Thursday, July 12, 2012

SEO Services

Have you or someone you know created an expensive website that can bring a lot of valuable content to the web? If you have you probably would love for everyone to see it but to be seen & marketed through the other billion websites out there how can you accomplish this monumental task? The easiest thing to do is have a professional internet marketing company do this for you. There are a lot of internet marketing companies now and days that claim to be professional, give excellent results, and say yes to whatever you want but to have nothing delivered. I have gone through and weeded out a lot of internet marketing companies in Orange County and the Los Angeles County area to finally find a great internet marketing company SoCal Digital Marketing. The reason I love sending all my clients to SoCal Digital Marketing is because of several factors, they are reliable, honest, and really care about my company as a client. They go through extra lengths to see that I am happy as a client and that is why I am referring them to you know. I have worked with other SEO companies that strictly stick to what is in the contract which is fine, and I have worked with SEO companies in Orange County that actually deliver less than what the contract stated. However at SoCal Digital Marketing this Orange County SEO company actually delivers above and beyond the signed contract.

There are not a lot of SEO companies out there that try to optimize your website without some form of manipulating site rankings with auto software that search engines despise but at SoCal Digital Marketing they are literally obessed with sticking with the guidelines that search engine's provide to web masters. They say that the reason being is because they want long-term long lasting relationships with their clients not short-term get rich quick schemes. Once I talked to my representative at SoCal D.M. I realized that this company was different and we will build a long lasting beneficial relationship. My company makes the most of our profits online through an E-commerce store and we had no idea how to drive traffic to it other than using social media. When we called SoCal Digital Marketing they explained several different ways to gain attention in the digital world which are SEO (search engine optimization), Pay Per Click (sponsored advertising), social media marketing (using social media to engage customers) and creating press releases.



My CEO and I decided that the best method of internet marketing is to do SEO. The reason being is because SEO is a more long term investment in the website that optimizes your site for valuable keywords to increase the chances of being ranked high in search engine results pages. If you want instant results you can choose to do a Pay Per Click campaign but most keywords or phrases cost $3-7 dollars per click. We also chose this method because that's how we searched for internet marketing areas in Orange County and Los Angeles because we typed in "Orange County SEO Company" & "Los Angeles SEO Company" and found SoCal Digital Marketing. We figured if they could rank on the first page for a highly competitive keyword than they must really know what they're doing and so far we were right. Our main 5 keywords went from no match to page 1 within the first 3 months and our other 5 secondary keywords went from page 10 and 12 to pages 2-4! The return on our invest for hiring this internet marketing company has been well worth it and we highly recommend SoCal Digital Marketing for all of your SEO, PPC, or social media marketing endevours. They also do Web Design and can host your website as well if you don't have a website for your company already.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Create a Sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools

Creating a Sitemap for Blogger is Easy
This article is about how to create a sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools.

Example of a Sitemap
What is a sitemap? A sitemap is basically a plain text hyperlink that displays all the web pages on your website. Kind of like a word document with just hyperlinks to all your web pages.

The benefits of creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google is not difficult and will optimize your website in several ways.





 
1) Once you create a sitemap Google and users will easily be able to find pages that would otherwise be hidden within the content of your website. A sitemap is basically a plain text hyperlink map that displays all the web pages on your website.

2) If your site is new and Google hasn't crawled it yet (this process could takes months) submitting your sitemap to Google will get your website Indexed and crawled much quicker (usually within a few days).

3) If your site has interactive and dynamic content or is frequently updated than a sitemap will let Google know that your website has been updated.

4) If your site has a lot of separate web pages that are not well linked together (inbound links I will talk about this in another post) then a sitemap, will make navigating your site simple for search engines and visitors.

How to create a Sitemap

To create a Sitemap you should have already have a Google Webmaster Tools (click here to create one) account first.
All you need to do is have a gmail account to sign up and then be able to verify your website by creating an html file or inserting a new meta tag. Just like verifying your Google Analytics tool.

Once your webmasters tools is verified go to Audit my PC to automatically create a sitemap for you. Follow the instructional video to create the sitemap.

When you finish creating your sitemap login to your Webmaster Tools account and click on the Sitemap tab.
Next, on the "Add a sitemap" tab select General Web Sitemap from the drop down bar and enter the URL of the sitemap that was generated for you from Audit my PC. Then click on Add sitemap to submit your sitemap to Google.

With the sitemap created and submitted directly to Google you will greatly reduce the amount of time needed to index your website as well as decrease the risk of having hidden web pages.


If you are interested in having an internet marketing company create a sitemap for you I highly suggest calling or visiting http://www.socaldigitalmarketing.com for social media marketing, SEO, and pay per click management.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Top 5 Easy Steps Before Creating a Website

1. Key Words in the URL
This is probably one of the top 5 most important parts of SEO. The reason being is because if your URL (website address) has the exact match domain for a key word or phrase, then you have a much higher chance of showing on the 1st page of Google. For example if you want to make a website about canine dog food, then register to your domain name as www.Caninedogfood.com Once your website has just a few backlinks and content about canine dog food your website will most likely show up on the first page once indexed. All you need to do before you register a domain name is do a quick key word research with Google Key Words tool, and find which key word or phrase relating to your website has the most traffic and low-medium competition. If you are interested in having a professional internet marketing company optimize your keyword research then I highly suggest SoCal Digital Marketing. Otherwise keep reading!


2. Register Domain Name and Selecting a Host

Domain Name -Once you have completed step 1, register your domain name. This will usually cost you $7-9 a year which is relatively inexpensive. I suggest Godaddy.com because it is quick and easy.

Hosting Service- Next, choose a hosting company and select a service plan based on the amount of traffic or domains you want to register. If you think you are going to have a large amount of traffic which takes bandwidth than go with a more premium plan. I use Hostgator.com  for my sites because the customer service is actually helpful. Hosting services should cost about $4 a month for basic plans to $12 a month for unlimited bandwidth plans.

3. Know Your Competition
Type in a similar key word or phrase to your website and see what shows up. Are your competitors paying for PPC (pay per click) campaigns with Google Adwords? If so, that means that your niche is competitive and you may have to work a bit harder for organic (natural) search results. However you can check your competitors sites and see who is visiting them and leaving comments. How is there website set up and is there anything your website can do better? Is there a forum on this site that has a large community built around it? See what makes these sites show up in the top results page and try to out do them.

4. Build Anticipation
Think of your website as opening up a new store because essentially it is a digital doorway to your business. Think about how retail stores generate a "buzz" in the local news when they are opening a store because they want the community to visit the opening day. This is the same model you should use for your website.

If you have a Twitter account start hinting that you have a site being constructed and even offer free promotional gifts to the first 100 visitors! Don't just stop on Twitter, use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to promote you website to your friends and family there too. If you really want to start off on the right foot have a press release ready to be sent out the moment your site goes live. Make sure that you don't submit your press release before your site is actually up because you would be missing out on potential backlinks and visits.

Google Analytics Chart
5. Track Your Website

Once your website is live, I would immediately install Google Analytics to begin tracking your website traffic. Knowing how and where your traffic is coming from is vital information to marketing a website!









Follow these easy steps before your site is created and this will save you a lot of trouble with SEO.

Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions

Monday, August 8, 2011

How to use Google Analytics

The first thing you need to do before you start all that other search engine optimization stuff is, you want to be able to track and analyze your current website traffic. A free and very useful tool provided by Google Analytics does much more than that.

Google Analytics shows you where your website traffic is coming from by country, what key words (very useful) visitors are using to find your website, the average time spent on your website, your top 10 landing pages (first page people view), referring traffic sources and much more. Here is a picture of what your Dashboard will look like;
Google Analytics Example
In order to access the power of Google Analytics all you need is an email address and someone who can input one html code that Google will provide for you. You can even do it yourself it is literally copy and paste. All you need to know where in your html coding to place it. Google suggests to place the code above the </head> tag which can easily be found by clicking ctrl+f and typing in </head>. Just paste the code right above that header tag and you now have successfully installed Google Analytics. Visit Google Analytics to sign up. From their the program will automatically run itself and all you have to do is analyze!

Google Analytics utilizes some cool graphs and features to show you how your website traffic history is progressing.

By clicking on visitors over view, you can track how many visits your website receives per day/week/month and how many unique visits (individual IP address visits).

In the content over view,  you can analyze which web pages on your site are receiving the most traffic and the entrance pathways there. This is beneficial to check because if you have a "squeeze page" which is the sales page that says "CLICK HERE!" or "SIGN UP NOW!" you can see if it is the most frequently viewed page, how visitors are finding the page, and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage % of visitors that will view one single page of your website then exit. So the lower the bounce rate the more interested people are with your website.

Another great feature of Google Analytics is the traffic sources overview, this page lets you see how much traffic is coming from direct URL entries, search engines, and referring sites.

This helped me market my banks website by finding out which websites refer (backlink) to the banks website and what reviews they wrote about. This shows you more insight on what kind of traffic (hopefully quality) your being sent by other websites.

Detailed view of California Analytics
The last main feature of Google is probably the most interesting one. Click on the map overlay and it will provide you with a map of the world that you can click on to get to what city your visitors are coming from. All you have to do is click on the country, then state/province, and that will bring up little orange dots that will show you the specific city your visitors came from. Cool right (almost scary).

These are the main features of Google Analytics. I highly recommend using this program not only because its free but because big G knows there stuff and provides great information (they are the worlds largest information resource).

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about Google Analytics and I will be happy to assist you. Also if you know of any other note worthy website traffic reports then feel free to suggest them. I learned how to utilize Google Analytics from an Orange County Internet Marketing company called SoCal Digital Marketing click here to check them out!

Sunday, August 7, 2011

How to SEO

Hello fellow Bloggers!
Once you finish reading my blog you will understand advanced SEO techniques that cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to pay someone else to do, and you will be able to Make Money Online!

I am currently an Internet Marketing Intern in California. I have decided that I would like to share with you all the information that I have learned over the course of this Internship. The reason being is because I feel a need to give back to the Internet Marketing community, especially those that write about search engine optimization (SEO).
A lot of free and valuable information has been posted on the Internet about SEO, but there is one major problem. The information on How to SEO is scattered and limited in the amount of valuable information.


You literally have to search for days to find the valuable information that you are looking for and when you do it usually leaves you with just enough information to be asking even more questions. I was lucky enough to be able to do paid research on this specific topic 6 hours a day for months.

 I realize that most people/businesses don't have that kind of time or money to hire someone to do that, therefore I have created this blog to solve this problem for you. Not only will you be able to find all the valuable information on how to SEO and do a majority of internet marketing yourself here, but I will also be providing free information that companies pay thousands of dollars for so called SEO "gurus".
Why would I do this though?

There are actually several reasons; the first being that the "How to SEO" information that I have gathered can all be found online for free anyways. The other reason is that I plan on pursuing this career as an Internet Marketer, and having a blog is an important asset to have in this business. If you are interested in what an internet marketing business is check out this company's website.

I am hoping that you find the information here valuable and follow my blog or bookmark it. Also don't be afraid to ask any kind of question you may have about learning how to SEO or start an Internet Marketing career!
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