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Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’
Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
The Web changes. So does SEO. In fact, SEO is not the same today as it was 10 or 15 years ago. Below are 4 distinct SEO ideas that are no longer valid, yet I hear people talking about them all the time as if they are still good and valid ideas. These ideas are as outdated as silent movies.
- You need meta tags – Not really. The keyword meta tag is no longer necessary. The search engines ignore them. You should too. As far as the meta description tag goes, it’s still useful, but the search engines don’t always use it. It’s supposed to be the snippet searchers see in search results when your website comes up. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
- Search engine submission services get your site indexed – No they don’t. At one time, that was true. But it hasn’t been true for at least 10 years. You don’t need to submit your website to search engines. Just build a few inbound links and they will discover your site.
- You need a keyword-based domain name – It might help. It might not. This is just one ranking criteria, however, many websites rank well for keywords that are not in their domain name. Branded domain names work just as well. Just look at Google, Bing, and Facebook.
- Social media isn’t necessary – Absolutely incorrect. In today’s search engine marketing climate, social media is every bit as important as organic SEO. In fact, the two are intricately intertwined.
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, Social Media
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
Monday, March 25th, 2013
Press releases are just as effective online as they are off line, but there is one major difference. Your online press release has to be well-optimized for search. Otherwise, it won’t be as effective for your online promotions. Otherwise, online press releases are just like traditional press releases.
Here are the 5 essential elements that every online press release should have to be effective in promoting your business:
- Optimized Headline - News stories have headlines. So do press releases. Make sure your press release is short and succinctly states what the release is about. Also, it needs to grab your reader’s attention, so make it interesting. Give it some impact. And use your primary keyword in the headline as well.
- Lead paragraph - In addition to being optimized for search, your lead paragraph needs to provide the essential information. It needs to provide the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your news story.
- Press release body content – The best press releases are structured like news stories. That means putting the most essential information at the top and the least important at the bottom. Journalists call this “the inverted pyramid” structure. It’s the structure of all news stories, and it should be the structure of all your press releases.
- Quotes – Quotes add flavor to press releases. Provide at least one quote, preferably two, from a credible source that backs up the information in your press release.
- Contact information – You need to provide your contact information so that journalists who want to run a story can reach you. Sometimes news sources just run your press release as is. More often than not, however, journalists will contact you for an interview. Make it easy for them. Provide your contact information and the contact information for your public relations firm.
If you ensure that all of your press releases contain this basic structure, then your online promotions will be a lot more successful.
Tags: online promotions, online publicity, press releases, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in PR for Small Business | No Comments »
Friday, March 22nd, 2013
Like all things related to SEO, photo optimization is bound to change as well. In fact, Google+ recently added photo search for Google+ users. That means photo optimization is a new opportunity for small business owners and businesses that want to rank better inside Google+ (and who doesn’t?).
To get the most out of Google+ photos and to help searchers find your photos more easily, I’ve identified ways that you can optimize your photos better for search inside Google+. Here are 5 ways to ensure your Google+ photos are well-optimized:
- Two ways to upload – Let’s start with uploads. You can upload your photos in two ways: Inside your Google+ posts or using the photo icon in your Google+ sidebar. Either way is fine, but use the tools at your disposal to optimize those photos.
So what are those tools? Glad you asked.
- Albums – Create albums for your photos. Name your albums using keywords you want your photos associated with and group your photos according those keyword classifications.
- Captions – Create captions for each individual photo you upload. Make sure your captions use keywords you want those photos associated with.
- Locations – You can also geotag your photos by adding a location. You might not want to do that with every photo you upload, but this is a great way to optimize your photos for local search, especially if you run a local business.
- Tags – In Google+, you can tag your photos with the names of other Google+ users. It’s a great way to associate your photos with specific people and if Google+ users search for those people specifically, your photos could come up in the search query due to those tags. But make sure your tags are appropriate. You don’t want to be known as a tag spammer.
- Content – When you upload photos to a post, make sure your content is well-optimized for keywords you want associated with your photo.
Google+ photo optimization is as important as any other kind of optimization. Make sure you get it right and your photos will stand a better chance of being found in Google+ search results.
