For increased traffic, conversions and sales during the holiday season, celebrate Christmas in July by getting the SEO help you need - now.

The holiday season is a peak time for shoppers and, to get an increased share of those holiday dollars, you need to begin using the right organic SEO techniques today.

If you had a so-so season last year, focus on turning that into a good season. If you had a good season last year, let’s boost your SEO techniques and go for great!

You might be wondering why you need to start using the right SEO techniques now for to get the attention of holiday shoppers.

It’s a good question. The reality is that it takes time for search engine spiders to index your pages; for you to create, optimize and/or expand your content; and for your rankings to become boosted by your SEO/SEM strategies.

For your “Christmas in July” strategies, you should:

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Do you know what a search marketing scam looks like?

The email read:

Thanks for your time. Once again this is guaranteed first page placement in the sponsored links on GOOGLE 24/7 in The US at flat rate pricing.
There is a onetime set up fee of $79.95. There are NO Contracts. Keep in mind once this placement is sold I cannot sell them to anyone else. I can get you online the same day.

A client had forwarded me this email he had received. He wanted to know if it could be this easy. Could there really be some search engine ranking cheats that would allow his site to appear at #1 for any word for the low, low price of $79.95? Certainly sounded a lot easier then all this content work and this link building drudgery.

I explained that this was a classic search marketing scam. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know what a canonical issue is?

If you are relatively savvy about SEO, you know that your site should have a robots.txt, a human site map and a sitemap.xml. These are considered to be basic elements that you add to a site for SEO purposes. But did you know that you also need a canonical redirect?

Fixing canonical issues is important. A canonical issue can wreak havoc on your site in the search results. It can cause the search engines to penalize your site and remove pages from your site from the results. And all it takes is a simple oversight on your part with your site.

Is your site susceptible to a canonical issue?

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Introducing the newest member of The Search Guru Expert SEO Team: Rebecca Koluder, Search Engine Marketing Analyst

Rebecca Koluder will be providing numerous search engine optimization services, including assisting TSG clients with their pay per click management (PPC management). She will also be providing written reports to clients that highlight the progress of their organic SEO campaigns.

Koluder has worked in the telecommunications field for the past ten years, focusing on project management, regulatory management and quality assurance, along with financial analysis and regulatory compliance. Most recently, she was a quality rater for Google.

Experienced Google Quality Rater

Overall, Koluder says, being a quality rater means that she supported the “high quality of the user experience with Google. Quality raters have the unique responsibility of being the ‘human intervention’ within Google search. We helped determine if web sites were using deceptive techniques to ‘fool the system’ to have their site displayed as a valid search result.”

“It was quite interesting,” she adds, “to see the variety of lengths some sites went to in order to attempt to fool the system. As the use of the Internet continues to grow, companies realize the increasing importance of a strong Internet presence and, unfortunately, some are willing to forgo best practices in order to achieve the desired search placement.”

Transition to Search Engine Optimization Company

Koluder made the decision to join the expert SEO team at The Search Guru in April 2008. She made that decision because, “as more and more people turn to the Internet for their information, it is increasingly important that companies use expert and ethical SEO techniques to optimize their sites’ performances, and utilize all of the white hat tools available in order to promote the goods and services offered.”

Her favorite part of the job is helping TSG meet the needs of our clients through ethical expert SEO practices.

More about Rebecca

“I have been married for nearly eight years, and we have two wonderful sons. I am a certified body sculpting instructor, and enjoy teaching classes, exploring with my family, and spending time outdoors. Our oldest son was born with a heart defect, and we have been actively involved with the American Heart Association to raise money for the awareness and treatment of Congenital Heart Defects.”

Welcome, Aboard!

How “green” is your site? Your keywords’ supply and demand changes and your site should too.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is a mantra for those who are environmentally aware. But it should be a mantra for those who do SEO as well. When you check a website for keywords, you should also occasionally recheck the old keywords.

Knowing how to pick keywords for a site is important, but you need to make sure that those keywords remain useful to your site. Your sites’ keywords supply and demand can rise and fall in relation to trends and seasonal changes. The ideal amount of keywords found in summer may not be as effective in winter or if you check a website for keywords one year, a year later they may not be as effective.
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