make up the on-page content of your website.  Your content can be really long or really short.  Ideally you should have about 500 words per page at a minimum.  If you are posting to a blog sometimes that’s a little much.  The key is to have unique content about a few keywords so that your content can rank well for those keywords.  If you try to put too much information on one page it won’t rank well for any of it.

Take this series of articles for example.  I broke it out into an introduction and four follow up posts so that each one could focus on one aspect of search engine optimization.  Take a lesson from that.

When all four of these elements are in sync you can rank really well for your chosen keywords.  If there is a lot of competition it may take a little longer, but it can still be done.  You will just need to work on getting more incoming links to those pages.

Tomorrow we are going to talk about Link Popularity.

To your success,
Ken Partain

Search Engine Optimization – Clean Code

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Not all code is created equal!

This is the second in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.

One of the strongest factors of a website that ranks well is the code itself.  This is something that most small business owners never even consider.  If a site looks good, as far as they are concerned, it’s a good site.

However, the coding plays a big part in how well your website ranks in the search engines.  If your site has a lot of unnecessary code to compensate for lack of technical ability on the part of your web designer, that can cause a problem.

I see this alot with small companies who sign up for cheap web sites because they can build it themselves.  The companies offering such sites have done so many things to make the sites dummy proof that there is an extremely high amount of unnecessary code.  This is true for scripts as well.  Scripts are small (sometimes not so small) pieces of code that make a site function a certain way.

Every bit of code and every script that is required to make your site function properly can potentially slow down the amount of time it takes for your site to load.  Site load time has always been a factor in rankings, but just recently Google made an announcement that page load times are going to be a bigger factor in rankings and have even provided some tools in Webmaster Tools so that site owners can measure their page load times and take steps to improve it.  Keep in mind that if your site is built on one of the do-it-yourself platforms mentioned above that you will have little to no control over these factors.

Our own site is built on the WordPress platform, which, in my opinion, is a very well coded system.  It is an open-source platform so there are literally thousands of programmers around the world working on it every day to make it better.  Every site we have built on the WordPress platform performs significantly better in search results, even than the sites we had previously optimized on other platforms.

It just takes a few seconds to look at a site and tell if there are issues with bloated code.  Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll be glad to take a quick look at your site.

If you would like to know all the other factors affecting your rankings, you may want to consider our Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about your on-page content as a ranking factor.

To your success!
Ken Partain

Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics

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Watching one of my favorite movies this weekend, Hoosiers, with Gene Hackman, I was reminded that the same thing that applies to basketball, practicing the fundamentals like dribbling, passing and shooting free-throws, also applies to SEO.

In SEO, the fundamentals are just a little bit different.  When optimizing your web site there are essentially four main ranking factors, 1) the coding of your site, 2) the on-page content, including the meta tags, 3) your link popularity, or how many other, related sites are linking to yours, and 4) your traffic.

All of these factors play a role in how well your site ranks overall, although some will have a greater impact on your rankings.  Also, some of these you have a great deal of control over and others you don’t.

Throughout this week I’m going to dig a little deeper into each one of these factors.  I hope you will follow along.

To your success,
Ken Partain

A Great Big Thanks for Our Clients

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Since Thanksgiving here in the United States is this Thursday, I want to send out a big thanks to each of our clients today. Tomorrow’s post will be a thanks to our business colleagues and marketing coaches. And then on Wednesday I’m going to show my thanks for my family and close friends.

Today I’ll begin with our most recent client and work my way back in time. Without each and every company listed here, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Thanks to Pickens, Snodgrass, Koch, LLP, an Arlington, TX Accounting Firm.  By the way, they have an opening for a Senior Tax Position if you know anyone in the area that is looking.

Thanks to Jade Electrolysis, a Vancouver Hair Removal company.  Jade Electrolysis is run by Jennifer Desloges and is currently offering training and Electrolysis Franchise Opportunities throughout Canada.

Thanks to Management 2000, a franchise consulting firm.  Management 2000 offers consulting, training and planning for companies considering franchising to grow their business.

Thanks to West Direct Express Courier, a Calgary courier and delivery company.  If you are in the Calgary area area and need a document or package delivered, across town or across the country, check them out.  They are the best in Calgary.

Thanks to Marketing Consultants of Nevada, a consulting company that can help you open your own independent dollar store.  In this economy owning a dollar store can be a very smart move.

Thanks to Number Junkies, a Calgary small business bookkeeping company.  A Quickbooks Pro Advisor, Donna Folden can help your small business get your books up to date and keep them that way.

Thanks to Greenbaum Marketing, a franchise marketing and website development company.  Martin Greenbaum really knows how to market your franchise, whether big or small.  He is very active in the International Franchise Association and speaks throughout the country.

Thanks to Light It Up Electric, a local electrician serving Frisco, Plano, McKinney and all of North Dallas.  This is one of the companies I have actually used personally and Todd Guernsey, the owner, is excellent at diagnosing and fixing electrical problems.