Tags: google, photo optimization, photos, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
Thursday, November 8th, 2012
Images are becoming more and more important in online marketing. From Pinterest to infographics, savvy online marketers are employing more images and using them quite effectively to present their messages to their target markets on their blogs and websites, in their social media circles, and wherever they build content.
Images serve three useful purposes online:
- They provide a graphic way for you to communicate your message. Remember, a picture (re: graphic or image) is worth a thousand words.
- Images also open up another channel of search engine optimization for your web pages, blog posts, or social media posts. All it takes to optimize each image is an alt tag and some associated text. Target your keywords in both of those and you increase your SEO possibilities.
- Make your marketing more interesting and graphic-oriented. Studies have been done that show that image-based marketing messages are far more likely to be shared and go viral than mere text-based messages.
If you want to juice up your online marketing efforts – whether it be on your own website or blog, your social media outposts, or your e-mail marketing initiatives, add images. Why do you think Pinterest is so popular? It isn’t because of the pretty colors. OK, maybe that’s a part of it, but still, it wouldn’t be Pinterest without the images.
Tags: images, online marketing, search engine optimization, Social Media, social networking
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 5 Comments »
Monday, August 13th, 2012
If you are hiring an SEO firm or agency to handle your search engine optimization, does that mean you can skate by without any knowledge of SEO? You can, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Look at any organization where a supervisor oversees the work of people under him/her and you will notice that the supervisor more than likely started where those he supervises started. If not, then he or she started in a similar position. They have the knowledge and skills to perform the tasks that those they supervise perform on a daily basis.
Where this is often not true is in areas of supervision where the supervisor is required to have a college degree but no direct experience performing the tasks of the job. In those cases, the company hiring is looking for management skills and experience.
Here’s the point: If you hire an SEO agency, you’ll be the supervisor. Your job is to make sure they do their job. If you don’t know any SEO, how will you be able to effectively ensure that your SEO agency does what it’s suppose to do?
Now, I’m not saying you have to be an SEO expert. Your agency will be the expert. But you should have some knowledge of SEO. You should know the basics, just enough to ask the right questions of the agency before you hire them and to know when you are getting good SEO advice versus the bad advice that often gets shared by low-cost providers with little or no experience.
Long story short, you don’t have to be an SEO expert when you hire an agency to handle your SEO needs, but you should have some understanding of the basics.
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Sunday, July 29th, 2012
Blogging has often been called the bridge between social media and search engine optimization. Once you understand it you’ll know why.
With blogging you are feeding the search engines every time you create a new blog post. If you blog once a day, that’s a new web page on your website. The blog pings a list of services that help the post get crawled and within hours your blog post is indexed and searchable in the search engines. Do that three times a day and you increase your SEO coverage.
But a blog also has other characteristics that static web pages don’t have. People can comment on your blog posts and you can comment back, making it a particularly useful platform for meaningful dialogue.
With the advent of social media, you have other ways to get traffic to your blog other than through the search engines. Since all sales and marketing is relationship-building, you can build relationships with your prospects through social media, then send your friends and fans back to your blog for a deeper conversation. Its a multi-tiered approach to marketing that works.
At least, it’s worked for thousands of businesses for the last decade.
It seems that blogging and social media were made for each other. They go hand in hand. And if you haven’t started your blog yet, or begun your social media marketing, then I’d encourage you to jump on board.
Tags: blogging, search engine optimization, Social Media
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012
Blogging, more than any other kind of marketing, is multi-dimensional. In fact, I’ve identified 5 key dimensions of your blog and they have all equal value. When you blog you should keep each of these 5 dimensions in mind.
Here they are, the 5 dimensions of blogging:
- Search engine optimization – Every blog post is a separate web page. Since search engines rank web pages, if you blog every day for a year and each blog post is optimized for 3 key phrases, then you’ll have 1,095 potential No. 1 rankings for your blog alone. And that’s not counting the benefits you get from internal link building, photo and image optimization, video embeds, etc.
- Social media – Your blog is a conversation. That conversation starts off site at places like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Savvy marketers figure out how to get the conversation from these social media outlets to their blog.
- Branding – The best bloggers create a brand. Your brand is your message. Speak it loudly, speak it boldly, and make it memorable.
