Jul
14th

Bouncing Back with SEO

Posted by Natalie on July 14, 2009 at 8:44 am

Lame title, I know. But I’ll tell you what’s even more lame — when one of your competitors lands a higher position on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). What should you do if you fall victim to this type of ruthless, business eat business type of attack? First, take a deep breath and remain calm. Second, give Oneupweb a ring at 877.568.7477. After all, we’re pros at handling this type of stuff and we love a good, hearty challenge.

And in the meantime, here are a few questions you should to be asking.

Is my business keeping up on the social scene? No, the social scene I’m referring to doesn’t have anything to do with gracing everyone with your presence at half-off martini and discount sushi night — although it doesn’t sound too bad. Back on track — the type of social I’m referring to deals with blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Ringing a bell? I sure hope so. Keeping a well optimized social presence can help your business in more than one way, but what I’m focusing on here and now is how it can help you garner higher SERP rankings. Don’t have a company blog? Start one. Encourage employees to post regularly about topics relevant to your business, industry events, etc. Post interesting company videos to YouTube, establish Twitter and Facebook profiles, and keep them updated with interesting content or special offers. Doing this will give you a better chance of improving your SERP results. But be sure to constantly monitor and update all of your business’s social profiles. We know — it’s a big fish to fry. Not feeling up to the challenge? We always are. Don’t hesitate to contact us.
Choose the right keywords. No, I’m not referring to cheesy pick-up lines that you may use at half-off martini and discount sushi night. I’m talking about those words that your site visitors will use to find your business when they’re performing a search online. You need to be incorporating these words into your website tags and your copy. If your site is a pet shop, you may include keywords such as “pet supplies”, “pet shop”, “pet store”, etc. Anything you think people may type in when they are looking to find your business. This takes a lot of research and can be extremely time consuming — it’s a darn good thing Oneupweb hires people specifically to formulate lists of keywords that will guarantee your business successful results.
Does my business need help? Remember, there is nothing wrong with asking for a little help. In doing so, you’re not declaring defeat — but better yet, victory!

Employing the help of a digital marketing agency like Oneupweb to help you wage your online marketing battles is a smart tactic. After all, competition is fierce and it’s essential that your business is keeping up. Contact us today.

Image: Bouncing ball strobe edit

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Jul
2nd

The Importance of SEO in Social Media for Your Brand

Posted by Leah Singer on July 2, 2009 at 1:19 pm

Social media is a crucial element in order to dominate the real estate on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Owning the space relative to your brand on a SERP leaves your company in control of your message. Instead of having competitors or the unfortunate bad review listed on the SERP, your social media networks are there instead.

Note, if you do have negative press/comments in a social media network, it’s best to respond to those negative comments in the same network. For example, if someone on Twitter complains about an experience they had with your company’s customer service, it would be best to respond to that user directly on Twitter. Also, never attack someone who has negatively commented about your company, this will most certainly backfire. Instead, use the opportunity to let that person know what you are going to do to rectify the situation. Being honest and open about the issue will let people know you are working on the issue. What’s cool about social media is that transparency, or being honest and open about your company, will get you a lot more R-E-S-P-E-C-T, thanks Aretha.

Ok, back to the issue at hand. Let’s take a look at Oneupweb’s SERP when searching for, you guessed it “oneupweb.”

Notice from the image that every listing is either our website, or some sort of social media network we control: Flickr, local business listings, Twitter, our blog StraighUpSearch, press releases, YouTube, facebook, LinkedIn and our podcasts. Oneupweb completely dominates the SERP for our branded keywords — and your company should be doing the same.

What is your company doing in social media? The biggest hurdle a lot of companies have is the lack of actual human resources to take the time to spend within these social networks. Uploading photos/videos, tweeting, and changing status updates all take time. This is certainly an understandable hurdle, but one that you can certainly clear when having (shameless plug coming up) an understanding social media agency, like Oneupweb, help you along the way.

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May
2nd

Searching for Positions in the NFL Draft

Posted by admin on May 2, 2007 at 8:55 am

This last weekend was a major event for most football fans around the country. The 2007 NFL Draft was a turning point for many men and their careers in the National Football League. Watching the draft made me think about how SEO, football, and the NFL Draft have a lot in common.

In football, there are individual players who are considered stars in the NFL and the sports world. Be it a wide receiver who can get great separation and catch a poorly thrown ball, a quarterback who, amidst intense pressure, swiftly hands off the ball to his running back, or the defensive tackle who does everything he can to stop the run, these stars wouldn’t be very effective without the rest of the team.

