The Thalo Creative Blog

We have always been known by our clients to be the source of information as to which tools on the Internet work for businesses to expand their Internet marketing. The newest buzz word in the industry is Social Media. In essence it is quite simple; however, any business owner that tries it realizes it takes up too much time. We at Thalo Creative have found a solution to that in Managed Social Media.

Its that time of year again. Where everyone tells themselves that this year I am going to do it better. Whether it be personal resolutions or business resolutions I would like to share my top 7 website resolutions. If you make it through the list you will find a coupon worth hundreds.

Has your website been nice this year? Should you get it a nice shiny new banner or a blog. Has your website been naughty? Do you feel that it only deserves a lump of coal? Here is a list of gifts to put under your tree for your website.

One of the most important parts of your website is often overlooked until after you put your site online. After a couple of months you realize no one is visiting your site. Then you discover that it is because you don't have a good set of keywords optimized for your website. Where Do You Find Keywords? Let me give you a few hints...

That is right. Stuffing goes into the bird not into your website. Keyword stuffing is the act of repeating the same keyword or keyword phrase over and over multiple times per page. Some webmasters will even hide the text by making it the same color as the background or by absolutely positioning a div to be invisible. There are alternatives...

One of the best selling exercise systems sold on TV was and is still the BowFlex. You remember it the pitches, "fits in the corner of your home" (as long as your bedroom is 30x30). It spoke of how in as little as 30 minutes per day you could change your life, become physically fit and mentally strong.

I try to think of an SEO campaign in the same fashion. If you put up your website and don't do anything actively with it then don't be surprised when it ends up with adult onset website diabetes.

If you just took 30 minutes per day to do something for SEO how much stronger do you think your website will feel at the end of one month? two months? six months? Like the old adage states: You will only get out of it what you put into it.

Take a look at the Thalo Creative Blog. We have generated an enormous amount of quality content because we took the 30 minutes to 1 hour out of each day to choose a topic, read a report, watch a video or just vent about our day in hopes that it can help our visitors an may be food to those search engines!

Until Next Time...

Let's face it. Before there were search engines the only way you found your way to our site was from a link from another site. That or you heard our rocking new commercial on Thunder 104.3 fm. Sites linking back and forth to each other always has been and always will be a good idea for marketing your website. In the past it was difficult and time consuming to really keep a good link campaign up and going.

People realized they didn't have time to work full time at linking and full time at their profession. Around 7 years ago I found a product that helps to simplify the linking process, saves me and Thalo Creative hours upon hours of time. Above and beyond that it is the only US patented ethical link exchange management system online. What is it you ask?....

My post yesterday was about the rumor that SIRI will kill off SEO. I read another article today that explained some of this topic as it played out at PubCon the annual search engine convention.

The author writes, "According to Leo Laporte of TWIG (This Week in Google), SEO will in fact be dead in about 6 months. Laporte was one of the speakers at the recent search marketing conference, Pubcon, a forum designed to promote the search industry and solve its collective problems. Laporte’s remarks stirred up quite a controversy."

“Google is in deep trouble right now. And if I were your business, I would really be looking at alternatives to search engine marketing and search engine optimization.”  

Someone pointed me to an article on the web that said Apple's Siri was going to kill off all need for SEO. I have to agree and I think that everyone should stop all their SEO right away. Well at least all the business that compete with me. Stop the SEO and focus on just one system and just one user and just one demographic. Then I can conquer everything else.

Lets face it people- The Phone Book isn't extinct yet and we have been telling people it is dead for years; however, businesses still dump tons of money into Yellow Page listings because they get customers. The same applies to SEO even in the face (or non-face) of SIRI.

Why will SEO be important going into the future: Why don't you go ask SIRI? oh.... wait.... it doesn't answer questions like that. Continue Reading for my thoughts on SIRI and other voice recognition programs.

Great job you now have me sold on this link exchange aspect to my website marketing; however, the question now is how do I even find websites to link with? Don't just think about those spammy emails you get asking for 'link exchange' from someone who obviously sent out a blanket email to thousands of webmasters.

