As I mentioned in my last post, I now work with Dealer Solution, Inc. which its main products is a dealer software for used and independent auto dealers. They brought me on as a partner to help them offer SEO services to their customers which are are mainly independent and used auto dealers. This has prompted me to learn more about the auto dealer fields.

Auto dealers in particular small independent and used auto dealers often don’t invest in SEO mainly because they either don’t understand the value of search engines or they think it is way too competitive of a field for them to get any good traffic. That is why they invest in listing their websites in third party sites such as Shop for Auto and other similar sites with traffic uploading their inventory in hope of getting some good traffic.

But what they miss out on is local SEO. Yes it maybe hard to rank organically for “used Honda Civic” nationally but if you invest in local SEO, if someone in your area looking for a used Honda Civic, Google’s local search and customized search will have a great chance to return your website in the top list if you optimize your website effectively for local SEO.

Local and customized search are now bringing the most traffic.Near 30% of traffic for this blog is based on local search terms and customized traffic (including logged in search). This means that this also could be a huge traffic opportunity for any websites and auto dealer websites aren’t exempt.

There is a ton of opportunity in local SEO and that is what we will be focusing on when it comes to our auto dealership clients when optimizing their websites. If you are a small business owner of an auto dealer and looking to optimize your website, feel free to contact the should you need any help, consulting, or even a simple question.

Although my business is registered in San Diego, Encinitas to be exact, and I have clients from both Los Angeles and San Diego, I have moved to Orange County to work with a couple of local firms helping them boost their internet marketing division. It is a new stage of my career that I am very excited about.

But I am not limiting myself to these two businesses and I have some free time doing SEO consulting and I really want to tap into orange county area so if you are a small business or medium business looking for an SEO consultant in Orange County, I am now local and can help your business. I offer a variety of SEO and internet marketing consulting services I recommend you check out.

- Local SEO is becoming more targeted by spammer – Google’s heavy focus on “citations” is the main reason because as getting links from other websites can be difficult, getting citations isn’t as difficult. For example, spammers can spam forums and blogs with “citations” and since there is no link involved, there is no nofollow tag or no spam detection hence it is easily absued.

-  Google Search Quality Declines because of Google+ – Competing with Facebook and Twitter, Google is favoring its own social media network, Google+, and showing it in the search results. Many search engine experts and usability experts believe this will decline Google’s search results. Although this will probably not effect Google’s search market share as its biggest competitor is way behind in the industry.

- SEO Business on The Rise – Just like how late 90s there was a .com boom, there seems to be a “.seo” boom now that many companies have websites, they want to get soem search engine traffic as it is the most targeted type of traffic. As the result SEO firms and SEO consultants are highly in demand these day.

I am taking some time off working for others full time to focus on myself and my consulting business. I will be working with a few local companies here in OC such as Bold Array and Dealer Solutions(AutoXplorer) as well as my own clients in San Diego, OC, and LA. This is a much needed time for me to reach out truly to the entrepreneurial side of me and applying my internet marketing skills to my own business.

I will be working with those companies mainly offering my SEO, SEM, and web development businesses.

I am not ruling out working for someone else however, if there is an exceptional opportunity I will pursue it but at this point it is much needed for me to do this for myself and my services.

Just thought I drop a quick note indicating that Search Marketing Posts accepts guest posts on search marketing and internet marketing topic. If you are a blogger writing about such topics make sure you visit that link.

Of course I am the owner of that site as well trying to get it going to hopefully become one of the top visited search marketing blogs in 2012.

As an SEO consultant, I often advise my clients to heavily invest in content because of search engines love content and want to show the most relevant content to their uses. The particularity like two type of content;

a) Search engines like quality content
b) Search engines like fresh content

Now the question come is that where to invest this content. And my answer is that “it depends!”. I personally invest most of my content on my websites. Mainly because I think in long term it helps my site more by generating traffic to your website as opposed to guest posts and articles where they usually get a little bit offsite traffic and ranking boost to your website but eventually they disappear deep inside pages as more posts come and the links to your website disappear.

But if you put content on your own website, then you get some good traffic off line tail and if you continue improving internal linking.

How to improve internal linking
Always reference your old and archive posts when relevant. For example my press release post I wrote a few days ago has a few references to older posts linking to them hitting the bots to revisit this pages even though they are old because they have valuable content hence the ranking of these pages will increase in the search engines and they will become more valuable again.

Offsite Content
Offsite content as mentioned earlier refers to article submission, press release submission, and guest posting when you are trying to get some exposure and self promote.

