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Most business owners have come across Google Adwords advertisements and may not have realized, others may realize that Adwords marketing is what you are seeing down the side and above the main Google results: with a yellow background labeled as ads.

If you have realized that this is what Adwords is you still may not understand how it works or what good value it is, Adwords is also accessible by any business no matter how big or small with no real minimum budget; in fact it is often possible to get vouchers when opening a new Google Adwords account, giving you often around $50-$75 of free AdWords marketing.

The Adwords system doesn’t just limit you to ads on Google either, you can also set it up so your ads appear on web pages with matching keywords, this is optional and you can stick with Google but it can bring in a lot more traffic, the websites of course earn money from this.

In either case, advertising on Google or on other websites, or both, you get very relevant traffic. On Google itself in the same way that websites show up in the main results to match keywords so do your ads. You bid on keywords and where your ad shows depends on how much you are willing to pay. How much each keyword is depends on how much competition there is, so for quite niche keywords you may pay mere cents yet still get highly relevant traffic. As for other websites you still compete for keywords and your ads match the keywords on the pages where your adverts appear. With both types of ad placement through Adwords you only pay anything when someone clicks your ad.

Adwords marketing is low risk and you can set your daily budget, you can track which keywords are bringing in traffic leading to sales or other most wanted responses even and ditch those keywords that aren’t performing.

Recent surveys by Research Now looking at small and medium sized businesses are encouraging: 55% say they have already recovered or that they expect to recover within 6 months. This number rises to 62% for those businesses of between 20-99 employees.

Important though is how businesses spend their money and this will impact on the rest of the economy, these small businesses employ much of the country’s workforce but may struggle to take on more people due to the costs involved and the need to spend spare money on marketing to ensure that demand improves. This may lead some businesses to be stuck with the choices of either being able to find more work but not be able to fulfill it or taking on staff and not having enough work for them.

There is one main way businesses are overcoming this in Tampa, SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is a great way for small businesses to target highly relevant traffic online to get them to their websites: and hopefully from there make a sale or get them to call or visit a business.

67% of small and medium sized businesses in fact plan to improve their web presence including SEO. For business in Tampa SEO is a way to make sure that what they do spend on marketing attracts only relevant local people, meaning they spend less for as many sales and therefore have more profit to spend on other parts of their business, including taking on staff.

For many businesses in Tampa SEO is used alongside Social Media: another great way to get relevant traffic either to your website or to communicate with them directly on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. 57% of small and medium sized businesses in fact plan to use social media during 2012.

While for some businesses in Tampa SEO is used as well as traditional marketing others find they can reach the same people for less money using the technique. By finding the keywords that people are searching with in Tampa, SEO can be used to place those keywords on to a website: so that in Google and other search engines the keyword matches and means the site is shown in results. By then using SEO techniques including link building and on page optimization the ranking or position of a site in search engine results can also be improved by convincing search engines that a website is good quality and relevant.

Further analysis of traffic on a website can make the already efficient spending on SEO even more effective, by looking at which traffic who originally searched for which keywords are the most likely to buy from a website, or perform some other valuable action such as sending an enquiry, efforts can be focused on the most profitable keywords.

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For many years people working in SEO have struggled to understand how the no-follow tag for links was viewed by Google, most people understand that it does stop the flow of Pagerank to other sites but many have assumed that therefore it keeps back Pagerank and helps more flow to other pages, including pages on the same site and other partner sites and sister sites.

Matt Cutts of Google though has categorically stated that Google doesn’t pass extra Pagerank to a page because another link is no-follow: the Pagerank is still worked out based on how many links regardless of how many, if any, are no-follow.

This has now been the case for some years but many still need to update their sites; many site owners have tried to direct Pagerank to certain pages on their site, or sculpt Pagerank in such a way that a site generates Pagerank internally: this is not possible, certainly not through using no-follow links and still not through loops within a site. Matt Cutts has also confirmed that Google uses a decay factor on Pagerank as it is passed, chances are there are also other algorithms to stop sites being able to generate Pagerank internally, or else everyone would do it.

Google want no-follow to only be used for its original purpose, to say ‘I don’t endorse this site’, they therefore don’t want people using this on their own pages or on all external links.  So how should no-follow links be used? From an SEO point of view you need to consider who you link to with a do-follow, if you link to too many spam and poor quality sites you will get penalized by Google and they will start ignoring all of your links, including internal links. On the other hand linking to the right sites can actually boost your sites, Google see linking to other high quality, high Pagerank sites with do-follow links as a sign that you may have a good quality site as well.

It is worth considering this then for SEO purposes especially if your site has a lot of user generated content, many blog owners and other site owners have all links in comments set to no-follow; if you have time to check your comments though before they are published you may be better to manually edit them and either don’t publish content including poor quality links or make them no-follow manually.

Should you then make an effort to include as many do-follow links to high pagerank sites as possible for SEO? Well to an extent, of course high quality content on your own site is still most important for SEO but putting in do-follow links to relevant useful sites when possible may be a good idea.

All internal links should be do-follow as well, there is no advantage to be gained by making them no follow and does it really make any kind of sense to be saying to Google of any of your own pages ‘I don’t endorse this page’?

