SEO News » SEO 101


Too many online businessmen around the world spend a fortune to rank higher in the search engines so that they boost their business quickly. Hence, a great number of search engine marketing companies have mushroomed to cater to this need. However, online businessmen have growingly realized that their search marketing techniques are highly ineffective. Brick Marketing, an internet marketing company, has recently revised and re-launched their search engine optimization services to adjust with growing trends. Among the top Search Engine Optimization companies in the world such as Brick Marketing currently offer SEOENG™ technology to their clients.

SEOENG™ technology provides an exact assessment of how search engines view a website, hierarchy of web pages and how ranking penalties are calculated based on internal link flow. One of the most useful features of SEOENG™ is a search bar that webmasters place on their websites so that users can obtain a free automated website analysis on a limited basis.

Website links are assigned a value that search engines use as a criteria to establish rankings. SEOENG™’s automated website analysis Link Flow™ tool examines a website’s internal and external links and provides an accurate and critically important perspective on how search engines determine rankings. This information is very useful to clients and Internet marketing companies equally as achieving a higher placement on a search results page considerably increases the number of users a website attracts.

Brick Marketing is a full-service Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing company owned and managed by prominent Internet marketing expert, Nick Stamoulis. Mr. Stamoulis ’achieve his goals by providing the most innovative online marketing techniques and services to his clients through SEOENG™ techniques.

MWI, a web design and SEO firm based in Utah, recently completed a survey asking respondents about their awareness of search engine optimization (SEO), their companies’ practices regarding it, and costs they would expect to pay for certain SEO services. The results from 124 respondents were both positive and negative with some surprising findings.

The survey showed that roughly 66% of respondents’ companies had direct experience with SEO, either by doing it in-house or by hiring an outside search engine mareting firm. 35% of the total respondents were actively engaged in an SEO campaign, and 31% had run an SEO campaign in the past but had stopped it for some reason. More than half of the respondents who said they would pay for SEO services or searc marketing services and chose a specific price range said they would be willing to pay between $500 to $1,000 per month, the lowest price range available for selection on the survey.

When respondents were asked an open-ended question about their experiences and feelings regarding SEO some responded saying that “SEO is not rocket science” while other expressed feelings of confusion and doubt about whether SEO is effective or whether SEO firms can be trusted to work ethically. A common thread was the desire to work with SEO firms that are compensated under a “pay for performance” model. Most respondents perceived SEO as important and capable of delivering results if the right SEO firm was employed. Another challenge facing SEO or search engine marketing firms are clients who wonder about the potential for positive ROI. Although respondents saw SEO as being important and beneficial, they had doubts about whether it was worth the expense.

Overall we see these survey results as positive for legitimate and ethical SEO firms. Increased awareness, understanding, and perceived value surrounding SEO services will cause growth in the industry. Firms that are unethical or do not provide true value in their services will be marginalized as the consumer becomes more savvy.

Search engine optimization is the hot topic of the day. Until recently, however, the focus of any search engine marketing company has been on optimizing the website of its client’s company. But this limited view of search engine optimization rarely gets a company into the coveted top slot of keyword search results by itself. Instead, marketing public relations firms are now at the forefront of search engine optimization. Specifically, a few leading firms are properly optimizing and distributing news and feature articles about products and taking their clients to the top of major news and search engine rankings in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Before people are ready to buy, they research topics, products, and services by keyword. But to capture these leads, you must be on the first half of the first page of search results. That takes specific expertise that only a very few marketing PR firms have. The reported payoff of this new approach typically includes an immediate and significant spike in website traffic, increased call-in leads and overall improvement in news and search engine results under the companys major keywords.

Instant Visibility through the News Search Engines:

According to statistics captured over the course of one month in mid-2004, over 27 million Americans searched Google and Yahoo! News for information. The news search engines are now major players in the dissemination of news. More importantly, these news engines allow for keyword searching and generate results in much the same way as the search engines. Therefore, an article that contains strategically placed keywords, can reach the top of news rankings.

However, news search engines naturally require that the article is timely. Thus, the release will only stay at the top of the news engine rankings for 2-4 weeks before new news replaces it. Still, a company that can churn out a fresh, optimized news article every month can effectively stay at the top of the rankings for a very long time.

Additional Visibility through Major Search Engines:

If news engines represent the possibility of an immediate response through marketing publicity and optimization, then the general search engines present a mid-term opportunity.
As these articles are distributed through major wire services and posted on key industry websites, the major search engines begin to locate and index the releases. If the article is properly optimized, there will be a corresponding increase to a company’s overall search engine ranking over the course of several months.

Search engine optimization is a rather large segment of the online marketing industry and it is important as a marketing company to always stay competitive and constantly tweak your product offerings. Search engine optimization has become such a sought out service and with many internet marketing companies brutally competing for business it is important as an internet marketing company to stay on the forefront of this product. This type of constant evaluation is important to stay competitive against all the other internet marketing companies offering this product as well.

Brick Marketing, an internet marketing company, has lately revised and re-launched their search engine optimization services to adjust with growing trends. This search engine marketing company has acknowledged that a revision of this product and the way it was offered to our clients had to be revised in order to remain competitive with other agencies. Prospective customers can now be used to similar pricing strategies has other players in the industry. The search engine marketing industry is a very fast moving industry with changes occurring sometimes over night. In order for firms and consultants to stay in a competitive range a watchful eye must be kept on all offerings in order to be able to offer only the best solution for clients.

Brick Marketing is not just a search engine marketing firm but rather a full service website marketing company offering a full gamete of products offering help and assistance to many business owners large and small in the world of online marketing. Brick Marketing’s product revision has also come with a redesign of the search engine optimization section of its website. Product bundling has been altered along with the products overall positioning and how it is offered. The new way that this product is packaged with other services will now allow the product potency level to be increased. Brick Marketing has realized the importance of revenue generating internet marketing services and always keeping your eye on the prize.

Brick Marketing has recently re-vamped and restructured their offerings in this area by streamlining the process of optimization. This decision was made in order to keep up with growing industry trends and be able to offer only the quickest service without compromising the quality and integrity of the product.

The Net Impact, a well-known search engine marketing farm in St. Louis, has announced that it will be working with Ardent on Internet marketing, website design and maximizing project for the ARDENT website. Ardent contracted with The Net Impact to build up their search engine optimization policy to get better visibility of their website on the Internet through search marketing techniques.

Since 1997, The Net Impact is a division of Unidev having Internet marketing, web design firm and St Louis web design chief, empowering clients with highly creative as well as innovative and search engine friendly websites. Professional services cover search optimization techniques, training, seminars , web site design, internet marketing solutions, Internet plan and policy development.

Ardent is an American owned company of high performance fishing reels and accessories with administrative offices in St. Louis and manufacturing facilities in Missouri, Macon . Ardent setup his business for four years and distributes reels and accessories through a nationwide distributor relationship with Big Rock Sports who serves independent dealers and national accounts. Ardent can achieve the objectives for maximizing the customer contact through its expanding dealer network.

Search Engine College has launched and set new industry standards for education and training in the field of search engine optimization and search engine marketing in 2004.

The Search Engine College student population now has a global reach that includes the following countries: Canada, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Iceland, Czech Republic, China, Finland, France, Germany, Belgium, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, Argentina, Pakistan, Jordan, Spain, South Africa , Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, , UK, Ukraine, USA and West Africa..

In 2006, Search Engine College developed the search industries for designed to fast-track training and provide a complete professional qualification in one of the following three specializations: Certified Search Engine Marketer, Certified Pay-Per-Click Marketer and Certified Search Engine Optimizer.

Search Engine College courses are designed at a wide aim audience, with marketing executives, small business owners, SEO operators, students and job seekers preparing for a profession change. Subjects available for study include Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Web Site Usability ,Keyword Research ,Link Building and , Web Site Copywriting. Students can select to take part in tutor-led courses principal to recognized certification, or download a self-study course. All courses are offered completely online in a time-frame that suits them. Students can choose which course to take from the Search Engine College website and when they enroll, they are sent an access key and login to the online course area. From there, they can download and print their lesson materials, take their online analysis quizzes, submit homework for grading by their instructor and take their final exams.

Each certification course provides students with a particular and proven skill-set, designed to make them directly employable in the fast-moving search industry. Courses are updated every few months to reflect the ongoing changes within the search industry. All courses are designed by industry experts and use a holistic approach to web site promotion, focusing on the importance of web site design, functionality and usability as well as search engine compatibility.

The Search Engine Optimization Journal (SEOJ), the leading daily search engine optimization (SEO) blog, has rolled out a new section to the journal, SEO Videos. The SEO Videos section offers guidance on SEO application to businesses in a weekly series of videos. The SEOJ is a renowned forum owned, operated, and written by Nick Stamoulis of the respected SEO firm, Brick Marketing. Brick Marketing has been instrumental in the success of online businesses through link building and other search engine marketing solutions over the past decade.

While other SEO and search engine marketing firms focus only on one or two aspects of online marketing, Mr. Stamoulis’ philosophy is a complete approach to the marketing that includes better ranking opportunities, greater brand awareness, and a blend of marketing methods for short- and long-term success. The ability to take full advantage of his expertise with the launch of the SEO Videos, a proactive learning environment, adds another facet to his commitment to successful promotion of online businesses.

The SEO Videos are short lectures presented by Mr. Stamoulis on boosting a company’s success by driving qualified traffic to its business website. Each segment of the SEO Videos series is an element in a successful SEO campaign. You will hear how to kick off the process and learn various SEO techniques, tricks, and tips of SEO professionals as the series progresses.

Chances are you’ve heard about Keyword Density, but what exactly is it? Well, an articles keyword density is a measurement (most often expressed in the form of a percentage {%}) conveying the abundance of a specific word or phrase (the keywords/key phrase). A simple example shows this nicely, If your webpage is about learning how to horseback ride then a sample keyword would be something like “Horse Riding” or “Horseback Lessons” even something as simple as “riding lessons” could suffice as long as you word the article appropriately. Google offers several tools to help you understand Keyword Density, simply type “‘Keyword Density” into the Google search bar. One tool is expressed as an easy to read chart, as seen below.

Notice how certain tools secure a higher prominence rating than if they were not used. Titles, Meta-tags, and Sub-headings all score higher ratings.

Why does keyword density matter? Well, Popular search engines like Google and Yahoo use keyword Density (amongst other things) to determine the ranking of each site in their index. The right keyword density can help you achieve a higher rank. However, this does not mean that cramming as many keywords in as possible is going to put you up top. They have security features to ensure this doesn’t happen, the spiders that crawl your page will instead recognize your page as spam and ignore it. It has been rumoured that Google has a Golden % for keyword density. But instead of writing for the search engine, write for your audience, your articles and pages will flow more naturally and have more relevant content.

Every year, companies around the world are discovering that their business’ website is serving little to no purpose. Often times, the sites haven’t pulled in any profit for the companies, simply because they aren’t generating any traffic. And why should they?

These sites are often poorly made, and jam packed full of useless information making it difficult for Google to categorize the site properly. This leaves the site with a low ranking in Google’s index, causing the business to lose potential customers.

Immediately after realizing the error of their ways, marketing personnel will scramble to get a hold of an SEO company in order to solve their problems.

What some people don’t know is that your average, traditional SEO firm focuses primarily on Text Optimization, often pushing Image Optimization to the back of the bus if not right out the door. Image optimization is an entire corner of the SEO industry, why not take full advantage?

Core Principles of Image Optimization

Image Optimization is a useful tool that has been utilized in web design for several years. Optimizers are aware that by incorporating the use of relevant images into their web pages, they are accessible not only to the text engine search, but image search as well.

In order to understand how Image Optimization works, and to successfully apply it in web design, you should first understand that not every pixel will require optimization.

Here are a few fundamentals to consider when optimizing images.

Four Basics:

1) Quality - Is the image of acceptable quality?
2) Relevance - Is the image relevant to the content surrounding it?
3) Appropriate labelling - Is the label relevant to the image?
4) Image Format - Consider adopting a template for strategic placement.

Its true that a Picture is worth a thousand words, so be sure to find an SEO agency that fully utilizes every tool at its disposal!

The following guidelines, specifically the “Quality Guidelines”, are intended to help your site rank higher in Google’s search index. This article will also outline specific illicit material which may have your site removed from Google and their partner sites indexes.

Once Your Site is Ready:

Procure as many back-links as physically possibly. ( have sites link back to yours ) Use http://www.google.com/addurl.html to submit your site to Google. Double check, and be sure that every site that should know about you, does.

Guidelines for Content

  • Frequently scan your site for dead links and broken links as well as HTML.
  • Your site should have a clearly presented hierarchy with links to route users through each page.
  • Ensure that your sites Title and other headings are descriptive and practical.
  • An easily accessible site map will help users navigate your site.
  • Be sure to populate your site with rich content that directly relates to your product service, or message. Skip the jabberwocky and stay focussed!
  • Be reasonable, having over 100 links on one page is to cluttered and confusing, consider dividing the load between a few pages.
  • Include Key Phrases and Words throughout your site that people would search for in Google. ( i.e. if you are a potter from Toronto, spread the phrase “Toronto Pottery” throughout your site )
  • The Google Crawler wont pick up images so avoid important bytes of info in picture form, text is best.

Tech Guide

  • Take full advantage of the robots.txt file your web server offers, this will tell spiders what they can and cannot scan, keep it up to date, you wouldn’t want to block the Googlebot Spider. To learn how to direct the bots when they find your site check out the following link: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
  • If possible, using a text browser to examine your site can be a real plus, simply because most users see your site just as the browser would. Search Engine Crawlers might have difficulty scanning your site if certain features like JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep are in place.
  • Be sure that your server supports “If-Modified-Since HTTP” header. Doing so will inform Google that a change has been made since the last scan.
  • Investing in a Search Engine Optimization Content Management system such as Bergstrom Solutions might be a good idea, as they usually take care of much of this stuff.

Quality guidelines

  • Firstly, DO NOT assume that just because we have not specified a certain manipulative technique that Google or any other popular search engine will necessarily approve of it.
  • These are merely guidelines or, suggestions if you will.
  • Spending time following the core principles relayed in these guidelines will reward you with a higher ranking than those who simply cheat the system by exploiting loopholes.

Core Principles - A Guideline

  • When creating pages, know your audience, don’t forget that you are writing for people, not Google’s Spider Bot. Avoid “cloaking” your site by deceiving Google’s Bots. People don’t appreciate when their time is wasted.
  • Don’t manipulate the Crawler Bots to improve your rankings. If you can’t reveal your secrets to your competitors, then chances are you shouldn’t be utilizing these secrets.
  • Don’t fall prey to the many schemes out there that claim to improve your site ranking, these gimmicks can often permanently brand your site as a bad apple.
  • Unauthorized programs submitting pages are a big no-no as they violate Google’s terms of Service. Google Typically frowns upon the use of automated submitting programs

Specific guidelines -

  • Never create a site with malicious intent, creating Virus’s, worms, file cracks etc. are illegal
  • Cloaking and manipulative techniques are frowned upon
  • Avoid irrelevant keywords, there is no sense wasting space.
  • Avoid duplicating text, pages, files, documents, etc. again, there’s no sense in wasting space.
  • Stray away from hidden text/ links.
  • If your site is in collaboration with another site, or maybe even several other sites, be sure to add relevant and useful content. Give people a reason to visit you!

If your site meets and/or exceeds these guidelines congratulations, if not, don’t worry, you can always make the appropriate alterations and re-submit your site to Google!