Local Search Engine Optimization & Online Reputation Management

April 17, 2012 Leave a comment

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

IX Brand SEO Services Company

We help small businesses achieve high rankings in Google search results and we also help our clients gather great online customer reviews and recommendations.  IX Brand SEO Services Company is based in Wharton, TX with an office in Sugar Land, TX.  We work with clients throughout the Houston Metro area including Rosenberg, Richmond, El Campo, Bay City, Arcola, and Webster.  We also have clients in other states.  Give us a call at 979-531-8300 to visit about your business and the goals you’ve set for your online presence.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services

Google Chrome

Google Chrome (Photo credit: thms.nl)

As we view search engine optimization, it includes our work to move your website higher in Google and other search engine rankings, and it also includes our work to improve your business social media and your online business listings.  If your business appears at the top of the first page of results, for your good keywords, because you have a great YouTube video, then you win.  If your Facebook business page appears high on the first page of search results for other keywords, then you win again.  If your blog post appears for other good keywords associated with your business, you win a third time.  Our goal for you is to give your business multiple opportunities to win in search results competition by improving your website and by improving your social media.

 

Better Google Business Listings

Google Places Listing for IX SEO Client Gimmie A Break in Webster TX

Google Places Listing for IX SEO Client Gimmie A Break in Webster TX

IX Brand SEO Services has years of experience helping small businesses with Google and other online business listings.  These listings can place your business at the top of the first page of search results if they are set up correctly and if they’re part of a complete SEO strategy.  Best of all, most of online business listings are free or

almost free, so you’re only paying a labor charge to set them up and maintain them for your business.  If there are no changes to your listing information — no charges to you!  Call us at 979-531-8300 for more information about your Google Places listing and other online business listings, and get them working for your business!

 

Online Business Reputation Management Consultant

We have found that it doesn’t do your business much good to be highly visible in search results if you have a bunch of highly visible negative reviews.  Potential customers will find your website, social media, and business listings, but they’ll quickly head for your competitors with better reviews.  We’ve also found that most small businesses will ignore the issue of customer reviews until a bad one appears and then it becomes very urgent to remove the bad review and obtain good reviews from happy customers.

We work with you to help you implement a business process to collect great reviews from your customers and then we help you place those positive comments online in the best way to promote your business.  When a negative review appears, we help you respond in the best way possible to minimize the damage to your business reputation and to your customer relationships.

Business Process Improvement Consultant

We have experience in providing business process improvement consulting services using process mapping, and even computer simulation in process mapping and process evaluation.  Although we are familiar with Lean Six Sigma techniques, we also apply the Theory of Constraints methodologies developed by Goldratt.  If you are considering hiring a consultant to help you improve your business processes and your business performance, please give us a call at 979-531-8300.

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Filed under Business Process Improvement, Business Reputation Management, How to SEO Tips, SEO for Web Developers

Google Lists 5 SEO Mistakes – Serving Katy

May 23, 2012 Leave a comment

Google's Five Common Mistakes for SEOs

English: Google Logo officially released on May 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

IX Brand SEO Services Company provides search engine optimization, Internet marketing, and online reputation management services for small businesses in the Houston area, including Katy, Richmond, Rosenberg, Sugar Land, and Webster.  Call 979-531-8300 to discuss your website, your Google ranking, customer reviews, or any other Web marketing issue.

Google recently released a great video titled, “5 Common Mistakes in SEO,” presented by Maile Ohye, Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead.  Here they are in the order presented by Maile:

No Value Proposition.

In other words, why would a user choose your website in search results?  Remember, your website is listed with just a snippet of text and your website title.  Is there information in your title and in your page description that would entice a Web searcher to click the link to your website?  If not, then you should work on adding a value proposition or a call to action to all of your page descriptions.  If you’re not sure what a page description is, please contact us.

Segmented Approach to SEO.

Your website is segmented and not working together.  Your pages aren’t linked to each other and the information on any one page is independent of and doesn’t reference your other pages.  You should consider the entire visitor experience from initial entry to your website to actual conversion as a customer.

