Yesterday, Goldstein Media creative director Seth Goldstein was fortunate enough to speak on a panel about SEO and Paid Search at the SCORE eBusinessNow conference. Along with moderator Neal Wiser, of Neal Wiser Consulting, Glenn Gabe, of G Squared Interactive, and Lance Bachman of 1SEO, the discussion focused on how small businesses can get the most of optimizing their content for the search engines.

The eBusinessNow conference is put on by the SCORE Association, which is an organization that helps counsel America’s small business owners on how to get the most out of their business. It was a free  event and more than 300 small business owners were in attendance.

To learn more about the eBusinessNow conference and when it will be coming to your town check out their Website.

Does this make sense? Good. Now you have to find the time to work on SEO. That’s where we come in. We specialize in getting companies found online through Search.

Drop us a line at 215-352-5216

On the whole engaging in Black Hat SEO techniques might gain a brand a quick burst in the search rankings but over all the fall out is much greater. Getting banned from the Google search results is not work the small and temporary gain you might achieve.

Matt Cutts recently addressed a group of SEOs at Search Engine Strategies and explained that the search giant does in fact penalize big brands for engaging in Black Hat SEO.

Honestly I’m glad to see Google dealing with brands of all sizes the same.

The only true way for lasting results in Google and other search engines is to play by the rules (to an extent) and not push the envelope to the point of ripping.

As a Philadelphia area Search Engine and Interactive Media firm, we have clients constantly concerned about the price of organic search. One of the biggest complaints is that even though ranking organically is free, it really isn’t. Unless you have an internal team that knows the ins and outs of SEO, businesses must hiring outside consultants to advise and tweak their business’ site to be best optimized for the targeted keywords.

In his article, Stein further addresses the need to not ignore SEO:

It has always been hard for SEO people to get across the importance of ranking high for a keyword and all the good it does for a business. Many people don’t realize that a large part of SEO is optimizing the site, not only to rank well, but also to achieve the best chance of converting those visits into paying customers. Nor do they understand that the core of SEO is understanding your customer base so that you can advertise on the keywords they are using.

Ok time for an example:

Let’s invent a site for this, let’s pretend you own “http://www.anniversarygifts.com/” and as the name suggests it specialises in gifts for anniversaries. Last month (August 2010), there were 201,000 searches for “anniversary gifts” in the US, (data from Google Keyword research tool).

It is generally agreed in the industry that ranking first on a search will get you somewhere between 35-45% of people looking for that keyword. This number is usually half for 2nd place and continues to drop from there. The second page sites are lucky to receive 5-10% collectively and likely receive many repeat customers, which would inflate the percentage.

If your site ranked first for “Anniversary Gifts” even at the conservatively low estimate of 35% that is 70,350 visitors a month. Before we even get into purchasing that is 70,350 people viewing your site, reading about your products, finding out about your brand and acknowledging your existence. If your site is designed to be user friendly (which is part of the SEO) then the users are likely to have a pleasant experience, share that experience with friends, and return to your site when they need another anniversary gift.

That is only 1 keyword out of dozens you are likely to have, though it is the best one. A well-optimized site can usually get around 10% of their keyword potential and around 5% of those would go so far as to purchase. We’re going to take another conservative low and say 1% become leads, we should therefore expect 704 (rounded up) people purchasing from your online shop A Month. (I don’t know about you but I kind of want to create this site now).

The best part of all this is the fact that everyone who is looking for your keywords is also looking for your type of business, people who type “anniversary gift” in Google are, more likely then not, looking to buy your hypothetical product(s).

Stein shares a great chart showing what would happen if the site didn’t rank first:

I completely agree with Stein’s view of SEO. It’s something that needs to be integrated into every Web project. If not, why even bother building a site? The chances of it getting found on its own for the appropriate keywords are slim to none. Be sure to click over to Search Engine Journal to read more of Stein’s great post.

What do you think? What are your thoughts on SEO and it’s place on the Internet? Post your thoughts in the comments below.

Image Credit: DeviceMag.co

Yesterday’s big announcement of Google Instant has left many in the SEO and Web community in general with lots of questions about what this new feature means for search engine rankings.

Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, has published a blog post where he attempts to answer some of these questions.

Included in the post Matt highlights one of his YouTube videos where he answers a question about if SEO will still be around in 5 years. His answer, simply — Yes.

White Hat techniques are a good thing, Matt says. People edit their resumes to make them more appealing to to employers. White Hat SEO techniques are just like that. Essentially you’re tweaking your site to be more appealing to both the search engine and to visitors.

