What Is Search Engine Marketing?

Putting content in front of people who overtly and explicitly express a desire, via keywords for a particular product, service or a piece of information.

What is a long tail keyword?

A long tail keyword (or key phrase) is the set of words that is typed into the search box of a search engine to find a particular business or topic. An example of a long tail keyword is "affordable ecommerce website developers".

How Long Does It Take?

We're asked this over and over, the best way to answer this is by saying it really depends on your industry and the keywords you select. No two companies are exactly the same.

Paid Search vs. Organic Search

Paid search is when an organization pays to have their website and service appear at the top of search results. When a user searches a specific term, ads that fit this keyword appear as the first group of results. Advertisers use the Google Keyword Tool to see which keywords and phrases are being used, and match these keywords to their business to service a specific niche, product and/or service.

Organic search is search results that match Google’s search algorithm, matching websites that closely suit the keyword being searched by the user. A website with credibility, good content, and authority in a specific area is more likely to appear near the top of a search query.

Both strategies offer highly advantageous end-goals for any website: appearing on the first page of Google translates to more visitors for the site.

What Does It Cost?

As you can see, both organic and PPC search have their advantages and drawbacks. The important thing is that both have short-term and long-term advantages that greatly outweigh any negatives. Interestingly, a combination of both is found to be the best way to get results from search engines. Most of the time, the two strategies bounce off of one another, providing benefits in one area and then feeding another, which leads to unparalleled growth for an organization’s digital presence.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO tactics are those that are meant to trick the search engines or site users in an effort to create a shortcut to higher search rankings. Those tricks can include: using duplicate or low quality content, paid link schemes, cloaking (delivering different content to the search engines and the user), keyword stuffing, and trying to hide keywords on the page (like using text the same color as the background). All of these tactics violate the guidelines set forth by the major search engines.

They are a bad idea and a waste of time. The time spent on trying to game the system is better employed in creating a better site (with quality content and a good user experience). With the release of Google’s Penguin algorithm update in April of 2012, these tactics became even less effective than they had been. If you are talking with a company about doing SEO work for your website, you need to ensure that they will not be using any of these tactics on your behalf.

HTTP vs. HTTPS: Why Should You Care?

The difference is that encrypted HTTPS is the basic price of security these days.

You may have heard people urging you to switch your website to the HTTPS security encryption. They cite Google’s announcement that HTTPS is a ranking signal and that failure to switch could mean your ranking will take a hit.

How Long Will My Premium Listing Last?

No one can guarantee how long the listing stay due to the competitive nature of your keywords and industry. The major search engines changes their algorithms often in order to prevent spamming and illegal listing tactics. We must continue to make sure our projects meet these new requirements on a monthly basis.

We run a site audit every week in order to review your site's compliance and make the necessary changes.

Once we achieve 1st and/or 2nd page results, we must continue our marketing activities to keep you in those positions.