The key to SEO and Link Partners is the quality not the quantity of sites you are linking with and who link back to you. Click on Continue Reading to review Five Free & Easy way to qualify your next Link Partners.

Having worked for the past 7 years solid on link management for over 4,000 sites I have compiled a library of articles, blogs and examples for businesses to use to help them get on the right track for link exchange and traffic generation.

Many people ask us if they should use the PPC or Pay-Per-Click method to get traffic. The simple answer is...

Us geeks know all the robot codes. Most people who surf the Internet have at least seen a 404 Page Not Found error which is the most common error web surfers run into. There are actually dozens of different codes that mean different things.

Today I am going to discuss two of the most important codes the Search Engines use in ranking your website. These codes are what tells the search engines if you are updating your website frequently which is important to them since they really want to focus on delivering fresh content based on your keyword search.

What are the codes? Click on Continue Reading for the deets.

We here at Thalo hear prospects and clients constantly ask us to do some SEO for them to get them better rankings. Most of the time our first answer is, "Great we would be happy to do that what keywords are your targeting?". At that point they just stare at us with a blank expression.

Doing any Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing or Social Media Marketing without fully understanding your target market, perfect visitor and what their search trends are is like Advertising a Child's Toy in a Seniors Magazine.

You cannot simply just SEO something for the sake of saying you are doing SEO! Nor can you do it because some guy (you don't know) called you on the phone every Friday for the last two months saying how poorly your site ranks. If they have time to call you weekly and sell you SEO then they aren't doing the SEO their selling!

In a recent article I read that Bing is alleggedly receiving 33% of the search traffic online.

That is 1/3 of the search market!!

Good luck Bing!

How does your site perform in *all* the search engines?? Everyone talks about Google but did you know there are a handful of other large search companies that compete with Google? Did you know there are literally hundreds of niche search engines and probably thousands of search directories that your site could be listed on. All this relates to more traffic which leads to more conversion possibilities.

If you build it they will come...

Whisper it or shout it when it comes to web traffic that dream is not always a reality. If you want people to come to your website you have got to tell everyone and every site you can find about your new site. Not to the point of spamming your email list or littering your neighborhood with flyers but at least submitting to search engines and directories that may be a target for your niche market or location.

Check out this article about linking directories and find information on the hottest linking web directories.

This is a great web page with basic information about link exchanges referencing the industry giants. More and more companies are choosing to outsource their linking campaigns; however, caveat emptor - not all "services" are going to do linking ethically and many are going to just try to cram hundreds of links onto your site to "game" the search engines.

In this blog you will find some definitions of the linking basics and some more extensive resources:

Keywords... Everyone knows what they are and what they are used for. In the most basic form your keywords are food for the search engines. One of the things you should consider in developing your website is how to approach your keywords. Additionally keep in mind that you can change your keywords at any time.

What is the best way to come up with keywords?

Linking is a very broad topic with many heated arguments between developers and SEO cowboys. Linking has been around since the inception of the Internet. After all that is what the Internet is based on: 'one site linking with another to another to another'. At the beginning of the Internet if you went to a site typically you would find a set of links to other sites that you may be interested in. That was the only way to navigate the web.

So you finally have your website online and you have spent hours upon hours getting everything to look just the way you want it to. Everything is perfect -- or so it seems. What will your site look like on other people's computers? What about on smart phones or {{shiver}} a regular cell phone.

There are a number of browsers available online and just because your site looks good in one browser doesn't mean that it will look as good in other browsers and/or operating systems.

More often than not search engines and local services are being used by people in your hometown to find what they are looking for. A deep research has shown that somewhere in the neighborhood of 71% of households do some kind of search for a local product or service on a daily basis.

On a daily basis!

That is the reason why every local search is becoming more and more important to your advertising campaign and major search engines are rushing to become the next local search engine. But, you may ask, what is Local Search and how can it be helpful to my Business?