No online business nowadays can survive without its Online presence. Keeping your online business’ Website operational is equally as - and perhaps even much more - essential as the overall look and feel and ease of use of the Website itself. With this thought, choosing a trusted business Web hosting company is a significantly important step for any online business operator.

Business Website Hosting Requirements:

• To ensure that your online business is functioning properly 24/7 on the Web, your online business will have to select a trusted business Web hosting company to host your Website. When picking a business Web hosting service provider, you’ll need to uncover whether the business Web hosting company provides:
• Round-the-clock emergency customer support services. In case your Website has an outage, you should know that your business Web hosting provider is working to have your online business back up and functioning at a moment's notice!
• Nightly backup copies of your online business' Website to make sure your Website information and data is fully protected and may be restored quickly in the event of an outage.
• A money-back guarantee for their business Web Hosting services. In case your business Web hosting provider doesn’t meet your requirements for maximum up-time and customer support services, they aren't supplying you what you've been paying them for! Make sure you can get your money back if you aren't fully satisfied.

Steer Clear of Big Box Business Web Hosting Companies:

You may be enticed to select a big box business Web hosting provider that might provides an incredibly low rate per month, or will host your site free of charge. If you are thinking about this Web hosting option for your online business, reconsider!

Choosing a locally owned, Atlanta Web Hosting company provides many business Web hosting benefits that your online business won’t be able to find from a big box hosting company.

• Smaller local business Web hosting companies hang their hats on supplying quality customer support services for their valued clients. By choosing a big box business Web hosting company, you’ll most likely end up in an infinite, frustrating automated voice answering system when you have a Website outage. By going with a local business Web hosting service provider, you’ll be greeted by a real person who will gladly answer your phone call and assist you to fix your issue.
• It's widely known that Big box business Web hosting companies bog down their Web servers with numerous amounts of Websites as they can fit, which results in decreased site speeds and an annoying user experience for the Website visitors. If you select a smaller local business Web hosting provider, you’ll get enhanced, lightning fast performance out of your Website simply because they don’t overload their Web servers with the most amount of Websites that they can. If your company needs Atlanta Dedicated Servers, a local business web hosting company can easily accommodate your requirements.

Since you now have more details and information on what to search for when shopping for a business Web hosting company, make sure to research your options and find the most reliable local business Web hosting provider that will live up to your hosting requirements!

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

Mis-informed companies are under the impression that when they draft press releases, all they need to do is write a general release and distribute it to various PR Websites around the Internet. These companies aren't taking full advantage of the power of the press release. These companies should consult a professional SEO Company to create viable press release SEO strategies for them to help improve the overall value of their press release campaigns.

When it comes to effective press release SEO, companies need to be taught how to properly craft and optimize their press releases to get premium gains in the search results. When executed correctly, press release SEO can provide outstanding gains in search engine traffic and overall brand identity impressions.

Press Release SEO: How to Properly Execute It

Press Release SEO isn't an incredibly difficult concept to grasp. These five simple press release SEO techniques should be followed in order to maximize search engine value:

1. Press Release SEO shares many of the same technical tactics as a Website SEO implementation does. It's important for press release SEO to sprinkle in relevant keywords throughout the body content of the press release. It's also important to use these relevant keywords in the header tags for the press release as well. This press release SEO tactic can bolster the amount of brand impressions and/or standings in the search results by making the press release more relevant to the search spider – and to potential new clients who are searching for your keywords.
    
2. Online press releases utilize the same type of HTML page structure as a normal Website would. So it is advantageous to use standard H1 and H2 header tag structures that include your keyword terms. To the same effect, standard HTML bold and italics tags also provide the same effect as they would with a normal Webpage, giving more emphasis to your keyword phrases, so this should also be used in press release SEO.
    
3. To further expand on press release SEO techniques, most SEO's suggest using accompanying images or videos (that have file names that include the targeted keywords) with the press release. This tactic provides some great visuals for people reading the press release, and also builds more credibility with the search engine.
    
4. The press release SEO strategy should put an emphasis on developing as many on-text keyword phrase backlinks from PR Websites with high Google PageRankings. Quality backlinks are the single-most contributing factor to building PageRank, and to Increase Your Rank so this should be a main focus of the press release SEO campaign.
    
