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About Google’s SEO Report Card

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Google recently published this article on the Official Google Webmaster Blog regarding the overall SEO of Google and the products and services they offer.  The PDF link within the article gives a very good overall view of how a site should be graded for SEO and what the most important things to look for include.  Here’s what they had to say:

How many of Google’s web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google’s SEO Report Card.

Google’s SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google’s product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.

We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you’d like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner’s Guide.

We hope this helps you on your journey through SEO and understanding what the pros look for when taking any SEO into consideration.

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The Inconvenient Truth About HubSpot’s Website Grader

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I’ve come across a few blogs reviewing the use of Website Grader from Hubspot and they all have mixed reviews. Over the course of 2009 until now, I have to say that we have found the results to be inconsistent at best. We’ve ensured that our site is not only W3C Valid, but also have passed the initial 508 Compliance tests from Cynthia Says for our home page, Checked with DomainTools on our SEO score (We score 100% on all metrics there), have listed ourselves in the paid Yahoo! Directory and are listed in the DMOZ.

Not only that, we’ve turned on GZIP Compression in Apache using mod_gzip and mod_deflate, tuned Apache, PHP and MySQL, enabled all other sorts of goodies for security and speed, turned on all types of Caching, checked our headers and then did the entire process all over again when we migrated servers. We just can’t seem to get past the 95-98.6% range on Website Grader. The one good thing of all of this is that our Alexa ranking is improving dramatically and we’re still #1 in our area for what we do.

HubSpot has said many times over that they are not selling SEO “snake oil”…but if you sign up for their 7 day free trial, you’ll find a hefty $9000.00 price-point PER YEAR with a $500.00 setup fee if you want to continue. Surely they know who they want to market to with that kind of investment for one company. With a “free SEO tool”, pushing someone to eventually spend this much money is a bit absurd to find out information that you could have Googled or found with another “free SEO tool”.

Hubspot says this about their product:

HubSpot’s software helps you take advantage of the changing nature of how people research and shop for products – bringing together a suite of Internet marketing tools for the small or medium sized business, including tools for search engine optimization, business blogging, website content publishing, lead tracking and intelligence, marketing analytics, and competitor analysis. HubSpot is web-based, does not require any IT staff, and is designed to be used by a marketing person, not a techie.

While this may be true, it only gives a very topographical look – more correctly as one blog put it as a “website check engine light”. Now, what really, honestly, confuses me is when searching Google for Website Grader, I managed to pull up a site that not only has a poor design, but it scores higher than we do on Website Grader. Check this out. How does a site with that many errors get listed as 99.3? CertGuard.com has a 99.5 and about the same number of errors. So, why is it when we take all of these measures to CORRECT the things that HubSpot are listed as wrong that we are scored lower in light of the two sites that have multiple Website Grader errors and score higher? This seems backwards. Why put your trust in a company that asks for this much money and does not accurately depict a website?

On another note, you can order effective and worthy SEO services from TurkReno Incorporated at our online store for much less than HubSpot is asking for.

Comments are welcome.

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SEO Word Cloud for SEO in Mobile, Alabama

Google DOES NOT CARE about META Keywords

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We were recently e-mailed by one of our clients regarding an SEO company that is basically trying to sell them snake-oil and defraud them of their money. We hate companies like this because they prey on people who have good intentions but may not keep up with everything that comes from Google HQ or from SEOMoz. Yes, the title of this is in fact “Google DOES NOT CARE about META Keywords” because they don’t and haven’t for quite some time (years to be exact). What is important is your META Title and META Description. Other search engines do care about the META Keywords and it was best said to do them anyways for “META Insurance”. But, again, not an important factor at all to Google.

Below is what Matt Cutts of Google (SEO MASTER) had to say on the Google Official Webmaster Blog:

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Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

 

At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Watch the Video on YouTube.

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

 

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

 

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets.
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

 

Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

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And that’s the official P’s and Q’s ladies and gentlemen. Do not let some snake-oil salesman sell you “keyword optimization” because it is FRAUDULENT! If you did, now would be a good time to go to your bank and file a fraud affidavit. But, again, this is just Google. No one, not even us, can guarantee you on the 1st page or top 10 of Google. Are they secretly hacking into the Google servers without someone noticing and changing the search algorithm themselves? HIGHLY UNLIKELY, so therefore it would be impossible for any sort of guarantee. And, Google generates results based on your IP Location, like we’re listed in Mobile, Alabama. You drive to Nashville, TN and you’re going to get different results because they’re trying to provide you relevancy based on location. Things that are generally popular, validated to W3C standards, and optimized correctly the other tags will rank higher than other sites — and that’s a fact. If doing this puts you at #1 for Google, then that’s an added bonus.

