Well, it’s the second day of the second half of the year.  And my question to most customers and potential customers is, “What did you do with the first half of the year?”

Personally speaking, the first six months of the year was phenomenal for me both on a personal and professional level.

My hope is that you set and achieved goals on both a personal and professional level.

As it relates to business, I hope your business has been able to make leaps and bounds in achieving greater customer growth and revenue.

That said, today wraps up our series: SEO Audit Increases SEO Effectiveness.  I hope that both Part I and Part II have helped you identify opportunities for SEO growth as well as confirm SEO successes.

Too, I hope you’ve had a chance to perform a SEO Audit or have an SEO Audit performed on your website.

If not, what are you waiting for?  Time is passing by and so are endless opportunities to increase search rankings, traffic, customers and sales.

In today’s post, we’ll discuss how performing a SEO audit will help shed light on the dark areas of your website and benchmark your SEO efforts in comparison to the competition.

Let’s move full speed ahead.

Over the last 10 plus years, I’ve been on a winding course of Internet entrepreneurship that has lead me to crash and burn a number of times with various ideas and concepts.

From printing and graphic design to IT consulting and support to web design and development to designing and selling t-shirts to women’s boutique to disaster and emergency communications to non-profit and religious websites, I’ve done it all.

However, the one constant in all of the businesses mentioned above was my reliance on effective search engine rankings and search engine optimization (SEO).

Overall, the experience was phenomenal and chock full of life and business lessons that small business owners and professionals alike could learn and benefit.

From search penalties to de-indexation to stupid and costly mistakes to the mountain-top of page one ranking for hundreds of highly competitive keywords and cash registers converting and ringing nothing but profitable success, I’ve knowingly and unknowingly have experienced my fair share of search engine failures and successes.

Today, as a seasoned SEO consultant, I’m privileged to consult and coach a wide variety of customers and the question I receive the most from small business owners is, “Are there any SEO strategies and techniques that I can implement myself?”

Understanding that small business owners are typically short on time and money in some cases, I set out to create a simple and easy-to-use guide to help lead small business owners down the SEO path in achieving sustainable and profitable SEO results.

Welcome back to the SEO Audit series where I’ve been sharing very critical search engine optimization tips and insight to increase website rankings and traffic.

As a recap, Part One of SEO Audit Increases SEO Effectiveness, we discussed how the SEO audit should be performed when designing or redesigning a website.

We covered that a SEO audit can help to avoid, prevent and eliminate careless search engine optimization errors leading to search engine penalties that would otherwise go undetected for quite some time by the untrained eye.

So, I’m dying to ask, but have you had a SEO audit performed on your website?

If not, then I’m sure after today’s post you will want to have a SEO audit performed ASAP.

In today’s post, I’ll discuss how performing a SEO audit will help identify and verify indexing frequency, and off-page and on-page optimization strategies.

Let’s dive in, and pick up from where we last left off.

Much like having your car’s oil changed or visiting a general physician each year to determine your health and well-being, it is recommended that your website receive an SEO audit. Why?

The easy answer is that an SEO audit is vital to help gauge and measure how effective or ineffective your search engine optimization strategies and efforts are for your website.

If certain SEO tools or methods were not consistently generating customer growth and revenue or keeping your from growing your business, wouldn’t you want to know about it?

Sure you would want to know about it.

Knowing about ineffective SEO efforts could save you time and money, and find another proven and sound internet marketing strategy and tool to invest in that will bring you results.

Although it is quite simple to push a SEO Audit to the back burner in sake of other bottom-line enhancing business activities, it’s actually worthwhile to take preventative SEO action versus reactive.

I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I’ve had customers frantically call or email me about lost or damaged search engine rankings.

Performing an SEO audit on the customer’s website, I discover a multitude of small SEO problems that have accumulated to gargantuan issues.

Sometimes these issues cause the customer’s website to be penalized or de-indexed from search engines altogether.

Other times it is loss of rankings without a penalty which takes less work to correct.

However, the common ground and conclusion for most of the issues and challenges I find is that they all could have been prevented or identified before harm was caused by performing a consistent SEO audit.

Personally, I perform monthly as well as quarterly checks on my own websites in addition to a variety of customer websites.

Thinking about the various issues I’ve encountered across a number of customer websites, I’ve developed a list of some top reasons to perform consistent SEO audits to increase and maintain website traffic and search engine rankings.

In today’s first of 3 series post, we’ll discuss two reasons you should strive to consistently perform SEO audits for your website.

• Part One: SEO Audit Increases SEO Effectiveness
• Part Two: SEO Audit Increases SEO Effectiveness
• Part Three: SEO Audit Increases SEO Effectiveness

Search engine optimization (SEO) is do or die for most businesses, and a very critical resource and facet of the internet marketing strategy.

Many small businesses use a variety of effective SEO Tools and heavily depend on SEO to increase website rankings across a multitude of search engines.

Without proper SEO, it is extremely difficult to achieve first page rankings across multiple search engines due to the ever-growing competition.

And add in the constant changes in search algorithms imposed by search engines, and your website could find itself on a never-ending SEO roller coaster, drastically moving up and down for a variety of keywords.

To help their website gain SEO relevance and rank well in search engines, companies make use of many search engine optimization tools and methods.

Most SEO tools have been developed by SEO experts as a way to help others lacking SEO expertise to perform SEO without having to learn each and every aspect of SEO as a strategy.

Now widely available to most Internet users, search engine optimization tools are available via desktop applications, software plug-ins, or browser extensions.

And with the treasure trove of search engine optimization tools on the market, there also comes a wide variety of prices.

From free to monthly to annual to one-time fees, it can be quite a daunting task to review and compare SEO tools, and choose the best SEO tool according to your business and SEO needs.

As with most internet marketing tools, most offer SEO tools and software using the “freemium” model, a blend of “free” and “premium” meaning free to download and use but for to be a premium user, you have to pay a fixed or monthly fee.

Today, I’m going to quickly discuss and give you a few “freemium” SEO tools to try out and use for your website as a part of your SEO efforts.

The title says it all.  Not many knew the difference between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO tactics until penguins and pandas brutally attacked them.

I can’t express the importance of knowing every detail about the type of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics deployed on your website to rank across all search engines. 

I’ve personally worked at and for companies as well as fielded calls and requests from customers in dire need of understanding why their websites have been penalized, lost traffic, or, worst, been de-indexed by all search engines (OUCH!).

Most of the time, many actions are in play that is quite detrimental to the loss of search ranking and organic search traffic.

Sometimes the customer is at fault due to a lack of search engine knowledge and experience to understand the difference between good and bad SEO tactics.

Other times, deceitful SEO consultants or firms take advantage of an unsuspecting customer.

Or the customer blatantly participates in bad SEO tactics, also known as black-hat SEO, for a variety of reasons.

No matter the cause for drifting to the dark side of SEO, most customers don’t want to take the time to perform good SEO, also known as white-hat SEO tactics.

The common goal of all customers seeking SEO is quite simple: increase website traffic and sales.

In today’s post, I hope to help you better understand white-hat SEO versus black-hat SEO and how both can make or break your website and business with a simple algorithm update.

Open any web browser and use the Internet, I’m willing to bet you will come into contact with pay-per-click advertising (PPC) at some point during you web usage.

You see pay-per-click ads on top, bottom, and to the right of all pages in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo as well as social media websites, Facebook to be more exact.

Pay-per-click advertising, also known as ppc advertising or search marketing — a more search engine optimization common or generalized name — is an effective method and internet advertisement system to drive profitable and targeted traffic to one’s website.

In today’s post, I hope to shed a little light on the pay-per-click advertising, and how to effectively use pay-per-click advertising in such a way that you can make it a profitable search marketing method to drive and convert targeted traffic.

Let’s jump in and get started with the good, the bad and ugly in pay-per-click advertising.