Second, even if your web design company added all the bells and whistles in your website, the one thing that will truly make it work is effective an effective San Antonio SEO company.  That’s because search engine optimization is truly about content of your website. Without content, you have nothing to offer visitors nor search engine spiders.  While your web designer will tinker about the colors, the borders and the images that will capture the essences of your online presence, the words that will fill each page are essentially the responsibility of the SEO company.

Third, San Antonio SEO companies will go beyond your website in ensuring that your online presence is strengthened. As a website owner, you should know that a strong presence online is also attained through off page optimization like using or contributing to other sites such as forums and social media. Your SEO company can help you get listed in directories, forums and other online groups and social media platforms that can boost incoming links and traffic to your site. Again, this area is not covered by most web design companies. So, it is a good idea to have an SEO company working on your side.

Fourth, you need to use effective San Antonio SEO company if you want your audience to effectively learn and absorb what you have to offer.  Good SEOs address strategy that encompasses content, usability, link building and brand building as well.  And finally, you should not use a web design company if you want to be on the top of the search engine results pages. As the Web becomes a very important component of any business, being listed on top of search results may well be considered as the online Holy Grail. Knowing what part of your website a designer or SEO specialist should work on is important for your online success.  In a nutshell, your better off letting designers do what they do best and SEOs do what they do best.

For this very reason, San Antonio SEO companies must become marketing oriented. Sure, traffic generation is essential, but by being marketing focused, your SEO strategies help you get relevant traffic. This is characterized by visitors who are really looking for the product or service that you are offering. By getting quality traffic, you are a step closer to making a sale on your website. With a marketing approach to SEO, you are more likely to get a pre-qualified traffic that can really relate to what you have to offer. With that in mind, all you need to do is provide the right call to action that will nudge your visitors into buying your product or service.

With marketing-focused San Antonio SEO companies, being on top of search engine results pages somehow becomes a second priority. As you may know, there are websites that rank first in search results, but in terms of conversion or online sales, such sites can still perform poorly. Worse, there are sites that rank high on major search engines and still get minimal traffic, if at all. The point is you have to include time-tested marketing strategies when implementing SEO for your website. The SEO company that you should get must know the potential of good marketing strategies if you want to succeed online.

Simply put, by being marketing oriented, San Antonio SEO companies can help website owners get enhanced business results as opposed to simply having a good number of traffic. Alongside proven SEO standards, it is important that your message gets across to your target audience. Always remember that the end users - your target audience - will always be in control of your online performance. By targeting them with marketing-centered SEO right from the start, you have the proverbial foot on the door to success.

Consider this.  The facebooks, myspaces, social bookmarking, forums, tweets, reviews, blogs and advisory sites are proliferating.  If you own a business, like it or not, people are talking about it.  The problem is that upset customers are more likely to make their voice heard.  Not to mention, the ease for even the novice internet user these days having the facilities to make that happen are here.  How many iphones and blackberries have you seen lately?  For example, if you own a Bed & Breakfast and do a significant amount of business, more than likely people are talking about you on sites like TripAdvisor, IgoUgo and TravelPost …and it may not be all good!

Rule 1.)  Start getting involved.  These types of sites do allow establishment owners to rebuttal.  Its always a good idea to be involved with sites that have the potential to effect your reputation.

Rule: 2.) Leverage monitoring tools to listen to what people are saying about you.  Google has a free one called “Google Alerts” in which you can monitor any keyword and receive alerts.  If you own Joe’s Popcorn Shop, have alerts sent to you for “Joes Popcorn”.

TOTUS offers Internet Reputation Management (IRM) services that guarantee results.  Are you having trouble posting a decent review about your property on sites like TripAdvisor, TravelPost or IgoUgo?  TOTUS has insiders on all major reviews websites that ready to be positive about your establishment.

If you don’t have the time and/or desire to get a leg up on social media feel free to consult with us.  We manage social media campaigns across mulitple platforms and devise thorough internet marketing social media strategies.

A new patent filed by Google describes a way for webmasters to view the top phrases that Google assigned to their website. The patent shows that Google finds the most important keywords on a website with a phrase-based indexing system and it describes a method that could allow website owners to add additional related keywords.

How Google finds the top keywords of your website?

All major search engines index web pages based on the individual words that they find on the page. If certain words and phrases appear together on the same page, search engines assign a topic that is related to these words to the page.

