Archive for seo company

Maximize Your SEO Efforts

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a useful tool for any business. It gets your name ranked in Google so that traffic to your site increases.  As you build an online presence it only makes sense that you keep track of it. You can use tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar to check on your current ranking. If you’re running a blog you should also notice which posts generate the most traffic and see where they rank and what keywords were used to get it there. If you’re in need of keywords to help advertise business, look toward Google Adwords.

Also, add your site to search engine indexes. Search engines use crawlers (sometimes referred to as spiders) to browse for pages. Basically if you’re generating good content, rankings, and linking the amount of times your site is crawled will increase. Overall this will help you. It’s a way of creating faster searches and up-to-date data.

However, keywords are your best friends when you want to get search engine’s attention. titles, content, links, and image names can all include keywords. Just be sure that you use them wisely. They must be appropriate and they must be used effectively. Too many will get your material labeled as spam, too little won’t get your page noticed. Also, link internally to pages with keywords or relevant text. The more you link to your own site, the more traffic each page will get.

Other good practices are to add image descriptions, avoid flash and other media that isn’t used by every format. Link to associates. Having an alliance will boost both of your reputations. When you’ve build yourself a cornerstone and these foundations it’s time to keep traffic going through social media sites, like Twitter. Good luck!

 

SEO Company Woes: Help, My Business Has a Negative Review Online!

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Whoever said “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” obviously never met Yelp. Or TripAdvisor. Or any of the other customer review websites that can make or break a business and disrupt an otherwise smooth sailing online marketing campaign.

If a negative review is showing up for your company on Google, this complaint is likely costing you business, and it’s in your best interest to counter or remove it ASAP.

How? You have a couple of options:

  • Contact the consumer. If your review comes from a consumer with a specific complaint, the simplest course of action is to correct the damage at your source. Are they mad that you didn’t refund their shipping? Refund their shipping. Do they claim their product was defective? Send them a new one. Spending $20 or even $100 pleasing a customer is a worthy investment, consider dozens of customers it’s likely scaring away.
  • Consult the Powers That Be. If your review includes information that you know to be false, you can try asking the website that hosts it to remove the offending content. You might even consider taking legal action.
  • Cancel it out. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, negative publicity cannot be removed. In this case, your best course of action is to counteract the bad press by promoting a positive company image. This means a company blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and positive buzz on other forums and customer review sites to help push that negative feedback off the front page of Google.

Whether you’re working with an SEO company or doing your online marketing in-house, it’s important to keep tabs on your business’s reputation online. Sign up for daily Google Alerts of your company name — including variations: Ajax Union, AjaxUnion, AjaxUnion.com — to monitor the web for negative publicity.

And if you need help countering bad press, trust PR United, our business PR service, to repair your reputation online.

Is Your SEO Company Cool Like Facebook?

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Solid Cactus just posted a pretty neat article about the valuable business lessons contained in The Social Network — that movie about Facebook that isn’t Catfish. So put on your thinking cap and soak in the following business marketing tips, as culled from David Fincher:

  • Address a Need: Before you start a business, ask yourself, who are you helping? What do you have to offer that your competitors do not? In The Social Network, Zuckerberg saw a hole in way people communicate online and was the first to fill it.
  • Create a Need: In the film, we witness Zuckerberg’s a-ha moment when he releases that he his budding social network needs a Relationship Status function — a function we’ve all relied on, but probably didn’t know we need. Can you create a need for your customers?
  • Keep It Cool: Considering its C++(plus)-proficient founder, Facebook has maintained a rather cool reputation through a variety of factors — the initial exclusivity, the reluctance to commercialize. Think about what you can do to make yourself cool.

Facebook is one of our favorite online marketing tools, but we never thought we’d be taking notes on their business strategy, especially not the cinematic interpretation. But then again, it was a pretty good movie.

Sites Our SEO Company Loves

seo companyLet’s face it — you can’t spend all of your time on AjaxUnion.com. And for those rare moments when you need to take a break from our SEO company, you might be wondering, Where should I go?

Well wonder no longer. Here are 4 of our favorite sites around the web:

  • Selma Deals — A budding deal site featuring multiple hot deals every day, Selma Deals is a shopper’s destination. Window shoppers welcome.
  • NY Sports Digest — Yankees or Mets? Giants or Jets? NY Sports Digest is the only blog online to cover ALL the teams in New York, even the little-known Brooklyn Nets.
  • Entertain Me Daily — Great blog about everything from Glee to iPhone apps. (Maybe even iPhone apps about Glee.)
  • Brooklyn Trends — Whether you’re looking for a BK bar or simply checkin’ in on the hood, Brooklyn Trends is an excellent resource for the intellectual Brooklyner (or the nosy Manhattanite).

Still stumped on where to go? You can always check out our search engine agency online on Facebook and Twitter! Or, you know, Bubble Spinner.

Ajax Union: More Than an SEO Company

internet advertising servicesAt Ajax Union, we sometimes identify ourselves as an SEO company, but our online marketing offerings actually extend well beyond the realm of search engine optimization. Let’s take a look at some of our other services:

PPC Feeder
Offering professional Google AdWords management for small business, PPC Feeder delivers immediate results — that means more traffic, and more conversions. Our PPC management service includes strategic keyword selection, ad creation and optimization and statistical reporting.