The changes with Your World include personal results which show you results for photos, posts and so on of yours or which have been shared with you, then there is the potential for profiles to be included in search if Google thinks that a person, or brand, is of interest to you or if you already know them and lastly people and brands when searched for have their Google Plus pages come up as an auto-suggestion: great for SEO if no-one else on Google Plus yet has a similar name or brand name but you are struggling to rank naturally for your own name

If we assume that Google are going for the latter of the two options given earlier, i.e. trying to purely make search results more relevant, and not just pushing Google Plus then it means for SEO that more niche content may be needed and more content rehashed to be relevant to different localities perhaps. It may well also mean that getting plus ones is going to be even more important than originally thought and that it really will be a matter of getting plus ones from as wide a range of people as possible for general websites or focusing on a relevant niche for a niche site. In either case it is going to require communication with real people, no longer will good relationships with Bloggers and other site owners be enough or even Social Media superstars. Websites are going to have to communicate effectively and continually with everyone in and around their target audience: for those already great at Social Media it should be easy, for those webmasters who have relied on SEO keyword research, content creation and link building the game may be about to change.

One thought is that certain types of websites will lose out unfairly, there are a lot of websites that are useful, functional but still not exactly interesting and they may struggle to interact with people who come to them purely to get information or to complete a task such as completing a tax calculation for example: this could actually see people having trouble finding what they want.

Google despite what some SEO experts claim don’t usually role out major changes too quickly so that they can’t iron out problems, those who say they do tend to use black hat techniques and are the people Google want to catch out.

So what does it mean for SEO if Google is just trying to promote Google Plus, well Google plus one buttons and a social media campaign on Google Plus might be necessary, though of course by doing this you are giving Google exactly what they want but working in SEO isn’t that what we have always had to do?

“Google had a really strong quarter ending a great year. Full year revenue was up 29%, and our quarterly revenue blew past the $10 billion mark for the first time,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “I am super excited about the growth of Android, Gmail, and Google+, which now has 90 million users globally – well over double what I announced just three months ago. By building a meaningful relationship with our users through Google+ we will create amazing experiences across our services. I’m very excited about what we can do in 2012 – there are tremendous opportunities to help users and grow our business.”

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Businesses too who are unsure how to use Social Media often focus on SEO, Tampa businesses though can benefit from working with an SEO company who know what a benefit Social Media can be.

Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have no follow links, these are no use for SEO, Tampa businesses may assume that this means that there is no use in trying to get links on Facebook and Twitter back to a website.

The truth is of course that increasingly people search through social media sites to find what they want and look at what people are saying: people are more likely to trust a link recommended by a friend than trust one found on Google, this of course however isn’t SEO. Tampa based website owners may or may not realize though that Google looks at links on Social Media sites even if they are no follow.

Matt Cutts of Google in fact confirmed recently that Google’s spiders look at Social Media sites and look for links that are getting a lot of recommendations. What you ideally want for SEO is having your link posted by a large number of different users who aren’t all closely connected and which don’t post links too often. The higher profile that user is, i.e. how many people follow them and are friends with them, affects how important Google think the links they post are. These links won’t have an effect on Google Pagerank but will have an effect on rankings in Google results, which at the end of the day is what is important; it is also understood that the keywords in a post containing a link are considered to decide what specific terms Google will increase a page’s rank for.

There is another way in which Social Media can be used for SEO, Tampa businesses with new websites especially will benefit from this. The Social Media website Facebook has a pagerank of 9 on most pages, this means that it often outranks other pages.  With a branded Facebook page especially, for a product, company or other brand, the Facebook page often outperforms the brand’s website: this is mildly irritating if the Facebook page is top and your page is second: what if you have a new website though and your page is on page 4? It may be that a Facebook page can get to the top of Google’s rankings a lot quicker, and if properly keyword researched may be able to outrank some of your competitors.

With this method of SEO Tampa businesses can use Facebook to get visitors to their website rather than their competitors via a Facebook page that directs people to their website if needed; for some businesses however all the important, necessary information such as a telephone number and address can be given on the Facebook page.

We Offer $100 Google AdWords coupon to all new customers signed for the Google AdWords or the SEO optimization campaign.

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+Affordable SEO Company is a member of the Google Engage Program since 2011. This program helps us to engage new clients to utilize AdWords program by providing AdWords introductory coupon to our customers.

Oh well we are all human and the software, even written by Google is written by humans. That probably can explain why our company did not get a new batch of introductory coupons on time in 2012. Well, customer services sometimes might be a pan on the neck. But not Google’s customers service.

I was actually quite surprised but the easiness to reach Google support and the professionalism of the customer support.

To make the long story short, Estefany C. (I promised no to disclosed her identity) has gone above and beyond the usual average technical support while assisting me today. She has not only tried everything possible to resolve the problem on our call, not only followed up with me via an email on the status of our call but in about 2 hours after the initial conversation called me to update me on the resolution status.

I have promised Estefany I would mention her first name and I also said that Google does rock!

Thank you Google! Thank you Estefany! Your support is greatly appreciated.

PS. I hope many US based company will learn from Google how to provide an excellent US based customer support.