- Customer Service – Customer service begins at first contact. For many marketers, that first contact is through a blog. Build your customers one conversational piece at a time. Readers become customers, customers become evangelists.
- Reputation Management – Your reputation is everything. By keeping your blog posts focused on your core competence and mission, and because you promote your message through the various social media outlets, every time you present yourself in some corner of the Internet you build your reputation. Do it one step at a time.
Blogging is multi-dimensional Internet marketing. Create a strategy and stick with it. You’ll be glad you did.
Tags: blogging, Branding, internet marketing, Reputation Management, search engine optimization, Social Media
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 4th, 2012
There is no one way to market a business online. Every marketing strategy is different and every business deserves its own marketing strategy. That’s why customization is the best method for pursuing the business you want to attract online.
A customized online marketing strategy will make your website and your web presence unique. Not only will customers and prospects perceive your brand to be unique and different, but your content will reflect the natural uniqueness of your brand – and that’s how marketing is supposed to work.
Small Business Mavericks uses proven online marketing strategies based on proven traditional marketing strategies that have always worked. Your business is unique, your customers are unique, your brand is unique. Therefore, you should have a unique approach to reaching the market you are targeting for your services.
The first step to achieving an effective customized marketing strategy is to evaluate your current position. What are you doing, what’s working and what’s not, and what are your goals?
After we answer these questions about your website and your business, we’ll then develop a strategy that works for your type of business. It should include your website design strategy, search engine optimization, social media, e-mail marketing, and brand placement. We may even add additional elements like video marketing depending on your goals and niche.
Any way you look at it, your online marketing strategy should be as unique as you are. We’ll make sure that it is.
Tags: Branding, online marketing, search engine optimization, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 33 Comments »
Sunday, June 3rd, 2012
Have you checked your website’s health lately?
If not, you might want to take it in for a checkup. The Web changes and what was considered best practices in web design and search engine optimization five years ago isn’t the same as it is today. You want to ensure that your website follows the best practices and helps you reach the right prospects so that you can help people achieve with the benefits you offer.
When you have your website evaluated by a professional, we’ll take a total look at your Internet marketing plan to see where you can make some improvements. Specifically, we’ll address the following concerns:
- Is your website search engine friendly?
- Are you targeting the most relevant keywords for your niche?
- Are you turning customers away with your website?
- Are you getting good links or bad links to your website?
- What are your website’s statistics saying about the performance of your website?
- What can you learn from your competition to gain a competitive advantage?
- How can you tell what your prospects are really seeking and how you can deliver it to them?
- How you can put yourself in front of more prospects
- Where are the best opportunities online for a website in your niche or industry?
These are pertinent questions for any marketing plan. We’ll help you answer them. All you have to do is ask for a website health checkup. It’s the beginning of a more effective Internet marketing plan.
Tags: internet marketing, search engine optimization, website checkup, website design
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »
Friday, June 1st, 2012
Before you start marketing yourself online, you should develop your online marketing strategy. But what should that consist of?
The first step to developing an online marketing strategy is to assess your current state of online marketing. What have you done until now and how has it worked out for you? Once you have a complete picture of your current online status, then you’ll be able to tell what has worked and what has not. You should move forward with a plan that incorporates what has worked in the past while incorporating new strategies for the future.
At a minimum, your online marketing strategy should address the following concerns:
- Website design and development – Does your website have issues? If so, are they hindering your ability to convert traffic to sales, achieve respectable search engine rankings, and promote your website through other means?
- Search engine optimization – Most websites still receive 80% of their traffic from search engines. You’ve got to include a search engine marketing strategy in your marketing plan.
- Social media marketing – Trying to market yourself online today without some kind of social media strategy isn’t making the most of your opportunities. You should have a social media plan.
- Paid marketing – Will you be utilizing paid marketing? If so, how will you implement it?
- Branding – What branding efforts will you undertake and how will it fit into your overall online marketing strategy?
- Analytics – You can’t change what you don’t measure. How will you measure the results of your online marketing and what will you do with the information you gather from your analytics?
Now is the time to develop an online marketing strategy. You may need to include more research and other strategic elements into your plan, but the above list should be your minimum, a fitting starting place.
Tags: analytics, online marketing, search engine optimization, Social Media, website design paid marketing
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 37 Comments »
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