Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization from Directory One will benefit your business by working closely with you to achieve the return on your investment so that your Internet advertising campaign delivers measurable results through precise target audience lead generation.  Please give us a call today at (800) 477-1324 to discuss your current online marketing objectives and how our SEO services in Houston can benefit your business today!

SEO services include a variety of marketing strategies, each functioning collaboratively to build a strong foundation for long-term business marketing success.  The process of establishing a strong web presence that will grow your business is a multi-faceted plan, which involves a number of technical pieces that occur both behind the scenes and for the public eye to view.

SEO Services

Even Google themselves has a web pages dedicated to describing the benefits of hiring SEO services to help your business website perform better in organic search engine listings.  At Directory One, we are intimately familiar with the innerworkings of the search engine companies because we have been helping credible businesses with the online advertising campaigns for such a long time.

You will not find another company that has been in business longer than Directory One in our industry because of the relative youth of the computer industry in general and because we have been helping businesses to succeed for more than 20 years through a variety of business marketing and search engine optimization processes.

Your business is unique and your business marketing plan should be customized to match where you are and where you are going.  Contact Directory One to enjoy a smooth transition as you climb the search engine ladder of online business marketing success.

Houston Marketing Firm

Your Houston marketing firm, Directory One, will be happy to discuss any and all of your search engine optimization and business marketing needs today!  Trust the management of your online business development campaign to the experienced SEO professionals ready to provide you with the dynamic Houston business marketing strategy to make your company stand out above the competition.

Increasing awareness of the significant return provided by Internet advertising has made hiring an SEO service in Houston a top priority for many corporations today.  No doubt, the very fact that you are reading this blog means that you have developed an awareness of the importance of online advertising.

Give yourself the edge you need by giving Directory One a call today at (800) 477-1324 to learn more about the many aspects of search engine optimization that will give you the competitive edge required to reach the large consumer base that is already seeking your services online right now.

Additional Search Engine Optimization Resources:

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Relevant Traffic Yields Higher Return Rates

Relevant traffic yields higher return rates on your SEO dollar. Call Directory One at (800) 477-1324 to receive the most effective Houston SEO service to help your business succeed online.

Advertising costs in today’s world mean Internet advertising, which means SEO. This is an indisputable fact now and just because there is more technology involved in the process of building an Internet advertising campaign, does not mean that it is any less important or valuable, but rather the opposite is actually true.

It is critical for businesses to advertise online in order to compete in today’s marketplace and to avoid missing out on the tremendous exposure that the Internet provides. The Internet has been growing rapidly in recent years. In the early 90’s it became open to commercialism and since then has been a booming economy.

Despite the economic difficulties that have occurred in 2009, the Internet still grossed the largest amount of money ever in online sales, particularly during this Christmas season. The value of advertising where the people are has been proven time and again.

Focused Internet Traffic

Long tail key phrases are often much more effective in helping your business to actually receive a return on your Internet advertising dollars. If you don’t care about your sales conversion rate and only care about product or company branding, then getting to spot number one under ubiquitous terms is a fine strategy.

However, most businesses operate for the purpose of revenue….profit….making money…

There are a variety of methods for helping you to achieve your financial goals with Internet advertising. Directory One is the company with the proven success rate and the experience of years in business to help you to best understand what you need in order to drive relevant traffic to your website.

There are time periods that these SEO methods take in order to achieve top results that are actually maintainable. Don’t fall for an SEO company’s sales banter about getting you to the top of page 1 in a few days. It will not stick, nor will it provide you much of a sustainable increase in revenue.

Advertising dollars should be spent in such a manner that will help your business to grow. At Directory One we know exactly how to do that and have been doing it for a large variety of clients spanning across all industries for years.

Call (800) 477-1324 to receive results that matter. Relevant traffic yields higher return rates and at Directory One, we will get you the best ROI for your important Internet advertising from Houston.
Additional Houston SEO Information:

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Website Analysis: Make Sure Your Business is Getting the Bang for Your Buck

Website Analysis: Make sure that your business is getting the bang for your buck! You may have a business website already, but do you know how well it is performing for you? Call the website experts in Houston at Directory One at (800) 477-1324 to get this question answered today!

You should know exactly how many visitors you are receiving, where they are coming from and how long they are staying on your site…..as a minimum….

Maybe you already know all of this and you don’t understand why these numbers are so low! Maybe you have searched on the key phrases that seem like someone would type into a Google search engine when they are looking to purchase your products or services and you can’t seem to find your business website anywhere. Why is this??

Around every corner you will hear one person or another claiming that they know what they are doing with websites and search engine optimization. Maybe they use articles. Maybe they use maps. Maybe they use videos.

Here at Directory One, we not only stay on top of ALL of the best practices for successful, long-term SEO and business website development, but we have been doing it for over 20 years successfully…helping businesses to grow, increase their profits and succeed in the competitive business directory and online marketplace.

What’s Wrong with My Website?

If you are certain that you know what key phrases people are typing in to look for your services and you are certain that there is a large market of buyers out there who want what you sell, then you have no choice left but to ask yourself, “What’s Wrong with My Website?”

It’s time to end the guessing game. Stop asking your employees to figure it out and give the experts in the business website and SEO industry a call today! At Directory One, we would be more than happy to perform a website analysis for your company and provide you with a detailed listing of exactly what you need to do to start showing up at the top of Internet searches.

Did you know that the Google algorithms look for about 150 different things when determining which website out of millions in each category should go on those ever important first 3 pages? Are you in the top 30, top 20 or top 10 search results that are just about the only search results than anyone is even going to look at when they are surfing the web??

Protect Your Business Website Investment

It isn’t likely that it was particularly cheap for you to get your website built. Now, how much are you spending on having it maintained? If you are spending money on a website that isn’t generating results for you, every penny definitely counts!

Why waste your money and time on a business website for your Houston company that isn’t doing its job?

Give us a call to make sure that your business is getting the bang for your buck with your business website, which should be the foundation of and center of your business marketing universe. You can maximize your ROI (return on investment) today by giving Directory One a call.

Why Should I Optimize My Website?

A website analysis will help you to understand the details involved in optimizing your website. Many business owners are just now getting on-board with the online marketplace and having their business websites either built or updated. For some, it is difficult to completely understand the reason why a business website is necessary at all, and now they are being told they have to “optimize?”

A simple way of explaining the reasoning behind this would be to compare your website and the Internet to a large filing system. The Internet would be the building that contains millions of pieces of paper. Your website would be one of those pieces of paper.

You could just scratch out your company name and information and tell people why they should buy from you on a piece of paper (i.e. your business website.)

Then you could walk it over to the big building and just throw it into the stack of the millions of other pieces of paper.

That is what you are doing when you have a website built that is not optimized.

Now, consider that that same building also has an extremely large room with well-organized filing cabinets and some of the files are more easily accessed than others. Everything that starts with the letter “A” is the easiest to find.

Instead of just throwing your website onto the big pile of papers in the building, you decide to walk it over to the filing cabinets. (That’s what you are doing when you hire an SEO Company.)

Unfortunately, your business name starts with a “Z” and the filing cabinets with the “Z” assortment is situated down a very cramped hallway. The SEO Company you are using might attempt to help you to find a way to get your piece of paper titled so that it is a bit easier to reach in the filing cabinet system.

However, it will take an experienced Houston SEO Company like Directory One to tell you all the details involved in making sure that you get into the “A” filing cabinet, right up there in the front so that you don’t have to wonder at how much time your customers will actually spend perusing through the filing system before they ever even come across your piece of paper and the information that you put on it.

Now that you are in the front, you also want to make sure that the information on your piece of paper is fully developed (content development in Houston by Directory One) so that the customers who look at your page will actually feel motivated to give you a call and provide you with the opportunity to deliver your products and/or services to them.

This analogy could probably go on and on, but the fact remains that by calling Directory One to receive a website analysis for your company, you will be giving your business a real chance to succeed in today’s modern marketplace, the Internet.

We understand that you probably have many questions about how Houston Internet advertising can really help your business to grow and we are looking forward to discussing your opportunity for taking advantage of that business growth today!

Call (800) 477-1324 and get your questions answered, get your specialized website analysis and make sure that your business is getting the bang for your buck when have a website built or when maintaining an already functioning website. There is no sense in throwing your money away on a company website that isn’t doing you any good. Nor is there any sense in ignoring the thousands and perhaps millions of customers who are looking for your products and services online right now.

Call Directory One today to avoid these pitfalls and start making more money from your company’s online presence now.

Additional Houston SEO Resources:

Bing Suggestions for Search Engine Ranking

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When it comes to social media – everyone wants one thing: metrics.

I hear from clients all the time, “I know I should be using social media – but I have a hard time investing money in something I can’t measure.” Fair enough. That’s why I’ve worked on developing a list of metrics and measurement considerations for social media.

Social Media Measurement is Similar to Measuring Public Relations

Before listing out some tools and ideas for measuring your ROI; I want to note one thing about social media marketing and its impact. It is slightly erroneous to compare social media to traditional media in terms of analyzing return-on-investment. While some of the impacts of SMM will resemble those of more tradition media buying efforts (increased sales, increased brand awareness, etc…) other impacts are more analogous to another traditional business investment: public relations. In public relations, the impact is often hard to measure. Nonetheless, no self-respecting company would ignore (or dispute) the value of public relations. Whether it’s improved image or a sense of community “connection” – public relations provides it. So too does social media. It is especially that connection that social media creates. It is hard to put a dollar value on the relationship a consumer develops with a brand because of social media efforts.

Social Media Metrics:

Ideally; you’ll know how you’re going to measure your social media campaign before you launch it. What I mean by this is that you should have clear objectives before starting any internet marketing campaign, whether it be: search engine optimization; SEM; or social media marketing. Having a clear objective and determining how you will measure success should be the first step of any social media marketing campaign. It should also be noted that it’s important to make sure that social media is the best tool for reaching you objective.

Here are some common objectives that social media is a great tool for:

• · Increasing brand awareness
• · Increasing consumer and visitor interaction
• · Advertising to a targeted audience
• · Generating traffic for your main site
• · Customer relations via real-time service and “fire-stomping”

Creating metrics for each of these objectives is fairly straightforward. For instance: measuring whether your social media campaign is generating website hits is as simple as using Google analytics to see if Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter is driving your traffic.

In this instance, you would be sure to assign a specific value to the objective. What particular page or pages do you want to drive traffic to and what percentage do you want to increase your current traffic.

One campaign is likely to have multiple objectives. A Facebook Advertising campaign might be geared at increasing web traffic and increasing product sales. There are also unique tools to measure certain harder to judge objectives like: increasing brand awareness. Various real-time and composite search results allow you to see not only who and where people are talking about you – but whether the overall context of their conversations is positive or negative.

The tools are out there – the specific metrics that you’ll use will depend on your campaign. The trick is to define what you are trying to measure before beginning any social media marketing project. Asking “is this effective” after creating and managing a Facebook page for several months is going to be more difficult to answer.

Contact a Social Media Marketing company in Houston to learn more about finding the best tools and measuring their effectiveness.

Questions or comments? Find me on Twitter @smmjenn or email me at jenn@newnectar.com.

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One of the most difficult obstacles for businesses wading into the social media waters is the ever-shifting nature of the platforms. Whether it’s an entirely new ( and suddenly popular) platform that you must adapt to — or a major change to an existing platform — it seems like nothing is ever static for long in the world of social networks.

Case-in-point is Facebook’s  announcement that it will be changing how its “Group” feature functions. Facebook groups used to be incredibly useful tools for businesses to promote upcoming events or even themselves. With the advent of the Facebook Business Page (or Fan Page;)  it appeared the social network wanted to shift groups to the background in order to monetize and maximize the use of Facebook pages for business.  As the news feed evolved — Groups were kept off of the real-time feed. This handicapped their ability to spread rapidly.

Now Facebook is putting Groups on the newsfeed — though word is they will limit a group’s appearance on the feeds to only those comments or postings that are made by an individual’s friends. This is still a potentially big development. Facebook Fan Pages are great tools — but one thing that always made groups better for getting the word out quickly was the ability of an admin to invite large groups of people to a group. The spread of pages is unfortunately limited to a slower style of virtual-word-of-mouth.  If groups retain this feature while also joining pages and profiles on the newsfeed — it might be well worth the effort to create a group page as well for your business. Actually — it might make sense to create multiple groups to cater to multiple campaigns.

To learn more about the use of Groups vs. Pages and Profiles on Facebook; contact a Houston social media marketing company today. You can also contact me at @SMMJenn on Twitter or by emailing me at jenn@newnectar.com.

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Social Media Creates Opportunities & Efficiencies for Small Business

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In previous blogs, we’ve talked about ways to use Social Media to interact directly with potential clients. I’ve shared how Facebook Advertising can get your message in front of potential customers for very little cost ; and how a Facebook Business page can grow your business – but today I’d like to talk about some ‘alternative’ uses for social media. Many of these examples are platforms (such as YouTube) that can be used for more traditional social media marketing uses — but I’ll also introduce you to several unique platforms that allow you to collaborate with business partners and work more efficiently.

Social Media Tools for Collaboration

Social media creates great possibilities for real-time collaboration. You are likely already familiar with Google Docs – which allow you to share documents with your colleagues for instant revision, editing, and general collaboration. You may not be aware of other tools that allow you to collaborate via wikis. You’ve probably heard the term “wiki” before in reference to “wikipedia.”  Imagine a private “wikipedia” of information on your clients, services, ideas, etc… pretty neat, eh?

A wiki can be part of your internal site, but that requires you work with your website developer or IT guy. This may be a solution for you , but you might want to experiment with external wikis first to see if they are a good fit for your collaborative needs.  Online, hosted wiki sites allow you to create and edit multiple wikis on so-called “wiki-farms.” These external wikis, like an internal wiki platform, can be as private as you like.

Why is this helpful for small business?

Wikis allow you to centralize and grow information related to a specific topic. Say you have a new business idea – you can create a wiki and allow your partner to edit it. On the other hand, perhaps you’d like to create a wiki about your competition. You can share information and knowledge within the wiki – and attach links and files as well. Wikis can either be public or private (even if they exist on a wiki-farm) so you can keep some information close-to-your-chest and share other types of information with potential clients, customers, or partners.

Example sites include Wikispaces & Wikia

Social Media Allows You to Manage Your Clients and Your Time

Several social sites have sprung up to allow you to manage your clients. A new one that is garnering a lot of attention is BookFresh. Bookfresh allows you to manage your client appointments online – and to access that information via a smart phone when you’re away from your computer. More than just a calendar, BookFresh allows your clients to actually schedule appoints (and be reminded of them,) online.

Another time management tool is Remember the Milk, a site which allows you to not only create tasks online for yourself – but to share them with other people on your team.

Why is this helpful for small business?

The interactive nature of these tools makes them superior to say, a calendar application on your iphone. In addition, these products are either free (Remember the Milk) or low-cost alternatives to expensive software solutions.

Example Sites: BookFresh, Remember the Milk, Ta-Da List

Social Media Can Help You Train Employees & Clients

Media sharing sites can be great for marketing – but they can also be a great way to share training information or to make a pitch to your client. This can be done either in video form (and then post to a video sharing site)— or you can use powerpoint to create a slideshow (and then upload it online for viewing and embedding.)

Why is this helpful for small business?

Product demonstration or detailed instructions can often best be conveyed via video or a Powerpoint with animation or additional text. While these products can certainly be emailed – posting them online creates ease of access and it creates opportunities for comments, feedback, and even SEO.

Example sites: YouTube is the preeminent video sharing site. Videos from YouTube can also easily be embedded in websites and blogs and shared on other social media platforms. Slideshare is a great platform that allows you to upload Powerpoints and other documents – and as an added bonus, it is integrated well with Facebook via a special application.

Simple social media solutions can help your business become more effective and efficient. For more information on how to utilize social media to help your business grow, contact a Houston social media marketing company today.

Questions about this or other social media marketing topics? Use the comment section below, email me at jenn@directory.com , or go all SMM on me and contact me @SMMjenn on Twitter ; and I’ll do my best to address your question in an upcoming blog. You can also consult Directory One today at 713.465.0051

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