Search Marketing Post

The ways of making money with online services has changed drastically in the past few years. Today, most people enjoy the benefits of being associated with the online world, due to the large range of profits generated. With time, new programs and ways are being initiated that can help small businesses make monumental money from various services. One of these services is white label SEO. There are more than a few ways to make money through white labeling.

The basics of white labeling

White labeling is fundamentally the way in which a reseller SEO service provider sells SEO services to clients after buying the same from a main service provider. Unlike affiliate program, where the reseller has to use the name of the main service provider to sell his services, white label allows the reseller to sell his products as a private label.

Making money with white labeling

Making money is the first and foremost concern of any business, but making money through white labeling is little different because you can control your business profits as an owner. The pricing structure of white label SEO is extremely unpretentious and advantageous to small businesses that are struggling to make a mark in their niche industry. As a reseller of SEO, SEM services, you can buy the services from a genuine parent service provider and sell them to your clients on your own rates. In simple terms, it can be said that the main service provider will have no hand or control on your pricing. In practical terms, you are just rebranding the services as your own and price them according to your clientele.

How are you making money?

The most common concern for most businesses is the cost factor. Small businesses can hardly invest massive amounts on setting up a business structure and for them, white labeling is the perfect way to make a private clientele of their own by providing quality services. This is probably the cheapest way to grow on the internet. You are selling products of others and making a business of your own. Needless to mention, since you have control over the pricing, you can make profits with almost no significant setup cost. Every client you earn knows the name of your company; and you can significantly increase your base to as many dimensions as you want. However, unless you deliver quality flow of services, white labeling cannot fetch you the right profits. You need to partner with growing firms to increase your online exposure and presence.

Since the popularity of this SEO is increasing every day, more hosting companies are trying to offer best services to resellers for creating a large network. While successful companies are making their share of targeted profit, small businesses are escalating the stairs of success rapidly.

About the Guest Author -

Anita is an online SEO and marketing specialist who works for workmonk.com as project manager and often writes on Seo/Sem and businessmarketing strategies regularly as guest blogger.

A self storage company started their website with a regular self storage website which contained their basic information about their storage facility, a few pictures, phone number, directions, etc;  Just a typical business website. The next challenge was for them to build traffic to the website doing some SEO work and engage in other online marketing campaigns and that kind of worked but it didn’t necessarily have the results they wanted. The owners of facility then decided to do something radically different and that is when they invested in a Self Storage directory.

Starting a self storage directory attracted other self storage facilities to the website wanting to enlist them. And that helped the website’s content grow hence its natural search engine traffic.

How Does Helping Your Competition Help You?

You may ask how helping your competitors help you. A simple answer is data. We live in age of data where data if analyzes correct can help you boost your business. That’s why there are many data analytic tools out there helping you keep track and analyze your data.

By allowing your competitors to have an entry on your website, you learn more about their online traffic, and that can help you make some good marketing decisions and that is exactly what happened in this case.

In addition to learning more about your competition and their traffic, you can also establish an authority in your industry and have other sources of revenue expanding your business.

I have been doing SEO for a solid few years now. I currently work as an SEO consultant and write about SEO as well on SEO blog Search Marketing Post. I think it was 2005 when I made transition from being a web developer into SEO after launching my own business when it was an online soccer store and I had to learn about SEO tactics to improve my ranking.

Prior to that, I had very basic knowledge of SEO. I knew the basic stuff like meta tags, and onsite optimization a bit but I never did dive into it like I do right now. I cared more about my website design and functionality and less search engines. I just assumed I would build it and they would come. But when I did my own online ecommerce business, I couldn’t take a chance. I learned about SEO and I was able to boost my online ecommerce store after a few years I sold it to my competitor because he was more established than I was.

After that business adventure, I started working full time as an SEO expert and consultant for various small and large companies as well as SEO freelancing, so I had to stay up to date with latest Google ranking signals. I found myself spending a ton of hours reading all popular SEO blogs and publications, networking with other SEOs, and doing SEO testing to see what works and what doesn’t. In other words I found myself chasing Google’s signals and got obsessed so that I even subscribed to patent email notifications reading latest Google Patents’ seeing what they are up to in order to get ahead of them.

After couple of years of being totally obsessing with Google’s latest signals and factors, I came to realize that instead of Chasing Google and their changes, I can keep up with them or even stay ahead of them if I understand Google’s business model effectively.