5. There are many free PR Websites out there. But don't be fooled by smoke and mirrors. There aren't as many SEO backlinking benefits from blasting out press releases exclusively to free sites – they simply are not as powerful as the paid sites. Paid sites have more valuable link building opportunities than that of the non-paid PR sites. The paid sites also tend to rank higher in the search engines organically.

When developing a press release SEO strategy, be sure to follow these critical steps to ensure the press release is properly optimized for the search spiders so that maximum SEO benefits are achieved.

As an Atlanta Web Design & SEO Company, we strive to provide our clients with any competitive advantage we can to rank as high as possible on the Google SERPs and to increase the amount of qualified traffic conversions for their company Websites.

Historically, our Atlanta SEO Company and SEO companies around the world have directed clients to purchase and use keyword-focused domain names for their Websites. To further illustrate this SEO tactic, say your company specializes in commercial roofing in Atlanta. Your search engine optimization company may suggest that you to buy “atlantacommercialroofing.com” or a domain with similar targeted keyword relevancy to help increase page and SERPs rankings for your Website.

This SEO ideology may soon be losing relevancy according to Google’s Matt Cutts. In this video, Cutts discusses grievances he’s heard about Google giving too much weight in the SERPs to keyword domains. Because of these complains, Cutts says Google may try to even out the playing field by adjusting its algorithm.

Additionally, Cutts notes his preference for more “brandable” domain names like Hulu.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com, and offers these domains as the model that effective SEO works without using a targeted keyword domain.

In sum, if your company is trying to choose an appropriate domain name for your Website, it’s not entirely necessarily to choose one that includes targeted keywords. You may want to select a domain name that is more catchy and marketable.

Using the Metric System – Assessing the Value in Links

Google’s Page Rank is used to “rank” the importance of every webpage on the Internet. The major factors in determining Page Rank is the number, quality, and relevancy of the inbound links a page receives from other sites. In order for any company to successfully grow their Web presence, they must consult with an effective link building service to not only track the number of links to their site, but assess their quality. In addition, they must have a viable way of creating new links in order to sustain interest in the site.

There are a number of tools that can be used to build links, for example:

1. Google Back Links Checker – it’s from Google, and it’s free, but it offers a relatively small amount of backlink information for a standard user.
2. Linkscape – A pay-for-use tool from SEO company SEOmoz. This utility not only pulls quantity data, but quality of link data as well.
3.  Majestic SEO – Offers both a free and pay version, and can generate useful graphs of backlink history over a period.

No matter what tool, it is essential that it be used in properly and with right knowledge about effective link building, such as someone with the experience in the industry to detect trends and strategize accordingly.

A professional and effective Atlanta SEO company will be able to not only assess the strength of current links, but bolster those that are of higher quality, leading to a greater rate of return. 50 backlinks from weak sites will not prove nearly as useful as one from a top player. In order to properly assess data and determine the ideal SEO strategy, effective link building opportunities such as the three noted above are essential.

The Internet presence of many companies is often limited by two factors – the strength of their page ranking on Google, and the strength and simplicity of their domain name. Unfortunately, most easy to remember domain names have already been taken, and businesses will often choose to buy an expired domain names in order to capitalize on their potential use. And, unfortunately, this can pose a number of problems.

In the same way that a used car’s problems become a new owner’s once they have purchased it, the issues from buying an expired domain name are transferred entirely to the buying company. While potential exists for domain names that are reputable to grant a company instant traffic and popularity, buying an expired domain name carries several risks.

The most significant problem that companies can face when buying expired domain names is that the domain has been blocked by Google or tagged as being in violation of Google’s strict policies. To determine if a Web site comes with undesired baggage, there are a number of tactics companies can implement:

• Use the "cache:yourdomainname.com" tool at Google. This lets a company see the indexed version of the domain name’s site. If no version exists, the site was likely blocked by Google
• Examine links. Review the current domain name’s Web site to see who is linked and linking, and to determine if the links are relevant
• Use the WHOIS database. This can be used to find out when a domain name was first registered. Names that have been registered longer tend to be given more weight by Google.

Just as with a used vehicle, there is no absolute way to determine if a domain name is a “lemon”, but by screening any name a company is looking to purchase, obvious ranking issues can be avoided.

A good SEO consultant can help any company develop link building strategies that get their main page and specified keywords well-ranked with major search engines; and some companies assume that the works stops there.

In reality, a company focused on selling online needs to find ways to ensure that their product description pages (PDPs) are receiving links in order to help increase e-commerce conversion rates. To achieve this, the company needs to work with a reliable Atlanta SEO company on its Deep Linking SEO strategy.