We will say that Search Engine Optimization on the META description and META title level with content analysis is a good thing, but $125 per “keyword”? Robbery and a scam. Have us take a look at your site and we’ll give you the what’s-what and who’s-who on SEO without trying to milk every dollar out of you. We’ve done this for several years now and know what techniques work and which don’t. Matt Cutts at Google saying this only helps to rectify our point.

Contact us today and get REAL SEO, not some snake-oil scheme/scam.

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W3C Valid Code

W3 Validation – Does it make a difference to be a perfectionist?

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Well, it’s interesting to put all of our training to work. Yet despite all of the certifications and education that we have, it is interesting to contradict my scholarly standings with yet another blog post.  At this point, we want to discuss validator.w3.org.  Even though we have known about this handy feature for a while now, it should at least be questioned.  Does it make a difference?  In a few cases, we have found questions like this one below throughout the Internet:

“I just wanted to present this question to all you SEO savvy people out there. I have recently been building websites with W3 compliant code as an added SEO feature. Do you think that it helps with SEO and if so, do you know if there are any statistics out there on the web that show how much it helps?”

A lot of people answer no change at all… Some report high change.  We personally think that it is case specific.  Even with a site that may have several errors (+50), it is important to properly grasp the situation by giving a proper analysis.  If the site has never been launched before, yes – it is extremely important. If it is a site that you have maintained with dynamic content and it has been done before, it may or may not make a difference.

What errors matter to W3C?

There are some errors that matter more than others that can hinder your SEO for XHTML:

Incorrectly defining your entire page by forgetting to declare your DOCTYPE.
No Alt tag on <img> tags.
Forgetting to close your tags the right way or within the correct tag.
Forgetting to put a <p> before text in a <div> tag.

There are plenty more things. We did a lot of what we described above when validating pages last night…even though the blog here is not yet validated.  Do we think that it makes a difference?  Not really. Because if this was a magic bullet, then our pages would be where we want them to be at this very moment.  But of course, we would tell our competition that.

Have thoughts?  Please leave a comment!

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Does Running a Web Consulting Business Mean No Bank Holidays

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Here I am sat in front of the computer waiting for one of my business partners to arrive and I start to think, ‘Does Running a Web Consulting Business Mean No Bank Holidays?’

Well, the truth is out there, as the saying goes, and take a look at any successful network marketer and they will tell you one thing. You never stop.

It might seem as though you’re listening when your partner walks into the room, throws a cup of coffee your way and tells you the kids have just climbed up onto the roof and are throwing rocks at the neighbor’s cat for the fifth time this week but the truth is you haven’t heard a word of it and so you smile curiously and say something like, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll be with you in a minute. Thanks for the coffee’.

You haven’t heard a word because you’re too busy looking for that next million. The Internet is taking over your home and there’s nothing you can do about it. So why not make a web site?

And listen, if this is you:

It’s okay.

Really, we understand and we know what it’s like to rush down stairs at 3:47AM because there’s just that something you need to do online because the guy you were talking to an hour ago in Hong Kong promised to get back to you and you’re sure he’s probably online right now waiting for your reply and besides you’re not really that tired.

We understand.

So go do your thing this bank holiday and forget that others around you have different lives. We’re still here giving quotes.

Yours is exactly that so make the most of it.

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Website Design in Mobile Alabama

How To Become A Web Expert Without Spending A Dime

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I recently read this online and really felt like it spoke to me directly.  I know that parts of it are a bit catchy, but it serves a very good purpose and point.  Read it, comment, all kudos go to the original author though.

Imagine you’re a master at making money online, that you’re passionate, and excited during almost every hour you spend working. Visualize people coming to YOU for answers to their most important Web-related questions. Envision emails and phone calls flooding in every day with eager, prospective customers. Read on to learn the secret to achieving all of this.

If I could show you how to become a Web design, development or marketing expert without spending a dime, would you want to learn?

Imagine you’re a master at making money online, that you’re passionate, and excited during almost every hour you spend working. Visualize people coming to YOU for answers to their most important Web-related questions. Envision emails and phone calls flooding in every day with eager, prospective customers. Read on to learn the secret to achieving all of this.

First, discernment and discretion are vital. There are many programs online, many e-books, many self-proclaimed Web gurus and so much information today that it’s overwhelming and could send you to the poor-house faster than the speed of digital communication.

Where should I go to learn Web marketing? How should I spend my time? Who should teach me? What websites offer the best information? How do I make money using the Internet? What are the most important things I should learn? Should I learn Java or PHP? What are the fundamentals? How do I write effective copy online? How long will it take me before I can start my own business? The answer to all these questions can is . . .

Before I explain, let me tell you a brief story of my inchoate professional life. I barely knew what a computer while in college. It was only after living on both coasts playing live music did I conclude that a career in computers may make me a few more dollars than a career in music. It was then I decided I wanted to become a Web expert.

I had first considered attending a high-priced computer school that a programmer friend had recommended. But I had no money, and the school required all its students to attend full-time. I needed to eat and provide a roof over my head, and for that I needed to work full-time, so this expensive computer school was out of the question for me.

Although my options were limited, but I diligently looked in the Want Ads till I found a job that I could possibly do that was related to computers. The job title was “Internet Exploration Specialist”. I know that sounds slightly strange, but if you had met my chair-throwing, screaming and eccentric boss-to-be, it would make a little more sense.

I got the job and outlasted the most optimistic office pool prediction for how long I would remain working for the perpetually livid CEO. Looking back, it was probably one the best things I could have ever done (minus the maniacal boss, that is). I learned how to surf the Web. I became an expert Internet peruser, a digital explorer, a website connoisseur, and a professional information superhighway surveyor.

At around the same time I learned one of the secrets to becoming an expert at something. You have to put the time in. People who remain working in careers that they hate don’t put in the extra time to develop a career in something they love. Pure and simple. So while I had down time at work, I read books and found websites that taught me how to do things Web-related tasks. More importantly, I spent time after work and on the weekends reading, practicing and developing my Web skills.

Back when I began developing my Web career, the Internet wasn’t as big as it is today. There weren’t as many options for learning Web-related skills. Since I had no money, I simply searched for free online tutorials, primers and how-to’s. They became my staple for learning. Since I had seriously developed my Web surfing skills, I inevitably found many highly educational websites. And there weren’t as many scams back then either, there weren’t as many “gurus”. Web marketing or e-marketing hadn’t even become terms yet, so I had a lot of success getting reliable information.

Today it’s different. This is both good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad news.

You can’t throw a rock into the Internet ocean now and NOT hit a get-rich-quick plan, a Web marketing curriculum, or an e-marketing “expert”. You’ve got StomperNet, Portal Feeder, Pipeline Profits, The Rich Jerk, Strategic Profits and Traffic Secrets to name only a few. There’s too much to choose from and they all come for a steep price. Now many of these programs may teach you a lot, but it will cost you. I’m here to say that you don’t need to spend any money. You’re reading this for free, aren’t you?

But here’s the good news.

Because of the way Google ranks websites now, because the very nature of the Internet as man’s most prolific and complete resource on everything, and because of human nature being curious and information-driven, the Web has massive amounts of extremely useful, high-quality, free information. People are falling all over each other trying to produce and publish high-quality Web content all at no cost to you.

Again, Google is one reason. One main way Google ranks a website is by how many authoritative sites link to that website. The best way to get new links pointing to your site is by creating useful content that anyone can access. If the content is fresh, original and high-quality, people will link to it.

And here’s more good news. Of all the subjects there are in the world, and therefore all of the subjects discussed online, the Web is the most popular.

Of course this has to be true. Think about it. Who’s doing all the posting? Webmasters. And what do webmasters know best? The Web. So you’re going to find a huge amount of tutorials, primers, articles, forum posts, blogs and websites that offer tons of useful information on how to become good at all kinds of Web-related things, and all at no charge.

Here are a few tips for effectively searching online.

  • Open up two or three browser windows at a time. One should have Google, the next Yahoo or MSN Search and the third should be your working browser. Use all three browsers when searching by toggling to each of them. By using different search engines, you’ll get a wide range of different results.
  • Use quotes around your phrases to find exact phrases. This will give you results that have the words in your phrase only in that order.
  • Use long tail search phrases when using a search engine. Long tail means many words. The more specific your search phrase is, the more relevant results you’ll get. For example, searching in Google for “free tutorials for beginner web marketers and expert career advice” instead of “web marketing tutorials” will yield more relevant results for you.
  • Use the minus sign to weed out superfluous results. For example, if you’re looking for event tickets and you type in “Boston tickets”, you’ll end up with lots of airline related results. Instead use “Boston event tickets” “airline flights”.
  • Get creative in contructing your search phrases. Combine multiple concepts.
  • Don’t just use search engines. Join forums like WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, SitePoint, HighRankings and SEOChat, visit blogs, and read how-to’s and tutorials found in article directories. Regularly visit authority webmaster sites like DevGuru, Developer.com, TheNetGazette.net, HTMLprimer.com and WebKnowHow.net.
  • Go to and participate in Web 2.0 sites such as PlugIM, FreeIQ, Digg, Technorati, Simpy, Del.iciou.us, MarkTD, BibSonomy and Squidoo.
  • Become good friends with your Favorites or Bookmarks feature in your browser. Set it up so you develop a well-organized, useful list of websites, Internet destinations and Web pages and posts that you can constantly refer back to.Becoming an expert Web marketer or Web programmer can be done by putting aside time every day to learn your craft and by becoming good at finding the right information online that doesn’t cost anything. The more you search for useful information, the better you’ll become at it, and it will soon take you less and less time to find what you want.Therefore, the answer to all the questions above is: you’ll need patience, discipline, time management skills, and Internet searching skills. The searching skills come to you by simply practicing, by putting the time in online. Everything you need to know to become a Web expert without spending a dime is literally a few clicks away online and most of it is free. Get to work.

