SEO and Search Engine Friendly Press Releases from SlickRockWeb

New Press Release for Belize Client Las Terrazas

2008-05-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

SlickRockWeb has released a new "search engine friendly" press release for its client Las Terrazas in Belize.

The press release is titled, "Las Terrazas Real Estate Development in Belize Releases Phase II Residences at Pre-construction Prices" and can be viewed here.

About SlickRockWeb:

SlickRockWeb Inc. (www.slickrockweb.com) is a leading provider of affordable SEO (search engine optimization) and SEO services. SlickRockWeb creates and manages cost-effective PPC (pay per click) campaigns and can improve a website’s organic search engine rankings through a variety of proprietary SEO methods and offers search engine friendly company press releases. SlickRockWeb also provides a full suite of web development tools, web makeovers and custom designs, e-business solutions and web marketing strategies. SlickRockWeb’s clients hail from across the United States and three foreign countries. For more information, please visit www.slickrockweb.com or call (800) 975-5695.

About Las Terrazas:

Las Terrazas (www.lasterrazasbelize.com), an island community of 78 fully-furnished Belize villas on 4.8 acres of private beachfront, is located on the popular vacation destination of Ambergris Caye, Belize. Each residential villa has been fully furnished and handsomely appointed with stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, flat-panel televisions and everything necessary for new owners to enjoy immediate occupancy. A renters' pool is also available. Ambergris Caye is Belize’s largest island and known for the phrase, “no shirt, no shoes, no problem.” Residents of Las Terrazas will enjoy luxurious yet laid-back island living and the convenience of reaching Ambergris Caye from Belize City by a short flight or high-speed sea ferry. Multiple airlines also offer convenient flights from the United States and Canada.

New Minnesota Small Business Resource

2007-08-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

Launch of MyMinnesota411.com deemed a Success

SlickRockWeb Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of their new Minnesota Small business Directory. This new directory located at www.myminnesota411.com is a free online directory and resource site for any Minnesota small business.

Why is my competitor's website ranking higher than mine?

2007-03-03T20:02:00.000-08:00

We get this question all time and there can be many many reasons why. The algorithms for the search engines take into account dozen's and dozen's of criteria to determine a website's rank.

One of the not so obvious reasons can be the actual age or registered age of a website. A recent client asked us to explain why one of their competitors was ranking higher than them even though on the page content of their competitor seemed very sparse and not very relevant. This can almost always be explained by off-page factors.

The competitor's site was created in 2002 and is registered until 2015. That is an actual age of 5 years and a registered age of 13 years. Our client's site targeting Minnesota weddings is a relatively new site and had an actual age of 2 years and a registered age of 3 years. We informed our client to extend their domain name registration for another 7 years to get an even 10 year spread. It would be the best $70.00 they could spend.

I first learned about this concept in one of Google's 100 page patent applications. Because many scam sites are only registered for 1 year at a time Google came up with a creative way to determine which sites were more serious and legitimate about staying in business. The age of a website and the "spread" of its registration period are one factor that Google and probably the other major search engines take into account to determine legitimacy and "expertness". So if your site was created in 1995 then a forward registration period of 2008 would be fine. However, because our client's site is relatively new compared to their competitor it makes sense to extend their registration to look more serious in the eyes of the search engines. Now I am not saying that this simple little trick will instantly help you but it is one of dozens of criteria that the search engines look at.

The other important issue is that their competitor has a popularity index value of 107. That is very good and it is partially because their competitor has had an online presence of some form since 1999.

By comparison our client's popularity index is only 9.

This is clearly one of your site's weaknesses in terms of the search engines. It is also the most time consuming and expensive to improve. This is where our search engine friendly press releases ($300.00 each) can add anywhere from 5-10 points to your popularity index. A couple of our releases that were picked up by TV stations across the country added 30 points to one of our client's website.

More on the popularity index in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading the SlickRockWeb affordable SEO Blog. "Bringing you business one click at a time".