Here are a few ways to increase Deep Linking SEO potential for any e-commerce site:

1) Solicit Product Reviews

It's simple – if a company sends a reviewer a free sample or trial product and asks for a review, they'll almost always receive a deep link in return. So long as the product is of a decent quality, a free sample encourages reviewers to be unbiased and fair in their analysis.

2) Guest Posting

Companies can begin the process of deep link building by making guest posts on other relevant sites. A sports clothing company might be able to guest post on a marathon running site about new technology in the world of spostswear and, in turn, include a link to their PDP in the footer of their post.

3) Current Customers

A company can also ask for testimonials and links from current customers and those consumers who love the product. Many tech-savvy users have their own websites or blogs, and can help in the deep linking seo process.

4) Freebies

Give away a free trial, phone app, or video, and make sure to put it on the PDP. People will come for the freebie, but see the product on their way through.

Deep linking SEO is in many ways more of an art than a science. A tailored Atlanta Link Building program of deep linking strategies can go a long way to increasing e-commerce conversion rates and boosting overall e-commerce sales.

When it comes to maximizing ROI (return on investment) on Internet marketing strategies, companies must examine their costs for “Pay Per Click” (PPC) advertising. With the assistance of a dedicated SEO consultant, a company can see great returns from their PPC campaign, but this type of advertising is in many ways, more art than science.

While there are a number of salient factors that come into play when a company looks at the value of their PPC investment, there are two that stand out – PPC Budget and PPC Bid.

PPC Budget

First, a company needs to determine just how much they should spend on their PPC advertising costs. A reputable Atlanta SEO consultant should provide advice for targeted keyword use and ad scope in order to help develop an effective pay per click budget, but a company must also determine what the value of a single click will mean for them.

This can be roughly estimated by starting with the life-time value of a customer and working backwards through the approximate number of customers developed from leads, the number of leads developed from registrants, and the number of registrants developed per click, giving a maximum value to pay per click.

PPC Bids

Companies must also determine where to set their PPC Bids for pay per click advertising, but higher bids do not always equal higher returns. It is a good idea to manage bids by keyword and use tools such as Google's bid simulator in order to determine a maximum and minimum bid. It is also important to track the quality of keywords that have been selected in order to get the most out of each PPC dollar.

PPC advertising can be an effective way to convert clicks to customers, but finding a good pay per click management company to manage its cost is essential to maximizing ROI.

Each new year presents its own challenges for companies looking to get ahead in the search engine optimization market. As advertising providers increase costs, customers become more savvy and social media continues to rise, a business must ensure that it is prepared for the coming of the new Search Engine Marketing year.

What is Going to Happen:

1) Social Media is not Going Away

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – the list is almost endless, but many of them are gaining in popularity and advertising power with each passing day. Recent studies have shown that most consumers will come in contact with Facebook advertising in some form during their buying process, even if the Facebook link is not the last one they click on.

2) Advertising Will Cost More, Customers Will Pay Less

Estimates put cost per click increases at anywhere from 12-15% in the coming year, driving the amount a business must pay for advertising upward. At the same time, consumers, burned by the recent recession, have begun to use the Web as a tool for searching, rather than buying. Multiple searches are conducted for products and reviews analyzed, and companies need to be prepared to deal with this new reality.

3) Bing! Microsoft May Be a Winner

Despite coming late to the party, the Bing search engine has seen steady growth over the last year and is predicted to continue this upward trend into 2011.

4) Mobility May Mean Money

The marketplace has been crowing for years about the supposed age of mobile e-commerce, but very little aside from Web browsing has happened in the last half decade. Now, with Google working on a credit-card replacing phone and with start-up companies on track to make e-commerce viable, 2011 may just be the year of the mobile money-maker.

What Companies Need to Do About It:

1) Diversify search engine marketing strategies. Businesses need to use Facebook campaigns, viral marketing, and make sure that all of their advertising eggs are not in one basket.

2) Optimize effectiveness. Companies need to have SEO that is viable, straightforward and that generates targeted traffic in order to convert searches to sales.

3) Invest in Bing marketing. Google is still the big fish in this ocean, but Bing cannot be ignored by savvy companies. A good SEO Company should advise that Bing marketing dollars be increased.

4) Do not ignore mobile. This might not be the year it goes big, but waiting an extra 12 months could mean significant lost sales. Start testing the waters using the Google AdWords platform and see what comes up.