Copyright: Copyright © 2007-2008 Jason OConnor

Jason OConnor is President of Oak Web Works – The
synthesis of Web design, technology and marketing

Jason is an expert at Web design and programming, e-strategy, and
e-marketing

http://www.oakwebworks.com

mailto: joconnor888 @ hotmail.com
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Drop us a line! Web Site Design, Web Development, Web Hosting, Web Everything from TurkReno Incorporated in Mobile, Alabama.

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Local SEO

Professional SEO Consultant Services, TurkReno, Daphne, Alabama

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Search engine optimization (SEO) has changed a LOT over the past 10 years, so much so that for some types of websites it is practically impossible to gain enough organic search engine traffic (through SEO means) to warrant spending significant money on organic SEO services (low ROI).

Before contacting TurkReno for a free SEO quote for our Professional SEO Consultant Services please read through the following site descriptions to determine if your business web site is likely to benefit from our long term professional SEO services.

Is the Professional SEO Consultant Services Plan for you?

1. I own a new domain or an old domain with hardly any backlinks (very low PR) and want fast Google rankings.

Any ethical SEO consultant will tell you since 2005 it takes far longer to gain rankings in Google with a new domain than it did in 2004: see the Google Sandbox Effect for details.

If you expect fast results for a new domain NO organic search engine optimization service can help you: you could sink tens of thousands of dollars into an extensive links campaign, but Google’s algorithm changed in late 2004 made it impossible to rank highly for competitive SERPs fast: fast being a few months from going live.

Because of the Google Sandbox effect it takes over 9 months for a new domain to rank well for competitive SERPs in Google. This doesn’t mean a new site can’t gain any SERPs/traffic at all, but it’s hard to gain reasonable traffic SERPs in those early months and so paying for professional SEO services at this point might not be a good use of your marketing funds.

Many online business owners expect unrealistic results with new domains, even with perfectly search engine optimized content and a great links campaign it’s going to take at least a year before you’ll see a return on your SEO investment (this is not the case for sites with aged links, see later).

Based on the previous 3 years experience (2005-2008) only a small percentage of SEO clients are prepared to wait this time while paying for professional SEO services: Average SEO client with a new domain will come on board and within a few months of poor search engine results become frustrated, consider the SEO service a failure and drop our SEO consultant.

This isn’t good for us or the client, it wastes the clients and ours time/money (we only make money from long term clients, not short term). For this reason it’s rare for SEO Gold to take on clients with new domains: understandably a year is too long to wait for most business owners when they have to pay SEO fees.

As a potential SEO client of ours with a new domain if you can’t wait a year for good search engine results we are not for you: please don’t think you can find another quality SEO service that can rank new domains fast, it’s not possible (we’ve tried on over 200 domains) and any SEO firm that tells you otherwise is at worst unethical or at best poorly educated in current search engine optimization techniques and trends!

If your site falls within the description above please continue to read our Free SEO Blog and spend six months optimizing your content and gaining new links (aim for a PageRank of at least 4 for your home page). If you need help at that point come back to us for a free SEO quote.

2. I have a domain PR4+ with aged backlinks (a year plus old backlinks), but only have a small number of pages on the site and have NO plans to add new content.

Good news is you are in a much better position than if you were starting with a new domain. Google relies heavily on backlinks, in particular aged backlinks: the age of links is so important which is why it’s impossible to rank fast for competitive SERPs in Google with a new domain (no aged backlinks).

If you have a domain with aged backlinks your business site has far more potential for Google search engine rankings than a website with no/few aged links.

