SEO in Las Vegas, NV

A bit of time spent planning before you start working on a new website can save you time, money and headaches.

Here are a few points to consider before you set up your website:

1. Put someone in charge. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning to have someone outside or inside your company doing the work on your website – you need someone to be responsible for keeping the site up to date and performing well. Websites aren’t “set and forget” sales generators – they need to be regularly updated and fine tuned, or you will find your leads slowly dwindling.
2. Have a budget, and a timeline. Developing a website can quickly eat up more time and money than first anticipated – so make sure you map out a detailed agreement with your developer before you hand over any money. Get your developer to produce and commit to a project brief and a timeline for implementing it, including a definite “launch” date for the site. Make sure it includes all of the features you want your site to contain, and that there are regular reviews built in.
3. Know who you’re selling to, and what your site needs to do for you. Do your customers want to buy online and have their purchase sent to them? Do they just want to research your product or service and then make contact in person? Do you need a shopping cart, or don’t you? How ‘tech savvy’ are your customers, and how important are bells and whistles to them? A thorough profile of your customers and their needs are critical to designing the right site to appeal to them – and can save you a bundle of money if you can eliminate unnecessary website features.
4. Make sure updating your site will be easy. If you plan on managing your site in-house, choose a developer that provides a Content Management System (CMS) so you can update the site yourself. If you only plan on periodic updates to your site and you want to outsource, make sure the costs and scope for this are included in your project brief with your developer. You don’t want to be stuck paying through the nose every time you want to advertise a special on your own site!
5. Check out your competition. Look at your competitors’ websites, and assess what you need to do to be in their league or better. There’s no point spending time and money on a site that won’t stack up again your competitors.
6. List other sites you like or dislike. This is a great help for your developer, and will prevent your designer coming back to show you something you can’t stand! Tell your designer what you like or don’t like about the sites, and remember they don’t have to be in your industry. You’re just looking for design and functionality.
7. Carry your brand through. Your website is more than just an electronic brochure, but it should still look like your website. Give your existing marketing material to your developer, so that they can design a site that ties into your brand and the way you present yourself.
8. Work out what will be regularly updated, and what will be mostly static. Choose a few areas on your site that you update regularly – at least monthly. You might have a news section, specials, a library of articles, or an archive of your newsletters. This is important to maintain your search engine rankings and keep your site looking current for your customers.
9. Get your site ranked. There’s no point having a great website that no one but your existing customers can find. Work out how you’re going to go about getting a great Google ranking, and then do it from day one of your site going live. It takes time to build up a good search rank. If you don’t have someone in-house who can manage your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), find a reputable company to manage it for you. Media One Pro (Google them!) is a favorite of ours, or your developer may be able to help you with this.

We learned from Google’s patent application last year that Google was changing how they rate links. It didn’t get nearly the attention that I think it deserves and it’s important so I am going to recap the info again now.
Not every link is weighted or valued the same. Google is weighting them based on how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be to click on that link. To try to figure this out, Google is looking at 2 things:

• link visibility (placement and appearance)
• link relevance

So, no more small text links in footers, no more links buried in comment spam, no more link exchanges where your link sites on a link page with a bunch of others. You need quality links that stand out and are likely to get the click. (Hear that link spammers, no need to keep emailing to ask for link exchanges!)

Linking methods that are no longer as effective:
• Forum posting and blog commenting. (Still do it to add value to a conversation and help people but don’t count on link juice from it)
• Social bookmarking. It’s still a helpful resource so use it to be helpful but don’t count on link juice from this.
• Bulk directory submission. This has been a bad idea for a while but it’s worth repeating.
• Bulk link exchange. Bad idea and could result in penalties or being banned from the engines.
Linking methods that are effective:
• Guest blogging. Great way to get exposure for yourself and get a high quality link back to your site.
• Link baiting. This means just putting great content out there that acts as bait and people can’t resist linking to it. The content has to be really good and it
really needs to be spread around.
• Press releases. With some effort and some luck, you can get a quality link from big media.
• Social Media. As I mentioned earlier in this newsletter, you can attract links via Twitter (and Facebook).
• Article Syndication. A great way to spread your content (but it has to be good)

If you are not reviewing your Yellow Pages ad results on a regular basis, you may be tossing hard-earned dollars down the drain. Yellow Pages ads have a number of built-in limitations that may reduce the effectiveness of your advertising dollar and restrict your ability to reach new patients. These limitations include:

• High cost. Depending on its size and location, a Yellow Pages ad can cost up to $20,000 per year. And you can easily spend another $5,000 designing a customized ad. At those rates, it takes a lot of customers just to break even on the cost of the ad. Plus, studies show that the phone directory companies continue to raise their fees far beyond current inflation rates. Read more…

“We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook,” says Cutts. “I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.

Read more…

We hear many business owners ask the question, “Is there any real value in Social Media for my Business?” Whether you like it or not, today and in the future social media is, and will be, an important component for all businesses.

Whether you are a bricks and mortar business or an online Internet-based business, chances are your sales will go up if you are marketing your business. There are many offline businesses that can effectively leverage social media to strengthen and grow their businesses in creative and effective ways. It’s about thinking outside the box.

Most importantly, your social media marketing must fit in with your overall business Marketing Plan. If you are ad-hoc in how you use social media to market your business then yes you will probably get ad-hoc results. Be sure to implement a Social Media Marketing Plan to ensure you get the most effective results for your business.

Many of the popular social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, all engage prospects and customers, grow the awareness and popularity of your business and inevitably boost your sales.