Some of my previous employers and clients have asked me to provide an ROI on SEO initiatives so that way they know how much to invest and while that is a very reasonable thing to ask, I often tend to tell them that don’t count on the ROI results heavily and invest in SEO for long term results.

SEO is a guideline not a marketing campaign
Sure you can break down your initiatives into so called “campaigns” but they not true campaigns. And the reason I say they are not campaigns because by definitions, campaigns have an end. Marketing campaigns in particular have a certain end where you measure your campaigns success. A good example is an email marketing campaign where you run to see your open rate, click through rate, and conversion. Same deal with social media campaign, and even your PPC  campaigns.

But your SEO initiatives should not have an end they should be ongoing. SEO is an ongoing refinement of your website and its content. Your web masters or web developers should always be on the look out to implement the latest web development techniques that are search engine friendly, your content writers should always have both users and search engines in mind, and your marketers should always be marketing your content, product, and services out there in order to earn popularity.

Link building should be an ongoing process, as many older links drop and new ones appear, and that is how search engines rank websites based on active links. And since nowadays sites change, update, and content gets pushed down, your links fall off the chart so you need to continue building new links.

Of course throughout the process you need to be analyzing and measuring all your efforts, see where you need to put more of focus. For example, if you think your site is SEO friendly enough, then you can shift some of your resources toward quality content creation and or outsourcing. But so as long as you want to rank well in search engines and get search engine traffic, you want to continue your SEO efforts and that is why it is very hard to call it a marketing campaign. SEO is an one king effort which is why I like to call SEO a technical and marketing guideline.

I just came out of an SEO meet up in north San Diego called Encinitas SEO meet up or something hosted by Best Rank in Solana Beach. The topic of the meet up was link building and host of the meet up discussed article submission and press release as a good method for SEO.

While I agree both article submission and press releases are perhaps good way of marketing and building traffic, I highly advise against using them to boost and manipulate your rankings for following reasons;

All press releases and article sites are PR0 because they are deep inside each their parent websites news or article directories and since there are so many press releases and article submissions, there is hardly any good SEO value being passed.

You gotta do a lot of article submissions and press releases to be able to have any noticeable ranking changes. I am talking about hundreds and in some niches it may take thousands of articles and press releases to be able to improve ranking. And if you improve your ranking it won’t be by much and there won’t be much improvement and it will not last if you don’t keep it up.

That gives you the question of ROI; What is the biggest bang for my buck? And I sincerely believe article submission sites or press releases are not it. The ROI isn’t just there. Imagine all the time and resources you use to write these articles and you won’t even know if it is going to improve ranking or not and how much. The traffic it generates is not really the type of traffic that converts so why spend so much time abusing this method.

Don’ get me wrong there is still good uses for both articles and press releases. Articles are there to get your name out there, your content out there so people get to know you, and if your content is really exceptional, then you are going to get some really good results. So you don’t have to write a ton of content rather than less content but focus on quality so you may get someone to like your article and perhaps want to learn more about you buy following you and establish an online relationship and that may help you with long term marketing plans.

Same sort of concept goes for press releases. Press releases are tools to get newsworthy content to media. If you have a good newsworthy content like a new merger or partner, industry related news, new company earnings and major changes, or any other truly newsworthy content then submit a press release. And if your content is really newsworthy then it can grab some attention and perhaps some people write about you and link to you. This happen not long a go when I submitted a press release for a client of mine and then an industry related blog wrote about my client and linked to them. But if you are submitting a ton of press releases that lack true newsworthy content, just in hope of getting some contextual links in order to improve you ranking, then its going to take a lot of work and investment on your part to see a slight ranking improvements just like article submission sites.

Again it all comes down to biggest bang for your buck. If you have a nice article to write, then go ahead submit it to high traffic and authority article site. If you have a newsworthy content to release, then go right ahead and submit that press release. But if you don’t then spend your SEO time and link building efforts elsewhere.

More reading on this topic:

Press Release; Good for Link Baiting not Link Stuffing

Press Releases Becoming Less Effective, Thanks to Social Media

How to write a great press release

This post I will be a bit of how I got into SEO and what I thin it takes to make it in this field whether as an SEO consultant or SEO specialist working for others.

I am currently an SEO consultant in San Diego with a full time job in Encinitas as senior SEO. I have been doing SEO consulting for a few years now. I got into SEO professionally when I launched my online business GoHiTech.com which at the time was selling GPS and electronic Gadgets before ipod came out completely killing my business. The I got a full time job as a web developer at Experian and since I knew SEO, I got into the SEO committee where we would talk about SEO initivies and their implementations.

