Unfortunately, there are no software tools that can tell you what you need to know about your audience, your message and their relationship. It is the answer to these questions that should guide the entire website development effort, and not just the search engine optimization.

The PR, advertising, business development and marketing departments for any business or website need to set the overall objectives for the website. Successful San Jose SEO projects are invariably team efforts. Ideally this team should be multidisciplinary, cross-functional, and involve the main stakeholders from the departments already mentioned. At the very least, there should be a single team lead or manage, a technical lead, and someone covering the creative side.

In many small organizations, it will be one person responsible for all of these areas. This is not necessarily a problem though, as long as the person responsible is able to look at the problem from these different and often conflicting perspectives. Along with coordinating all the efforts, the team leader should set the overall direction of the San Jose SEO project. Some questions a team leader should be asking include the following:

* who is the core audience targeted by the website?

* what can the marketing department tell us about them?

* how have we found this audience in the past?

* what metrics shall be used to track them?

The answers to these questions should (and will) have an impact on the final technical choices and implementation.

The people from advertising should have a well thought out and clear message already prepared for the website. Key phrases and marketing slogans should already have been decided before the San Jose SEO project begins. While feedback on the current competitive environment will influence their evolution, there should already be strong buy in for the advertising plans. Debating whether to optimize for “best widgets ever” or “the only widget you will ever need” six weeks into a project is unlikely going to lead to a successful San Jose SEO implementation.

The main role of advertising in any organization is to compel people to take a specific action. That action too, needs to be clearly defined. If you are running an San Jose SEO project to get more people to buy your widgets, everyone needs to be on board that this is the primary goal. If half your team want to increase sales, while the other want your clients to download your “widget screensaver”, the project will not achieve either goal particularly well.

Ultimately though, the technical team is responsible for actually delivering the project. While the overall direction and goals might be driven by PR, advertising and marketing, it will be up to the technical team to implement these in an effective San Jose SEO plan. You cannot expect each department to work independently and then hand over their work to this implementation team though. The entire SEO effort will be an iterative process.

As implementation of the plan progresses, for example, marketing should continue to feedback on whether the target audience is being reached and whether they are getting the message. Advertising should be able to point out whether this audience is taking the desired action. PR will be able to gauge the media perceptions and responses to the plan. Continual feedback and evaluation is going to be essential to prevent you spending a lot of time, money and effort optimizing in a way that is not working, or worse, optimizing for goals that do not contribute to the overall strategic direction of the business.

In conclusion, it cannot be stressed enough that a successful San Jose SEO project can only be delivered through teamwork. Communication between the various stakeholders and team members will therefore be vital. Even for San Jose SEO projects that have a team of one, that individual will need to understand the value and importance of thinking through the plan from the many different perspectives covered.

The fact that search engines continue to tweak and improve their search algorithms also makes it difficult to have a single plan that will continue to work indefinitely. Even if the competition has done nothing to improve their SERPs, a recalibration of Google’s ranking algorithm could adversely affect a business’s ranking.

In many ways, this is good news for both SEO practitioners and website owners. For SEO practitioners, the continually changing landscape is a guarantee that work will continue to be available for many years. Both existing businesses, and new businesses just discovering the value of San Jose SEO will continue to be valuable clients. For website owners, the changing SEO landscape means that it will never be too late to catch up with even well-established sites. Even in the most competitive industries, no lead is insurmountable and a first page result on Google is often achievable with less than a year.

* Factors that should be considered by any SEO professional when coming up with a plan for a specific businesses include the following

* What the organization is trying to promote

* The organization’s target market

* Is the target market geographically based in just one area?

* The competitive landscape in those markets.

* The current brand strength and perception, particularly online

* The existing Website structure

* Current site content

* The ease with which the existing site structure and content can be modified

* Amount and type of content that is immediately available.

* Amount of resources for the development of new content and content types

It should be pointed out that the list above is just some of the factors that any serious San Jose SEO strategy and plans should continue. That said, the individual items in the list should not be considered in isolation. Two companies dealing in the same products might be targeting two completely different client bases, so will need SEO plans that are quite difference. Another example is the difference between SEO strategies for a website that has been in existence for a number of years, and one that has only launched. An existing site might have a larger library of content, staff that is more experience with running the site, or just more, and older links from other third party sites on the internet.

The resources available for any web development and online marketing will also play a significant part in determining the most effective San Jose SEO plan. Where significant resources are available, a business can afford to spend a lot of money targeting a wide audience, and taking on the competition head on. Some firms on the other hand, are better off spending limited resources targeting niches that their better resourced competitors might be ignoring.

