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SEO for small and very small businesses.

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NJ Presentation: The Secrets of Do-It-Yourself SEO

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Sponsored by SCORE of Northwest New Jersey

I’ll be presenting at Fairleigh Dickinson University on Wednesday, May 8 at 6:30 PM.
The presentation is focused on small businesses and startups, and will explain the essentials of search engine optimization, focusing on things you can do yourself.  If you have more time than money in your startup or small business, invest some time in making sure that you show up in Google when potential customers are looking for someone who does what you do.

Click here to register.

Score presentation for New Jersey small businesses on SEO.

I hope to see you there!

Click here to register.

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We Are 100% Green

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Going Green

We have always been environmentally aware, and have been moving toward renewable energy for a long time. We’ve just made a big improvement and wanted to tell you about it.

Solar hot water systemSolar Hot Water

In 1975 we took advantage of solar energy incentives from the Jimmy Carter administration to install solar hot water panels on our roof. In the winter they pre-heat our water to about 85° before it goes to our water heater, which is a significant improvement over the roughly 55° town water coming into the building. In the summer the roof panels heat our water to 150°. Woo-Hoo!

Solar Electric

In 2006 we installed solar PV panels on the roof, and have been generating about 2/3 of all our electricity use from them ever since. We can’t go completely off-grid though because the panels generate nothing at night or when they’re snow-covered  — and we can’t generate more than about 2/3 of our electricity because we ran out of roof space. Nevertheless, our solar electric decision has turned out to be an excellent one in terms of reducing our energy costs and our carbon footprint.
Rooftop solar paanels

The Green Grid

We have now changed our electricity supplier to one that generates all of our electricity from wind farms. So even the electricity we get from the local power company is now green energy. We’ve just done this; it adds only a couple of cents per KWH to our electricity cost, and we’re not polluting air and water or contributing to global warming for any of our electricity anymore.

Rank Magic is now 100% green.

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Green Natural Gas

100% GreenWe’re now getting our gas from landfill generation. Decomposing waste in municipal landfills produces gas, which is a mixture of about half methane and half carbon dioxide. These landfills are the third largest source of human-made methane emissions in the United States, and methane extracted from them is the source of our natural gas now. Not only are we no longer relying on fracking and other destructive methods of extracting natural gas, we’re also using methane that would otherwise have vented into the atmosphere. That’s a good thing because methane has 25 times the global warming impact as carbon dioxide does.

Other Than That

Other than that, we’re still the same personal, all-American, hand-crafted, non-automated SEO company we’ve always been. Going green hasn’t changed how we work with our clients, but if you’ll feel better working with an environmentally conscious company, that’s just another reason to consider Rank Magic. Get in touch to see how we can help you.

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Our Interview at MediaShower

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Media Shower is a content-oriented web company that helps businesses by creating great content and incoming links
media-showerRecently they interviewed me about small business SEO. We talked about things like how small business SEO is different from what’s done for larger companies and the kinds of questions I get most frequently when speaking to business groups about SEO,
I invite you to read the interview here.
Feel free to comment or ask questions below.

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SEO – Not a Sprint but a Marathon

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When the challenging economy strikes your business, you may need to revisit your marketing and ramp up your efforts to gain new customers. SEO has about the best ROI of any marketing strategy, but it can’t work miracles … especially not instantly.

SEO needs time to percolate in order to produce results. Here’s why:

On-Page Factors

You can’t just spend some money and find your self perfectly optimized. Keyword research needs to be done so you can choose the important keyword phrases to optimize for. On-page SEO needs to happen next. That involves sometimes extensive copywriting, website architecture and navigation changes, page download speed improvements, writing of page title and description tags, implementation of proper internal linking, and more.

Off-Page Factors – Link Authority

Those on-page improvements to your website aren’t enough. You need to ensure competitive link equity or link authority, and that means an ongoing link building program has to happen. Any scheme to get you hundreds of inbound links in a hurry is likely to hurt you more than help. You need an ongoing link building program that brings in new links on a steady basis, month after month. That helps your rankings to grow, but it’s a slow process.

Some of the more popular social media sites.Off-Page Factors – Social Media Exposure

You need to generate some buzz as a result of information posted at places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so forth. Real-time links from social media are getting increased attention by the search engines.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Your rankings and traffic will typically increase slowly but steadily as your link popularity matures and your on-page optimization takes hold.

At Rank Magic, we include a year of link building on a steady monthly basis as part of a typical SEO project. Depending on the competitiveness of a client’s market niche they may require more intensive link building or a more protracted link building process of an additional year or more.

Beyond that, you need to be prepared to monitor your links, rankings and traffic on an ongoing basis. Changes in the search engine world, changes in your competitive landscape, changes in the focus of your business, and website changes and redesign all have the potential to take a toll on your rankings, and you need to spot that quickly so corrective action can be taken promptly.

SEO is not a sprint, but a marathon. Have a little patience.

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When employing SEO it’s important to approach it with the understanding that it’s not sprint, but a marathon. If you expect to win the prize of a rapid increase in customers within a couple of weeks or months you will be disappointed.

Need help? Ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.

We welcome you to join the conversation in the Comments section below.

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Our Entrepreneur Magazine Article

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Our latest article has just appeared on Entrepreneur Magazine’s web site. It’s titled Improve Your Website’s Reputation. If you’re ignoring your link authority–the number and quality of other sites that link to yours–your search engine rankings will suffer. Find out what makes good links and how to get them.

Intro:

How well you rank in the search engines when someone searches for your products or services is a function of two things: relevance and reputation. Relevance has to do with how easily the search engines can tell if your page is relevant to the terms that were searched for. That’s addressed through classic search engine optimization techniques for enhancing on-page keyword relevance.

Reputation, on the other hand, is measured by your link popularity or authority, which is the number and quality of websites that link to you. Search engines view incoming links as “votes” for the quality of your site by the websites that link to you. So obviously, it’s critical to obtain a good number of inbound links to your site. But … not all links are created equal, and it’s important to understand why, especially if you want to improve your link popularity.

This article provides concrete strategies that’ll spell out just where to look for links, how to evaluate potential links and — when you request a link — how to specify the exact link you want.

If you need help with link building, just ask us.