Austin Webpages

Category: Search Engine Optimization

  • Why Google Algorithms are a Waste of Time

    In 2014, all that matters is that you know what you are talking about

    Small business owners probably got headaches when their SEO firm said things like Penguin or Hummingbird, as most owners have no desire to keep up with Google’s search algorithm updates. The SEO firms would sell that they know they would magically know the secrets to Google’s madness like they are the cure for cancer. Kudos to them for being persistent, but its mostly a scam.

    To clear the air, your SEO firm should be bringing you value with their direction. What to topics to blog about during the week. What static content to have on your site. What topics and information you are lacking. What your competitors are doing. Maybe they also write some content and your blogs for you or create infographics and images for your blog posts. They help you manage your social networks, material for your various communication campaigns. They bring awareness to your business outside of just your websites. Its a lot of work.

    What they shouldn’t be telling you  is that you need to adapt to Google algorithms and their constantly moving target. That isn’t a stable marketing plan. A good SEO company will undoubtedly follow Google’s moves, but they must understand why the algorithm changes, not so much the how the formula works. What the end game is. The goal, has always been the same, do you have the information that someone is looking for.

    Google is looking at your website, reading your content, and determining what you are an expert in. Your content is all that wonderful knowledge that you have in your head. Google is categorizing that info, grabbing similar information from your competitors and putting them all in a file cabinet. The ones at the front, have the best info for that topic.

    What is the Google Algorithm trying to do?

    Google isn’t 100% there yet, but that is ultimately where they are heading. That is the basic function of a search engine. It’s very simple. Someone asks a question on Google, and whoever has the best answer or information, is displayed first. No fancy coding. No fancy SEO gimmicks and front page unrealistic expectations. Do you have the best information, and nothing else.

  • Recent Google Changes Affect Small Businesses

    Google quietly changed their search algorithm and didn’t say anything for a month

    I believe that small business owners don’t have a website for two main reasons – either lack of time or lack of know how. As we mentioned in our previous blog, Google recently made a change in their formulas that handles the search results. This falls under both of the reasons why a small business owner hasn’t made the jump into employing a business website. The owner  has no time to keep up with these changes – obviously they have a business to run. On top of that they need to know how these changes affect their small business website and their marketing strategy.

    Quick History Lesson on Google

    Google changes affect small businesses and shows its direction - picture from google.comForget Panda, Penguin and other code named updates to Google’s algorithm. Instead lets look at the main ideas behind all of Google’s updates. In the early 2000’s, Google changed the game and stopped responding to keyword stuffing. An example of keyword stuffing is if “Google changed their algorithm” or some variation of that phrase, were repeated into every other line of this blog.

    A few years later, they got rid of the reciprocal links and began to address link farms. That mean’s that websites setup to show large amounts of similar category links made less of an impact on search rankings.

    Four years ago, Google started to incorporate social media. A couple of years ago social media was much more incorporated into search engine rankings when Google+ made its debut.

    A lot of this I am simplifying, and there were many more updates in addition to the ones I mentioned. Mainly I want to show small business owners the trend. Google used to be influenced by fancy code and loopholes. Today, Google is striving for a goal of being humanly compatible. It wants you to be able to ask it “Where do I pay my cable bill?” and instead of showing you your cable company’s home page, it will show you the exact page where you can pay your bill online. It wants you to ask “how do I cook a steak properly” and restaurants do not show up, but instead great articles showing you step by step instructions. Further, if you ask anything about location, it will take into consideration where you are, if you have set up Google to allow that. Such would be, if you were looking for a “website for your small business” and you were in the Austin area, you would (hopefully) arrive here. What is only going to matter, is if you truly match the intent and needs of the customer.

    The difference between today and back in the early 2000’s, is that more and more, the internet is much more of a level playing field. It’s not 100% there yet, but it is moving in that direction. If you are the right fit for the customer and you have the information, product and services, customers will find you.

    The Next Step

    Hummingbird, Google’s latest update, is also bringing in a slight curve ball. Don’t worry, it is still very much a part of the bigger picture that we believe Google is after. As mentioned earlier, location seems to be one of the bigger topics that Google is incorporating into its “knowledge graph”. The trend is showing that Google is going to continue to merge its social media via Google+ more and more to its search results. It won’t be long before you can ask Google “what do my friends want to eat tonight”, Google will check your friends and their likes on Google+, check their calendars and come back and give you a listing of local Chinese fast food restaurants.

    On the internet, it doesn’t matter if your business only has a few employees. Contact Austin Webpages today to get your Austin Small Business online. We know how Google changes affect small businesses. Call for your free quote and expand your customer base today!

  • Getting Links to Your Website

    Getting Links to Your Website – The Worlds Largest Poll, the Internet

    Something that all SEO geeks out there can agree on, is that getting links to your website is a great thing. In our last blog about the bad practices SEO companies partake in, we mentioned that the internet is a giant popularity contest. It is the equivalent to the age long saying ..it’s all about who you know. Getting links to your website from high profile websites, say a university and their valuable .edu domain extension, is a great example of the holy grail of backlinks – the links that other people/companies have on their website that point to your page. It is like a celebrity telling their friends that they know you personally…you would be a popular guest anywhere you go.

    I don’t have control of those pages….

