Louisville Kentucky SEO Consultant

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.

One tip I would like to to share is the use of your meta tag element link. If you have several pages that you consider “important”, then you should include them in your meta section of your pages like this:

link rel='archives' title='title of page linking to' href='http://www.domain.com/page.html'

Be sure to open and close the link element with < and >.

Include these important pages in your HTML sitemap file, XML sitemap file, site navigation ( if appropriate ), and within the body of your content. You may also list these important pages in 404 pages ( pages not found ) and in search results ( if your web site has a site wide search ).

You can also link to these pages from other pages as a ‘related’ entry in your body message for those pages that are closely related to the topic in which you are writing about.

Using linking in this way will help ensure that search engine find and index your important pages within your site.

As a first post to my new blog, I would like to share with you a tactic that works for many clients of mine in helping them gain more expose online. This tactic doesn’t work well for everyone, but if you operate a bricks and mortar business it is something that should not be over looked.

The tactic? Local search marketing!

The search engines are slowly putting more and more emphasis on bringing relevant local results to users when they search for products and services based on their search query ( city or state + term ) and IP location when they made the query. The big 3 ( Google, Yahoo, and MSN ) have already been doing this for some time and with the advent of Google making personalization a permanent feature when using their search engine, you will find more and more users of Google getting exposed to localized results automatically as most users will have already done a few local search queries that will be stored in their personal search history.

With more and more exposure to map services and mobile phone services provided by the big 3 ( think Google 411 and Maps along with MSN and Yahoo Maps ), getting your online presence into local search results just makes sense. Not only will these results show up in the Local versions of the search engines, but in their main index listings too.

Web surfers are even turning to specialized local search providers like online yellow pages, TrueLocal, JudysBook, and more for their local search results. Many services like Yahoo Local allow surfers to rank and review services from companies to help better filter business listings and services.

Currently, I submit my clients to over 60+ local submission services to ensure they get indexed for the proper localities and terms they are seeking. The big 3 get most of their information from 3rd party services as well as their own submissions for local search inclusion. Don’t stop at just submitting your local data to Google in Google Local, go the extra mile and submit it to other local services as Google, Yahoo, and MSN all verify and use 3rd party information to verify their results. The more times they find your information for “Louisville Search Engine Marketing” on other sites, the more likely they are to rank you higher for those queries when someone types that in.

Ranking for a local term might not bring in a ton of traffic compared to the same generic ( non localized ) term, but you will be finding better quality, targeted visitors looking for your products and services.

Think about it.. if you were a web surfer looking for a dentist to perform a cleaning on your teeth, wouldn’t you search for a local dentist ( example “Louisville Family Dentist” ) rather than searching for just “Family Dentist” in Google? The traffic might be a lot lower, but then again you are getting better quality leads that will actually convert for you in the end, raising your conversion rate in the process.

You can extend this idea to pay per click marketing ( Adwords and Overture ) and other areas as well. Never stop thinking about how to use this tactic to your advantage. The market for local terms is smaller and less competitive compared to general terms, but that loop is closing faster and faster every day as the larger competitors are catching on and hogging up the results. If you don’t believe me, just do a search for any local real estate term like “Louisville Real Estate” or “Louisville Homes for Sale” in Google. Sure there are some local companies and agents listed, but you will find several non-local companies with local results, like Trulia.

Bottom line, get in local search results now before it becomes overcrowded by the larger companies and dominates the search engine results.