Author: Philip O’Hara CEO
Directory One, Inc. SEO Company

Blogging is becoming very important in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) circles. I met with an Oil and Gas company today and told them to start blogging on oil and gas news, along with any other subjects that are important to their prospective customers.

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Author: Philip O’Hara CEO
Houston Search Engine Marketing Company

Listing your website with other sites on the Internet is a tricky and sometimes costly thing to do. Yahoo, Google and MSN spiders crawl websites and then reports back to the search portal on how many links it finds for a given site on other sites.

The best kind of links you can have on your site is a text link using keywords. For example, a link from Directory One, Inc. might have the main keywords of their company which are, Houston Search Engine Marketing, Houston Search Engine Optimization, Houston Internet Marketing or Houston Website Marketing.

A link to Artistic Video on the other hand would have key phrases like Houston TV Commercials, Houston Video Editing, Houston Video Recording, Houston Training Video, or Houston Promotional Video’s as their text links on their sites.

The more relevant the site is that links to you, the better it is. For example, a link from seoconsultants.com is relevant for Directory One, Inc. so it’s a better link. A link to Artistic Video from any video source would be a great link. A link from a press release is a powerful link too.

When you apply for a link in a directory, try and find a category that has some meaningful page rank. Page rank can be measured on the Google tool bar. You may have to go under the setting to display it though.

You should pay Yahoo $299.00 to list in their directory. You should also list yourself in the local Yahoo directory as well. The local directory is free. You should also list in DMOZ, Google maps, Google local, and Business.com.

It is worth $10.00 to $25.00 a month, if you get a decent back link. I have a $9.95 a month yellow page link in Yahoo yellow pages and a link of $25.00 a month on yellowpages.com too. They both send me about a lead or two a quarter.

Link submissions are one of the many keys that help the optimizer achieve results. One will need links from great relevant sites to dominate in the search results. I think Directory One, Inc. will show up more often and not less often as Google continues to give the directory or wikopedia type results over the local vendor. Local directory vendors like www.CheckHouston.com  will become more and more prevalent in the results on google.com

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Author: Philip O’Hara
CEO, Founder & Sales Communicator

When introducing your staff to your customers, let them know you have the goods and services behind you. Customers appreciate the time you and your staff will take communicating with them.  It is important that everyone of my employee’s communicate with the customers every day. Our goal is that each employee at Directory One, Inc. will speak to at  least three customers a day. The more you communicate with your customers, the more they will value your services and know what they spend with you will benefit them.

It’s all about Return On Investment (ROI) in any Search Engine Marketing campaign. People will spend thousands a month if the ROI is there. The more time we spend with our customers, the easier it is to determine their ROI. One person can get at least 150 reoccurring customers in any five year period. Some of these customers will spend thousands of dollars a month. The more the customers know your staff, the better they will feel about the money they are spending with you. Have all of your staff blog about the list of chores they had for the day. Blogs help a lot. Check out another SEO blog at www.seolouisville.com/blog

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Author: Philip O’Hara
Directory One, Inc. CEO & Artistic Video

Today’s post is happening during a Video we are doing to help Web Designers and SEO people learn how to get their sites ranking in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Jeremy Brake, Josh Cornett, and Amir Zaman are teaching us the ropes.

Amir is teaching the Internet Marketing or SEO class at Rice starting next week, so five of us joined him to make sure his course work was smooth. He is ready. He is one of the best read people I know. Directory One, Inc. is lucky to have him as part of our team.

Jeremy taught us about PHP forms and Josh trained us on how to build CSS. Josh covered the div tag, suckerfish, a IE 6 java script fix for suckerfish menu and navigation. I look forward to the SEO world finding out who we are at Directory One, Inc. In the future you can go to www.directoryone.com for our video series. We have 2 to post so far, and our hope is, as time permits, to eventually add to them monthly. In the future, also look for updates on our newsletters and our Biography pages.

Pemanent 301 redirects were also part of the study program today. You have to go into the htaccess file through an ftp program, you connect to the htaccess file and download it to the desktop, and then hit edit it. All Website Redesigners need this information.

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Author: Philip O’Hara
CEO & Founder

Directory One, Inc. has added three more employee’s this week. We added a new receptionist and a new SEO writer. On Monday, we also had a new accounting person start. This makes 4 really good search engine optimizers on our team, David Ogletree, Amir Zaman, Herb Firestone, and Terri Stevens. Pablo Gomez and Arthur Brown are becoming great SEO Web Designers too.  Jeremy Brake and Josh Cornett are teaching some CSS classes in our conference room this Saturday.

Most of this growth is from the new contracts Directory One has won lately from its’ Physician and Attorney customers. They are seeing great opportunity to their practices a lot quicker. A physician or attorney in any city in the U.S. could use the expertise we have gained with our Houston Texas customers.

Lize`and Shaun are still holding down the Louisville office and Shaun had some help from an Intern for a while. Shaun started a blog on www.seolouisville.com.

Since the Christmas rush, Directory One has many people to thank including special thanks to these team members: Roseann Janek, Cristy Hayes, John Phillipe, Brian Beardon, Rachael Dunlap, Mark Weber, and Patrick O’Shea. They all have contributed to making 2007 our best year ever. Our customers have really rallied around us and we have spent a great deal of time with many customers.

Any time that a Directory One Employee can spend time with our customers it is time well spent.  I want all my customers to get to know the whole team over here at the Directory One, Inc. office.

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Losing one of the great tools on the search marketing front will be hard to replace. In the past you could see how much your competitor’s were bidding on Yahoo search marketing keyword bids tool but at the beginning of February Yahoo decided to turn it off. Now you get a message that reads Gone.

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