People don’t use phone books anymore. No more big book of yellow pages sitting on the counter. People are using the internet and search engines like Google to find everything they need in their area. Did you know there’s 2.6 billion searches done online a month? Doing SEO for your business can be less than the cost of advertising in a phone book and newspapers, plus it’s more effective.

So how does Google or other search engines know you’re best? It’s pretty simple, really. The search engines read your website and notice when certain words are repeated. These are your keywords. Google, or whichever, then takes your site and indexes it under those keywords. The sites are put in order of importance. The search engine decides the importance by basically seeing who else is talking about a particular website, or in other words, how many backlinks their are out there. That way, only the most reliable websites come up first for any particular keywords.

You want to be on page one, no doubt about it. Page one is where it’s at, and where you need to be. Most people don’t even go to the second page, let alone the third or fifth. SEO is becoming highly competitive, and your competitors are using SEO now, so you want to make sure you get ahead and start doing SEO immediately.

Once you start doing SEO you need to keep it up on a monthly basis. Once you get to the top, you can be knocked down, but not if you’re keeping a good solid SEO strategy moving. Don’t let your business fall behind your competitors.

So what happened? No one really knows. A notable decrease in clicks has been reported, while no notable amounts of traffic or revenue are lost. Google Analytics even shows that traffic is normal. Is it some sort of glitch in GWT? Should anyone be worried?

Rumor has it that it’s because of Google Caffine, but there has been no official report from Google as to why this is happening. There have been reported cases of legitimately lost traffic and revenue, but most say that their traffic and revenue is the same while GWT says their Clicks/Impressions are steadily dropping by day. We feel that the reported cases of lost traffic and revenue must be a coincidence and be caused by something else.

Make sure you watch your Webmaster tools and Analytics and make sure everything is going okay for you. You don’t want to be caught off guard, reading about a glitch and then ignoring it when it happens only to lose revenue. No one knows for sure what the deal is, so don’t take any chances at all! Just keep your normal SEO operations moving and keep watching your traffic and rankings.

The Fortune 500′s are failing. Do you know why? Poor SEO strategies. Their strategy is to spend millions a day on PPC campaigns. They’re blowing all this money on advertising that doesn’t even work. Did you know that 50% of Fortune 500 companies have zero search engine visibility? Only 25% show up in a top 50 search for their own product, service, or keywords! That’s terrible. How do they manage to even stay Fortune 500?

You can easily beat that. it’s easy. All you need is a solid Local Search Marketing plan. All you need is a good internet marketing, team and a realistic budget!

So why did they do it? Well, only Google knows for sure. It’s a small algorithm change and they are known to make more than one change every day that most people don’t even notice. Speculation says that it has to do with helping Google Caffeine works it’s magic quickly. If long tail keywords were slowing it down, it’s understandable why they would nix them out of the mix all together.

Were you affected? You’d be able to tell by checking on your rankings or if your traffic has decreased. Use whichever ranking tool you use to check, and check your analytics to see if ranking has dropped. If one or both happened, and it was on or shortly after May 1st, then you were affected by this. Many and most of you won’t be, and the ones who are will only slightly be affected.

What can you do? Just wait it out. There’s no reason to blindly go changing things, just stick with your normal plan. As previously stated, there’s hundreds of changes made a year that you don’t even notice. No need to freak out about one just because it’s been mentioned around the web. If you’ve been drastically affected, well then you need to check all your resources and make sure it’s not just a coincidence and something else has happened around the same time. Don’t want to point the blame the wrong way.

In the end, high-quality SEO plans will triumph over any small change Google makes to the algorithm. Just keep your SEO going as usual

1. You Need Specialized Expertise

Some people know certain SEO niches better than others. Some people know Social Media better, some know content generation and backlinking better. It all depends on a person’s specialties. You can’t be expected to know everything your self!

2. You Can Learn A Lot From An Outside Expert

Even if you’re an SEO expert, you can’t be expected to know everything. Having an extra brain around with extra ideas is always a plus. Some people have done things you haven’t before.

3. You Should Double Check Your Strategies Before You Start Them

While building a strategy, it’s easy to forget something, put something extra in, or just do something wrong. Usually a second or even third person to review it before implementing it can help. The outside SEO Consultants can catch any mistakes that are made.

4. Benefit From Collaborating With Other SEOs

Don’t you find it refreshing to work with other people? I know I do. Sometimes it’s tough doing things by your self. Get some help with a consultant and take some stress off.

5. A Consultant Can Help You Talk To The Higher-Ups

One of the hardest things to do is get approval and funding by your superiors to try new things, or do the things you already know will work. A second voice to help convince your superiors that what you’re doing is right is more than a good idea, it’s a fantastic idea!

6. SEO Is Too Much Work

SEO is a lot of work, and no one should have to bear that burden alone. With outside help, responsibilities can be delegated and the stress load can be removed so that no one person is stressing out over a lot to do. Things will also get done a lot faster.

7. An Outside Point Of View On Unforeseen Issues

It’s possible that you haven’t experienced everything yet. No matter how long you’ve been in the SEO business, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen it all. Luckily, a consultant may have seen the particular issue you’ve run in to. They’ll know exactly how to fix it and things can run smoothly!

Getting an outside consultant isn’t wrong, it’s actually encouraged. Do what you feel is right and what is needed the most for your SEO campaigns.

Previously, Firefox was the best browser for handling things like SEO because of the Firefox extensions.  Unfortunately, Firefox is very bulky.  There is a solution! Google Chrome is not near as bulky as Firefox, and now has a growing list of extensions.  Go ahead and see for your self.  Open up a website you spend a lot of time on in Firefox.  Then do the same in Google Chrome.  Check your task manager and see which is using more memory.  Now, check out this list of SEO Extensions for Google Chrome:

Google Local Search isn’t something that will replace SEO for local businesses, but it is necessary for the big picture (of marketing). It’s really easy, all that a business needs to do is set it up, get verified, and then come back to check the reports.  As you can see from the image provided, this client site has received a lot of traffic just through Google Local.

This is something that has actually been in effect for weeks. Google never mentioned it because they said that less than one (1) percent of websites have been affected so far. This is because site relevance still holds the most weight in importance to Google search rankings. Not only that, but site speed is only one of over two hundred (200) different algorithms running to decide a page’s search ranking and PageRank.

Wondering how fast your site is running? Check your site speed with this Firefox plug in or go to your Google Webmaster Tools and go to Labs and then Performance.