Posts Tagged ‘LeadQual’

LeadQual Expands

This early part of 2008 will go down as one of the most memorable times in the history of LeadQual. Our client list in all our products from Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as our Lead Qualification Service has been growing rapidly and as a result both the East Coast & West Coast offices have been knocking down walls (literally) in order to make room to bring in new talent.

Our Search Engine Marketing Team is located in Emeryville right in the heart of the Eastbay coast. We’ve recently moved into a new office located in 6001 Shellmound St. #325 right next to the infamous Public Market known for their great variety of international eateries. No more Subway 5 times a week, thank goodness. Our office is newly furnished with spacious tables arranged in an open atmosphere conducive to promoting teamwork as our guys are always hard at work exchanging creative ideas to improve our client’s accounts. We’ve bought new more powerful computers to crunch those 50 megabyte excel files for analysis and new network gear for faster connectivity. The newer members are already taking it for granted while the older members continue with their “back in my day” horror stories. Good times.

Search Market Grows

Speaking of new members, the Search Engine Marketing industry is very unique in its job market situation. In this time of recession, Search Engine Marketing (at least at LeadQual) continues to grow. The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has reported the industry has grown nearly 30% from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.1 billion in 2007. Year over Year growth has been slower but this is reflective of the maturation of the search industry. It is well recorded that SEO and SEM are rated second and third respectively as the most effective among all online and offline marketing tactics. The first being internal email marketing. For this very reason, despite the slow economy and smaller overall marketing budgets, many of the big SEM spenders who have optimized their campaigns to ROI continue to allocate more of their marketing dollars to SEM. Overall SEM budgets are expected to grow and this is consistent with what we see with our clients. In an economy where Return on Investment is so important, Search Engine Marketing when implemented well and optimized properly becomes an extremely attractive solution.

Grabbing Talent

Despite the growth in SEM, it continues to be difficult for Search Engine Marketing companies to procure good talent. There are plenty of people looking but we pride ourselves in taking whatever time and resources to find someone we know will succeed and have the experience to bring great value to both our team and to our clients. I have noticed that the awareness level of Search Engine Marketing has been growing in the last few months. Some higher institutions are starting to touch upon SEM and SEO in their e-commerce courses. Others have simply become more familiar with online marketing and want to enter into this hot field. I feel extremely blessed to have gotten into this industry early and have been urging my friends to get in while the industry is still young. LeadQual is always growing so be sure to check out open job opportunities in our career section.

Search Marketers! What is your feel for the market? How has your hiring experience been?

Paul LeeSr. Manager of Web MarketingLeadQual

This is my first post to the LeadQual SEO blog. I thought I’d start out with a top level view of how we at LeadQual approach Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services for our customers. You can find more information about our SEO services here.

First, we take a long term view. We want our customers to be successful over the long term, rather that a quick fix. This of course means we take a “white hat” approach to SEO, using what we consider to be “best practices” for SEO (which of course change over time as the SEO landscape changes). It means we really try to understand our customer’s business and objectives, so we can focus our efforts on meeting their goals. It also means we give recommendations that are focused on achieving high SEO rankings over the long term.

How we approach an SEO engagment varies significantly depending on the needs and objectives of the customer. This can range from a detailed analysis of a current website, to working in an agile and iterative fashion as a member of a team launching a new or redesigned site. We pride ourselves on being flexible in working in whatever mode is needed to make our customers successful.

Regardless of how we approach SEO for a given customer, we find it will always involve the following areas:

1) Keyword analysis
2) Website structural analysis and recommendations
3) Website content analysis and recommendations
4) Linkbuilding

It is critical that each of these areas be done well in order to achieve good SEO rankings. You need to do all of these to succeed.

First, keywords are critical for SEO. You need to target keywords that will bring the right users to the website. You also need to be sure you choose keywords and phrases where it is possible for the website to compete, based on the relative link popularity of the website and the competition. You may choose to go after very competitive terms, or you may go after less competitive terms where you can achieve high rankings.

Second, a website needs to have a structure that search engine spiders can crawl and index. The site needs good navigation and clean links, without “spider traps” such as redirects, JavaScript links, Flash navigation, excess query parameters and the many other things that can prevent spiders from finding a page. The linking hierarchy of the site also needs to be structured so that each page can be reached from the home page within a few clicks, and so that each page does not have too many links. Spiders favor “top level” pages, and will only follow so many links on a page.

Next, the site has to have good content, and that content must have keywords. “Content is King” is an old addage for SEO, and it is true. You need to make sure each page has a unique title and meta description tag that contains keywords, and that you make effective use of on-page elements such as headings, body text, and alt attributes. You also need to avoid “hiding” content via images, Flash, AJAX and other methods where search engines cannot read the text.

Finally, the site needs to have good link popularity in order to rank well. Inbound links to a site are a “vote” for the site, and the search engines, especially Google, place a lot of importance on inbound links. Link building is hard, because you need to convince other sites to place a link to your site on theirs. The search engines work hard to discount “artificial” linking strategies such as reciprocal links, paid links, directories, link farms, etc. You need good links from good sites. The best way to get links is to attract them by having great content — build a site that others want to link to. There are also many other things you can do to attract good links — we’ll get into that in later posts.

There are of courses many other things we do to help our customers succeed at SEO, but starting with keywords, structure, content and linking gives a good basis for virtually all of our SEO engagements.

Stay tuned to this blog for many more posts with information, tips and techniques about SEO. If you need help, feel free to contact us.

John Erickson
VP SEO
www.LeadQual.com

This blog is a forum for the LeadQual staff to share our knowledge, experience and ideas with our customers and the world in general. The LeadQual team has decades of experience with lead generation, lead qualification, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), and many other topics. Through our blog, as well as through our services, we will share our knowledge to help you become more successful with your website and business. We hope you find the information and insights here useful.

If you have any questions or comments regarding LeadQual or this blog, please contact us here. We look forward to hearing from you!