2011 will continue the trend of increased SEO diversity and it's important for your company to understand on how to capitalize on these growing search engine marketing trends in the new year!

In 2006, Twitter was launched and the site now has over 175 million users generating 65 million “tweets” per day. Tweets are short messages created by users that have a maximum of 140 characters and are, by default, available for the public to see. They are intended to convey specific, relevant information; and it has long been speculated that the site's growing popularity would have an influence on search engine rankings, a fact recently confirmed by both Google and Bing.

A number of websites have now taken up the cause to see just what impact tweets and the Twitter universe have on search engine rankings overall. Some sites have gone so far as to create two separate linking pages: one promoted via Twitter only, and one via “normal” link building methods in an effort to see which type of advertising – social or traditional – would have a greater impact. Though long-term data is not yet available, the Twitter-based page in one example was able to easily out-distance its link-based competitor in the first few days the experiment was run.

What Does This Mean for E-commerce Companies?

This means that ignoring social media is not an option. It is a near-certainty that the link and tweet-based pages will begin to overlap and influence each other, eventually leading to a stronger search engine ranking for both. This then means that companies must find Search Engine Marketing providers that are able to not only simply create viable organic keyword SEO ranking sets and generate traditional links, but also create targeted tweeting and other social-media driven campaigns.

Opinions matter, especially those given in the moment, a fact that Twitter has capitalized on to substantial effect. In order to compete in the new e-commerce marketplace, companies must be prepared to tweet!

Google Instant and What It Means for SEO in Google

In the computing world, speed is life. Processors are tuned to go ever faster, and new applications and Internet browsers are constantly developed to keep up with the demand for speedy information returned. The quicker consumers can find and click on a company’s Web page, the greater their popularity and potential sales volume will be. One tool that is helping to limit the time consumers spend searching is Google Instant, and it has several impacts on search engine optimization SEO strategy.

What is Google Instant?

• Debuting in September of this year, Google Instant attempts to predict what users will type in based on what they’ve already started typing.
• Unlike auto-complete which was previously used by Google, Google Instant will populate a page with results before a user has hit enter.
• The content will change based on what the user types into the search field.

What this means is that “first page” Google results will now be available as soon as a user begins typing and constantly change. For companies looking to maximize their SEO success, simply cornering the market on one term may no longer be enough. For example, a luxury spa treatments company might choose to optimize their SEO by focusing on those words, garnering them a top spot on Google when the terms are entered. With Google Instant, as soon as the words “luxury spa” are entered, a host of pages will be pulled up based on those terms alone, lowering the chances of the company’s website being seen first.

Google Instant provides a way for companies to use broader link-building strategies used on the most likely first word consumers will type in, as well as those that follow it, to result in an overall ranking on page one of the results.

Holiday Marketing is Crucial to Increasing Online Sales

With the holidays fast approaching and the rise of such pre-holiday events such as Cyber Monday, companies are advised to tweak their online marketing strategies. According to statistics gathered after 2009’s Cyber Monday sale, peak buying times saw over 7 million visits to sites per minute. With the proper advertising and marketing, these visits can translate into big sales numbers.

There are a number of simple holiday marketing strategies that can be employed by any business to increase both targeted traffic and ecommerce sales during the holiday season.

1. Web Design and Display

As soon as Halloween was over, retail stores have Christmas trees up and Carols playing on the loudspeakers. While an online business may not need to jump so early, adding holiday web design touches to a website can show consumers that the site is up to date and has specials for the holidays.

Along that same line, make sure to use those expectations for specials to showcase best-selling items and ones that are actually in stock. Whatever is getting sold should be around to ship out.

2. Pay-per Click (PPC)

Start early with Pay Per Click strategy by designing PPC ads with holiday marketing wording and special deals. Keep track of which PPC ad performs the best and use variations on it for the rest of the holiday season.

3) Retargeting

Google AdWords does a great job of retargeting, which is the science of showing people who has stopped by a website but not bought anything from the ads for that same website when they surf somewhere else. This IP-based technology involves dropping a cookie into the user’s Web browser, and can be a very worthwhile investment for holiday marketing campaigns.

With the right holiday marketing strategy, online retailers can significantly increase both traffic and sales on their website.