EmailSpark
Business email marketing, simplified. EmailSpark offers full service email marketing — we write and design your monthly newsletters, send them out, build up your contents and send you comprehensive stats on how your campaign is doing.

PR United
Our business PR service provides press release writing and distribution for exposure all over the web, including credible news outlets like Google News and Yahoo News. It’s the perfect combination of SEO and branding.

ApplesCreations
Specializing in small business websites, ApplesCreations offers professional, affordable WordPress website design, a great way to give your brand a new look or build a new website from scratch.

That being said, Ajax Union does offer comprehensive SEO, including on page website SEO and AnewB, an off page SEO plan.

Search Engine Marketing Playlist

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Do you work for an SEO company? Do you wish you worked for an SEO company? Either way, you’re probably curious to know the very best jams to listen to while engaging in the various forms of online marketing. Go forth!

Off Page SEO — “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers
Search engine optimization is all about going the distance — spreading your message far and wide via blogs, articles, classified listings, directory postings, social profiles, etc. etc. In fact, if we hadn’t chosen this Proclaimers ditty, we probably would have gone with “Going The Distance,” by Cake. The Proclaimers won out, though, mostly because this song was in Benny & Joon.

On Page SEO — “Do You Love Me?” by The Contours
Have you ever tried to change yourself to win somebody over? We have. Website SEO is sort of like the makeover scene from Pretty Woman, except you’re not trying to impress Richard Gere — you’re trying to impress Google. (So, yes, we could have gone with “Pretty Woman” here, but we’d prefer to honor a song that mentions a dance called the mashed potato.)

Pay-Per-Click — “Push It” by Salt ‘n’ Pepa
What is a click, really, if not the direct consequence of a forefinger pushing the button of a mouse? While we’re tinkering with the advanced settings of our Google AdWords management accounts, Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Push It” keeps us going strong. Ooh baby baby!

Email Marketing — “Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes
Let’s face it, email kicks snail mail’s butt: the formatting, the speed, the statistical potential — not to mention the lack of a physical postman. This Marvelettes tune reminds us of that bygone era before @’s and dot coms, reminding us to be thankful that, when we can’t find a message we’re expecting, we need only to open the folder labeled spam.

SEO Company Nightmares: The 25 Hardest Keywords

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Search engine marketing is all about keywords. You have to rank for attainable keywords (on your budget), but still target a high enough search volume to see results.

Thus, trying to ranking for “light brown capri pants with side zippers” would not be very productive. And, on the other end of the spectrum, targeting a super-popular keyword is not smart either.

SEOmoz recently published a list of the 25 most difficult keywords to rank for.

Highlights include:

  • free
  • click
  • SEO
  • money
  • blog
  • business
  • internet

If you had any of those keywords on your list, we suggest you cross them out. Try ranking for something a little more attainable, like SEO company.

2 Cool SEO Company Tools

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It’s Friday, amirite? In light of this momentous occasional, we’ve spent much of the afternoon perusing the internets for some fun SEO company tools to play with.

That’s when we discovered WebConfs.com, a website overflowing with SEO tools. TGIF.

Let’s take a look at our two favorite tools, both of which are backlink-related:

1. Backlink Builder

That just sounds good, doesn’t it? The WebConfs Backlink Builder allows you to search for relevant, high PR sites likely to link to your site. We searched “online marketing” and found a lot of results.

2. Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer

These days, scoring a lot of backlinks isn’t enough — if you want to see SEO results, you need anchor links listing your site under a targeted keyword. This handy and/or dandy tool gives you a list of anchor text links leading to your domain. If you see any non-keyword anchor text (for example, “Ajax Union”), consider emailing the site owner and requesting that they replace it with a keyword term, like online marketing.

Can Your SEO Company Get You to #1?

We love this video by Google’s Matt Cutts, which answers a question search engine agency employees hear all the time: “Can you make me #1?” It’s not the position that matters, Cutts says, it’s the search terms you’re ranking for.

We can divide search keywords into three categories:

1. Super Broad: Words like “doctor,” “fashion,” “plumbing,” and so on are extremely difficult to rank for, and often not what a business actually needs. As Cutts points out, a plumber in California wouldn’t be able to help everyone searching “plumbing” online.

seo company

2. Super Narrow: Can we rank you #1? Sure! We can get you to the top of the page for “young children’s black suede shoes from Florida.” That’s what you wanted right?

3. Just Right: Listen up Goldilocks — the best keywords to rank for have a respectable search volume that matches up with your potential customer group. People who search these keywords are looking to buy, and they’re looking to buy products like yours. Even ranking in the top five for one of these keywords can be extremely helpful.

So next time your SEO company promises to take you to #1, be sure to ask for more specifics…

SEO Company Tips: Your Guide to Video Sitemaps

seo companyIf you’ve hired an SEO company to enhance your online presence, here’s an item to add to your list of demands: a video sitemap.

Similar to a conventional sitemap, a video sitemap makes it easier for search engines like Google to locate and index your videos. Google’s Webmaster Central has a very useful page on video sitemaps.

Some highlights:

  • Your video sitemap can include three types of content: pages with embedded video(s), video player URLs, and raw video URLs.
  • Every entry in your video sitemap must include five meta elements: title, description, play page URL, thumbnail URL, and the URL of the file location/player.
  • Google can handle vids in a variety of formats: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf.

When you finish creating your video sitemap, don’t just sit on it — submit it! Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap for faster indexing. Or ask your internet marketing company to do it for you!