SEO by Chris Estes

Since the middle of January I have been in search of fresh employment.  I choose to focus my attention onto my passions and experience in IT and SEO.  After making a few trips around the US interviewing and sharing my skills I have found a fit in New York City. 

New York City?

Though I am not yet releasing the name of my company… I can share that they have a long list of powerful clients and they have recently launched a new marketing initiative that will incorporate me!

Why are you just now making it public?

Typically I keep these things separate from my personal blog.  A couple days ago I made the career and location change public with a mass e-mail and post on my personal blog.

Due to the pending changes…

In my life I am sure that my frequent post will become even more infrequent.  That is where you come in.  If you have a post that you would like to make I invite you to contact me and we can discuss.

Stay tuned for future updates and to my personal blog for more updates on the move. 

Search engine marketing by definition is marketing and advertising through search engines. 

If you do a quick search on Search Engine Marketing you will find all types of answers. The most practical answer is advertising through search engines. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are two different marketing techniques. Both use search engines, both use keywords, both can be found on the same search engine result pages (SERP), but both are different. They are different in their approach. Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is paid or sponsored search often called Pay-Per-Click. The most commonly used tools for sponsor search is Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Search Engine Optimization is for free organic results and used with page content and many other factors discussed at this site.

Both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing use keywords. They use keywords as a way to sell advertising space. Advertising space? If you have ever noticed along the top and bottom of most Search Engine Result Pages there are links. Those links are being paid to be there. Most all the times the ads are purchased based upon search terms or blocks of search terms.

What does this have to do with search engine optimization? With a joint effort of search engine marketing and optimization can produce a major Return on Investment (ROI). SEO is a long term investment and SEM should be used for the interim. Together the two different approaches can make a big difference on ROI. Using a Pay-Per-Click campaign to "kick start" a marketing campaign is a good idea. Pay-Per-Click offers very little direct SEO advantages besides traffic and visibility. Visibility leads to the potential of bookmarking and linking. Traffic brings search agents to the site also.

Back in the old days, summer 2007, search marketing occasionally gave excellent links. With many sites hosting paid listings on their site, much like SEO by Chris, search bot crawlers would occasionally index paid ads from these text link advertisements. Hosted ads are not supposed to be indexed or crawled, errors do happen (after all humans program the search agents). An ad appearing on a page often means that the ads are contextually relevant giving a credible link. Since October 2007 less of these type of indexing errors. Since these errors are not supposed to happen and should continue to be phased out as indexes are updated.

So what is Search Engine Marketing to Search Engine Optimization? Together in tandem they are part of complete online marketing strategy. Effectively used they will produce a maximum return on investment.

Printable Document Format, or more commonly known as PDF’s, are search engine friendly?

PDF’s are becoming an internationally recognized format for sharing documents.  They are easy to create and offer a certain security.  With readily availble resources and tools for PDF’s it appears that there usage is getting stronger. 

Tim Nash an SEO in the UK caught my eye with a test of searchabilty on PDF’s. Though his conclusion on the worth of making PDF’s search engine friendly is not decisive, I feel that the ease of making the document search friendly is worth it.  Take a look at the post and if you have questions on making PDF documents search engine friendly contact Search Engine Optimization by Chris or comment below.

What is branding? Answers.com defines branding as: A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer. Branding your business and maintaining your image is important.

A traditional example of branding and image is pizza places. Most everyone has gotten fliers from the pizza place dot matrix neon pink flier that is hard to read. Then there are the fliers from the big chain places printed on a smooth high quality paper, with vibrant earth tones, and a picture of delicious looking pizza. Both places carry the same exact product with the same exact prices. Now which one are you most likely to buy? The one on the smooth nice paper. You spend a lot of time. energy, and money on your product don’t let it fall because of a bad image.

So how does branding apply to SEO and online advertising? If you don’t have a good web-site design you are giving good traffic to your competitors. No matter your SEO power, no matter how good your product, if you website is hard to read and unusable, no online plan is going to give you a maximum return on your investment. If your website is poorly designed or not usable you might as well stick with the neon pink flier.

Online branding is as important to your image as the cleanliness of your store front. Protect your online brand with a clean up-to-date style.

Tornados tore through my home state of Alabama today.  Homes were lost and communites devistated. Please remember these people in your thoughts. 

If you want to know how to help contact the River Region United Way or your local Red Cross.