According to a recent SEMPO Search Engine Marketing Report, 90% of businesses currently use some form of paid search engine optimization to increase the profitability of their Website. While this number has remained constant over the last three years, 52% of those businesses plan to spend more on SEO marketing in 2010 than in 2009. In other words, SEO works; and when done properly, it continues to work.

However, while the total company numbers have remained the same, the environment in which their SEO is being done has changed – and will change again before the end of the year. Such is the nature of the Internet, and such is the reason that every business would do well to create and monitor a timeline of SEO activities.

This starts with simply keeping a linear recording of when SEO changes were implemented for a company by a provider. As the market changes, it is important to know what was done to the strategy and when.

Using Website Analytics companies must also look at three other areas of interest over time:

• Keyword rankings
• Number of Indexed pages
• Links

Keyword rankings are always of high importance. While it is essential to track high-value keywords to the site, also plot lower-valued ones as well in order to determine if changes in ranking are search-engine or trend based. As well, a provider should periodically query a search engine in order to determine how many of their client’s Web pages are being indexed, and how quickly. Lastly, inbound and outbound site links need to be monitored to understand the flow of traffic.

A company would do well to select an SEO company that can not only design strategies for the “now”, but that also records and uses SEO data to predict and adapt to future trends.

Video SEO – Taking a Look at What Makes It Successful

Traditional search engine optimization techniques have focused on the optimization of keywords and written page content in order to generate first-page rankings with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. This was in large part because search engines were unable and unwilling to index videos and video feeds, making it effectively unsearchable and useless.

Now, many providers including Google have begun to heavily index video content in order to create what are known as “Blended Search Results” when a search is conducted. Blended Search Results are just as they sound – a blend of content types that will hopefully provide the user with the information they are looking for. This is evident in the way videos are displayed in Google results – if there is a relevant video attached to the keywords entered, the video will be displayed as the first or second search result.

Why?

• Usable, indexed videos are still a rare commodity on the Web.
• In order to create effective and balanced search results, relevant videos are almost always displayed as the first result.
• Video titles are given heavy weighting in keyword searches.

What this means is that a properly placed and indexed video is 53 times more likely to find a spot on the first page, at least according to a study conducted by Forrester research. Providers that only use traditional, text-based organic SEO techniques are cutting their clients out of a rare opportunity – to strike at the world of video SEO before the market is cluttered.

While videos abound – YouTube is the easy example – very few of these are properly indexed by search engines. This means that a company can make significant inroads in SEO rankings by submitting keyword-relevant videos and ensuring that they are properly submitted to search engine sites.

This is best done by a dedicated SEO company, one that can ensure that not only does a video’s title and URL contain keyword-rich terminology, but that both a permalink of the video in addition to a feed are established and submitted. In addition, a professional and client-focused SEO company can help to ensure that links to the videos redirect users to the company’s website, rather than that of the video provider, and can assist in developing thumbnail video stills that best capture the visual essence of the company’s preferred keywords.

First-page search engine results don’t come from a haphazard submission of text, and while video is a new and powerful tool in SEO campaigns, it must be properly managed by an experienced SEO consultant in order to reap the maximum benefit for a company.

According to a February 2010 study by digital marketing company iCrossing, companies surveyed had “95% of all their non-branded natural search traffic from page-one results pages across all three major engines”.

This high impact search engine data reinforces what savvy companies already know about getting found online – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is big business. But while getting to the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines is important, it doesn’t guarantee success, and companies need to be constantly monitoring their Web presence. One simple way to do this is through the use of referrers.

Referrers, independent websites that link to a company’s web page, can be an excellent way to keep track of pertinent analytical data for web traffic. While it is simple to install a page view counter, this does not tell a company what it needs to know about how effective its website presence is. In order to know if the current web content is doing the job, companies need specific data to properly tailor their website to their target markets.

To do this, companies need a Search Engine Optimization company that has a user-friendly suite of Website Analytics to analyze data from referrer sites. This information includes data points such as:

• Total number of visits from each referrer link
• How many of these visits are “new”
• How long each visitor stayed on the company’s website.

In addition, these tools can let companies easily see exactly which pages were visited during a customer’s stay on the website, and can offer information about what is working on a site and what needs to be changed. Referrer data will also show companies which referral links are generating the most traffic and allow them to properly focus their SEO and Link Building efforts.

Creating an optimal web presence for a company takes work and dedication. Further, a combination of not only SEO, but also monitoring and building referral links through analyzing Web Analytics has proven to be an excellent strategy in increasing the effectiveness of a company's website.