LUCID Public Relations

Protected: E224

LUCID Public Relations — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:39:17 +0000

SEO Site Review

Dan Sevigny — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:02:59 +0000

If you are doing your own SEO or are wondering if your current SEO firm is doing their job correctly you can submit your site to LUCID Public Relations for a free site review. If your site is selected for review it will be graded by LUCID’s SEO expert, Dan Sevigny, and published on this site for discussion amongst our experts and readers. If you would like a private site review please contact Dan Sevigny at (dan@lucidpublicrelations.com).

Find out how your site is performing in the search engines and find out what you can do to increase your ranking today–submit your site for a site review by emailing web@lucidpublicrelations.com now.

SEO Linkbuilding – How to Get Links by Writing Articles

Dan Sevigny — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Links are the driving force behind gaining the coveted #1 positions for high search volume keywords. Today I am going to explain 3 things as they relate to building links by writing informative articles on your company blog or website. I will go through the following main three points:

Why you need links
What links are good links
HOW to get links by writing articles

First off, lets go over why you need links in the first place. As you may or may not already know, building a steady supply of links from related, high profile websites to your site is the single most important factor in search engine optimization today. By discovering links to your site from high quality, highly relevant websites major search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) are able to see that your site is credible and relevant for industry related keywords. According to Google, their “search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value.” — in this way, the web is somewhat of a democracy, allowing links to serve as votes of confidence for your site. The only difference in Google’s democracy and ours here in the USA is that Google gives a bigger vote to more “credible” sources. So in short, you need links from individuals/organizations in your industry who are credible and highly regarded by search engines because these votes are the kind that count with Google and other major search engines today.

Alright, so you know why you need links and I have briefly touched on what kind of links are good links, but what exactly are we looking for in a good link? A good link will be all of the following:

From a domain with high Google PageRank or PR (individual page PR is important, but if the domain has a high page rank you are just as well off, as the individual page will gain PageRank over time. Read more about PageRank.
From a domain or page that is relevant to your industry (For example, LUCID Public Relations is relevant to a number of related industries such as marketing, advertising and search engine optimization–links from quality sites in any of these industries would be great for us).
Utilizes your keywords in the anchor text of the link (for example a good link for LUCID would look like this: LUCID Public Relations)
Is a DoFollow link (one that passes a vote of confidence to your site, as opposed to a NoFollow link which is used for advertisements or sites that a webmaster wants to link to, but not endorse in any way). Read more about NoFollow/DoFollow at Google.

Now that you know why you need links and what kind of links are good we can get into the most important part of this article: how to get great links by writing articles on your site!

If you don’t already have a blog set up on your site, now may be the time to get one set up– there are many ways to get articles on your site, but that will have to be discussed at another time (or with your web developer). If you already have a blog CMS (Content Management System) set up, or know how to create articles on your website, you are ready to get started. There are several elements that you want to include in your articles in order to attract the most useful links.

Make the article topic relevant to your industry. At LUCID Public Relations (we are an SEO and Public Relations firm) we write only about public relations, SEO and internet marketing– this attracts links from websites that are related to ours.
Include keywords in the title (without making it look “spammy” or overstuffed with keywords). Often times people will link to articles using only the title of the article as anchor text, so using your keywords in the article title will increase the likelihood that those keywords will be included in your anchor text.
Provide useful, intelligent information for your readers. This one may seem like a no-brainer, but believe it or not, many webmasters think that pushing out poorly written articles on a mass-scale is the solution gaining important in the search results. Not only does this practice damage your brand by making you look like a spammer, it doesn’t work nearly as well as writing thoughtful and original content.

Think about the process of distribution that an article goes through once it is published on your site–how are you getting the word out? I will spare you the “if a tree falls in the forest” analogy, but this is really important: if you write amazing content and no one ever sees it you are guaranteed to not get any links, so find a way to distribute your work. You may want to try these avenues:

Social Networking: Blast new articles out to all of your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Often times articles on mediums like these can spread like wildfire from one profile to the next, causing an article to go “viral”.
Social Bookmarking: Submit your articles to sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.Icio.us, Fark, Slashdot, Propeller, Etc. — often times, sites like these can bring in 20,000-30,000 hits in a day (don’t believe me? Check out the Digg Effect/Slashdot Effect on Wikipedia).
Ping Ping Ping!!: Ping the search engines when you have new articles written. Our favorite service for this is called Ping-o-matic– this one-stop pinging machine will tell a number of sources that you have recently updated an article on your site and is great at driving in search engine traffic. Furthermore, after you submit your site using Ping-o-matic, it may start showing up in Google’s blog feed (which means your articles will be instantly indexed, rather than having to wait days at a time).

Please feel free to contact us at LUCID Public Relations or comment below if you have questions or comments and we’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as possible (if you want a reply, emailing or calling us is the best way to get one).

OK! Weekly Quotes LUCID Client, Dr. Payman Simoni

LUCID Public Relations — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:00:15 +0000

OK! Weekly quotes LUCID client Dr. Payman Simoni in their cover story article about celebrity plastic surgeries. You can see Dr. Simoni’s quote and a clipping of the article below.

To see a full PDF of the article please click here.

URL Canonicalization & WHY it Matters

Dan Sevigny — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:32:08 +0000

Matt Cutts recently wrote a blog post about URL Canonicalization and although it may sound boring it is incredibly valuable to any person doing, seeking, or contemplating SEO. Canonicalization, to put it briefly, is redirecting many different variations of a web address to one chosen variation, therefore erasing duplicate content that can get you penalized and your content dropped or lowered on search engines. This example, taken from Matt Cutts’ blog, shows how seemingly the same URLs can all lead to different pages and content if it is not properly canonicalized.

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

Although all of these URLS could potentially lead to the same page on your site, they are in fact different URLS and can be seen as individual pages by search engine spiders. As Matt points out, all of those URLS could potentially lead to different content. Canonicalization is when you redirect all the variations of your page to one, allowing search engines to easily recognize that there is only one copy of your page. The easiest way to do this is to add a 301 redirect to your .htaccess code. a 301 redirect, or a permanent redirect, is a search engine friendly way to forward visitors and search engine bots to your desired page.

You should canonicalize all of the pages on your site to one form (either www form or non-www form). Adding the following code to your .htaccess file (if you are on a CMS, be careful that this does not conflict with their default code):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]+\.[a-z]{2,6})$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%1/$1 [R=301,L]

You can find other variations of the 301 redirect in htaccess by simply searching google for “301 htaccess”. If you have any questions or need help you can also email LUCID’s Internet Marketing Director, dan@lucidpublicrelations.com and he will assist you.

FBESpa.com Gains 142.92% in Organic Google Traffic with LUCID SEO

LUCID Public Relations — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:06:52 +0000

FBE SPA (FBESpa.com) recently hit 142.92% in gains in organic Google traffic to their site when we compared last month’s traffic to the month before they started with LUCID’s SEO team. We were able to increase their branding by increasing their rank for terms related to their business name (like “FBE Spa” – a keyword that got a massive 236.49% increase and “FBEspa.com”) – we were also able to get them traffic for nearly 1000 other keywords in Google, many of which they had never gotten hits for previously.

This site had a lot of problems early on that included duplicate content, broken links, wrong internal linking structure, non-canonical homepage, poorly optimized header & title tags and much more – these problems resulted in a heavy penalty from Google. After we fixed all of the problems with the site, we requested reconsideration with Google and were pleased to see things start to turn around.

If you have questions or comments about how LUCID Public Relations can help get you results like FBE Spa, feel free to contact us any time.

Bridges To Recovery on Women’s Abuse

LUCID Public Relations — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:31:30 +0000

Bridges to Recovery is a Los Angeles based treatment center for men and women who suffer from mood disorders. Bridges recently wrote a post on their blog about the abuse of women that we felt is worth sharing. Story from Bridges to Recovery below:

To family members, friends, and other observers, it may seem to be a “no-brainer” that a woman who is abused by her partner should leave the relationship. But, in fact, research indicates that leaving a relationship that involves intimate-partner violence is a complex and, often, dangerous process. First, empirical studies suggest that a woman (and, at times, her children) may be in greatest physical danger when she is attempting to negotiate separation from an abusive partner. In fact, it has been reported that the most deadly time for a woman is when the batterer believes that she intends to end the relationship.

Second, separation is a process rather than a one-time event. It is not unusual for a woman to consider physically leaving her relationship and then reconsider; it is not unusual for a woman to actually arrange to move out and then cancel all plans. And, according to a new University of Illinois journal article describing the research of Lyndal Khaw, there are several stages of the leaving process, each one complicated by unclear boundaries. For example, even if a woman physically leaves and establishes a separate living environment, practical and/or legal issues often necessitate her continued contact with her partner. If the couple has children, court-ordered child visitation with the partner contributes to the confusion over the partner’s physical presence in the woman’s life. Further, in addition to the issues of physical separation, the woman must negotiate emotional separation from her partner, including memories of more positive times with her partner, her dreams of a happy family, and other emotional ties to her partner and to the relationship.

Mental health professionals who are experienced in the assessment and treatment of domestic violence can offer crucial, and, at times life-saving, assistance to the woman caught in intimate-partner violence, as well as to her family and friends.

How to hire an SEO company

Dan Sevigny — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:22:45 +0000

SEO means Search Engine Optimization – this is the process of making your site more accessilbe to search engines with the goal of increasing your ranking for certain keywords; Search Engine Optimization experts or SEO firms are the professionals that are employed to do this.

Before you run off and hire the first SEO firm you can find, there are some things you should know. Hiring the right SEO firm is essential, because hiring the wrong individual or company to do SEO for your website could result in penalties or even a ban from Google and other search engines. You need to find an SEO firm/person who knows what they are doing. This article will show you what questions you should ask an SEO company, what qualities a good SEO company has, and how to avoid bad SEO firms and SEO scams.

Questions to ask an SEO Company

This list of questions is based off of Google’s Search Engine Optimization article on the Google Webmaster Tools Help website.

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

The potential SEO company or consultant should have at least a few clear SEO success stories. The best answer involves not only verifiable keyword rankings gained for a website, but how those rankings converted into sales or other goals for the client. Ignore any SEO company that tries to impress you with #1 results on Google/Yahoo/Bing for keywords using more than 4 words. Focus on how much traffic they brought to the client and how that traffic generated sales, sign-ups, leads, etc.

Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

The answer to this should be: YES, YES, YES.

Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

Most legitimate SEO firms should (and do) also offer advice and/or management for pay per click services like Google’s Adsense.

What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

You want an SEO company that is realistic with you about what you can expect. This is obviously something that is decided on a case-by-case basis, but I think most results can be expected within 6 months. Success can be measured by gain in traffic, increase in website conversions from search engines, or top 3 result presence for specific keywords.

Other good questions to ask an SEO company:

What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been doing SEO?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Qualities of a good SEO company:

Honest & Transparent – Your SEO company should be able to explain to you in plain English what they are doing for your site (both on-site and off-site) to increase your search based traffic.

Communicative – You should be able to contact your SEO company with questions about your SEO project and they should have time to talk with you no more than 24 hours later. They should also clear any changes to your website with you before making them, ensuring that you understand what they will be doing before they do it.

How to avoid bad SEO companies and SEO scams:

There are literally hundreds of thousands of scams that have sprung up around Search Engine Optimization – in addition to that, there are hundreds of thousands of ‘SEO experts’ who, despite good intentions, just don’t know what they are doing. The field of SEO is not regulated by any official body and has not been (until recently) taught in any schools in the United States – as a result, anyone who knows how to use a computer can jump up and claim: “I’m an SEO Expert!” As an SEO firm we have been contacted numerous times by people who claim to be SEO experts who ask us questions about simple SEO related tasks that any real SEO expert should already know.

So, how do you avoid SEO scams and poor quality SEO imposters? Ask lots of questions when interviewing your potential SEO company (the list above is a good place to start, but also ask some that are more specific to your website).

Also, watch out for any individuals or companies who:

Send unsolicited emails about their services

Guarantee 1st page or 1st place rankings

Don’t have a website

Can’t give you references

Can’t explain their SEO methods

Good luck and remember: take the SEO hiring process slowly and seriously. Find an SEO expert who understands your business, your goals and has an established track record of success to show you.

SEO Help: Website not indexed by Google

Dan Sevigny — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:38:53 +0000

There are many reasons why a website can go unnoticed by Google and other search engines – I will go over the causes and, more importantly, the solutions to this problem.

1) Make sure you have properly attempted to find your website in Google search results
Go to Google and use the site search function – this will show you all of the pages that Google has indexed for the specified domain. Example: site:yourdomain.com – if nothing shows up, also try site:www.yourdomain.com , site:http://yourdomain.com, and http://www.yourdomain.com . The results are not likely to change, but it’s worth trying a few different ways just to be sure.

2) Was your site indexed by Google before?
If this is a new problem for your website, you may have been blacklisted by Google – if this is the case see our article about removing and avoiding Google Penalties

3) Is your site new?
If your site is new, it may take Google and other search engines some time to find it – post some links to your site on popular websites around the web and Google will follow those links to your site soon enough. Also, submit a sitemap to ensure that Google finds all of your pages. See the Google webmaster central article on creating and submitting a sitemap for more information.

4) Website has been around a while, but STILL isn’t indexed:
If your site has been around for more than a month and has still not been found by search engines you either need more inbound links or you have been hit by a penalty. Try getting some links to your website on other sites – if this doesn’t rectify the problem within a week or so, you are almost definitely looking at a blacklist problem. Rectify any violations of Google’s webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request once you have made your site comply.

KLEAN Treatment Center Featured on Fox 11

LUCID Public Relations — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:46:06 +0000

(Video)

We wish we could take credit for this great piece about alcoholic mothers on Fox 11, but our newest client KLEAN did so well with their first media hit this week that we just had to show everyone.

KLEAN Treatment Center in West Hollywood, California focuses on younger adults, and has developed a unique approach that incorporates the Pennsylvania (or medical) model of treatment, which focuses heavily on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and appropriate psychiatric care. KLEAN also incorporates the traditional twelve step model, as well as several other methodologies in an effort to expose clients to a variety of treatment models.

KLEAN Treatment Center press inquiries should be directed to Jonathan Franks of LUCID Public Relations