Louisville Kentucky SEO Consultant

When shopping for a local Kentucky SEO Consultant, you should know that not all Louisville search engine marketing professionals are created equal.

A smart Louisville SEO professional will not only keep up on the newest trends in Internet marketing and have years ( at least 7 years of direct experience ) of broad range online marketing experience, but also a network to back themselves up when things get tough.

All to often you will find a rather ‘green’ or inexperienced consultant that got lucky and ranked well for a term. Hey, it does happen! By chance this does happen, those consultants will think they are the new guru in town because they ranked themselves number one for a very non-competitive term and will try to fool you into thinking they know this industry like the back of their hand. However, what will happen when they lose their rankings? What if it was your rankings they lost?

Smart SEO’s have several backup plans and integrate them into your marketing agenda without having to be asked. As an example, my years of professional consultation has put me in a position to be an editor at many high level news sites, informational sites, and directory sites. At any time I can use my high level access rights at these sites to promote your site to help boost your rankings and traffic flow. I also have contacts in the legal, real estate, medical, technology, fashion, news media, and travel industries that I can use to help gain links to your site from all the networking I have done over the years building web sites. I also have a network of my own sites that branch into many different industries and niches, and if there is a niche industry I currently don’t support myself, I have many friends that will support and help.

So just because someone got lucky for a week and ranked their site number one for ‘Louisville bird cage reseller in the highlands’ in Google, doesn’t mean they know anything about true online marketing tactics and best practices. Make sure you do your homework before hiring or consulting with a Louisville SEO.

Everything impacts your search engine marketing goals. Everything from your domain, history of your domain, IP address, content, people that link to you and people that you link to, the freshness of your content, and even the company you host with.

If your hosting company doesn’t have a properly set up server, you could experience problems with your site that result in programing and database errors, 404 pages, and periods of time when your site is not accessible at all. What should happen if one of these problems happened with Google or Yahoo decided to visit your site for an update?

You could find your results in Google now displaying your site errors, having your site suspended or devalued in the rankings, or having your site completely removed from the search engines.

Your hosting company could also have you on a shared IP that is used by people that spam, have ‘questionable’ type sites, or has a history of such things. You could also be hosting with a company that is already banned or going to be banned for hosting lots of spammy type sites and your site will be labeled as one of those because you are on their IP block.

When you start looking into optimizing your site and doing your research, make sure to start with your hosting company for any potential problems.

I have noticed a trend lately that many of the so called ‘full service’ marketing agencies in town don’t offer Internet marketing as a service to their clients, and if they do, they don’t advertise it.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of marketing companies here in Louisville. There are more companies that claim to do marketing than car dealers selling junk on Dixie Hwy. at this point. I normally look these companies up myself when I can and see what services they offer when it comes to Internet marketing. Through my research I have found that about 96% of the marketing companies here in Louisville have no services for Internet marketing!

Out of the other 4%, only 1% have what I would call an effective, full time, experienced Internet marketing person(s) in shop. The other 3% simply outsource the work or hire a college freshman to do the dirty work on their internship ( learning on your dime ).

I think this is a problem because many people in Louisville still do not recognize the value of Internet marketing to their business. They do not understand online marketing so they don’t bother to research or get informed about it. They don’t understand that an optimized website could be a low cost, 24 hour salesperson that can reach worldwide customers and push their products to people that are actively looking for them.

Some Louisville marketing companies have been burned by ’snake oil SEO salesmen’ in the past who basically took their money and ran, but this should not discourage you from seeking out a true Louisville marketing professional that can work with you one on one and get you results you need.

If you work with a company that doesn’t offer Internet marketing services, you are literally leaving money on the table when it comes to advertising and marketing.

As a business owner, you owe it to yourself to partner with a Louisville marketing company / agency that can offer you true ‘full service’ marketing. There is no since in skipping such a valuable service that can also help you bring in revenue with offline ventures as well.

The next time you work with a Louisville marketing agency, make sure you select one that offers competent Internet marketing services and be sure to check their references too.

Often when local Louisville small business owners seek out a Louisville website design company, they end up unhappy and frustrated with the end result. Most of this is caused by trusting their wallet instead of trusting their ‘gut’ feelings. I want to walk you through some cases I have seen lately.

Most of the time, the person wanting a web site built finds out that their cousin, uncle, or neighbor is a ‘budding’ website designer and feels that they can trust this person to build their website for cheap. They also sometimes find someone who is in high school or new to the industry that was promoting their services on sites like rent-a-coder or elance and can only compete on price with their services since they are so new to the industry. The web site owner goes with someone that was low cost because they have no real industry experience and thinks that ‘everything will work itself out’ later in the process. Many times too, they just come across the first person they find in Google with no further research or questions about the service provider. All of the above examples will only give you headaches and trouble down the road.