However, with only a small number of content pages you aren’t giving the search engines anything to work with. This means all your organic search engine traffic has to come in through a small number of pages and this means your going to need high traffic SERPs (which are always hard/competitive).

Although it is possible to gain competitive SERPs long term, there’s no guarantee your site will be in the top 5 for this type of SERP in a reasonable time frame. Although top 10 SERPs will generate traffic, top 5 is where the real traffic is. There can be millions of competing pages for a single competitive search phrase, only 10 of them are going to be listed top 10 and there’s no guarantee even when doing everything right that your page will be one of them. Basically a small number of pages SEO strategies are high risk.

To give an extreme hypothetical example of why many small sites are not SEO friendly: lets say you own a mortgage website consisting of 5 pages with only two (one being the home page) targeting actual mortgage SERPs (other 3 pages are contact/privacy type pages).

Together we could do everything right SEO copywriting/backlinks wise and get your site to the top 10 for SOME mortgage SERPs, but with only two content pages to work with there’s only so much we can do.

The top traffic mortgage SERPs are these:

mortgage calculator
mortgage rates
mortgage rates predictions
mortgage payment calculator
reverse mortgage
(lots of calculator SERPs)

This is a particularly difficult niche (most financial niches are competitive) and to do well it’s going to take highly optimized content and a lot of backlinks using mortgage phrases as the anchor text.

Depending on the starting point of the site will determine how much optimization and text links are needed and unless you already have a lot of decent PR backlinks already (that have aged) our basic 50 text links supplied with the SEO service isn’t going to be nearly enough (more text links will be needed and this can be costly).

Let’s assume to make a good return on your SEO investment a site like this is going to need to be top 10 for a half a dozen of the top traffic SERPs (so most of the mortgage SERPs list above).

This is where it gets almost impossible for a small site, (it’s difficult for a large site) there’s only so many phrases one page can target before the SEO copywriting is watered down so much the page doesn’t do particularly well for any of the targeted mortgage SERPs.

In a perfect SEO world you would target one phrase per page with the hard SERP being targeted on the home page. From an SEO copywriting perspective it’s not hard to optimize for one phrase, but to optimize for even half a dozen phrases on one page is almost impossible without impacting a pages main SERP (there should always be one main phrase).

In our hypothetical mortgage site example (just two pages to work with) we clearly need a mortgage calculator page for maximum search engine traffic, but what if the clients site lacks this type of content, to tackle a SERP ethically the targeted phrases should be found within the content: if we are optimizing for mortgage calculator SERPs there should be a mortgage calculator on the site or some information about them.

But our hypothetical site lacks a mortgage calculator and doesn’t keep track of mortgage rates since the client doesn’t plan to add new content, so there’s nothing to use to gain most of these SERPs, or at least not ethically and within Google’s webmaster guidelines: never a good idea to use blackhat techniques.

What this means is we are limited in what SERPs we can aim for, we’d be left with SERPs like Mortgage, Home Mortgage, Mortgage Company, etc. which are good SERPs, but they are hard and even if you owned one of the major banking sites your not guaranteed a top 10 for SERPs this hard!

As it happens for the mortgage calculator SERP there’s only one major bank in the top 20 (RBC Royal Bank).

With a site like this (very small) it either does really well (usually because it’s really old and a has a LOT of old backlinks) or terrible and for this reason we avoid working with web site owners who have small sites with no plans to expand. We only work with sites that we are reasonably confident we’ll help gain more organic search engine traffic for.

As you can imagine a business owner like the hypothetical one above is very frustrating and unrewarding for our SEO consultants to work with and since our SEO services are in high demand we never take on clients like this.

A Little Free SEO Advice

If you have a aged site with little content on it you could increase your traffic many times over just by adding new content to cover more relevant SERPs.

If your site falls within the site description above please read our Free SEO Tutorial and if you ever reconsider your position on the size of your site feel free to contact us for a free SEO quote.

What Sort of Website is Ideal for SEO Services?

Now that we’ve scared off most of our potential SEO business clients we finally come to what the perfect SEO client looks like.

You have a aged domain with a lot of content, preferably sales based content (like product pages) with unique content on most pages.

This is the perfect site for us to work with because there’s the potential from the aged backlinks and there’s plenty of content for the search engines to work with, we can go for thousands of long tail SERPs.

With content optimization and steady link building a site like this can see significant organic traffic growth. How much/fast depends a lot on the site/niche and how old and how many aged backlinks the site has. We’ve seen ~1,000 page ecommerce sites with a PR4 home page go from under 500 visitors a day to over 4,000 visitors a day within a few months of working with us mostly due to simple code changes and better SEO copywriting: we taught the owners how to write for search engines and visitors and their websites cleaned up on long tail SERPs.

If you have a under performing site like this or plan to create one we’d love to work with you to gain maximum organic search engine traffic. Working with business owners with large websites is very rewarding for us.

What is the Professional SEO Consultant Services Plan

For a fixed monthly fee you retain the long term services of an experienced SEO consultant. Your consultant will guide you through the mine field of SEO myths and misinformation you’ll find online today and be available to answer any questions about your web sites search engine optimization needs by email.

There are no limits (within reason) to the number of SEO questions you can ask your SEO expert about your web site.

From simple yes or no questions to fully detail multiple page responses (most emails answered within 48hrs) your SEO consultant will be there to help guide your webmaster through the optimization process of your website over time.

No need to wade through hundreds of websites that are trying to sell worthless search engine submission software (complete waste of time) or how to generate obsolete meta tags (most not important to Google any more) and don’t forget the countless hours spent reading contradictory information on the SEO forums some of which can harm your site!

We tend to have an informal/friendly relationship with our clients and can either deal with the client direct or their webmaster (usually the best option).

Your SEO consultant will look through your website and provide lists of items to improve, you arrange to have these items changed on your timescale and over time your entire website can be search engine optimized.

The best way to use our service is to designate one person to work with us through email. Ideally this person will understand your websites code (so they have no problem optimizing your code) and have access to its content (so they can rewrite some of it).

Through one to one email we can teach a member of your staff how to optimize your websites code, how to write for search engines (SEO copywriting skills) without damaging your visitor experience and how to gain new backlinks.

If you follow all the advice the end result will be a fully search engine optimized website and the ability to gain organic backlinks.

We also supply 50 text links as part of the service for as long as you use our Professional SEO Consultant Services. We try to match these to your content, but it’s more about adding some new links to get you started (will be some PR4+ links) than adding 50 themed text links.

If your HTML skills aren’t very good your SEO consultant will try to guide you through the HTML changes to be made to your sites code.

We’ll try to give code snippets, detailed explanations to help get the work done and if you lack the skills required to modify your site we can do it for you at a relatively low fee: we charge SEO clients on this plan just $85 per hour for code work.

If you are looking to learn about SEO, this is a perfect opportunity to do so whilst putting your website on the search engines map.

Our SEO consultants are here to explain why a change is necessary and what its SEO benefits are, why you shouldn’t be using blackhat search engine optimization techniques that can land you with the Google death penalty!

You’ll note how much information we’ve supplied on this page and our free SEO Tutorial pages, if you need a detailed explanation of something you don’t understand we’ll supply one.

Our SEO Consultants – Who Will You Be Working With

Our expert consultants are native English speakers and have many years of experience building and running websites including ecommerce sites, between us we own well over 300 websites totaling millions of pages (indexed in Google etc.).

Our main SEO consultants’ websites for example receives over 20,000 search engine visitors a day (August 2008).

For example, panda.com.sa that’s owned by one of our clients, has 10s of thousands of pages indexed in Google and as of August 2008 receives over 10,000s visitors a day (these are real visitors a day, NOT HITS).

This means not only do our expert SEO consultants understand the latest SEO techniques, they use them to rank their own websites in Google, so if something stops working they will ‘feel’ it in their organic traffic (none of us pay for traffic) and will have to learn what went wrong and how to get a site ranked today.

We also appreciate the intricacies of running a successful online business website (we’ve all ran ecommerce sites at one time). Our main SEO consultant for example ran a successful online store (~1,500 products) that received up to 8,000 unique visitors a day in the very competitive lingerie niche.

It’s not about a few good SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but masses of highly targeted search engine traffic (the SEO long tail) that converts to sales without ruining your visitors experience (you want repeat customers after all).

Payment Details

Pay by credit or debit card (online), cashier’s check, or PayPal.

Since we need to view your web site prior to agreeing to an SEO consultation, detailed payment advice will be supplied with your no obligation SEO quote.

Our starter fee for the SEO Consultant Retainer Plan is $400 a month with no setup fees and no minimum contract: you should budget for at least 6 months and ideally 12 months.

For an extra monthly fee we can also supply text links at low cost if you’re having problems gaining them yourself.

Free SEO Quote for Professional SEO Services

To obtain your free SEO quote contact us at sales@turkreno.com detailing as much about your website and your needs as possible. Please be as descriptive as possible, more information you supply easier it is for us to understand your website/business and research your niche.

We are very busy and existing SEO and Web Design clients always come first.
Please allow at least 5 working days for a response.