Putting Time and Effort into Workarounds.

You should put your time and effort into new features or simplifying your website to enhance the user experience and to make it easy for Google to index your website.  The example that Maile used was the use of rel=”canonical” in paginated content.  But the larger issue is to look at your website from your customers’ viewpoint.  Look for ways to improve your website to improve your customer experience at your site.  Maile also talked about using “Fetch as Google Bot” in Webmaster tools to ask Google to crawl new website content quickly.

Getting Caught in SEO Trends

Unfortunate SEO trends of yesteryear — hunting for the ideal keyword density.  As was discussed in the previous Matt Cutts post, there is no ideal keyword density.  SEOs should focus on producing keyword rich, compelling and quality webpage content.  Maile advises SEOs to avoid getting caught in the latest trends and instead, concentrate on things that will bring lasting value to your website.

Slow Iteration!

Maile makes the point that the “constant in SEO is that it’s constantly evolving.”  The faster your team can define metrics for success, implement improvements, measure impact, create new improvements, and prioritize improvements based on market and personnel, the more successful you will be.  You have to find what works for your particular business — the combination of website improvements, social media usage and local business listings that will work for your business in your business niche and location.  And count on it changing over time!

Some Good Suggestions for SEO

  1. Do something cool — have a value proposition that separates you from your competitors.
  2. Include relevant keywords in your copy and do the keyword research to find out what your relevant keywords are.
  3. Be smart about your title tags and meta description tags and your site architecture.
  4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools so that you’re notified if there are issues with your websites.
  5. Attract buzz to bring natural links and votes and attention to your website.
  6. Stay fresh and relevant.  Expand your reach to social media sites and make sure that your site is easy to use and to navigate on smart phones.

Here’s the full video for you to enjoy!  If you have any questions or need help with any aspect of your website, online business listings, or search engine optimization, please call 979-531-8300 or use the contact form to send  an email.

Filed under How to SEO Tips, SEO for Web Developers

Website Ranking – Sugar Land SEO

May 23, 2012 Leave a comment

Which Website Ranking Signals Do SEOs Worry About — That They Shouldn’t — And What Should They Focus On

Matt Cutts discusses website ranking signals

Matt Cutts talks about Ranking Signals (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

IX Brand SEO is a search engine optimization and online reputation management services company with offices in Wharton and Sugar Land, TX, serving the Metro Houston area and other States too.  If you’d like to discuss your small business website issue, please call 979-531-8300.

The head of Google’s WebSpam Team, Matt Cutts, recently starred in a video responding to a questions — “Which ranking signals do SEOs worry about too much and what ranking signals should SEOs focus on the most”?  There are lots of search engine optimization “experts” who rely and promote statistical tools that tell you if your website or blog post has been “optimized.”  Google’s message is that focusing on the tools and the statistics they generate isn’t wise.  Remind yourself that Google is looking for high-quality, relevant and compelling websites to list for Web searchers.  You should remember Google’s goals as you set the goals for your website and your Internet marketing effort.  Here’s the video:

Matt’s response  was “keyword density“ to the first part of the question.  In other words, you shouldn’t be overly concerned about how often a particular keyword is used on a page, if you’re producing high-quality and highly readable copy.  I have SEO tools that calculate keyword density and I’ve read SEO books that claim there are specific limits to the number of times a keyword can be mentioned on a page.  One friend was telling me about a software tool that “optimized” blog posts by counting keywords.  Matt’s and Google’s guidance is to focus on producing quality content that people want to read and link to.

I have a client, Emerald Sod Farms, that’s fortunate enough to have good keywords as part of it’s business name.  It’s natural to write page copy for this business that uses the business name in talking about the turfgrass sod it grows and its delivery and installation services.  If we couldn’t use the word “sod” more than a couple of times on a page for fear of exceeding a keyword density limit, we couldn’t talk about the business or its services in a clear and understandable way.  In developing page copy for the Emerald Sod Farms website, we certainly use keyword research so we understand the words and phrases people are using to find turfgrass sod on the Internet, but we use those words and phrases in a natural, understandable, and hopefully persuasive way to make a positive impression on website visitors and convert them into customers.

