USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is, “How do I get better Google rankings for my business?” While the answer to that question can be very complicated, a lot of people who ask me this seem to think I’ll be able to tell them something quickly that will fix all of their problems.

The truth is, it takes a good amount of knowledge, some consistent work, and a little bit a creativity to get the results you’re looking for. It’s not as simple as a quick fix, and in today’s search engines, it takes more than some content and a good product. Ranking your business on Google can be especially tricky, since this is the search engine that a lot of people go after. You need to have your website optimized in order to have a chance to compete on a search engine like Google.

One of the problems with getting your website optimized, is that the rules what you you should do to increase your rankings can change from day to day. Search engines are changing their algorithms all the time, which means if you aren’t staying on top of the updates, your site can suffer some unexpected penalties. A good way to combat this is to hire an SEO firm where their job is to stay on top of these changes, so they can optimize your site accordingly.

Google is a very competitive search engine, so getting good rankings for the key phrases you want can be very difficult without some professional help. Unfortunately, a lot of companies charge large amounts to help you get the rankings you need. Some firms charge as high as six figures to get your business ranking on top of the search engines. This kind of price might work well for top-shelf large businesses, but what about small ones? That’s where USA SEO Pros comes in.

We focus on search engine optimization for all kinds of companies, including small businesses. And in addition to our SEO services, we also provide companies with the other Internet marketing services they may need. Make sure to check us out if you’re looking for SEO services, but can’t see why you’d need to spend five of six figures on your campaign.

There has been a debate flaring up recently. It isn’t a new debate, but with some heads of the industry taking a stand on one side or another, it’s beginning to be talked about more than usual. The discussion is about exactly how much of an effect social websites have on an SEO campaign. It isn’t difficult to see that social networking/bookmarking definitely has some effect when it comes to exposure and branding, but what about actual SEO efforts?

Some SEO companies are now selling campaigns that include social networking as part of the overall package, explaining that it effects SEO in such a way that it needs to be a part of the overall effort.

Others in the industry are on the other side of the debate and say that social accounts have a minimal effect on actual SEO. These people say marketers should stick to more traditional SEO in their campaigns. These professional don’t argue the idea of exposure, but say that the social accounts aren’t worth the effort if your concern is strictly SEO.

At USASEOPros, we have numerous social accounts all over the Internet. As an SEO company, it’s important to at least test the waters and see for yourself before you go listening to other people. Our findings seem to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to this discussion. There are definitely some benefits to be had when using social accounts for SEO, but it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as some other companies may try to make it out to be.

Social accounts are great for a number of reasons: they can increase brand exposure, bring in new people to see what you have to offer, and can even get you a few fans. As far as regular SEO goes, social accounts do have an effect, but traditional SEO is still a very important. Social accounts aren’t a replacement for traditional SEO, they are a compliment to it.

Social accounts can be tool to help a website gain more links. If you post links to a good article or something interesting on a site, there’s a chance other people will link to it as well, and more links means more search engine power. In the same respect, there are some social bookmarking sites that have the potential to give you some good SEO juice if enough people vote on your link submission. As long as you produce things people want to see, social sites can be a useful tool for SEO. Otherwise, it may just be a good way to get exposure and do some reputation management.

If you’re curious and want to sign up for some sites that may be good to test out some of the facts of this debate, we’ve posted a blog with the eight most important social sites for marketing on our company site.

Also, here’s some video of professionals discussing social networking and marketing. The first part is embedded, the rest can be found on YouTube.

We recently submitted the USASEOPros company blog to the new Amazon.com Kindle Blog Publisher to see what it was like, and what it can do for SEO. The process was relatively simple, and we now have a cool little Amazon.com store for the Kindle version of our company blog. Overall, submitting your blog is definitely a good idea, but there are some problems we saw with the setup they have for the program. It’s still in its beta form, so some setbacks are understandable. These setbacks may not affect USASEOPros, and they should be taken care of before the real version comes out.

One of the most obvious problems with the Kindle Blog program is that it is very simple to claim a blog that doesn’t belong to you. TechCrunch has already had some extensive experience dealing with this, as they have had their blog claimed by someone else, and have also stolen someone else’s blog (don’t worry, it was all to test out the system, no actual thieving was involved). There is also a problem with the pricing and split for blog creators: Amazon has full control over pricing the subscriptions and bloggers only get 30 percent of the take.

Going beyond those couple of obvious problems, the real question here is: what can submitting your blog to the Kindle Store do for SEO? We’re still in the beginning stages of this, but there are a few things we can tell you. First, the setup process only takes a few minutes, so even if it doesn’t do much for SEO, it still may be worth a shot. Although we haven’t seen much effect so far, we only set up the store this morning, and some stuff has already happened.

After we submitted the blog, it only took a few hours for them to verify it and set us up with a cool USASEOPros Amazon page. If this Amazon page has the juice it should, it’s possible that it may rank well for the brand name, which would be interesting. A more interesting aspect would be if Amazon throws a couple of links to our blog around their site. This could do some cool things for the SEO of the blog, but we’ll have to wait a little longer before we can see if any of that stuff happens.

If the Kindle Store does end up doing good things for SEO, Amazon better be watching carefully or they’re going to get massive amounts of spammers very quickly. It was so easy to sign up, that it seems like it would be hard to have anti-spam stuff for the program in place at this point. We’ll just have to wait and see.

UPDATE: After a night of getting pumped full of Amazon.com juice, our company blog seems to be doing noticeably better for certain keywords. While this could be some sort of coincidence, chances are the Kindle submission had something to do with this happening. Hopefully this keeps up, and let it be known that this is potentially and useful way to give your blog a bit more SEO power.