The Bottom Line is this:

1. Choose an SEO Company that offers solid in-depth reporting on what they do.
2. They will have references, and you can contact them.
3. They should showcase a clear strategy, and offer it to you.
4. They will offer a hybrid SEO / Social Media campaign.
5. Lastly, a great company should offer proper reporting on traffic increases, keywords ranked, keywords NOT ranked, conversions, ROI analysis (if applicable), etc.

Of course, if you are looking for a local SEO company in the Austin, Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio areas you know where to go!

Check out our most recent post featured on Search Engine Journal:”How To Choose An SEO Company in 2013“.

The post How To Choose An SEO Company In 2013 appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

local seo timing

1. Major data providers
2. National and Local search engines
3. National and Local directories

Is there a specific order for Local SEO campaigns?

The simple answer is yes.

Step 1: Start with Google places.

Step 2: Major Data Providers – supply information to local directories and search engines

• Localeze
• Acxiom
• ExpressUpdateUSA (previously infrogroup)
• CityGrid (previously CitySearch)
• iBegin

Step 3: Search Engines

• Google places (for business, revise if necessary)
• Bing business portal
• Yahoo! local
• Yelp (for business owners)

Step 4: Local directories – these are niche, vertical, and Geo-directories. Usually aggregate information and have a review based system.  getlisted.org is a great resource, but not complete.

Rules:

Keep your entries uniform.

Pay special attention to your NAP.

Remember your timing

With Local SEO and timing, there are a few steps you will need to keep in mind when moving forward with your Dallas SEO Campaign.

The post Local SEO and Timing – Dallas SEO appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

*You may visit our Dallas SEO, Austin SEO, Houston SEO, or San Antonio SEO pages for examples.

Search Audit

1. Audit indexed pages
2. Audit search for brand and branded terms
3. Audit Google cache for key pages

Audit Content

1. Home page
2. landing pages
3. SEO pages
4. Proper keyword targeting, keyword map, site architecture, etc.
5. Keyword cannibalization (site architecture), mapping, etc. ^^^
6. Proper formatting: H1′s, alt tags, etc.
7. Engaging headings on blogs
8. Content to Ads ratio

Duplicate Content Audit

1. 1 URL for each piece of content (no duplicates)
2. Search Google for duplicate content
3. Sub-domain check
4. Secure version check
5. Other sites owned

Audit Accessibility

1. Check robots.txt file
2. turn off javascript, cookies, css (use web developer toolbar)
3. Change agent to Googlebot and compare
4. Check for 404 errors, etc.

Site Architecture

1. Hierarchy of pages and structure
2. landing pages for SEO
3. quantity of category pages
4. Pagination / faceted navigation
5. Click to content ratio
6. prioritize content

Technical Audit

1. 301 redirects
2. JavaScript usage
3. iFrames
4. Flash issues
5. Speed of website
6. alt texts
7. Google Webmaster Tools errors
8. Sitemaps (HTML, XML, etc.)

Canonicalization Audit

1. Canonical version of site established via 301
2. GWT
3. Rel tag
4. Absolute URL’s vs. relative URL’s

Audit of URL’s

1. Clean up the URL’s
2. Short URL’s
3. Descriptive URL’s

Audit Internal Linking

1. Quantity of links on page
2. Vertical links
3. Horizontal links
4. Links inside of content
5. Footer links
6. Internal anchor texts used
7. Broken links – inbound and outbound

Title Tag Audit

1. Unique title tags
2. Keyword rich title tags
3. Primary phrases in title tags
4. Include branding
5. ~65 to 70 characters

Meta Tag Audit

1. Meta keywords tag (used vs. not used)
2. Meta description
3. Optimize key page descriptions
4. Meta robots tag – noindex, etc.

The post SEO Audit Checklist: A Brief Overview appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

In schools they teach just about everything from religion, to maths, to art to PSE (whatever that is). What they neglect though is a lot of the genuinely useful skills that kids could use to start making money, being heard and changing the world both now and in the future. They don’t tend to teach business skills until college or Uni for instance, and they don’t teach web design or SEO either.

This is a big shame though, as actually web design and SEO are great tools that are in high demand. These are skills kids can sell fresh out of school or online before they’ve even left, and if they want to promote a site of their own then they’ll actually have a huge advantage.

You see the main secret to success in SEO is simply sticking at it and not giving up when you don’t see results right away. The trick is to keep on posting good quality articles, to gradually build up regular visitors, to get your site on good quality and varied (but relevant sites) through link baiting and by writing guest posts for other sites, and to keep promoting your site on social media sites. This all takes time, and it’s really a matter of gradually building up a huge site and a huge and natural looking links profile – which unfortunately most time in full time employment don’t really have time to do (they need to win the bread a bit more quickly…). In other words, if you start doing SEO when you’re 15, you’ll quite possibly be able to live off it by the time you’re 21 and actually need to start paying rent.

Being Systematic

If you’re a teen then who’s interested in making money online, I highly recommend not taking up a part time job. Doing so will be good experience sure, and it will earn you some fast cash, but you’ll get a different kind of experience from doing SEO and in the long run it will be a lot more profitable. You’ll just have to convince your Mum…

Then though you need to treat this as a job and that means writing a certain number of posts for your site every day, sending off a certain number of guest posts every week, and posting a certain number of messages on social media sites every day. Do all this and concentrate on being systematic every day, and eventually you’ll find that your site starts to build momentum.

Take Advantage of Your Age

You should also make sure that you make the most of your age and your situation. For instance if your school has a newsletter or your Uni has a student paper you should try and get mentioned in that (and of course on the website) – that’s free promotion that you wouldn’t get so readily as an adult.

At the same time you should think about writing for teens. Teenagers provide a fantastic niche because they have a lot of spare time and disposable income, and because there isn’t as much competition out there. Whether you write about bodybuilding, gardening or electronics try giving it a ‘teen slant’ and you’ll find you have an automatic loyal audience.

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 

Today’s guest post is courtesy Mike K, an internet marketing consultant at Wisdek. With SEO becoming increasingly important day by day for businesses, he feels there is no harm for teenagers to start their own SEO activity from a young age. He likes sharing his experiences and is very vocal about the developments in the SEO industry on his blog.

The post SEO For Teens appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

Spam Links Over Time

Here are the facts:

1. 10,000 links analyzed pointing to top 50 sites of Inc 5000 list of 2012.
2. SEOmoz and Majestic SEO were 2 tools used.
3. Custom crawler was designed
4. Total collected data was more than 250k URL’s of links pointing to penalized and non-penalized websites

What the data showed?

• 72% of websites have clean linking profiles when less than 10% of their links were coming from questionable resources

• 20% of the websites had were noted as having between ~10% to ~40% “spammy links”

• There were a total of about 4 different websites that were at an obvious “at risk” of being penalized with ~40% of questionable links within their linking profile.

The post Is Google Penguin Update Getting Stronger Over Time? appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

Though this topic has already come up late last year in 2012, I wanted to touch base on this once again as I see the industry taking a slight turn.

Google Is Watching!

As we already know Google has let us know of an update regarding penalizing guest blogging blogs. Needless to say if Google is trying to penalize something it’s usually because that tactic works. If said tactic works, then we’ll just need to dig in a little deeper to find out exactly “how” they want us to “Guest Blog”

Does Google Take action on Spammy Guest Blogging? [video]

Here are a few rules to follow that will save you lots of time, resources, and heart break:

Rule #1: don’t spin articles (duh)
Rule #2: don’t link out to garbage sites
Rule #3: don’t create or post garbage posts (refer back to rule #1)
Rule #4: ask yourself: would I want to read this? Would I want to share this?
Rule #5: Understand that shortcuts will get you penalized.

Be wary, Google is WATCHING your every move!

The post Does Google Take Action On SPAMMY Guest Blogging Tactics? – Dallas SEO Company appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

If you operate in the SEO realm, you’d have to have had your head in the sand not to have heard all about Google Authorship, that system by which authors of content can have their picture show up in the SERPs by linking their work to their Google Plus account.

[visit our  Dallas SEO page]It’s gotten a tremendous amount of attention in the SEO community in the past year, with content producers scrambling to make sure their Authorship profiles are optimized and all of their content pages have the appropriate tags embedded into the code.

At this point it seems that the hubbub about Authorship has outpaced the actual benefits one receives, but this is because the consensus in the SEO world is that Google has only shown us the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the entire purpose of authorship.  The widespread expectation, seemingly confirmed through Google’s actions, is that Authorship will soon morph into Author Rank, at least once Google can iron out the many wrinkles inherent in a major overhaul of their search results.

What is Author Rank?

Briefly, Author Rank is based on Google’s patented “Agent Rank” tool, which was formulated with the intention of having certain online content rank higher than others because it is digitally connected to an authoritative and trusted individual.  A person with a high “Author Rank” might see his work featured more prominently in the search results than less-authoritative agents or work published by anonymous or unknown authors.

Author Rank would be built up over time based on the popularity and trust of the content produced, and also on social signals, particularly those derived on Google Plus, the platform which facilitates Google’s attempts to match online content to specific individuals.

The idea is that Author Rank will eventually become a complement to Google’s Page Rank system, and that the listings that appear in the SERPs will be based on the authority and trust of not only the domain and page, but also on the trust and authority of the specific author, where appropriate.

Google sees this as a way to boost the visibility of certain authors who have demonstrated their niche expertise and also as a way to weed out the spammers and hackers who attempt to achieve their rank through means other than establishing an authoritative voice on their chosen subject.

Waiting Game

As previously mentioned, Google has yet to implement Author Rank into their system for producing search results, and as of now the only perk for having Authorship enabled is that it enables one’s picture to be listed in the search results next to their content, which in general is believed to increase click-through-rates and promote author visibility.

It appears that the reason that Google has yet to launch a fully operational Author Rank system is because there are too many loose ends to tidy up; Google is undoubtedly testing this feature and thus far appears to be less than thrilled with the results.

Some of the major issues with Authorship have been discussed recently on the Google Plus Authorship and Author Rank Community (a fantastic resource, BTW).  The members of that community are incredibly adept at following the latest developments on the Author Rank front, and have noticed a few peculiarities that shed some light on the issues Google needs to address before a full-fledged Author Rank program can be unveiled.

One of the biggest issues for Google is matching authoritative content to an individual author in instances where that person has not personally linked their content through their Google Plus page.  While Authorship tags and Google Plus connections have become common practices for those in the SEO and certain tech industries, for the majority of online content producers it is not yet a habit for them to worry about Google Authorship, whether they even know it exists.

As much as Google would love to have everyone using Google Plus, and most soothsayers agree that more and more people will be compelled to do so in the future, they are also aware that for Author Rank to help improve search results, there needs to be some way to rank authoritative authors, even if they don’t manually connect their work to their Google Plus account.

Wrinkles

Google has been trying to figure out a way to do this, and the results appear to be more than a little buggy at this point.  One of the most infamous examples occurred late in 2012, when Google attempted to automate an Authorship link for certain New York Times articles.  Instead of properly linking Times authors to their work, the results ended up crediting a certain piece, written in 2010, to famed author Truman Capote, who died in 1984!  Somehow the Google automaton had skimmed over the actual writer of the piece and honed in on the name of Capote which was only mentioned in passing in the author’s bio at the bottom of the piece.

It was quickly remedied, but it served to highlight the difficulties Google will have in trying to auto-associate content.  More recently, a discussion on the aforementioned G+ Community pointed out that Google was attempting to add Authorship status to search results of Amazon.com books.  In what appeared to be another series of auto-association errors, community members found a whole host of mixups in which the wrong author was given credit for a certain piece of work.

Bottom line

Sooner or later, Google is going to straighten out the kinks in their author-attribution model and Author Rank will be unveiled, likely in a gradual yet emphatic fashion.   There’s little doubt that getting your foot in the Authorship door now, and begin building your author authority and trust now, will pay dividends when Author Rank is finally, and forcefully, implemented.

Cody Cahill is counting on posts like this one to eventually build his Author Rank to the point where he is able to dominate the world.  See more of his writing on the Page One Power’s link building blog.

The post Author Rank is Coming, Despite Wrinkles to Be Ironed Out appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

[Visit Our Texas PPC page]

1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood

The post The Top Twenty Keyword Categories That Demand The Highest CPC appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

This is a republished article from SEOBook.com. It’s a great read and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The post Comparing Desktop vs. Mobile Usage (SEO BOOK) appeared first on Texas SEO Company.

Image via Shutterstock, used under license

Link building certainly was a hot topic in 2012 – maybe it’s because Penguins are so gosh darn cute that we just can’t help ourselves, right?

Outside of the penalties dished out by cute black and white animals and search engine algorithms alike, our team of veteran link builders kept doling out solid advice for search marketers.

Whether you need a fresh start on link building in 2013 or are just looking for a few new ideas and sparks of inspiration, take a look at some of the tips and observations shared in the wildly popular posts listed below.

All you need to know about link building is printed clearly in black and white.

Our Most Read Link Building Posts Of 2012

1. 50+ Things Every Link Builder Needs To Know - Julie Joyce
2. Can There Really Be 85 Types Of Unnatural Links? - Eric Ward
3. How To Creatively & Effectively Build Links Using Public Data – David De Souza
4. What 65 Google Changes May Mean For Your Link Strategies – Eric Ward
5. How Pandas & Penguins Change Your Link Building Strategy – Erin Everhart
6. 5 Ways To Get The Best Links For New Websites – Erin Everhart
7. How To Remove Your Unnatural Inbound Links – Erin Everhart
8. Linking Strategies For Google Plus Your World – Eric Ward
9. How To Find Link Prospects Without Using Google – Erin Everhart
10. Signs Of Linking Over-Optimization – Eric Ward
11. Why A Diverse Link Profile Is More Critical Than Ever – Julie Joyce
12. Must-Have Browser Tools For Link Builders – Eric Ward
13. How To Conduct A Link Audit – Julie Joyce
14. Why Link Builders Need To Do More Than Just Build Links – Julie Joyce
15. Infographics: Why They Fail For Link Building – Erin Everhart
16. Understanding Ranking Lag Time For New Links – Eric Ward
17. Five Linking Myths That Need To Go Away In 2013 – Eric Ward
18. The Unbearable Torture Of Linking – Eric Ward
19. Link Building Tool Review: Link Prospector – Debra Mastaler
20. Link Building Tool Review: Ontolo – Debra Mastaler
21. Link Building Tool Review: Ahrefs – Julie Joyce
22. When The Going Gets Tough, The Links Get Blamed – Julie Joyce
23. The Domino Effect Of Links & Relationships – Julie Joyce
24. Link Building Tool Review: WordTracker Link Builder – Debra Mastaler
25. The Unintended Consequences Of Link Removal – Eric Ward

The post Resource: Best Link Building Posts of 2012 (SEL) appeared first on Texas SEO Company.