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Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
When you think of doing business online, do you first think about those big businesses with million dollar budgets? You don’t have to. Small businesses are alive and well on the internet.
So, where do you fit in? What’s up with all that talk of keywords, SEO, social media, and such? There are three basic elements that will drive your business online. They are:
- On-Page Content – If possible, have mixed content on your site. Take advantage of articles, videos, etc. and provide your site visitors with a wide range of content to match their interests. Optimize your content to help it rank better in the search engines for your most profitable keywords.
- Off-Page Content – Content you create for marketing off of your website is good for building links back to your site and delivering new visitors to the site.
- Behind The Scenes Content – This is the code that makes your website visible to search engines and web browsers. You can have too much and you can have the wrong kind. Make sure your code is optimized for better results in the search engines.
Since the internet is growing by leaps and bounds, it is very important to have these elements successfully optimized on your website. It sounds complicated, but it really is not.
With the right guide and a good web marketing strategy you can build a great website with excellent on-page content, a wide variety of off-page content that drives traffic to your site, and great code that gets you well deserved rankings in the search engines.
Tags: advertising, google, keywords, link building, PPC, search engine optimization, SEO, small business
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 25th, 2011
Some search engine optimizers are stuck on keywords and links. If you listen to them talk, these are the Holy Grail of online marketing. But are they?
Don’t get me wrong. SEO is important. I mean, how will you rank in the search engines for the key terms you want to be known for if you don’t employ sound SEO strategies? But you should also understand that there are some things about SEO that you can’t control. The search algorithms, for instance.
It’s important to study what you can about SEO tactics and perform your best practices. But don’t hang your hat on them. They can change at any time.
Branding, however, is something you have 100% control over. It’s your image. You control what images, taglines, and statements are associated with your brand. No one else can control that for you. So if you focus your time and energy on building your brand with some thoughts how to employ SEO and a social media strategy effectively, then you’ll fare better in the long run.
What I’m really saying is this: Build your brand first. Market it secondly. SEO and social media are the nuts and bolts of online marketing. Without a brand, they’re just nuts and bolts.
Tags: Branding, online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Branding | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
When you plan your search engine optimization efforts, do you do it for the long term or the short term? Most search marketers do it for the short term.
Short-term SEO can be characterized by a list of do’s and don’ts on your search company’s list of best practices. They are essentially a list of things to do today so that your website ranks next month. But they don’t account for eventual search engine algorithm changes. They are essentially based on a follow-the-crowd mentality.
Long-term SEO is different. It doesn’t concern itself with what everyone else is doing. It just does what makes sense and what will ultimately make sense five years from now.
For instance, a short-term SEO strategy usually leads to broken links and bad website navigation. Long-term SEO, on the other hand, takes into consideration how a user might navigate several hundred web pages on your website before those pages have even been planned. It takes into consideration the taxonomy of web pages and puts together an intelligent web design plan that will make as much sense next decade as it does next week.
So I’ll ask again: Is your SEO strategy a long-term strategy or a short-term strategy? How many times to do you want to build that website?
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, web design
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Friday, September 30th, 2011
Here’s a joke for you: How many SEOs does it take to optimize a website?
Answer: Only 1.
So that’s not funny? I didn’t suspect it would be. It’s not really a joke.
The reason I bring it up is because some clients seem to believe that if they hire multiple SEOs to work on the same website, then they’ll get better search engine rankings. That’s not true. In fact, you could actually be hurting yourself.
Not all SEOs think alike. Some put more emphasis on link building while others emphasize on-site SEO factors. If you hire more than one SEO to work on the same website, then your optimizers could actually compete against each other and cancel each other out. What you really want them to do is work together and enhance each other’s efforts. But can you really expect them to do that?
You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if you just use one SEO for each web property you own. If you own more than one website, you can have a different SEO working on each site. But don’t let two SEOs work on the same website. Ever.
The only time multiple SEOs working on the same website will work is if you have a division of duties system where there is one decision maker at the top who assigns responsibilities and tracks your total SEO efforts. It’s the only way to ensure the team remains a team.
Tags: search engine optimization, SEOs, website optimization
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 2 Comments »
Friday, September 2nd, 2011
SEO is not a difficult task if you know what you are doing. Many small business owners shudder at the thought of it, but you don’t have to. I’ve discovered 5 quick and easy ways to improve the SEO of any web page you own in under 5 minutes. Here they are.
- Write a unique title tag – Every page on your website should have a unique title tag that uses the primary keyword for that page.
- Compose a unique meta description – In 150 words or less, describe or summarize the contents of your page using your primary keyword and, if possible, a secondary keyword.
- Grab attention with a dynamic headline – Write an attention-grabbing headline in 70 characters or less that utilizes the primary keyword for that page.
- Social bookmark your pages – Social bookmarking can often be a great source of links. You can get direct links by bookmarking to do-follow websites or get indirect links by producing great content that others share and link to in their own blog posts.
- Create an internal link – Pick a keyword phrase on one page that matches the primary keyword phrase on another page and create an internal link between them. Make sure the link points to the page that is optimized for that keyword phrase and not vice-versa.
Each of these SEO tips can be performed in less than 5 minutes and they can each improve your website’s SEO tremendously.
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 6 Comments »
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
Many website owners have given up on SEO entirely. They’ve abandoned the old-fashioned Internet marketing channel of search engine optimization in favor of the easier to manage social media channel. But I don’t think that’s a wise choice.
