Texas SEO Company Blog

I thought it might be helpful to analyze the Google SERP for the key term “Odessa Texas”. If we Google that phrase, what will we find and what would a company have to do to capture the No. 1 spot for that phrase?

I’m going to focus on the top 5 listings because anything below that likely doesn’t get the kind of traffic that I’d want to get with a commercial website. The top 5 listings for “Odessa Texas” are:

• The city of Odessa website
• Wikipedia entry for Odessa, Texas
• The Odessa Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Odessa’s City-Data page
• Odessa Chamber of Commerce

To capture the No. 1 spot for “Odessa Texas” would require a lot of work. I’m not saying it can’t be done but a webmaster would have to work awfully hard against the age factor and inbound links pointing to the above sites. You would be much better off targeting “Odessa Texas” and keywords related to your business. For instance, let’s say you own an antique shop in Odessa and you want to capture the No. 1 spot for “Odessa Texas antiques”. What would you need to do?

That would be a lot more feasible to attempt and if you are starting an antique website in Odessa, Texas, I’d say recommendable. The first thing I’d do is build a solid website with good on-page SEO. Secondly, I’d undergo a link building campaign using target keyword phrases as anchor text and point them to my most important web pages. I’d also start a blog on my domain and blog to it every day. A blog will fresh original content to your website every day and help you increase your on-page SEO strengths, giving you a vital and necessary content creation edge over your competition. I’ve actually seen companies take a No. 1 spot in Google within a year using that strategy. Your company in Odessa Texas can do it too.

There are two ways to get excellent SEO benefit from back linking. The first way, which everyone by now knows about, is through traditional SEO with keywords related to your business niche as anchor text. Nothing really new.

The second way to get effective back links, and it’s not really new but many small business owners with a local presence aren’t really aware of it, is by using geographical place names along with your niche-related keywords as anchor text. You can do this in one of two ways:

• Place geographical place names and keywords together in one anchor text (ex: Texas SEO)
• Have two separate anchor text links

Inarguably, the first option is better. If you can swing it, you want to try to get your geographical place name together in your anchor text with your niche-related keyword. Here are a few examples:

• Houston mechanic
• Brazos County horse trainer
• DFW courier service
• Texas insurance company
• West Texas cattle
• Panhandle leather cutter

These are just a few examples. There are plenty more.

When it comes to geographical SEO for Texas companies like yours, call on the best advice you can get. Don’t settle for Lousy Annas, OK?

Link popularity is a useful measure of success, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. It is simply a measure of the total number of web pages that link in to a specific web page on your website. You can measure the link pop of your website, but keep in mind that it is simply a report of the links pointing in to your home, or index, page.

Link popularity does not measure link quality, which is a little more difficult to explain because each search engine has its own criteria in judging the quality of a link. In large part, link quality is measured by the relevance of a link to your site, the authority of the site linking to you, and the anchor text description used to link to you. Why are these important?

Relevance means that a site is related to yours in subject matter or content. For instance, if your site is related to candle making then another website related to candle making or candles linking to yours will register on the relevance scale; a website on garden tools or automotive parts won’t. Authority has to do with whether or not the search engines believe a particular website deserves credit for a higher grade. It usually means that a lot of other sites are linking to it, which indicates a democratic pronouncement of quality. Thirdly, anchor text relevance has to do with the word descriptions used to link to your website’s pages and whether or not they are relevant to the content on those pages. If a link says something like “click here” or “learn more” then that won’t register as a very high grade, but if it says “learn how to make candles” and that happens to be your primary keyword for that page then that will register highly.

Inbound links remain very important for webmasters in building their own authority and increasing their reputations online. It’s worth spending some time learning how to build links the right way.

Listen up, Texas. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not as difficult as some people make it out to be. On the level of difficulty, it’s somewhere between playing Tic-Tac-Toe and rocket science. The key is know what to do and how to do it then to follow that up with a successful game plan.

Geographical SEO is still a virtually untapped area. If you are specifically targeting a geographic region like Texas then your search engine optimization strategy must involve geographic key terms. The state name is just one place to start. You’ll also want to use names of cities and towns, counties, zip codes, etc.

Keep in mind that search engine optimization strategies are not just on page techniques. You have on page SEO and off page SEO. On page SEO typically consists of keywords, internal links between your pages, graphics and images, meta and alt tags, etc. Off page SEO is primarily how you go about building links and performing anchor text management.

If you learn how to make your on page SEO and off page SEO work together then you can build a website that is successfully SEOd for Texas business. Why not start today?

An article published at Article Content Provider’s article marketing blog claims that article marketing is better than SEO. Is it?

First, I’d like to commend the author of the article on a great peace. It’s a good read and Peter Nisbet makes some good points, which I’ll summarize below:

• Web traffic is the name of the game
• Most people have low traffic to their web pages
• SEO relies on ranking well for your key terms before you get a load of traffic
• Article marketing drives traffic to websites that are optimized poorly
• People read articles in article directories
• Readers click the links in articles
• Article create back links, which are good
• Article marketing is free advertising for your website

I don’t dispute any of those points. Article marketing has clear benefits. That’s why I do it. It’s also why I’ve owned article directories. I use article directories. I believe in article marketing.

