Today the internet is making history. All across the web websites are making news by blacking out their sites in protest to the SOPA and PIPA. As we discussed in a previous blog post, these new bills could effect our online freedom and hurt online businesses.

After you’ve done a bit of reading, we want to encourage you to take action. We’ve listed a few ways to protest SOPA below. Now is the time to take action and get involved.

• Search the online list of Senators at senate.gov and contact your corresponding Senator.
• Use the form at AmericanCensorship.org to send a note to your Senator.
• Sign the petition from Google addressed to Congress.
• Use the form at savetheinternet.com to see who is for or against the legislation.
• Join sopastrike.com and write to Congress.
• Use Wikipedia’s zipcode lookup to find the representatives in your area.

Together we can make a difference. Today is the day to act and make your voice heard.

Early this Monday morning news broke about hackers accessing Zappos and their affiliate site servers. User data and other sensitive information was compromised and emails were sent out to those that were effected.

“We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password),” wrote Zappos and 6PM.com in a note to users.

Due to the attack, affected users have had their password reset as a security precaution. But the information that was stolen is now in the wind and there is no way to know what the affects of this data heist may have on the accounts accessed.

Unfortunately this story is nothing new to the online world. Login data is stolen on a regular basis from sites all across the internet. That’s why at SEO Services we take extra steps to keep all of our customers’ login data not only secure, but we also create unique passwords for each and every account that we setup. Whether it is a Google account or a minor social media media channel, all accounts have their own password so that if one of those passwords happens to be stolen it will not affect the integrity of the other accounts.

SEO Services is one of the elite search engine marketing companies specializing in organic search engine results. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, SEO Services has achieved incredible success in organic search engine results in numerous industries. We are committed to providing our customers the very best in search engine optimization services.

The other day a friend of mine mentioned that he was searching for a new car online. He had been browsing many different auto manufacture’s websites, but had yet to come up with a choice on the car he wanted to buy. He knows that I work in the internet marketing industry so he mentioned how much Ford spends on their advertising. He said “I see their ads everywhere I go!”

The truth is that my friend had been experiencing an innovation from Google called Remarketing. Because he had been browsing the Ford site a cookie was placed on his browser indicating his interest in specific products. A few days later as he was browsing other websites that have nothing to do with cars, the cookie was triggering ads from Ford to show up on other sites.

From the view point of my friend, he was seeing the same cars from Ford over and over again. While Ford was not paying a single penny to show those ads to him, they were effectively remarking their products to him during a critical time of the buying cycle.

Google AdWords is a great way to bring in new customers to your website, but when you add the power of remarking through the Google Display Network many advertisers see higher conversions for their campaigns overall. Advertisers can “tag” pages of their site that correspond to certain categories they want to promote. Then when someone visits one of those tagged pages, they will begin to see those display ads over the next several days as they browse sites across the Google Display Network.

My friend has not yet decided on what car he will buy, but the last time I talked to him he was leaning towards purchasing a Ford. I never told him about Ford’s little remarketing secret.

At SEO Services we offer full service PPC management for our clients to give you an edge over your competition.

If you spend a lot of time using the internet as a source for media, whether it is news, sports, music, movies, blogs, or any of the thousands of forms of information now available, then you have likely run into the discussion about the SOPA. In today’s blog post we will discuss what it is and how it can effect regular users like you.

Here’s how Wikipedia explains the bill:

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 pieces of music or movies within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Basically the bill gives power to big media to have sites shutdown if they disagree with what has been published or say that the media is copyrighted.

Matt Cutts, source we have frequently used on this blog, recently posted about SOPA and the progress against it. He says that if the “SOPA becomes law, it could stifle the innovation (and jobs) that the technology industry creates. That’s why Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, and Zynga all oppose SOPA. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue…”

Finally, in a New York Times article Rebecca MacKinnon further explain how the potental for abuse of power is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the internet age. At SEO Services, we manage the ranking of our clients’ websites and their online reputation. We encourage you to learn more about the SOPA and how it can hurt innovation. Companies like ours would be greatly limited by the control of the internet from the government and big media companies.