The importance of developing and SEO plan before you start spending money on anything cannot be emphasized enough. Doing this will not save money in the long run, since it will invariably lead to the implementation of half-baked plans that may or may not be appropriate for the particular needs of a business.

So before we go any further, I’ll reiterate this for our new readers; why is it important to be on top of things in the San Jose SEO, both on page, and off page? Well, look at it like this. Advertising is essential when it comes to gaining new clients and customers. And obviously, forms of advertising evolve as we move forward in time. A few years ago, it was the YellowPages that was where businesses had the opportunity (for a high cost) to advertise. Now, the YellowPages is OUT; San Jose SEO is IN! Rank your site higher on Google through SEO, and the potential for your business to grow is nearly infinite.

External Linking

It is a myth that external linking will bring down your websites authority and lower its ranking. In fact, a website with zero, or very few external links, is bound for failure. Of course, it’s definitely not recommended to load up your website with external links, but you get the point. Search engines want to see that you’re linking to other sites, particularly authority sites. This is mind, you need to also remember to keep the number of external links fewer than the number of internal links.

Internal Linking

It is extremely important to link to different pages of your website on every single page. Google loves internal links. Keep in mind though that linking to random pages on your site is not as effective as linking to related pages. Always try to link to pages on your website that are in context.

Keywords

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Very important if you want to be at the top of the San Jose SEO game. Google is constantly changing their algorithms, thus it is hard to say exactly how many times per page your keywords should appear, but a good practice is that 2-5% of your content should be your keywords. On another note; if you do need keyword optimized content for your website, I specialize in that area as well. You can contact me through the contact form for more details.

There are many more factors that are essential to have strong on page SEO and take over the San Jose SEO competition for your market, but if we were to list every single one, the list would almost  would go on for a while. These are simply some of the basics that you should practice, given you choose not to work with a SEO professional like myself. As my website is fairly new, I am currently working on ranking it in Google for various keywords, like San Jose SEO. RankThatSite is currently sitting on the 4^th page of Google, out of 13,000,000 results! Keep in mind, my website has only been live for 3 weeks. RankThatSite should be at the top of Google for San Jose SEO in no time!

Branding (visibility)

Research has shown that consumers see the top placement of a business in search engine results as a stamp of approval. The general belief and consensus is that a business would not be achieving such high search engine rankings if it was not generally considered to be one of the best in its field. Experienced internet users know enough to realize that these assumptions are not true. That said, the vast majority of internet users are not ‘experienced’ or power users. For many consumers, and business professionals, this endorsement is very real. Clearly therefore, by improving the SERPs performance for a website or webpage, any SEO can add significant value to a brand.

Web traffic

In the early days of the internet, all you had to do was build your website, and “they would come”. Today, the competitive landscape has shifted so radically that virtually every business needs to make a concerted effort to continually maintain and improve their SEO performance. It is not also enough that your website gets a lot of traffic though. That traffic needs to be targeted. By using a number of techniques, both on and off-site, an effective SEO can increase both the amount and that quality of traffic that a business’s web properties might be getting.

For a long time in the early days of online marketing too, many businesses seemed obsessed with ‘page views’. A lot of them sought traffic and visitors to their websites at all costs. Many businesses failed during the dot Com bust as a result of spending money getting visitors who failed to translate into increased (and in some cases into any) sales and profit. Effective San Jose SEO operators on the other hand, know that it is far more cost effective and profitable to just target relevant traffic.

Additionally, by understanding why and how users conduct search on the internet, SEO businesses, can help improve the way a business runs its web operations. This could be anything from making improvements to the content on a site, to optimizing the way the site interacts with visitors.

High ROI

While improved brand visibility and increase traffic are all very well and good, the most important goal is that your online marketing help achieve the overall goals of your organization. For the vast majority of businesses, this means increased sales, better customer conversion, and ultimately higher profits. For others, and in particular non-profit or non-trading businesses, the goals might just be to spread the propagation of a particular message. By increasing the amount of traffic, and by targeting only relevant traffic, SEO can significantly increase the business’s bottom line.

As far as returns go, San Jose SEO possibly provides the greatest potential in business today. For many organizations, including many that have been online for years, the return on SEO expenditure if far higher than it is for radio, print or TV. Despite many occasional claims in the industry, San Jose SEO is already replacing all of these traditional media channels. The smart businesses though, are ensuring that they have a unified strategy for all their marketing efforts, in order to send a consistent message to both existing and potential clients.

