Qiigo SEM » SEO Magic

The Phones are Ringing in Philly

ginny — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:01:03 +0000

When Dave Myers, owner of the 101 Mobility franchise in Philadelphia, started working with Qiigo he had one main objective: to drive calls to his local phone line. By partnering with Qiigo for Search Engine Optimization services, Myers has seen an almost immediate response to achieving this objective.

With a focus on Myers’ two main categories of business, stair glides and ramps, Qiigo was able to immediately impact his call volume. Myers started seeing an increase of as many as 4 calls each day. By qualifying those calls, he has seen an increase in closed sales over the last several months. “Our March numbers were up 50% over February, April was up 25% over March, and we are on track to have a record month in May thanks to the SEO work Qiigo has done,” says Dave Myers.

Driving business to his local site was an important objective for Myers. His clients want to work with someone who has a local presence, someone who is rooted in the local community. By emphasizing his local website and phone number, Qiigo was able to start generating calls for Myers right from the start of the campaign. With the volume of calls increasing exponentially, Myers has even added staff to ensure that phones are answered at all times.

“I am 100% pleased with the work that Qiigo has done and I look forward to expanding my efforts with Qiigo shortly,” says Myers.

The Importance of Local Search Profile Optimization

ginny — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:31:06 +0000

The advent of Google Instant and the insatiable need for real time information has led to an increase in the appearance of locally focused websites appearing at the top of website ranking results. Focusing internet marketing strategies on maximizing website ranking results is an essential first step in winning the local optimization battle. So where do you begin?

Initial steps toward local search optimization should include:

Claiming your company’s listing on online sites. Essential sites to claim your listing on include: Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. Here are few to help:
Embrace social media to promote your brand, interact and engage with your customers and promote your website. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the obvious social media choices.
Explore the use of location based marketing sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

All of these techniques work together to enhance the local search optimization of your site. However of these three techniques, claiming your local listings on search engine sites can most quickly and significantly impact your ranking results. When claiming and validating your local listing, you are taking control of the data that is seen online. By taking control of your listing, you also prevent others from claiming your listing.

When claiming your listing, pay special attention to:

Business Name. Be specific when identifying your business name. Include the full name of your business. However, if your company is just named “Qiigo”, consider adding a descriptor that includes keywords. For example, enter “Qiigo Search Engine Marketing”. Don’t be tempted to stuff your business name listing with keywords, but do add them when your business name is too vague to deliver adequate search results.
Location/Address. The search engines place significant impact on your business address when ranking results. Be as detailed as possible, including latitude and longitude information. Don’t know your address’ latitude and longitude coordinates? Find them here.
Category. Choose the category that best describes your business. If one category doesn’t exactly fit, test several over a period of time to determine which category garners the best results.
Reviews & Ratings. It never hurts to ask! So ask! Ask your current customers to go online and review your business. Provide them with the link for easy access. Good reviews and ratings not only help your ranking, but also drive new business.
Citations. These are mentions on other sites about your business. In Google Places, they can be found on the “What People Are Saying About” page. This is another case of the more the merrier, so work on securing citations from many sources.

With these areas completed, you will be well on your way to improving your local search rankings. The more complete you can get your profile the better. It is also recommended that you claim your website and submit it to primary local providers listed above. The time and effort you put into these tasks is bound to pay off in improved ranking results.

Maximize Your Twitter

jennyg — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:42:36 +0000

Twitter is expected to be one of the only social networking sites to have long term viability. Twitter usage and name recognition has been growing in leaps and bounds. Many are using Twitter not just to stay connected, but to market as well. So how do you maximize your Twitter?

Get an active Twitter account.

Yes it sounds basic, and you may already have one, but don’t just breeze past this section. We have some interesting tips to help you maximize your usage.

For those of you just getting started, open your account at http://twitter.com/signup. Once you have the registration form complete, connect with as many people as you can. They make it easy by allowing you to search your email lists (see below for more information). Customize your profile to show your main website and your, or your company’s, bio information. Don’t forget to set your location, update preferences and how you want to be notified of friends who have joined the Twitter revolution.

Draw attention with a customized background.

Get creative here. Simply click on “Settings” and then “Design” to choose a premade background or upload your own image. If you have a flair for design and a little Photoshop experience you can create a background that speaks volumes about you and your company. Check out some great custom layouts like:

http://twitter.com/JetBlue

http://twitter.com/BBCClick

http://twitter.com/MarthaStewart

Gather friends and follow interesting people and organizations

Finding friends on Twitter is easy. Three options are available.

1. Search Twitter. Use the “Find People” function to search for anyone from your next door neighbor to celebrities to companies.

2. Search other networks. Connect to anyone in your email contact list. Twitter can search through your hotmail.com, Gmail, Yahoo mail or AOL mail contact lists and if your friends use Twitter they can be added to your list.

3. Manual invites. Have friends, co-workers or clients who are not on Twitter? Manually input their email addresses and invite them to be your friend.

Connect your blog to Twitter

One of the best tools to connect Twitter and your blog was created by Alex King. This plug-in will automatically create micro blogs from your WordPress blog posts. Just follow this link for all the information

http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

to download this plug-in click here

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/share-this.2.3.zip

If you blog regularly, be sure to review the instructions and support information.