Thanks to Glenhill, Inc., a Chicago graphics and website design company.  Al Snyder, the owner, is also an Authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coach.

Thanks to the Lucid Group of Companies, a Calgary real estate investment and development company.  This is a company that seems to be doing everything right when it comes to real estate throughout Canada and the U.S.

Thanks to Glue Solutions, a Calgary graphics and website design company and Authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coaching company.  These guys do great work on designing and building websites and then helping small business owners market themselves more effectively.  They build websites that are graphically pleasing and coded very well which makes it much easier to optimize for top search results.

Thanks to Better Optics, LLC, a provider of quality binoculars, rifle scopes, spotting scopes, range finders and other accessories.

Thanks to NexTec Group, an accounting software consulting company with offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Cleveland, New York and New Jersey.

Thanks to Clean-Co Systems, a Houston hydroblasting and specialty cleaning company.  Clean-Co Systems offers chemical cleaning, Vacuum Truck service, Hydro Excavation, Dry Ice Blasting and Tank Cleaning.

Thanks to Line-X of Arlington, Texas, the leading spray-on bedliner company in the Dallas – Ft. Worth Metroplex.

Thanks to Collin County Sprinkler and Lighting, offering sprinkler repair and installation throughout Collin County and the surrounding area.

And last, but certainly not least, is Country Place Living, a rural senior living franchise company.  Country Place Living offers franchises of small, quality senior living centers in rural areas, which are typically underserved by larger senior living centers.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

As I said at the beginning, we would not be where we are today if it weren’t for you.  I look forward to serving you for many more years.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Remodel Buddy SEO Podcast Resources

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Thanks for visiting our site. I hope you enjoyed the interview we did with Kyle Hunt at Remodel Buddy, a marketing coach company for remodelers and home improvement professionals.  Below are some helpful links and additional information for improving your online presence as a contractor.

The most important thing to start with is to claim your local business listings in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Below are the links to do just that. Each of them are free so there’s no excuse for not doing this right away.

Google:

Here’s the link to look up your business.

Once you have claimed your listing you will need to verify your information. Google will provide you with a PIN by phone or by regular mail. Once you receive your PIN you will need to log into the Local Business Center and verify your listing.

Yahoo:

You will need to go here to sign up for your Yahoo Local Business Listing. You will need a Yahoo login, so if you don’t have one, you’ll have the ability to sign up during the process.

Bing:

You will need to go here to claim your Microsoft Map listing. You will need a Windows Live ID, so if you don’t already have one, get one of those first.

We also have our own Local Search Engine Business Profiles that are very well optimized for local search. Approximately 90% of them are on the front page of Google for their primary keyword phrases. For a limited time, we are offering a 50% discount for the first year. After that, it will automatically renew each year for $99.

We also recommend that you get your business listed in as many relevant online business directories as you can. You can find a multitude of free directories in which to list your business, but many of them will be of little value to your business.

There are also a handfull of paid directories (along with a couple of free ones) that we recommend. Below is a list of those directories along with a link to get signed up.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to do this yourself you can take advantage of our Link Building Program and we’ll take care of everything for you.

Don’t forget about doing a few press releases.  The two sites we recommend are PRWeb and FreePressRelease.com.  As I mentioned on the podcast, PRWeb seems to give you a little more exposure and a lot more flexibility, but you will benefit regardless of which one you choose.

If you have your own web site already and you’re not getting the traffic you want or generating the leads you want, you may want to consider one of our SEO Plans. After all, that’s our specialty and we’re proud to say that every single site we have worked on has gotten front page placement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

And lastly, if you don’t have your own website, what are you waiting for? Every single day people in your town are searching for your services online. If you’re not there, you’re losing money. For a very reasonable fee we can set you up with a small business website and blog of your own, one that you can add content to and edit as often as you please.

To your success!

Ken Partain (follow me on Twitter)

Dollar Store Marketing Consultants

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This week I finished the web site optimization of a new client site.  The site is for Marketing Consultants of Nevada, Inc., a dollar store consulting company.  They help people get started with their own dollar store without any franchise fees or royalties and few regulations.

The site was actually built by my friends over at Greenbaum Marketing, a franchise website development and marketing agency.

Once the site was complete, they turned it over to me for the optimization and I’m thrilled to be working with the folks at both companies.

Check out their sites and if I can help with optimizing your web site give me a call at 1-877-334-8022, extension 704.

To your success!

Welcome!

Ken Partain - Small Business Marketing ConsultantHello, my name is Ken Partain and I personally oversee every single SEO and Website development project that we take on at IPG Search Marketing and I stand behind our work 100%.

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Ken Partain
511 Ancient Oaks Dr
Marble Falls, TX 78654
United States
Local: 1.512.651.2963
Toll-free: 1.877.334.8022

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