The three main categories covered above are not an exhaustive list of everything that SEO can bring to the strategic table, but do highlight that no business with an online presence can afford to ignore San Jose SEO marketing.

The internet now plays an increasing role in our lives, particularly for residents of first world countries. From getting information, to communicating with friends, filing taxes and purchasing products, the internet is now part of the social fabric. The first point of call for many people when they get online though, is one of the big search engines.

Given the limitations of natural language, it is sometimes difficult to gauge what intentions a user has when they type a search term in their favourite search engine. That said, a lot of work and effort has been put into understanding this human intent. One of the results of this, is that activity on the major search engines can be classified into three broad categories. These are highlighted below.

Navigational Query

This is where a user searches with the intent to find a specific website or company. A user might type in your company or brand name for example. A surprising number of users still use their search engines to ‘search’ for sites, even when they already have the full website address. Reasons for this are many and varied. Some users just think that they need to type in the full URL for anything in their search boxes. For many users, the search engine’s site is set as their default homepage, and they will have just got into the habit of using their search boxes. The internet has only so many TLDs (top level domain names), and a user might not be sure whether your company is on a .com, a .net, or even the .org or .us TLD. Some companies have web addresses that have hyphens and given the confusion some users have with hyphens vs. underscores (‘-’ vs. ‘_’), it is just easier to use the search engine, and let it come up with the best suggestion. Usually though, it is just a lot easier for a user to remember your company name and search for it, than it is to try and remember your domain name.

Informational Query

This type of query tends to be performed by someone who is looking for an answer to a question, with no specific source of this information in mind though. The poor search facilities and navigational aids on many corporate websites is partly to blame for pushing users to the search engines. It is often much quicker for a user to use a general search engine to search for information that is (often) only available from one company’s website, than it is for them to try and figure out just where exactly on a site this information might be buried.

Transactional Query

Transactional queries form the third type of search performed on the major search engines. The best way to think about these queries, is that someone performing them has the intent to buy a product or service. That said, it can be difficult to determine when exactly an informational query might morph into a transactional query. The example below illustrates how this can occur.

A user searching for “digital cameras” might be looking to buy one, or might just be conducting research for a ‘History of Photography’ course. Starting with this, the user might read very broad reviews on one or more sites. The user might then search for “canon powershot G10″. At this point, the user might have reached the conclusion that this is the camera they want, or just want more reviews of that specific model. A follow-up search to this might be “buy canon powershot G10″. At this point the query can probably be considered to be transactional, since the user clearly intends to buy the camera.

The example above highlights some of the difficulty in trying to classify the types of queries users perform on the search engines. That said, keeping these in mind when implementing your SEO strategy will help you spot opportunities that many other webmasters ignore.

You need to look at SEO as a business; once you start a business, you must consistently maintain it, or else the business will ultimately fail. Same principle applies to your website and it’s SEO. Shortly put, you need to have a long term SEO plan, or else your web presence will be absolutely none. How do you do this? Well, this is where we come in; we keep an eye on the search engine algorithms, and are constantly keeping up with the changes. Furthermore, even once your site is ranked high on Google (and other search engines), there needs to be consistent work done to maintain that ranking. You may be up there for now, but others are constantly trying to pass your website.

It’s a simple business principle; your investment needs to be monitored. I cannot stress this enough, and there are just too many examples here. Another great example; you invest in the stock market. You are going to monitor that investment almost daily. If the investment is doing well, you may invest more. If the investment is not doing well, you will then attempt to figure out why it is not doing well. This principle, too, can be applied to Search Engine Optimization.

Years and years in the San Jose marketing field and we can never stress how important it is to maintain your rankings. In order to keep you at the top of the San Jose SEO market, we offer a monthly maintenance service, where will consistently monitor your site and its rankings. We don’t just want to get you to the top of Google and disappear; we want to keep you there.

Let’s rewind ten years; if you’re business didn’t have any online presence, such as a website and such, you weren’t missing out on much. The number of people who used the internet was not sky rocketing like it has today. Your business could still be very successful without a website. Let’s fast forward to 2011 now. If your business does not have a website, or some sort of online presence, you’re absolutely hurting your own business. I like to look in the YellowPages and other local books once in a while to see how many businesses are still paying for ad space in there. Come on folks; who even looks at those silly books anymore? Just about no one. Why spend money on such ads, and  even worse, receive no ROI (return on investment). That many can be more wisely invested online, and you can start getting to the top of the San Jose SEO and San Jose Marketing game. Get your site seen on the web; get more customers; it’s a win-win situation.

Aside from the business growth aspect, having a website and ranking Google just gives people a sense of trust in you. Studies have shown that people simply trust websites that are higher on Google. If people hop onto Google and search for “San Jose Dentist”, and there you pop up on the first page, on top of receiving a potential client, you also come off as very trustworthy. In addition, it just looks professional. I cannot even begin to count the number of businesses I’ve steered  away from because they don’t have an online presence. Now, if you feel as if I’m describing your business, get in touch with us. We don’t only specialize in San Jose SEO and San Jose Marketing. Are you in Australia? Heck, we still won’t turn you down! We want to help people grow their business online, and your location is not a barrier for us.

As our site is very new at the moment, it is currently not that visible in Google. No worries though; we shall begin our compaigning soon and you should see us at the top of Google for keywords like San Jose SEO, San Jose Search Engine Optimization, San Jose Marketing. After all, no one would want to work with a web marketing team that can’t even get their own website seen online!

Nowadays, linking is one of the most important factors in determining your sites ranking. Keep in mind though, it’s not that simple; there’s a lot to linking, which we will go over and explain to you. Basically, in the ideal scenario, you’re going to connect your site (“linking”) to other relevant sites, and also have them connect to you.

Below are three things to keep in mind, when considering what search engines want to see. You can trust us; we’re San Jose SEO experts!

1)      Consistency – Just because you build a thousand links in a day, and then stop, doesn’t mean you’re going to hit the top of Google. Search engines want to see consistent link building. In fact, you’d be much better off building 20 links a day for several months, than simply building a thousand links in one day and leaving it at that. Building too many links too quickly will actually hurt your ranking, more than it will help it.

2)      Organic – In other words, search engines want to see that your links are relevant. If your company is about cosmetic surgery, Google would prefer to see links from sites in that niche. Now, having links from other niches won’t hurt you, but they certainly won’t do you as much good as if they were organic links.

3)      One-Way Link Building – So, as soon as people started figuring out that links can help you increase your search engine ranking, everyone started trading links with one another. These are what we call reciprocal links. Google gives far more value to one-way links, than it does to reciprocal links.

Obviously, it is tempting for people to look for shortcuts; it seems like much of our society is built on taking shortcuts. Unfortunately, shortcuts lead to short lived results. We want our results to be long term. Being at the top of the San Jose SEO game is not something that will come overnight; it will take time, but it is definitely achievable. We know all the ins and outs of SEO, and will implement our strategies to bring you natural results that the search engines want to see. They say good things com with time; that famous quote applies to the San Jose Marketing and San Jose Search Engine Optimization scene as well.

Ben Hosseini here, the man in charge (kidding, of course). Welcome to our SEO and marketing firm. I just want to give everyone a warm and personal welcome. I’ll talk a bit about myself, and then we’ll get to talking about RankThatSite.

So, my name is Behnam, but I go by Ben; I’m sure you can see why, as Behnam isn’t the easiest name to pronounce. I’ve been marketing online for many, many years now. Actually, it all started back when I was in the 7th grade. I’ve always had a passion for computers, and used to spend countless hours on my old Dell desktop. Little by little, I was introduced to the world of internet marketing, and from there, the magic began. I learned all about Search Engine Optimization, internet marketing, and all that good stuff. Hobbies? Well, I consider my job a hobby, which is just how much I love the online world. But, aside from the internet? Well, I love spending time with my friends and family, love working out (24 Hour Fitness all the way!), reading, watching movies (Robert DeNiro, best actor of all time), and travelling. I guess you could say I’m your average guy.

Now, here I am, offering my services to help YOU grow YOUR business. Let’s be real here; who doesn’t want to take their business to the next level? I mean, after all, the whole point of a business is to have it grow, and grow, and grow, right? Well, RankThatSite is here to help you do that. We are located in San Jose, and specialize in San Jose SEO and San Jose Marketing, as it is much easier for us to meet with clients face to face here. Obviously, surrounding areas are not a problem as well; we don’t mind driving a couple hours. For clients who are farther, no worries; all of our contracts, payments, and so forth are designed in order to be able to serve customers across the World. And with technology such as Skype these days, we can hold any necessary meetings online; perfect!

So in a nutshell, we’re a San Jose Search Engine Optimization firm, as well as a San Jose Marketing firm (specifically web marketing). As we’ve reiterated throughout our site, we treat your business no different than we treat ours; we want your business to succeed, just as we want our business to succeed. We are all in this together.

All of my contact information is available on the right, so don’t feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions.

For now, adios!

Ben Hosseini

RankThatSite.com