I also believe in SEO. If you can reap huge benefits from article marketing to a site that is not optimized well then you can reap even better benefits to a website that is optimized well. Consider this:

• Your poorly optimized website does as well as Peter Nisbet suggests and you get 300,000 new visitors to your site through article marketing each month
• If your site was also optimized and ranked in the top 3 positions on Google, Yahoo, and MSN and you got just 1/10th the number of visitors from that as you do article marketing

Would you rather get 300,000 new visitors or 330,000 new visitors? Exactly. The more the merrier, right?

What’s the point? A well-optimized website using article marketing strategies will do better than a non-optimized site using article marketing. It doesn’t have to be an either/or. You can SEO your website and market it with articles. If you do it right, article marketing will make your good SEO even better as it adds quality, relevant back links with effective anchor text to your site’s inbound links. Effective article marketing is SEO.

Generally speaking, links from relevant websites within your niche are quality links as far as the search engines are concerned and the search engines don’t really consider geographic matters with regard to those links. One exception is in real estate. Because many real estate agents were linking to each other outside of practical geographical areas that would benefit either agent (for instance, an agent in Florida was linking to an agent in California), the search engines reasoned that these types of links were unnatural and quit counting them.

This also applies to real estate agencies in separate cities within the same state - in this case, Texas.

So if you are a real estate agent in El Paso and you enter a three-way linking arrangement with another agent in Houston and one in Dallas thinking this is going to help you, don’t count on it. The search engines are smart enough to figure out that your geographically targeted customers are not prospects for the other agents. A person looking for a house in Dallas is not likely to also be looking for one in Houston. So those types of linking arrangements are sifted through, sorted out, and not given the same credit that businesses in other niches with the same arrangement might receive.

Is that fair? Well, you know what your mother told you about fairness. That’s just the way it is.

Get the real low-down on Texas SEO.

Aaron Wall is recommending that companies with a brand name buy links, but Google says buying links is bad and discourages. Who should you believe?

I’ve always believed that webmasters have a right to do whatever they feel will make them more competitive and improve their websites for their visitors. But I also believe that Google has a right to do whatever it feels it necessary to improve its website and company to make it more profitable and to give its customers, searchers, better service. Hopefully, best practices and best results will meet where these two intersect. But that’s not always the case.

It does seem to be the case that there is a lot of search spam that still goes unfiltered. Is Aaron Wall right when he says:

The key to understanding the above is to appreciate that not only do the large brands have more money and more exposure, but they are less likely to be policed if they do the same thing that a smaller webmaster does. It is why a billion dollar company’s affiliate program passes PageRank and my affiliate links do not.

Obviously, I have no insight into Aaron Wall’s affiliate program and why Google may not count his affiliate links as valuable as some big brand. But he does make a convincing argument that big brands can get away with more than the little guy. Still, here’s some food for thought:

If you engage in a tactic then you must be willing to pay the penalty if you are caught. If Google says paid links are bad and discounts those links then you’ve paid a lot of money and spent a lot of time building links that provide you with no benefit. Even if you get the benefit initially, because Google constantly tweaks its ranking algorithms, you may find yourself at some point in the future falling in the rankings without notice and it will seem unfair.

I won’t tell you whether you should buy links for your Texas brand, but I will say tread lightly and don’t do anything stupid.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog’s series on links has been interesting. Last night they discussed inbound links.

It’s interesting that Google stated what it considers to be the most valuable types of links: Those links that occur as a natural consequence of webmasters building unique, valuable content. In other words, though Google didn’t say it outright, “Content is King.”

Content is king because if it is valuable, useful, and high quality then other website owners will link to your content without a formal invitation. They will do it because they want to. But how do you build that kind of quality into your content? Here are a few suggestions:

• Start a daily blog
• Post videos
• Do original research and post on topics no one else is posting on
• Add new content on a regular basis
• Teach new things
• Report news that no one else is reporting
• Entertain your audience
• Provide insightful information
• Show the world that you are the expert
• Interview interesting people
• Provide a useful product or service

The bottom line on content development is to produce quality, high value content before anyone else does. Beat your competition. Get there first and do it better. It’s an old journalism creed that still works in the online world. When you build that kind of content then other website owners will link to you automatically and that’s Google’s preferred type of inbound link.

I love farmers, but not in the old-fashioned way. When it comes to farming, there is one type of farm is an absolute no-no. In SEO circles we call it the link farm. I don’t know what ya’ll call it in Texas.

A link farm is a website with a godawful lot of links. You know, like hundreds of links on a single page. Search engines hate those thangs. And, quite frankly, I do too!

A link farm is bad for one very good reason. Most of the links on those pages are not any good, either because they are outdated or because the owners of the sites do bad things. If your link is on the same page with those guys then you’ll be associated with them. On the Internet, you are who you run with. Run with bad company then you’ll be bad company. And link farms is the online equivalent of bad company.

Besides, Google has done gone public with saying they won’t count links that appear on link farm pages. So your best bet is to make sure that your inbound links don’t show up on pages with 100+ links on them. To be safe, I’d stick with pages that have fewer than 50 links. For one thing, you don’t want to be right in the middle of a page with an endless line of links on it. It won’t benefit you. Even if the search engines counted those links, which they don’t, you won’t get very many clicks from humans. You won’t get penalized per se, but if you spend all your time chasing links from link farms then you’ll basically be wasting your time. I don’t know any self-respecting Texans that like wasting their time. Do you?