What to Look For In a Good SEO Company.

People who are turning into online commerce are steadily increasing. A lot of people are now realizing that having an online store offers an advantage compared to having to rent out office space. Aside from that, a lot of services are now being offered to online clients to maximize their income.

In order to be an effective online merchant, one thing you will need is SEO. However, it'll be pretty hard to start up a web store and start SEO as well, not unless you have enough manpower and resources.

Take note that dominating a very competitive industry is not very easy, especially if you're competing with brands or companies that have existed for more than a decade. That is why you need to avail of SEO services. Instead of training yourself to do SEO or (and most likely starting from scratch), it will be better for you to avail of SEO services. If your business relies heavily on online traffic, you can't afford not to avail of SEO services. SEO companies will certainly help you increase your rankings and increase your revenue.

When hiring an SEO firm, be sure that the following services are being offered.

Keyword Research

This is the basics of SEO. Every activity involved in SEO has everything to do with the keywords you want to rank for. You need to consider the number of searches for your keyword. Trying to rank for a keyword that only gets 5 hits per month isn't exactly what you'd call a lucrative business.

Link Building

Another necessary part of SEO is getting links out in the web. The more links you have, the better your site will rank for certain keywords. Every SEO firm should be able to do as much. However, make sure that they're doing white hat strategy. There are SEO companies that do black hat strategy. Admittedly, it can work for a while. Unfortunately, search engines like Google and Yahoo didn't hire PhD grads just so you can easily cheat them. I'm not saying black hat strategies don't work. In fact they do, but it's something that's short-lived.

Social Media Marketing

Increasing your hits will require you to delve into social media marketing. Almost every user of internet spends at least a few minutes, if not hours, on social media like Facebook, twitter, etc. Tapping into these can certainly expand your potential market.

Change favors the bold

Change is constant. Nothing lasts forever. Such clichés are applicable when we talk about earning from the internet.

What might have worked before may not have worked today. 

Even search engines constantly change their algorithms to adjust with the times. It is the goal of every search engine to provide their users the most relevant search results.Unfortunately, there are also people who try to find a loophole with the system to make their sites come out at the top. Before, simply stuffing your pages with your keywords and stuffing your meta data with the same keywords is enough to get you on the top spot of the search pages. Now, it won't work and it will even get you banned. 

Search engines are continuously changing their ways to make their system foolproof.

Even today, they've incorporated the location of the sites for local searches. People searching for potential goods that can be bought in the internet will find that the search results give more weight to local pages. In a way, this has brought concern to international retailers. However, that is a topic for another post.

Linkbuilding In New Ways

Explore different kinds of ways of linking to your site. Exchanging links is a thing of the past. Site owners have disabled html tags in their comments section because most of the times they’re flooded with links to different sites. In some cases, they are automatically converted to “nofollow” links which do not add value to your site.

In order find new ways of linkbuilding, keep watch for new platforms that programmers develop. Before, social media had initially the purpose of connecting people with one another. Nowadays, it’s one of the most preferred venue of advertising, linkbuilding or otherwise.

If you want to get on top of the heap, then it is only logical for you to change as well. Change favors the bold.

What To Expect For 2011

As we approach year 2011, there are now a lot of changes that we have to go through. With mobile technology alone, there are a lot of tablets being released that offer more than just a book reader. With these mobile gadgets, you can now interact engage in various forms of social media interaction.

Along with the sudden outburst of social media apps on various mobile gadgets, you can also expect many local businesses to start integrating some of their marketing with location based strategies. There are tools like FourSquare and Gowalla that certainly help. Mobile phones are equipped with GPS that allow local businesses to be found also when a user is navigating.

Video Streaming will be hotter than ever. With internet usage getting cheaper as time goes by and as infrastructure goes faster, it will be more practical to spend more time in front of the computer than in front of the television.

SEO will be moving towards Social Media Optimization. SEO is now a bit outdated considering that majority of the people accessing the internet is accessing it because of social media. Facebook alone gets at least 25% of the page views. If you want to be visible online, then you'll have to optimize your site for social networks like Facebook, YouTube and even Twitter. Luckily for us, these resources are all free. Of course, there are still some PPC campaigns for the hardcore marketers.

More Videos than ever. More online marketers are now using videos to keep their sites entertaining as well as interactive. Who can blame them? People respond to these sites more positively because they are an eye candy. Now, pictures do not simply cut it anymore. Additionally, because search engines put more weight on pages that have more content, meaning text, pictures or videos, you can expect the net to be flooded with more videos for promotional purposes.

What about you? Are you expecting something for 2011? Care to share your thoughts?

Why Businesses Turn To Social Media

If you own a business and you don't have an online presence in social media networks, it may be time for you to start to consider having one.

According to the latest stats, people spend a lot of time in the web and approximately 23% of those are time spent in Twitter and Facebook.

Marketing agencies also keep themselves abreast with the trends of today's society. Whether it's just a post of your favorite shoes, dress or even movie, Social media takes all of that data and pools together some information that can help almost any business with their ad campaign.

Right now, almost half of the population falls under the age of 30. Almost all of which are part of an online group or network. We spent more than half of our waking time in front of computers. And this is not limited to youngsters. Even people of middle age and old age groups turn to this medium in order to connect with people.

In order to maximize your profits, you have to increase your sales and decrease your expenses. Considering that scenario, wouldn't having an online presence benefit your business? These two reasons should be enough for every business to consider going into social media.

It’s Free! Subscribing to paid advertisement in television is now getting more costly than ever. Yet, most of the advertising venues on social media border on being free. Wouldn't that be more advantageous for your business? You are able to reach more audiences through the internet depending on the medium you are in, whether it's Facebook or Twitter.

It's actually a lot more cost effective to create an online presence than it is to have your ads run across the television stations. In fact, if you have enough know-how, coupled with a bit of website SEO efforts, you can even maximize the exposure of your business.

More Audiences. You can basically connect with anyone in the world today. Though this has already been brought about by the creation of the internet, the creation of social media basically strengthened this fact. With people logging in almost every day in social media sites, there’s no telling how many people you can reach just by signing up.

So, still think resorting to social media isn't worth it?

Strengthening Social Media Authority Benefits Website SEO

As you may already know, one of the primary reasons why people use the internet is because of social media. It only becomes logical if search engines make use of these sources for their rankings.

Over time, it's becoming clear that the stronger presence you have in social media, the stronger your presence becomes in search engines as well, which makes it good for your Website SEO.

However, it should be noted that it is not clear how search engines take a look at things from Twitter and Facebook in order to help the organic searches.

Danny Sullivan, the Search Engine Land Chief posted a very important article about how social media affects search engine rankings and surprisingly enough, Google and Bing gave direct answers that they do, though they didn't exactly divulge their respective secrets as to how it does affect search engine rankings.

According to Google, when an article is retweeted in Twitter, it sort of flags up as a signal and they also consider how many people shared the articles. Despite of these links being nofollow links, it clearly shows that they in fact have bearing when it comes to Google searches.

The same can be said about how they treat Facebook Fan pages. The more authoritative the crowd sharing links to your content, the better you rank in the search pages.

Bing also explains that they also look at social authority of users. They also consider the number of people following those users and add a little more weight in the links they have. In other words, Bing decides when links carry more authority by determining the person who tweets it.

In terms of Facebook Fan pages, Bing explains that if the same links is shared in both Twitter and Facebook, it is more likely to be legitimate.

So, if you really want to rise in the SERPs, it may be good to looking into increasing your authority in both Twitter and Facebook.