    Getting links to your website is not an exact science, has its challenges, but as small business owner you should not get discouraged. Again, in our last blog post about SEO companies and if they are doing a good job, we said there is a bunch of initial work that your SEO company can do to get the ball rolling. Remember, advertising online is going to take time: months and years not days and weeks. Nevertheless there are things we usually recommend business owners to do. We cannot stress this enough, marketing a small business online is a partnership between the owner and your SEO company.

    What Business Owners can do to get website links

    Getting links to your website can be heavily influenced by the owner, especially at the local level. Your online reputation is just as important as your local business reputation or word of mouth. Remember, online, your business is open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Thus, you do not need an SEO company to sett up your profiles on the various Yelp and Yellow Pages of the online world. That’s an easy few and each of those review sites will have step by step instructions.

    Google also allows you to setup your business so that it properly shows up on their popular maps webpage, it is easy to sign up for and they verify that you are the owner it by sending you a code in the mail. This is usually one of the first ones you should target.

    You should immediately contact your past customers once your review webpages are up and running and ask for a review of your service on these pages. You are most likely already following up with your past customers looking for possible repeat business or referrals. That is an opportunity for an owner to ask for a review and testimonial online, as it will make it easier to start getting links to your website. Your SEO company might ask for a really good review from one of your customers to glorify on your actual website, but the reputation is going to matter more on 3rd party sites like Yelp, and that is something you can do on your own.

    How can I Increase Website Traffic

    Getting links to your website isn’t the only thing a business owner can do on their own, but they can also start driving some website traffic in the exact manner most local business do today. If your business can accommodate for it, reach out to them and offer something for free. Start an email campaign (and nothing more than once a month) where if they bring a friend with a coupon, which you have to get from the website, you get half off a free meal at your restaurant. They could get a free upgrade, or a free our of service / consulting, you know your business and where there is margin. Post these same coupons on your Cragislist ad (you are posting to Craigslist, right?), that is a great way to start getting links to your website, or at the very least some more visitors.

    Austin Webpages can partner with your small business to increase your customer base in the Austin are. We will start getting links to your website and guiding you with the right direction to grow your website traffic. Find a website you like the look and feel of, and contact us today! Get your past customers contacts ready, and we will make your old business create new business.

    Updated on 9/22/2013

  • Is My SEO Company Doing Their Job

    Is My SEO Company Doing Their Job

    Is my SEO company doing their job? Signs to show if your SEO company is hard at work or just taking your money

    When it comes down to it, an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company is doing their job when they annoy you constantly. You should hate when your phone rings and it is them on the other line. You should want to pretend to ignore their email that just came in with your weekly to-do list. Only when they stop getting on your nerves, and the emails stop, and the phones stop ringing, should you find a new SEO company. So is my SEO company doing their job? Just ask yourself…have they annoyed you? Annoying is good because it means they are working for the long term, successful search engine rankings result.

     Long Term is better than Short Term

    When you own a business, the owner expects an ROI, naturally. When you invest in some form of marketing, a small business owner can easily be attracted to someone who promises results in as little as a month or two. In the SEO world, promises of results should be a big red flag.

    First, a couple of easily agreed upon things in the SEO world is that content is king, and links to your site is important (commonly referred to as “backlinks”). Lets take the latter first. Think of the internet as a giant popularity contest. Every webpage owner has as many votes as they want. They vote by linking to a website on their own page, but they cannot vote for themselves.

    Content, the material that users read when visiting your website, is what an SEO company is going to want to constantly publish about your product. There is a reason that most websites today have some sort of blog and/or utilize social media.

    Is My SEO Company Doing their job? Stay Away from the Guaranteed Results sales pitch

    So what about the promises of high ranks in only 30 days? From a high level overview, many SEO companies are creating pages full of keywords, and then adding your link on that page. This is cancer for business owners who are lured into the promise of ranking high for their keywords…it may benefit them today, but it could kill them tomorrow. When google discovers these pages the SEO company has built to influence your rankings, you will be penalized to the point where it is hard to recover.

    Instead, an SEO company is going to want to pick your brain all the time about the next blog to be published. They are going to want to know what you did in the past week so they can post about it on facebook and twitter. Since the SEO company is good at doing SEO, they aren’t going to know about your business. So is my SEO company doing their job? Unless they are paying someone to write your entries for you, they should be coming to you as the subject matter expert.

    How do I know I am on the right path?

    Blogging, social media, building links to your site…takes time. Give your SEO company 6 months to a year before pulling the plug on them, but at the same time, ask what they are doing. There is a huge list of basics every SEO company should be doing, whether initially or on weekly/monthly basis. They aren’t discovering next week’s lotto numbers, they are doing work on your behalf, so there is nothing they should be hiding. Ask for reports, ask for what external links have been made to your website, ask what keywords you are doing well in and which ones make sense to attack.

    The 30 days promise is another cookie cutter method that can extremely backfire in the long run. So is my SEO company doing their job? No, they aren’t and it is unfortunate that small business owners can be penalized simply because a company they employ is maximizing their profits without their customers well being in mind.

    Contact us today to discuss your SEO possibilities for your small business…we won’t cut corners, but we will promise a long partnership with your business. And yes…we will constantly nag you for the next opportunity to naturally improve your search rankings.