Eric Gehler SEO Richmond Virginia

Three Myths on Boosting
Search-Engine Rankings
By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

Small online proprietors often spend lots of time and money trying to improve their search-engine rankings, getting only poor results for their effort.

To avoid costly errors, make note of these common myths:

Myth 1. You can be guaranteed consistently high rankings.

Dori Hession says she learned an expensive lesson when launching her wedding-services business in 2000. She paid $8,000 in total to two companies that she says promised to put her South Lake Tahoe, Calif., outfit at the top of search-engine listings for searches on popular phrases such as “California weddings” and keep them high. In each case, her site’s ranking rose to the top at first, she says, “then all of a sudden it would be gone for a month or longer…When you fall off the search engines, you’re gone. You’re out of business.

Ms. Hession fell prey to a widespread misperception that a Web site can be guaranteed rankings on search engines. The companies she hired specialized in search-engine optimization (SEO), the process of helping place a site high in search-engine rankings when Web surfers look for information related to the site. The firms claimed “they could fake out the search engines,” she says, but she isn’t sure exactly what the two companies did. She has since learned that only search engines have control over the way sites are ranked in search results.

In 2003, she hired another SEO company that promised only to improve her site’s rankings and keep them high. The firm, Pole Position Marketing in Reno, Nev., achieved this by editing her site’s copy to include keywords, writing more search-engine-friendly Web coding, and arranging for related sites to link to hers, says Stoney G. deGeyter, president. In a recent Google search on “Lake Tahoe weddings,” Ms. Hession’s site, lakeoftheskyweddings.com, turned up as the No. 9 listing.

SEO firms can’t guarantee top search-engine rankings because search engines are constantly changing the way they rank Web sites, explains Chris Sherman, editor of “SearchDay,” a daily e-newsletter from SearchEngineWatch.com in New York. “No SEO firm has inside access to those changes. The best they can do is study, analyze and adapt to their procedures as best they can,” he says.

Before hiring an SEO company, ask for references from past clients to learn about their experiences, he advises. “Good firms explain what they do in very plain English, provide information on their background and clients and give away free tools for checking your rankings,” he says.

Myth 2. I need to submit my Web site to every search engine out there.

When Ice.com launched in 1999, the New York-based online jewelry retailer hired a summer intern to submit the site’s URL to as many search engines as possible. “That’s what he did all day, and I can’t say we saw any tangible results,” says Pinny Gniwisch, Ice.com’s founder and executive vice president of marketing.

Many new online sellers think they need to submit their site to every search engine on the Web, says Jamie Low, president of SearchEngineMarketing.com, a consulting company in Lotus, Calif. However, search engines find sites on their own from links on sites already in their databases, he explains. The more links a site receives, the higher up it will appear in search results, he adds. “Being linked to is probably the single most important thing outside of having good content for getting high search-engine rankings,” he says.

Bear in mind that search engines look for links from complementary sites, says Mr. Low. “It’s not just the quantity of links that matters; it’s also the quality of the links,” he explains. “You want to be linked to from sites that are relevant to yours.”

You can generate links to your site by publishing a separate site as a company blog (short for Web log or journal) with entries that include links back to your site. Just make sure the content is relevant to your company and offers information of value to readers rather than serve only as a means for boosting your Web site’s search-engine rankings, advises Mr. Low.

Since launching the first of four blogs in March, ice-cream company Denali Flavors Inc. in Wayland, Mich., has seen traffic to its Web site increase by about 20%, says John Nardini, executive vice president of marketing. The blogs, which also are meant to help with customer relations, offer news about a company-sponsored bicycling team, a behind-the-scenes look at how it makes ice cream and other information of interest to Denali customers.

In 2003, Walter Pereira, president of Indoor Clean Aire, a duct-cleaning and mold-removal company in East Brunswick, N.J., asked the National Air Duct Cleaners Association to link to his firm’s Web site. While he pays a membership fee to belong to the trade group, his site’s URL was posted for free. “It’s where we get 50% of our cold-turkey leads,” Mr. Pereira says. In exchange, his home page links back to the association’s Web site. He says he doesn’t regularly track his site’s rankings on search engines, but gets most of his business from people who say they found his company on the Internet.

Myth 3. Repeating keywords will increase my site’s rankings.

While search engines are designed to look for the words that users choose, padding your site with popular terms can backfire on a Web-site owner.

