Pittsburgh SEO – SEM – SEA | Internet Marketing and Website Design | Blackball Online

Pittsburgh, PA - Blackball Online is a firm believer in sound SEO principles to advertise and market your enterprise Online. Our business is to help you succeed in getting the exposure your company needs and the business that goes with it. To this end, we work tirelessly on every avenue of Internet Advertising and Internet Marketing. Search Engine Advertising (SEA) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are becoming just as familiar as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the marketplace.

An old saying in business is that there are the quick, and there are the dead. Meaning, failure to react to market trends and technologies can, and do, leave many a fine business in the dust wondering what happened. We are firm believers in the fact that a sense of entitlement is the kiss of death for any business. "We are NO. 1 and we'll always be NO. 1." This is a fallacy. Just look at GM. The wolf is always at the door.

The fundamental principles behind advertising and marketing, which are building your particular brand and connecting your product / services to consumers has not really changed. What have changed are the choices of delivery, and the Internet is now a major component along with the traditional. Our view at Blackball Online is that a successful campaign relies on leveraging the old and the new.

Combining a first class Website, sound Organic SEO, SEA, and SEM with Pay per Click only reaches one segment of the market. We still want to support and acquire customers that either don't have access to the Internet, or are unaware of the massive benefits our services can provide. A great site therefore is not enough.

So how do we help you reach the rest of your target market? We still believe in television, word of mouth, print, and good old fashioned elbow grease. That is what survives. We have formed strategic alliances with many businesses in all forms of advertising and marketing to help serve you better. We can help you craft a campaign that mixes the old and the new to cover all your bases. Let's get started. Contact Blackball Online today and while you're at it please sign up for our feeds through email or RSS on the right hand column of our Blackball Online Newsblog. Thank You as always for your support.

Pittsburgh PA - Blackball Online Client South Hills Electric, LLC wins the 2009 Gold Medal Readers Choice award for best Pittsburgh Electrician Website.

Blackball Online - South Hills Electric, LLC Gold Medal

The Pittsburgh Tribune Review has published their Readers Choice Awards for 2009 and our client South Hills Electric, LLC has won the Gold Medal for best Electrical Website in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh SEO and Website Design for this site was all done by Blackball Online and we would like to congratulate South Hills Electric, LLC on their winning this prestigious award. We wish them continued success and look forward to continuing our business dealings with them in the future. Check out their site at http://www.southhillselectric.com.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html

Above is a great article on the old Southside clock from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review - Trib PM edition - a little bit of Pittsburghana (if that is a word, kind of like Americana). Anyway, I thought I would break down the blog post name (Permalink) a little to help to clarify the conventions used to name blog posts and why they are important in the SEO for your site.

We want, ideally, for all our blog posts to rank in the search engines on their own. It lends to the credibility of our companies, our sites, and our posts directly. This is where the SEO comes in. In order to do that, the first thing the crawler sees is the blog post name i.e. the Permalink. Then the blog post title. Then the blog content itself. If anything blocks the crawler, it stops. The game is up and it only has that amount of information to go by. Take this fake post title for example:

http://www.blackballonline.com/?23456-ee.html

We've all seen links to blog posts like this above. The search engine is unable to crawl beyond the question mark (?) because special characters are not crawler friendly. So all the crawler sees is our site URL and no more. We've just blown a golden opportunity, and a lot of time to write a post nobody but the searcher inside our blog will ever see.

Back to the original post - http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html

A breakdown of the Permalink (blog post name) above:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com -                            The URL
x -                                                                       a convention used by the Trib
pittsburghtrib -                                                     the name of the blog
news -                                                                 the category or tag the post is under
tribpm -                                                               the category or tag the post is under
s_624777.html -                                                  the filename

A note or two about the breakdown.
1.) news and tribpm could be tags or categories - I don't know the Trib's nomenclature for titling their blog posts.
2.) the filename s_624777.html - while this is fantastic for Google Blog Search  it says nothing about the post, or the keywords for that matter. When it comes to ranking this, where does Google index it? Under news obviously, but what kind of news? The search engines will have to search the content.

The moral of the story is: If we want Google to index our blog posts and rank for certain keywords, we should eliminate the guessing game and just create what are called pretty Permalinks and stick to these naming conventions. That's why we optimize them using SEO.

You found us!  Welcome.  Let's get right to it.  The purpose of this blog is to help your small or home based business get new clients.  We are going to help by navigating you through the interactive medium of electronic marketing technology.

With so many people these days looking for products and services on the Internet, you can't afford to at least look at the Internet as a means to increase business.  My father-in-law worked in the trades his whole life and 10 years ago vowed to never own any piece of technology.

He just went on a 3 week trip and I installed a GPS (Global Positioning System) in his minivan, my son programmed his phone, and we showed him how to work his video and digital camera (again).

For better or worse, technology is here to stay; if you are a geek, this blog is not for you, this blog is for the people that don't understand the technology but want to explore how it can help grow their business. We hope you'll find this a great resource and if you don't, tell us why (we're married so we can follow directions well).