It can be a daunting task to market your online business. With all the competition on the web, there are many companies vying for the top spot in any niche. With new technologies come new challenges for an Internet marketer and being at the forefront is a great challenge. You have to not only place your website in front of the eyes of your customer, but you must compel them to click on your link. After that, it becomes a challenge of keeping them on your site and finally, choosing you over the rest.
Entrepreneurs spend tons of money coming up with innovative and attention-grabbing advertisements to increase awareness of there brand. While traditional advertising methods have shown to be effective in the past, today they’re slowly fading like the dinosaur. Online marketing and promotion have outstripped conventional advertising strategies. Search engine optimization is emerging to be the way forward for any business, online or off.

SEO has been around for years, yet a lot of business owners are still not fully aware of how powerful this marketing tool this can be. If you do not know where to begin with SEO, an SEO expert may guide you in utilizing SEO techniques to increase traffic to your site. Here are six reasons why as a business owner it is imperative that you hire the services of an SEO consultant in order to maintain a competitive edge in marketing your online business.

1. Any business can have a website, but how valuable is it if no one knows about it? Internet users who search for your product or service are the hottest potential customers. These customers need to be directed to your site somehow so they can choose you over the rest. This is why it is critical to obtain first page rankings for search terms that relate to your business. Here is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Experts come in. They can guide you through the process of building up your website rankings within the popular search engines.

2. A true SEO expert will have vast knowledge of not just a few techniques, but many that are critical in the success of your online marketing campaign. It is not enough just to create topical articles with back links to your domain at content directories. There is a lot more than trading links or publishing content. An SEO Expert will have a wide arsenal of SEO strategies and can utilize the best combination for your business.

3. To be successful in growing your business, it’s important to discover your true areas of weakness and to be resourceful in finding the best consultant for this. A good SEO advisor will be able to analyze and determine your weak points and develop strategies to strengthen these core areas.

4. The greatest value in SEO is simply the opportunity to increase your profit in relation to the expenditure with the SEO company. For example, a monthly expense of $1,000 in SEO services can be recouped by the gain of $8,000 in profit by the influx of new business that has been a result of the SEO expert’s efforts.

5. The benefits of SEO don’t stop when the service does. If you have invested heavily in SEO over time, then the higher rankings of your website remain, even if you stop the service for a time. In advertising, the business stops when the ads stop. The only downside is that if you discontinue SEO, you stand the chance of your competition catching up. That is why is it critical to have a SEO maintenance plan to maintain your high rankings.

6. The costs of SEO are generally less expensive than those of traditional advertising. For example, a directory listing (Yellow Pages) can run in the thousands. And the only benefit is that you can be found in that specific directory. With SEO, your website is found EVERYWHERE and on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). Most people search on these search engines and less and less people utilize paid directories.

If you are a new business or an established one but seeking an injection of sales, a true SEO expert can be the hidden edge that you are seeking. Be sure to take your time and choose wisely. An experience SEO consultant will have client references and case studies to prove that they can get the job done.

About the Author:
Steven Kim, aka “Dr SEO”, has been performing SEO services in Las Vegas for over twelve years. His expertise has helped many in the realm of online marketing. For more information, visit his website, Media One Pro.

as of 8/31/2009

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#1) Hire a good solid team, not individuals 
Many people make the mistake of hiring people for different phases of the website.  For example, Company “A” might hire a graphic designer to developer a layout for the website, but this person has no idea of business flow or optimizing code for search engines.  Next, Company “A” may pay for a web developer to code the site and database, but that person may not understand SEO structure as well.  Finally, the company hires a professional Internet marketer who charges a ton to overhaul the entire site and make it SEO friendly. 

If company “A” had hired a team that had all of these people working together already, then there would have been less money wasted, the site would have been developed faster and the marketing and business process would have been key throughout the entire development.

At Media One Pro, we have an experience staff of professionals that specialize in both the front-end user interfce (UI) design (with an emphasis on sales flow and conversions) and coding the backend for ecommerce and SEO.  This way, you’re site is built properly from the very beginning!

#2) Research, Analyze and Target specific Keywords/Terms

Don’t go after random search terms.  In other words, let us do the research and find out what exact keywords you should be focused on.  For example, if you want to sell cars on your website, don’t bother to go after the term “cars” only.  You’ll never break into the top page of  Google!  Instead, you should be more specific and detailed with your keywords, like “1996 toyota 4runners for sale las vegas”.  With a “longtail keyword”, you’ll stand a better chance of breaking into the SE’s natural rankings.  

At Media One Pro, we help our clients with keyword strategy and provide many different services to garner keyword search results. 

#4) Don’t stuff the “Keyword” Meta Tag

A while back, the search engines used to look at keywords for relevance on the web page.  Now days, there is less emphasis on keywords in Meta Tag’s as they’ve been abused by people who practice black hat SEO. 

You can still utilize keyword meta tag’s bt make sure that you use a different keyword(s) for each page.  Don’t put up more than a few keywords.. never, ever stuff a bunch into this tag as that’ll be a red flag for spam.
 

