Quite frankly, I am getting more and more irritated with the fact that there are web design companies in the USA that claim they do Lancaster internet marketing, or “SEO”. In reality, when you look at many of their websites, you’ll find that what they do is nothing more than link exchanges, and they are typically outsourcing those services, which means that their customers are getting charged more than they need to be.

Don’t Get Ripped Off!

So, here’s my recommendation. A few months ago, we created a link building chart. When you sit down to talk to a firm where you will discuss hiring them to do Lancaster SEO, make sure that you have that chart handy and make sure that they will be doing the things we recommend on that chart.

I was driving into work today, listening to 96.1 (yes, I’m in my mid-20s and I LOVE oldies), and Dave & Dog had an interesting little factoid to share. Apparently, emails beginning with the letters Q, Y and Z get only about 20% spam, while those beginning with A, M, S, R and P get about 40% or more. This information comes courtesy of Dr. Richard Clayton, a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge, as reported on BBC News.

I thought that was pretty darn interesting – here I thought spammers were keeping up with the times and constantly finding new ways to spam people as much as frickin’ possible. As it turns out, they’re missing out on tons of spamming opportunity.

Sort of in line with this – I’ve noticed my gmail has been missing more spam – for months, I saw not one spam mail in my inbox – they all went right to junk. For the past month or so, I’d say I average at least 1 spam email in my inbox per week – sometimes more. Of course, lucky me, my email begins with an A.

Anyone else notice gmail seems to be slippin’ with spam control? Or is it just my spam-magnet email address?

So many business people, whether owners, marketers, sales people or managers that I speak with are afraid to market online because they feel that they can’t target a local audience.

This couldn’t be further from the truth! For a few years now, Google has enabled businesses with a local audience to market only in areas where they want to target. In other words, if you are a plumber and want to come up with someone types in “how to replace a toilet”, you can create an adwords campaign that targets that specific keyword exclusively in the area that you have chosen to market.

Yahoo is now offering the same type of thing as well and I believe that Google is coming along with it.

One other important thing that I noticed is this. If you use the city specific local advertising option, it will also target keywords that people type in along with the city name. So, if you would type in “Lancaster plumbers”, the ad would come up in Lancaster, even though you never put “Lancaster plumbers” in as a keyword into your adwords account. This, however, does not seem to work for other forms of local targeting such as state or regional.

Let me know if you have experienced something different than this.