I Have a Dog Grooming Business; Can I Work with Ten Golden Rules?

Before today, most small business owners who wished to work with an agency would hear an answer they didn’t like – either it was cost-prohibitive or the agency lacked the scalability to work with smaller accounts. As a sign of the times, Ten Golden Rules is changing all that with new online marketing packages specifically created for small and medium-sized businesses that want to harness the power of the Internet to grow their businesses.

As a business owner, finding time to keep up with the ever-changing world of Internet marketing can be challenging. From Social Media to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to creating a competitive website, navigating the online world can be confusing if not a bit overwhelming. With these new services from Ten Golden Rules, you can now have access to the processes developed for larger companies, like hospitals and universities, without breaking your budget.

Simply visit the website and click on the service you’re most interested in. The entire process is automated for convenience and efficiency, and draws on almost a decade of knowledge from in-market testing and today’s best practices.

Do you do any of your own Internet marketing for your small or medium-sized business? Tell us about it in the comments below.

What Google Caffeine Means To Your Online Marketing

Last week, Google announced the completion of their new web indexing system, Caffeine. The main goal behind this new system is to provide fresher results then were available in Google's previous search results. Now more than ever, recency of content will be contributing to your search engine rankings. Caffeine allows Google to index more content faster in order to provide more recent information to users.

There are some simple ways for us to take advantage of this new indexing system. Providing fresh content on trending topics related to your industry is now more important than ever. The first step is to identify the trending topics within your industry. You can find out the hottest search topics using Google Trends. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon are also great places to identify hot topics.

Once you identify the current trending topics to write about, discuss these topics aggressively in Twitter, blogs, and press releases as these all get picked up in Google's instant search.

Choosing Keywords for SEO

To run a successful search engine optimization campaign, an important step is choosing keywords for SEO to focus on. Simply trying to rank for a list of keywords you think are important is not always the best for your bottom line. You should be less focused on generating lots of traffic and more focused on generating revenue.

To develop your list of keywords to focus your efforts on, you want to consider a few things: how frequently are they searched, how competitive they are, and how well they convert for your business. Keyword research tools, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and Google Suggest are useful in determining how frequently keyword phrases are searched and how competitive they are. While this information is valuable in deciding which keywords present the greatest opportunities for optimization (high search frequency, low competition), you also want to determine which keywords are likely to generate a lead or a sale.

If you run a pay per click campaign, you have a head start in identifying your best converting keywords (as long as you are tracking conversions). Go through your campaigns and see which phrases have the highest conversion rate. If they convert well from pay per click, there is a good chance that they will convert well in organic search. Choosing Keywords for SEO will improve your overall performance and search engine results.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Strategies for SEO

Start 2010 off right with the core strategies and advanced tactics you'll need to optimize your website to be found in Google and the other search engines!

Join Jay Berkowitz, Author of "The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing" for an interactive Webinar where you will learn:

1. How to determine how Google and the other search engines evaluate your website and how many search results you have today
2. How to read the minds of your customers and prospects. What are they searching for? What keyword phrases do they use? Which search engine do they favor?
3. Optimal website build techniques for SEO
4. Keyword research and content development
5. Critical link building
6. Meta Tags, File Names, Hyperlinks and AltTags

This webinar will take place on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: Ten Strategies for SEO

10 Free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips

Below is a list of helpful SEO tips to always keep in mind:

1. Build sites in html or another simple language the search engine spiders can read.
2. Add a page of content to your website each day if possible (or every week).
3. Make sure your site has a site map.
4. Have a strong on-site link strategy.
5. Add meta tags to each page on your site.
6. Include a meta tag “description.”
7. Insert header tags.
8. Add image names and alt-text.
9. Target a keyword density of approximately 5%.
10.Keep in mind you can break up keyword phrases.

What’s Your Web site’s Deep Link Ratio?

When it comes to organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the links pointing to your site are one of the most important factors that influence your search engine rankings. It’s not just a numbers game, however. The quality of those links is important, too - especially to Google. For example, if a large number of links and/or extremely reputable sites, such as The New York Times, point to your Web site for a particular search query, then Google "trusts" you are a relevant and popular authority on that topic.