After a couple years, of working there, I decided it was time to own another business, a soccer store in Vista in San Diego county. We first started online with an optimized ecommerce website initially under LAsoccerShop.com and later I was able to get SoccerNation.com. We did great online and then expanded into a real physical break and mortar location. We did good the first couple years then the economy got bad and in 2010 we closed the shop, sold the website to our competitor who turned it into an local San Diego soccer news and magazine, and then I moved to LA working for Solomon Finance then Cooking.com as SEO manager. While working full time as an SEO manager, I managed to pull a few project on the side as an SEO consultant while I was in LA but I got tired of that city and decided to move back to the city I truly loved; San Diego.

Currently living in Encinitas in North San Diego County, I work full time as senior SEO strategist for a small marketing firm, and also do SEO consulting on the side and I must admit life as an SEO has been quite a bit of ride and very interesting for following reasons;

1.All of your employers or clients want to rank on the first page for the most competitive terms in short period of time and stay there so as an SEO you often find yourself educating your client about what it takes to get there and somehow you may never get there. For example, I almost lost my job when I told my last company Solomon Finance that they there was no way they could rank on the first page for either keywords payday loan or payday loans mainly because of all the competition and spam in that field, it was very heard near impossible to rank first page. I advised my previous employer to bank on smaller keywords such a “direct payday lender” or “payday advance online” which are less competitive or spammed and if we rank for a plenty of those, then we can get the same type of traffic we would get from the keywords like “payday loans”. But as mentioned earlier, it took near a year before I could convince my boss about that and at that point I found a new job at Cooking as SEO manager.

2.As an SEO manager, sometimes you don’t have control over things and you can only advise. But it gets frustrating when things you advice don’t happen. A good example was my previous employer Cooking.com where they had an old platform they were not willing to change, and poor editorial and product descriptions, which they didn’t have resource to change. As an SEO, there was so little things I could do where your platform and content aren’t SEO friendly and you don’t have resources to change it and other stuff like link building and social media marketing can get you so far if you two have the other two Cs (code and content).

3.As an SEO expert, you have got to stay up to date with Google and Bing changes specially Google that tends to modify their algorithm twice daily (business days). And since their algorithms are not public, as an SEO I find myself reading a ton of reputable SEO blogs and news sites to figure out what’s going on however the biggest challenge comes when you have to distinguish fact from fiction. SEO blogs and bloggers tend to make a lot of things up, some purposely mislead, and good information are often not shared and that leaves it up to you to figure out what’s working and what is not. And that comes with a lot of experience and some seo testing o your own.

4.SEO reporting is a tricky one. Different clients or employers want different type of reports. I have had clients and employers where they only care about the SEO traffic and sales, and others think about keyword ranking, conversion rates, keyword trends, etc. So satisfying your client or your employer is an important issue. I find myself using various SEO tools and analytic tools to pull that data, and of course you have got to be really good at tools such as Microsoft Excel and Word.

5.Client or employer industry research is a big one. In a short period of time, you have to learn about the industry fast. Of course there are SEO and keyword tools that enable you with that however to my experience, the best type of results come when you better understand your client business model, their industry, and their competition as comprehensive as you can so you don’t waste any time or resources.

Every job or profession has its own challenges and as an SEO consultant, I have stated some of mine above. If you are an SEO expert and would like to share some of your challenges let me know.

I came across a very good post on one of my favorite guest blogging websites Famous Bloggers on how bloggers are not your average writers yet many people tend to judge bloggers by the way they write.

Blogging was never meant to be true journalism. Blogs has been a medium to allow everyone to express themselves, their opinion and write casually about the whatever they wanted to talk about. It was never intended to be true journalism and for most part it is remanding to stay that way. In addition to self expression, blogs were also created to create a community where the bloggers and their follows exchange ideas and feedback.

One doesn’t necessarily have to be a great writer in order to be a good blogger. Blogs are usually judged by their number of traffic and followers, and the type of content they cater not necessarly how someone’s writing skills are.

Of course there business sites that took blogging to next level for business goals and hired professional writers to do their blogging in order to create professional content. As an SEO consultant, I advice my clients to use blogging to enhance organic traffic and I often do advise them to write really high quality content to grow their authority and search traffic but high quality content from SEO prospective isn’t necessarily the one with the best style of writing it is the type of content the audience of a blog like and find useful. True my larger clients tend to hire business writers but that is a business decisions they take however many personal and business blogs are getting results by keeping it simple and writing average type of content yet getting good results and that tells you more that to be a good blogger, you don’t have to be good writer as well.