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  [caption id="attachment_435" align="alignleft" width="1080"] Personal attention is necessary and you get what you pay for.[/caption]      SEO Agency NYC Editorial From the Owner: For 17 years I have worked as an SEO professional. I simply must call out  what has recently been called "PRICEAGEDON" in the SEO community. It's hurting Working tirelessly to not only produce the best overall product while remaining price sensitive in a field where even a decade later, we still regularly have to educate clients on the ins and outs of SEO as part  steward and part provider. However, it is my goal to strip away the notion that any business owner can hope to find effective and cheap SEO. NYC SEO: How cheap is cheap SEO? Recently, Higher Visibility performed a much-needed study. They surveyed 500 people who help small businesses with their marketing efforts. This study was very revealing. A whopping 75 percent of respondents believe that SEO should cost under $500/mo. What’s even worse is that 38 percent believe SEO should cost under $100/month! So why is this so? First you have to understand the goal. To be on page one means you are in the 1% of 1% of top publishers on Google and sometimes a bottom of the page 1 ranking can produce single digit click thru rates. To say the competition is fierce is an understatement even on most local or regional terms. SEO Deliverables Matter Well, aside from the fact that there are a million SEO service providers trying to take advantage of unsuspecting and inexperienced business owners, the most hilarious of which is GoDaddy which offers Search Engine "Visibility" for $7/month? The old saying "You get what you pay for" definitely applies here. It's frustrating when our team meets with established business owners who are now being…

Google’s frequent Penguin, Panda and other algorithm updates are never feared by legitimate and experienced SEO companies. Google has simply punished websites with undeserved rankings that are often the result of questionable optimization techniques, not from legitimate techniques performed by a professional SEO service. As Google has mentioned in the past, its regular algorithm updates never intend on penalizing the websites that provide a positive user experience, publish high quality and well-written content, and that avoid using shady SEO services. Google’s algorithm updates have resulted in an evolutionary online ranking process -- in that the strongest websites in terms of content, legitimate backlinks, and optimization techniques always end up surviving each algorithm update, with many of them getting ranking boosts. Google’s algorithm updates have punished low quality content and backlinks Because Google’s recent algorithms were updated over the past several years to punish websites with poor content and low quality backlinks, some claimed that SEO no longer works. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that black and grey hat SEO doesn’t work and it never has, while the tried and tested method of publishing great content still works better than ever. Google’s recent Penguin, Panda and mobile-friendly updates and other subtler algorithm updates have continued to reward websites that release high quality content that is genuinely useful to their visitors and minimally optimized. Most of the recent penalties had to do with over-optimization Many of the past several penalties and algorithm updates had to do with over-optimization, or putting too many keywords in a particular article or webpage. With Google’s algorithm constantly becoming more and more advanced, it is able to spot even minimal instances of over-optimization and almost immediately lower rankings appropriately. This first occurred on a large scale during the February 2011 Panda update…

Contrary to what you may have heard lately or in the past, SEO optimization is far from dead and remains one of the most important marketing techniques for any business. Most businesses have a web presence and a large percentage of them obtain a majority of their customers from search engines. Neglecting SEO and focusing on more expensive marketing methods such as pay per click and social media advertising often results in businesses overspending while getting minimal long term results. You don’t need to hire the best SEO company in the world to get great long term results. Proper, safe, and expertly driven organic SEO is still a powerful method for generating a steady stream of long term leads and often costs a small fraction of what many companies spend on their pay per click budgets. Quality content still reigns supreme Webmasters who never tried heavy keyword optimization, using link farms, or other discouraged SEO techniques were likely never penalized during any of the prior Panda or Penguin updates. Quality content still reigns supreme in terms of search engine rankings, and a small amount of careful optimization is still very effective. Focusing on keyword density over quality content is no longer effective. The primary focus for the majority of businesses should be on creating as much interesting content as they possibly can, and researching what their audience and target market wants to consume. It takes experience and skill to know how to properly perform on-page and off-page optimization For both on-page optimizations such as meta tags, keyword density, and natural keyword integration into content, and off-page optimization such as backlink building, guest blogging, and social media link building, it takes a genuine SEO optimization expert with the experience to be able to avoid over-optimization and ensure that any efforts work…

The question of whether or not to change your site structure may arise if you are planning on making some on-page SEO adjustments, redesigning your website, or making other major changes to its structure. Altering your website structure can easily end up being an SEO disaster in many ways if you aren’t properly prepared for it, and it’s even more dangerous for well-established websites to do so without the guidance of SEO services in New York. Before you plan on making changes to your website structure, be sure to meet with an experienced SEO company in New York and plan everything out to avoid a ranking disruption. A website redesign or restructuring can easily result in disrupted rankings Frequently, when websites are restructured or redesigned, current rankings are punished as a result of poor execution. Website restructurings should almost always be supervised by a New York SEO service with experience in web development, even if it is mainly handled in-house, in order to ensure that website rankings remain stable. A number of crucial steps must take place during your restructuring in order to protect your rankings. Many web developers are not trained in these techniques, but they can work in conjunction with an experienced New York SEO company in order to ensure that the website changes are SEO friendly. Some of the steps that are needed include: Working on changes to a test website, not a live website in order to prevent bugs from popping up and affecting usability. Matching the website structure of the updated and the older website, including using a crawler to map out the website. Saving the original website information including a list of every webpage. Using SEO friendly 301 redirects for any pages which have changed URLs in order to protect rankings. Making every change…

AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a new initiative from Google intended to help New York SEO firms and webmasters ensure that their websites load quickly on mobile versions. The open source project utilizes a stripped-down version of HTML to construct very fast mobile webpages. AMP has become a crucial component of SEO best practices, and its importance for just about every website will continue to increase throughout this year and beyond. Hiring a NYC SEO company to create a mobile website with AMP helps to ensure that it will load as quickly as possible across multiple types of mobile devices and that visitors have a positive experience, which in turn will likely result in higher and more stable mobile keyword rankings. AMP significantly improves mobile web browsing speeds AMP is being implemented across the mobile web because it can dramatically improve mobile web browsing speeds. The efficient version of HTML that AMP uses restricts the use of JavaScript which in turn helps websites load much faster, as JavaScript is one of the biggest browsing speed reducers. Several other features improve loading speeds such as a restriction on CSS file sizes (must be under 50KB) and certain multimedia requirements. AMP supports a wide range of ad networks One of the major issues for publishers is website monetization when a large number of their visitors use ad blockers. Many of these visitors use ad blockers on their mobile devices for the purpose of increasing load speeds. Interestingly, Google has included an “amp-ad” extended component which ensures support for several different ad networks, and Google has stated that one of the goals of the AMP project is to ensure that users won’t have to rely on ad blockers for a fast and efficient browsing experience, while ads can still be displayed in…