The Rank Magic Blog

Social Bookmarking For Our Clients

April 29, 2009 ::: Because of the growing importance of social bookmarking and the increased attention it's getting from the search engines, we're adding a social bookmarking component to our normal link building services for Rank Magic clients. Now in beta mode for evaluation, we're submitting clients to five major bookmarking sites: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo! Buzz.

If this works out well, we may expand to more sites. If you have a favorite that's not on our list, drop us a line and we'll consider adding it.

If you're not a client of ours, let me recommend that you submit your own web site to these sites. In fact, even if you are a client of ours, it can't hurt to submit yourself. If we've already submitted you, your submission will count as another favorable vote for your site and improve your rating.

Best Practices During a Website Redesign

April 26, 2009 ::: Performing a complete website redesign is a lot of work, and if your website currently has good rankings, you need to do everything possible to preserve that visibility in the search engines.

Jill Whalen , CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter, and she wrote a comprehensive article on this subject for Search Engine Land recently. She covers these main scenarios

• Changing URLs, web site navigation structure, or site architecture

• Adding flash to your web site

• Adding or changing content and HTML tags

Check out her article for specifics on how to manage each of these scenarios.

Welcome New Clients

April 20, 2009 ::: Sometimes the best of intentions go unfulfilled. It's been our intention to highlight the businesses of some of our new clients in this blog, but the last time we did so was way back in June of last year. So with apologies for the delay, let's introduce some clients who've joined us since then.

• Toyjobs is the dominant toy industry recruiter, filling toy company jobs since 1981. Nobody fills more toy jobs than Toyjobs!
• JD Carton & Son Records Management Services provides comprehensive document management solutions including online storage of critical records and documents.
• JLB General Contractors specializes in hardscape design, inground swimming pools, and fixing waterproofing and drainage problems in New Jersey.
• Omland Engineering Associates provide full site development and municipal engineering services throughout New Jersey.
• Back Home Safely is a home safety modification company in New Jersey that helps modify your home to suit your safety and accessibility needs.
• Above & Beyond provides virtual office assistants, office space for rent and Quickbooks accounting in the northern New Jersey area.
• Total Health Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Center in Florham Park, NJ applies the latest state of the art technology to remove pain and physical limitations.
• Rod's Steak & Seafood Grille is New Jersey’s legendary steakhouse restaurant - widely known as the best steak restaurant in Morris County.
• The experienced wedding videographers at 1-2 Remember Studios offer complete wedding videography services throughout New Jersey.
• California fashion consultant, style & wardrobe consultant and author of Brenda Kinsel's Fashion Makeover; 30 Days to Diva Style! Get your image makeover from Brenda's fashion columns and books.

  

Link Building With Google Alerts

April 18, 2009 ::: Here's an idea to build quality one-way links to your site. It's a bit labor-intensive, but can be well worth the trouble -- especially if you have an assistant or intern who can be tasked with this effort.

Sign up for Google Alerts and enter keywords you want to promote. For example, you might sign up for "Brooklyn eye doctor". Whenever those keyword phrases pop up, Google sends you an email with a link to where the phrase was used. Lots of times your term will appear in a blog or on a social networking site like LinkedIn or Facebook or other social sites like those discussed in our April 13 post below.. Often someone may be asking questions about the topic that you can reply to -- and include a link to content on your web site in the process.

The point here is to get your site included in the mix of online discussions of the topics you care about. Prospects will follow those links and your search engine rankings may well improve at the same time.

Social Bookmark Button

April 13, 2009 ::: Social networking and social bookmarking sites provide a wonderful source of one-way incoming links to your web site, and they seem to be getting a lot of attention by the search engines. Sites like MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, Faves, Digg, Linkedin, and many others can be important as part of your  link building. They’re becoming even more important as Google increasingly focuses on the social networking sphere.

Adding the free AddThis bookmark tool to your web site can make a surprising difference. It's a simple piece of code that lets your visitors build your links for you. You can see it at work on our blog (upper right corner -- try it out!). To install it on your own site, go to www.AddThis.com, watch the video, and download the little code snippet to place on your pages.

The code looks nice and small on your pages, but opens up to allow bookmarking in more than 40 different sites:

Successful Local Search Results

April 8, 2009 ::: In a recent article on Search Engine Journal, Ryan Caldwell offered three keys to success with local search.

1. Anchor Text and Authority -- get links from authoritative local sites, and make sure the anchor text (the clickable text of the link) contains keywords and, if possible, a geographic reference.
2. Local Links -- see what local sites are linking to your local competitors and get links form those same sites.Ryan also recommends you get links from DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW and Business.com.
3. Local Citations -- these are like little testimonials, and they can help alot.  Ryan suggests getting people to give you citations at places like Google’s Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, Yelp, SuperPages and infoUSA.

Is Your SEO Campaign Working For You?

April 3, 2009 ::: After spending time and money on an SEO campaign, you need to know how it's working for you. If you're a client of ours, we can easily tell you how your rankings are doing in the search engines. But that's only a small part of it. The real measure of SEO success is in whether you're getting more customers and increased revenue.

You really need to track conversions: phone calls, information requests, and sales. Your SEO consultant typically can't do that for you -- you need to track that stuff yourself.

John O'Connor, owner of Shade Tree Garage in Morristown, NJ, a client of ours, maintains a yellow legal pad at his appointment desk. Every new caller gets added to a list on that pad, and they're asked "How did you learn about us?". That gives him a very clear idea of how his Yellow Pages ad is doing, how successful his newspaper advertising is, and how well his SEO campaign is doing.

By the way, John reports that he's getting one new paying customer a day from his web site.

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