Google Ads

Google’s main source of revenue is their adwords and adsense but adwords, the ads you see on the side of the organic search results is what brings them the big bucks. And in order for those ads to continue to be effective, they should work for the advertisers so they can continue investing in Google’s adwords program and in order for that to happen, google search results should be as relevant as possible helping user to find they were searching for so they keep using Google. In other word Google is constantly focusing on improving user experience so searchers keep using Google when they are looking for something on line.

Think User

As mentioned earlier, Google has got it right by caring about user experience. The more they improve their search quality, they more users like to search Google hence they will retain their search dominance.  So as an SEO, if you think user, then you can help improve your SEO.

Improve User Experience

Both Google and Bing in particular Google are looking at many user experience signals a couple that is known to the SEO community is your browsers back button; If a user searches for something and lands on your website but doesn’t like your website and clicks on back, then that means that user didn’t like your website or found the user experience poor. This will be a negative ranking point against you and if you get enough users clicking on back button or bouncing out of your website then that is good enough for you to remove ranking on that key term.   A user leaving your website without spending much time on it or doing much pageviews is called a user bounce and high bounce rate hurts your website SEO and authority. This is one of many signals that Google and Bing look at in order to examine a website usability. Other signals are social media shares, signals, website citations, and many more, just too many signals to chase. Just a few years ago, Google was looking at over 200 ranking signals, now after Panda Update and improving machine learning algorithms, these signals could way over a thousands, too many for any SEO to keep up and it would be awful waste of time to chase them anyway. Instead improving user experience of your website will cover many of those signals and helps you stay ahead of the game.

Focusing on great content and a great and usable website only helps you improve usability of your website. If you have a blog, focus on writing better content. If you have an ecommerce website, make sure you have great and user friendly website that loads fast, has great content, your products have consumer reviews, and you offer products and services that are in demand at a reasonable price.

Your SEO and marketing goals should be aligned with your user and what user is looking for. And if you think user and are strive to offer a website with quality content, that users are going to like, they are more likely to share with your website with others and link to you, and this natural pattern of sharing and talking about your website, with your other SEO and marketing efforts will help improve your search engine rankings.

Should You Stop Traditional SEO?

The quick answer is no. Traditional SEO tasks should be done; Both onsite and offsite. You should always make it easy for the crawlers to index and understand your content easily,  continue creating fresh quality content, and you should continue promoting your website and its content in order to grab others attention so they can improve your ranking.  However chasing google signals and SEO myths could only get you tired and waste your time and not deliver the results, and now that you know Google is making user experience their highest priority, you want to focus on a website and content that users like in order to stay ahead of the game.

Reach Our To Your Audience

The traditional saying of “if you build it they will come” doesn’t apply any more. There is way too much content on the web and way too many websites in your area to compete with so if you are not promoting website and content, no matter how quality your content or your website is, you are not going to be found hence no one is going to talk to you or link to you and therefore your rankings won’t improve. Use social media and social bookmarking to market your website and its content, in order to grab some attention and get people talking about you and linking to you.

Create a Community
Use social media such as Google+, Twitter, and Facebook to create a following and community for your website. Stay in touch with your audience, encourage them to participate, and stay active and keep your community going. The more following you have, the more it will help your search rankings.

The take away is that don’t get too obsessed with latest Google or search engine ranking factors but  if you stay aligned with their goals and think user, then you will have higher chance of success in world of search ranking and online marketing.

Traditional SEO is dead. I am not trying to contradict my earlier post on SEO not having changed but webmasters and SEOs should change their way of  old school thinking of creating randomized content that are keyword rich and focus on creating fresh quality content.  Google caffeine and recent Google freshness algorithm update encourages webmasters to update content their website constantly and Google Panda Update looks high quality content to be found in search results.

Installing a blog is one of the best ways that allows websites and businesses to produce that fresh quality content on their website in order to get some good and stable organic traffic with very little trouble. And having a blog allows you to experiment what type of content attracts the most type of traffic for your website.

What To Blog About?
My best recommendation is to stay as close as possible to your nitch. The more relevant you are to your industry the better type of traffic you get. And by better type of traffic I mean the traffic that converts. For example on this blog that is about SEO and Search Marketing, I can blog about Apple’s iPhone5 which is likely to come out this fall, or talk about the 2012 presidential election and how Ron Paul is sup rising in the primaries being among top 3 politicians, and the blog may bring some organic traffic, but since the theme of this website is not about smart phones or politics, the audience of the website are more likely to bounce and that will be the type of traffic that won’t help you in long term specially if you had a business that you have a product or service you are trying to push. But if I blog about SEO tools and Local SEO tool, and if I am selling my SEO consulting services then this traffic is more likely to convert. And even if it doesn’t convert, it helps grow my brand and authority in my industry and in search engines.

