Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

Blog Posts – This involves getting respected bloggers to write about you or your website. In addition to the benefit of having the topics discussed by recognized “experts,” often they will link back to your website within relevant text with an appropriate anchor text link. 

Press Release Marketing – Press releases are a marvelous way to increase the visibility of your website. They get your news and information in front of a potentially limitless audience through targeted distribution. 

Article Marketing -  Article marketing actually provides two benefits: it gives you contextual links back to your website and it allows your site to become the authority on a given topic. Because those who read articles you’ve written on a particular subject are generally following a link because they are already highly interested in the topic, traffic to your site will convert better than typical search traffic. It’s crucial that you provide articles that are informative, nut just fluff, and that you place them on high quality sites that are respected. 

Blog Comments – Commenting regularly on relevant blogs can be a great source of traffic and links for your websites. 

Bookmarking – Getting your site noticed on sites social media marketing that rate sites for their quality and interest can lead to impressive as web surfers visit and vote. Be sure you’re bookmarked on these popular sites for lots of incoming links.

Directories – Directories are pretty straightforward – steer clear of those that will accept everyone one and look for those that have editorial reviews. The more discriminating the directory site, the better the ranking you’ll get by being associated with that particular directory. If the directory has particular standards you need to meet and a review process before you can be accepted, it’s a good sign that the directory is a respectable one.

Videos – YouTube and other sites allowing you to post your own videos with links back to your site are great ways to increase traffic to your site. These days there’s no predicting what videos will go viral, and short “how to” videos are an excellent way to educate viewers and build trust.

Social Media Marketing – On Google’s own webmaster forum social links were recognized as a valuable source for inbound links – you can’t find a much better advocate for the validity of this source of incoming links. Because of the informal, social-based nature of this form of marketing, search engines tend to trust these links. 

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Being a professional search engine optimizer instructor I am always on the look out for new affordable SEO tools that I can share with my students. Google just launched a free analytics took called Google Insights.

Being able to follow your Web site trends and targeting the correct keywords if half the battle when it comes to fighting the rankings war on the Internet.  I am a long time user and follower of Wordtracker but I do realize many of my students just starting out in their SEO skills are on a limited budget and may not being able to afford the yearly subscription fee.  There are many free analytics tools out there but what Google is offering for free is spectacular.

As long as you have a Google account you can access their new tool for free and be able to down load excel spreadsheets of your research.  It has some great features to help you understand search behaviors and even has a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Go check it out…. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

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Are you becoming frustrated with all the challenges you face keeping your Web site competitive on the Internet? 

If so I have a great collection of techniques, tips and proven SEO tactics that you can apply to your Web site right away.

Leave the workshop with 6 months free SEO Mentoring and a personalized Web site audit performed on your site during class.  You will leave the workshop and know exactly what your next steps to a successful Web site will be!

Visit our Web site for a complete agenda for the 3 Day SEO Workshop.

Join me in North Charleston, South Carolina for our next SEO 3 Day Workshop, September 16, 17 & 18th, 2008.

Read what last months students had to say about the workshop…

The expertise offered by Tracy is incredible! Her knowledge and the success of her work on SEO instills confidence. - Vickie G.

Great, specific and immediately useful information thanks to the personal atmosphere and the earnest concern of the instructor! - Joe S. -

I feel very excited and encouraged for the vast improvement I can supply my future and current clients.  The teaching approach suits my learning style perfectly. - Denese S.

Not being a Web Designer, I liked the fact that I could look at ways to improve my Web site and optimize it that I could understand.  It’s not too technical and incredibly useful. Vickie G.

Discover the Powerful New SEO in You!

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If you are anything like me I notice any minor changes in my SEO efforts and this morning I did notice a slight change in some page ranks throughout some of the sites I work on.  I had not even had a change to read through my feeds but if I had I would have read one that came from Matt Cutts from Google the end of last week.

His latest post informed us of that Google had updated plans to update PageRank last week and this is the cause for the changes.  Before anyone panics this data refresh should have any effect on your rankings.  By the time we see the newer PR in the toolbar those values have already been incorporated in how we rank in the search results. 

Let me explain how Google calculates and updates PageRank.  Every 3-4 months they take a snapshot of PR values and export them so the new values are visible in the Google Toolbar.  They calculate PR by indexing data about your site such as backlinks, current PR and directory data.

So what happens if you are not happy with your current or new page rank? 

Then this is the time to start working on your PR for the next data refresh that will happen in a few months.

You can start by making sure your site is linked and added to industry related directories throughout the Internet. If you are not included on Yahoo!’s or Go Guides Directory that would be a good place to start.  You can also start working on building those incoming links.  Work on getting sites to link to you that have a PageRank of 4 or above and are authorative sites. 

One thing to remember…PageRank is not all what it is cracked up to be.  Even though I do check my PR’s every so often and do notice when they have changed I do not stress over the numbers.  I continually create high quality content that people naturally want to link to and if I keep my focus on that then PR will come as an extra bonus.

You can read Matt Cut’s post at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-pagerank-update/

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