He says on his blog:

A key insight behind Google Instant is that if we want to get people answers and solve their problems faster, we can help with that by improving our UI to help you formulate queries more quickly (and then doing a bunch of hard work under the hood to answer that query too). Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Here’s some additional questions, along with my personal take:
Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?”

/…/

Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Essentially, Google Instant makes getting your search results that much faster and that much more adaptable. It might effect SEO in the future, but for now it seems Instant has made searching Google new and exciting again.

Read more about Matt’s take on Google Instant.

What are your thoughts on Google Instant? Do you think it makes much of a difference in how you search? Share you thoughts in the comments.

Ed, from the Caribbean wrote:

How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of Internet users are unable to post a ‘followed’ link on the World Wide Web? For example Twitter, Facebook, wiki etc. are all ‘nofollow’. It seems only a very small percentage of links count.

I was very pleased about Matt’s response.

Matt is absolutely correct here. Create compelling content that people are going to want to link to and the do-follow links will follow. If you create a how-to about something related to your business, like a white paper or a really good instructional blog post,  people will link to that. The majority of the time, when people link to other stories, they don’t include the no-follow attribute. This is a great way to build links.

Matt has always said, often to the frustration of many in the SEO and Web design world, that building a great site with great content is the best type of optimization.

Now I don’t completely agree with Matt on the finality of that statement, the overall premise is key. Create great content and you will get good links and eyeballs looking at your site.

Crappy content will only yield crappy results.

What do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Google’s Matt Cutts

I totally agree with Matt, the quality of posts is by far the most important factor to having a good blog for both readers and search engines a like.

I always tell clients that they should try and write a quality blog post once a week. Now when I mean quality, I don’t mean that it has to be long. It  just has to be well written and informative.

The reason is that I want people to come to my clients sites not only because Google put the site high in the results but because they find what my clients write interesting. If people don’t like what is being written and never come back they’ll never convert into customers.

So as much as I hate to say it, I agree with Matt about creating quality content is some of the best SEO out there.

Mike McDonald over at WebProNews has a great video about how SEO isn’t dead it’s just redefining itself.  McDonald talks with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR. Greg points out that those who aren’t adapting to the changing landscape of SEO is dead to them. But those who are willing to look outside the box and evolve with the changes then SEO is still growing and thriving.

This is so true. SEO isn’t dying. In my opinion SEO is adapting and even merging with Social Media.

What do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments.

These are my links for January 8th:

• Google Toilet Paper : Optimize Your Wipe | Search Engine Journal – Here’s a fun Friday post about what could be easily mistaken for a new Google product launch to accompany the Nexus One and other new Google products : Google Toilet Paper (which gives a new meaning to “just Google it”).
• MediaPost – news and directories for media, marketing and online advertising professionals – If you were on vacation, similar to me, during the end of December you might have missed Twitter's big announcement. The company acquired Mixer Labs, the creator of GeoAPI, which provides developers with the ability to query data. That data can come from about 16 million businesses and thousands of points of interest. The technology also offers developers a layer on which to handle complex geographical queries and location-based services.
• National Weather Service: Twitter Storm Reports – GeoTagging is the act of associating geographical information with something, and Twitter has recently added the capability GeoTagging individual Tweets. This allows the NWS to correlate each Tweet to your location when it was sent. This capability will help to enhance and increase timely & accurate online weather reporting and communications between the public and their local weather forecast offices.
• Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted – If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.
• Social Media Today | Social Media Policies of 113 Organizations – With companies searching for and developing standards for social media usage, many of them have come up with social media policies of their own.
• Top CMOs on Twitter – These are the top 63 Chief Marketing Officers around the world who 1) provide useful content and consistently engage with their followers on Twitter, 2) truly "get it" when it comes to the best ways to use Twitter and other forms of social media, and 3) were active on Twitter as of January 7, 2010. Please let me know if I have missed any CMOs who have 500 or more followers. After the review and confirmation process, he/she may be added to this list, which is updated regularly.
• The Dawn of Facebook’s People-organized Web – GigaOM – In 2010, Facebook is setting out to structure a social layer of the web, indexing web pages and objects by harnessing what its users say about them, including whether those users like them or not, and what they tag within them.
• Apple And Verizon: Are Two Star-Crossed Lovers Ready To Consummate? – Apple and Verizon. Two star-crossed lovers.

  A few years ago, when Apple originally set out with the idea of giving the iPhone to one carrier exclusively in the U.S., they first went to Verizon. But the network balked at some of Apple’s demands, which at the time of complete and utter carrier dominance in this country, must have seemed like a joke. So instead, Apple with with AT&T, and the rest is history.

• Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal – In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.