E.g., the words “Paris” and “Hilton” are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, the words “Tiger” and “Woods” are associated with golf.

Google’s patent application indicates that Google might plan to tell you what they believe are the top keywords for your website and let you suggest changes to these phrases.

How can Google find the relation between words?

Google has billions of web pages in its index. If Google finds that many web pages contain both the word “Paris” and the word “Hilton” then Google might assume that these keywords are related. The other words on these pages could give Google a hint that this special word combination is about a woman.

Words that frequently appear very close to each other could get a tighter connection. Google has a lot of algorithms that allow them to calculate the relation between different words.

What does this mean for your website?

Google does not allow you to suggest your keywords through a form yet. That means that you must use other methods to tell Google for which keywords you want to be listed on Google’s result pages. That’s why search engine optimization is so important.

Here are some things that you can do to show search engines that your site is relevant to a special topic:

• Use a meaningful site architecture

Use a logical system to organize your website content. Create content sections that deal with different parts of your main topic and make sure that everything that is related to your topic is mentioned on your web pages.

Make sure that your web pages are put in the right categories on your website and that it’s easy to find the different categories.

• Create web pages that use different relevant search terms

If you want to get high rankings for the keyword “shoes” then it’s not enough to mention the keyword “shoes” on your website.

You must also use related keywords such as “sneakers”, “boots”, “sandals”, “footwear”, etc. to show Google that your website is relevant to the general topic.

• Find out why other pages rank higher than yours

If you ever asked yourself why another page has been ranked higher than yours although you perfectly optimized your pages for your search terms then you should analyze the inbound links of the top ranked pages.

The number and the authority of inbound links are important. However, it’s also important that the links come from semantically and topically related pages.

Don’t focus on a single keyword when optimizing your pages. Modern search engine algorithms require you to create a website that has been optimized for many different but related search terms.  Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords to get the best possible rankings in Google and other important search engines.

Google listings showing a Google Bomb

90% of our client base in which we have taken over their PPC campaign have their word banks setup to be all broad match.

So what does it all mean?  It means the difference between throwing money right out the window and executing a successful campaign.

Google: Exact Match: Will only match if the exact text is entered.  A bid on [pet toys] will not hit on toys pet. Singular and plural are not considered identical.

MSN: Exaxt Match: 99% equivalent to Googles exact match with exceptions.  Words with apostrophes are combined into 1 variation on Google.  MSN ignores extraneous words like, a, an, the, etc…

Yaoo: Standard Match: Similar to exact match, but Yahoos match driver technology also includes singular, plural, common misspellings, and alternative spellings.  Match driver is used with all matching options, and you can’t opt out.

Google: Phrase Match: Will match any query that includes the exact phrase.  A phrase match for "pet toys" will hit on big pet toys but not big toys.

MSN: Phrase Match: Equivalent to Googles phrase match.

Yahoo: N/A

MSN: Broad Match: Will hit on any search that includes all the words.  MSN does not combine singular/plural consistently, but they do dome light synonym matching.

Yahoo: Advanced Match: Will match any search query that includes all of the words, plus singular, plural, spelling variations, and synonyms.  Dog may be considered for puppy as an example.

Google: Broad Match: Like Yahoo Advanced Match, but Googles expanded broad match system also matches related queries.  Dog toy could be matched up with pet toys or pet gifts or anything Google thinks is related.

Google/MSN: Negative Match: Negative matches are keywords that your don’t want to appear in the query.  This allows you to avoid advertising on free television set when you do phrase or broad match for "television set", by setting a negative word for -free.

Yahoo: Excluded Words: Similar to Google and MSN, but toy and toys are considered equivalent.

Google: Embedded Match: Most advertisers have never heard of this one, but its extremely powerful.  Its a special type of negative match, where you can exclude exact or phrase matches.

Google: Automatic Match: Not an actual match type, but a feature Google rolled out this year, that extends their already aggressive expanded broad matching even further.  Your ad for adidas tennis shoes could be triggered when someone searches for running shoes.

Opinions?

Have a great American Labor Day Weekend!

I have a clients index page which has not been updated in months from a code perspective.  This morning while viewing their listing within the SERPS on Google, Google is displaying their old title tag which they had over 7 months ago.

What is going on?

UPDATE:  Okay, 3 days later title tags have returned to normal (meaning they are listed in SERPS as they are today).  Still very strange.  I am very curious as to why this would happen.