Last month we posted an alert that Google Plus is now open for businesses and since then thousands of pages have been created on Google’s new social network. With the huge interest in the new social network Google has been cranking out some updates to the Pages interface and last week they posted a blog post featuring the latest improvements to Google Pages.

First of all, there is now an ability to add up to 50 managers to your Page. Managers can publish posts, respond to comments, add photos, change profile information, and even add/remove other managers. This is particularly valuable to us as an online marketing firm because our clients can now add us as managers to their pages, which allows us to make changes, but still gives our clients full ownership of the Google+ Page.

Next, Google has added a way for Page owners and managers to get notifications about actions that take place on their pages. With this change, you’ll be able to customize the notifications for your business page separately from your personal profile, allowing you to choose the level of detail that’s most appropriate for you.

This last update is not as major as the others, but it is nice for vanity reasons at least. The bolded count number on your will now include both the page’s +1′s on Google+ and across the web as well as any people that have added you to a circle. Everybody loves to be popular and any way to get that +1 count higher is always welcome.

Give SEO Services a call today and we can help you better understand the role of social media in online marketing and SEO ranking.

As the year draws to a close, Google has posted the most popular search results of 2011. Sorting through the billions of searches there were 10 fastest rising global queries. In addition to providing the data, Google also presents the top rising searches in this beautiful YouTube video.

To give you some perspective on the top rising searches of 2011, let’s take a look at the percentage increase for each one:

1. Rebecca Black – >10,000% more searches.
2. Google Plus – 10,000% more searches.
3. Ryan Dunn – 10,000% more searches.
4. Casey Anthony – 2,680% more searches.
5. Battlefield 3 – 1,773% more searches.
6. iPhone 5 – 1,658% more searches.
7. Adele – 1,588% more searches.
8. 東京 電力 (TEPCO) -1,470% more searches.
9. Steve Jobs – 982% more searches.
10. iPad 2 – 939% more searches.

Taking a look at the list, it is impressive that Apple products holds two places in the top 10 considering that this top 10 list is not the total search volume of the year, it is the fastest rising searches. So that means even with the volume of searches already happening for iPhone 5 and iPad 2, the searches increased phenomenally higher from 2010 to 2011.

At SEO Services to take search very seriously and our know of the search engine optimization industry has put us at the top as one of the elite search engine marketing companies specializing in organic search engine results. We are committed to providing our customers the very best in search engine optimization services.

In a blog post about a month ago Google announced changes to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of web searches. In areas where the “freshness” of the search results matter, like recent events, hot topics, current events, and breaking news items, the results will be weighted more heavily towards newer content.

A practical example of these changes is most easily understood for a search like “presidential election.” Rather than typing the election year you are looking for, Google will now give you the most up-to-date results at the top of the page.

The big news is that Google believes this change will impact 35% of all web searches! Although the majority of web searches do not include topics that require frequent updates, over a third will be directly affected by these changes. According to the Google blog post, the major areas of change will be in the following types of searches:

Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 5 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.

Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Just when you think you’ve got a pulse on the Google search ranking factors, things change. At SEO Services we take a wide variety of tools to get your website to the top of Google and other search engines. Our SEO consulting services are designed to learn your business and create a marketing strategy to achieve top rankings above your competition.

Unlike many other forms of marketing, pay per click (or PPC) offers simple ways to test and prove different marketing messages. While SEO and social media can have use different testing methods, PPC has the benefit of giving clean, trackable results.