As to the second part of the question, Matt says that you shouldn’t focus on any particular website ranking signal.  You want compelling content that people will want to read, link to, and revisit.  You want to do keyword research so you know what words and phrases your customers are using to search the Web.  You want to have good titles and headings.  The SEO should make sure the content is crawled (indexed by Google and the other search engines), but don’t worry too much about any particular SEO statistic describing your website or its pages.  Developing compelling content should be your major focus as an SEO or as a small business owner or as a website designer.

As always, if you have any questions about local search engine optimization or online reputation management, please call 979-531-8300 or use the contact form to send an email.

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Filed under How to SEO Tips, SEO for Web Developers

How Google Uses Human Raters – SEO for Sugar Land

May 3, 2012 Leave a comment

Matt Cutts Describes How Google Uses Human Quality Raters

IX Brand SEO Services Company serves small businesses throughout the Houston area and around the US through offices in Sugar Land and Wharton, TX.  We focus on local search engine optimization, online reputation management for collecting good customer reviews, and business process improvement for using customer feedback information.  Please give us a call at 979-531-8300 or send an email using the contact form.

Searchengineland.com featured an article about a recent Google video describing its use of human raters.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam Team did the video.  It’s great information and it illustrates one aspect of Google’s continuing efforts to improve the quality of its search results — from the perspective of a human.  Here’s the video:

The question the video is intended to answer is how Google uses human raters as a part of its algorithm.  In other words, how does Google use people paid by Google as a part of its algorithm.  Here are the main points of the response:

  • Google does not use human raters to influence its algorithm in a direct way.  In other words, a human rater paid by Google does not influence your website’s placement in search rankings.
  • Google does use human raters to test, validate and verify its algorithm.
    • Google’s hundreds of raters have classified a large number of websites as good, not good, webspam, etc.
    • Google engineers use that bank of evaluated domains to test changes to its algorithm.  In other words, if a test modification to the algorithm results in higher quality domains being placed higher in results, then that’s a good thing and the algorithm change might be considered for additional study and implementation.
    • The next step in evaluating an algorithm change might be the use of side-by-side testing.  A human rater is presented with two sets of search results, side-by-side, for a particular query and then is asked to pick the better set of results, providing comments about the reasoning for the choice.  One side would likely be the results from the current Google algorithm and the other side would be the search results derived from the modified algorithm being tested. The human rater doesn’t know which side is which — derived from the current algorithm or the test algorithm.
    • Next Google’s engineers will look at the search results rated much better or much worse by the human testers.  If the testers didn’t see much of a difference between the quality of one side and the other, then the test algorithm wouldn’t be implemented.  Matt Cutts says that Google is looking for “outlier” differences — in other words very significant improvements from use of the test algorithm.
  • If the new algorithm is rated a significant improvement by the human testers, then a small live test is conducted to see if people in the real world click and interact more with the search results delivered by the test algorithm.  If so, then it’s a good thing!
  • The human testers sometimes have difficulty distinguishing spam from good websites, so Matt says the human testers are not a substitute for the expertise and intuition of Google’s engineers.  However, the human testers can have a significant impact on the testing of algorithm changes and they help Google identify the algorithm changes that are a big improvement or at least an improvement in the validity and relevance of search results.
  • Bottom line — the human raters don’t have a direct impact on search engine results, but they do impact the testing and validation of algorithm changes.
Google SEO specialist, Matt Cutts

Google SEO specialist, Matt Cutts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you have questions about this concept or you’d like to discuss your search marketing situation, please contact me using the web form or call me at 979-531-8300.  IX Brand SEO Services Company serves small businesses with search engine optimization and online reputation management help in the Houston area including Fort Bend and Harris County. Thanks!

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