The best way to find the Louisville website designer for you is to ask questions and use some simple common sense. I could not begin to tell you how many people come to me on a weekly basis to fix other peoples mistakes. This not only waste time and sales, but waste lots of money to have to clean up someones mistake.

I am not saying to skip ‘budding’ amateurs or to not save money by going with a more expensive Louisville web site design company, but I am sharing these tips below:

• Look at their portfolio of work.. do they even have a portfolio? Looking at their prior work will give you a sense if their style of design will fit what you want in a site and give you an idea of who they have worked with so you can get references.
• Talk to multiple designers. Talking to one person is not enough! I would call around and ask questions about your site and what the best solution is for you from different providers.
• Narrow down candidates based on options, not price. Look for the designers that offer the best options for you, not the cheapest price.
• Find a designer that can do more than design. Many times you will find you need some custom programming and/or Internet marketing for your project down the road. Having one provider for all of this is cheaper and less frustrating then with having multiple people work on the project at different times causing conflict.
• Go with your gut feeling. If one person/company feels like the right fit then go for it full steam ahead, but only after you have done your research.
• Find out who they partner with in town. Many times you will find that a person or company has multiple partnerships with other designers and programmers here in Louisville. It is likely that the person or company will outsource their work to these people. Finding out who is really doing the work on your site is important so you can research them.

Finding a Louisville web design company is like buying a car. You don’t just randomly pick one and show up at the dealership with cash in hand. You need to research what you really need, find out what company fits those needs, and get the best ‘bang for your buck’ based on your research. Don’t get stuck with a second rate designer that is cheap upfront as it will cost you more money down the road.

I would say that having a blog is about the best thing most people can do when trying to increase exposure to themselves online.

I talk about the importance of blogs almost every day while at work and most people think I am crazy for suggesting others to use blogs for Internet marketing.

Here are a few ways having a blog will help you gain exposure online:

• They help you quickly and easily add content to your site, and search engines love content.
• Most blogs are setup to be somewhat search engine optimized out of the box, so almost no work is needed for onsite optimization.
• Blogs help keep people that want your information up to date on what you may be offering or selling

I could go on and on about how blog software like Wordpress can do each of the following above and so much more, but the best thing you can do is actually download it from Wordpress.org, install it on your server, and give it a demo drive. If that is too much for you, sign up at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com for a free hosted blog.

I prefer the benefits of having my own blog installed on my own hosting account for MANY reasons that would keep me writing all night. I like to think of a blog as a separate mini website that is easily customizable and ready to help you get exposure to yourself out of the box.

If the reasons above are not enough to convince you to have a blog, then you will be a dead fish in water when your competitors read this post and give it a try.

I will never understand why companies in the city and state I live are so far behind in online marketing.

We have many… many companies here that are profitable and doing well and we have a very high quality of life in America’s 16th largest city. With that said, you would think more business owners would invest money into having an online presence and bring more exposure to themselves.

The sad truth is that they don’t. A large percentage of companies will simply not put aside funds to have a web site built. Those that do, will not invest into marketing their new presence online.

I think this is caused by several reasons:

• Not understanding the potential that online business can bring.
• Thinking that they do not have the cash to build and/or market a web site online.
• Believing that ‘if you build it, they will come’, with no work involved after building.
• Having a bad taste in their mouth about web design/marketing because they chose to have ’someone’s uncle’ or the cheapest person they could find build a terrible site for them last time and rip them off.
• Thinking that having a Myspace page, blogger account, or eBay store qualifies as a web site and that no marketing is needed for it.
• Feeling that they can ‘always do it tomorrow’.

For any reason why it goes on, none of them are valid. If you invest time and money into having a business, then you need to budget for marketing. If you don’t do this, then you will fail sooner or later. The time it takes to select the type of marketing you do is as crucial as picking the type of products/services you will have for sale within your business.

After 13 years of web development and online marketing, I would say that I see the same mistake over and over again that clients make before I consult with them on their search engine marketing projects.

This mistake ends up costing them on the average 40% more in consulting fees, work, and lost time ( which is lost sales ) than any other mistake they could make.

The mistake? Hiring a search engine marketing consultant after, or near the end, site completion.

Internet marketing needs to happen before anything else you do. Before you buy a domain, before you hire a designer/programmer, and before you pay anyone to do any work on your site at all.

Everything you do with your site can, and will, effect the ranking it has in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK. I am not saying everything has to be 100% perfect SEO for your site to rank, but EVERY LITTLE thing you can do can help you rank better even if it is selecting the proper domain and hosting for your site.

Many of you may still be wondering what I am talking about, so here is an example.

I have a client that is an attorney that wanted a simple site built that could generate traffic for his business. Knowing that most attorneys can only practice within certain city and state limits, it would make since to focus all his traffic to his local community. Why try to build a site around the term ‘lawyer’ when he can not help people outside his practice area? It would make more since to target ‘Louisville Kentucky Attorney’ or ‘Kentucky DUI Lawyer’ then to focus on a broader term that would most likely generate traffic he could not convert.

One thing that could have helped him was buying a domain that focused on his core keywords and audience. Many people think that a domain does not help in rankings, but it does in so many ways that I would be willing to sit down one on one with someone and discuss it until I am blue in the face. Instead of buying a domain like ‘louisvillekyattorney.com’ ( which has his terms in the domain ), he bought a generic domain. I already hear people screaming ‘but who would remember such a name as louisvillekyattorney.com? That is not the point here!

Using a domain that has your target keywords in it helps build search engine rankings, plain and simple. Use that as your main domain for your site and if you are worried that people will not be able to remember it, but a shorter domain based around yourself like your name or something easy to remember and print that on your business cards and such. Have this shorter, more memorable domain, redirect to your main site with your keywords in it. Now people can type it in because they remember it, and still reach your main site while giving you all the extra push you can get for having keywords in your main domain.

This client also went with the cheapest hosting company he could find. Not only does his site never show up when visited ( because his host is always down ), but Google never gets a chance to fully index and rank his site, because it is never available to spider it. Not only that, but I found out his hosting company was hosting spammy porn sites along side this client of mine and had been labeled a ’spam host’ by Google. This caused a penalty to be put on the entire class C IP block, including my client.. hurting his chance to rank well in Google.

All in all, this client was very unhappy and felt that he wasted his money on Internet marketing for his site. The truth is, this client never properly planned out his site and wanted to do things his way instead of listening and consulting with a search engine marketing consulting first.

If you own a business, don’t you owe it to yourself to make sure you have everything working for you and not against you when it comes to making money online?

Many times when I talk to people about optimizing a site for their business, they want to ask me all kinds of questions on my thoughts about an analytics program, tricks for building links, shortcuts to getting indexed, or a slew of other questions that might deal with table-less CSS design.

Wanna know what I really think about it? It’s mainly garbage.

Sure analytics has it place to determine the progress of your campaign and building links is a ‘must have’ chore for getting traffic to your site, but the number one thing you can do is write/have great content. When I speak about content, I am also lumping in your keywords as well as they will be apart of the overall content of your site.

If you have great content ( written for users, optimized for search engines ) that people want to read and enjoy, they will naturally link to you through their site ( a blog, a commercial site, a directory they own, a bookmark, a column in a online newspaper, etc… ) and thus will help eliminate having to build links yourself back to your site. If they don’t have a site of their own, they very well may refer people to your site or become a customer themselves of your services/products.

With all these links coming to you, you will naturally gain trust and authority which will help get you indexed almost daily ( if you are pushing out new great content that fast ) and get your content in the search engines faster for even more people to find.

As you are pushing out new content and getting new visitors from all these links, your stats are for sure going to go up. As long as you are building content people want to read, it is almost unnecessary to log into your stats program for what most common people look at. If you are not looking into logs and checking more advanced features like visitor path analysis and time spent on page/site, then it is almost worthless to check your stats for just ‘hits’ or ‘visitors’ as these will naturally have gone up anyways from all your great content.

When it comes to design, layout and testing are important.. however, you do not need to have a full ‘CSS only’ layout to gain ranking in search engines. As a matter of fact, I mix CSS with tables and have even ranked full table layout sites to the front page of Google for some very competitive terms, outranking sites with full CSS layouts.

Once you gain authority and trust in the search engines, you can pretty much rank well for tons of terms and phrases as you expand your site. You will also get indexed faster and show up quicker for those new terms and phrases, thus driving more and more traffic to your site faster than before.

Content is the cornerstone of optimizing a web site. Without content you have nothing to show your visitors. If you have content and it is boring and generally ‘plain’, then no body is going to stick around and link to you. Make the most of your content and watch the links role in for free. Within time the trust and authority will settle in and so will sales and leads.

Over the 13 years of doing web development and Internet marketing right here in Louisville Kentucky, I have had the opportunity to work with many established local web development firms, ad agencies, freelancers, start ups, Internet marketers, venture capitalist, Fortune 500 companies, small business owners, and what I like to call ‘Snake Oil’ search engine marketing wanna-bes.

Most of the times, these ’snake oil’ types fall into 2 classes:
A. New or incompetent web designers looking to expand their profits by offering more services like Internet marketing, even though they know very little, if anything, about Internet marketing to begin with. Most of the times they don’t even know web design!
B. Start up companies looking to bring in sales and promising the moon to just close the sales and bring in profits to their company. They later outsource the work to cheaper labor such as the above reference point A.

The problem is, neither of these types know anything about Internet marketing or marketing in general, let alone web design or programming in most cases. In the case of reference B., you literally have the blind leading the blind which is also not good for your business.

I’ve ran across people that only talk about PPC or getting you listed in other sites and not focusing on Internet marketing or true SEO tactics to get your site ranked naturally high in search engines. Truth be told, people like this are eagerly waiting to take your money away from you if you let them. Come on, since seven years old? Yeah I laugh about it myself too when I think of it. I also talk to web development firms and ad agencies that claim they do Internet marketing for their clients as well and most of them do not even know what A/B split testing is or even how to do correct keyword research for their clients.

Most of the times, these people copy and ‘ride on the coat tails’ of real Internet marketing professionals and claim the work as their own. Such an example would be researching a real SEO professionals client and finding out what they did to their site and coping the things they find. Sure this is fine, but what happens when trends change? What happens when Google or Yahoo decide to change the way they do things and rankings and result fall and rise for your competitors? The real professional will be able to spot trends and changes and act quickly and accordingly, while the ‘copy cat coat tailer’ will have to research and copy what the real professional did in order to make the same changes.. which can result in wasted time and sales for your company while someone else is in first spot in Google and your not.

The copy cat snake oil SEO will end up costing you more money in the long run as well. While they are charging you money for time spent on researching and reading forums for their answers, the real SEO professional will act on experience and knowledge and implement the correct changes the first time, without wasting time having to look up answers in a forum and billing for that time spent.

Real Internet marketing professionals will also have a very broad knowledge in online advertising and can consult with you on issues regarding SEO, email marketing, social media optimization, online classified listings, local search, online press releases, article writing, link building, paid campaigns like pay per click and banner advertising, and even correct syntax for your HTML code in your web site. If your really lucky, you can find one that has a solid history of building web applications and sites and can communicate with other programmers you may have on your team.

Most importantly, a real Internet marketing professional will have results to back themselves up. I don’t mean results in MSN or a second tier search engine, I mean results in Google and Yahoo where most of the online traffic is really at. Not only will they have results in these engines currently, but also a past history of ranking sites in these engines as well. It is rather easy to get a new site or even a current site ranked in Google for a term and have it ranked well for a week or two, but the real skill is ranking it well for a term ( at least the first page of results in the engine ) and keeping it there month after month as the engines change their ranking variables over time. This shows that not only can the person rank a site well, but keep it there over time and keep up on trends and changes that the search engines may throw out.

Another consideration is the type of terms being ranked for. Anybody ( even you ) can rank your site on the first page of Google for ‘flower shop in Louisville Kentucky on 22nd street’, but is anyone using that term online to find you? My guess is no. Having an Internet marketing professional that can rank you for national and general broad type of searches will effectively bring you in more traffic and sales than someone that ranks you for terms that no one is even using in the search engines. These type of terms would be ‘Louisville Flowers’, ‘Louisville Flower Shop’, ‘Kentucky Flowers’, or even just ‘Flowers’. These terms alone will bring you in more traffic in the long run.

So when looking for a SEO or online marketing consultant in Louisville, ask questions and look at the results when picking someone for your marketing needs. Ask them for proof of their results over a long range of time ( a year at least is good ) that shows the rankings of their site, terms used, and where they were placed in the engine each week for that term. Do they have a history of at least being on the first page of results or is it a wild up and down roller coaster ride? If they can not provide you this data, don’t do business with them. A competent professional will be more than glad to show off their work when requested.

I would also ask other Internet marketing professionals in the area as well. Most of us have worked with one another, talked, and even shared business with each other and if you tell us upfront you only want to know about another SEO professional and their work, we would be be more than glad to share with you our experience and concerns about that person. If at anytime you would like to know about services from another web marketing professional, you can give me a call at 270-422-5593 and I would be glad to share with you what I know for free.

In the end, only you are responsible for your success online. Be sure to take the time to research professionals that work with you ( or for you ) and learn that price is not the only factor in picking a professional.

Have you noticed not all of you pages show up in Google? Have you used a tool like Aaron Walls SEO for FireFox and found your pages are indeed in the supplemental index? Don’t know what a supplemental result is?

The best way to get your results out of the supplemental index is to make sure:

• Make sure your supplemental result pages are not duplicates of other pages you may have. Include unique meta descriptions, titles, keywords, and copy in the page.
• If the page has to be a duplicate ( because of site architecture, like in a blog ) then make sure to make the duplicate not indexable by Google. Include a “no index” meta tag or exclusion in your robots.txt file.
• Use internal linking to the supplemental result to help define importance to the page and bring it out of the supplemental index.
• Use external linking to the supplemental page for the same reason above.

These have been the best methods I have used to pull pages out of the supplemental index and into the main index for clients to date.