Note: if you only supply a link to your website and no other information we will not supply a free SEO quote. A business serious about its search engine optimization needs will supply a lot of information at this early stage to help us help them: we sometimes supply free SEO tips along with the quote.

Taylor S. Ripley, Owner – TurkReno Inc.

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Sneaky SEO – According to Matt Siltala

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This is a really interesting article that I stumbled upon by a gentleman named Matt Siltala.  All credit for this material goes to him.  The original article can be found here.

Sneaky SEO

I am calling it sneaky SEO, cause I am tired of hearing it referred to as SEO Overkill. In my opinion Search Engine Optimization and Overkill should never be used in the same sentence. Let me explain why. I have been involved in SEO and internet businesses for the last 9 years and I have never stopped implementing good SEO on my websites. It is not OVERKILL its just good marketing practices.

I know why it is refered to as SEO Overkill, but I want to re-define it and call it what it is SNEAKY SEO.

Lets get more familiar with how users view webpages first. 79% of users scan a web page and 16% read word for word. What are readers looking for?

  1. Headlines
  2. Meaningful sub-headings (not keyword spam)
  3. Bulleted lists
  4. Headers
  5. How the Content is Arranged
  6. Worthless text (for density) or informative text worth reading?

When you have a site that is professionaly designed and full of content worth reading you gain credibility and web browsers will stay longer on your site. Random people I survey tell me the most important things to them on a website are:

  1. Is the layout easy to understand
  2. What kind of font style? (is it the same on all pages)
  3. What kind of font color? (again, needs to be the same-don’t fall into the rainbow text trap)
  4. Font size all the same?
  5. How is the navigation of the site?
  6. Does the site have a site-map?

Write for humans not search engines, and remember that search engines rank pages not websites. Getting back to the SNEAKY SEO, lets list the things we need to avoid on our websites:

  1. Hidden text (any kind, anywhere)
  2. Domain Stuffing (example – www.HowToGetRichUsingTheInternet.com)
  3. Don’t try to get rankings for 400 keywords all at once.
  4. Keyword stuffing folder names
  5. Keyword stuffing page names
  6. Keyword stuffing the title tag (keep it to about 5-7 words long)
  7. Keyword stuffing the meta tag description (keep it to about 25-30 words)
  8. Keyword stuffing the meta tag keywords (keep them to about 10-15 words)
  9. Skip misc. meta tags (they do nothing for you search engine wise)
  10. Don’t over-do visable text with so many keywords its not readable. (write for humans not search engines)
  11. Dont keyword stuff or overuse header tags
  12. Don’t include visible text in places it does not belong.
  13. Don’t keyword stuff your site maps. (site maps are essential, but avoid stuffing keywords and limit the site map to 50 links max.)
  14. To much visible anchor text.
  15. Don’t keyword stuff your link title attribute with keywords.
  16. Don’t keyword stuff your alt tags.
  17. Don’t built up links to fast. (avoid link farms)
  18. Avoid duplicate content by avoiding gateway, or doorway pages.
  19. Don’t stuff your div tables with keywords

Make sure to avoid these tactics of SNEAKY SEO’s, and do your part to keep the term SEO clean. If you play nice, the major search engines long term will reward you. You may find some using these tactics have good rankings, but it will catch up to them so please do everything you can to avoid any kind of SNEAKY SEO practices. You started an internet business for the long term and remember that any time you get tempted to fall to the dark side.

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The Truth About Search Engine Optimization According to Idiots

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So I’m sitting here, reading through some of the larger social sites like Digg and Mixx, and I’m seeing a surprising amount of blogs and sites popping up today talking about things like “The secret of getting to the top of Google”.  I just want to point out that most of what I’ve read is bullshit.  Plain and simple.  So, what I wanted to do was basically go through these sites, make a list, and give my two cents to the matter at hand in a “Truth or Bullshit” manner and explain why.

1. Ways of getting traffic other than Search engines

Half Bullshit, Half Truth – This article basically goes through, explains some basic techniques of stealing other people’s steam, and then goes on to try and explain what directories are.  For the most part, these methods work, but they are not going to put you at the top of Google.  Instead of going and adding your listing into a directory, go make your own directory.  There is plenty of software out there to do this with little or no licensing fees associated with it.  If you do it right, you can actually create an income by selling placement in these directories.

2. How to Hire a Good SEO Expert

This is extremely important to note (and truthful):

“You don’t find offers of guaranteed placement from most of the reputable firms,” says Brad Fallon. “Almost to affirm it, they’ll say, ‘We can’t guarantee results – and anyone that would is a charlatan.'”