Search Engine Authority
Modern search engines in particular Google are putting heavy focus on website and domain authority and back in days, the best way to grow authority was to do link building and the more and better links you had to your website the better. That rule still applies today except that you must had equality content on your website to justify your incoming links. The more and better content you have, the better those links will help you rank. If you do a logical comparison, if site A had 100 quality links and thin content and Site B also has 100 quality links but is rich in quality and fresh content, which site do you think is gong to generate more traffic and rank for more keyword? If you guessed site B then you are correct. Site B also will get better “authority ranking” because of its fresh quality content.

What is Quality Content
SEOs have different opinion on quality content and I like to  share mine. Quality content is the content that users like or find useful. And the way search engines look at website usability is that they see how users react to content. They are looking at onsite factors such as page views and bounce rates to determine is interested in content or not. For example if someone types a search phrase, for example, Search Marketing Magazine and lands on this website but doesn’t like the content or theme of this website and clicks on back button on browser or bounce out to another website, search engines will count that as a negative point toward that website for that key term. So web masters should focus on creating type of content that is intriguing to the user.

Also search engines look at outside factors such as inbound links, social media shares and votes, and citations of a website in order to determine the quality of a website content.

What Type of Blog Software to Use
My answer is simple wordpress. I proudly enforce wordpress because it is free, it is up to date, it is SEO friendly, and it is the most common used platform. I highly recommend you don’t  write your own blogging software unless you have a good business or technology preseason for it. As I mentioned in my earlier post on my 2012 SEO strategy, clean code is essential to SEO success and wordpress customized properly, is one of the most SEO friendly content management softwares out there that is primarily used as a blogging software but it can also be customized to be used as other type of websites such as business websites, community websites, forums, and even commerce websites.  It runs on open source there are a ton of good plugins and themes available that makes your life easier.

How to Promote Your Blog
Installing a blog and writing quality content is not enough you need to promote your blog. Add your blog in top blog directories, do some minor link building, then promote each of your posts on social networks and share them on your social media accounts in order for them to get attention of other bloggers and websites. If you use wordpress, it will automatically ping Google but to be on safe side, you can ping Google manually every time you put write a new post. Also it maybe a great idea to join other online blogging communities to networks. There are a plenty of them available online, some are paid and some are free. When you join those community, you can share you content with them and promote your blog there and that is how you will get a ton of traffic, exposure, and links that helps you rank better. High quality article submission sites will help as well and writing guest posts for other websites in your industry and linking back to your blog also helps your blog rank better and grow in authority. Also allowing guest post on your blogs help your blog have fresh quality content and also allows you to get to know other bloggers in your nitch and network with the. I have noticed that when you allow guest posts on your blog, those that wrote those guest posts do a lot of promotion of that post for you and share your post on social media, and etc. I wrote a post last year about why I post on famous blogger and that shows some importance of guest blogging.

How Much Time or Resources to Spend On Your Blog
As much as you can. There are some business owners that hire full time bloggers to write multiple daily posts for them. The search traffic you get from your blog can have the highest ROI mainly because it is generated based on long tail keywords and long tail keywords in world of search marketing are proven to  have the highest conversion rate. That is how some bloggers make a living, some of them good living off blogging. They get very relevant affiliate ads, and some even sell very relevant products but they all start with blogging, grow their community and following, and then they introduce products and services. But if you had a small business and already have a product or service, then why not focus on a blog and spend a good amount of your time and resources on your blog coming up with content that drivers users to your blog.

Should my Blog be part of my main website?
Most certainly yes. One of the reasons you are installing a blog is to attract search traffic to your website by installing a blog and blogging. And unless you have a good reason to install the blog on a different domain or subdomian, i highly recommend you install it on your root domain. (www.domain.com/blog/) so the content and links to it are also attributed to your website and increase in your overall authority and rank.

In conclusion, blogging is one of the best ways business can improve their organic search traffic with high conversion rate if they focus on good quality content that is relevant to their business and industry and grow their brand and authority.

