Hot summer nights will soon turn into cool autumn nights as we head back to school. As I get ready to send my kids back to school, it’s a good time to review a few simple A-B-C’s of Search Engine Optimization, and sales conversion strategies.

Back to School sales, depending on your product or service August and September are good months to look at your inventories and determine what you need to clear off the shelf. Use the Back to School theme to promote a big sale, or give something related to academics away based on the same theme. Back to School is also a great time to promote upgrades or new products and services. Has your kid ever gone to school with an old spiral notebook? Fall is a great time to promote an upgrade, or market replacement systems or parts.

Christmas is just around the corner, and the holiday season which typically runs October through December is coming up even faster. read more

Welcome to a special post this month about the latest Google Update. It’s not about Page Rank, it’s about what Google has always been about… Speed. The latest Google update is called Caffeine, and it has now been written about extensively on Google’s Blog (googleblog.blogspot.com), or just type in ‘Google Caffeine’ and a lot of useful information will come up. Most analysts agree Caffeine has been slowly released over the past few months, and we are just now seeing the effects of the new search index update. Google has always been about indexing large quantities of data and this latest update will continue to keep Google head and shoulders above any competition in this space.

The most important thing to understand with Google Caffeine is that it’s not a new algorithm, or quality score update. Basically when you boil it all down, Google is now able to do in a day, what use to take a month. What this means, especially for those of us in Search Engine Optimization is that everything can change in an instant. Some of us have already begun to see that. Here is an excerpt from Google’s Blog about Caffeine: read more

The times they are a changing. Over the last few months we have seen a number of stories about the Google Algorithm, and how it and everything is changing. We have even experienced clients who have lost rank, or traffic over the last few months as well. During our investigation of both the news and situations involving our clients we learned a few things along the way. Here are a few tips from our recent investigations.

UPDATE YOUR CONTENT
KEEP IT CLEAN
DEEP LINKING
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Rankings are up!  Traffic is up!  Sales are up!  That’s great, where is your traffic coming from?  At SearchRankings.Net we work with a lot of large clients who rank for thousands of terms, and drive hundreds of thousands of unique visitors to their sites every month.  At times we have a tendency to over shadow fundamentals and metrics because everything is up.  How much more “up” would sales be if we knew where are traffic is coming from?  How much more “up” would sales be if we knew what traffic converts the best?

Every business needs to know the numbers, every business owner knows this.  In business you need to know revenue, expense, profit, cash flow and burn rate.  These are the basics, if you don’t know these numbers you won’t be around long enough to dive deeper into what makes you money.  Same holds true for rankings, where do you rank, what traffic are you getting from your primary keywords and what keywords would produce even more traffic.  Know Your Numbers, and update your numbers every month. read more

The A – B – C’s of Search Rankings

To quote the now infamous line I believe James Carville coined back in 1992, “It’s the links, stupid”, OK he may have said something else, but when it comes to SEO, it’s the links, but what you do with your site plays an important role in how you acquire links. Our own SEO_Audit goes through the A – B – C’s of Search Rankings, let’s walk through that and how links relate to each section. read more