The reason businesses are abandoning SEO in favor of social media is because it is getting more and more difficult.
Google constantly updates its algorithms. In fact, they do so at least a couple of times a day – every day – which makes high rankings a moving target. That’s not really a big deal when you think about it. As difficult as SEO is, it’s still based on a few proven principles.
Nevertheless, companies are abandoning it. And new developments such as HTML5, rich snippets, and schema, are making it more difficult. While these have not caught on just yet, you can bet that schema will eventually catch on, and when it does it will make SEO a lot harder. Only the truly initiated will succeed.
That’s why it will become even more important for small businesses to have a solid SEO company on their side. When you consider that more than 80% of web traffic still comes from search engines, it just doesn’t make sense to abandon SEO as a channel. If anything, we should be pursuing it all the more.
Tags: business, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 7 Comments »
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Small businesses do not have the benefit of a huge budget. Unlike many large corporations, you can’t just throw money at the folks in marketing and expect them to turn the world over. Chances are, if your business is small enough, you are the marketing department.
So how can you make Internet marketing work for you? Can you look big and still market your business online with a short budget? Yes, you can.
First, you’ve got to set your priorities. Too many small business owners get social media happy early on and forget that the search engines deliver the lion’s share of traffic to websites overall. It’s important that you put your time, money, and other resources into the channels that are going to make you the most money.
While social media is more difficult to track than other channels, it does have a kind of branding power that can augment your other channels. The trick is in getting the right mix of channels in your online marketing strategy.
Search engine optimization takes more time before real results start showing themselves, but it’s well worth the effort up front to make that happen. By contrast, pay per click advertising requires an upfront investment, but you can generally start seeing results much sooner. You have to figure out your budget early on, then put your money and your time into those channels that show the most promise.
Tags: internet marketing, marketing budget, Pay Per Click, search engine optimization, small business, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 9th, 2011
If you’re new to Internet marketing and you’re not sure what an IM package might consist of, relax. They’re all different. In fact, the first step to designing a good strategy for marketing your business online is to analyze your business and plan a strategy that is based on the needs of your market and your business.
Strategic Internet marketing takes time. It doesn’t just fall into place. What works for one business may not work for another. Therefore, it’s important to know your market.
Market analysis and competitive intelligence are both very important when approaching your online marketing strategy. Once you’ve done the initial legwork and you’ve determined what may or may not work for your business, then it’s time to get to work. Your Internet marketing plan might include some or all of the following elements:
To add to the variability of Internet marketing strategies, your business might benefit from local search strategies or global search strategies or some combination of the two. The first step, of course, is to see what you’ve done in the past and what you are currently doing with your marketing efforts. In most cases, you can get better results from online marketing on a smaller budget than you can from traditional marketing.
Of course, your first consultation is free. Let us check the health of your website today.
Tags: article marketing, blog marketing, internet marketing, mobile marketing, newsletter marketing, Pay Per Click, search engine optimization, social media marketing, website design
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
If you’ve noticed that your competition has passed you in the search results pages and you know that you have a superior product or service, what can you do? Well, there are several things you can do right now to improve your SEO. In just a couple of weeks, you can improve your SEO tremendously.
Here are the top 5 ways to improve your SEO right now.
- Get Verified – All of the search engines have a process for verifying a website. This involves adding an XML Sitemap to your site, allowing your website to be more crawlable.
- Tailor Your Title/Meta Tags – If all of your Title and Meta tags are the same, then you’ve lost the SEO war. Tailor the tags on every page. That one thing alone could make the difference between a search ranking or two.
- Internal Linking Structure – This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. What is the anchor text on your internal links? Are you using title attributes? Fix your internal links before you go looking for inbound links.
- Inbound Link Building – Another thing you need to do is to seek out quality inbound links. This is one of the most talked about SEO tactics online, but one of the least understood. Build quality inbound links and you’ll have staying SEO power.
- Add Fresh Content – The only thing that keeps search engines coming back to your website again and again is fresh content. Update your site often and you’ll see the search engines more often.
Improve your SEO with these 5 strategies. They’re easy to implement, cost little, and can go a long way to making your site more crawlable and indexable.
Tags: content, links, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 4th, 2011
Many small business owners are working hard to effectively promote themselves and their businesses online. But are they as effective as they’d like to be?
I’d be willing to wager that more than 50% of small businesses are not effective at online marketing. With that kind of bold statement, I guess I should define what is “effective” online marketing. So let’s do that.
Effective online marketing consists of, at a minimum, the following:
- Search engine optimization that leads to at least one page of the small business website that ranks in the top three search results for at least one important key phrase
- A pay-per-click campaign that leads to a positive ROI
- Social media marketing that leads to positive relationships, new traffic to the small business website, and new customer acquisitions
Notice that this is a minimum in order to pass the online marketing effectiveness test. But let’s qualify that: This assumes that you are running these campaigns. If you are not operating a pay-per-click marketing campaign, then that point obviously does not apply to you.
Here’s another caveat: If you are not at least engaged in social media and search engine optimization, then you are likely not being effective. These are basic online marketing strategies that every small business owner should be using on a minimal basis, at least. If you are not engaged, you cannot be effective.
Tags: online marketing, pay per click marketing, search engine optimization, small business, social media marketing
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
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