#3) It’s all about the content
Write good, clear and concise content about your products and services using different keywords and phrases that make sense for you or your business. The more keyword-rich content the better, and the more you vary your usage of your keywords and phrases, the better. Don’t think that just because you use the word “Book” in your content a million times means Google is going to care. The more useful information you have, the more your users are going to care, and that all adds up to good search engine results and rankings. Hey – why do you think I’m taking the time to write this article?

#5) The “Description” Meta Tag
This tag is important and still used by Google in many cases. It is often the blurb that comes up under your search engine result link. Choose a short and sweet, 1-2 sentence description of your site or business for your home page. For the other pages, change it up to reflect what kind of information is on that page.

#6) The “Title” Meta Tag
While it’s not really a meta tag at all, the “Title” tag is a very important part of SEO. I’d say it’s a good idea to have 3-12 words (keyword rich of course) describing what the page is and telling users (and search engine crawlers) where they are on your website. The more it relates to the content on the page – the better.

#5) Page URLs and Naming Conventions
The naming conventions of URLs on the pages of your website are an often overlooked way to make sure your pages are found by search engines in a way that is relative to their content. Instead of a 1 word file name or url ending like “about.php” – why not call it “about-specialty-book-seller-san-francisco.php” ? Seems a little lame I know, but from our experience, it seems to help in search engine result rankings. This is even more important on products in an e-commerce store. If the url is plain and doesn’t say anything about the product (i.e. “category.php?id=1″) then it isn’t telling the search engine crawler anything. If instead, it says something like “category-name-here?product-id=detailed-product-name-here” then you’re better off. A string of useless, arbitrary numbers isn’t going to do you a bit of good. Also, dashes between words are better than words with no spaces, and even underscores.

#6) Incoming Relative Links
This is probably one of the most important things you can have that will help your ranking in search engines. I’m not suggesting you do what some SEO companies may do, and add your site to a bunch of useless link farms, but the more links you have to your site throughout the pages on the internet, the better. Why? Because it means more people are finding your site, which increases your traffic, and more importantly, more people find your site valuable enough to link to it. With a little bit of a proactive effort, and a little grass roots internet marketing, we can show you how to increase the number of incoming links to your website.

#7) Traffic, in General
The more traffic, the more relative your website is to Google. If you just sit there waiting for things to happen, chances are, nothing will. An internet business or website is only as good as the marketing efforts and work you put behind it. If you aren’t sending people there, or promoting it in some way, your rankings just won’t get much better. Pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords can be a good way to jump start this, e-newsletters are another.

#8) Keep your Content Fresh.
If you never change your site’s content, your users may not have a good reason to return, and to put it bluntly, search engines won’t care about you. Update your site on a regular basis to keep it fresh, and to increase your site’s content, and you’ll be better off. Make sure you have a webmaster that can keep it updated for you on a regular basis, or better yet, get Media One Pro CMS set up so you can add and edit content on your site all day and night if you want. Content Management Systems are a must, in my opinion, for good search engine optimization.

#9) Be Smart: Don’t Spam or try to Trick the Search Engines
If you’re an idiot about bloating your site, your keywords and trying underhanded tricks like creating hundreds of useless pages, making real small, unreadable text or making the text the same as the background color so no one can see it – you’re eventually going to fail at getting a consistent placement. You may think you’re hot when it works for a couple weeks, but in the end you’ll be knocked way down the list or out the results completely.

#10) Register Your Domain for a Long Time.
If your domain is only registered for 1 year, it doesn’t look as good to a search engine as it does if it is registered for 10 years. Why? Because search engines don’t like fly-by-night, get-rich-quick sites that aren’t reliable or worth anything. Be smart and register your domain for at least 3 years if you are serious about your business and what you are doing.

Are you spending lots of money advertising on search engines?  Sure, it’s a necessary expense in the beginning phase of your business, but wouldn’t you rather be found at the top of the page WITHOUT incurring those expenses EVERY SINGLE MONTH?

Our SEO experts (Search Engine Optimization) know how to modify and improve your site so that it can be found NATURALLY or ORGANICALLY.  What this means is that your site  can be listed at the top of the search engine results for your particular keyterm for FREE!  We are also able to list your business with all the relevant local business directories to help you with the LOCAL business results as well!

So stop spending money month after month on PPC campaigns and give us a call!  At Media One Pro, our professionals have the tools to take your business to the top.

You can also click on “Request a Proposal” at the top of the page and one of our representatives will contact you within 24 hours.

You can tap into the immense volume of traffic that is generated by surfers typing in keywords (related to your business) via search engines! If customers are typing “Las Vegas Mobile Mechanic”, and you happen to be a mobile mechanic in Las Vegas, than you need to incorporate SEO into your site so you can take advantage of this highly specific target market! If that search term is typed in, let’s say, 2000 times a month.. than how many of those searches are pulling up your website? And if they do find your website, are they clicking on it? And from there, do they become a customer or leave?
At Media One Pro, we’re dedicated to helping your obtain the most traffic from industry specific search terms that will benefit you.