Gervais Group LLC

Developing your website marketing strategy will ultimately decide the level of success of your online endeavors. Let’s face it, with millions or billions of websites out there, how is anyone going to find you? The key lies in the planning and execution of your website marketing strategy.  

There are always people looking to build a better mousetrap in SEO. The problem is that many of these mousetraps fall into the black hat category of SEO practices. Here are a couple of practices related to link building that game Google’s algorithm to influence the rankings on the search engine pages.

While the internet may be considered as a level playing field, the big boys are still the big boys and going head to head with them in an SEO campaign is a sure way to blow through your SEO budget without much to show for it. That being said, the great thing about the internet is that small companies don’t need to win a direct battle with a larger business to build their online presence, increase brand recognition, and drive higher quality traffic to their site.

There is no place that describes “Survival of the Fittest” better than the web. Much like any competitive environment, those that execute on the web survive while those that don’t, well, don’t. If you’re serious about developing a presence for your site, you are going to have to adapt to what the fittest entities on the web are doing to both survive and thrive.

The search engine optimization process typically does not produce results overnight but there are several actions you can take to speed things along. Here are some of the actions that can give your search engine optimization campaign a jumpstart:

When it was noticed that J.C Penney was outranking Samsonite’s website for the keyphrase “Samsonite carry-on luggage”, the New York Times started an investigation on how the retail store was ranked number one in Google for hundreds of other search terms as well. The retail store also held the number one ranking for other highly competitive terms like area rugs, bedding, furniture and more. Had J.C. Penney just run one of the best SEO campaigns ever? Or was it something much less than that?

Failed relationships between businesses and their SEO provider usually have a bunch of common traits between them. J.C. Penney’s recent SEO problems with their provider are a high profile example of SEO gone wrong that ends up damaging a company whether it’s innocent or not. Because SEO firms can make big bucks for delivering high rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), there’s a huge motivation for them to push the boundaries of fair play either a little or a lot. If rankings are happening, it’s often the case of “don’t ask – don’t tell” regarding how exactly the high rankings are being achieved.

With all the time and effort spent on the SEO that drives traffic to a website, it only makes sense to maximize the conversion rate of the people that arrive. This requires many things, the most important being a fundamental knowledge in a specific aspect of selling; that of selling benefits instead of selling features. Boiled down to its most fundamental element a sale takes place because of what the product can do for the buyer (the benefit), not how it’s going the deliver that benefit (aka features).

As Google reminded all of us last February with their “Panda/Farmer” algorithm change, search engine optimization will continue to exist in a dynamic environment where minor changes can have drastic results. The good news is that some things don’t change. To that end here are the SEO tips for 2012: