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The Best SEO Tools Companies Do A Lot More Than Just SEO

There are lot of firms claiming to be one of the best SEO Tools companies on the web. Of course, they can’t all be among the best — there’s just not that many groups offering SEO tools to a significant share of the market. The question for those people who want to make the most of their relationship with an SEO toolbuilder is simple: what makes one SEO cool company better than another?

To a degree, associating an SEO tool’s success with it’s builder is a mistake — or rather, it’s a mistake to assume that the success and utility of one tool will have anything at all to do with the success and utility of any other tool, even one from the same company. There’s reason to have all of your tools come from the same company when you could just as easily (and often more effectively) cherry-pick the best tools from each company.

That said, it’s also a mistake to think that just because a company does SEO tools, it’s all they do. In fact, many of the most effective SEO tool companies also make apps, websites, and other software for other areas of Internet marketing and Web development, from PPC to website marketing.

It’s actually fairly accurate to say that the best SEO tools companies do more than just SEO tools, because the same understanding that they use to make SEO tools also allows them to make software for a variety of other purposes. More importantly, making tools for other purposes expands their comprehension of both their own code and the principles behind the market they’re writing for.

SEO tools companies can, do, and should also make software for:

• Social media management
• Pay per click management
• Link building
• Web design
• Hosting
• Website marketing
• App production
• SEO Content production
• Content marketing
• And dozens of other related areas

All of this is true for one simple reason: SEO tools companies are first and foremost software developers. They may have a pretty solid grasp on the principles of SEO — in fact, in most cases, they have a better grasp on SEO than the average entry-level guy working at an SEO company — but their real art is software development, and they should practice it in any SEO-related area that presents itself.

The Best Search Engine Optimization Companies Agree: Link Building Is No More

Link building as a ‘right proper’ SEO practice is still being pushed by many companies around the world, but the best Search Engine Optimization companies agree with Google — or at least the opinion that Google seems to have given what Panda and Penguin have done to SEO — which is that link building is through.

Google has long maintained a weird relationship with the practice of link building. Originally they considered it white-hat, then they kind of informally shifted it into the grey-hat area, and today they consider it strictly black. If you artificially create a link — any link — for money, you’re violating the Internet’s Terms of Use as far as Google is concerned. Which is ridiculous, and they know it, but they have to maintain the illusion that the competition for the first few slots on their SERPs isn’t rigged by SEO companies.

Why? Because their claim has always been that the SERPs show users what they most want to see — not what some other company has engineered into position.

Fortunately, the best SEO companies out there know the secret to success under today’s Google laws: “all” you have to do is make your client the page that people want to see. That’s why SEO has become this strange agglutination of reputation management, advertising, social media, and so on — because the best optimization these days isn’t link building, it’s market positioning.

Of course, it’s silly to think that every new startup that hits the market has a unique position. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there whose business concept really is “do exactly what did, only later and in a more saturated market.” Those people shouldn’t ever be at the top of the SERPs, because really, who wants to see another clone of something they’ve already been offered elsewhere?

So what does an SEO company do with a client that clearly doesn’t deserve a spot in the SERPs? They build them a spot in the SERPs anyway — even if it means working with the company until they’ve solidified a position in their market that wasn’t what they expected at first. Just another thing on the long list of things the best SEO companies have to do.

Simply The Best: Link Building Services Companies That Survived Penguin & Panda

If you haven’t heard of Panda and Penguin yet, you probably don’t know your SEO (that’s search engine optimization) from your BRB. But just in case, here’s the TWOL version: Panda and Penguin made website marketing harder by raising the bar. They raised the bar for content, penalizing websites with small amounts of content, websites with duplicated content, and websites with content that was more annoying to the end user than helpful (DO YOU HEAR ME, POPUP ADS?!?). They raised the bar for marketing by penalizing websites that engage in any number of “low-quality” or “spammy”.

One of the practices that was deemed “low-quality” with the Penguin update was link building. Link building was, at one point, considered perfectly fine by Google, but as the practice became ubiquitous to the point that people had robots roaming the web commenting meaninglessly on random blogs, the big G started taking a disliking to it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that link building died — it just meant that the best link building companies had to find ways to make link building work even with Google’s strictures. There’s really two ways to go about it.

Honest Links
The first method is to create ‘honest’ links by posting guest posts, asking for links from site owners, and whipping the social media sphere into a frenzy over some share-worthy content. The honest method is expensive and can be quite time-consuming, but if you pay for it, you’ll build yourself a very solid position in the SERPs. The likelihood that you’ll ever feel the pain of a Google slap is slim to none.

Grey-hat Links
Many of the best link-building companies steadfastly refused to ‘go legit’, instead mastering several ways of evading Google’s detection. These companies build backlinks by using proxy servers to appear to come from different parts of the country or world; they post 24 hours a day so Google can’t set up a time profile for them. They build backlinks just like they used to, but they use a different name for every profile they create and they use an array of random anchor texts in order to give a natural appearance to their creations.

Is SEO The Best? Pay Per Click Management Companies Would Like To Differ

There are a lot of people online talking about how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best way to get traffic to your website, bar none. Well, there are a lot of PPC (Pay Per Click) companies that disagree. The numbers that the SEO companies use to point out the benefits of SEO look powerful on paper: 80% of all search marketing money is spent on PPC, but only 20% of all search traffic is generated by PPC.

Makes it sound like PPC is ridiculously inefficient compared to SEO, but the numbers paint an incomplete picture. The fact is that of the 80% of the search traffic that isn’t generated by PPC, there’s no way to know how much of it was actually influenced by SEO companies. It’s certainly not 100%. Furthermore, a HUGE portion of that traffic isn’t commercial traffic. It’s people going to Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook. PPC traffic, on the other hand, is 100% commercial traffic — it’s literally ad-driven.

The big difference between PPC and SEO isn’t cost-efficiency, no matter what the SEO companies want to tell you. The difference is in when you pay for the traffic. SEO, you pay up front for months, and then the traffic comes. PPC, you pay after the visitor comes to your site. In other words, you have a chance to make money off of the visit before you ever pay for it. It’s a huge benefit to cashflow.

The best Pay Per Click management companies can turn a few hundred bucks of your advertising budget into a few hundred visits to your website — and if your web designer and copywriter have done their jobs, 3-5% of those visits will turn into purchases. All you have to do is make sure that each of those purchases is large enough to make more than you spend on PPC — which isn’t difficult — and you’re in the black. No waiting around for a long-term SEO investment to kick in, no finding out too late that a keyword isn’t working out for you: you get your traffic, you earn for it, and then you pay for it. It’s the best way to get traffic to your website, bar none.*

(*SEO companies may disagree.)

Even At Your Best, Reputation Management Companies Can Still Help Your Business

Lots of companies call reputation management groups because they had a disaster — an employee said something racist on the company Facebook account or your #ourcompanystories hashtag turned into a place for customers to tell horror stories about how one of their cousins found a bird’s foot in your boxed soup. But that’s kind of like looking for insurance just after you were diagnosed with cancer — a foolish use of a powerful tool.

The best time to seek out and hire the best reputation management company you can afford is when things are going well, not when they’re going south. What does a reputation management company do when you don’t have a disaster on your hands? Why, they prevent disasters, of course.

Sure, no one can keep your employees from stupidly misusing the Facebook account — but things like the #ourcompanystories debacle can be easily prevented by an alert reputation manager. Companies that look out for your reputation are experts at spotting not just active PR disasters, but potential PR disasters — the kind no amount of social media expertise can correct once they go public.

Reputation management companies come in a few different types. The lowest level types are the ones that specialize in knocking bad stories off of the news and making sure the SERPs don’t link to many pages disrespecting you or your company. These folks are nothing more than experts in ‘negative SEO’ — the art of tanking someone else’s rankings with black hat strategies. That’s not what you need; it’s reactive and it’s actively unethical.

What you want is a reputation company that will lead your company into the upcoming quarters and years by building a plan to cement your position in the marketplace and your public image. A company that will help you figure out who you appeal to and who you don’t, and work to improve your appeal to the second group. A company, in short, that will manage your reputation — not manage your reputation crises. Those are the best reputation management companies, and your company deserves one.