So it is in SEO – you have several key components to getting great positioning, but one of those components all by itself, often isn’t enough to bring you a high position on Google or Yahoo. Each component, with its strength and purpose, comes together, to bring its team (the website) a win (a high position).

How can the NFL Draft possibly relate to SEO? During the first round of the draft, teams make a serious investment in players that they can only hope will add to the team. Sure, the stats are there, the players performed well in college, but the question remains – will that translate into professional football? Considerable amounts of money are invested in players who are chosen during the first round of the NFL Draft – whether or not the player will benefit the team is yet to be seen.

A company has different departments. Let’s put it in football terms – offense, defense, and special teams. Your website is a key player on that team. When you hire an SEO firm, you are making a draft pick – you are choosing a company that you hope will contribute to the rest of the team, by bringing about higher positions on the search engines, higher conversions, and higher visibility. Just as it can take time to develop that rookie from the NFL Draft, so it is that it can take time before you start to see results. With a good SEO firm, it may take some time, but you will see the results.

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Dec
8th

All In a Week's Work in SEO: Sitemaps, DNS, CSS & Internet Explorer

Posted by Teal on December 8, 2006 at 4:31 pm

As an SEO, I am continually looking for ways for my clients to improve their overall visibility as well as increase usability – two very important issues for an effective online marketing strategy. There are three topics I would like to speak briefly about in this post: sitemaps (not Google Sitemaps) but real old-fashioned sitemaps that are supposed to be a helpful resource for users as well as search engines to find all of the pages on a site, how a DNS setup really can have an effect on search engine positioning and indexing, and finally CSS – a somewhat new and wondrous language to me – and the issues that arise from its use in Internet Explorer 6.

Sitemaps
Simply put, a sitemap is a way to provide users and engines a path to all of the pages on your site. Keeping this page updated, clean, concise and organized can benefit a site. For example, by providing users and engines links to the 5-10 most recent news articles and archiving the rest on pages organized by year, is a way to provide links to all news articles without listing them all or just linking to an umbrella news page. Also, by updating the list of most recent articles, new and fresh content is being added to the sitemap as frequently as your company creates news articles. If you can keep your sitemap to around 100 links, you are golden. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:

“Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.”

DNS / Server Setup
I definitely am not claiming to be any sort of expert on server setups, but the way a server generates URLs or as I learned earlier this week, the way a server allows subdomains with a CNAME, can greatly affect search engine positions and indexing. So be sure only one version of your site resolves and that your URLs are consistent and somewhat clean. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines urge….

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

CSS
We all know that the engines can’t read JavaScript, so recently, I suggested a client use a CSS dropdown in place of his current JavaScript powered menu. Because I use FireFox for a majority of my testing, when he emailed me later in the week and said he couldn’t get it to work, I was perplexed. I tested it in Internet Explorer just to see what happened and, sure enough, it didn’t work. A member of my team tested it in IE on his computer and it worked…still perplexed. We worked with the code for a bit until it dawned on us, I still have IE 6 on my computer and he has the updated, IE 7 version on his. And here lies the problem, IE 6 doesn’t support the a:hover function. Just something to keep in mind.

In closing, I would just like to mention that a quality SEO looks at much more than just title and meta tags. There are many, many reasons sites can have trouble positioning in the SERPs, and a good SEO will look into these issues and suggest quality fixes to these issues. A good SEO also focuses on usability and works with the client to improve the optimization of the site as well as the experience of the users.

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Jan
3rd

Here to Help, Just Let Us Know How

Posted by Tim on January 3, 2005 at 3:05 pm

More and more it seems like there is talk about search getting into the mainstream agencies. Agencies don’t seem to have much to say though. I can’t figure why that is.

At SearchEngineWatch there’s a thread that’s discussing this topic. One of the ideas put forth there is that search just isn’t “sexy” or “flashy” enough. I don’t buy into that theory though. At least not completely. It seems to me that it has more to do with undertanding the entire search field.

In her most recent ClickZ article, Shari Thurow mentions that in 2005 she wants to, “help agencies and the public in general understand why search optimization is an important part of the Web development process”.

What strikes me in all of this though, is why we are just playing a guessing game on what the agencies want/need?

I guess if I have a wish for 2005 it’s that traditional agencies start to at least talk about what they need. I’m not going to suggest that we can shine a light on them and open a whole new world of search marketing right away, but we’ll all be a lot further ahead if we start the conversation.

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