If you are serious about taking your business into the 21st century, then you will need to embrace social media. There are many ways that businesses can use social media to their advantage. Here are just a few:

* Become an Expert:

The first step is to create your profiles on the various social media websites and then update them on a regular basis. You will need to check your accounts a couple of times a week to respond to comments from your followers. This a great way to build presence, to be seen as an expert and to build relationships with your followers. The more you update and are seen to be interactive with your followers, the stronger your business’s reputation will be. 
 
* Educate Don’t Sell:

Social media is another way to build relationships with people, prospects and customers that you may not ever have otherwise been exposed to. So make the most of it. In today’s market, consumers are getting smarter, plus we live a world of mass advertising. The last thing you want to do is sell your products and services on social media. It’s about educating your fans. Every once in awhile you might promote a workshop or specíal deal. Educate more, Sell less. If people want to find out more about you and your products and services, they can visit your website.

* Get the Whole Company Involved:

If you have a staff, get them involved and task them to update your social media posts on a daily basis. This is an excellent morale booster and your staff’s involvement will strengthen your marketing effort and grow your business’s online exposure. A little suggestion – you might want to keep an eye on how much time your staff spends on social media and that it is for work and not personal purposes.

About Media One Pro

Media One Pro is a firm based in Las Vegas, NV that specializes in Online Marketing & Sales, helping passionate and committed businesses to grow their client base and reach a new level of success through custom online Sales and Marketing systems. If you want to learn more about how to grow your business, seo company in las vegas.

Youtube – You know that site with videos and all. Yeah! It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:

1. View high quality videos

Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos

While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18&Prime and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22&Prime to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part

Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4. Hide the search box

youtube url start time

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5. Embed only a part of Video

youtube url to mp3

Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6. Autoplay an embedded video

Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

7. Loop an embedded video

Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

8. Disable Related Videos

Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering

Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

10. Download Video

Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching.

Do you know of some similar Youtube URL tricks and hacks? Fire them in comments!

Microsoft  partners with Facebook to bring social relevance to its Bing search engine. This is a huge announcement  with deep implications for the future of search and whether Bing can make gains on Google. Microsoft is leveraging it’s ownership stake in Facebook to strike an exclusive relationship that can’t be matched by Google. In essence, Bing is betting that social signals are better than link signals in determining search relevance.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg himself made this announcement of a social search partnership with Bing. Zuckerberg stated, “What makes this a great partnership is that in this case Microsoft is the underdog in search. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone better to be working with to build the next generation of search!”

One of the first products of the Bing / Facebook partnership is that via a Bing iFrame, Bing search results are native inside of Facebook searches. Now, Facebook data will be integrated into Bing and influence search results based on signals from the searchers social connections. This product, called Bing Social brings Facebook posts and links that relate to the topic searched right into search results.

How does Bing bring the social context of Facebook into search relevance? Starting today, Bing is integrating data from your friends and social network into search results. This could include information on “likes”, reviews, photos and links from your friends into your search experience. According to Bing, search results will be really personal to the user, different than what others will see for the same search. This “instant personalization” will make a search by you relevant to you alone and not necessarily that relevant to someone else.

Obviously, the impact on SEO will be enormous. Search optimization currently relies extensively on relevant links from authority sites. If links and ‘likes’ from your personal social network become more important than links from websites then SEM’s will need to rethink their SEO strategy.

With the Facebook module your search results will now include information on what your friends liked or commented regarding the restaurant or movie or other item you searched for. Your Bing search results will actually be different depending on what your network of friends link to, like or dislike.

Another big implication is with a non-celebrity people search. Search engines don’t do this well today, often giving non-relevant results for common names. What Bing is going to do is use signals provided by Facebook such as location, friends, jobs and their interests to better determine what person you may actually be searching for. Bing is opening up features that will let you additionally add and confirm data back to Facebook as well. Bing also has plans to bring in the faces from Facebook of those who liked and disliked links that show up in your search results.

Social search may reignite the search wars. After all, Google rose up to conquer other search power houses like Alta Vista because PageRank made search results more relevant. If social search makes search results even better, then history has shown that the most relevant search algorithm will ultimately win consumers over!

- article courtesy of Richard Ord, Web Pro News

Media One Pro is an online web marketing company, rooted in Las Vegas, NV.  They have been on the leading edge of search marketing technology since 2002.  With this news regarding social search, Media One Pro is retooling its system in anticipation of changes ahead.  Who rules in the future, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Social Search, remains to be seen.

To visit our company in Las Vegas, feel free to call for an appointment and we will schedule a time to go over our SEO services.  Also visit our partner site 702SEO.

One of the concerns that often comes to mind when consumers hear about the concept of Web 2.0 is about the cost associated with new applications and software. What will happen when these initiatives are implemented? Will this mean more expenses for the consumer to absorb in order to be able to access and use the Internet? Here are some things you should know about the initiation of Web 2.0 software and what it will mean for both personal and business users of the World Wide Web.

The first thing to understand is that there are already Web 2.0 software that have been implemented. Such important functions as VoIP applications, Internet phone service, and increased security with online banking and shopping are commonly considered to be part of the Web 2.0 initiative. When it comes to these sorts of innovations, the fact of the matter is that the new software has not led to an increase in cost to the consumer. In fact, in many cases these newer services have led to a decrease in the costs that a customer pays for the same types of service through more traditional means. There is every indication that this will be true for many of the newer software packages that emerge in the years to come.

Of course, there is no iron-clad guarantee that all forms of Web 2.0 software will prove to be available at no additional costs to everyone. Businesses who want to take advantage of some of the newer software applications that are under development will no doubt have to pay a nice price to obtain them. Still, the value what will be derived from the implementation of the software, in terms of labor savings, time savings, and increased sales, will no doubt offset the initial investment in a very short time. Thus, while there will be some applications that will require outlay on the part of some of the users of the Internet, recouping the purchase price should take place in a very short time in many cases.