Unnecessary repetition of words can turn off customers, warns Allan Dick, general manager at Vintage Tub & Bath, an online retailer of clawfoot tubs and bathroom fixtures and accessories based in Hazleton, Pa. Mr. Dick says he tries to avoid overusing the search terms that potential customers might use to find his products, such as “clawfoot” and “pedestal.” Riddling a site with excess keywords runs the risk of confusing customers and driving them away, he explains. He says he concentrates on producing copy that reads naturally because “if we just wrote for search engines, human beings couldn’t possibly understand it.”

“You have to optimize your site for your customers first and search engines second,” he adds.

Overusing keywords may even lower your rankings, says Mr. deGeyter. “Search engines have a way of analyzing natural language on a Web page, so when you stuff keywords in your site, it throws things out of natural balance,” he explains. For example, some sites repeat keywords needlessly: “We offer carpet cleaning in Arizona, carpet cleaning in Utah, carpet cleaning in California and carpet cleaning in Nevada,” he says. “If you say the same thing over and over, the search engines will catch on and they’ll penalize your site.” Penalties vary among search-engine providers, but they typically will either bury your site in its rankings or not list it at all, he adds.

– Ms. Needleman is associate editor at StartupJournal.com

Eric Comments:
SEO is not hard, you ned to know the rules and Follow the Rules. The consitency and persistent of your work will pay off in the long run.

If anyone need SEO advice use my contact from, The testimoney of my cleints says it all!!
Posted – 07/24/2005 : 18:46:49
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Eric,

All I can say is thanks so much for the information you have already given me from this offer. We just started. I don’t even have the full report and already you have jumped in and provided me with several steps to take to start to seo my site. (For anyone interested, this is a different site than the one Eric did as part of his “free” offer. I was so impressed with that, I went for this bigger offer.) I am very impressed with your work ethic, even to the point of working on the weekend. I can see where you will be some task master. But I know that that is just based on your concern to see your client do well. You do understand my time constraints and are generously flexible in working with me. You’re a dream to work with, I must say.

Thanks ever so much,
Sandra
www.flowergardenlovers.com

—–
24 hours!

24 hours after getting Eric’s report, and after only doing a few of the tweaks that Eric has suggested, one of my sites jumped from nowhere to number 10 out of 1,900,000 on Google.

Now this wasn’t for a niche, tight keyword phrase, but an internet marketing related one that is in high competiton.

And I haven’t really started to get to work yet.

I highly recommend Eric to anyone who wants a comprehensive analysis of their website, with the optimization tips that will help bring your site out of the dust.

Thanks Eric!

best

Vic
________________________________________
Build profitable websites: www.onlyforprofit.com

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Geez Eric,

Why don’t you throw in the house and car with the deal! I am one of the individuals who was lucky enough to get a freebie from eric back in the beginning of July 2005. His assistance has helped me to not only increase my rankings for many of my sites but to increase my monthly traffic for my main site to over 20,000 unique visitors per month since July 2005.

While it may not be a lot for many of you, it’s a big deal to me considering I don’t do any online advertising and coming from a paltry 4,000 unique visits at this time last year. The only thing I can say is get in while you can and be ready to work. With Eric you definitely get your monies worth! Thanks for your assistanc Eric over the past couple of months.
________________________________________
Shawn Nelson, MSA
Stop Living An Unhappy Life!
Life Skills Help Article Directory!

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Posted – 09/19/2005 : 06:56:47
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Eric – haven’t spoken to you in a while so I had no idea you had broken your leg!
Hope you are on the mend and wish you nothing but the very best – and will start by
giving you an update on my own results from your efforts on WomensNet:

Before Eric’s review, I was getting good traffic but mostly from my own efforts with
press releases etc, I really had not bothered to do any SEO on the site. Right now,
I am in the top 10 (and in many cases #1 or 2) for half a dozen VERY competitive terms
for the home page in Google, Yahoo, and MSN…..and have just started optimizing some
of the interior pages.

I actually optimized several interior pages before I left on my last biz trip, uploaded 5 new
optimized articles, made the page changes suggested by Eric….and when I returned a week later was shocked to see top 5 rankings for ALL the pages that I had just done! Now that is the result of both the content and the page being properly optimized but that is
pretty awesome. And in case you think these were weird off the wall terms with 1000 competing pages to rank against – think again – 3 of the terms returned more than 20,000,000 results for the term!

So – this is FABULOUS offer – and one that will pay off time and time again, since Eric actually explains the how and why of everything in a way that is easy for us non-techies to understand.

Needless to say – both traffic and Adsense rev are growing daily….

Now if only I can find the time to make the needed changes to EVERY page……soon, Eric, I promise, soon!!

________________________________________
Melody Wigdahl
Womensnet.Net, home of the Amber Foundation Grants for Women Netrepreneurs
http://www.womensnet.net

many more…
Eric J. Gehler
SEO