From an SEO perspective, where those links point is yet another important consideration…

It addition to analyzing the quantity and quality of inbound links, you should evaluate your deep link ratio.

Simply put, your deep link ratio is the percentage of inbound links to your homepage versus all other pages of your site. To calculate your deep link ratio:

1) Calculate the total number of backlinks to your entire site. Important: Filter out links from your own domain. (Learn how to do this.)
2) Subtract the number of backlinks to your homepage. The result is the number of deep links to your site.
3) Divide the number of deep links by the total number of backlinks to get your deep link ratio.

Total Deep Links / Total Number of Links = Deep Link Ratio (%)

In general, sites with a higher deep link ratio tend to perform better in the search engines. So, all other things the same, a higher deep link ratio could give you just the edge you need to outperform your competitors.

However, be cautious of suddenly building a massive amount of deep links to your site. Links pointing to your site should always appear natural – both in terms of your deep link ratio, the anchor text used in the links, and the speed at which those links are acquired. Otherwise, Google and the other search engines may consider your site SPAM, and remove it from the search results.

Building Natural Looking Links

When building links for search engine optimization purposes, the best thing you can do is to make your links look natural. If you are actively building links to your website, you want to make these links look like people just decided to link to your website because it has good content. Since search engines increase your rankings for having natural links while they can penalize you if you are buying/selling links, it is important to cover your tracks.

One of the most common mistakes when building links unnaturally is to use exactly the same anchor text, for example a keyword phrase you are targeting, for a large number of links. If your links are natural, there is a very slim chance that everyone that links to you will use identical anchor text, and the search engines know this. If you use variations in your anchor text, your links will look more natural. For example, if you are targeting the phrase “internet marketing consultant”, when choosing anchor text for new links, sometimes use “internet marketing consulting” or “consulting for internet marketing” and other variations.

Another issue is your link growth. If your site has never generated more than five links in a month, then all of a sudden it generates 200 links in a month, this can look very unnatural to the search engines. If you are starting a linkbuilding campaign, start slow. Each month, try to get a few more backlinks than the previous month.

The key to a successful linkbuilding campaign is making the links appear to be natural. If you can accomplish this, you will see much better ranking results.

Linkbuilding for SEO - Quality Over Quantity

A common misconception that can be a crutch to people running a search engine optimization campaign is that getting as many links as possible is the ultimate way to reach those high search results. Yes, having loads of backlinks will generally help improve organic rank, but the quality of those links is what will make the real difference. Several basic factors should be considered about a site when requesting a link from it:

• Relevance to your site
• Neighborhood it builds
• Backlinks to that site

Relevance - What keywords are you targeting? Are those keywords on the page you are requesting a backlink from? These are the questions you should be asking in order to build a quality link. The more relevant the page is to your site, the more a link from it will be worth to you.

Neighborhood - What other sites is the page linking to? Ideally, other links on the page from which you are requesting a link would be to sites exactly like yours. This will help put you in the right neighborhood as far as Google is concerned. If a page links to sites that resemble your site, Google will consider these sites to be related to yours and that is a good thing. If a page links to your site and a bunch of porn and gambling sites, Google will consider your site to be related to porn and gambling, which can have a dire effect on your results.

Backlinks to the page - How powerful is a page that you are looking for a link from? A page that has no backlinks is not near as powerful as a page that has hundreds of backlinks. If a page that has hundreds of backlinks links to your site, the power of those hundreds of links is also shared with you.

These are just a few basic things that should be observed when building links. More will be shared in later posts. Keep reading!

Google Releases SEO Starter Guide

Yesterday on the Google Webmaster Central blog, they released an pretty interesting guide to help webmasters understand the best practices for SEO to apply to their website. It covers topics such as how one should construct their page titles, meta tags, URL structure and site navigation best practices. For a 22 page .pdf, it's worth taking a look at, and Google plans to update with new suggestions because as we all know with Google... changes happen all the time.

Of course, there are more elements to getting your website at the top of the search engines that also should be considered, such as social media, PPC and much more.