Today is the last day of 2011 and I have been brainstorming on what kind of SEO strategy I want to follow for 2012 based on my 2011 experience on what methods are most effective and what aren’t!

Below are some of SEO methods I will be pursuing in 2012

Technical SEO (code) – I will try my best not to reinvent the wheel and use the existing SEO friendly platforms such as wordpress and SEO friendly ecommerce platforms. As an ex-programmer, I know from experience it can be very time consuming developing SEO friendly websites and there are good platforms out there such as wordpress that can be very SEO friendly by making some minor customization so why invest time to put up sites from scratch.

 Content – Focus even more on user. User friendly content became even more important with search engines  in 2011. The more users like a content, the better it will rank because search engines are looking at many usability signals such as bounce rate and social media signals to rate content. So I certainly need to step up my writing and content efforts to get better ranking.

Credibility – I am thinking of spending less time doing traditional link building and more building relationships. That is why I am intending to join all the blogger networks, SEO forums, small business forums, and attend local meet pus and networking events in order to get myself out there. I want to spend less time doing artificial link building like link exchange and spend more time blogging, connecting to other bloggers and webmasters, and business owners.  This is the best way to get natural links and credulity for your website that has lasting relationship.

It looks like my 2012 SEO strategy is actually going to be quite simpler than my 2011. If not simpler  then at least more fun; Using existing  SEO friendly platforms, creating fun content that users like, and getting out there and getting to know the peers in the industry to make some lasting connections to increase credibility.

About Author: Al Sefati is an SEO consultant and founder of Sefati Search Consulting. Al writes about SEO and search marketing here on Search Marketing Post as well has many other online SEO and search marketing blogs.

It seems that these days many people are claiming SEO is changing. With the popularity for social media some are diverting their attention from SEO.

All the recent changes to search engine algorithms, as both Google and Bing admitted they use social media rankings signals into their algorithms. Then it is Google’s Panda Update and Bing’s equivalence to it which focuses on search engines machine learning which focuses on user behaviors and reaction to a website and its content and ranks that website accordingly.

In a nutshell, search engines are going away from traditional ranking factors such as keyword density, Meta tags, and even some linking schemes and looking at more advanced signals to determined ranking such as user behaviors and how they react to a website. While this has promoted many SEOs to change the way they optimize their website and create websites and content for the user not only search engines, I can strongly say the fundamental of search engines are still the same.

SEO Fundamentals Still the Same

It is true that ranking factors have changed as search engines are evolving and becoming better machines to return the most relevant search results to their users, hence focusing more on user signals such as social media and bounce rate and other user experience signals, but the fundamental of search engine optimization are still the same and following the 3C; Code, Content, and Creditability.

It is true that ranking factors have changed as search engines are evolving and becoming better machines to return the most relevant search results to their users, hence focusing more on user signals such as social media and bounce rate and other user experience signals, but the fundamental of search engine optimization are still the same and following the 3C; Code, Content, and Creditability.

Code – Search engines still need you to have a search engine friendly website so they can crawl, index, and rank it better. That is why both Google and Bing have webmaster tools communicating to you all the crawlers’ errors and warnings they have and onsite optimization guidelines that help you better optimize your website for search engines.  Code optimization still matters a lot to Google and Bing. A client that has a Bail Bonds in Los Angeles improved their rankings significantly after they changed their old site dynamic website into an SEO friendly wordpress site, and their organic rankings suddenly jumped because of that.

Content – All SEOs know that content is king. And search engines love good content. And good content isn’t only a text with a bunch of keywords but it is the content users like and react well to and like. That could be anything like text content, images, videos, infographics, etc. Search engines are getting more advanced in determining how to distinguish quality content from poor content by looking at user reactions to the content. They look at user factors such as social media sharing, bounce rate, and inbound links to determined if the content quality. Also Google cares a lot about content freshness and that is why we recommend all businesses to have a business blog. One of our clients, who have a self storage directory, was able to improve organic traffic noticeably by installing a self storage blog.

Credibility – This refers to how credible your website is. And traditionally search engines have looked at backlinks to your website and it’s content to determine credibility of your website and quality of its content.  The better and more quality links you have to your website, the more credible it is. But recent years, search engines are also looking at other signals such as social media signals, and citation of your website as other credibility factors to determine ranking.

In conclusion, while many people think SEO fundamentals have changed, I respectfully yet strongly disagree. SEO fundamentals haven’t changed but SEO rankings have changed as they always have.