Monitor your Twitter Rank

Twitter offers the Twitter Grader (http://twitter.grader.com) to show you where you rank against other Twitter members. Once you enter your user name, you will see where you rank among a possible 100 points.

Twitter Grading is based on overall rank, number of followers, your following and updates. The more active you are the higher you will rank.

Link your Twitter account to social bookmarking sites.

If you are in the Twitter game, be in it to win it. Build up your social networking account by bookmarking your Twitter account to sites such as Digg.com, Propeller.com, Dropjack.com and others.

Take advantage of advanced search features on Twitter

To really maximize your connection with people in your target market, go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced to use the Advanced Search features Twitter offers. In Advanced Search you can search by keywords or phrases, location, names and more.

Resist the urge to connect with everyone you see. Be choosy and select only the best people who actually have good information to share and are likely to accept your friend request.

As you take these steps to maximize your Twitter impact, you will see your social status rise. As with any adventure, the more you keep at it the better the results will be.

Multiple Word Searches Yield Better Results

jennyg — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:29:30 +0000

Bigger isn’t always better; especially in the land of search engine results. Every company would love to be the first search result posted by Google or Yahoo. But the reality is, that this is not going to happen. With literally million of websites, the chances of coming up number one, or even on the first page, are slim to none.

So how do you get your business listed at the top of the first page? By narrowing the search with additional keywords. As you add keywords your chances of coming up on top will increase exponentially. Let’s look at SEO as an example. Watch how the number of search results decreases as you add keywords:

Search	Keywords	Results*
1	SEO	262,000,000
2	SEO Company	10,700,000
3	SEO Atlanta	1,560,000
4	SEO Company Atlanta	334,000

As you can see, adding just two keywords to your search provides a more refined list of results. According to leading industry experts, as much as 50% of all searches conducted now include three or more keywords.

So what does this mean for the average company trying to increase their search engine ranking? Changing the focus of your SEO efforts to multiple keyword searches will garner far better results for your business. Don’t waste your efforts trying to develop catchy one-word product names. Building results based on three or more keywords will benefit you over the long run.

Source: Search conducted on Google, March 4, 2009

Successful Local SEO Searches

jennyg — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:32:44 +0000

To get the best results from local SEO searches, a few simple steps can make a world of difference. Follow these quick tips and you should see improved results in your local SEO searches.

First, spend some time researching the local link groups of the sites you are in competition with. Finding out which local link groups the competition is using will give you an idea of what you are up against. If you can get your web site attached to these same local link groups, you will make huge strides in catching up to the competition. While you are working on this part of the project, you could make Hubpages or Squidoo pages to enhance your results. The objective here is to simply group together sites that are normally together and add your website into the mix.

Another way to improve your local SEO search results is to focus on address citations. For this step you want work on getting your business name, business address, business phone and business website with as many references as possible. If you have access to HTML code, it is helpful to bracket your business address like this:

[address]
[/address]

Remember that each time your website gets a citation on another reputable website, search engines look at this in a positive light. The more citations you get in your geo-location, the better your SEO ranking.

Finally, combining the authority and anchor text will help to give you a final boost in rankings. Both anchor text and site authority are valuable factors in raising your ranking. By combining the individual strengths of anchor text and site authority, you will be more likely to win the ranking in a close race.

28 Great Link Building Strategies

jennyg — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:07:04 +0000

Link building can greatly help your business increase ranking within the search engines and cover any bad press about your business online. Here are some ideas that you can use to build links in the search engines:

1. Use social media. Social media sites such as FaceBook and MySpace are not just for the kids. You can create as many pages as you want that are SEO friendly and watch links build.

2. Use forums. Posting search engine optimized content in forums can end up drawing people to your website, especially if you learn how to use HTML.

3. Use RSS feeds on social media pages. This will allow your sites to be updated continuously.

4. If you have multiple sites, link your sites to each other.

5. Use social bookmarking pages.

6. Learn to use Meta Tags on your posts.

7. Take advantage of free press release distribution with SEO content.

8. Write reviews about your website on forums, blogs and especially on your site!

9. Encourage others to visit your site and spread links around.

10. Use a link exchange site.

11. Write articles for Ezine and have them posted containing SEO rich material.

12. Submit links to all search engines.

13. Distribute free articles on sites that will allow SEO content.

14. Use hyper links to your articles in your various websites.

15. Get a sub domain site in addition to your website and build on that.

16. Link all articles as an RSS feed on your website.

17. Write a blog at a free blogging site that contains SEO material.

18. Use a good Meta description for your articles that contains your keywords.

19. Blog on your social media sites.

20. Learn how to use SEO resources.

21. Use Video for your site.

22. Post videos used on your site to other video sharing sites.

23. Learn how to understand and use web analytics to improve your content.

24. Use question sites as a way to post about your site and for link building.

25. Use question sites to answer questions posting a link to your site.

26. Encourage comments about articles as these will also help build links. Even if you have to comment on your own article, this will help with link building.

27. Add content to all sites periodically to keep building links.

28. Join groups where you can post in forums.