SlickRockWeb writes article for "Small Biz" magazine

2006-10-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

I think I neglected to mention a few months back we(SlickRockWeb) were invited to write an advertorial on SEO and SEM for "Small Biz" magazine which is produced by Businessweek to cater to the small to medium sized business demographic.

Of course we said yes and I am happy to say that our article titled "340 Million Reasons Why SEO Can Help You Grow" turned out great and was published at the end of September.

We are quite proud of this achievement and I think it is a good testament to our abilities to have been invited by Businessweek. The print article is in the Fall/2006 quarterly issue of "Small Biz" on newstands all over the country and at most major bookstores. The supplemental online article is hosted by Sapien partners on their website and can be read here.
"http://www.expert-insights.com/report.asp?id=716"

SlickRockWeb is quickly becoming a leading provider of affordable SEO and search engine marketing services. SlickRockWeb creates and manages cost-effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and can improve a website’s natural ranking in the search engines through a variety of proprietary SEO methods. We have produced tremendous results for clients, many of them seeing triple digit growth in web generated sales leads, and all for less than the cost of one magazine print advertisement.

Even spending as little as $300 to have an optimized PPC account created or using our SEO-Optimax service to do a simple SEO recoding of a homepage can have a tremendous impact on a small business. In fact our clients who have invested in our SEO services have seen their business grow by anywhere from 30-100% this past year which has corresponded with huge increases in traffic to their websites from the search engines.

We have had tremendous results using our proprietary methods. Many of these results are shown on our website and in fact using our own techniques has given SlickRockWeb the #1 position on Google for "affordable web development" out of 20,900,000 results.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=affordable+web+development&btnG=Google+Search

Below are just a few of the SEO results we have achieved for our clients:

Kanantik Reef & Jungle Resort (Belize):
#3 in Google for belize resort

Daffy Apple Corporation:
#1 in Google for caramel apples denver

Las Terrazas
#3 in Google for belize condos

Mines & Associates:
#5 in Google for eap programs

How to setup ad scheduling on Google Adwords

2006-08-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

In mid June of this year Google added a long overdue feature to its Adwords pay-per-click campaigns. Ad scheduling which Google also refers to as "dayparting" allows you to schedule when you want your sponsored ads to show up on Google and/or Google's content network and when you want them to not show up (be temporarily paused). In addition, more advanced users can automatically modify their bids based on time-of-day and day-of-week cycles to improve campaign performance.

So for instance if your ad campaigns targets an audience that would only really be searching for your ads during normal business hours then it makes sense for you to have the ads turned off during the weekends or even during the very late evening hours.

Some of the click fraud audits that we have done seem to show alot of the click fraud occurs during the 12:00 midnight to 5:00 am times so it also makes sense for some of our clients to have their ads off during these periods.

Every client and business will be different and many businesses may get the majority of their online business occuring during the weekends so it would thus not make sense to turn their ads off on the weekends. Thus the decision to use ad scheduling should be done on a case by case basis.

To use this new feature you log onto your Adwords account and then you can enable it via the Edit Campaign Settings page. Below we show you the step by step process to enable and setup ad scheduling or "dayparting".

Step 1: Log onto your Adwords account and then click on the "Edit Campaign Settings" link as depicted in the image above.

Step 2: Scroll down the page and in the lower left portion of the page is a section called "Advanced Options". Click on the link called "Turn on ad scheduling" to enable the ad scheduling feature.

Step 3: Click on "Edit" for the days of the week you want to schedule your ad to show or not show. You will be allowed to select any block of time to turn off your ad and you can even select the quick link for weekends to turn off the ad for the entire weekend. The combinations of scheduling are endless and you choose certain days and/or hours of the day to turn off your ads.

Good luck and as always if you have any questions or would like to have an SEO expert help with the management of your pay-per-click accounts feel free to visit our website at SlickRockWeb.com.

Question: Are meta tags important for SEO?

2006-07-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

Answer: We get this question all the time. Alot of people seem to think that the keyword meta tag is all it takes to get listed in the search engines and if you are not listed you must optimize the the meta tags.

