The Info Group has partnered with Elkore to create 2StepSite.com a CPA Web Design & Marketing venture. The site offers CPA’s , Accountants and Financial Services Companies the means to create a website they can update at anytime with ease and speed and one that attracts targeted visitors with Search Engine Marketing options for any budget.

“The Yellow Pages are a dying breed, now everyone “Google’s” the service or product they are seeking and Financial Services oriented businesses are no exception.” said Mark Stone, a partner with The Info Group. “So, if you’re not online you limit your opportunities to compete in todays business environment.” he went on to say. “Finally, Elkore always delivers superior web design projects and when you combine that with our experience in online marketing I know this partnership will deliver results to CPA’s, Accountants and Financial Services companies anywhere.”

CPA, Accountants and Financial Services companies 2StepSite.com offers web design and marketing packages starting from as little as $159 a month.

I just read this post on the number of advertisers Google has. What made me stand up and look was the average spend per year is 16k … now multiply that by 1 million. No wonder they crush the competition. Read the full post here.

Here we are in the New Year! I’m sure a lot of people are asking where did 2008 go but as they say you can’t look back and so I won’t except to say it was a great year with several highlights.

So 2008 was great and 2009 looks to be even better especially for search. Several questions intrigue me, like, how much will mobile search grow? How will Google promote impact search engine rankings?

I wish you all a wonderful and prosperous New Year!

Parts For Your Car, a late model performance parts and accessories store, has contracted with The Info Group to improve their search engine marketing. If you are a owner of a late model Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Oldsmobile or Pontiac, PFYC.com is your one stop for parts and accessories.

When I started my SEO career in late 1997 it was easy to obtain rankings by simply optimizing the keyword tag and it didn’t take long, maybe a year or two, before that tag was so abused it lost significant value with the search engines. Then the SEO world began to yell to anyone who would listen that the keyword tag was dead. So much so, I remember reading a comment from a poster at a major international SEO firm who said they were not even putting a keyword tag on the sites they optimized. Well, I’m here to tell you from real results the keyword tag is not DEAD!

You heard me (or read me), I have never stopped using the keyword tag for my clients BUT what I have done is to use it for very specific purposes.

How?

Well one example in particular is misspellings. One of my clients resides in the legal>medical arena and during the keyword research phase I found several misspelling of a particular medical disorder that generated good search numbers on a daily basis. As you can imagine the client had no interest in placing misspellings in the visible content on their site so I placed it in a keyword tag along with several dozen other misspellings. For the past 5 years the site has ranked on the front page of Google & MSN for the term and some of the others and bounces between the top three pages on Yahoo. There has been no link building done using the term, no alt tags or other means and certainly no Black Hat Practices are in play. That’s the facts maam, you can draw your own conclusion but I’m sticking by mine … the keyword tag is not DEAD!

What a wonderful response to our newly launched live SEO Training Class available from Smart On SEO. The SEO Starter classes in September have filled up and the response to the October 7 & 21 classes have been just as enthusiastic. If you are looking to learn the fundamentals of effective search engine optimization, REGISTER NOW!

In our SEO Starter course you will learn:

• Identifying technical website problems
• Keyword research
• Title and Meta tag development
• Content optimization
• Internal linking
• Increasing link popularity
• Analyzing your results

This class was built on 10+ years of real SEO experience, so learn from an SEO Expert and register today!

We are proud to annouce a new venture, Smart On SEO! Over the past 11 years many customers and prospects have express a desire to learn search engine optimization and so using the old saying “experience is the best teacher” as our mantra we have developed a one day class that leaves the attendee with a plan and the tools to fast track their SEO project.

If chat rooms, forums and online video just don’t hack it for you, join us and learn what it takes to provide a solid SEO foundation for your website. Our live, one-day class includes:

So if you are a entrepreneur, small business owner, or a sales and marketing professional interested in maximizing your online marketing budget by increasing the visibility of your website in the natural results of search engines, then REGISTER and get Smart On SEO!

We had a great time attending the AirHogs game last night. A small way of saying thanks to the hard working staff of The Info Group. Shout out to infielder Cody Merrell for giving the Mattiza boys autographed baseballs and to Fighter Pilot Ace Bacon for stopping by and giving hugs and fist pumps to everyone. To the gang at The Info Group I say, JOB WELL DONE and thanks for the dedication and enthusiasm you bring everyday.

If your company is located in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and looking for a very family-friendly and affordable company outing I can’t recommend attending a Grand Prairie AirHogs game highly enough.
I’m not making a commission for this endorsement but give J Willms a shout for your event.

If you’ve not set your robots.txt file to exclude your image folder then you are probably receiving as much if not more traffic from Google images as you are from Google search. Why? Well Google reports that 15% of all queries made are conducted via their image search facility. So it’s possible to receive tremendous traffic from image search and in fact we’ve had clients who have come to us for SEO that are receiving more traffic via image search than content search.

So is the answer to exclude your images folder from being spidered? It could be but you can also take advantage of brand awareness and what we’ll call contact visits (visitors who start with an image search but will explore a site further upon landing from that image search). Brand awareness? Yes, with properly optimized images and rich media you can control how the image/rich media is displayed in the SERPs. Using relevant keywords in the file name and in the properties summary can have a dramatic impact on how your image or rich media file is displayed.

This same practice applies to pdf’s, word docs and almost any file you can place online. Taking the time to optimize your properties summary tab or file properties is a great way to increase brand awareness online.