Texas SEO Company Blog

You’ve likely heard purists who argue that SEO alone is enough to market your Texas business. I’ve known others who don’t bother with SEO, but who strive to make new contacts and promote themselves solely through social media. Can you both?

Not only can you promote your Texas business through both SEO and social media, but you should. SEO is great, but many times it takes a good long time to achieve real SEO results. If you are not on page 1 of the search engines then you likely won’t see a lot of traffic coming from your efforts. You’ll see much more if you are above the fold - higher than position 5, better if in the top 3. How long does it take to get into those positions using traditional white hat SEO techniques?

It depends. It can take up to two years, maybe longer, if you are in a competitive industry. What do you do in the mean time? Social media and other forms of online marketing allow you to achieve results more quickly than SEO, but that doesn’t mean you should replace SEO with these methods altogether. Plan a short-term solution, but don’t give up on the long-term plan. SEO is your long term bread and butter. Don’t be shortsighted into thinking that social media will survive your business forever. Truth is, social media results are there, but they are minimal. You’ll get much better results long term from effective SEO.

Search engine rankings are a lot like oven-baked bread. Pick the yeast and watch it rise. In this case, Wichita Falls is the leaven that can get your website to search rankings heaven.

Geographical targeting is something is much more easily, affordably, done online than off line. If you are used to doing direct mail then you know that a 1% response is considered effective marketing. But rarely do you just target a specific geographical area without also target marketing a sub-demographic. You can do that online, but the best SEO in the world is - like direct marketing - geographical and keyword-based. Off line, it isn’t keywords, but concepts - or niches.

There are enough businesses in Wichita Falls, Texas to test this concept. You can perform SEO on a laundry cleaning business in Wichita, an automotive shop, a donut shop, a cell phone sales center, a day care, or any type of business. Even the local book store in Wichita Falls can have a website.

Optimizing your website for local traffic is simply a matter of ensuring that the search engines know where your business is located. One way of accomplishing that quickly and easily is to submit your site to each search engine’s local directory. It’s free and takes little time. Plus, by being in the local directory of the search engine, you’ll see your dough (website) rise a lot quicker.

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?

It seems that there is some kind of plague going around causing companies to spend money on pay per click advertising instead of good old-fashioned SEO. We’re talking about to the tune of $9.1 billion vs. $1.3 billion. This is a little bit disturbing when you consider that 80% of the clicks from search queries are on organic search listings and not pay per click ads.

But let me define a few of these terms for you:

• SEO - Search engine optimization. The practice of using keywords and links to increase the chances that web pages rank in the search engines for specific, targeted keywords.
• PPC - Pay per click advertising. The practice of bidding on keywords to achieve a sponsored listing ranking in the search engines results pages when searchers make keyword-based queries.
• Organic search listings - The listings that come up naturally as a result of a search query in one of the search engines. Not PPC ads or sponsored listings.
• Search query - What a searcher makes at a search engine when they want to find something.
• Sponsored listing - A PPC ad, which you have to pay for.

Given that 80% of searchers who enter a search query click on the organic search listing and not the PPC ad or sponsored listing, you’d think more people would see the value in being listed higher in the search results and put their budgeted marketing dollars toward that. But that’s not what is happening.

My best advice for companies that want long-term results, as opposed to short-term results, is to put some of your marketing budget toward search engine optimization. You can still do PPC. Allocate 75% of your budget to PPC and 25% to SEO, initially. After you see results from your PPC, start funneling more of your budget toward search engine optimization. After you hit a financial milestone, move 10% or 20% of your budget to SEO and do that until you hit 80% for SEO and 20% for PPC. By utilizing this kind of strategy you can capitalize on short-term results and use your gains from those to bolster your long-term staying power.

The four leading search engines are always trying to improve their offerings and each one has a unique yet somewhat similar tool to help webmasters make the most of their SEO efforts. These tools are designed to help you see what is popular or what is “up and coming” in the search engines, which is useful if you want to know what people are searching for right now. You can then use that information to play off of the popular searches and SEO your website or blog to meet that demand.

Starting with the most popular search engine, Google, and working our way down, here are four tools the search engines provide to help you with your Texas SEO:

• Google Hot Trends - Lists the top 100 search trends at Google.
• Yahoo Buzz Index - An overview of what is popular at Yahoo. Unlike Google’s Hot Trends, Yahoo Buzz is organized by broad categories.
• Xtreme Movers - This is MSN Live’s list, but it isn’t a most popular searches list. It’s a list of the searches that are rising the fastest. Keep in mind that the lower down the list of popularity an item is, the higher percentage of growth it is likely to see with any movement. I’m a little leerie of this one.
• Interesting Queries - Updated weekly, this is Ask.com’s version of the most popular searches. Like the Yahoo! Buzz index, Interesting Queries is organized by categories.

