Semaphore - Successful in Search Engine Reputation Management

"Reputation management" here portrays what happens when you have a problem arise in SERPs, i.e. search engine result pages. Reputation management is a major pain for brands and businesses; whether this arises due to bloggers or social media site jumping on negative news - which might have resulted due to disgruntled customers or left-away X-employees, low morale competitors, etc.

In the online world with Search Engine results, Reputation management can be quite challenging, and more than this, you have frustrated clients who are pressured to make the negative content “go away”. But you can’t make it just “go-away”. If this has been a newspaper or pamphlet in an off-line media, you may throw this away; or even if this is broadcasted, this very rarely has a re-run so that the negative marketing has a real “go away” overtime. This may not bother you as much the negative marketing in an online-media would. In the online world, the information posted about you stays online, long time, accumulates links, and is always accessible from anywhere. Negative content in the search results won’t “JUST GO AWAY.” You will need to continuously get in this and create positive online content about your brand / business across the web so that unfavorable content is pushed down in search results by this positive content.

We at Semaphore Software have more than 15 years of rich experience in Offshore Software Development Projects, Web Design and Development and Search Engine Optimization Services.

We at Semaphore Software offer highly experienced SEO services to our clients. Our SEO and SEM skills get our client’s website to Top Rankings in the search engines and also result in increase in page rank of their website; giving our customers high satisfaction. We have expertise in Keyword Research, Analysis, On-page Optimization, Search Engine Marketing activities like:

• Manual Submission of your website URL in Search Engines

• Manual Submission of your website URL in Quality Directories

• Link Exchange

• Manual Submission of your articles into Quality Article sites/ directories

• Manual Submission of your press-notes into Quality Press Release sites/ directories

We also go for high quality link building efforts by Social Media Optimization/ Marketing.

Semaphore has a big list of clients that varies from small businesses to world-renowned brands. Three of our clients who are Big Brands across the whole world (names not mentioned as agreed upon with the clients) were severely affected with negative marketing and the negative links were positioned in the first SERP i.e. in the first ten results. It was driving towards a big loss towards the credibility of these Big Brands. We at Semaphore accepted this challenge and within a short span of 6 months were successful in driving these negative links back over 10-12 pages for all these three brands.

We called this “Search Engine Reputation Management” that sounds like an unlikely marriage. Search engine reputation management fuses two formerly separate faculties; reputation management and SEO. Reputation management has traditionally been the job of public relations specialists while SEO, a process of optimizing web pages to rank high in the search engines for specific keywords, is considered a function of marketing and promotion. Together they can do double duty and provide a hybrid form of risk management.

As also put earlier, our clients’ businesses were affected so much that they were ready to spend a few thousand dollars to overcome these ‘reputation management’. Our SEO experts at Semaphore planned definite strategies creating 12- 20 micro-sites and optimizing them with applying SEM campaigns for each of these. Our Press Release submissions, social bookmarking and posting positive content of our clients’ businesses into social media sites, blogs and forums proved to be very useful in achieving us our goals and objectives. It is projected (by one of the clients) that through the SERM activities, over a period of time client will save a few million $.

Semaphore Software has a 100% success ratio in achieving its project objectives and thus giving our clients a high level satisfaction. Semaphore has an independent division for Search Engine Optimization with highly experienced SEO professionals. Semaphore also provides them high quality training on regular basis.

Coming back to Reputation Management, a negative marketing not only damages your credit but also destroys your business to a big deal- putting your business into a bin. Hence, before this destroys you, it is always wise to go for Search Engine Reputation Management through a Professional SEO company like our clients did.

Social Media Optimization and Marketing

Semaphore helps Clients to lead high through SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION and MARKETING (Know about Social Media Optimization/ Social Media Marketing and find out how Social Media benefits you with Search Engine Optimization)

Everything that helps grow your business is developed on the foundation of good marketing efforts by you. Marketing gives a push to increase your customer base and thus revenue. But more important becomes customer loyalty, good credit within customers’ segment; and therefore comes into the picture: Social marketing. Social marketing includes building your brand, your customer base, loyalty and much more. Semaphore carries years of rich experience, helping our clients with their social media marketing needs.

Call us today at 201-299-3668 or contact us on info@semaphore-software.com immediately to know more on how we have helped our clients lead high and what more we can do for you!

Introduction to Social Media…

With the increasing use of Internet and Technology, website owners are looking for more new ways to expand their businesses and are building strategies to move out through various channels. Their prime aim is to attract more consumers than ever before.

In today’s competitive market, the simplest way that many website owners adopt is Search Engine Optimization services for their website. Search Engine Optimization helps the web-pages to get crawled easily and rank that page high in the search engines. But then how to develop an additional customer base or how to create a more loyal customer base is a million dollar question for all businesses.

For a small website with less number of pages or less competition in its business market (which is a rare case), the website easily gets on the top SERPs with proper Optimization of the website, few Search Engine Marketing activities like Directory Submission, Link Exchange or using Blogs. But for a website with good number of pages – targeting very competitive keywords, with high competition in the business, it takes much more of it to rank high.

Let us recall the Universal and finely accepted –thumb kind of rule that says “Word of Mouth (WOM) is the best Marketing” –that not only gives rise to new customers but increases the loyalty of your customers. This Golden Rule implies similarly in for The Virtual Business World. Here the Word of Mouth happens through social media websites Using social networking sites, business networking sites, blogs or forums or discussion groups helps you for real good quality traffic.

How can Semaphore help you with Social Media Marketing...

Semaphore has a wealth of highly skilled SEO Professionals that carry a rich experience of 5+ years. We can create an affordable SEO/ Social Marketing plan for you, keeping your best interests in mind.

We at Semaphore have a lot to offer. We shall never provide you with plans in general; but we shall study your website and draw the best plan that caters to your business /website requirements.

Social media optimization (or Social Networking Marketing) is currently one of the most featured ways to branding. The very concept utilizes the power of information distribution that a closely bound group of individuals and/or organization enjoys. Through our effective services in social network marketing, we deliver website branding, community awareness at its best. Our actions are reliant on search engine optimization, Google top ten ranking requirements, quality content distribution, and a diverse set of proven activities that help generate good and quality traffic on the website. We market through the following:

• Social Networking Sites
• Business Networking Sites
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Video Sharing Sites
• Photo Sharing Sites
• Forums/ Blogs/ Discussion groups

Applying these techniques, may help you for a potentially large rise in traffic on your site, including willing customers who are ready to deal with you.

Apart from Social Media Optimization / Marketing Services, we also offer the following at its best:

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services

 

We at Semaphore, offer world class SEO services to our clients throughout the world. 

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Services / Link Building:

 

We provide complete web promotion services globally, that includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM), SEO consulting services, market research, as well as link building campaigns.

Search Engine Reputation Management Services

 

We at Semaphore have been 100% successful in delivering the best Reputation Management services to our clients.

About Semaphore Software:-

Semaphore is an offshore software development company. With over 500+ employees, 15+ years of rich experience and with 1000+ Offshore Software Projects developed successfully, Semaphore can assist you in any of your requirements for Software Development, Website Design and Development, Mobile Application Development, Internet/Intranet Solutions, E-Commerce Solutions, Legacy Application Re-engineering, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing or its Business Process Outsourcing...

We at Semaphore have expertise in core technologies like Microsoft .Net, Oracle, SAP, LAMP, Windows Mobile Applications, PHP and Open Source like Joomla, OsCommerce, Zend, and Coldfusion. We also have expertise working on Java Platform (J2ME, JSP, Servlets, Struts, Spring, EJB, Hibernate, etc.). We also offer Offshore Staff Augmentation services (Offshore manpower resource services) at attractive prices and help you setup an offshore or remote IT office.

SEO The Most Unnoticed Yet Important Marketing Strategy on the Internet

Today many businesses are turning towards having their own websites. Having an informative website or rather having a virtual presence on the www platform has become very common now a day.

But then there comes a very vital question: what is the use of having a website if your potential customers can’t find it!

There are many different ways like email or banners or print ads to drive people or rather say Web Traffic to your website; but if you think more about this, there’s no prominent way to score more online customers other than by spooling in people who tell what they are interested in, what information they want, request information on your website and visit you website at zero or rather say no advertising cost.

Then here is where the Search Engine Optimization comes into picture.

Search engine Optimization and Search engine marketing is the low-cost and high-return tool for targeted advertising. And it’s proven that one yields great rewards by adopting and utilizing this tool. I would rather say that there is no better way any body can challenge that can drive better traffic to your website.

It is proved that in b2c ecommerce models, online businesses have yielded more business than traditional brick and mortar ones. But the only way seen now to stand above in the crowd and stake your claim in the online industry is by employing the sound practices of search engine marketing.

Today, many are adding-on their presence in this virtual business world. SEO is a tool that is affordable by all. And small players have started to compete with the big ones by using the smart moves of SEO.

People strive hard to get their websites to the top of Google's, Yahoo's, and MSN's search results.

The best way is adding proper Title and Meta to each of the web pages of your website. You have to be very careful in defining your keywords and description. Try to have key-word oriented titles; and that is a simple and straight way to have your pages ranked higher for that keyword.

The Google algorithms consider this very much. Also important is on-page optimization where in you put Heading tags, Alter tags (to pictures and links), 'links' in the content wherever applicable, using images with low size, giving bold and italic styles to keywords and titles wherever applicable, etc.

Now the time is of SEO-Friendly websites

As it is truly experienced, this is an era of Virtual identity. We love to be more virtual than real! Many people (about 90%* of the IT-savvy people) have their virtual identity called “avatar” in one way or the other.

Trade and commerce have also taken an “Online” presence with the name of “e-Commerce”. These new technological advancements have given rise to a high level of competition.

Most of the businesses that go online will start simply with a website. In 2000, the size of the Web was considered to be around 7 million unique websites, a 50 percent increase compared to the year 1999. One study estimated the World Wide Web (www) to contain 11.5 billion pages (not sites) by January 2005. And in 2005, Yahoo! announced that its search engine index contained more than 19.2 billion documents.

"There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," said Netcraft's Rich Miller in 2006.s

Websites have become an important rather an aggressive tool for any business now-a-days! But in this tough competition, to use your website-tool for revenue-generation or simply put, to get more business; it is important to rank high in the SERPs, i.e. to rank high in the Search Engines for competitive key words / phrases.

The solution is to go for Search Engine Optimization Services: Optimizing your site, running link-building campaigns for your website, etc.

Also, other activities to rank up your website in search engines are submitting your website URL into more and more search engines, adding your website URL into online directories, building up links with other relevant business sites, submitting rich articles into article sites, submitting your blog pages into various blog sites, submitting Press Releases into various Press Release sites. This will both increase the traffic overall to your site and enhance your search engine rankings, since the search engines pick up on the number of times people link to and from your site and rank your website higher accordingly.

Hence today, most of the people prefer to have their websites Search Engine Friendly or SEO-Friendly as it is said. 90% of our clients at Semaphore-software ask for SEO-Friendly Websites.

We always follow the Web 2.0 standards while designing a website and we also apply the W3C validation. But now along with these web-design standards, more demanding is having a SEO-Friendly Website.

There are many factors to check to have your website SEO-Friendly.

Few of them are:

 

• Web-page size should be less than 40K
• Applying proper Title and Meta (Keywords and Description) to all web-pages
• Applying Alt tag to images and Anchor tag to links
• Applying Heading (H1- H6)
• Avoid using Flash
• Avoid using frames
• CSS drop down navigation (no Javascript or Flash); CSS stylesheets
• Checking proper density of researched keywords in document text; don't hide text

There are many such factors to be taken care of. We have designed hundreds of websites at Semaphore for our clients; but now the time is of SEO-friendly websites. We ensure your site is built in a way Google can "read", so all your pages, and new ones you create, are soon in Google search results. This is search engine friendly website design.

Building a SEO Friendly design for a website is not doing Search Engine Optimization of your website but making the website Search-Engine Friendly. Search Engine Optimization is an on-going process of extensive Keyword research with link-building for your website.

At Semaphore, we design SEO-Friendly websites for our clients as per their requirements. Also we have our own independent division for SEO where in we take on separate SEO projects for different websites and have successfully achieved the targets as expected by our clients.

Finally, with looking at the current trend from our international customers, now the time is of SEO-Friendly Websites!

Using Images for SEO

Humans vs. Search Engines

Human visitors and search engine robots that visit websites and index information about them look for different things in a page. People like to see an attractive layout with nice pictures and graphics, animation, easy-to-locate navigation, and friendly greetings like "Welcome to Annie's Online Shop" at the top of a page. Search engines, on the other hand, like sites that have lots of textual content, good site structure (sitemaps, consistent linking style), and a meaningful phrase such as "Chicago Area Florist" as the heading of a page. While search engines can read the "alt image" tags of graphics, they cannot "look at" pictures the way a human visitor can, and far prefer text.
Replacing Text with Images

One way to work around this paradox is to shift some of the text that search engines have no interest in over to graphics. For example friendly greetings like "Welcome to Our Site" or "Annie's Online Shop" work best as header graphics.

Creating a header graphic in a graphic editing program like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks has the advantage of letting you know exactly what that part of your site will look like to visitors. If you create a header or navigation bar with text, you are limited to a common set of fonts. If you use a fancy font that is installed on your computer, your page will look great to you, but when a visitor who does not have that font on their computer visits your site, their browser's default font will be used and that nice aspect of your site will disappear. By making your header or navigation button images, you are free to use any of the fonts on your computer, and can be sure they will display the same way to your visitors.

Another advantage of using a header graphic is that you can remove words irrelevant to your target keywords from your textual content. When search engine robots visit a site, they read pages from left to right, top to bottom. The first 20-25 words and last 20-25 words of your text content are especially important, and you want to make sure to include your target keywords within these sections. If at all possible, your primary target keyword phrase should be the very first text in your page. That is, if you are able to make a natural-sounding sentence beginning with it. If your page begins with "Welcome to our site!", then you are pushing your keyword further away from the starting point of your text.

The first line of the main text on your page should be in heading format, with H1 tags (In html code it will look like this:

London Hotels

), and should contain your target keyword. However, you may want to add a greeting above the heading ("Welcome to Our Site!" for example). Since this is a very general phrase, with no relevance to any target keyword, it is best to make this a graphic.

If your site already has a greeting such as "Welcome to Our Site" in text at the top of your main page, it is relatively easy to convert this to a graphic, as follows.

• Open your page in an internet browser.
• Push the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard.
• Open a photo editing program, such as Photoshop
• Create a new document and select Edit & Paste or Ctrl+V on your keyboard. The screenshot will be pasted on the blank document.
• Crop the image down to just the word or phrase you would like to replace, with only a little blank space around the edges.
• Choose "Save as" or "Save for Web", saving the file in the "Images" folder of your site.
• In your site editor, such as Dreamweaver, simply open your page, delete that text, and drag and drop in the image you created. Save and upload your page.

Replacing Images with Text

Of course, the opposite might also be true of your current site. Your keywords might be displayed as graphics rather than text. In this case, you should either repeat those keywords in text in a way that looks natural, or get rid of the graphics altogether and replace them with text. The important thing is that your target keyword appears as text, as close to the beginning of the page as possible, and within H1 tags.

Alt Image Tags

"Alt image" tags are short pieces of text that are associated with a graphic. If the graphic cannot be displayed for some reason, or if someone has set up their browser to block images, the text is shown instead. (The "alt" is short for "alternative".) Also, browsers designed for the sight impaired read out the text content of pages, and read the alt image tags as a way of describing a page.

Search Engine Optimization - The Significance

From a small local business in a town to a big industry playing on an international platform, marketing has been a prime tool for any company or business to succeed. People started with using tools like write-ups, references, pamphlets and much more to convey their means or advertise themselves among a group. But now is a time where everything happens just on the click of your finger. And in this time is required marketing at the speed of light, marketing with niche concepts that are applied even before a common man would think.

With the time we are moving from a physical world to a virtual world. Companies started building up their websites to have a presence in the virtual world. But likewise there are billions of websites. What would be your identity then? In this age of Internet and Technology, getting your business visible to your customer segment is more important and this is where the Search Engine Optimization comes into picture.

Building up a website is like making a saw and optimizing your website is like sharpening that saw to use. And it is quite logical that you cannot take optimum use of your saw without sharpening it.

Search Engines are a system through which one gets the information the later wants. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. In simple words, Search engine optimization (SEO) just means your site is as accessible as possible to the search engines to improve the chances that they will serve it up when your potential customers type in specific search terms (called keywords). The more easily search engines find your site, the higher up it appears on their results pages.

In this world, SEO is definitely a smart move for any business.

But getting your site ranked for your keywords, there are many aspects that play a key role: a proper site structure, clean coding and necessary keywords, to name a few. This requires the every page of your website to be optimized. Every page should have a proper title, genuine keywords and a perfect description that matches the page. These title, keywords and description have to be relevant for every individual page. Search engines "crawl" the Web looking for the keywords that their users enter, so putting those keywords throughout your site means your pages will be picked up during searches by the search engine. Hence you have to put your foot into your customer's shoe to understand what keywords your customer would use to search for a particular product or service. You have to learn your customers' mind and this will give you the best of Title and meta (Keywords and description) to optimize your website. Also, optimizing your content is equally important as that plays an important role. You may optimize your content with putting keywords in your content, giving the Heading tags to titles, giving bold effects wherever necessary, giving links (to phrases in the content) to internal pages wherever appropriate.

Also, other activities to rank up your website in search engines are submitting your website URL into more and more search engines, adding your website URL into online directories, building up links with other relevant business sites, submitting rich articles into article sites, submitting your blog pages into various blog sites, submitting Press Releases into various Press Release sites. This will both increase the traffic overall to your site and enhance your search engine rankings, since the search engines pick up on the number of times people link to and from your site and rank your website higher accordingly.

People try many techniques to boost up their website ranking in these search engines for the specific keywords. People make researches to add-on their skills to make this task easier, faster and more genuine. There are companies that provide services for SEO to other companies. We at Semaphore Software have a dedicated team that researches on the SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) activities and undertake projects to upgrade the website ranking for our clients from different businesses.

It has become very important to move ahead with the fast pace if you wish to survive your business in this global competition.