Posts Tagged ‘link building’
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
by our guest blogger Justin McGill, SEORCHERS
Eight of 10 people go online when looking for products and services, according to the latest studies from Marketing Sherpa. If you haven’t figured it out already, building your web presence should be your primary marketing focus in the months to come.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art of putting your website higher in search engine results so that your business is in front of targeted potential customers who are looking for what you offer. SEO will continue to head the list of online marketing strategies in 2010.
Some of the new and interesting aspects include personalization and greater relevance. That means that as you develop your SEO strategy, dedicate some of your resources to developing content that targets niche audiences. If you are a wine company for example, consider having content devoted solely to wine tasting.
Fresh Content
You’ll also want to keep your web content fresh and up-to-date since search engines will begin factoring publication dates, geo-locations and social media content into their relevancy algorithms. This is also why it’s such a great idea to incorporate a blog into your business website. Blogs are an easy way for you to update your website and keep search engines coming back looking for fresh content. It’s no longer sufficient to just maintain your website and social media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You should be updating the content as often as possible—keeping it fresh for search engines—as well as be promoting the profiles via blogging and e-mail newsletters, YouTube, and other social media resources. Creating a cross-promoting strategy with all these tools will go a long way.
For instance, videos that appear on your website but nowhere else online will fail to reach a large portion of your target audience. Web users have a tendency to search one centralized site, such as YouTube, for any content on a given topic. If your video doesn’t appear on YouTube, then for that viewer it may as well not exist. The same thing can be said about your website. If a potential customer performs a search query on Google and your website doesn’t show up, then your company might as well not exist to that potential customer.
Learn the SEO Basics
You owe it to yourself and your business to learn the basics of SEO. This allows you to communicate with your SEO provider or employee performing the SEO. It also helps to ensure you are protecting yourself against the numerous SEO related scams that are in the marketplace today.
So what are some things you can do on your own? Keyword research for one! SEO is a delicate marketing platform that’s easy to lose track of … and ultimately fail with. Your campaign must start with the right keyword focus in mind—this is of paramount importance. Most business owners believe they know those keywords they want to rank well for them. For example, if you sell promotional products and someone Googles the keywords “promotional items,” your company will rank high on the results list. However, you should be considering elements outside of your industry knowledge. Ranking well for a keyword that no one searches for will do nothing for you. That’s why it’s crucial to find the right keywords. And you might have to keep playing with them based on your initial results.
How to Develop Keywords
First and foremost, you want to make sure people are going online and searching for your products or services. So, how much search volume is there for your ideal keywords? You can help identify search volumes by utilizing Google’s Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
Though these search volume numbers are not 100 percent accurate, they will point you in the right direction and provide a decent baseline for your campaign.
Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords that are relevant to your business and offer high enough search volumes, you’ll need to delve deeper into your research. Perform a Google search for your list of keywords. You can see how many results there are for each keyword at the top right of the search results page. The lower that number is, the lower your competition will be.
This is a very simplified measuring stick for you to use as a baseline. This step in your SEO campaign is all too important. I would always suggest you have a professional consultation with an SEO expert that has access to much more robust reporting tools.
Once you have your keywords, it’s what you do with them that makes the difference. You need to have content on your website that is targeted to those keywords. Search engines like Google are successful because their results are relevant to the user’s query. Therefore, they are looking to see what your website is about before giving the results. If you’re targeting a keyword such as “Antique dorm furniture,” then you want this keyword phrase to be a topic of your web page’s content.
Link Building
Another important element of your SEO campaign is link building. This is essentially when another website links to yours. Search engines calculate how many websites link to you when they’re giving their results.
Think of each link pointing at your website as a vote. In general, the more “votes” you get, the higher your search engine rankings will be. This is easier said than done, but you can start by requesting links back from friends, family and other business associate websites. Not only might potential customers come across those links, but you’re building up search engine credibility at the same time.
Converting Visitors
We discussed having content relevant to your keywords. While your content needs to relate to the search query, it also should answer two very important questions:
• What do you do?
• Why should I choose you to do it instead of your competition?
This is part of another online marketing consideration called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO. Improving your website’s conversion rate can net you the money you were previously leaving on the table. If you get 100 visitors to your website every day and are converting 1 percent of them, then you have one new customer.
However, if you did nothing else to increase traffic to your website but focus on better conversion, that alone could increase your revenues greatly. In fact, just by improving your conversion rate to 3 percent, you have three times as many customers through your website. That’s without increasing the traffic. Now, imagine a better converting website that’s also attaining more targeted traffic. Nice.
Using your advertising dollars effectively means putting them toward the venues that will produce the most return on your investment. When done correctly, SEO has proven to be a platform in which businesses can generate long-term ROI.
Justin McGill is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS, a local web-marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization with a focus on converting visitors into clients. In the late 1990s, McGill developed a fascination with web design and what became known as SEO. In early 2008, he invested his wealth of technical knowledge in founding a full-service internet marketing company. More: 1-877-736-5673; www.SEORCHERS.com.
Tags: content, Conversion Rate Optimization, Keywords, link building, ROI, SEO
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
I haven’t talked much about Search Engine Optimization on this blog, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. If you have spent any time on the web, you probably know at least that it has something to do with the Search Engines and you are certainly on the right track. In very basic terms, it means using different techniques and strategies to help improve your website’s rankings on the major search engines so that potential customers can find you. Now a few years ago, this sort of thing really wasn’t necessary because there weren’t that many websites, now that Google has indexed over 1 TRILLION websites, it’s become a bit of a necessity.
Of course, with any “new” industry, there will be a shallow knowledge base to begin with and always the slick character out to make a buck on the backs of innocent, trusting businesses. There are two “types” of SEO, one of which is called ‘Black hat’ and the other ‘White hat’. I am sure I don’t have to tell you which one you want to avoid. But what exactly is the difference? If you don’t know much about SEO, you aren’t going to know the difference. We have been in TOO many meetings with clients who have been blindsided by one of these slick characters that promise ‘to get you on the 1st page of Google’. If you have someone making outrageous promises like this, don’t walk, RUN in the other direction! They may be able to get you on the first page of one of the big ole’ search engines, but it won’t last long and the search engines will ban your site from their pages, making it virtually IMPOSSIBLE for potential clients to find you.
In this world of instant gratification it can be VERY tempting to believe these fly-by-nights, but for the sake of your business’s growth, DON’T!!!!!!
The following is a list with brief explanations of some techniques black hat establishments use in their campaigns, click on the titles for further explanations ~
Keyword stuffing - just as the title suggests, your pages are stuffed with the keywords people search for throughout your page, this includes meta tags and ‘invisible’ text placed throughout the page.
Doorway pages- these pages, which spam the search engines with certain phrases or keywords that are likely to be searched, are only used to direct visitors to an entirely different page and specifically for the purpose of increasing rankings. They muddy up the search results and cause LOTS of frustration!
Article Spinning- is the act of using existing articles and rewriting all or portions of them. They also involve using ‘pirated’ content from other sites.
Link Farms- this involves a group of websites that all link back to each other, typically through automated programs to spam the search engines and raise their ranks. They are used to ‘increase the link popularity’ of a site.
These are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of black hat tricks in the world of SEO. I would highly encourage you to investigate further on what NOT to do when building an effective SEO campaign. Here are some other resources you can check out -
I love wikipedia
About.com has some great information
Neil Patel of Quick Sprout has some great tips for SEO
And there are plenty more out there. If you are overwhelmed and need help with your campaign, please let us know, we are happy to get you on the right track!
Tags: Black Hat, effective seo campaign, link building, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Website, White hat
Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »
