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SEOTERIC Host SEO Learning Workshop
Written on January 29, 2011 at 5:38 pm, by admin
The Athens-Clarke County Department of Human and Economic Development and Oconee County Economic Development Department are collaborating to offer a series of free monthly workshops to small businesses in the area. Beginning January 24, these free workshops will be offered every fourth Monday of the month. The location of these workshops will rotate between Oconee and Athens-Clarke County. Each month’s workshop will cover a different topic relative to area small business owners. The January 24 workshop covered search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines. Presented by Jeff Rorabaugh and Matt Brooks of SEOteric, the workshop answered introductory SEO questions and explain how a website/SEO marketing campaign can increase small business revenue. This workshop was for all skill levels.
There were about 50 people in attendance for this free SEO learning workshop, and Jeff and Matt covered everything from a Google Page layout down to algorithmic ranking factors. We had some rich discussion and Q&A, offering solutions to practical SEO issues.
Championing SEO education is a part of our mission statement, and we were excited about the opportunity to offer this SEO workshop in conjunction with Athens Clarke County and Oconee County. We hope to be included in further workshops about hosting, social media, and using the internet as a source of marketing. Join our facebook page for info and updates.
Andre Gallant of the Flagpole in Athens gives a good write up of the SEO workshop and some overview of the Athens-Clarke and Oconee County partnership in hosting this and future business seminars.
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2010 – A Year In Review
Written on January 3, 2011 at 11:15 pm, by admin
2010 – A Great Year In Review
SEOTERIC finished up its first real year of business this year. Until January 2010, it was a two man show working on websites, hosting, and SEO for small local clients. This year, we created a great team here at SEOTERIC, adding a few key positions and people along the way.
Our first goal was to set up a customer advocate/customer servant role within the company. We wanted someone to be able to liason between the development team and the customer, building relationships and fostering long term partnerships. Jeff Rorabaugh came on board this year and has help fulfill exactly that role – just about to perfection. Jeff brings a great attitude and a heart for people, he believes in the company and the services we provide. Adding Jeff was probably our smartest move of 2010.
We also grew in our core competencies of CMS website development, design, and marketing strategies. We had our first national publication on SEOmoz (a national SEO blog) and actually had one of the top 5 blog posts all year. We want to keep pushing the envelope of success and strategy, so we continue to research and contribute our findings with our clients and other industry professionals.
We took our product offering from Athens and expanded into Alpahretta, Atlanta, and Columbia, SC. Jeff Rorabaugh is covering sales and service in Georgia, while Jim Amick is covering the Carolinas. Both Jeff and Jim give us an edge of personal touch when dealing with very technical stuff such as hosting, design, development, and SEO. We hope to continue to expand our service areas into the next year.
We have also seen some amazing successes for some of of clients this year – some adding hundreds of new customers, other achieving multi-hundred thousand dollar sales, and some others breaking into new markets and expanding their service areas.
Our hope is to see an even brighter 2011. Through a slow economy, we saw a full year of growth and opportunity with more exciting things to come. We have some great SEO tools and resources we are rolling out for our clients this year, and a lot of other great things in the pipeline. If you haven’t become a fan on facebook yet, go there now and “LIKE” us. We will be blogging a lot more this year, so stay up to date with what is going on in the WWW.
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See Our Article On SEOmoz!
Written on October 21, 2010 at 11:57 pm, by admin
Check out our article on www.seomoz.org! http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/its-getting-harder-and-harder-to-keep-a-white-hat-clean. We did a write up about blog comments and spam SEO tactics. We will do a follow-up on our site from info gathered from the comments on SEOmoz. Stay Tuned!
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Is Your Business Experiencing Growth?
Written on September 28, 2010 at 11:55 pm, by admin
As a marketing company, we often talk to business owners about how business is going. We want to understand what is going on and how the current status compares to historical data to help identify and establish a baseline of company performance. The recent recession has caused a lot of pain for businesses. With the current economic conditions, is there a way to alleviate some of the pressure?
Economist say the recession technically ended in July of 2009. Since then, the economy has seen very small incremental growth. The problem is, the fallout was quick and deep, leaving a 10% unemployment rate, businesses filing bankruptcy, and an economic forecast of extended period of pain and slow growth.
Sounds great. I’ll have two of those.
Here is the catch. Yes, the overall economic growth is going to be slow. Yes there are less “consumers” in each industry, and yes sales are down. Unemployment will be high until companies feel safe to start hiring again. BUT – this is the median result, the norm, but NOT the rule. There are a lot of exceptions to this.
We talked with a few of our clients and wanted to share some GOOD news. One of our software provider clients has had over 200 new clients since July. A lot of this can be attributed to strong SEO and visibility in the search engines. Another client just signed a contract for the largest commercial solar project in South Carolina, and they found his company on the internet. Another client of our is hosting a grand opening this coming week (the week of 10/01/10) after we helped them with launching their new businesses.
With so much negative media, it is important to understand that there are still ways to grow your business and get your products and services in front of your customers. Stay positive. Capitalize on opportunities to seize market share. Improve your image. And when the economy starts getting stronger, you will be in a real position of competitive advantage. Are you ready to get your business growing again?
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A Sampling of Current Projects
Written on September 18, 2010 at 4:55 pm, by admin
We have been having a lot of fun here at SEOTERIC. We have some great website under construction and we thought we would give a sneak peak at some of the current developments! In addition to these few in development, we also have a few other website going live this week, including a girls clothing and consignment e-commerce project and a beautiful landscape company website with enhanced images and photography
The most exciting thing about launching new business websites is the impact it can have on your business. Your online image has the opportunity to win over potential clients, and when added to one of our marketing campaigns, you will see your search engine rankings, website traffic, and sales and leads begin to increase. We are going against the grain of a slow economy and helping businesses start growing again. Are you ready?
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Top 5 Reasons Social Media Is NOT A Fad
Written on August 26, 2010 at 1:41 pm, by admin
Social Media is the culmination of the mediums people use to stay connected on the internet. It is the combination of personal, professional, and entertainment networks that we create as we navigate the internet. There is increasingly strong evidence that social media isn’t just a fad – it is the new way of sharing information.
With the creation of Myspace and Facebook, we saw a massive push towards creating personal internet space (hence Myspace). People could connect, share, communicate, and express themselves without having to be a website developer. Myspace’s popularity has dwindled while Facebook has taken social media to a new level. There are over 500,000,000 facebook users – and most are active on the site multiple times a day for increasing amounts of time.
Other social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn have also enjoyed massive amounts of users. The interesting thing about social media is that it is not something that is going away anytime soon, but it will continue to evolve. New services will come out to connect people and share information, but the idea that social media is not sustainable or isn’t here to stay just isn’t holding water.
There have been a few pioneers in the corporate world who have invested in social media because they understood the impact it would have. Pepsi traded their Superbowl commercials for a social media campaign. Ford has been launching new cars and revealing new designs to their fans and followers on social media networks. More and more companies are realizing the power of building brand and loyalty through social media.
After managing social media accounts for a while, we came up with the top 5 reasons social media is NOT a fad but is something that is here to stay.
1) Social Media channels have become integrated into our daily lives – email, news and events, and applications are all funnelled through social media.
2) Social Media allows a fast, friendly, and free way to connect with friends and share info such as images, videos, news and more.
3) Social Media continues to grow in users and volume. New users come on board every day, and the amount of time spent on social media is still increasing.
4) Businesses and individuals see the value of social media. Businesses can create loyalty, branding, and expand customer bases while individuals can connect with friends and businesses and share information.
5) (and possibly most compelling) There is a strong indication that social media will begin influencing search results in search engines such as Google and Bing (which also powers Yahoo! search). You can already see Twitter info and news in search results, but we expect the search engines to adapt and show results based on relevance AND what is trending in social media. This will be a huge shift in how people search for things, and could mark the maturity of a very young (but rapidly growing) way of using the internet.
Take a look at this video that shows the power of social media. Prepare to be amazed.
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Using Analytics To Measure Marketing Effectiveness
Written on August 25, 2010 at 9:05 pm, by admin
Most marketing campaigns are created to drive traffic to a website, get people to come to a location, or to make a phone call about a product or service. Media and advertising create the “call to action” that persuades a potential customer to make contact. Most established businesses have a location, a website, and a phone number. Other businesses only have a website and a phone number and in either case, how can a business owner or manager measure the effectiveness of traditional or media based advertising?
With visits to a location and phone calls, sales people can easily ask a customer how they heard about the business. You can also set up a specific phone number for a marketing campaign to easily tell how effective the advertising was at generating calls. Measuring the effectiveness of website visitors to an advertising campaign (like radio, TV, or print ads) can be a little tricker.
We advise our clients to integrate some sort of tracking and analytics software on their websites. We like Google Analytics because it is free, pulls an extraordinary amount of data, and has the ability to drill down to specific reporting on visitors, traffic sources, keywords, and user behavior. Using Google Analytics, we can set up some goals and dig up statistics to find out how effective advertising is.
If the advertisement has a printed (or stated) website address, we can look for clues such as increases or spikes in the amount of direct visitors to the site. We can make an inference that the increases are coming from individuals who saw an ad, related to the product or service, and went to the website for more information. We can also look for increases in the amount of traffic brought in from searches for the business name. This can be attributed to people hearing the business name but not remembering the website address. We can also look for keywords associated with the advertisement. If there is a specific product or service advertised, we can look at the statistics for 1) incoming visitors searching for those keywords in search engines and 2) increases in traffic for the pages containing the products and services you advertised.
With traditional media and advertising, we can’t know exactly the impact it has on website visitors, but we can make some very good inferences and understand the overall impact. Adding up the increases described above will paint a fairly clear picture on the impact of advertising on website visitors.
Internet based advertising is much easier to track because we will know everything about an incoming visitor – where they came from (search engine or referring website), what they searched for (keywords) or what they clicked on (links). we will know exactly what the impact of online advertising is based on segmenting the data into these areas. This is also a great way to measure the impact of social media campaigns – you can see exactly how many visitors come from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
You can go a step further and use this for an email marketing campaign. You can parse your analytics data into referring sites, allowing you to see the incoming traffic from email accounts. You can add these together and get a great look at the traffic generated from an email newsletter, promotion emails, or even from having your website address in your email signatures.
There is a deep well of data that is available for business owners and managers to make informed decisions about where to expend energy in marketing. You can understand the impacts of traditional advertising, email campaigns, internet advertising, and printed ads. For more information on this, contact us at (800) 314-4736. Let SEOTERIC help you increase leads and help you make your marketing as effective as it can be!
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What is SEOTERIC Up To?
Written on August 16, 2010 at 5:30 pm, by admin
In addition to web design, marketing, and hosting, we have been working on some exciting things for the next few months. We have branched out into the Atlanta Market and now have a formal presence in the Atlanta, GA area. We are also looking to expand into a few additional cities in the coming weeks.
We have a few clients in South Carolina, so our next step will be getting some representative into Columbia and Charlotte. Soon after that we hope to expand into Nashville, Birmingham, Montgomery, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee!
We love building great websites that help businesses start growing despite a weak economy. If there are prospective clients out there, we can help you find them with some great online marketing. It’s great to be a part of something like helping businesses grow because we can help businesses recover from weakened sales and less potential customers. Are you needing more exposure? Get going with SEOTERIC!
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Link Building Best Practices For SEO
Written on July 8, 2010 at 7:15 pm, by admin
Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work. Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far.
Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links. After years of combining strategies and tactics, I have come up with a list of best practices for obtaining incoming links to your website.
Hopefully this best practices list will help you understand the importance of link building. I originally posted this article at SEOmoz.org (here is the original post). The best practices have been updated and added to from the great discussion we had in the comments. SEOmoz is one of the top SEO blogs in the industry, and you can find a lot more information about link building there.
About the Author: SEOTERIC is an Atlanta web design and SEO company specializing in building business websites and generating sales and leads through natural search results.
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Google Is Missing Its Page Navigation
Written on July 3, 2010 at 4:13 pm, by admin
I was browsing Google this morning and realized an usual occurrence – the page navigation at the bottom of the search results was missing. I refreshed the page and it came back. I did a few more queries and the same thing happened. What is going on over at Google?
It is the holiday weekend, so maybe all the guys are out on their boats or taking a well deserved day off – but I couldn’t hep but find this odd.
Here is a screen shot of this…
It makes it virtually impossible to go past the first page of results. If you can’t get to any more than 10 results, maybe the click-through of their sponsored listings will increase 
but who knows, right? I am just wondering if this is a fluke, or if anyone else had noticed this.
Happy searching – I hope the Google results are relevant enough for you to find what you are looking for in the first few listings!
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