According to Wikipedia, A/B testing is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. In Google AdWords, the testing process allows you to test the performance of two entirely different versions of an ad. Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you sell running shoes. Your ad might look something like this:

Comfortable Running Shoes
Many Sizes Currently In Stock.
Free Two Day Shipping!
www.yourwebsite.com

After you have created that ad (our control ad), the alternative ad might look like this:

Stylish Running Shoes
Many Sizes Currently In Stock.
Free Two Day Shipping!
www.yourwebsite.com

As you can see, the ads are very close to being the same, but you want to test if the word “stylish” attracts more people than the word “comfortable.” This test would provide valuable information about your customers’ interests. If more shoppers clicked on the “comfortable” ad and made a purchase on your website, then you would then delete the “stylish” ad and try something else, for example:

Comfortable Jogging Shoes
Many Sizes Currently In Stock.
Free Two Day Shipping!
www.yourwebsite.com

This second test ad would determine if your visitors are move familiar with the term “jogging” instead of “running.”

This is a very basic view of A/B testing with Google AdWords. Leaps and bounds in visitor testing can really be made by making changes to your ad’s landing page. These tests can include changes in your ad copy, call-to-action, page color, headers, and many other tweaks.

The truth is that website and ad testing is never complete. It is a continuous process for the best click through rate and the highest conversion percentage. At SEO Services we not only provide premium SEO consulting, but we can then help you put those strategies into practice. Give us a call or fill out our contact form so we can discuss your online marketing strategy in more detail.

When building a paid or natural search campaign, it is important to use the keywords that are most frequently searched on Google. You don’t want to choose keywords that are rarely used, because it would decrease the likelihood that your business would show up when your key customers are looking for your products and services.

For that reason, we’ve got a great free tool to help you research and compare the popularity of specific keywords. It’s called Google Insights and it is an invaluable tool to help you rank your keyword hunches and focus on the truly popular phrases.

To best illustrate this topic, we will use an example product search for supplies needed to physically ship items, a particularly popular search topic this time of year.

Let’s make an educated guess before we start the test.

Hypothesis
Choosing 5 different keyword phrases, we expect that the most popular keywords will be as follows (ranked from most popular to least popular): shipping supplies, packing supplies, shipping supply, packaging supplies, mailing supplies

Research
Now that we know what keywords we expect to be the most popular let’s use Google Insights to determine which ones are actually the most searched on Google. To perform the test yourself go to http://www.google.com/insights/search.

Results
After entering the keywords into the tool, we can now see that our hypothesis was correct in some instances, but wrong in others. Here’s the breakdown…

What we’ve learned here is that if we want to advertise for packaging supplies, the best keyword to use is actually “shipping supplies.” It has twice as much search volume than any other keyword. And that data has can be confirmed since 2004!

At SEO Services we use a wide variety of tests to assure that the keywords we use to advertise your business are the best possible to bring new customers to your website. We are Ecommerce SEO experts and we’ve proven it to our customers year after year.

Why doesn’t your business utilize social media? According to a recent infographic on the state of social media in small business, most businesses don’t know how to start using social networks to build their companies.

While only a minority of businesses activity monitor and update the social networks 88% of all businesses see potential in it or believe that it will impact their business.

Reasons small businesses are currently using social media:

• Branding – If you don’t have social accounts for your business, then you are risking losing your brand usernames. For example, if your company name is CompanyABC, someone may beat you to that username and steal your branding opportunity.
• Lead Generation – While this is not a big area of social media (because lead generation is not the primary goal of social networks) it is still a strong reason to at least create a presence on the biggest social networks.
• Customer Service – Many people prefer to connect with businesses using social media platforms. Phone calls and emails are still very popular, but a growing number of people are seeking help through Facebook and Twitter.
• Product Ratings & Reviews – When you setup your account on a social review site, you will encourage your customers to leave your company some positive reviews. On the other hand, there is no way to completely avoid negative reviews, but if you don’t monitor these review sites you will never know when someone posts an angry review about your company or product.

At SEO Services, we offer a packaged solution to social media management. Give us a call or fill out our quote request form to discuss your needs in further detail.