Do The Best Email Marketing Campaign Companies Allow Spam?

There are a lot of autoresponder companies out there — groups offering a SaaS (software as a service) model of business. You hook up with them, write your emails, and set them up. The software sends those emails out on a regular basis, and some percentage of the people you sent them to opens them up. Then some percentage of them read them and get the marketing message you buried in there, and they buy something, and you either are the seller or you’re an affiliate and you get a percentage of the sale.

Those are not the email marketing campaign companies. Those are the autoresponder companies; some of them are also email marketing campaign companies, but not all (or even most.) The email marketing campaign companies are the ones that actually organize a plan behind the emails, write them, track the results, and make adjustments to your campaign as results come in. Some of them even supplement your email campaign with aggressive website marketing through other routes as well.

They’re a much more in-depth service than the hands-off SaaS autoresponder folks. They’re like any other marketing agency: they want to see you succeed because they profit from your profit. That’s exactly why the best email marketing campaign companies have an incredibly strict no-spam policy. Many of them will drop you as a client if they get a third complaint about spam — and we’re talking about email here, where people will report you as spam just because you’re not already on their whitelist.

Why the hatred of spam? Simple: first, sending spam makes your business look bad, and these folks have enough potential clients that they don’t want to waste time on a client that is willing to make themselves look bad. Second, autoresponder companies have even stricter anti-spam policies than the email marketing campaign firms, and if your autoresponder gets canned, your email campaign is essentially over. Finally, people can and do research these email marketing companies, and they don’t want even a whiff of spam attached to their reputations.

So, no: the best email marketing campaign companies don’t allow spam, end of story.

What Makes A Great Pay Per Click Management Company?

The best pay-per-click management companies provide quite a few services to their clients that the hack jobs simply don’t. Pay-per-click management is one of those areas that many people simply don’t know much about, so we figured we’d point out a few things that make PPC managers great. You should be on the look out for an AdWords management firm that offers:

A dedicated account manager
The number one service that separates the men from the wee little boys. If your PPC firm offers you a live human who is always ready to deal with you — and more importantly, is the only human who interacts with your account — you’re probably dealing with one of the big boys.

Bid management
If you’re a PPC newb, you might not understand the terms just yet, but before you sign on with just any old PPC manager, ask them if they offer bid management. Ask them if they offer big gap monitoring, bid price change monitoring, and bid queue maintenance. Pay-per-click managers that don’t aren’t in it for their clients, plain and simple.

Transparency
Even if you don’t actually understand them, you want your PPC management company to be able to show you how they research their keywords, how they collect their data, and how they spend your money.

Certification
Google AdWords certification is an absolute must for anyone calling themselves a pay-per-click manager. Yahoo Ambassador and Microsoft adExcellence certifications are good, but AdWords is the king of PPC at the moment and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Support
Finally, your PPC company should offer rapid-response customer support. It doesn’t necessarily have to be 24/7/365, but you should be able to call or email and expect a response back within a few hours.

Experience
The last thing you need — or, perhaps more accurately, the first thing you need — from a pay-per-click manager is experience. Preferably, years of it. It’s the only way to know at a glance whether you’re talking to someone who knows the theory or someone who has the practice under his belt. Ask for references, check how long they’ve been in business, and ask them for clients similar to yours that they’re doing well on. If you pay attention to nothing else on this list, insist on working with PPC experts who have experience.

Website Optimization: Humans vs. Spiders

The best website design companies in the market have mastered the art of speaking two languages at once: the English that most of the internet’s users speak, and the markup language that most if not every website spider uses to teach itself about the contents of a site. It’s a more difficult trick than it seems. No matter how simple your website, optimization for two variables means neither one of those variables will end up as good as it can be.

Here’s an example of what we mean: spiders read text, and nothing else, but human eyes love pictures. Putting up a landing page that consists of little more than a giant Flash banner and a few links to other pages on the site might be awesome from and end-user perspective, but gives Google no idea of what the page might be about, because the Flash banner is just a giant blank spot to a spider.

Similarly, a spider starts in your left-most column and reads down, then moves to the next-leftist column, and reads down, and so forth. Search engines put more emphasis on the text that comes at the beginning of a website — but if you’re designing for a human, you may assume that the ‘beginning’ is the top of the central, ‘main’ column, and you’d be wrong. The most important stuff should be at the top of the left-most column, even if, to human eyes, that looks a little odd. (This is why columns on the right side of blogs are more popular than those on the left side.)

So if you want your content to rank the most easily, you want to write for the spiders, but if you want it to get the most social attention, you want to write for human minds. How do you do both at the same time? Well, first you familiarize yourself with the rules of on-page SEO and the mechanics of how spiders work. Then, you find the most human-friendly content that will fit into that cookie cutter. It’s something that the best website design companies have been doing for years.

SEO & Marketing: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

It used to be, a year or so ago, that SEO and Marketing were, to coin a phrase, the same side of two different coins. You used each one for the same basic purpose — to get people to buy things from you — but they rarely interacted. Today, however, with Panda and Penguin having thrown “normal” SEO under the bus, almost all truly good SEO is marketing — specifically, Content Marketing.

In other words, the best search engine optimization companies around offer marketing as an SEO service.

Every advertisement you create is, in the eyes of an SEO company, a piece of content. And every piece of content you create can, in the eyes of a marketing company, act as advertising. Panda and Penguin obliterated a vast swath of non-content-oriented SEO practices, and among the leaders in content-based SEO, Content Marketing is the obvious choice.

Seriously, the other option (having someone create content that is used strictly for backlinks without any consideration to whether or not people actually want to read) is insanity. If you’re going to put the time and effort into having content created in the first place, why would you pay $.01/word to someone who burly speak English and get just the backlinks when you could double that, pay for a native English writer, and get content that will motivate people to buy in addition to the backlink?

Yes, SEO and marketing today are in fact largely one and the same. Well, there are clearly still lots of offline marketing firms who know nothing of SEO, but trying to find a high-quality SEO company that doesn’t also have a few marketing experts on staff is becoming an increasingly unlikely task.

In the eyes of the consumer, this should be considered a good change, for one simple reason: great content never gets Google slapped by some minor algorithm change. It never gets sandboxed. It will never become ‘grey hat’. Great content is the ultimate evergreen resource; chase it or eventually, whatever else you’re

What Do You Need On Your Landing Page — SEO Not Included?

Your business’ landing pages’ SEO is the beating heart of your online commerce — if it’s not healthy, everything else you’ve done dies with it. But what separates a LANDING PAGE from just any old web page? Obviously, you intend for surfers to land there, but what do you do differently to make sure that they stay? We asked the best landing page SEO companies we could find, and this is what they came up with:

A Hooky Title
Your title is like the hook — not of a fishing line, but more like of a great song. It should implant itself in a reader’s brain like the opening riff of Roxette’s She’s Got The Look. Yeah, I’m old. Anyway, the best way to make a title is quite literally to make two hundred potential titles and then have someone else in your industry pick the best one.

A Description Of Your Product or Service
The description should be short and to the point. The upstart Dollar Shave Club says it in just nine words: “A great shave for a few bucks a month.” If you can describe your offering that succinctly, you’re doing well.

A Demonstration Of Your Product or Service
Usually in the form of a video, or maybe a slideshow if you’re old school, it’s absolutely critical that your landing page shows your audience what your product is and does.

A List of Benefits
Consumers are picky, finicky, critical, and mean — but they’re not all that smart. If you don’t tell them in really obvious words how your product or service makes their lives better, they won’t get it, and if they don’t get it, they won’t get it.

A Really Obvious Call To Action
Whatever it is that you want your surfers to do next to move closer to becoming a customer, make it as blatant as you can. Giant orange arrows that say “click here” or “enter your ZIP code” or whatever you’re asking for are ubiquitous because they’re good.

That’s it — make your landing page someplace that’s good for people to land, and you’re golden.