NO ONE CAN GUARANTEE YOU AT THE TOP OF GOOGLE!  But, a friend of a friend told me….  No, you’re not listening now.  You’ve bought into the whole “AdSense will make me 100 Dollars” mentality.  Again, NO ONE CAN GUARANTEE YOU AT THE TOP OF GOOGLE!  There are plenty of techniques that even I employ and show on this blog that used in conjunction with each other on a full moon MIGHT get you to the very top of Google, but that doesn’t mean you have any permanent fixture there.

Think about it.  If you go in, decide nonchalantly “I want to be at the top of Google” like a moron, and start padding the wallet of an SEO company, then you’ve done nothing but waste your money – bottom line.  The BEST thing that you can do for yourself is go write and rewrite your content.  Say it 10,000 different ways on 100 different pages, watch your tracker/stats, and make sure your Robots.txt isn’t blocking anything and you’ve just done 75% of what an SEO company will do.

I can remember thinking to myself, “Why not just hire an SEO company (to do my job for me)”, and I realized after I spoke to them just how much of an idiot I’d really have to be to buy this service just because I was trying to impress my boss.  SEO companies do NOT have any further control over Google than YOU do.  So, what, you’re paying them to make YOU feel better?  Fluff, you pay them for fluff.

3. Damn sure SEO tactics- SEO tips

Absolute Bullshit.  Ok, well, maybe it is true that you need the right keywords, but how the hell are you going to know that they’re working?  Easy and I’ll tell you because this guy obviously doesn’t.  Go use DomainTools and search your site or go use Google Webmaster Tools.  There will be an SEO browser, also better known as a plain text browser, there to show you. 

I digress.  You don’t convert keywords.  Words can have several meanings, but rarely do those words mean anything to anyone else unless millions of dollars worth of advertising and branding has happened to them…like the words Camel, Frosty, or Gateway.

He instructs you to use your company logo….well, I may use my company logo time and time again, but in the end I know that no one gives a damn about my logo, how much time I spent making my logo, or what it means.  No one cares about your “free wallpaper” either.  If they came there to get something for free, after you’ve fulfilled the obligation of “free stuff”, nothing is going to keep them there – including a search engine. 

Translation is a funny thing too.  Babelfish has been out for years and it’s still wrong.  What would make the difference to say that Google has any better technology yet?  Well, I can tell you from being quoted in Portugese that Google isn’t right all the time.  Just because you translate it to another language doesn’t mean that you’re even anywhere near the Google search engine for that language.  Go search your site on something like http://yandex.ru/ and see where you stand.  Much different, isn’t it?  What makes you think that SEO from just translating the site to another language makes any difference?  Again, the majority might just ignorantly brush this off because they think Russians are poor or because they have this inate fear of doing business overseas.  But, it matters, so think outside the box.

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Launch An Internet Marketing Campaign With No Money

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There are plenty of free services on the Internet when trying to advertise your services. Following these few simple steps, you can guarantee that you’ll be listed in the major search engines with little to no money.

  1. Create a sitemap using a sitemap creator and submit it to Bing and Google.  Your best bet is to follow the open-format Sitemaps protocol.  Verify your sites and verify that your sitemaps do not have any warnings (Google is the currently the best way to check this).
  2. Assuming that you’ve already picked a topic or product that you plan on sticking to for a while, begin to write two or three short essays that score at least a 500 word count.  These will be your primary advertising content, so make sure that these essays are not only on your site, but refer to your product or service in the best light.
  3. Start with Google Groups, which is a syndicate for the UseNet.  All that it requires is a simple Google Account.  Find as many related topics to your product or services and distribute the essay that you wrote.  There are thousands of niches on the UseNet, so it’s easy to find a few dozen to inform.
  4. Create a WordPress Blog on either your web site or at WordPress.org and use plugin such as Gregarious or Sociable to distribute your content to Digg, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Mixx, and Del.icio.us as well as your favorite social websites.  These sites can be an excellent way of gauging the quality of your content, product, or service.
  5. If you are confident enough in your company, you should next go and make a press release with the essay that you wrote.  It may take some minor revisions to make your essay look like a press release and follow the correct format, but not long.
  6. Follow this list with 20 free press release points and submit your release to them.  Ideally you want to target sites that will submit your release to places like Google and Yahoo News.
  7. Go search Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your topic and add the term “forum” or “blog” and become a member of that site.  Do not spam these sites as you do not want to associate negativity with your product.

This should be enough to fulfill a day or so and see at least 50+ referring links to your site that can generate plenty of traffic.  Enjoy!

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