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SEO advice from Titus Blair - Q & A

Titus gives Rick some advice on way to increase his website’s SEO.

Rich Sloan:  We're going to go to Rick in Bellmore, New York.  Welcome to the show, Rick.

Rick:  Hi, how are you?

Rich Sloan:  Doing great, having a good time with Titus here. 

Rick:   Yeah.  I'm glad to get through.  My wife has a store, April's Fine Baby Apparel in Bellmore Village, and I use the Internet for marketing.  We don't do e-commerce but I just have been having troubles getting good ranking, especially on  Google.  I can't break -- I have great ranking on Yahoo and Optimum Online.  But I just can't break through with Google.  And they tell you to go to the open directory project and that seems like those guys are really hard to break through.

Rich Sloan:  Okay.

Rick:  You got any suggestions there?

Rich Sloan:  One of the key things, I just want to interject before Titus gives, perhaps a more detailed answer, is that it's very important to make sure that you have lots of the keywords on your homepage and throughout your website that those search engines -- search crawlers will look for instead of fancy graphic, which, in many cases, they don't recognize.  And that typically creates what's called search engine optimization that will perform better for you, or SEO.  But, Titus, you got some wisdom for this gentleman?

Titus Blair:  Yes.  My wisdom is -- thanks for calling, by the way, is that --

Rick:  No problem.             

Titus Blair:  -- the best thing to do, because they have ad words at Google, is to just buy some ad words.  They're not very expensive and I've noticed, and I don't know, you know, I don't know if this is true or not, but when you do have ad words you rank higher in Google.  So, you know, just put in a small bid and you can go to adwords.google.com and, you know --

Rich Sloan:  So, that, now, Titus, is that search engine advertising?

Titus Blair:  Yes. 

Rich Sloan:  Okay.

Titus Blair:  You do it by bids. 

Rich Sloan:  Right.

Titus Blair:  Like, you bid -- and I would say, optimizing though, if you want to do it for free, look at the top five to ten sites, view the source code, which is, like, the HTML code, and look at the key words they're using and how they've kind of formatted that page.

Rich Sloan:  And simply copycat those onto your page.

Rick:  Well, you know, I must be doing something right.  Because, you know, I'm trying to get, like, communion outfits Bellmore, communion outfits Nassau County.  And on Yahoo I come up number one.  But on Google, I don't show up at all. 

Titus Blair:  Yeah.  Well, with Google there's also a traffic aspect, which is, they also base rank on traffic and other factors.  And, so, if you have a high web traffic it's a good probability that you're going to be higher ranked as well.  But that's not official.  But, I would say the other ones are picking you up well because maybe they're refreshing faster.

Rick:  Uh-huh.

Titus Blair:  And Google might refresh on a different rate.  So, sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes weeks.

Rich Sloan:  Rick, thank you very much for your call.  You're probably also a WABC listener out of New York.  It's just a huge station with some, obviously, some great entrepreneurs listening in.