Gervais Group-Evolving SEO in 2011

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Gervais Group

Search engine optimization evolves both gradually and suddenly as witnessed by Google’s recent Panda/Farmer update. Expect the following changes to continue into the rest of 2011 and beyond.
* Pay per Click (PPC) will get more expensive – Competition in the bidding process for PPC placement is rising as more businesses shift away from traditional advertising methods to online efforts. Combined with the well established trend showing that searchers click on and give more credence to organic search results, it may be time to re-evaluate the return on investment for any existing PPC campaigns.
* Search engines are transferring their love from content farms to social media – While they probably resent the content farm title, EzineArticles, Hubspot, and the like were the primary target of Google’s Panda/Farmer update and saw traffic drop off a cliff. Meanwhile, the major search engines are doing everything they can to show results that originate from social media sites. Even if you don’t plan to fully engage on these sites, you should have a monitoring system in place to see what is being said about topics relating to your business.
* Local search via smart phones will accelerate – If you’re not optimizing for local search, start now. The trend is entrenched in traditional search and is expected to ramp up faster as smart phones expand their slice of the mobile phone pie chart.
Consider these trends as you move forward with your SEO efforts. As always, vary your marketing strategy between multiple fronts because you never know where the next algorithm changes are going to be targeted.

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Gervais Group-5 Ways to Build Inbound Links

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Gervais Group

5 Ways to Build Inbound Links
While link building is one of the most mundane tasks in the SEO process, it is also one of the most important to get right due to the weight given to inbound links by algorithms used by the search engines to rank pages and sites. Here are five simple ways to build inbound links that you can start today:
1) Participate in relevant forums – Find the highest ranked forum in your industry and start contributing useful information. Put a link to your website in your “signature” section and with each contribution you’ll build an inbound link.
2) Spy on your competition – You can see where your competitors are receiving links from by typing “link:competitor’s website” (replace competitor’s website with the actual URL) in Google’s search box. You’ll see a list of their inbound links which can tell you where you can get them as well.
3) Article marketing – You can submit articles to a variety of sites which allow for a link back to your site in the resource box below each article. These sites include EzineArticles, Articlesbase, Hubspot, etc.
4) Write for industry related directories – Much like article marketing, you’ll get an inbound link for each article. The advantage of writing for industry directories is that your audience will be far more targeted than the more generic directories.
5) Set up a blog – Provide a link to your site with each post and you’ll have another backlink for each one.
Setting up these inbound links not only scores with the search engines, it can deliver traffic as well. Make link building a habit and you’ll build a mountain of inbound links and traffic for your site.

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Gervais Group-The Advantages of SEO versus PPC

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Gervais Group

The two primary methods to promote a business are search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. While there will always be a debate about which method offers the best returns, search engine optimization has several advantages over PPC once the debate gets past PPC’s faster route to results. The problem with PPC’s faster route is that it can become quite expensive rather quickly and if it’s not accompanied by conversions each click can become a painful event, especially if clicks are running at between $50 and $100 per pop. SEO on the other hand is slower to produce results, which is usually the point that PPC believers bang over the SEO camp’s head during the ongoing debate.
Both SEO and PPC have their have their pros and cons, believers and skeptics but if you have to choose between the two SEO will deliver more benefits over the long run.
Here’s why:
* The results from SEO are long-lasting – The results of a successful SEO campaign will stick around in the form of high rankings on the search engine results pages long after the heavy lifting is done. Once the spending stops on a PPC campaign, the ads disappear quicker than a relative who owes you money.
* Search engine users trust organic links more than PPC ads – The increased sophistication of searchers means that most of them see PPC ads as simple advertisements while organic listings are more like a popular vote.
* SEO is less expensive over the long run (and sometimes the short run too) – The knock against PPC is that you have to pay for every click whether it leads to a sale or not. Highly competitive keywords can run to over $100 per click so those looky-loos’s can be costly. It hurts even more when they bounce off the site after 2seconds on the landing page. With SEO, once you get a higher ranking in the organic searches your click throughs are practically free.
Full spectrum SEO takes a holistic approach to deliver traffic that converts. Considered to be more credible than PPC ads, organic listings account for about 7 out of 8 click throughs on a given results page, and the clicks are free. For more information on full spectrum SEO, visit: http://gervaisgroupllc.com/ or call (866) 530 7703.

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