The best way to make good use of Texas SEO from these lists is to find a hot topic that is at least a little bit related to your niche and blog about it, or create a static web page about it. Be sure to relate it to the state of Texas or your local geographic area, if possible.

For instance, if you are a fashion designer in Quinlan, Texas you might want to write a little piece on your blog about one of the latest fashion trends. Google Hot Trends has “abercrombie and fitch” at 81 on the top 100 list. You could write something about Abercrombie and Fitch on your fashion blog and say something like “The last place on earth you’d expect to see an Abercrombie and Fitch fashion show is in Quinlan, Texas ….”

Texas SEO is all about regionalizing or localizing your SEO efforts to reach the audience you want to reach at home. Do all that you can to maximize your opportunities. The search engine tools are there to help you.

If you’re just getting started on planning your SEO campaigns for Halloween, you may as well forget it. You’re too late. But you’re right on time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. More on time for Christmas than Thanksgiving, but you still have a little bit of time left to implement your Thanksgiving marketing plans, if you don’t get too sophisticated.

If you are in a retail business in Texas that caters to Thanksgiving holiday shoppers then now is the time to get your SEO and advertising campaigns going. Wait any longer and you’ll miss the holidays.

One rule of thumb is to think 6 weeks ahead of schedule for any upcoming holiday or event. That’s not planning - it’s implementation. You have to give your SEO campaign time to kick in and get noticed by the search engines. If you are driving pages to the tops of the SERPs then you need to allow yourself the time to make that happen. The one exception to this is in blogging. You can start blogging about Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ahead of schedule and then you’ll be right on time.

When it comes to SEO for Texas businesses looking to impress for the holidays, call someone who knows how to get results.

Texas SEO has a lot going for it. Just like that old-fashioned dance, The Watusi. But there are a few things that good ol’ SEO and great S-E-X have in common. Here’s the short list:

• Both are more fun when you’re nekkid
• You don’t need a partner, but having one can add some excitement
• You can do it in any room in the house
• Insertions make the experience more enjoyable for everyone
• Improper linking ruins it for everyone
• The more positions you have the better your chances of receiving visitors
• You don’t always have to be on top
• You can pay for it, but it’s always better when it’s free
• It works in any language
• You don’t have to shout to the world every time you take some action

So now that you’ve seen some of the similarities between Texas SEO and sex, wouldn’t you like to know what makes one better than the other? Find out at TexasSEO.net.

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.

First, let me say that nothing in Texas is boring. SEO in particular.

I overheard a conversation between two girls the other day at the mall. A young stud (at least, he thought he was a stud) was trying to impress his interests in his SEO skills - what he thought was a strong point. I don’t guess he figured out that teenage girls don’t care about SEO. One of them told the poor lad, “SEO is boring.” He never should have used that pickup line, “Let me see your inbound links.”

The second girl turned her nose up at the kid and shrieked, “I don’t care how big your PageRank thingamajiggy is, I’m not going anywhere near your keyboard.”

Poor guy. I was so tempted to slide on over and help him pick his self esteem up off the floor. But, hey, a kid’s got to learn.

The fact is, SEO is boring if you are a teenage girl looking for hip-hop king with some bling. But if you’re middle-aged old fart trying to outdo your high school drinking buddies, it sure beat Pokemon. Besides, if you’re trying to run a business online, trying to do without proper SEO is like playing Texas football without a quarterback. You might have some cool plays, but they won’t advance the ball.

Google Webmaster Central, a few days ago, posted that PageRank sculpting is a waste of time. Today there’s a post over at Search Engine Optimization Journal saying that PageRank sculpting might actually work if your site is big enough. But he’s really repeating what Rand Fishkin said. Who’s right?

I’m going to fall on the side of Webmaster Central. I think for most of us it’s a low pay off activity and you shouldn’t bother.

If you don’t know what PageRank sculpting is, here’s a quick definition: Use nofollow tags in your links to keep search engines from crawling pages that you don’t want crawled for the purpose of cutting off PageRank distribution to those pages and sending it to other pages where you want it to go. The reason webmasters like Rand Fishkin say to do this is because search engines evenly distribute PageRank authority to linked-to sites rather than send the complete PR checkbook to every site being linked to. For instance, if you have a PR 7 web page linking to a PR 5 and A PR 3 then both of those pages being linked to will get a PR 3.5 link credit. If you nofollow one of the links then the other page will get a PR 7 link credit. Perform this equation several times for several pages and you can see that in high numbers you can transfer pretty decent PageRank credits to the pages you want it to go to, but the problem is two-fold:

• Time spent nofollowing your links
• The number of pages on your website

It takes time to go in and add that nofollow tag. For most of us, the pay off is so low that the time spent isn’t worth it. Secondly, most small business websites have so few pages that spending time on such a low pay out activity is worthless. And that’s why webmasters at Google Webmaster Central say don’t both with PageRank Sculpting. I say there are other SEO activities you can spend your time working on.