Here is a good example to start off with in an effort to try and dispell the myth that the keyword tag is so important. Mathematically if you figure for example there are 29,200,000 results for the search "affordable web development" it is near impossible to have 29,200,000 results sorted and ranked solely based on the 300 - 450 characters that might occur in the keyword meta tag. And that is for ONLY one keyword phrase combination. Most keyword tags contain many different keyword phrases. Next if you look at our site we rank #1 out 29,200,000 results for the extremely competitive keyword phrase "affordable web development" and here is the clincher ...... we don't have a keyword tag anywhere on our homepage.

Search results in yahoo

How do you suppose we rank so well and we don't even have a keyword meta tag??? Because the search engines have stopped putting any importance on most meta tags years ago. I can find you hundreds of examples of top ranking sites that don't even use ANY meta tags. We also rank #5 for "Affordable SEO" .... again we did that without using a keyword meta tag.

Back in 2002 Google began completely ignoring the keyword meta tag because it had become so misused. If you consider the amount of spamdexing (stuffing of Keywords shamelessly into Keyword Tags) it's not hard to figure out why the search engines starting discounting this tag. In September of 2002 AltaVista also abandoned the keyword meta tag. At that time Inktomi was the only major search engine supporting the keyword meta tag. Since then the search engines have kept their algorithms and ranking criteria's very close to the vest so no one knows for sure if any of the search engines even look at the keyword meta tag anymore. Most SEO experts agree that it is of very little importance. I challenge you to find me a SEO expert who would argue any of these points with me. In fact I would love to have anyone contact me and discuss why they believe they are important and the basis for why they believe that.

The ranking of a page for a specific keyword is a very complex process and the search engine algorithms have very complex multivariate equations taking into account dozens of criteria to sort and rank the sites for a specific keyword. This is precisely why "natural" SEO will be such an important discipline in the coming years. If you think about a specific keyword phrase that is important to your business .... there are essentially 10 spots for that keyword on the first page of Google. Those 10 spots are fixed and will probably not increase much. However, the number of companies competing for those top 10 spots increases every day and every month and every year. It is the law of supply and demand. The supply will not be much different 5 or 10 years from now. I can guarantee to you that the demand will however be VERY different 5 or 10 years from now.

Finally it is human nature to still do what you believe in your heart will help so for those of you who insist on playing with and changing the keyword meta tag here are a couple simple tips on using the keyword meta tags. Keep the number of repeated keywords or phrases to a maximum of three. Use Keywords, which are relevant to your page and target market and make sure any words used in the keyword tag for that specific page also show up somewhere on the visible part of the page. Keep the number of characters in the keyword tag to around 450 characters or less. If you ignore these rules you could incur a SE penalty which would do far more damage than the almost unperceivable good that you think having the keyword meta tag will do you. Actually messing with the meta tags has the potential to do far more damage and than the very trivial good it could do. The "description" meta tag is treated differently and it is probably the ONLY meta tag that carries any weight with the search engines. But again there is very specific criteria on how to use this tag which I will save for another day.

I hope this was educational and takes one step in dispelling some of the very persistent SEO myths that are still circulating across the internet.

SEO Q and A by SlickRockWeb

2006-07-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

Well I decided to finally get my own Blog. I resisted getting a cell phone for many years and I guess the same has been true for starting my own Blog. But here I am starting my own SEO blog. As the owner and operator of a SEO firm, SlickRockWeb.com, I have been at the forefront of the this new fledgling industry and I have to say it is an exciting plact to be. SEO has and will continue to revolutionize the way small businesses compete and advertise in a global market.

The definition of SEO, as defined by Wikipedia.org is the following: Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.

SEO to me is a combination of computer science, marketing, HTML programming, data mining, business intelligence, and analytical research.

I hope to provide real life example of how SEO has helped some of our clients and I hope this blog will provide an avenue for you the audience to ask questions, post ideas, and just sometimes talk about anything that comes to mind.

Well that is all I can think of for my first and introductory post.